House of Commons

Thursday 10th October 2013 Commons Chamber

Thursday 10 October 2013

The House met at half-past Nine o’clock

Prayers

Thursday 10th October 2013 Commons Chamber

[Mr Speaker in the Chair]

Oral Answers to Questions

Thursday 10th October 2013 Commons Chamber

The Secretary of State was asked—

[Alex Cunningham (Stockton North) (Lab)]

1. What recent assessment he has made of the provision of food aid in the UK.

[Luciana Berger (Liverpool, Wavertree) (Lab/Co-op)]

6. What recent assessment he has made of the provision of food aid in the UK.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (George Eustice)]

The provision of food aid ranges from small, local provision to regional and national schemes. There are no official figures for the number of food aid organisations or the number of people using them in the UK. The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs has commissioned research to assess publicly available evidence on food aid provision in the UK, and that work will be made available in due course.

[Alex Cunningham]

I congratulate the Minister on his appointment. In the past year, several new food banks have been opened in my constituency and the neighbouring constituency of Stockton South by excellent organisations such as A Way Out and the New Life church. Some are supported directly by the Trussell Trust, which states that the number of people relying on food banks has gone up from 41,000 to 350,000 since this Government came to power. What does the Minister think has caused that explosion in demand?

[George Eustice]

There are a number of complicated reasons for those changes and nobody is quite sure. That is one of the reasons we commissioned this report. The use of food banks has been going up for some time, and it also increased dramatically under the previous Government. This is a good example of the big society in action, and we are seeing some good organisations stepping up to help people.

[Luciana Berger]

I welcome the Minister to his new post, but I hope he will have time to refer to the facts and figures of the matter. Under this Government, the use of food banks has rocketed, and I hope he will read carefully the report from Oxfam and Church Action on Poverty that came out in May and shows that, this year alone, half a million people will access emergency food aid. I think that is a national disgrace. Does the Minister agree?

[George Eustice]

As I said, the reasons for the increase are complicated. The hon. Lady asks about the facts and figures, so let us look at them. The accepted way to measure household expenditure on food is by looking at the bottom 20%. We know that in 2008, when the previous Government were in power, the lowest 20%—the most disadvantaged households—spent 16.8% of their income on food. That figure is now 16.6%. If we look at the facts, spending on food as a percentage of household income for the most disadvantaged is no more than it was in 2007.

[Andrew Bridgen (North West Leicestershire) (Con)]

Does my hon. Friend agree that the provision of food banks in this country should be seen in the light of the tenfold increase in food banks under the previous Government, and will he commend the work of the Coalville food bank in my constituency?

[George Eustice]

My hon. Friend makes a good point, and we must recognise that if we want to tackle poverty we must help people get back into work and off benefits. That is one reason why the Government’s welfare reforms are so important.

[Mr Gary Streeter (South West Devon) (Con)]

I welcome two west country colleagues to the Front Bench and wish them every success. Does my hon. Friend recognise that food banks have careful rules about how much food they give to people and how often they give it, to ensure that people do not become dependent on food parcels? Surely giving a helping hand in times of need is a very good thing indeed.

[George Eustice]

My hon. Friend makes a good point. Two food banks in my constituency do very good work, and, as I said earlier, that is an example of the big society in action. We should support that and welcome it.

[Mr Barry Sheerman (Huddersfield) (Lab/Co-op)]

2. When he expects bovine tuberculosis in England to have been eradicated.

[The Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Mr Owen Paterson)]

I welcome the Opposition Front Benchers to their new positions—the hon. Member for Garston and Halewood (Maria Eagle), who is the new shadow Secretary of State, and the hon. Member for Dunfermline and West Fife (Thomas Docherty). I also thank my hon. Friends the Members for Newbury (Richard Benyon) and for Somerton and Frome (Mr Heath), who have stood down from the Government Front Bench, for their sterling work, for the absolute support I received, and for the sensible advice and experience they brought to their posts. I also welcome two new Under-Secretaries of State, my hon. Friends the Members for Camborne and Redruth (George Eustice) and for North Cornwall (Dan Rogerson). They come from a rural background and will embellish the Department.

The answer to the question from the hon. Member for Huddersfield (Mr Sheerman) is that the Government have recently completed their consultation on a draft strategy for achieving officially bovine TB-free status for the whole of England in 25 years.

[Mr Sheerman]

The truth is that the cull is incompetent—it has been described as such by the lord mayor of Oxford, and the whole May family, including Brian May, say that it is a disaster—but we should not ignore the fact that what is being done to badgers in the west country is morally reprehensible. It is ineffective and inefficient, and ignores scientific opinion. Why does the Secretary of State not resign?

[Mr Paterson]

The hon. Gentleman supported a Government who did nothing about the disease. Thanks to the policies of the Government he supported, 305,000 otherwise healthy cattle were hauled off to slaughter at a cost to the British taxpayer of £500 million. If we go on as he left it, the disease would double over nine years, we would be looking at a bill of £1 billion and we would not have a cattle industry. The pilots were set up to establish the safety, the humaneness and the efficiency of a controlled shooting by skilled marksmen. It is quite clear that, after the first six weeks, we have succeeded on all three criteria.

[George Freeman (Mid Norfolk) (Con)]

Schools across Britain recently celebrated world milk day—milk is produced by cattle, Mr Speaker—which I saw for myself when I visited Pavilion nursery school in Attleborough, Mid Norfolk. I am sure that hon. Members on both sides of the House applaud that initiative as a key opportunity to highlight the benefits of milk as the health drink, and the enormous pressures facing the UK dairy sector, not least the threat of TB in cattle. What steps will my right hon. Friend take to ensure that the dairy market is working properly for consumers, processers and farmers?

[Mr Speaker]

Order. That was an extraordinarily strained attempt on the part of the hon. Gentleman to shoehorn his personal pre-occupations into Question 2, but the Secretary of State is a dextrous fellow, and I dare say he can respond pithily.

[Mr Paterson]

Thank you, Mr Speaker. My hon. Friend raises a vital point—we need a dynamic, productive and successful dairy industry. We will not have a dairy industry if we do not tackle that bacterium, and if we do not do what every other sensible country has done when there is a reservoir of disease in cattle and a reservoir of disease in wildlife.

[Angela Smith (Penistone and Stocksbridge) (Lab)]

The estimate last October was that there were 4,300 badgers in Somerset. The estimate this week is 1,450. Is it the Secretary of State who has moved the goalposts, and not the badgers? Has he not scored a massive own goal in pursuing this misguided cull?

[Mr Paterson]

I do not know whether the hon. Lady saw my comments. I stated something that was screamingly obvious: badgers are wild animals that live in an environment in which their numbers are impacted by weather and disease. She should reflect on this. I can report to the House that some of the animals we have shot have been desperately sick—in the final stages of disease—which is why we are completely determined to see the pilot culls through, and why we will pursue measures that the previous Government ducked. We are dealing with a bacterium that affects cattle and wildlife, and ultimately human beings. We will address that bacterium in a rigorous and logical manner.

[Andrew George (St Ives) (LD)]

Further to that point, given that the policy must be based on sound science and evidence, can my right hon. Friend say whether there have been similar dramatic drops in badger numbers in the Animal Health and Veterinary Laboratories Agency site at Woodchester park and sites such as Wytham in Oxfordshire, where they are monitored closely?

[Mr Paterson]

I cannot give my hon. Friend the exact numbers at Woodchester park, but in other areas there has been a significant reduction in badger numbers compared with this time last year.

[Maria Eagle (Garston and Halewood) (Lab)]

Last year, the Secretary of State cancelled the cull because there were too many badgers. Yesterday, he admitted that the cull in Somerset would be extended because he could not find enough of them. Can he explain why Gloucestershire has also applied for an extension, even though the six-week trial there has not finished? Is it because the badgers have moved the goalposts there as well?

[Mr Paterson]

I welcome the hon. Lady to her post. I should like her to reflect that, back in 1972, we had the disease beaten—it was down to 0.01%—when we had a bipartisan approach. In every other country where there is a serious problem in cattle and a serious problem in wildlife, both pools are addressed. Her Government tried to sort the problem out by addressing the disease only in cattle. That was a terrible mistake.

On the numbers, as I have just told the hon. Member for Penistone and Stocksbridge (Angela Smith), these animals are wild. There have been similar reductions in Gloucestershire. We are satisfied that, if the local farmers company wants to go on and to apply for an extension, we will be broadly supportive.

[Maria Eagle]

I am afraid that this policy is an absolute shambles. The Secretary of State has failed to meet his own target of eradicating 70% of the local badger population in Somerset, and it is clear that he expects to fail in Gloucestershire too. He must know that extending these trials risks spreading TB over a wider area. Rather than the ever-rising cost of policing his failed approach, we need a coherent plan to eradicate TB through the vaccination of badgers and cattle, and tougher rules on the movement of livestock. Instead of blaming the badgers, when will he stop being stubborn, admit he was wrong and abandon this misguided, unscientific and reckless killing of badgers?

[Mr Paterson]

I am disappointed by that question. We are clear—and we have had advice from the chief veterinary officer—that the number that was achieved in Somerset will lead to a reduction in disease. The hon. Lady should look at what Australia did with its buffalo pool, what New Zealand did with the brushtail possum and—importantly—what the Republic of Ireland did when it had a steadily rising crest of disease in cattle. As soon as the Irish started to remove diseased badgers, they saw a dramatic reduction in affected cattle and, happily, the average Irish badger is now 1kg heavier than before the cull. The Irish are arriving at a position that we want to reach— healthy cattle living alongside healthy badgers.

[Mr Speaker]

We need to speed up. Succinctness can be exemplified by Mr Laurence Robertson.

[Mr Laurence Robertson (Tewkesbury) (Con)]

As part of the cull is taking place in my constituency, I thank the Secretary of State for being the first in over a generation to tackle this issue. Does he share my concern at the statement made by the police and crime commissioner for Gloucestershire yesterday opposing the extension of the trial? Does my right hon. Friend agree that it is for the Government and Parliament to decide what should happen, not a publicity-seeking PCC?

[Mr Paterson]

Policing issues are not for me. There will be legitimate protests because we live in a democracy and we respect that, but there is a grey line and we do not support obstruction of a policy that was endorsed by both parties in opposition and in government and has been endorsed by this House.

[Mrs Emma Lewell-Buck (South Shields) (Lab)]

3. What timetable he has set for the completion of the England coastal path.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Dan Rogerson)]

We have not set a timetable for completion of the English coastal path. We will be implementing coastal access step by step by tailoring the amount of activity to the resources available. Natural England is currently working on a programme to deliver coastal access on a number of stretches of the English coast.

[Mrs Lewell-Buck]

At a cost of £1 per metre, the coastal path represents excellent value for money. However, the Minister’s predecessor showed little enthusiasm for the project, leading to fears that it would be shelved. Will the Minister confirm that the coastal path budget will be protected during deliberations on the Department’s future spending, and give a date for final completion?

[Dan Rogerson]

I thank the hon. Lady for her question: it was a pleasure to serve alongside her briefly on the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee following her election. The key issue for us is pushing forward this project, but we have to be honest about the fact that we are in a time of restricted resources. We must therefore be efficient in working with landowners and others to streamline the process and to deliver the coastal access that everyone in the House would like to see.

[Sir Tony Baldry (Banbury) (Con)]

4. How many cattle were slaughtered in Britain as a result of bovine tuberculosis in the last 10 years; and at what cost.

[The Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Mr Owen Paterson)]

Between 2003 and 2012, a total of 305,270 otherwise healthy cattle were compulsory slaughtered in Great Britain as a result of bovine TB. In England alone, the disease has cost the taxpayer £500 million in the past decade.

[Sir Tony Baldry]

Cattle may not have the same anthropomorphic advocates as some other animals, but they are equally part of God’s creation. Is it not a tragedy that more than 300,000 healthy cattle have had to be slaughtered? Is it not right that unless, collectively, we manage to sort out bovine TB, huge numbers of other healthy cattle will be slaughtered? There has to be some concern for cattle in all of this.

[Mr Paterson]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right to raise this matter. In his county, 234 otherwise healthy cattle were slaughtered in 2012. Shockingly, in the first six months of this year the number of healthy cattle slaughtered reached 307. I again appeal to those on the Opposition Front Bench to look at the policies pursued in America, Australia, New Zealand, the Republic of Ireland and even by their socialist friends in France, where there are regular culls of diseased animals. We do not have a valid cattle vaccine. We are working closely with the European Commission, but we are at least 10 years away from that, so the hon. Member for Garston and Halewood (Maria Eagle) cannot hide behind dreams ahead. We have to address the disease now with the tools we have at the moment, as every other sensible country does.

[Caroline Lucas (Brighton, Pavilion) (Green)]

It is indeed a tragedy that so many cattle have been slaughtered, but that does not make a badger cull right or effective. The Department is reported to be undertaking new research into the possible gassing of badgers. Will he confirm that that is the case? If so, what is the scope of the research, and why does he have cause to think that the 2005 DEFRA review, which found that gassing badgers could not be done humanely, is no longer valid?

[Mr Paterson]

I am grateful to the hon. Lady for her question. As I have just said, until we can establish vaccines we have to use the tools employed by other sensible countries to remove wildlife. Our TB strategy is clear about looking at other methods of removing wildlife. Yes, gassing is under consideration, but we will not use it unless it is proven to be safe, humane and effective.

[Nadhim Zahawi (Stratford-on-Avon) (Con)]

14. Farmers in Stratford-on-Avon welcome the Government’s commitment to the control of bovine TB through the culling of badgers. There is, however, significant concern about the reservoir of TB in camelids and the lack of a testing or control regime for these animals. What do the Government intend to do on this matter?

[Mr Paterson]

I am acutely aware of the concerns of livestock farmers about the risk to cattle posed by camelids. However, evidence suggests that camelids pose a very small risk of spreading the disease to cattle and badgers. In fact, there are no known cases where a cattle breakdown has been caused directly by transmission from camelids. Nevertheless, I have asked the Animal Health and Welfare Board for England for advice on a proportionate disease control regime for the camelid sector, including how surveillance, breakdown and pre-movement testing can be more effectively carried out.

[Bill Esterson (Sefton Central) (Lab)]

Media reports suggest that some gassing of badgers is taking place. Will the Secretary of State confirm that if his officials come across any evidence of the gassing of badgers, they pass it on to the police?

[Mr Paterson]

Emphatically yes, because any random cull would worsen the disease. If the hon. Member has such evidence, he should take it to the police.

[Roger Williams (Brecon and Radnorshire) (LD)]

I congratulate my hon. Friends on their new positions and I look forward to working with them. Sadly, bovine TB is well established and endemic in various parts of England, but other parts are free of the disease. What action is the Department taking to ensure that the disease does not spread from the highly infected areas to the less infected areas?

[Mr Paterson]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right to raise this issue. The danger is that unless we get a grip on the disease in high risk areas it will work its way across to other areas—I cited the figures for Oxfordshire in response to my hon. Friend the Member for Banbury (Sir Tony Baldry). Our TB strategy is clear about containing the disease in high-risk areas and not letting it spread. We must be emphatic about that.

[Kerry McCarthy (Bristol East) (Lab)]

Given that it has so far cost the taxpayers of Somerset and Gloucestershire £4 million, I was rather concerned that the Secretary of State implied that he did not think that policing was of any concern to him. Does he not think that that money would be better spent on a comprehensive badger vaccination programme?

[Mr Paterson]

I think the hon. Lady may have misinterpreted my comments. I do not handle policing; I handle disease in animals. This is a zoonosis, which has to be brought under control. It will take 10 years for a programme agreed with the European Commission to develop a cattle vaccine. Labour Members need to recognise that we cannot sit around as they did, waiting for a new tool to arrive. We have to use the existing tools, which have effectively reduced the disease in other more sensibly run countries.

[Mr David Amess (Southend West) (Con)]

5. What steps he is taking to encourage responsible dog ownership.

[Andrew Stephenson (Pendle) (Con)]

8. What steps he is taking to encourage responsible dog ownership.

[Simon Wright (Norwich South) (LD)]

9. What steps he is taking to encourage responsible dog ownership.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (George Eustice)]

We have a robust package of measures to tackle irresponsible dog ownership and improve public safety. New powers will allow local authorities and the police to deal flexibly with local dog issues. There will be new legal protection against dog attacks on private property and stiffer penalties for those who let their dogs kill or injure someone.

[Mr Amess]

I congratulate my hon. Friend on his appointment. With my rescue pugs, Bo and Lily, about to take part in the Westminster dog of the year show, does my hon. Friend agree that I will be responsible for their behaviour—may God help me—just as all dog owners are responsible for the behaviour of their own dogs?

[George Eustice]

May I wish Bo and Lily the very best of luck in the Westminster dog of the year competition? I was told by my hon. Friend the Member for Enfield, Southgate (Mr Burrowes) earlier that his own dog, Cholmeley, will be there offering competition.

My hon. Friend the Member for Southend West (Mr Amess) makes a very good point. I had a rescue dog—a border collie called Mono, and these dogs make for loving and dedicated companions. My hon. Friend is absolutely right that getting responsible dog owners is the way to get good dog behaviour.

[Mr Speaker]

No doubt we will hear about the dog enthusiasms of Mr Andrew Stephenson.

[Andrew Stephenson]

Thank you, Mr Speaker. I congratulate the Minister on his new position. Unfortunately, I do not have a dog, so I cannot enter one into the competition.

As for dog attacks, my own mother was attacked in the run-up to local elections by a dog on private property. As the Minister will be aware, around 70% of dog attacks on postal workers occur on private property. What effect does the Minister think the extension of the criminal offence of allowing a dog to be dangerously out of control on private property will have on all those whose jobs depend on visiting people’s homes?

[George Eustice]

My hon. Friend makes a good point. Volunteers in my own constituency, too, have experienced dog attacks. For the first time, this measure will give hard-working people such as postal workers and others who visit homes as part of their job the full protection of the law when they are confronted by an out-of-control dog. This Government support hard-working people—not just in words, but in deed.

[Simon Wright]

The ease with which puppies can be traded on the internet is bringing more and more poorly looked after and sometimes dangerous dogs into the community. Will the Minister update us on what progress has been made to ensure that animal welfare and responsible ownership are promoted when puppies are made available for sale online?

[George Eustice]

The hon. Gentleman makes an important point. My noble Friend Lord de Mauley recently met members of the Pet Advertising Advisory Group and they discussed a voluntary code to improve standards of internet advertising. Officials have looked at the problem of illegal puppies being imported through our ports—an area in respect of which I intend to have further meetings in the weeks ahead.

[Robert Flello (Stoke-on-Trent South) (Lab)]

The hon. Member for Southend West (Mr Amess) will be pleased to know that my rescue German shepherd dog, Diesel, is not taking part in the competition this year. However, on a serious point, one way in which dog owners can act more responsibly is to make sure that they do not buy puppies from industrial puppy farms, which are often sold through pet shops or online and too often result in dog rescue centres bursting at the seams with the numbers of puppies and older dogs in them. Will the Minister agree to meet me and dog rescue charities—Marc Abraham has done a lot of work in this area—to look at how we address the disgraceful issue of industrial puppy farms?

[George Eustice]

I commend the work the hon. Gentleman has done on this issue. I know he hosted a recent meeting on the subject in Parliament, which I attended. I would indeed be happy to meet him about the problem. We all know that part of the problem with out-of-control dogs stems from them not being raised or socialised properly in the first six months of their lives. That is why we need to look at the issue of the responsibility of dog breeders. We should remember that good laws are already in place requiring those breeding puppies for sale to have a licence from the local authority. We need to ensure that that is enforced more widely.

[Julie Hilling (Bolton West) (Lab)]

Will the Minister explain why he is ignoring all the dog charities and other agencies, including the RSPCA, the Royal College of Nursing and the police, and is not introducing dog control notices in the forthcoming Bill?

[George Eustice]

I have considered the issue carefully, and have concluded that, far from being more limited than the Scottish-style dog control notices, the community protection notices proposed by the Government have more scope and are more flexible. This week we have published guidance for practitioners. I think that there is concern not because the proposals for community protection notices are not good enough, but because there is not yet enough understanding of how they can be used.

[Christopher Pincher (Tamworth) (Con)]

11. Regrettably I have no four-legged friend entered in the House of Commons dog show today—[Hon. Members: “Aah!”] I know, I know. Also regrettably, the number of dangerous dog attacks on guide and assistance dogs—which cost £50,000 to train—is rising. What steps might my hon. Friend take to increase the sentences that are handed down for such attacks?

[George Eustice]

That is a very good point, which has also been raised by the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee. In the summer, we consulted on proposals to increase the maximum penalties for dog attacks on people and assistance dogs. Such attacks can have a devastating effect on the victims. Attacks on assistance dogs can cause them to lose their confidence and become unable to help their owners. We are currently considering what sentences would be appropriate for such attacks.

[Julie Elliott (Sunderland Central) (Lab)]

7. What plans he has to protect consumers from excessive rises in water bills.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Dan Rogerson)]

Water bills are regulated by Ofwat, which sets price limits every five years. Government guidance to Ofwat in advance of the 2014 price review has emphasised the importance of delivering a fair deal for all customers, and of protecting customers who are struggling to pay their bills. We have also published guidance to help companies to introduce social tariffs for vulnerable customers.

[Julie Elliott]

There is a cost-of-living crisis in my constituency and throughout the country. Millions of households in England and Wales are experiencing water poverty. Will the Minister support Labour’s proposal to impose—not just recommend—a duty on water companies to introduce social tariffs to help struggling families to pay their bills?

[Dan Rogerson]

I entirely understand what the hon. Lady has said about the cost of living. We are all aware of the problem. I represent an area in which incomes are very low, and in which water bills are a significant issue. It is clear from our discussions with Ofwat—my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State has engaged in some recently—that it understands the importance of the issue, and believes that the benefits to water companies of, for example, low borrowing rates should be passed on to customers. I am pleased that companies are considering the introduction of social tariffs, and I shall continue to keep the matter under review.

[Miss Anne McIntosh (Thirsk and Malton) (Con)]

I congratulate all who have been elevated to both Front Benches. We look forward to the return, in the very near future, of those of them who have served on the Select Committee—[Laughter]—in their ministerial capacity.

Will my hon. Friend use his good offices to press Ofwat to ensure that the 2014 price review enables the necessary investment to be made in the infrastructure and in innovation? May I also tease out of him the date on which the Water Bill will be given its Second Reading, and can be scrutinised by Parliament?

[Dan Rogerson]

I thought for a moment that my hon. Friend, who chairs the Select Committee, was petitioning the Prime Minister to summon us back to it, and that our tenure on the Front Benches might be very brief.

The timing of the Bill is, of course, a matter for those who manage our business. I look forward to debating the issues with colleagues in the House and, subsequently, in Committee.

What my hon. Friend has said about investment in the sector is crucial. We have already managed, through our regime, to deliver huge investment in water infrastructure. We now want to establish a regime which, while being fair to customers, also attracts further investment, so that we can have an industry that is fit for the future.

[Thomas Docherty (Dunfermline and West Fife) (Lab)]

May I begin by paying tribute to the previous Minister who worked in a bipartisan manner throughout his term in office and welcoming both new members of the Government Front-Bench team? I should also thank the chairlady of the Select Committee for her tutelage of us all over the past three and a half years.

Does the Minister understand that when households are struggling with inflation-busting water bills, it is simply unacceptable for water companies to try to avoid paying corporation tax? If he does, will he work with Opposition Members to make the necessary improvements to the forthcoming Water Bill?

[Dan Rogerson]

I welcome the hon. Gentleman to his post and look forward to debating these issues with him. As we look at the regime the Bill is seeking to bring in, we can discuss some of these issues, although there are probably other key areas we will want to focus on. The issue of corporation tax is crucial across many industries and I look forward to hearing what the hon. Gentleman has to say on the subject as we move forward.

[Grahame M. Morris (Easington) (Lab)]

T1. If he will make a statement on his departmental responsibilities.

[The Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Mr Owen Paterson)]

DEFRA’s priorities are growing the rural economy, improving the environment and safeguarding animal and plant health, and I am today pleased to announce £3 million of funding from the anaerobic digestion loan fund, which will enable farmers to obtain funding to set up small-scale anaerobic digestion plants. The technology will not only save farmers money on energy costs, but will provide them with the opportunity to boost their income by exporting electricity to the grid. It will also help them cut waste and reduce the amount of artificial fertilisers they use. This funding is an example of this Government’s commitment to sustainable economic growth and environmental improvement. The two are not mutually exclusive.

[Grahame M. Morris]

I want to ask about food banks and, in particular, about the answers the Minister gave a few moments ago in response to questions from my hon. Friends the Members for Stockton North (Alex Cunningham) and for Liverpool, Wavertree (Luciana Berger). I understand that in April 2013 DEFRA commissioned important research to review evidence on the landscape of food provision and access. Given that this information and research will be very helpful to Government in targeting policy to the most needy, why is it not being published? I know the Minister is new in post, but can he expedite this, because a promise was made that it would be posted on the Department’s website?

[Mr Paterson]

I am happy to answer the hon. Gentleman’s question. We undertake research on a whole range of areas and this obviously cuts across a number of different Departments, with whom we are consulting.

[Simon Wright (Norwich South) (LD)]

T4. Will the Secretary of State ensure more people are able to enjoy access to woodlands, particularly those close to our towns and cities?

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Dan Rogerson)]

We are consulting on the future of the publicly owned forest and management of forestry issues generally and looking at what we will take forward. There are many excellent landowners, such as the Woodland Trust and the National Trust, who encourage public access and enjoyment of woodland and I look forward to working with them and other landowners to ensure we increase access for everybody.

[Huw Irranca-Davies (Ogmore) (Lab)]

A National Audit Office report today shows the response to the horsemeat scandal was hampered by confusion caused by the coalition Government splitting the Food Standards Agency’s responsibilities in 2010. It also raises concerns over the reductions in food testing, public analysts and local officers working on food law enforcement since this Government came to power. So will Ministers now accept their share of responsibility—or is this the fault of the badgers?

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (George Eustice)]

The Department will look at this report from the NAO and study its recommendations very carefully, but I have to say there is no evidence that the division of the FSA’s role has contributed to this, and, more importantly, we have appointed Professor Chris Elliott to look at this whole issue in great detail and his report will be key.

[Stephen Metcalfe (South Basildon and East Thurrock) (Con)]

T5. Given the importance of exports to the country’s economic recovery, what is my right hon. Friend doing to help producers and exporters open up foreign markets?

[Mr Paterson]

Only this week I was in Cologne, taking our largest ever delegation to the world’s largest food fair; last month, I was in Moscow, where we announced a trade deal opening up the market for beef and lamb which will be worth up to £100 million over three years; and our work last year in opening up China has led to a 591% increase in pork exports in the first six months of this year.

[Stephen Timms (East Ham) (Lab)]

T2. My constituents who work at Tate & Lyle have been very appreciative of the Secretary of State’s efforts to secure a level playing field for cane sugar refiners in the European market. His former ministerial team were very diligent on this issue. I welcome his new team and wonder whether he can reassure the House that they will be equally determined on this issue.

[George Eustice]

I can, indeed, give the right hon. Gentleman that reassurance. The EU sugar regime is one of the most distorting parts of the common agricultural policy, and we had great success in negotiating the removal of sugar beet quotas in 2017. However, he rightly says that we need now to take those trade barriers down, and time is of the essence. We are therefore pushing the European Commission to ensure that all opportunities to secure additional trade concessions are taken at the earliest opportunity.

[Duncan Hames (Chippenham) (LD)]

T6. The Secretary of State will recall the petition I sent him that was collected by Climate Friendly Bradford on Avon; more than 1,000 Wiltshire residents were calling for a charge on single-use plastic carrier bags. How will the Minister ensure that neither the Chancellor nor the supermarkets cling on to the cash it collects?

[Dan Rogerson]

Although in England we cannot mandate where the money will go, because the relevant primary legislation, the Climate Change Act 2008, does not allow for that, we will discuss with retailers how the money raised should be spent and encourage them to give the profits to good causes. We have an expectation that, as in Wales, the money raised should benefit good causes.

[Graeme Morrice (Livingston) (Lab)]

T3. Is the Secretary of State aware of the most recent piece of scientific research on the Cayman turtle farm? It supports the position of the World Society for the Protection of Animals that: “There is no humane way to farm sea turtles”. Will he, along with the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, take decisive action to alleviate the suffering of these endangered animals?

[Mr Paterson]

I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for his question. The matter he raises is of real concern to a number of Members who have written to me. We are taking what actions we can, but we are the Government of the UK, and he has to remember that.

[Stephen Mosley (City of Chester) (Con)]

T8. Poaching in some parts of Africa is getting so bad that Tanzanian Minister Khamis Kagasheki has called for a shoot-to-kill policy to deal with poachers, following the loss of half of Tanzania’s elephants in the past three years. On current trends, it is estimated that the African elephant will be extinct in the wild by 2025. What action are the Government taking to tackle the illegal trade in endangered species?

[Mr Paterson]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for raising this shocking issue, on which he is absolutely right. The problem is even worse in respect of rhinoceroses; we lose one every 11 hours. So this Government are taking a world lead. We are calling a conference on 13 February next year, and we intend to co-ordinate world action—with western countries, with the countries where these animals live and with the countries where there is significant demand—before these iconic species become extinct.

[Julie Hilling (Bolton West) (Lab)]

T7. Whether or not the Government see sense next week and accept our amendments on dog control notices, that will not resolve all the issues relating to dangerous dogs, including controlling breeding, and ensuring that puppies are properly socialised and that children and adults are educated about dog ownership. Does the Minister agree that we still need a full dog welfare and control Bill?

[George Eustice]

Actually, I do not agree. There are lots of bits of legislation covering many areas, but the laws are in place. We need to ensure that they are better understood, which is why we have published guidance this week pointing out what community protection notices can do and how they can be used by practitioners.

[Several hon. Members]

rose—

[Mr Speaker]

Extreme brevity is now required.

[Robert Neill (Bromley and Chislehurst) (Con)]

Will the Secretary of State meet me and my hon. Friend the Member for Orpington (Joseph Johnson) to discuss the persistent and serious breaches of control of the Waste4Fuel site on the boundary of our constituencies, which the Environment Agency appears to be unable to cope with?

[Dan Rogerson]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right to highlight the concerns of his constituents about this site. I have looked into the issue, am aware of it and discuss it with the Environment Agency. If he and my hon. Friend the Member for Orpington wish to meet me to discuss it, I will be happy to do so.

[Joan Walley (Stoke-on-Trent North) (Lab)]

Does the Minister share the concern of Stoke-on-Trent boat club, and the Association of Waterways Cruising Clubs all over the country, about DEFRA’s deferment of the decision to stop Environment Agency navigation waters going over to the Canal and River Trust? Will he urgently review that situation and raise it with the Treasury?

[Dan Rogerson]

The hon. Lady has obviously been concerned about these matters for some time. I would be happy to hear more from her about the details and perhaps we could take the matter forward on that basis.

[Tim Farron (Westmorland and Lonsdale) (LD)]

Do my right hon. and hon. Friends share my alarm at the growing practice of Natural England’s insisting on the removal of sheep from land under new stewardship projects? Given the absolute need for the UK to be able to provide more of its own food, is that not a dangerous step? Will Ministers take action?

[Mr Paterson]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for that question, which touches on our conundrum in the hill areas, where we clearly want to increase food production but also want to improve the environment. We will be consulting shortly on whether we modulate a significant sum from pillar 1 to pillar 2 and what the shape and form of those pillar 2 schemes might be. I am absolutely clear that we have a real role to play in helping hill farmers to keep the hills looking as they do and to provide them with sufficient money to provide food.

[Mr Speaker]

I call Michael Connarty—not here.

[Diana Johnson (Kingston upon Hull North) (Lab)]

Is it acceptable that properties built after 2009 and small businesses will not be covered by the Government’s new flood insurance scheme?

[Mr Paterson]

We are working very closely with the Association of British Insurers on the new scheme, which will replace the statement of principles, and we are looking in detail at a range of different options. We do not propose to extend the scheme to post-2009 properties.

[Sheryll Murray (South East Cornwall) (Con)]

Local people have for many years expressed concern about the Whitsand bay dump site. They have identified an alternative site; will the Secretary of State meet me to discuss the reclassification of that alternative site?

[George Eustice]

I know that the issue is important for my hon. Friend and I would be more than happy to meet her and others affected by the decision.

[Several hon. Members]

rose—

[Mr Speaker]

Order. I am sorry to disappoint colleagues, but I think that Mr Philip Hollobone must be the last questioner.

[Mr Philip Hollobone (Kettering) (Con)]

To better understand the spread of TB in wildlife, why are the badgers that are being culled not being tested to see whether they are infected or not?

[Mr Paterson]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for that question. Let me clarify in simple terms: carcases that have been shot would not give an accurate reading following post-mortem.

The hon. Member for Banbury, representing the Church Commissioners, was asked—

[Mr David Nuttall (Bury North) (Con)]

1. What lessons the Church of England has learned from the increasing size of congregations attending services at cathedrals.

[The Second Church Estates Commissioner (Sir Tony Baldry)]

I am glad to report that over the past 10 years there has been a 35% increase in average weekly attendance in cathedral services. A team from Cranmer Hall at St John’s college, Durham is conducting a detailed survey of the trends in increased cathedral attendance.

[Mr Nuttall]

I thank my hon. Friend for that reply. It is indeed good news that there has been such a significant increase in the number of people worshipping in cathedrals over the past 10 years. Will the research seek to discover why attendance at services held in cathedrals has been going up at a time when attendance at many parish churches has been declining?

[Sir Tony Baldry]

Absolutely; the research will seek to understand the detail of attendance trends at cathedrals and I hope that the results of the study will be published early next year.

[Susan Elan Jones (Clwyd South) (Lab)]

I am sure that many of us will be of the view that the increased attendance in cathedrals must be down not only to the high standards of liturgy but to the fact that they have a diverse range of clergy. On the subject of churches and diversity, would the hon. Gentleman like to congratulate the Church in Wales on the decision to elect women as bishops? Would he say that there are great lessons to be learned for the Church of England, which is increasingly becoming a minority within the Anglican communion on that issue?

[Sir Tony Baldry]

The House well knows that I very much look forward to the day when the Church of England can welcome women as bishops.

[Simon Hughes (Bermondsey and Old Southwark) (LD)]

2. What discussions the Church of England is having with the Foreign and Commonwealth Office regarding the protection of religious minorities in Syria and Egypt.

[Sir Tony Baldry]

Following the Archbishop of Canterbury’s visit to the middle east in the summer, he met my right hon. Friend the Foreign Secretary in July to discuss the vulnerable situation of religious minorities in Syria and Egypt. The Church of England has made representations to Foreign Office Ministers to suggest appointing an ambassador at large for religious freedom.

[Simon Hughes]

That is a welcome bit of news, both about the meeting and the initiative. May I reinforce the point that in Syria and Egypt and across the middle east and north Africa the decline in Christian communities is alarming and they are feeling horribly oppressed, as they are in many other Muslim countries of the world? Will my hon. Friend ask the commissioners and the Church in this country to make that a priority in the years ahead? They need our help, and they need to know that the rest of the Anglican communion is on their side.

[Sir Tony Baldry]

I entirely agree with my right hon. Friend. It is difficult to underestimate what is happening. The International Society for Human Rights, a secular organisation based in Germany, estimates that 80% of all acts of religious discrimination in the world today are directed at Christians. The bishop of the Coptic Church in Egypt, based in London, has said that there is almost ethnic cleansing to eliminate Christianity and Christians in Egypt, so this is an issue to which we must all—the Church of England, the Foreign Office and civil society as a whole—give the highest priority. Whether it is people being murdered in Peshawar or churches being burnt in Baghdad, this is a terrible issue which must be addressed collectively.

[Kerry McCarthy (Bristol East) (Lab)]

I urge the hon. Gentleman to look at the recent report by Amnesty International into the attacks on Coptic Christians and on churches, in Egypt in particular but in the middle east more generally. I echo the request by the right hon. Member for Bermondsey and Old Southwark (Simon Hughes) for the hon. Gentleman to talk to his colleagues in the Foreign Office and ensure that this issue is an absolute priority for them.

[Sir Tony Baldry]

I thank the hon. Lady for her question. I reiterate what the Archbishop of Canterbury said on the Amnesty International report. Archbishop Justin said that he welcomed

“this timely report from Amnesty International”

and continued:

“Attacks on any community are deplorable and any state has the responsibility to protect its citizens. The appalling attacks in August on the Christian community in Egypt highlight the need for all citizens to be duly protected. Despite the pressure they are under, by the grace of God, Christians in Egypt continue to do all they can to work for the good of the whole of the society of which they are an essential part.”

It is very welcome that organisations such as Amnesty International are drawing attention to what is happening to Christian minorities in the middle east and elsewhere in the world.

[Mr Philip Hollobone (Kettering) (Con)]

If Muslims were treated in this country as Christians are being treated in Egypt and Syria, there would be international outrage. Can the Church of England work with the papacy, the United Nations and other international organisations to have a real international initiative, perhaps with the Arab League, to condemn all these atrocities before they get far, far worse?

[Sir Tony Baldry]

The international community as a whole needs to recognise that the persecution of any faith group, and the persecution of Christians across the world, is wholly unacceptable and has to stop.

[Diana Johnson (Kingston upon Hull North) (Lab)]

3. What work the Church of England is undertaking to support food banks in local communities; and if he will make a statement.

[Sir Tony Baldry]

Many parish churches are closely involved in running and supporting food banks all across the country, and a recent report from the Church Urban Fund found that four out of five churches are supporting a food bank in one or more ways.

[Diana Johnson]

I was pleased to hear what the hon. Gentleman just said about the progress made in the Church of Wales. The fight obviously continues in the Church in England to ordain women bishops. On the increasing number of people using food banks, however, does the hon. Gentleman agree with the Archbishop of Canterbury that

“there is a danger…that people are categorised, that all people on benefit are seen as scroungers and that’s clearly completely untrue”?

[Sir Tony Baldry]

The benefits system exists to ensure that those who are entitled to benefits receive benefits. In respect of food banks, the question really is one of concern, which has been raised earlier in the House today, about the increase in the use of food banks. I would like to report to the House that the Church of England’s mission and public affairs team, together with Oxfam and the Child Poverty Action Group, are examining the underlying reasons for the rapid growth in the use of food banks, and will recommend changes in policy and practice that would help to reduce the use of food banks in the longer term.

[Mr Dennis Skinner (Bolsover) (Lab)]

Isn’t he a food bank himself? [Laughter.]

[Mr Speaker]

Order. I will not repeat what the hon. Member for Bolsover (Mr Skinner) has just said from a sedentary position. The Second Church Estates Commissioner is an extremely distinguished Member, but he is not what was said of him from a sedentary position.

[Sir Tony Baldry]

If we were not discussing such an important subject as food banks, Mr Speaker, I would comment to the hon. Member for Bolsover (Mr Skinner) that one of the great things about this place is that one must have humility. Ever since I received my knighthood, the family at home have called me “Sir Cumference Hippo”, so I would not worry too much.

[Mr Speaker]

We appreciate that from the hon. Gentleman, with his unfailing sense of humour.

The Chairman of the Public Accounts Commission was asked—

[Mr Barry Sheerman (Huddersfield) (Lab/Co-op)]

4. What steps the Public Accounts Commission is taking to encourage improvements in the quality and standard of training in the accountancy and audit professions.

[Sir Edward Leigh (Gainsborough) (Con)]

The Public Accounts Commission has a number of statutory functions in respect of the National Audit Office, including approving its corporate strategy, agreeing and laying its estimate and appointing non-executive members of the NAO board. Naturally we have no direct responsibility for training, but we always press the NAO to fulfil fully its obligations on training.

[Mr Sheerman]

I am sure the hon. Gentleman is aware that many of us who had employees in the banking sector and friends who had a stake in the banking sector were horrified by the lack of ethics of the accountancy profession when it came to the basic job of auditing the banks and auditing other big corporations where they did it badly. Surely we should speak up through the Commission about ethics, responsibility and moral certitude in accountancy.

[Sir Edward Leigh]

That is a very interesting question but it is rather wide of our responsibilities. I wish we had those responsibilities, but we are responsible only for the budget and the annual report of the National Audit Office, which audits accounts in the public, not the private, sector, so I am sorry I cannot do more for the hon. Gentleman.

The hon. Member for Banbury, representing the Church Commissioners, was asked—

[Miss Anne McIntosh (Thirsk and Malton) (Con)]

5. What recent discussions he has had with Natural England on bats in churches; and if he will make a statement.

[The Second Church Estates Commissioner (Sir Tony Baldry)]

I understand from Natural England that the licence application for St Hilda’s in my hon. Friend’s constituency was submitted last Monday and a decision is expected this week. Following the granting of a licence, the work would start on site next week, blocking the access points of bats. The application is for the exclusion of bats from the interior of the church only, so this solution is intended to allow the interior of St Hilda’s church to be completely free from bats, while allowing their continued use of the exterior of the building.

[Miss McIntosh]

It is a source of some cynicism that the licence was issued or applied for only after my question regarding bats having the run of the church, St Hilda’s at Ellerburn, appeared on the Order Paper. As £30,000 of taxpayers’ money has been spent conducting a survey which has as yet led to no result, will my hon. Friend exert all his influence on the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs to issue the licence so that the congregation can meet and use the interior of the church free from intrusion by bats?

[Sir Tony Baldry]

My hon. Friend makes a good point. It is worth recording that this one single parish church has had to spend tens of thousands of pounds so far just to get to this position. We have to improve the whole situation in relation to bats in churches. It is not a joking matter. Churches are not field barns; they are places of worship, and it cannot be right that bats can be excluded from reopened railway tunnels and the living spaces of domestic homes, but it is so difficult for active community buildings such as churches to resolve such an issue.

[Fiona Bruce (Congleton) (Con)]

6. What progress the Church Commissioners have made on plans for a credit union.

[Sir Tony Baldry]

The Church of England is developing a three-pronged strategy in its work with credit unions. The first is to link parish churches to local credit unions to offer support where any is available. The second is to set up an archbishops taskforce to work with the credit union movement and the local banking sector to produce credible alternatives which offer financially responsible products and services. The third is the plan to found the Church’s credit union, primarily for clergy and Church employees.

[Fiona Bruce]

I welcome the work the Church is doing to promote the good work of credit unions. Will my hon. Friend also update the House on the involvement of the Church Commissioners in the proposed new bank, Williams & Glyn’s, which I understand is to lend to local small and medium-sized enterprises in particular?

[Sir Tony Baldry]

I am glad to be able to report to the House that the Church Commissioners were part of a consortium of investors that will be partnering with Royal Bank of Scotland to set up a new bank, Williams & Glyn’s. It will be a vigorous challenger bank which is intended to set up the highest ethical standards and give consumers more choice, and I hope that it will work out how we can better help some of those denied access to financial services.

[Damian Hinds (East Hampshire) (Con)]

With regard to the first of my hon. Friend’s three prongs, are there any sub-prongs, by which I mean ways that local parishes can work with credit unions, perhaps through the use of premises, the recruitment of volunteers and board members, and, critically, raise awareness by marketing the credit unions?

[Sir Tony Baldry]

Absolutely; the Church of England is rich in resource, buildings and expertise, and we want to share all of that. We want to encourage many more credit unions to be established across the country.

[Mr Speaker]

Mr Kevan Jones—not here.

[Andrew Stephenson (Pendle) (Con)]

8. What steps the Church Commissioners are taking to publicise the introduction of the Scrap Metal Dealers Act on 1 October 2013; and what steps churches are taking to protect themselves from lead theft.

[Sir Tony Baldry]

The Church of England has been working closely with its insurer, Ecclesiastical, to promote the “Hands off our church roofs” campaign, and the Scrap Metal Dealers Act 2013, which came into force on 1 October, is extremely welcome. Overall, we hope that we can promote the various deterrence methods available to protect church roofs and metal artefacts from theft.

[Andrew Stephenson]

Will my hon. Friend confirm that since it was made clear that that legislation would be introduced there has been a significant reduction in the incidence of metal theft? Although vigilance is still needed, does not the passing of the Act mean that we are no longer fighting a losing battle?

[Sir Tony Baldry]

The whole House will be really pleased about the introduction of the Act, because although we still have some way to go, the reduction in the incidence of metal theft has been substantial. Although churches of course still need to use CCTV, SmartWater and so forth, the fact that scrap metal can no longer be traded for cash—people can no longer rip lead from roofs and sell it the next morning for cash to a local dealer; it is now a cashless business—is clearly already having a considerable impact on ensuring that our heritage does not continue to be ripped off.

Business of the House

Thursday 10th October 2013 Commons Chamber

09:30

[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 14 October—Motion to approve a Ways and Means resolution relating to the Anti-social Behaviour, Crime and Policing Bill, followed by remaining stages of the Anti-social Behaviour, Crime and Policing Bill (day 1).

Tuesday 15 October—Conclusion of remaining stages of the Anti-social Behaviour, Crime and Policing Bill, followed by a motion to approve a Ways and Means resolution relating to the Deep Sea Mining Bill.

Wednesday 16 October—Opposition day (7th allotted day). There will be a debate on zero-hours contracts, followed by a debate on high streets and changes to use orders. Both debates with arise on an Opposition motion.

Thursday 17 October—A debate on a motion relating to defence reforms, followed by a debate on a motion relating to funding support for deaf and young people. The subjects for both debates were nominated by the Backbench Business Committee.

Friday 18 October—Private Members’ Bills.

The provisional business for the week commencing 21 October will include:

Monday 21 October—Business to be nominated by the Backbench Business Committee.

Tuesday 22 October—Second Reading of the Immigration Bill, followed by a motion to approve a European document relating to the European public prosecutor’s office.

Wednesday 23 October—Opposition day (8th allotted day). There will be a debate on a motion in the name of the Democratic Unionist party. Subject to be announced.

Thursday 24 October—Business to be nominated by the Backbench Business Committee.

Friday 25 October—Private Members’ Bills.

[Ms Eagle]

I thank the Leader of the House for announcing next week’s business. May I begin by echoing the Prime Minister in congratulating Professor Higgs, this year’s joint winner of the Nobel prize for physics for his work in explaining why the universe has mass? I think his theory may even be able to explain how the badgers managed to move the goalposts.

I note that the Offender Rehabilitation Bill is still strangely absent from future business, despite the fact that it completed its Lords stages well before the summer recess. The Leader of the House will know that on Report in the other place the Government lost a crucial vote and that clause 1 now reads:

“No alteration or reform may be made to the structure of the probation service unless the proposals have been laid before, and approved by resolution of, both Houses of Parliament.”

We have had no such document, so will he explain why the Government have published contracts to sell off £800 million-worth of probation services and why probation staff have been given notice that they might be offloaded to companies such as G4S or Serco next spring?

It looks to me as though the Government are deliberately ignoring the will of Parliament by delaying the passage of this Bill until after they have privatised the probation service, so rendering their defeat in the Lords irrelevant. Could the Leader of the House prove that my theory is wrong by telling me when we can expect to see the Bill in this House?

The Government succeeded in rushing through their sinister gagging Bill last night without giving us adequate time for scrutiny. It now goes on to the Lords in similar haste so that the Government can get their gag in place in time for the next election. Given that Parliament has not been given the chance to scrutinise the Bill properly and it was not consulted on before it was published, an independent commission has been established to analyse its impact. Will the Leader of the House join me in giving evidence to that commission, and will he give his assurance that the Government will not proceed with the Bill until the findings are published?

We are just back from the conference recess and we learned a lot from the conferences of the two parties in power. The Liberal Democrats believe they have a right to be ensconced in their ministerial cars in perpetuity, whoever wins the election, and the Tories dream of a land of hope and glory. The reality is that, with this incompetent Government, it is more a land of hopeless Tories. I also understand that, following his conference speech, the Business Secretary has changed his voicemail to that old Liberal Democrat staple, “Please leave a message after the high moral tone.”

I am relieved to see both the Leader of the House and his deputy, and, indeed, the Patronage Secretary, in their place after the Government reshuffle at the beginning of the week. Reshuffles on either side are a difficult time for everyone and I want to take a moment to recognise the service of all those leaving their respective Front Benches as a result of Monday’s events. The Leader of the House and I have both been on the right and wrong sides of reshuffles in our time, so we have a personal insight into what people go through. I salute the hon. Member for Newbury (Richard Benyon), who lost his Government job on Monday and was good natured enough to repeat a tweet he received after he had been given the bad news, which said:

“Fisheries Minister sacked. Word is he’s gutted”.

Inexplicably, our friends in the Press Gallery treat reshuffle day as though it were a nerve-wracking episode of “The X Factor”. All that was missing on Monday was some tense music and Dermot O’Leary giving out hugs at the end of Downing street, although I did think that some aspects of the Government’s reshuffle really were worthy of reality TV. First, a Liberal Democrat, the hon. Member for Taunton Deane (Mr Browne), was sacked for being too right wing. Given that criterion, I am surprised the Deputy Prime Minister managed to spare himself. Then we realised that the Prime Minister’s new strategy to stop his Back-Bench rebellions was to give as many people as possible a job. It seems that a small state needs a very big Government. It then emerged that the Deputy Prime Minister had put a conspiracy theorist in the Home Office behind the back of the furious Home Secretary. I understand that the book written by the Minister of State, Home Department, the hon. Member for Lewes (Norman Baker) is shooting up the Amazon charts as a result of all the unwanted publicity. I am sure we all look forward to the new Minister telling us what really happened at Roswell, whether NASA faked the moon landings and whether Elvis ever did actually leave the building.

[Mr Lansley]

I am grateful to the shadow Leader of the House. I am enjoying our return to business questions after the recess.

I join the shadow Leader of the House and our respective party leaders in congratulating Professor Peter Higgs. It is wonderful that this country has produced so many leading scientists and, indeed, recipients of Nobel prizes. That is something that people in Russia might like to ponder when they call us a small country. I am reminded that there is one college in the small city of Cambridge on this small island that has more Nobel prize winners than the whole of Russia.

I am not yet in a position to enlighten the House on the timetable for our consideration of the Offender Rehabilitation Bill. I will announce that in due course. The Ministry of Justice is rightly proceeding with plans that will improve the quality of probation services and, importantly, offer probation services to those who leave prison after short sentences. That is an important reform and I look forward to the consideration of the Bill in this House.

The shadow Leader of the House tried to return to the debate on the Transparency of Lobbying, Non-party Campaigning and Trade Union Administration Bill. However, it has now left this House. I met Lesley-Anne Alexander, Stephen Bubb and others to discuss the establishment of the commission. I made it clear that we would take account of anything that they said, but that it was important for them to consider the issues more quickly. They are establishing the commission two and a half months after the Bill was published and in the midst of its passage. I will gladly hear what they have to say, but we will proceed with the Bill in the Lords as planned. As we made clear in yesterday’s debate, we have a timetable for the passage of the Bill. It received full scrutiny on the Floor of this House and I know that their lordships will do a similar thing in their House.

I will not dwell on particular aspects of the reshuffle. As the shadow Leader of the House kindly observed, we have all been subject to these things over the years. My observation is that what goes around comes around. I agree with her that a number of my colleagues have given very good service as Ministers. We very much appreciate that and thank them for it.

We must always be aware that one can contribute to public life not only through ministerial office, but through many other forms of service in this House and in public life more generally. I left the shadow Cabinet and sat as a Back Bencher for a couple of years. That did not mean that I could not make a significant contribution. For example, I helped to write the provision in the Communications Act 2003 that provided that media mergers should be subject to a public interest test in the same way as other mergers, which has been found to be of considerable use. I therefore encourage my colleagues who have left the Government most recently to reflect on the other opportunities for public service.

[Mr Ian Liddell-Grainger (Bridgwater and West Somerset) (Con)]

Today, we will rightly have a debate on the funding of local councils. May we also have a debate on the future of small local councils? My constituency contains the smallest local council in England, which is finding it nigh on impossible to survive. We need to consider how we will fund small councils not only for the next two years, but for the next decade. We must consider whether they can survive in the changing world in which we live, given the recession that we are all facing.

[Mr Lansley]

My hon. Friend makes an important point about funding. If he has an opportunity to speak in today’s debate, I am sure that it will be relevant. I will say two things. First, while small local authorities have a valuable role in ensuring that democracy is accessible and relevant to their populations, many such public authorities have successfully explored ways of sharing costs and back-office services with other authorities, and that is very useful. Secondly, the BBC survey discovered that it is possible to secure more and better services with less money. That point will be important in this afternoon’s debate. It illustrates how public services have responded to the tough times that we inherited from the Labour Government and is a credit to those who are running local authorities.

[Mr Dave Watts (St Helens North) (Lab)]

Given that the general public think their regulators are ineffective, can time be found for a debate on whether we should replace the current regulators with organisations that can stop British consumers being ripped off?

[Mr Lansley]

It is particularly important that we ensure that regulators and the competition authorities are effective. Competition is what delivers for consumers, and regulators have access to concurrent competition powers with the competition authorities. We need to be sure that those powers are being used to deliver the benefits for consumers that competition should deliver.

[Mr David Heath (Somerton and Frome) (LD)]

I understand that we are now to call High Speed 2 the north-south railway. Will the Leader of the House find an opportunity for the Secretary of State for Transport to come to the House during the next week to announce that just a fraction of that investment could be spent on providing a barely adequate east-west railway?

[Mr Lansley]

It is a great pleasure to have my hon. Friend here to ask a question. He was a distinguished occupant of the post of Deputy Leader of the House, and we thank him for that and for his work in his subsequent responsibilities related to farming.

Over the next few years, up to about 2020, there will be much larger investment elsewhere in Network Rail than in HS2. It is not absorbing resources that would otherwise be available for the rest of the network. On the contrary, we have among the largest ever investment programmes elsewhere in the rail system, and rightly so. Just as HS2 will meet clear north-south capacity requirements, we need other investment to meet capacity needs elsewhere.

[Mr Barry Sheerman (Huddersfield) (Lab/Co-op)]

Now that we are back in operation, may I ask the Leader of the House if we can reflect on something that troubles me—the growth of monopolies in almost every sector of life? Whether we are talking about the energy sector, the supermarkets or transport, there are organisations with a monopolistic tendency to do down the consumer. May we have a full debate on monopolies and how we regulate them?

[Mr Lansley]

I think that is exactly the same point that the hon. Member for St Helens North (Mr Watts) made, and in a sense I think we agree about it. We need competition if we are to deliver benefits to consumers, and we need it to be robust. That competition is not driven naturally in markets; it has to be regulated for by authorities. We should not have a free-for-all in markets, because of the tendency towards monopoly. We must have effective competition regulation to make competition happen, and this Government have been keen to ensure that it is in place. To be fair to the previous Government, they also did that under competition and enterprise Acts. This country has established what is regarded as one of the more effective competition regimes, but we must continuously be vigilant and use the competition authorities to deliver it.

[Oliver Colvile (Plymouth, Sutton and Devonport) (Con)]

As my right hon. Friend knows, Plymouth university was named in the top 300 in last week’s Times Higher Education world rankings, putting it in the top 1.5% globally. Will he join me in congratulating it on its remarkable feat? May we have a debate on the role of universities in delivering growth in our economy both here in Britain and globally?

[Mr Lansley]

My hon. Friend is right, and I join him in expressing appreciation for the tremendous progress that Plymouth university has made and the standards that it is achieving. He and other Members will be well aware not only of the comparative strengths in our higher education system, which are dramatic, but of the contribution that they are making to our economic recovery and our future prospects. If we are going to win the global race, it will be on the basis of knowledge-based industries. The connection between universities and higher education and the new industries of the future is critical.

[David Wright (Telford) (Lab)]

May we have a debate on the privatisation strategy, which colleagues have mentioned, with a particular focus on Royal Mail? Many people feel that that sale is outrageous and that a lot of smaller investors have been locked out of the process by the fee level.

[Mr Lansley]

This House passed legislation that permitted the privatisation to go ahead, and many small investors will have seen the advantage in seeking to be party to that privatisation and part of the future of Royal Mail—a future that will be stronger by virtue of its access to private capital.

[James Morris (Halesowen and Rowley Regis) (Con)]

Today is world mental health day, and mental illness will be one of the major health challenges we face over the next 20 years. May we have a debate on the vital issue of achieving parity of esteem between physical and mental health conditions in the national health service?

[Mr Lansley]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend and it is right to recall that issue today. The Backbench Business Committee has helpfully scheduled debates in the House on two occasions, which has allowed the House to make a signal contribution to identifying the problems associated with stigma and discrimination related to mental health. We should not rest on that, however, and must pursue the issue further. The Time To Change campaign—which has now rolled out across the country, supported by £60 million of Government funding—is capable of making a big difference. I recall it was trialled in Cambridgeshire, and a lot of people appreciated how it enabled many people to change their views about the impact and character of mental health problems, which so many people in all sorts of families suffer from.

[Thomas Docherty (Dunfermline and West Fife) (Lab)]

On 16 August and 2 September I wrote to the Business Secretary on two matters: first, the Government’s role in selling fake bomb detectors to other countries, and, secondly, the export of chemicals that could be used to make chemical weapons in Syria. I have not received a reply to either letter and I wonder whether the Leader of the House’s wonderful civil servants could have a word with their counterparts in the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills to find out why the courtesies of the House are not being followed.

[Mr Lansley]

Yes, of course. I will be glad to do that as I regard it as one of my responsibilities to assist Members in ensuring that we respond promptly—timeously, I should say—to requests for information and representations to Ministers.

[Andrew Selous (South West Bedfordshire) (Con)]

May we have a debate on job creation and the possible impact of tax rises on larger businesses? Last week I visited Honeytop Speciality Foods in my constituency—a company that employs 900 people and is creating 200 extra jobs over the next month. It has exported naan bread to India and made Dunstable the crumpet capital of the United Kingdom. I do not want to see anything that would threaten investment and the creation of full-time British jobs.

[Mr Lansley]

Next time I am delayed by a traffic jam on the A5 in Dunstable I will take time out to enjoy a crumpet. I am grateful to my hon. Friend because it is important to illustrate that when we mention the 1.4 million new private sector jobs created since the election, we sometimes lose the human character behind that big number. Those 200 extra jobs in his constituency show that human benefit because these are people in jobs who are bringing home good salaries and changing their economic prospects and those of their town. That is multiplied many thousands of times across the country, and it is right for him to draw attention to the importance of supporting that.

[Jonathan Ashworth (Leicester South) (Lab)]

Further to the answer of the Leader of the House to my hon. Friend the Member for Dunfermline and West Fife (Thomas Docherty), a few weeks ago I wrote to the Home Secretary about her proposal for a £3,000 visa bond on visitors from India and Pakistan, which is causing consternation in my constituency. Last week a Home Office official rang my office to say that they were sorry, but there is a 12-month backlog of correspondence and they are waiting for the Home Secretary to sign those letters. Does the Leader of the House think that is acceptable?

[Mr Lansley]

If I may, I will speak to the Home Office and see what the position is. I am sure there is not a 12-month backlog for Home Office correspondence, but I will find out the position and report back to the hon. Gentleman.

[Sir Bob Russell (Colchester) (LD)]

May we have a debate on the salaries and wages to be paid to staff in the national health service? There have been reports that there will be no wage increase next year, but one is expected. Does the Leader of the House agree that we rely very much on the dedication and hard work of our NHS staff, that we should not treat them in that way, and that they should not be taken for granted in that way?

[Mr Lansley]

My hon. Friend will be aware that pay in the NHS is the subject of independent pay review. Therefore, to that extent, the recommendations on future pay will wait on the results of independent review. It is quite proper that the Government, in that context, should provide evidence to the pay review, which has happened. The affordability of any pay rise must have a bearing on that evidence, bearing in mind the overall Government approach, which is for the overall increase in pay to be of the order of 1% in the year ahead. As I know very well, there is contractual pay progression in the NHS. When I was Health Secretary, it was about 1.4% per year. I believe it has increased recently. As he will understand, there is an obvious relationship between the affordability of progression pay of that kind and any headline basic pay increase.

[Robert Flello (Stoke-on-Trent South) (Lab)]

I have previously asked a question on the sale by the Ministry of Justice of the former magistrates court at Fenton town hall, to which I received a reply stating that the Ministry of Justice wanted to receive maximum funds for the sale. Given that neither the Ministry of Justice nor its predecessor Departments have ever paid so much as a penny to the people of Stoke-on-Trent to buy or rent the building, may we have a debate in Government time on Government Departments selling buildings that properly belong to local people? Perhaps we could have the debate before the petition is delivered to No. 10, which will happen soon. It is outrageous that the MOJ is selling a building that belongs to the people of Stoke-on-Trent, who have never received a penny for it.

[Mr Lansley]

If I may, I will look at the correspondence—I recall that the hon. Gentleman rightly raised the question previously and has received a reply. If the MOJ has proper ownership of a building, it must, not least in the interest of the taxpayer, ensure that it realises best value for it, but the Government have been clear on the opportunities local communities should have in relation to assets of community value. I cannot promise a debate, but I will look at the hon. Gentleman’s point.

[Julian Smith (Skipton and Ripon) (Con)]

As part of its reporting of national security issues, The Guardian has not denied sending the detailed family and personal information of our security agents across borders. That is illegal and it is threatening our agents and their families. May we have a statement from the Home Secretary to clarify that the law will be upheld, whether or not the organisation involved is hiding behind the fig leaf of journalism?

[Mr Lansley]

My hon. Friend and the House know that the freedom of speech we prize so highly comes with a responsibility. Members of the House and the public will have been struck by what the director general of MI5 said this week. I am sure he was right to say what he said. In that context, I will ask the Home Secretary to consider my hon. Friend’s point and how she might inform the House in due course, but it seems to me that, regardless of any action taken by the Government, it is incumbent on the press—meaning, in this context, The Guardian—to exercise accountability for its decisions.

[Keith Vaz (Leicester East) (Lab)]

May I declare my interest and remind the Leader of the House that 1 million people in this country have undiagnosed diabetes? He is the architect of the health and wellbeing boards. May we have a statement or debate on the amount of money they are spending to create awareness of the condition among the general public? I pay tribute to the Under-Secretary of State for Defence, the hon. Member for Broxtowe (Anna Soubry), for the good work she did on diabetes before she was moved from the Department of Health.

[Mr Lansley]

I join the right hon. Gentleman in thanking the Under-Secretary for the work she did, which has taken us into a new era in public health. We are protecting the real value of the resources within the NHS budget, which we are increasing in real terms, but a larger increase is going to public health, because, as he correctly identifies, if we can anticipate future illness and act to prevent it, it is important that we do so—in the case of diabetes, early diagnosis and intervention has successful outcomes. Health and wellbeing boards, as part of their joint commissioning in public health, will look at how they can ensure that people access diagnoses of the conditions that place them at risk.

[Anne Marie Morris (Newton Abbot) (Con)]

Given the importance of localism, which the Government have recognised, and in the light of the new powers communities have been given to influence housing decisions in their area, does the Leader of the House agree that the time is now right for a debate on a community right of appeal in the planning process? That is not the same thing as a third party right, which the Government have considered and rejected, but at the moment local communities feel disfranchised in the appeal process.

[Mr Lansley]

My hon. Friend might like to note that on Monday 21 October my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government will be here with his colleagues and she may consider it worth her while to raise this issue then. We must be careful in this context. It is important to ensure, as we have, that we strengthen the local or community voice in the establishment of local development frameworks and—as I have seen done very effectively—through neighbourhood plans, to create a framework so that those who exercise their right to bring forward development on land they own or have acquired do so in the context of the community’s view about the use of land in their area. Otherwise, we might run the risk of a chilling effect on development as a consequence of subsequent rights of appeal for the community against planning permissions that have been granted.

[Nick Smith (Blaenau Gwent) (Lab)]

Demand at Trussell Trust food banks has gone up 800% under this Government. When can we have a debate on this cost of living crisis?

[Mr Lansley]

We are continually engaging in a debate on the issues relating to cost of living, and how families are able to cope with the consequences of the reduction of wealth in this country by 7.2% under the last Government, in the most serious recession we have faced in a century. It is inconceivable that such a reduction in wealth would not have consequences across society. Fortunately the number of workless households is now at its lowest level, and those who are in work are increasingly finding that their tax bills are going down. Inevitably and rightly, there are charitable and other endeavours to help those people who are in hardship, just as the benefit system should. We will have further opportunities to debate how we can target that support to best effect, and I look forward to those.

[Mr Nigel Evans (Ribble Valley) (Ind)]

Perhaps we could have a wider debate on planning laws. The issue that has had a real impact on the Ribble Valley, whose core strategy is not in place, is the number of speculative planning applications that have been put in. The local council turns them down, they go to appeal and the decisions are overturned. It is not only communities that feel frustrated, but local councillors, who wonder what the use is in rejecting such planning applications only to have their decisions overturned time and again.

[Mr Lansley]

I completely understand the point that my hon. Friend makes, not least because South Cambridgeshire—he will not be surprised to learn—has a heavy demand for new housing and many applications. We want to ensure that we also meet housing need by having local plans in place, including neighbourhood plans, so that decisions can be made consistent with the local understanding of how planning should be structured in the area. That is what needs to happen. If those local plans show how they will meet the housing demand for the next five years, they should be robust in the face of challenge.

[Phil Wilson (Sedgefield) (Lab)]

May we have a statement from the Secretary of State for Education on his announcement that only the first entry results for GCSEs will count towards school league tables? Any improvement in a pupil’s progress through his or her hard work and excellent teaching will not be counted. Is that not the wrong way to deal with multiple exam entries?

[Mr Lansley]

It is important to have clear and meaningful indicators of school performance. If I may, I will ask a Minister at the Department to respond to the point the hon. Gentleman rightly raises, rather than attempt to do so myself.

[Sir Edward Leigh (Gainsborough) (Con)]

With regard to private Members’ Bills and the forthcoming return of the European Union (Referendum) Bill, will the Leader of the House remind the House that the Bill is such a beautiful yet fragile flower that seeking to improve it by amending it will be about as useful to its life as throwing a gallon of poison over it?

[Mr Lansley]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. This important Bill is drafted in a straightforward way. Even with the best will in the world—he is very knowledgeable about the procedures of the House—seeking to improve private Members’ Bills in a way that is no more than tinkering risks prejudicing them. Those who, like me, share the view that the Bill should pass—it will give people the say that they should have, and at the right time, in the future of this country’s relationship with Europe—should accept that and get on with it.

[Tom Blenkinsop (Middlesbrough South and East Cleveland) (Lab)]

Total UK production decreased by 1.1% between July 2013 and August 2013, with manufacturing decreasing by 1.2%. Between August 2012 and August 2013, production output decreased by 1.5%. Investment in plant and machinery for factories remains below 2007 levels. The Leader of the House talks about the global race and the Chancellor talks about the march of the makers. May we have a debate on manufacturing and talk about why UK manufacturing is in full retreat at the moment?

[Mr Lansley]

I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for the opportunity to remind the House that business confidence is up, consumer confidence is up, exports are up, construction is up, manufacturing is up, growth forecasts are up, and that only this week the International Monetary Fund’s international outlook upgraded its forecast for the UK economy for this year and next year by more than any other major economy.

[Jake Berry (Rossendale and Darwen) (Con)]

Will the Leader of the House ask the Secretary of State for Health to come to the House to make a statement about the recent changes proposed in Europe to both the packaging of tobacco and the banning of menthol cigarettes? While we all support anything that reduces the number of people who take up smoking and reduces the number of cigarettes that people smoke, the House needs to have the opportunity to debate this serious health issue.

[Mr Lansley]

These are important issues and the House will want to consider the agreement in Europe this week on the tobacco directive. Rather than the Secretary of State coming to the House to make a statement, the proper route is for the issue to be scrutinised by the European Scrutiny Committee. If the Committee then recommends a debate in the House, we will seek to achieve that.

[Kerry McCarthy (Bristol East) (Lab)]

I have been contacted by a number of parents who are concerned about the Prime Minister’s announcement at the Conservative party conference on “earn or learn”. This might just be one of the attention grabbing gimmicks we expect from the Government during conference season, but people are concerned about it. May we have a debate so that the Government do not rush into this ill-thought-out policy?

[Mr Lansley]

Parents should be encouraged by what the Prime Minister has said. All indicators regarding young people’s prospects suggest that they should be in either education, employment or training. Not being in education, employment or training can cause serious damage to their prospects. We are setting out to minimise the number of young people who are not in education, employment or training, and I hope the hon. Lady supports that.

[Andrew Bridgen (North West Leicestershire) (Con)]

It was announced last week that developers had signed a legal agreement with Blaenau Gwent council for construction of the Circuit of Wales. It was also announced that the project will be part-funded by the Welsh Government. May we therefore have a debate on the subject of devolved Governments using public funds potentially to distort markets—in this case, a matter of great concern to the Association of Motor Racing Circuit Owners?

[Mr Lansley]

I need to point out that one of my constituents is the chief executive of the Heads of the Valleys Development Company, so I will make no comment about that. I will, of course, ask my colleagues in the Treasury to respond to my hon. Friend’s point.

[Kevin Brennan (Cardiff West) (Lab)]

May we have a debate on why the Government are refusing to do anything about the scandal of rip-off premium rate phone lines? The Which? report out today shows that this is a continuing scandal, yet I understand that the Government plan to take no action on it. Why are the Government always on the side of rip-off big business rather than the little guy?

[Mr Lansley]

On the contrary, the Government have been very clear that public services should not use premium rates so that people can access public services without paying a premium price to do so. If I may say so, when I was Secretary of State for Health, the roll-out of 111 as a service could be distinguished in a number of ways from its predecessor service NHS Direct, including being free to those who use it. There is a wider issue about the use and impact of premium rate services, particularly from utility companies and the like: customers, and particularly vulnerable people, should be able to access them without having to pay an extra charge. I shall ask colleagues in the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills to respond to the hon. Gentleman on this point.

[John Glen (Salisbury) (Con)]

The closure of the A344 alongside Stonehenge appears to have caused chaos along the A303. The Stonehenge traffic action group is very keen for the roads Minister to make a statement on progress made towards dualling this infamous stretch of road. Will the Leader of the House ensure that that happens?

[Mr Lansley]

I completely understand my hon. Friend’s point. I sat in a queue on the A303 in August, so I had the benefit of that experience myself. I will, of course, ask my colleagues at the Department for Transport about this. As my hon. Friend and the House know, the Department is well aware of the problem and is seeking to deal with it. I hope that, by the end of the year, it will be in a position to make announcements as a result of its study of the relevant options.

[Bill Esterson (Sefton Central) (Lab)]

My local authority wrote to the Under-Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, the hon. Member for Great Yarmouth (Brandon Lewis), about cuts to the fire service on Merseyside. The reply it received, however, was rather disappointing because it came from a civil servant and not from the Minister. Will the Leader of the House confirm that replies to local authorities, especially on such important matters, should come from a Minister, not a civil servant?

[Mr Lansley]

If I may, I will check the position with the Minister responsible for the fire service, who is assiduous in his duties. I know that he would normally expect to respond to local authorities on this issue; we need to know what happened. It might have had something to do with the summer recess and an attempt to ensure that the local authority received an early reply, but I will inquire into the circumstances.

[Mr Mark Williams (Ceredigion) (LD)]

May we have a debate on the lamentably slow way in which the banks are dealing with cases of alleged mis-selling of interest rate swap products, which affected many businesses across the country, and on the fact that tailored business loans, in respect of which similar products have the same damaging implications for people’s livelihoods and businesses, are not included in the review at all?

[Mr Lansley]

My hon. Friend is right to raise these issues and to be persistent in raising them. We need the banks to come forward with their compensation schemes as quickly as possible. I will raise my hon. Friend’s particular point with colleagues in the Treasury and ask them to respond.

[Diana Johnson (Kingston upon Hull North) (Lab)]

rose—

[Mr Speaker]

Colleagues may feel that, when it comes to Opposition Back Benchers, I have left the best until last.

[Diana Johnson]

Thank you, Mr Speaker.

On 9 August, the Hull Daily Mail led with the following report:

“Yesterday the Prime Minister…said A & E departments would get a share of the money over the next two years, to ensure they are fully prepared for winter.”

On 10 September, I learned that Hull will not get a penny of the £250 million set aside for this winter. May we have a debate on why Hull, despite its real needs, is not getting a fair share of funding—it applies to council funding, too—from this Government?

[Mr Lansley]

As the hon. Lady will recall, a written statement reported that there had been full consultation between the Department, Monitor and the NHS Trust Development Authority to establish how resources could be used to offset the specific risk of their not meeting the required service performance standards. In fact, Addenbrooke’s hospital, which is in my constituency, received no resources, although its staff had worked immensely hard to maintain their performance standards. Ministers are only too aware of the issue, but they have focused their additional resources on managing the greatest risks throughout the country.

[Mr Peter Bone (Wellingborough) (Con)]

I understand that in Wellingborough the song “Maggie May” is being sung with great gusto today following the publication by the Home Secretary of the Immigration Bill. Lefties hate the Bill, the Labour party is against it, and I understand that some Liberal Democrat MPs are queasy about it—so it is clearly the right Bill. Will the Leader of the House insist that the Immigration Minister come to the House and introduce it as a matter of urgency?

[Mr Lansley]

I am happy to report that the Immigration Minister is available and ready to introduce the Bill presently. As my hon. Friend will have noted, I have announced a date for its Second Reading, so that we can make progress with a vital measure that will ensure fairness in relation to access to services and the country’s immigration structures.

[Mr Philip Hollobone (Kettering) (Con)]

Like me, the Leader of the House represents constituents who are heavily affected by the A14. He will have been as saddened as I was to learn of a fatal car accident that occurred in the summer on the A14 near Kettering, in which two young people in their twenties lost their lives because a drunk driver was driving along the road in the wrong direction. That drunk driver was sentenced to eight years’ imprisonment by Northampton Crown court. Along with many of my constituents, I feel that that simply is not enough. May we have a statement from the Ministry of Justice, or a debate on the Floor of the House, about the sentences that are imposed on people who kill passengers on our roads as a result of either bad driving or drink-driving?

[Mr Lansley]

I entirely share my hon. Friend’s distress at what happened. The character of such events, not only on the A14 but on other roads, is very disturbing. My hon. Friend may have heard the Prime Minister say, during Prime Minister’s Question Time yesterday, that the Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice had asked the Sentencing Council to review sentences for driving offences, including the offence of causing death through dangerous driving. I will refer my hon. Friend’s question to the Secretary of State for Justice, and will try to establish when he may be able to report further on the issue.

[Jason McCartney (Colne Valley) (Con)]

May we have a debate on the booming manufacturing sector in Yorkshire? Today, we heard the sweet news that Haribo is to open a new £92 million factory in the county, which will provide 300 new jobs and which has received £6.4 million from the regional growth fund. In my patch, we learnt over the summer that Disposables UK would be moving to new premises; Wentworth Valve is also moving to new premises, and the order books of Camira Fabrics are bulging. Will my right hon. Friend allocate plenty of time for a long debate on the manufacturing success in Yorkshire?

[Mr Lansley]

That is immensely encouraging news from the hon. Gentleman’s constituency. I am delighted to hear it. I have been struck by the number of new projects that are being supported by the regional growth fund. I believe that about half a million new jobs will be associated with projects that are receiving such support, or for which such support is in the pipeline.

As we all know, creating the right economic framework is the fundamental way of bringing new investment to the country and promoting new investment in companies here. That is what the Government are doing and what we will continue to do, and I know that, as a consequence, more companies will report having received new investment of the kind to which my hon. Friend has referred.

[Greg Mulholland (Leeds North West) (LD)]

May we have a debate on how councils are responding to community applications for “assets of community value” registrations? Leeds city council recently turned down applications for a playing field and a swimming pool in Headingley and Hyde Park, where there are very few such facilities, on the grounds that the community would not realistically be able to buy them. I do not think that that is appropriate in terms of legislation. May we have a debate to establish whether the community could at least try to bid for those facilities?

[Mr Lansley]

That is an important point. I will ask Ministers at the Department for Communities and Local Government to respond specifically on how the new legislation should be interpreted in relation to what should be entered on to the register of community assets and whether some pre-emptive decision should be made about whether the community would be able to bid for that. It is important that assets of community value can include sports fields and sports facilities, and the right to bid really applies, of course, when that list of community assets is established, so the point my hon. Friend makes is important.

[Neil Carmichael (Stroud) (Con)]

The Education Committee recently published a report on school governance and school improvement. The report has generated some interesting comments from the Government, so the Committee would like to have a debate in this Chamber. Will the Lord Privy Seal consider that request, and may I say that I hope that debate is held in this Chamber so we can all focus on what is an important step in the right direction through improving accountability and localism in our schools?

[Mr Lansley]

I encourage the Select Committee to seek time for such a debate through the Liaison Committee, which has a certain allocation of time, although the Backbench Business Committee has substantial time available in the week after next, and not only on Thursday, so I hope it will take good advantage of that, not just in respect of the school governance issue but also in the light of what we have read this week in the OECD report. I have to say I was staggered by this simple fact, if by nothing else: we are among the three highest performing countries in literacy for 55 to 65-year-olds, but we are among the bottom three countries in literacy proficiency among 16 to 24-year-olds. All of us in public service and public office should be ashamed of the fact that we are not making progress in improving literacy and numeracy skills among the young people currently leaving school and those who have been leaving school over recent years. That is shameful, and we in this House should focus on it.

[Mr Robert Buckland (South Swindon) (Con)]

May we find time for an urgent debate on the deteriorating situation in the Maldives, where the first round of a presidential election has been annulled and it is feared the authorities are trying to obstruct the return to power of President Nasheed, who was ousted in a coup last year and who clearly won an election that was described by international observers as free and fair?

[Mr Lansley]

Yes, these are disturbing circumstances. I have not visited the Maldives, but many people in this country are familiar with it from holidays and the like, and I will ask my colleagues at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office to update the House on this matter at oral questions, if not before.

[David Rutley (Macclesfield) (Con)]

Given that the 4 million self-employed in our country make a huge contribution to the economy and many have the potential to take on a first employee and bring thousands into the workplace, may we have a debate in the House on the support available for first-time employers in order to help further strengthen the entrepreneurial spirit across the country?

[Mr Lansley]

I have not yet had an opportunity to announce to the House the timing of the introduction and consideration of the national insurance contributions Bill, which is relevant to the point my hon. Friend rightly raises. We know that so many of the new jobs being created are coming from small businesses, and we have perhaps the highest rate of start-up businesses. We hope many of those start-up businesses will move from being sole traders or one self-employed person to somebody who starts to employ others for the first time, and that Bill will enable us to introduce the employment allowance next April. That £2,000 off each employer’s national insurance bill for employment will seriously help in encouraging people to take that first step to becoming an employer as well as a trader.

[Christopher Pincher (Tamworth) (Con)]

May we have a debate on volunteering? I am pleased to say that Tamworth has more volunteers per head of population than anywhere else in Staffordshire, and they are ably led by Rev. Alan Barrett and his wife Janet, who are soon to retire from St Editha’s church to Cumbria. That debate would allow us to discuss the value of volunteers and praise volunteers such as Alan and Janet, who make it happen.

[Mr Lansley]

If I may, I will join in thanking Rev. Alan Barrett and Janet for their voluntary service and the leadership they have given to voluntary service. I also congratulate my hon. Friend on the record of volunteering in his constituency, which is reflected across the country; volunteering continues to be well supported. I hope that we will even increase it in the future, not least because of what the Prime Minister has done in promoting the National Citizen Service, in which this summer more than 30,000 young people will take part. That creates for them the prospect of a lifetime of public service and volunteering.

[Dr Julian Huppert (Cambridge) (LD)]

Two days ago, the Competition Commission made a bizarre decision that may force the sale of the much-loved and well-used Cambridge Arts Picturehouse. The Competition Commission has previously refused to act on Stagecoach’s near-complete monopoly of bus services in Cambridge or on Tesco’s dominance in the grocery market in Cambridge, but it is acting in a case where not only do the public not have concern, but many thousands have signed a petition against the Competition Commission’s decision. May we please have a debate on whether the Competition Commission should focus on real local monopolies and leave the Cambridge Arts Picturehouse alone?

[Mr Lansley]

I say to my neighbour, having visited the Cambridge Arts Picturehouse, that I agree with him; it is an excellent facility in Cambridge, and I do not think for a minute that it is in the same market as some of the multiplexes outside the centre of Cambridge. The job of the Competition Commission is to identify markets and act to restrict monopolies in those markets, but I do not think we are talking about the same market here. The point my hon. Friend makes is a good one. Speaking purely personally, and not for the Government in this context, I share his view that there is no cause for the Competition Commission to seek to intervene in the ownership of the Cambridge Arts Picturehouse.

Points of Order

Thursday 10th October 2013 Commons Chamber

11:27

[Huw Irranca-Davies (Ogmore) (Lab)]

On a point of order, Mr Speaker. In a recent speech, the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs referred to the 100,000 homes being connected every week to broadband by his Government. This is a big issue for rural communities in particular. That figure conflicts directly with the more accurate one—I believe—of 10,000 per week given by his colleague the Minister with responsibility for the broadband roll-out. Is there a way of correcting this on the record, so that the House is in no way inadvertently misled? There is a tenfold difference in the figures, and so many people are struggling to access broadband at the moment.

[Mr Speaker]

It is extraordinarily public spirited of the hon. Gentleman to seek to help me with the arithmetic in case I was not able to manage it for myself, but I am deeply obliged to him for his point of order. What I would say to him in response is that all Members of the House, including Ministers, are responsible for the content of their answers and other statements to the House. If a Minister has made an error inadvertently—I think the hon. Gentleman acknowledges that it would be inadvertent—it is up to the Minister to correct the record. The hon. Gentleman has effectively drawn the matter to the attention of the Minister by raising it in the Chamber and it will be in the Official Report. I think that the hon. Gentleman knows that that is the effect of what he has done. We will leave it there for the time being, but I know that he will be keeping an eye on the matter.

[Nick Smith (Blaenau Gwent) (Lab)]

On a point of order, Mr Speaker. Is it in order to raise a matter affecting another Member’s constituency without giving notice? The hon. Member for North West Leicestershire (Andrew Bridgen) has just said that the Welsh Government support may distort markets. I understand that any Welsh Government support for a race track in my constituency is absolutely above board. I suggest that the—

[Mr Speaker]

Order. I will help the hon. Gentleman.

[Nick Smith]

I suggest that the hon. Member for North West Leicestershire—

[Mr Speaker]

Order. The hon. Gentleman does not need to pursue his point of order any further; I am extremely grateful to him for what he has said thus far. He asked me a question and the answer is that what the hon. Member for North West Leicestershire did was in order. If a Member were to raise a matter very narrowly focused on an individual constituency that was not his or her own, it would normally be thought courteous to notify that Member of the intention. If, as in this case—I hope my short-term memory is not deserting me—a Member raises a matter relating to the Welsh Government and a particular policy, he is not under any obligation to notify Members. The hon. Gentleman has required the time to go on to explain what the implications could or could not be, but in this case the hon. Member for North West Leicestershire has not erred. The hon. Gentleman has taken the opportunity to air his particular point and I know that he will feel appreciative of that fact.

Bill Presented

Immigration Bill

Presentation and First Reading (Standing Order No. 57)

Secretary Theresa May, supported by the Prime Minister, the Deputy Prime Minister, Mr Chancellor of the Exchequer, Secretary Chris Grayling, Mr Secretary Pickles, Mr Secretary Hunt, Mr Secretary McLoughlin, Mr Francis Maude, Mr Oliver Letwin, Mr David Laws and Mr Mark Harper, presented a Bill to make provision about immigration law; to limit, or otherwise make provision about, access to services, facilities and employment by reference to immigration status; to make provision about marriage and civil partnership involving certain foreign nationals; and for connected purposes.

Bill read the First time; to be read a Second time tomorrow, and to be printed (Bill 110) with explanatory notes (Bill 110-EN).

Backbench Business

Thursday 10th October 2013 Commons Chamber

Adult Literacy and Numeracy

Thursday 10th October 2013 Commons Chamber

11:31

[Caroline Dinenage (Gosport) (Con)]

I beg to move,

That this House believes that, with one in six adults functionally illiterate, the UK’s skills gap is preventing the country from fully realising its economic potential; understands that improved literacy rates not only have economic benefits but also have positive effects on an individual’s self-confidence, aspirations and emotional health and wellbeing; notes that literacy rates for school leavers have shown little change in spite of initiatives introduced by successive governments over recent decades; understands that the social stigma attached to illiteracy and innumeracy often prevents adults from seeking the help they need, which means that signposting illiterate and innumerate adults to Further Education Colleges is not always the most effective course of action; recognises that literacy and numeracy programmes must be made easily accessible to the most hard-to-reach functionally illiterate and innumerate adults if valued progress is to be made; and calls on the Government to renew efforts to provide imaginative, targeted and accessible support to illiterate and innumerate adults.

I thank the Backbench Business Committee for granting us the time for this debate, which raises a matter that many Members of the House feel passionate about. For everyone fortunate enough to be able to read the Order Paper without any trouble, adult literacy might not seem like a pressing issue. It is certainly easy to take the ability to read for granted without thinking about it from day to day, but for the millions of functionally illiterate adults in the UK, the inability to read will define and limit their whole lives. The loss goes far beyond missing out on the delights of the Order Paper, with everything from bus timetables to important medication leaflets remaining a challenge.

You might think, Mr Speaker, as I did, that the issue affects only a small minority of people. You might assume that everyone around you can read fluently as you have never heard them say otherwise. In reality, a staggering one in six adults in the UK is functionally illiterate.

I should probably take the time to remind the House what illiteracy and innumeracy mean, as they are not always the most helpful terms. There is a spectrum of ability. For example, the one in six figure is not for adults who are completely unable to read but for those who have a reading age no greater than that expected of an 11-year-old child. According to the most recently published Government survey, there have been welcome gains for many of those at upper levels, but the big worry is that those at or below entry level—that is, those with the poorest skills—appear to have increased in number, at around 15% of the adult population. That is a staggering 5 million adults. Those people might be struggling on, desperately trying to hold down a job or manage a household without the basic skills every person in the UK deserves. That could be anyone we know, from a fellow parent at our child’s school to a friend who seems always to forget their glasses. Numeracy figures are an even greater cause for concern, with almost 50% of the adult population—17 million adults—having only primary mathematics skills.

According to research released by the OECD this week, some 16.4% of adults living in England and Northern Ireland—or about 5.8 million people—score at the lowest levels of proficiency in literacy. We must address that issue if we are to build a skilled economy that will drive Britain forward in the global race. The figures get worse for those aged 16 to 24, where we bump along at the bottom of the league tables below Estonia, Slovakia and Poland. In fact, England is the only country in the survey where young people today have lower basic skills than their grandparents did.

Weak literacy and numeracy have an impact not only on the business and skills agenda but on Government policy and community life. How can someone hope to get off welfare and get a job if they cannot read or write? How can we decrease rates of recidivism when illiteracy in prisons is so high? How can we properly prepare our troops for civilian life when literacy is not valued among our armed forces?

There are many social consequences of our collective failure to give people the help they need, but, more than that, this is a crisis for individuals. National numeracy statistics reveal that adults with poor numeracy are twice as likely to be unemployed as those who are competent, and more than twice as likely to have children while still in their teens. Those with the lowest numeracy skills are twice as likely to miss their repayments and risk losing their home. Children who struggle with numeracy are twice as likely to be excluded from school. Tackling that is the first step to raising aspiration, increasing self-confidence and helping everyone to reach their potential.

To those who lack the ability to read and write, every door appears closed. They cannot apply for most jobs because filling in forms poses a challenge; and they lose their sense of self-worth because they lack the skills that so many of us take for granted.

[Mr Mark Williams (Ceredigion) (LD)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend on securing the debate. I have a background in primary education. Does she agree that the best education that we as parents can offer our children is a partnership between what we do in school and what we are able to do in support of our children at home? That reveals a deep problem—the effect that illiteracy and innumeracy have, not just on community but within families. A few years ago I was lucky enough to run a scheme for parents to help them support their children in numeracy. It revealed starkly the problems that my hon. Friend is alluding to—parents’ lack of confidence to support their children.

[Caroline Dinenage]

My hon. Friend makes an incredibly valid point. It is often where parents have weak literacy and numeracy skills that the children are least inclined to learn. I will return to that later in my speech.

It is worth pointing out strongly that just because someone is illiterate or innumerate, it does not mean they are stupid. Just think how sharp they have to be to get through even a day without these skills. Some people are incredibly bright but they just missed an opportunity somewhere in their life. That is the situation for one in six adults in the UK, and there is no quick fix to overcome it.

Literacy and numeracy rates have shown little change, despite numerous initiatives by successive Governments. Between 2001 and 2011, Labour spent £9 billion on adult literacy programmes, with little improvement at the bottom end of the literacy spectrum. Illiteracy and innumeracy are not problems that can be tackled simply by a Government throwing money at them.

[Huw Irranca-Davies (Ogmore) (Lab)]

The hon. Lady is making an excellent speech. I draw her attention to the progress that has been made on adult numeracy in Wales since 2001. There has been a marked improvement, and now over 80% of the adult population exceeds level 1. However, we now need to make great strides in literacy, so there will be a constant effort to drive up standards. Will she acknowledge the work that has gone on in Wales, where there has been a marked improvement in numeracy?

[Caroline Dinenage]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for that intervention. Sadly, the OECD report relates only to England and Northern Ireland, so it does not bring into consideration the results for Wales, but it is fascinating to hear those statistics.

There is a social stigma in being unable to read or write, which prevents individuals from seeking the help that they desperately need. Between a third and a half of adults with poor literacy and numeracy want to improve their skills, although less than 5% have actually been to a class. If we are to boost literacy and numeracy rates in the United Kingdom, we must first help learners to overcome the barriers created by social norms, and provide the help that people need right in the heart of our most vulnerable communities.

Over the past two years, I have raised this issue at Prime Minister’s questions. I have posed numerous oral and written questions on the subject to the Department for Work and Pensions, the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, the Ministry of Defence and the Department for Education. The responses tend, almost without exception, to direct me to the great work that is being done via formal adult education providers, such as further education colleges. But literacy and numeracy are not further education; they are basic education. If we are to make them accessible to the most hard-to-reach individuals, we must think about where, and how, we deliver them. In many cases, a formal educational environment did not work out very well for these people the first time around, so the prospect of going back as an adult is, quiet literally, terrifying.

One exemplar of a formal education provider tackling this issue is in my Gosport constituency. The Out There project, which is funded by Hampshire Learning in collaboration with St Vincent college, provides courses for those wanting to extend their basic skills. These courses are delivered in community centres right on the doorstep of some of our most vulnerable—and valuable—residents. It is the friendly, informal environment, the free courses and the access to free child care which break down many of the frequently cited barriers to adult learning. This is what is giving individuals the confidence to go out and transform their lives for themselves. Between 2012 and 2013, the Out There project attracted 2,427 hard-to-reach learners, making it the most effective scheme of its type in Hampshire. It has even been used as a case study of excellence in the EU-REALM Platform against Poverty initiative. I am proud not only of the recognition that it has received from overseas, but that it has had such a positive impact on my constituency.

The Government have secured continued funding for over 600,000 adults to take maths courses and 600,000 to take English courses, which are essential, but it is also essential that funding continues to flow into projects such as the Out There project, and I hope the Government will continue to maintain their support, both financially and politically.

Clearly, the problems of illiteracy and innumeracy begin in schools. A crucial component of raising standards of literacy and numeracy has to be getting children to think that it matters: 25% of kids do not believe there is a link between reading and success. This failure to value literacy at a very young age has a profound impact on someone’s life chances. Once someone starts down this path, the problems become deeply embedded, and part of the experience is the problem of parents. If a parent has weak literacy or numeracy skills, a child is less likely to be imbued with an aspiration to learn. I agree with the National Institute of Adult Continuing Education—NIACE—which suggests that all schools should develop a family learning policy and all local authorities should form strategies for child and family development.

The percentage of children who, at 16, lack basic literacy remains stubbornly high at around 19%. Of course, ensuring that our children leave school with good literacy and numeracy skills is essential and it must be a priority, but we cannot leave behind a generation of adults who have been failed by the education systems of the past. Low skill adults need a second chance and we must recognise that skills can be developed outside formal education. One way of doing this is through peer-to-peer learning.

In my constituency, there is a truly remarkable man by the quite glorious name of Andy Paradise. He has set up a charity called Read and Grow, which combats illiteracy. Andy was shocked by the very low levels of literacy that he witnessed while he was an inmate in Dorchester prison, and he was inspired to help others less fortunate than himself. Under the ethos of “each one teach one”, Andy and his volunteers at Read and Grow use a reading tool called “Yes we can read” to share their skills in environments such as the local library discovery centre. This book is the brainchild of a brilliant author, Libby Coleman, a former head teacher in some of England’s most challenging schools. “Yes we can read” facilitates peer-to-peer learning. The idea is that anyone who can read can use the tool to teach somebody who cannot. The results are startling.

The London-based homeless charity The Passage piloted a literacy scheme in one of its hostels using “Yes we can read” to help former rough sleepers develop their skills. One of the most amazing side effects was that staff at the hostel noticed a drop in drug and alcohol use by their homeless learners the night before they were due to have a lesson. The scheme has been so successful that Westminster council announced that it would roll out the project to all its hostels. I hope other councils will recognise the huge potential of literacy schemes to turn around the lives of those who have fallen on tough times.

[Christopher Pincher (Tamworth) (Con)]

My hon. Friend is making a powerful speech. Does she agree that this is another area where local volunteers, whether from a church or a local charity, can assist local councils in helping people who are in such desperate need?

[Caroline Dinenage]

That is the key. The interventions that can take place in the community through volunteers—those who care passionately and those whom others feel they can more easily relate to—are extremely important.

[Huw Irranca-Davies]

I commend the hon. Lady for her excellent speech. Following the point the hon. Member for Tamworth (Christopher Pincher) made, I pay tribute to the schemes run in partnership with not only the voluntary sector but the public sector, like those run by the Bridgend county borough council libraries, by Cymorth, and by Flying Start, the equivalent of Sure Start in Wales, where parents and children sit together and read. There is a role for both the voluntary and public sectors in driving the agenda forward.

[Caroline Dinenage]

I think that this problem can only be tackled from the grass roots up.

“Yes we can read” is also reaching offenders in Britain’s prisons. In 2008 over two thirds of prisoners starting a custodial sentence had numeracy levels at or below level 1. The book has recently been made available in prison libraries, providing prisoners with invaluable access to this excellent resource. Peer-to-peer learning is arguably the most effective way to boost skills among prisoners. It removed the barriers created by an uncomfortable classroom and teachers whom the inmates often cannot relate to.

Improving literacy skills is crucial to reducing reoffending, as it boosts the chances of getting a job and holding on to it when released. One of the Prison Reform Trust’s Bromley briefings describes the National Grid-led offender training and employment programme. It works with prisoners coming to the end of their sentences and provides training and a job on release. More than 2,000 prisoners have passed through the scheme, which has an average reoffending rate of just 6%.

[Mr Stewart Jackson (Peterborough) (Con)]

I thank my hon. Friend for giving way and apologise for arriving late—I was serving on a Select Committee. She touches on recidivism and penal issues. Is she aware that the exemplar national payment-by-results scheme at Peterborough prison, which will hopefully be rolled out across the prison estate, depends on literacy, numeracy and life skills to reduce the level of reoffending and that it is absolutely crucial to prepare prisoners for life outside prison? Adult literacy must be at the centre of all such schemes.

[Caroline Dinenage]

My hon. Friend makes an excellent point. Although the scheme is not just about basic skills, the statistics are quite striking. It has a reoffending rate of just 6%, nearly eight times less than the UK average rate of 47%.

Basic literacy and numeracy skills are the foundation for an adult’s employability. Young men and women who lack literacy are the least likely to be in full-time employment by the time they are 30. That failure has a dramatic impact on business. A 2011 CBI study showed that 42% of employers were unhappy with literacy among school leavers and 44% were investing in remedial classes to improve basic skills. That is in line with my experience. I have owned a small business for the past 20 years and seen for myself the gradual decline in the level of numeracy, literacy and employability one can expect as the norm from school leavers.

I am pleased, therefore, that the Government have embedded a system whereby Jobcentre Plus advisers must scrupulously assess the English and maths needs of a relevant benefit claimant, mandating them to an initial interview with a provider where the lack of skills is preventing them from moving into work. NIACE is concerned that without improving basic skills among benefit claimants, we will be unable to improve employability and help reduce the number of long-term benefit claimants in the UK.

In order to achieve that, jobcentre advisers need to invest time in clients. Historically, their attempts to combat illiteracy and innumeracy have been hampered by staff choosing the quickest methods of assessing skills needs, falling for the “I’ve forgotten my glasses” line that we have already discussed, but that is not satisfactory and we must ensure that such practice does not continue.

I am pleased that all apprenticeship providers will be required to support apprentices to achieve level 2 in English and maths. Apprenticeships are a fantastic way for people to develop their skills and get a foot on the jobs ladder. With that in mind, I welcome the progress the Government have made in tackling adult literacy and numeracy problems, but there is still more to be done.

In closing, I reiterate that the focus must be on grass-roots learning. Community learning is a great way to promote skills development, and I welcome the Government’s support for that progress so far. I firmly believe that courses aimed at improving literacy for families and individuals who are most disadvantaged and furthest from learning are one of the best ways to tackle the absence of fundamental skills among our adult population. Adult literacy and numeracy problems cannot be solved by top-down Government policy and investment; our action must be bottom up, from the grass roots of society. If we can raise standards in schools and embed programmes that help right in the heart of our local communities, we can provide hope and opportunity to millions.

[Several hon. Members]

rose—

[Mr Speaker]

Order. I should advise the House that the second of our debates under the auspices of the Backbench Business Committee is extremely heavily subscribed. Therefore, in respect of this debate, it would help if each Back-Bench colleague who now speaks—I certainly do not include the hon. Lady leading the debate in this category—could confine him or herself to no more than 10 minutes. That would be most useful. We will be led by a master of the genre, on the strength of his 34-year service in the House, Mr Barry Sheerman.

11:50

[Mr Barry Sheerman (Huddersfield) (Lab/Co-op)]

I will not report you to the ageism commission for that remark, Mr Speaker. I congratulate the hon. Member for Gosport (Caroline Dinenage), who has been a strong campaigner—the best I have known—on adult literacy and numeracy. She has corresponded with me on the issue many times and I am delighted to be a co-sponsor of this debate along with Members from the other two main parties.

I have tremendous guilt about this issue, because I chaired the Education Committee, which has had various names, for 10 years. We thought we were doing a reasonable job, but I do not think we focused as much as we could have on literacy and numeracy. It is never too late, however, to look at the issue again.

One of the most important things to recognise about this debate is that there are no easy solutions. The answer has evaded all Governments and all political parties over a very long period. During my 10 years as Committee Chair I learned that evidence-based policy is not always the total answer, but it is not a bad place to start. We should ask, “What is the evidence?” I have discussed adult literacy and numeracy with a number of people and there is a great danger that some think they know the answer intuitively. They will immediately say, “The reason is this”, and then give a simplistic explanation that is not based on anything. Only this morning I spoke to a colleague who said, “Well, the reason is the high level of migration in Britain”, but that is not true if we compare ourselves with other countries.

The recent report on adult literacy by the OECD—it was published only this week—is convenient and substantiates everything the hon. Lady said in her very good speech. We are ranked 19th out of 22 nations on the literacy of people aged 16 to 24, and 14th out of 22 on adult literacy. That is a chilling comment on our society.

A fundamental problem in this country is that our social and economic structure has changed dramatically over a short period. As you have said, Mr Speaker, I have been an MP for 34 years, but during my young days as a university teacher—one of the undergraduates I taught at Swansea university is sitting on the Government Benches—the world was very different, in that there were a lot of low-skilled and unskilled jobs in our economy. I remember cycling to Hampton grammar school and seeing a sign outside a factory I passed that said, “Hands wanted”. There was no mention of brains. That was the society in which we lived, with 50% or 60% of people working in manufacturing industry. It was a very different society.

When I speak at universities today and ask people about the social and economic structure of our country, they reply that 30% or 40% of people work in manufacturing, but the real figure is 9.5%, while 30% work in education, health and local authorities—what are sometimes called public services—and 60% work in private sector services. People who work in the early-years and later-years sectors are on the minimum wage or minimum wage-plus. People who work in retail and distribution are on minimum wage-plus. We live in a very different society today. The onus is on people who are seeking employment to have high skills and high literacy and numeracy.

[Mr Robin Walker (Worcester) (Con)]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

[Mr Sheerman]

May I just finish this point? In many ways, we have responded to that challenge. We have more graduates and more talented young people coming through with the advantages of higher education. That is indisputable. However, at the same time, we have failed to deliver basic education to a significant percentage of the population. Those people are very unlikely ever to get anything other than the most menial work on the lowest wages.

[Mr Walker]

I wanted to intervene not to disagree with the hon. Gentleman, but to strengthen his argument. He said that roughly 9% of people work in manufacturing industry. I am sure that he would recognise that the nature of that industry has changed enormously. The skills that are required for people to enter that industry are probably greater than they have ever been in the past 100 years. Even in that industry, it is not just hands that are wanted, but brains. The modern manufacturing world wants people who are literate and numerate, and who can work with computers.

[Mr Sheerman]

That is absolutely right. A lot of manufacturing is coming back to this country because things can be manufactured anywhere in the world with highly sophisticated equipment, such as 3D printers, and only a small number of highly skilled people.

We have the problem that about 25% of the young people coming out of our schools have only one bare GCSE. Something is going dramatically wrong that we have not been able to put right. We must do something about it. I want to make a strong case for looking at the evidence. We need more research into why that is happening.

When I became the Chair of the Select Committee, I had all sorts of assumptions about which parts of our country were underperforming educationally, but that was absolute prejudice. The evidence shows that the coastal parts of the country are among the lowest performing areas. People on the street would say that the north-west performs very badly, but that is not true. It is coastal areas and the east of England, which contains Cambridge university and the Open university, that are the lowest performing areas.

We must look at the facts. Where is the underachievement? What is it in the structure of certain communities that means that people do not value education, do not stimulate their children to be interested in education and do not support them in the school process? We know that the early years are essential. It is important for children at a very young age to sit on somebody’s lap and have those little cloth books read to them. We must get children into reading very early on. We know that that works.

There are many fashions and fads. If there is one thing that we must not do in this debate, it is to be party political. We must not get carried away by enthusiasms. The research on teaching children to read shows that if teachers are trained to use a system and that system is used, it works. It is fashionable to say that only synthetic phonics works. We know that that is not true. If we have a system and train people to use it, we will get good results.

We must carry out research and have systems in place, but we must also have people who inspire us. Mr Speaker, you know that I am obsessed with the English poet, John Clare. When he lived, he had only 100 poems in print. We have since discovered a lost archive of 1,000 poems. He was one of our greatest poets on the environment. He left school at 12, the peasant son of a thresher and a farm labourer. All his life, the only jobs that he got were through standing in the village and being hired. He was only 5 feet tall, so he did not get much work. However, he learned to read at the parish school and was liberated to be an amazing poet. He lived a full life in so many ways.

Only this weekend, I was reading Caitlin Moran in The Times. I am an unashamed devotee of Caitlin Moran—in fact, I got some strange comments when I was in Spain with all our great-grandchildren and I was reading “How to Be a Woman” by the side of the pool. I tweeted that I was getting some strange comments, and Caitlin Moran immediately tweeted back:

“You carry on being righteous, dude”,

which I thought was rather good. Caitlin Moran is a young woman from a family of seven who lived in social housing, and there were a lot of barriers to her succeeding, but she learned to read and could not stop reading. What a fantastic talent she is. From John Clare 200 years ago to Caitlin Moran today; that is how to get kids to be liberated and become full citizens.

When I go into schools and universities I talk about the importance of education and of liberating talent, and I call it “the spark”. The spark is in all of us, if only we can reach it. If a child does not have early stimulation and the support of a network, it is quite difficult for them to find that spark later in life, liberate it and let it blossom. The earlier the better, but it can still be done later on. Further education colleges are good at parts of that and provide basic skills, but there are other ways. Mentors are crucial, and I say to the Minister that they are cheap. I find that business people, professionals and university teachers want to give back, and they will be mentors.

When I talk to university and other students, I say that if they liberate themselves, they will liberate themselves for a good life. The best debate we can have with young people is by telling them that it is difficult to have a good life on the minimum wage. That is true, and we have to liberate young people so that they are not only talented and great providers in our economy but great citizens. We can do that only by tackling the problem as early as we can, and let us do it on a cross-party basis.

12:01

[Mr Nigel Evans (Ribble Valley) (Ind)]

It is a delight for me to make my first speech in the Chamber for three years on this subject. I thank the hon. Member for Gosport (Caroline Dinenage) for giving me the opportunity to do so by securing the debate. I also thank the hon. Member for Huddersfield (Mr Sheerman) for remarking that he was my lecturer at Swansea university—he has a lot to be blamed for in many ways. I always said that he taught me all I know about politics, and he reminds me that I came into Swansea university as a little Tory and came out a bigger Tory. That is a fact.

This is a good debate. We need to do more about literacy and numeracy, and I was delighted to hear what the Leader of the House said about it in business questions. The hon. Member for Huddersfield is absolutely right that it is not a party political matter. It has dogged this country for decades under different Governments, and we have to look harder for the solution. It is about making people better not simply so that they can get better jobs but so that they can fulfil their ambitions and lead better lives for themselves. It is a quality of life thing, and that is vital. Millions of people are affected in this country alone. The OECD report has been mentioned, and it is shocking that we are so low down the table—almost at the bottom. All Members should hang their heads in shame that that is the case, and we need to do more.

Dyslexia has not yet been mentioned. We need to do a lot more to understand people who suffer from it—they are not stupid people, but they need better help and earlier diagnosis. If that does not happen early on, we can find that they lack interest in what is going on in school because they feel that they are not up to it, which is not the case. Some 10% of people in this country suffer from dyslexia, and apparently 4% severely so, so we need to do a lot more.

We have heard about the shocking number of people who are innumerate and illiterate, and the same goes for people in prison. There are 84,000 people in prison at the moment, and we need to do a lot more for them to ensure that they get the education they need while they are in prison.

The hon. Member for Gosport mentioned libraries in prisons and the good they do. When local authorities up and down the country are looking for savings, it is shocking that one of the first and easiest targets they choose are libraries. “Let’s close the library”—well no; let us ensure that the libraries stay open, encourage more people into them, and use them for adult education classes so that people can become more literate and see the wealth of books available. That is one of the reasons people should want to learn to read, write and be numerate.

About 3 million pupils who leave school after GCSEs are ill-equipped for life, and, as I said, about 40,000 of people in prison are illiterate, and 55,000 are innumerate. We must do more to make education in schools more relevant to pupils so that they see why they need to read and write. Nothing surprises me more than when I go into a pub and see youngsters playing darts. They are able to add up what they have just scored and deduct it from, I think, 360. I am there with chalk and a board trying to do that, but they do it in their heads. They are so much better at it because it is relevant to them and that is why they are able to do it. On literacy it is the same with texting, and people substitute certain words for letters and so on. That may be okay, but life is not Twitter and we do not lead our lives in 140 characters. It is much richer than that, and we must ensure that people get the full wealth of knowledge and culture that is denied to them if they are not able to read and write.

I do not believe that teachers want demotivated classes with youngsters who lack ambition or hope, and where the only thing they look forward to is the “X Factor” on television. There are 25 letters in the alphabet apart from X, and if we combine them there is more wealth out there than there is on “X Factor”.

I was on the Council of Europe for five years, and nothing shamed me more than the fact that there were people from other countries who seemed to speak English better than we do. They came from Denmark, Sweden—a number of countries—and their ability to speak English as well as their own language, and probably Italian, Spanish and French while they are at it, was amazing. In this country, however, we have statistics showing that people cannot even speak our country’s national language. We must do more.

The hon. Lady mentioned stigma, and we must stop all that. People have not failed; we have failed them because they are unable to read and write. It is not their stigma but ours, and we—rather than those people—should have that stigma. We must correct that and give people opportunities to be able to read and write. Lifelong learning is important because education does not finish when people are 18 or 19, or when they leave school or university. It goes on for ever, and we must make opportunities for people to have lifelong learning.

The number of immigrants who have come to the country over the years is phenomenal and many simply do not have the skills to speak English. That should be a priority for us. I know we say that people should not come to the country and settle down unless they are able to speak English, but we must recognise that millions of people have come in who cannot do that. What are we going to do about that? Let us not deny to immigrants who have settled in this country, rightfully and legally, the opportunity to play a full role. Let us do more for immigrants who have settled in the country but who are not able to speak English.

When schools finish and the doors and gates are locked at night, it is a crying shame that they are not thrown open for all the people who want to do night classes. Community centres have been mentioned, but lots of schools up and down the country are closed and should not be. The lights should be on at 7 o’clock in the evening so that people can go there, and there are lots of resources, including teachers who would be willing to be mentors and teach those who want to read and write.

If we want people to have fuller lives, and if we want people to be better citizens and have better opportunities for employment, we must ensure they can read, write and be numerate. We must work harder. We cannot let people down as we have for decades.

[David Rutley (Macclesfield) (Con)]

My hon. Friend, as well as other hon. Members today, makes a powerful speech. Given the importance of the internet and the digital economy in helping people to access information and to learn, does he agree that it is vital that IT skills are linked to helping people to learn literacy and numeracy skills, including older people who have difficulty accessing public services? Does he recognise the important role that organisations such as Age UK play in that important task?

[Mr Evans]

I agree with my hon. Friend—that is exactly what should happen. When I am learning French or Russian, I use the internet. There is an amazing amount of stuff in different languages to read on the internet. It is the same for those who want to learn English, but they need the IT skills to do that. Those things can be combined—lifelong learning clearly involves IT.

[Mr Sheerman]

On that point, is the hon. Gentleman aware of an interesting innovation between Cambridge and Hertfordshire universities? They are working together on a new system that evaluates people’s competences. They begin with competences to start businesses. If people get through the evaluation, the universities give them courses to make them fit to do so. That is the beginning of an interesting process.

[Mr Evans]

I was not aware of that innovation, but the hon. Gentleman shows us the potential that is out there, which we must use to its fullest. We cannot allow millions of people in this country not to live the fullest life they possibly can. They need to be given extra support. All hon. Members recognise that we have let a lot of people down for decades. They will say fairly well the same thing as I have said in the debate—that we need to do a lot more—but when will we start? If not today, when?

12:11

[Julie Elliott (Sunderland Central) (Lab)]

I congratulate the hon. Member for Gosport (Caroline Dinenage) on securing this important debate. She has worked tirelessly and done a huge amount on adult literacy. As colleagues have said, this is not a party political issue—it affects all our constituencies and all who live in our country. I have always passionately believed that education is a lifelong journey and not one that stops at A-level, university or apprenticeship level. Improving standards of adult literacy and numeracy is fundamental both to our economy and to the well-being of every man and woman who struggles with those crucial skills.

I should like to talk about an under-reported but hugely important project helping and training thousands of people at all levels to improve their skills through learning. Unionlearn, in collaboration with the TUC, trains thousands of union learning reps and has helped hundreds of thousands to train and learn through their union every year. Before entering the House, I had the opportunity to see first hand the difference the scheme makes to real people in the real workplace, and the brilliant results.

[Mr Brian Binley (Northampton South) (Con)]

I apologise for being late, Mr Speaker.

When I was a relatively young man, I took great advantage of, and was very well served by, the Workers Education Association. I was a secondary modern schoolboy who left at 15, and the WEA had the important effect of broadening my horizons. Will the hon. Lady help us by telling us whether that organisation is still doing that good work? If so, are we helping it as we should?

[Julie Elliott]

The WEA is very active, and certainly in my area. It often uses the skills of people who have retired from full-time careers in education—they do a little bit of work here and there to help to train people. It is an active but undervalued organisation.

Union learning dates back to the 19th century, with the establishment of colleges for working people. More recently, the union learning fund, set up in 1998, distributed £150 million towards training and education, which helped to recruit many union learning reps and expand the number of people in training and education. The fund, which has supported more than 50 unions in more than 700 workplaces, has several key goals: to embed learning and skills so that they become a core strategic objective of all unions; to help unions form active partnerships with employers, which I will mention later; and to raise demand for learning among the low skilled and other disadvantaged groups. Colleagues have mentioned people using their peers to access learning. When people are vulnerable and find themselves in adult life without the ability to read and write properly, peer groups are a crucial tool to making that first step into learning.

Unionlearn exists because of a fierce belief that access to learning is fundamental to every person’s life chances, and that such opportunities should be available to everyone—the entire work force—regardless of background. The access to opportunity, and the ability to reach people who may not have been reached by others, makes Unionlearn and union-led education so crucial to the well-being of hundreds of thousands of people.

Approximately 20% of the adult population cannot read to a level that allows them to do their job effectively or gain a promotion, and more than 5 million lack a good GCSE or equivalent in English. In my experience, I have seen examples of incredibly gifted people who cannot read and write much more than their own name, but who have tremendous other skills that have enabled them to get through a workplace and end up at a senior level. One of the most alarming and surprising things I learned when I was involved with Unionlearn was that some incredibly senior managers could do little more than write their own names. Obviously, they have huge skills to have the ability to work around that and get to that point.

Substandard reading skills are strongly linked to poor writing skills, so many adults are prevented from helping their children with homework, which exacerbates the problem, because it is extended to the next generation. As I have said, some people are barred from career advancement because they are unable to fill out job applications. The hon. Member for Ribble Valley (Mr Evans) mentioned online learning and the internet. People need a basic understanding of English and writing to access the help available.

A Government-backed study found that nearly 50% of working-age adults in England struggle with maths. Innumeracy does not just affect people’s ability in the workplace, but follows them everywhere, from looking at price comparison websites to reading bus timetables. Alex Smiles Ltd is a great example of union-led training in my constituency of Sunderland Central. The firm employs more than 100 people. Its core activity is the gathering, processing and recycling of waste materials produced by the construction and manufacturing industries. It is a non-unionised workplace, and represents an increasing number of employers that Unionlearn and the TUC regularly work with through partnership working initiatives.

More than 16% of the Alex Smiles Ltd workforce have completed a numeracy qualification and 15% completed a literacy qualification at either level 1 or 2. Becky Smiles, the training and development manager at Alex Smiles, has said of Unionlearn:

“Every interaction has been positive and business-led, driven by making us a better, higher-performing workplace in every respect. The learning activity is making inroads to upskilling our people and addressing front-line business goals that have bottom-line benefits, too.”

Adult literacy and numeracy skills are fundamental to our economy, and to the life chances and well-being of every individual in the country. Unionlearn and other union-led projects give all people the chance to improve their skills, and I am delighted to have had the opportunity to sing their praises and raise awareness of that excellent scheme.

12:19

[Justin Tomlinson (North Swindon) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Sunderland Central (Julie Elliott), who covered all the great work that Unionlearn has done. I have asked to see that first hand in my constituency, but I have not yet had a reply to my request.

It is also a pleasure to follow excellent and thoughtful speeches from my hon. Friend the Member for Ribble Valley (Mr Evans) and the hon. Member for Huddersfield (Mr Sheerman). I also wish to pay tribute to my hon. Friend the Member for Gosport (Caroline Dinenage), who has done some exceptional work in this area. Indeed, I was surprised by her calm, measured and constructive manner, when I would have struggled to hold back my anger at the fact that one in six adults is financially illiterate. The OECD figures are a disgrace, and we have robbed people of opportunity. We all have drivers of our politics—the issues that motivate us to do what we do—and this is one of my core drivers.

I went to a school that was bottom of the league tables and many of my friends were robbed of opportunities in life. As Members of Parliament we see from our casework people in real distress, arguably through no fault of their own but because they are simply not equipped to deal with the challenges that life throws up. My wife volunteered for two years at a job club and found people were not equipped to get jobs to give them opportunities in life.

[Mr Nigel Evans]

Does my hon. Friend agree that one area in which numeracy has an incredible impact on people’s lives is that of payday loans at 1,400% from Wonga and various other companies? When people do not have the faintest idea what that means, they get into huge financial difficulties which cause great misery. If they were numerate, they would understand exactly why they should not take out loans at those exorbitant rates.

[Justin Tomlinson]

That is a brilliant intervention with fortune-telling skills, as that is exactly what I was about to say. Numeracy is not just about applying for jobs—it is about confidence, about being a savvy consumer and about dealing with things such as payday lending. We have had several debates on this and I am sure that my hon. Friend the Member for Worcester (Mr Walker) will also touch on that issue—although to be fair, most Treasury Ministers would struggle to calculate the APR on payday lending. We live in a complex world with marketing messages, and my hon. Friend and I are working on a paper at the moment about how consumers are not empowered. The markets are in control because consumers are not equipped to make the right decisions.

I want to talk about three areas in which we have opportunities to help people—financial education, work in schools and using libraries as hubs. On financial education, we have had an exceptionally successful cross-party campaign—235 MPs signed up—and I am delighted that as of September 2014 it will be a core part of the national curriculum. The key driver behind the campaign was the fact that 91% of people who get into financial difficulties say, “If only I had known better.” My hon. Friend the Member for Gosport pointed out that 50% of adults struggle with even primary maths skills, so it is no wonder that people get into financial difficulty. The campaign focused on four strands—schools, further education, higher education and the crucial vulnerable group, work on which is led by my hon. Friend the Member for Congleton (Fiona Bruce). That group is crucial because although we are bringing in the changes in schools, further education and higher education, some people will still slip through the net. The report will be published in the next couple of weeks and will contain important points for the Government to take up, so that we can ensure that the most vulnerable people are not missed out.

I am a big fan of the school reforms, which will drive up standards and include making grammar and spelling important in all exams; making mental arithmetic more important in primary schools; restricting the use of calculators; and upgrading maths in the curriculum. I was a maths fan in school, but I was in the minority, even though maths is incredibly important. The pupil premium is providing schools with opportunities to target resources to those most in need.

I had an inspiring visit to Seven Fields school in my constituency. As I have mentioned in previous debates, I had the honour of the Minister for Schools coming to visit after I had set out just how good the school is. To put it in context, it is in one of the top 5% most deprived areas and it was formerly a failing school. To give credit to the previous Government, money was provided to rebuild the school, which was the beginning of the process, but the fundamental changes came from the school reforms, which gave its inspirational head teacher the ability to make a real difference. Some 70% of the children are on the pupil premium and that money has been used—now that the class sizes have been almost halved to 17—to work with the community to get volunteers to come in and read one on one with the children. That has been done by providing a free Sunday roast on Wednesdays to the Penhill luncheon club, who work one on one with the children on reading and numeracy. It makes a huge difference.

Lately resources have been diverted to the nursery because, as the head teacher told the Minister for Schools and me, some of the children coming through have simply been abandoned in front of the television. Not only can they not walk, they have not even reached the first stages of crawling. They literally have to start again. When the children arrive at the school, they are 18 months behind the national average, but by the time they finish, they have caught up—giving those children opportunity.

Huge effort is put into selecting the best, most ambitious teachers, who want to go the extra mile to make a difference. We all know from our own time in schools how teachers who make the extra effort can make a huge difference. The school also provides a constructive and positive environment, including children taking their shoes off and treating it like their own homes. They also have opportunities to make visits beyond school to do things that they would not otherwise have the chance to do.

The head teacher still has a wish list of things that would make a difference. She feels that school holidays undo the great work that is done. Some of the children are upset that they will not be able to come into school. Before teachers start thinking that I am advocating a 52-week term, I should say that the idea is to open up the schools in holidays for summer camps on sport, literacy or numeracy, or for the Scouts and other volunteer organisations to use. PFI schools often have expensive charges for outside groups, which removes the opportunity for constructive work. The head teacher thinks that some of the children benefit from the almost family environment in the school, and should perhaps be held back beyond primary school age—perhaps up to 14 or when they are in a position to go to the local FE college or start an apprenticeship—because they need that sort of environment, perhaps because of their family background. As they go off to the traditional secondary schools, the influences and temptations away from the right path prove too great without family support—and the school can be a substitute for that.

The final, and perhaps contentious, item is the need for performance-related pay for teachers. My father was a teacher, as were my grandmother and grandfather, and many of my friends are teachers. We need to provide incentives for the very best teachers who make a real difference to people. I do not see why they should not be rewarded financially, because in any other profession they would be.

[Toby Perkins (Chesterfield) (Lab)]

I wish to explore how the hon. Gentleman thinks that would work in practice. My son is doing a GCSE in business studies with two different teachers. If one is good and one is bad, how would we work out who got the pay rise and who got the sack?

[Justin Tomlinson]

That is a good point, and the key is that I would not do that, because I am a politician and what do I know? It would be the head teachers who decided. We should entrust them to run schools like any other organisation. The head teacher at this school was waxing lyrical about the inspirational teachers with extra enthusiasm and energy, and she should have absolute freedom to ensure that she has the very best teachers for those children from very challenging backgrounds who do not have the luxury of private education and who rely on this single chance in life.

The parents also need to be engaged. My hon. Friend the Member for Gosport mentioned the role of parents. The school I am talking about has parental contracts. If parents want their child to go to the school, they have to play their part and engage with the school, to ensure that it is not only in school hours that the children benefit from the opportunities provided

I am chair of the all-party parliamentary group on libraries, and I think libraries have a big role to play in adult literacy, which might simply be by opening up the doors to volunteer groups in the evenings and when the library is closed. The summer reading challenge has made a huge difference in getting children to read six books over the summer, when previously they might not have read a single book—look at the number of adults who have not read a book in the last 12 months. Perhaps jobcentres could utilise the libraries to provide opportunities, even for those who need to start from scratch. I have advocated in other debates that we should open up school sports facilities for free to organisations that provide constructive, energetic activities for young people, and a similar principle could be applied to libraries.

The situation is a disgrace. We have to show urgency in our attempts to make a difference. People have one chance in life and, as all hon. Members will make clear, they are being robbed of it. That is a desperately poor situation.

12:30

[Kelvin Hopkins (Luton North) (Lab)]

First, I apologise to you, Mr Speaker, and to other hon. Members, for arriving late. I was in a Select Committee interviewing the Home Secretary and the Justice Secretary so I could not be here earlier, but I wanted to speak in the debate and I am glad to have the opportunity to do so. I will not speak for too long, because others wish to speak.

I am particularly concerned about numeracy. I used to teach economics and statistics and am familiar with numeracy problems. Lord Moser, who is a splendid member of the other place, wrote a report some 15 years ago that I have talked about in the Chamber many times. He found that more than 50% of the population were innumerate. He illustrated that by saying that 50% of the population did not understand what 50% means. When I write articles for newspapers I do not just write 10% but “one in 10”, to make sure that people get the message, because not everyone understands percentages.

I have encountered many adults with numeracy problems. When I taught economics, the first question I would ask my students was: what is the difference between 1 million and 1 billion? Many of them did not know, so I said that a million is not very much and a billion is quite a lot. I used to ask, “How many houses can be bought for £1 million and how many houses can be bought for £1 billion?” In Luton, one might be able to buy five for £1 million and 5,000 for £1 billion.

[Mr Sheerman]

Was my hon. Friend teaching in the US or the UK? The answer would be different if he taught in the US.

[Kelvin Hopkins]

I was teaching in Britain, where of course 1,000 million makes 1 billion—let us get that straight from the beginning.

I met Lord Moser recently at a reception in the House of Lords. He is an elderly man now, but he still despairs of the problem of adult innumeracy. Adults are bamboozled by politicians because we throw numbers about all the time—all parties do it. A Front Bench spokesperson can say, “We are going to spend £20 million extra on the national health service.” Twenty million pounds is absolutely nothing in the scheme of things in public expenditure, but £20 billion is a significant amount. Politicians constantly bamboozle the electorate, knowing that they can be not very sophisticated at handling such numbers.

I used to teach elementary statistics to A-level students studying sociology. I used to do simple sums with square numbers to find the square root. For example, the square root of 100 is 10—that is quite easy. When one of my students said that nine times nine was 89 and 10 times 10 was 110, I realised there was a problem. I have another anecdote. The daughter of a good friend of mine wanted to be a nurse. She had various O-levels, so I said, “Why can’t you be a nurse?” She said, “I can’t pass O-level maths.” I asked her why not. She said that she could not do multiplication because she had never been taught it—imagine that.

We have to go back to a philosophy of education and teaching that was utterly misguided. My wife and my brother are both primary school teachers. In the 1960s, 1970s and, to a certain extent, the 1980s, rote learning of tables was regarded as anathema—absolutely forbidden. Complete and total nonsense. Of course, I angered many of my good friends on the left who thought I was some sort of authoritarian, because I thought that learning tables was a good idea so that people knew that 12 times 12 was 144—elementary stuff.

When I first entered the House in 1997, I raised this issue with the then Schools Minister, Stephen Byers. I said that we had to look at teaching methods and the interface between teachers and pupils, particularly in primary schools so that pupils learn numeracy properly at the beginning. He said, “Oh no, that would be too prescriptive.” Sometimes we have to be prescriptive. We have to say that some things work and some things do not work. Let us look at other countries where numeracy is better.

The international comparison table published in The Independent yesterday showed that we are slipping down the table, and that 16 to 24-year-olds are actually worse than the previous generation. We are now quite low down the table, which is very worrying. If we are to produce the engineers and the skills we need for the future, we have to address numeracy problems. Governments have to look at what works and try to ensure that that is what is applied in schools. It is not enough to reorganise institutions—creating academies and free schools and so on. We have to look at what is happening in the classroom at every state school, because we have a problem.

[Mr Binley]

I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman, who I will refer to as my hon. Friend, because he is a friend. I am delighted that he is speaking so passionately from such an informed background—it is very helpful. I wonder whether we have enough of a joined-up approach to adult illiteracy and innumeracy. I also wonder whether we use our libraries enough, and whether the Minister ought to be thinking about using such facilities and giving them a new lease of life.

[Kelvin Hopkins]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for his helpful intervention.

We should try to have one-to-one teaching for adults with numeracy problems. I have done some coaching and have found that it is often the simple things that fox people. Not everybody is gifted at mathematics, but sometimes people are puzzled because they do not realise that a division sum can be expressed in different ways: by having one number over another, or by having two dots on either side of a line. People get confused, but it all means the same thing. How many times does 10 go into 100? Whichever way we write it down, it will always be 10. We have to have one-to-one tuition. During my coaching and teaching I have seen the light that appears in people’s eyes when they understand something that has mystified them all their lives.

We have to look at what happens in the classroom between the teacher and the pupil. We have to ensure that teachers in primary schools are comfortable with mathematics, can handle numbers and feel at ease with them. A deeply worrying statistic from 40 or 50 years ago was that 60% of primary school teachers had failed O-level maths. I am not saying that O-level maths is the acme of success, but it showed that they were uncomfortable with the subject. If teachers are uncomfortable with the subject, having them introduce children to mathematics is not a sensible way to proceed.

It is clear from the statistics published yesterday, and from the Moser report some time ago, that we still have a problem. We are slipping down the league table and Lord Moser still has concerns. I hope that the Government, whoever is in office, address this problem by looking at teaching methods and finding out what works. We need to ensure that the next generation of children do not become innumerate like so many adults today.

12:38

[Mr Robin Walker (Worcester) (Con)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Gosport (Caroline Dinenage) on securing this important debate.

I have found myself heartily in agreement with every Member who has spoken. What the hon. Member for Luton North (Kelvin Hopkins) said about basic standards in education chimes with the e-mails I receive from constituents and the feedback I hear frequently from businesses in my constituency. As a member of the Select Committee on Business, Innovation and Skills, this is a matter of concern. It is raised with me by businesses in Worcester on a regular basis. On a national level, the CBI is concerned about the literacy and numeracy of school leavers, and how that feeds through to the challenge of Britain competing in the 21st century. We also face the specific challenge of improving the English language skills of first generation immigrants and ensuring that women, particularly those at risk of isolation, are able to access adult education—an important point we should not overlook.

I recently took part in an excellent inquiry run by the all-party group on literacy into how business, schools and government can work more closely together to improve reading and communication skills, and basic business literacy for young people. We have heard about best practice and I commend the report to colleagues, but we clearly need to go further if we want to eradicate the problems of illiteracy and innumeracy among the adult population.

As the motion suggests, low adult numeracy and literacy is a substantial cost to our country in opportunities missed and earnings limited. Helping people to reach a higher level of literacy, numeracy and work literacy will help to restore a culture where work always pays and where opportunity is open to all.

According to the National Numeracy campaign, 17 million adults are at only “entry level” in numeracy and, as my hon. Friend the Member for Gosport said, 5 million are at the same level in literacy, which means that they reach only the standard expected of a primary school leaver. After over a decade in which education spending rose sharply, that is a shocking statistic. The latest CBI employment trends survey showed that 35% of employers were dissatisfied with levels of literacy among school leavers—higher than it was in 2003, at the beginning of that period of investment.

This week’s report from the OECD should act as a wake-up call to anyone who is complacent about this issue. In particular, the worrying figures for 16 to 24-year-olds suggest that the problem has been getting worse in this country rather than better over the last decade and that the UK is falling further behind its competitors. For England to come 21st out of 24 industrialised countries for adult numeracy when we are the greatest financial centre of the lot is something that really should concern every Member.

Britain has at times been parodied as a nation of shopkeepers, and the retail trade is still one of the most significant employers in the UK economy. Our Select Committee is currently conducting an inquiry into the future of retail, so we have heard a great deal of evidence about the changing skill-set required by the industry, but basic numeracy and literacy are absolutely non-negotiable.

KPMG research shows that adults with at least basic numeracy—level 1 or above—earn on average 26% more than adults with skills below that level. When controlling for education level, social class and type of school attended, there is still a 10% earnings premium for basic numeracy. These figures show how, if people were earning more money, we could reduce the deficit, help to raise tax revenue and help pay for public services. The research also showed that over two thirds of prisoners at the start of their custodial sentences had numeracy levels below level 1.

According to the National Research and Development Centre for Adult Literacy and Numeracy, adults with poor numeracy are two and a half times more likely to report having a long-standing illness or disability and are roughly twice as likely to report several symptoms of depression. Adults with poor numeracy are more than twice as likely to have had their first child while still in their teens. Dealing with low levels of numeracy can therefore help to reduce welfare dependency, crime and mental health costs.

So what can we do about it? We need to empower employers to work more closely with target groups in the adult population, as well as with school-age children to show the relevance of numeracy and literacy skills in the workplace and the opportunities they can bring. Local economic partnerships can play a key role in that, bringing the private sector together with some of the public sector organisations involved.

The Government are rightly enthusiastic, after the great campaign of my hon. Friend the Member for North Swindon (Justin Tomlinson), about putting financial education into the national curriculum—a key step in making numeracy relevant to many people who want a practical rather than an academic understanding of its importance. It will also equip people better to deal with the sort of problems people face with payday loans, mentioned by my hon. Friend the Member for Ribble Valley (Mr Evans).

We need to reject the lazy assumption that some people are just not mathematically minded and we need to target better support to those who suffer from confusion about numbers, just as we have over the years to sufferers of dyslexia in the literacy space. We need to make sure that numeracy is made relevant and literacy exciting—not just in schools, but at every level of education and skills. Campaigns such as the Reading Champions campaign, bringing sports personalities into primary schools to talk about the value of reading, do great work on this already, but there is much more scope for using role models at every level of the adult population to promote literacy and numeracy alike. We need to keep a vigorous focus on raising standards in education, which the current Secretary of State has done a lot to foster, while recognising that the school system alone can never deliver the solution for everyone.

As my hon. Friend the Member for Ceredigion (Mr Williams) pointed out earlier, we need to support parents who want to read and do maths with their children but who may lack the confidence to do so or feel there is a stigma in admitting they need help. As the motion mentioned, not all the people we need to reach are going to access help through the further education sector, which means we need to make sure that community libraries, Sure Start centres and other community facilities play their part in providing help. I greatly agreed with the point made earlier about getting schools to do more in the evenings with parents and to reach out and provide help on these problems.

As National Numeracy has suggested, we need to achieve a broad cultural shift whereby everyone realises that, with effort and support, they can improve their numeracy. We must avoid creating greater stigma and focus instead on raising aspirations and seeking pathways to help.

We need to focus particularly on helping the most vulnerable, supporting innovative approaches in probation and through homelessness charities via the troubled families initiatives and early intervention services in order to get help to those who need it most. We also need to work on improving the transition to adulthood, as vulnerable people often find a sharp drop-off in the level of attention and support they receive on reaching adult age.

All those things are challenging to achieve but need to be delivered through a combination of innovation, Government activity and private and voluntary sector good will. I shall not detain the House further, as demand to contribute to the debate is high. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Gosport on securing this debate. The motion is right to highlight the importance of this issue for our country; by addressing it, we will create greater opportunity for all.

12:45

[Christopher Pincher (Tamworth) (Con)]

I will obey Mr Speaker’s admonition to be brief, not least because I do not think I could hope to match the expertise already shown by other hon. Members.

I should like to say a few words about my own constituency experience, but let me first congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Gosport (Caroline Dinenage) on securing this debate and pay tribute to the hon. Member for Huddersfield (Mr Sheerman), who made a very thoughtful speech. I agree with him that this issue should not be party political. I agree with him that Governments of every shade have failed to get to grips with dealing with adult education, illiteracy and innumeracy. I hope he will agree with me that the failures of the past must not be the yardstick for the future. When my hon. Friend the Member for Ribble Valley (Mr Evans) asks, “When do we deal with this issue?”, I hope we will all say “Now” and I hope the Minister will say “Now”, too, when he replies shortly to the debate.

I am pleased to say that unemployment is falling in my constituency and is now lower than at any time since before the recession. The biggest barrier to entry to employment for young people in my constituency, however, is illiteracy and innumeracy. When I talk to local employers—small and medium-sized enterprises such as light engineering firms and chemicals or plastics firms—they tell me “Yes, we can find new 40 and 50-year-olds to replace the people who retire, but we do not have younger people with the right level of numeracy or literacy to replace our employees.” That presents SMEs in my constituency, and in the country, with a ticking time-bomb, as they will struggle to find the right people with the right skills to replace their employees. Unless we are able to educate young adults and the kids at school now, we will not succeed in the global race about which the Prime Minister and the Chancellor rightly talk.

We also face a challenge with communication. We all deal every day with constituents who raise problems with us via e-mail or letter. All too many of my constituents who write or e-mail me are older people. My office gets lots of phone calls from younger people with housing, immigration or tax issues, but when my office says, “Can you send us an e-mail or write to us to provide more detail so that we can fully understand your problem”, all too many respond by saying, “Actually, we would rather not e-mail and rather not write because we are not comfortable about doing that.” How can we hope to help our constituents when they cannot communicate effectively with us about their problems and concerns?

[Mr Binley]

I believe that our libraries can offer much more training than they are at present. I urge the Minister to look at the connection between education and libraries, particularly with regard to technology. I am one of the people who are bemused by it. It is right to point out that this is a generational issue, but I think we could do much more in our localities through our libraries if only there were more of a joined-up approach to the problem.

[Christopher Pincher]

Mystic Binley demonstrates once again his crystal-ball-gazing skills, as I was just about to come on to the issue of libraries. The local library in my constituency, provided by Staffordshire county council, offers free books to help adult readers. A local volunteer organisation, DIGIT—the dyslexia information group in Tamworth—provides support to those adult learners by providing them with reading buddies. DIGIT does even more by providing help for Tamworth’s young children falling within the scope of the dyslexia spectrum to improve their reading, writing and arithmetic skills. Academisation has also helped. My local head teachers now have more scope to decide what to teach, how to teach it and whom to employ. GCSE results at the Rawlett School, for instance, have improved significantly this year. However, more still desperately needs to be done.

We have the adult and community learning fund—to which I am sure the Minister will refer—the skills for life fund and the traineeship programme, all of them underpinned by Government and supported by money so that young adults can be helped to learn, but I must ask the Minister to consider two other issues. The first is the teaching and knowledge of dyslexia in our schools, which is at best uneven. Tamworth has some good dyslexia teaching schools, such as Wilnecote high school, but others are less good. That is because there are not enough teachers with the right skills, and not enough head teachers who know enough about the scope of the dyslexia spectrum to deal with young people who suffer from the condition. We also need to ensure that there is as much dyslexia teaching in primary schools as in secondary schools, so that dyslexia can be recognised and dealt with as early as possible.

The second issue, which I hope the Minister will consider during his discussions with his colleagues in the Department for Education, is the need for more vertical integration between primary and secondary schools. All too many students in my constituency go to secondary school at the age of 11 with a reading age of seven. They are doomed to failure at GCSE the moment they walk through the door of their secondary school. We need secondary schools to know as early as possible which kids face challenges so that they can help the primary schools to help those children, and the children can go to secondary school with a higher reading age and improve their chances of obtaining better GCSEs. We must ensure that children do not walk into a cliff face at the age of 11 because their secondary schools did not know who they were.

I think that if we do what so many Members today have suggested we do—and if the Minister at least takes on board the two points that I have raised—we shall be able to improve literacy and numeracy, and improve the life chances of so many of our constituents who, for so long, have been disregarded and have not been helped.

12:52

[Toby Perkins (Chesterfield) (Lab)]

I congratulate the hon. Member for Gosport (Caroline Dinenage) on securing an excellent debate about an issue on which she has fought and campaigned for some time. Her speech reflected her expertise and passion. I also congratulate the other Members who have contributed to this valuable and serious discussion of an issue that continues to be significant.

The warnings issued by the OECD in its report make it clear that Britain faces a considerable challenge in aiming to raise the literacy and numeracy levels of, in particular, the most deprived people in the country. The report is unequivocal in identifying the need for England and Northern Ireland to address social inequalities, especially among the young, as a key reason for the fact that we are falling behind in that regard. It emphasises that although we in Britain make good use of our highly skilled talent pool, there is a stronger association between higher levels of literacy and good social outcomes here than in most other countries.

Although the motion provides some guidance in regard to the aspects that we should be considering, it is somewhat limited, in that it proposes an academic solution to what is largely a social problem. I entirely support its call for literacy and numeracy programmes to be made more accessible to the people who are hardest to reach, and its call for imaginative support for illiterate adults, but, to a degree, it seeks to address the symptoms rather than the causes of the current problem.

The hon. Member for Gosport provided us with an impressive list of statistics relating to the social and economic costs of illiteracy and the extent to which it disadvantages Britain in the global race. She also suggested giving jobcentres a mandatory role in dealing with illiteracy and innumeracy. I believe that, if jobcentres are to play such a role, they will need to change their relationship with the people whom they see as customers. Many people come to see me after visiting jobcentres, and it is clear to me that the current relationship is not likely to enable them to feel positive about jobcentres’ sending them in the direction of literacy. However, the National Institute of Adult Continuing Education has said that there is a potential role for jobcentres, and I think that the idea could be considered if the culture within them were to change.

My hon. Friend the Member for Huddersfield (Mr Sheerman) made an excellent speech. His passion for Caitlin Moran was clear for all to see, and I am sure that it will gratify her. He reflected, importantly, on the changing face of our economy, and on the fact that our economic and educational needs have, in some respects, become aligned with each other. As our economic needs change, it is vital for our educational needs to change as well. He made another important point about the huge potential for business people to serve as mentors in our schools. The Labour party is considering that proposal in detail. Business people have been serving as school governors in Labour-controlled Waltham Forest, and I should like to see more of them reflecting the needs of business in our education establishments.

The hon. Member for Ribble Valley (Mr Evans) made such a brilliant speech that I wrote down four of his observations so that I could reflect on them. He pointed out that the issue of literacy and numeracy had dogged the country for many years, and that successive Governments had wrestled with it. Like other Members, he mentioned libraries. He also referred to the important issue of immigration.

Immigration has produced numerous economic and cultural benefits, but there is no point in pretending that it has been a one-way street. It has also posed significant challenges. As the OECD report made clear, in many cases there is a higher level of illiteracy among members of specific ethnic groups who come to this country, quite apart from the fact that English might not be their first language.

My hon. Friend the Member for Sunderland Central (Julie Elliott) was passionate about a project in her constituency, and about the excellent work that is being done there. Indeed, throughout the debate we heard about positive projects that are taking place in individual areas. It seems to me that if those projects could be joined up, they would work better as a result.

The hon. Member for North Swindon (Justin Tomlinson) made a plea for financial education. He too focused on the importance of libraries, as did the hon. Member for Northampton South (Mr Binley)—who, I understand, could be backed at 16/1 with Paddy Power yesterday to win the deputy speakership, but is now at 5/2. While I entirely endorse what he said about the role that libraries could play, the massive level of local authority cuts is causing them to close throughout the country. We cannot say that libraries should be doing more while at the same time ordering authorities to make the cuts that are leading to the closures.

I would make a similar point to the hon. Member for Worcester (Mr Walker), who referred to Sure Start. There have been huge cuts in Sure Start, 400 of whose centres have closed. It is estimated that a third of its funding has disappeared since the Government came to power. Although I think that the hon. Gentleman is right to ask about Sure Start’s role in relation to literacy and numeracy, I do not think that it can be taken out of context.

The hon. Member for Tamworth (Christopher Pincher) asked when we will deal with this. When will we see this done? Will this be the Government who really make a difference? I am keen to investigate that question now.

The OECD report made it clear that Britain is above average in the achievement of level 3 and level 4 literacy in comparison with our European neighbours—ahead of Germany, the USA, France, Italy and Spain—but we have many more people than our competitors do who fail to reach level 1, which is people who are functionally illiterate. Adults at level 1 have a reading age of 11. I read today that The Guardian has a reading age of 16 and The Sun has a reading age of 11, and I share the concern of the hon. Member for Gosport that many of the one in six adults to whom she referred will be able to read The Sun but not The Guardian. That could explain a lot.

We face a significant challenge and we need to focus on the steps we are going to take to do something about this. We need to realise that social inequality is a key determinant of academic inequality.

[Kelvin Hopkins]

Will my hon. Friend give way?

[Toby Perkins]

I am tempted to give way, as I am always very keen to hear from my hon. Friend, and his attempt to intervene reminds me that I failed to mention his contribution on the importance of numeracy, particularly in rebalancing the economy. I was surprised and encouraged to hear that he has been annoying his friends on the left. That is not something I have always accused him of, but it is always good to have things revealed in the House.

We need to look at what is actually happening. There has recently been a big increase in child poverty. The Institute for Fiscal Studies estimates that 3.1 million children will be living in absolute poverty by 2013. Much of the progress that was made on child poverty between 1997 and 2010 is being eradicated and that is not going to reduce the social inequalities that this report tells us we need to address.

There have been cuts to local authorities and Sure Start centres, and further education funding has been cut by £260 million. The number of working poor is increasing. Countries at the top of the education table are countries that have a social democratic model of government. We need to learn the lessons from this report.

What would our approach be? First, we need to identify those groups in society who are most vulnerable to being illiterate or innumerate and put in place a series of guarantees to ensure they are not simply thrown into the job market and expected to sink or swim without the skills they need in numeracy and literacy. Any step that would see more children educated by unqualified teachers would be retrograde. We need to see steps to support people who are at greatest risk applying to all school leavers. Those who are not achieving the standards of literacy and numeracy that they should by the age of 16 will be given a chance to catch up with a guarantee of further study in those areas until the age of 18.

We also need to support Army leavers more. About 39% of Army recruits join with literacy and numeracy skills at level 1. The Army’s extensive apprenticeship programme has already done a fantastic job in improving the literacy and numeracy of many of those people, and one nation Labour would strongly support the Ministry of Defence as a leading Department in tackling that problem.

We also need to focus on our prisons. Some 48% of the prison population have a reading age of 11 or lower, so there needs to be a real focus on supporting people in our prison population to ensure they get the skills they need.

The answers to the problems are not purely pedagogical, however; they are very much social. When we still live in a society where people can be in work and in poverty and where the cost of child care can mean it still does not pay to be in work and where children can arrive in school at the age of five unable to speak, we should not be entirely surprised that we face this problem.

To address it, a one nation Labour Government will ensure that working parents of three and four-year-olds will get 25 hours of free child care a week, paid for by a banking levy worth £800 million a year. We will also legislate for a primary school guarantee that every school is an 8 am to 6 pm school. I agree with what has been said about making better use of our schools. We need to rescue Sure Start from the huge cuts it has had, and we need to work with experts to develop the best solution to overcome these stigmas and barriers.

I congratulate the hon. Member for Gosport on the excellent debate she has instigated and her contribution to it. She is right that this is a vital issue. A tremendous partnership approach is needed in order to improve it and to ensure we have greater opportunities for all, and to make better use of all of our people so we can start to fulfil the promise of Britain.

13:05

[The Minister for Skills and Enterprise (Matthew Hancock)]

I echo the words of the hon. Member for Chesterfield (Toby Perkins) in saying this has been an excellent debate and congratulating my hon. Friend the Member for Gosport (Caroline Dinenage) and the other supporters of the motion. Not only has the debate been informed and valuable—there is now no need for me to read out many of the statistics I have to hand to set the context as they have already been given—but it is timely given Tuesday’s OECD report. It was a shocking report and it will reverberate down through the education debate in Britain for many years. I hope it will persuade many who are sceptical or resistant to the reforms being put in place to come onside and support more rigour, and support stronger maths and English within schools.

The OECD demonstrated that over 8 million people in our country lack functional numeracy and over 5 million lack functional literacy. While Britain is strong at the top of the skills range, on these measures we have gone from being about the third best in the world to about the third worst in two generations between 55-year-olds and 16-year-olds.

[Toby Perkins]

That statistic was given earlier today by the Leader of the House. The OECD report said we were third bottom of 24 countries, not third-bottom in the world. I am sure the hon. Gentleman would not want to mislead people. He is out there fighting for British jobs, and he would not want to tell people that the situation is worse than it is.

[Matthew Hancock]

Absolutely. We are third from the bottom in the developed world, as surveyed by the OECD. We are 22nd out of 24 in numeracy and 21st out of 24 in literacy and however we want to cut those figures, they are bad.

I pay tribute to all those who have worked so hard in this area, especially the National Institute of Adult Continuing Education and its chief executive, David Hughes, whose lifelong work has been spent trying to drive up adult literacy and numeracy. So much of the solution is about high expectations and standards and, as a country, we have tried over the last decade and more to find one merely by throwing money at the problem. It is clear that while money is part of the answer, it is only part of the answer, and a lot of it is to do with making sure we get the right teaching to the right expectations with the right level of rigour.

This problem must be solved first in our primary and secondary schools. We can then try to solve it, for those who do not succeed at school, in colleges and further education, and then, of course, for those for whom that still does not work, throughout life. This problem must be tackled at all levels, therefore.

Let me set out some of the actions the Government have taken. The focus on numeracy and literacy in primary schools is crucial, but, as well as time spent on these issues, we have to make sure we have high expectations of children at a young age. We need to make sure that grammar is taught properly and that mental arithmetic matters—that we do not rely only on calculators, and instead the understanding of basic maths is inculcated deep in pupils. Then we must reform GCSEs and have a more stretching curriculum for teenagers, and then, for those who do not get the crucial C or above in GCSE, make sure they continue to learn English and maths. The introduction of the tech level and the tech bac will drive that among those who do not go down the A-level route. As announced this week, we are introducing a core maths paper that is somewhere between a GCSE and an A-level so that for the 40% who get a C at GCSE but do not continue to study maths there is a qualification that is not as big as a full A-level but allows them to continue studying maths.

[Kelvin Hopkins]

I wonder whether the Minister is going to touch on teaching methods in primary schools and some of the points I made. Some of his ministerial colleagues and former ministerial colleagues were keen on examining teaching methods, particularly in primary schools, to make sure that we have got that right. If we do not get that right, we will not make much progress.

[Matthew Hancock]

I could not agree more with almost everything the hon. Gentleman has said in this debate. He made a remarkable contribution and I was coming on to respond in more detail to it. I entirely agree that getting teaching methods that work matters, but what also matters is that the teachers believe in the methods they are using—that is what the evidence shows—and move away from what he called an “utterly misguided” philosophy of learning. I like him more the more I listen; thank goodness there are people on both sides of this House who think that it is utterly misguided not to stretch pupils and not to have rigorous and evidence-based methods of teaching.

We are also tackling levels of illiteracy among benefit claimants, introducing new conditionality to require the learning of English and looking towards introducing a concept for younger benefit claimants of “earn or learn”, so that we incentivise people into training rather than pay them so long as they do not train for more than 16 hours a week.

Apprenticeships and traineeships are, of course, close to my heart, and they increasingly require English and maths. Some people say, “If you go into an apprenticeship, you should not have to do English and maths because apprenticeships are for people who are going into jobs that do not require those things.” But there is almost no job that does not require a basic standard of English and maths. In this modern workplace—by that I mean around the country, not necessarily in this building, as it is not the most modern of workplaces—the level of English and maths required is vital.

[Mr Binley]

The Minister knows I am keen on using community assets in a much more imaginative way. How might we do that in this context, particularly with libraries, which are very underfunded, as the shadow Minister stated? How might we improve that situation and have a more involved local community push in this respect?

[Matthew Hancock]

I was coming on to deal with the role of community facilities, where I understand my hon. Friend is driving forward the argument. Academies and free schools are one way to help, because giving more autonomy to head teachers allows them to use their buildings as they wish. On libraries, managing community facilities more imaginatively is important, and a lot of that is down to the individual managers of individual institutions. I strongly support what he said about that.

Of course, good teaching of English and maths requires good English and maths teachers, so we are today announcing new Department for Education support for the national centre for excellence in the teaching of maths to develop a maths enhancement programme to upskill existing teachers of maths in further education. The programme will be delivered by professional development leads associated with the centres for excellence in teaching and training. We need more maths teachers, and we are on track this year to have trained more than 600 FE teachers. So we are constantly working to drive up the number of English and maths teachers, as well as the English and maths taught.

Above all, this comes down to school reform, because without excellent schools we will not solve this generational problem. I hope that the OECD report will have helped to build a stronger consensus behind our school reforms, which remain opposed—inexplicably—by some people who otherwise describe themselves as “progressive”. As the shadow Minister said, the OECD showed the problem of the link between deprivation and education being greater in England and Northern Ireland than elsewhere, but the problem is that poor education entrenches deprivation. Education needs to be the foundation of social mobility, and in the UK that is not happening nearly enough now. The hon. Gentleman did not mention the collapse that the OECD study showed in the results among 16 to 24-year-olds, where this country has gone from the top to very near the bottom. We are driving forward on making sure that we reform our schools system, bring in free schools, give head teachers powers under academisation and improve the standards of teachers. However, we have opposition, and I do not understand why people who otherwise call themselves “progressive” say that they are opposed to these things. I wonder whether we are going to get a change of heart from the Opposition Front-Bench team on so-called “unqualified teachers”, not least because the new shadow Education Secretary once was an unqualified teacher.

[Toby Perkins]

The report makes it absolutely clear that England and Northern Ireland need to address social inequalities, particularly among young adults—that was a key part of its recommendations, which is why I focused strongly on it. Of course I understand that educational inequalities can lead to social inequalities, but this report is saying that social inequalities will lead to educational inequalities.

[Matthew Hancock]

I am sure that the hon. Gentleman will want to welcome the fact that inequality in Great Britain is at its lowest level since 1986 as a result of the efforts of this coalition Government.

The hon. Member for Huddersfield (Mr Sheerman) made a passionate speech. I hope that this debate will not become party political because there is no need for it to be; if we all listen to what the OECD said and drive rigour and standards through schools, it does not have to be party political. He also mentioned mentors. We are reforming careers advice to make it about inspiration and mentoring, and to help brokerage between businesses and schools. If anyone had him as a mentor, I have no doubt that they would absolutely value that. He made many extremely important points, crucially recognising that this has not gone well for a long time and needs to be turned around. He said that we have failed to deliver the most basic of education over a number of years, and that is exactly what we are trying to turn around.

[Mr Sheerman]

May I remind the Minister that I was also trying to get over the fact that we have been very successful for one section of our population, really expanding things, at the same time as we have been totally unsuccessful with, and almost wilfully neglectful of, the lower achievers?

[Matthew Hancock]

Absolutely; I believe somebody once called them the forgotten 50% and they were indeed forgotten. That is no longer the case. Educational reform has to be about making sure that everybody can reach their potential. I was going to say that an intellectual error has been made in the past and we have to put it right. I am talking about the argument that because someone has a low level of education or they are undertaking a low-level qualification—level 1 or level 2—what they are doing does not have to be rigorous, stretching and high-quality. At every level of education we have to make sure that we get as much improvement in pupils as possible. We are trying to put right that mistaking of a low level with the “need” for low-quality and sloppiness.

It is fantastic and an honour to be answering the first speech that my hon. Friend the Member for Ribble Valley (Mr Evans) has made from the Back Benches for several years. He rightly argued that this is about the fulfilment of lives as well as about jobs and the economy. He, like my hon. Friend the Member for Tamworth (Christopher Pincher), mentioned the importance of tackling the issues faced by those who have dyslexia, and I could not agree more. It comes back to the previous point: just because someone has dyslexia does not mean they cannot have decent English and maths. It makes those things harder to teach and we need different techniques for teaching them, but we should not have low expectations just because people find something difficult. He also mentioned the importance of the context for learning and, as the Minister responsible for apprenticeships, I often find that people who failed in English and maths in a formal setting thrive in them as soon as they encounter them in a job. That is because suddenly it matters whether or not they can do their maths. If they can, they can do their job.

The hon. Member for Sunderland Central (Julie Elliott) mentioned Unionlearn, and I am grateful to her for highlighting it. The Government support it and fund it—it would be great to get some acknowledgement for that. My hon. Friend the Member for North Swindon (Justin Tomlinson) talked, as he often does, about financial literacy, and it was great to be able to put that into the curriculum. I hope that it works and that we do not think that the job is done just because we have put it in the curriculum. We have to keep an eye on it and make sure that it really works. He also talked a lot about school reform, which is the heart of the long-term solution to the problem.

My admiration grows for the hon. Member for Luton North. I did not know that he was an economic historian until now.

[Kelvin Hopkins]

An economist, not an economic historian. I am sorry.

[Matthew Hancock]

It was going so well. Never mind, I will forgive the hon. Gentleman. I am a former economist, but I have repented my sins.

My hon. Friend the Member for Worcester (Mr Walker) talked about employer concern and the problems highlighted by the CBI, the FSB, the BCC and the EEF. I want to put the Government’s position on the record on one point. He said that there is sometimes an impression that people are not mathematically minded and went on to say that they should still be able to learn maths. The concept of people who are not mathematically minded does not exist anywhere else in the world. It is a peculiarly British cultural concept and we must eradicate it, because everybody can do maths. It is just a matter of how they are taught. I absolutely hope we can turn that around, although changing cultural perceptions takes time.

Many Members talked about probation and prisons and we are working hard to drive up English and maths in prisons. We are paying by results and outcomes rather than simply the number of classes taught to try to improve that.

The challenge is historic and is set next to an historic publication. The shock from the OECD’s report has brought up an objective fact, which needs to be answered. I hope that it has finally settled the debate between those who say that a constant increase in qualifications passed represents a constant increase in quality of education. Increasing numbers of qualifications matters only when those qualifications are of constant value and we know that they have not been. The evidence shows that we have a serious problem that has got worse in the past 10 years.

We have learned that, above all else, alone in the developed world, our 16 to 24-year olds are not better educated in English and maths than those aged 55 to 65. Yes, money is important in solving the problem, but money alone is not the answer. Expectations, rigour and challenge matter too. The solution will not happen quickly. It takes years to turn around schools, but then it takes years for those turned around schools to educate the next generation. It is a vital task and I hope that all parties and Members of this House can get behind it so that everybody in this country can reach their potential.

13:22

[Caroline Dinenage]

I thank the Minister of State and the shadow Minister for their words and thank colleagues from both sides of the House for a fascinating and valuable debate. We have heard some thoughtful and thought-provoking speeches, which have demonstrated a huge underlying passion for this important subject.

There have been some outstanding individual contributions. I am primarily grateful for the support of the hon. Member for Huddersfield (Mr Sheerman). Adult literacy and numeracy are a crusade for me and he has been steadfast in his support on every step of the journey. I feel only sadness that I was not at Swansea university when he was a lecturer there and that I missed him by some years, unlike my hon. Friend the Member for Ribble Valley (Mr Evans), who had that great opportunity in life. I was also extremely honoured that we got to hear my hon. Friend’s speech from the Back Benches. It was outstanding and showed a depth of understanding of this important subject.

I am grateful to colleagues from the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills for their support. The Select Committee on Business, Innovation and Skills takes the issue seriously and also understands that it is not just the responsibility of BIS to address the issue. That must be done across government and across society.

My hon. Friend the Member for North Swindon (Justin Tomlinson), who is a hero in the world of financial education and has been a champion for the whole issue, asked why I was not more angry in my opening speech. I am angry. I am frustrated, sad and desperately upset that we have failed generations of people in this country through their education and through adult education. We need to grab this issue by the throat and shake it until it works, because people are being failed.

As the Minister said, the most staggering result of the OECD report is the fact that in the developed world we are the only country in which 16 to 24-year-olds have fewer skills in this regard than their grandparents. The most important point to come out of the debate is that this is not a party political issue. It is much more important than that. We must work on the problem for generations to get it right. There is no quick fix and it will not be solved overnight. We must have policies that will get it right far into the future. It cannot be solved quickly and it is not an issue that should be tackled by just BIS and the Department for Education, as the situation is cross-departmental. For example, the Department for Work and Pensions has plans to get as many people as possible off welfare and into work. That is a noble aim but one that must take account of the vast levels of illiteracy that prevent people from getting and holding down a job. We must put the systems in place to recognise that and to help them. The universal credit system, which will be coming in online, presupposes a certain element of not only literacy and numeracy but of computer literacy. That must be a huge concern. In the Ministry of Justice, where the staggering illiteracy rate among prisoners is no coincidence, the promise to reduce reoffending must go hand in hand with promises to tackle illiteracy and innumeracy.

It is an injustice that illiterate and innumerate adults are cut off from so much, whether that is a rewarding job or just being able to read their kid a bedtime story. That needs to be tackled jointly by the Government, society, community groups and charities—some amazing charities are working on the issue. We must ensure that the injustice does not continue into another generation.

Question put and agreed to.

Resolved,

That this House believes that, with one in six adults functionally illiterate, the UK’s skills gap is preventing the country from fully realising its economic potential; understands that improved literacy rates not only have economic benefits but also have positive effects on an individual’s self-confidence, aspirations and emotional health and wellbeing ; notes that literacy rates for school leavers have shown little change in spite of initiatives introduced by successive governments over recent decades; understands that the social stigma attached to illiteracy and innumeracy often prevents adults from seeking the help they need, which means that signposting illiterate and innumerate adults to Further Education Colleges is not always the most effective course of action; recognises that literacy and numeracy programmes must be made easily accessible to the most hard-to-reach functionally illiterate and innumerate adults if valued progress is to be made; and calls on the Government to renew efforts to provide imaginative, targeted and accessible support to illiterate and innumerate adults.

[Ian Murray (Edinburgh South) (Lab)]

On a point of order, Madam Deputy Speaker. A senior member of the Government party in the other place said live on television at lunchtime that he believed that Royal Mail was significantly undervalued. Given that Royal Mail will enter the stock market system tomorrow and that taxpayers are set to lose out on anything from hundreds of millions to billions of pounds, is there any mechanism by which we could bring the Minister or Secretary of State to the House to explain to the public why the undervaluing of Royal Mail could lose the taxpayer millions?

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Dawn Primarolo)]

That is not a point of order for the Chair, as there is no mechanism by which the Chair can decide Government business on the Floor of the House. I hesitate to suggest that the hon. Gentleman should write to the Minister, although there are Members on the Treasury Bench who have heard his comments. I am sorry to have to disappoint him by saying that that is not within the power of the Chair.

Funding for Local Authorities

Thursday 10th October 2013 Commons Chamber

13:28

[Neil Parish (Tiverton and Honiton) (Con)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered funding for local authorities.

I thank the Chairman of the Backbench Business Committee and the Committee for allowing us good time to debate this serious subject.

In the summer of 2012, the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government recognised the penalty for rural authorities—that is, that the formula for allocating funds to local authorities disadvantaged those in rural areas—and improved the sparsity weighting for the formula for the local government financial settlement for 2013-14. That was the good news for rural authorities, and the Government must be commended for recognising that historical inequality and for seeking to improve the funding formula for local authorities to take into account the higher costs associated with delivering public services in rural areas. I fully support the Government in their stated aim.

However, the Government seemed to have a little wobble. The damping model that the Department chose to minimise the swing in funding for councils wiped out all the gains from the improved formula for rural authorities, and as a result their total funding actually fell faster than that of urban local authorities. I am not seeking to steal money from urban authorities; I seek a fair deal for rural authorities as well.

The Department allocated a further £8.5 million to the most sparsely populated authorities after the rural fair share campaign. MPs pressed the Department and made our case. However, that is still only a one-off grant for 2013-14, and it distributes the £8.5 million to 95 local authorities in amounts ranging from £649,000 to £856,000. Is the Department considering ensuring that we have a little bit more money than that next year? In fact, I would like another £30 million at least. I probably cannot horse-trade too much, but it must be recognised that the rural authorities are not getting their fare share. Although welcome, the one-off grant makes no material change to funding disparities within the overall £22 billion settlement. That is a very big sum of money.

[Ian Mearns (Gateshead) (Lab)]

I hope the hon. Gentleman accepts that there are significant regional variations in the impact of the cuts. It is not just urban or rural; in some regions, both urban and rural authorities are facing significant disproportionate cuts in relation to national averages. The north-east of England is facing cuts across the board of about 23% in the next two or three financial years.

[Neil Parish]

The hon. Gentleman is right, because what the Government seem to have done—dare I be so blunt as to say it—is to ensure that those that least need it get the most money, by which I mean the south-east of England. Coming from the west country, I would of course say that. Many of my colleagues from the south-east probably do not necessarily agree with me.

[Sir Peter Bottomley (Worthing West) (Con)]

rose—

[Neil Parish]

It looks as though we have already drawn blood.

[Sir Peter Bottomley]

It is not a question of drawing blood. I hope that at some stage someone will say how much support there is for the elderly on the south coast—say, in the Worthing district—compared with support for the elderly in the north-east or the south-west.

[Neil Parish]

My hon. Friend makes a good point, because I believe that will need to be recognised not only in local government funding but in health service funding. In my constituency the town of Axminster has a population profile that matches the one forecast for the country in 2035, meaning that there is a much more elderly population. In Seaton and Sidmouth and along that coastline, there is an increasingly elderly population.

[Mr Jim Cunningham (Coventry South) (Lab)]

I congratulate the hon. Gentleman on securing the debate. Does he agree that the local government funding formula in general needs to be looked at, because there are different problems in different regions, and they require different answers? In Coventry, the local authority has lost £45 million over the last three years and is expected to find another £19 million next year. That is affecting jobs as well as services, so Coventry is down 15%—1.5% above the national average in relation to cuts and resources.

[Neil Parish]

I started my political life in both district and county council—this is going back to the ’80s—and the formula was just as complicated then. Under successive Governments we have made it even more complicated. I think, dare I say it, that it is all done because if the formula is made complicated enough, no one will understand it and those in government can do what they like. The Government spend a lot of time talking about the spending power of councils. It is not only about that spending power, but about how we get to that spending power and who pays for it. I shall discuss that issue later.

Urban councils are still receiving 50% more per head than local authorities in rural areas, despite the fact that residents in rural authorities, such as Devon county council, pay 15% more council tax, and many public expenses are more expensive to deliver in sparsely populated rural areas.

[Mr Ian Liddell-Grainger (Bridgwater and West Somerset) (Con)]

West Somerset, which my hon. Friend knows well, is the most sparsely populated part of England, with the smallest council. As he knows from his days in Somerset county council, we have never been able to catch up with the deficit, simply because the rurality of the area means that there is no way, with our ageing population—it is the same in Axminster—to do that. Perhaps we should look at the future size of these councils to see whether they could provide a joint service to make more efficient use of funding made available through the Government.

[Neil Parish]

I remember West Somerset well from my local government days. The problem is that it has a population of about 28,000 or 30,000, and if it is necessary to have a raft of chief officers to run a council, it becomes extremely expensive. We must come up with a system whereby some of the very small rural authorities can share their chief officers or combine them, because in this day and age it is difficult to deliver with very small authorities.

[Andrew Bingham (High Peak) (Con)]

The Minister is aware of the work that was done by the Conservatives in High Peak borough council when I served on it. It shares a chief executive and a senior management team, and I am delighted that the Government have now recognised that and given the local authority some money as well.

[Neil Parish]

My hon. Friend makes a good point. A council in my constituency, East Devon, shares a chief executive with South Somerset. Even though it is a sort of coalition, because one is Liberal Democrat-controlled and the other is Conservative-controlled, it works at officer level. Even though adjacent councils may be of different political persuasions, they can share resources. If it is possible to share administrative resources and cut expenses, it is possible to deliver a far better up-front service. That is what local government finance is for—to give people services, not to be gobbled up in administration. I have believed that all my political life.

More importantly, the local government settlement for 2014-15 is being frozen until 2020. As a result, the current disparity in funding between urban and rural local authorities will be entrenched, locking in past inequalities. The Government set up the review to settle that disparity, but we now have a damping and a freezing—back to square one for another five years. What is the Minister going to do about it, and how are we going to settle this so that we can transfer funds and have a fair deal?

[Daniel Kawczynski (Shrewsbury and Atcham) (Con)]

I pay tribute to my hon. Friend for securing this important debate. He and I both represent very rural constituencies. Does he agree that it is important for the Government to explain to us what work they are doing fully to assess and understand the sheer cost of providing services in rural areas in comparison with inner-city areas, and the impact of that on our constituents?

[Neil Parish]

I know that my hon. Friend represents his rural constituency in Shropshire very well, and he realises that sparsity of population, distances, small schools and so on make services much more expensive to deliver. The irony of his question is that the Government have already done that work. They have already investigated the situation and come up with a policy to transfer those funds. That is what is so frustrating; they will not carry on with the process. That is why I am particularly keen to get them to look at that again and continue the great work that they have already done. That is all I ask. I am not asking for a new wheel; I am just asking for the present wheel to be rolled a bit further.

[Graeme Morrice (Livingston) (Lab)]

The hon. Gentleman is making some sensible and considered points, but does he agree that the unfairness in the system—I know the grant system is incredibly complicated—is exacerbated by the existing plan to top-slice and hold back grant, such as the new homes bonus? That simply amplifies the problems for areas that are already disadvantaged, such as many of the local authorities in my region, including Durham county council and Gateshead metropolitan borough council.

[Neil Parish]

I do not necessarily want to get into a debate on how the new finance will be handled. Retaining the business rates and the new homes bonus are all part of it. A system where it is shared more equally across all authorities in the future may be one answer, but I do not want to argue with all the Government’s policies. I just want them to carry on with the very sensible policies that they had. [Interruption] Did my hon. Friend the Member for Beckenham (Bob Stewart) want to intervene?

[Bob Stewart (Beckenham) (Con)]

When invited to intervene, I am delighted to do so. In the area that I represent, Beckenham in Bromley, we sometimes feel that although we are part of London, we are quite hard done by. For example, meeting the statutory requirements to 2018 will inevitably result in a £36 million deficit, so it is not easy. The metropolitan areas also have problems and there are differences between metropolitan areas. Bromley is currently very hard done by.

[Neil Parish]

rose—

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Dawn Primarolo)]

Order. Before the hon. Gentleman answers that invited intervention, I remind him that one does not invite interventions, particularly when he is supposed to be speaking for only 15 minutes, but of course he could give way to his hon. Friends if they indicate that they want him to. Otherwise, I hope he will desist.

[Neil Parish]

I apologise, Madam Deputy Speaker. I thought somebody behind me had asked to intervene, hence I turned around. It was not purposely done, I assure you. In the future I will make sure that I do not invite interventions.

We are not asking for a change in the Government deficit reduction strategy. We support the Government in taking tough decisions to tackle the budget deficit inherited from the previous Administration. A quarter of all public expenditure is accounted for by the councils so this must be addressed. In response to my hon. Friend the Member for Beckenham, whom I unfortunately invited to intervene, there is some discrepancy in the figures for central London and those for outer London boroughs. The problem with local government formulae is how we invent a system that is fair to all.

[Anne Marie Morris (Newton Abbot) (Con)]

Will my hon. Friend give way?

[Neil Parish]

Yes, I will.

[Anne Marie Morris]

Does my hon. Friend agree that there is an issue in relation to the definition of “rural”? My understanding is that the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs uses the rural-50 or the rural-80, whereas in this case the “shire” word has been used, which will inevitably skew the results?

[Neil Parish]

My hon. Friend, who asked to intervene, is right. There is a different definition in DEFRA from the one used in local government, which does not seem to recognise councils that have a large rural population and larger rural parts of their areas. Why is it that the Department for Communities and Local Government does not recognise the DEFRA definition and may come up with another one? Is it to complicate the grant system still further? It would be cynical, would it not, to suggest such a thing.

We are here to press the Secretary of State to make good on the long-standing promise to correct the historic imbalance and give rural local authorities their fair share of central Government funding, in line with the summer consultation. We call on the Government to reduce the urban funding advantage over rural areas incrementally, year on year, to no more than 40% by 2020. Closing the gap between urban and rural can be achieved within the existing resources, within the period to 2020, without placing any individual authority in a worse position than others, and it is one of the recommendations to be made to the Government by the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee, of which I am a member, in its report on our inquiry into rural communities.

By reducing urban funding by an extra 0.1% per year of the £24 billion local government funding settlement, the Government can reallocate £30 million to rural authorities and reduce the funding gap from 50% to 40% by 2020. I know that this is a matter of concern across the House. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for North Devon (Sir Nick Harvey) and my hon. Friends representing Worcestershire for helping me to secure the debate today. I also thank my hon. Friend the Member for Beverley and Holderness (Mr Stuart), who chairs the rural fair share campaign—

[Bob Stewart]

He is here in spirit.

[Neil Parish]

Indeed. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Beverley and Holderness for pursuing the issue with great vigour, for considering the issue with Ministers with such tenacity, and for helping to secure this debate, as well as for the support and information provided by the local authorities in Devon and across the country.

A quarter of England’s population live in rural communities. Providing services presents many challenges to local government. This is particularly true in rural Devon, where there are serious barriers to services, with nearly 56% of residents living in rural areas across the county and with the house price to earnings ratio well below the national average. Lower than average wages and higher house prices is a trend replicated in other rural local authorities.

[Ian Mearns]

Reflecting on the point that the hon. Gentleman has just made, I know that many people regarded the council tax and its implementation as a blessed relief in the aftermath of the poll tax in the early 1990s, but unfortunately property valuations have not been reviewed to any great extent since then. An eight-band taxation system might have seemed fair at the time, compared with what there was before, but it has meant an awful lot of people in poor value properties paying a much greater proportion of their income in local taxation.

[Neil Parish]

The hon. Gentleman makes a good point. However, the Government that he supported had 13 years to change that and chose not to. The problem with opening up the issue of council tax banding is that it is probably a very big can of worms. I understand why successive Governments have not gone there, but that does not necessarily mean that one day we will not have to do it.

One of the biggest obstacles to providing services to a dispersed rural population is the high cost of transport, which has a knock-on effect on nearly all other areas of local government responsibility, such as adult and social care services, refuse and recycling, and ground maintenance. In 2009, 42% of households in the most rural areas had regular bus services close by, compared with 96% of urban households. These rural bus links are often the only way for many residents, particularly pensioners, disabled people and the unemployed, to access public services. I think I am right in saying that some 20-odd per cent. of the population of Devon has to go to work on buses, and if there are no buses, it is very difficult for them to do so.

[Mr Robin Walker (Worcester) (Con)]

My hon. Friend is making an excellent speech. Does he agree that that also has a massive affect on education and the cost of getting children to school in rural areas, which is not part of the education funding formula but is part of local authority funding?

[Neil Parish]

My hon. Friend makes a good point about the distances involved in getting children to school. Also, in rural areas we have many smaller schools, which are very good schools but are more expensive to run.

Despite the fact that rural areas have been underfunded, I would highlight the very good services that education authorities, schools and those across the piece have managed to deliver in very difficult circumstances. However, that does not mean that we should sit here and allow the Government not to give us a fair share. I want to put it on the record that I believe that we have very good services, despite the meagre amounts being spent on them.

[Mr Jim Cunningham]

I am sure that the hon. Gentleman will agree that the areas he and I represent have an additional problem in social care, because £0.8 billion has been shifted away from local government to try to fund social care, leaving a gaping hole in the funding.

[Neil Parish]

rose—

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Dawn Primarolo)]

Order. Before the hon. Gentleman answers that intervention, I remind him that the Backbench Business Committee’s recommendation was that the opening speech should last between 10 and 15 minutes. Even with the interventions, whether invited or given, he has now been speaking for 22 minutes. A large number of Members wish to speak in the debate, so if he would consider drawing his comments to a conclusion in the near future, I would be grateful.

[Neil Parish]

Thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker. I have probably been over-generous in allowing interventions, but I will now carry on and try to finish my speech—

[Daniel Kawczynski]

Unsolicited interventions.

[Neil Parish]

Be quiet. [Interruption.] I mean, the hon. Gentleman must be quiet.

To put it in perspective, Devon county council currently spends over £10 million a year on statutory bus pass schemes, which is twice as much as it can afford to invest in the actual public bus services. I am delighted that the Government are sticking to their promise to maintain concessionary bus passes for pensioners, but Devon county council will need to fund them. I am sure that the House will agree that bus passes will do nobody any good if there are no buses on which they can be used.

Public transport is also a challenge for local authorities in rural areas with large road networks to maintain. Devon has the largest road network in England, with nearly 8,000 miles. I believe that it has as many roads as Belgium. In 2010 the council had to repair around 200,000 potholes due to severe weather, and since July 2012 Devon has suffered significant flooding, which has done untold damage to the roads.

I will come now to the final part of my speech. The summer consultation showed rural areas gaining more than £30 million. Those gains will be lost because of the chosen damping mechanism, which will actually increase the funding gap between urban and rural areas, the formula grant for rural authorities having fallen between 1.7% and 2.3% more than that for urban authorities. We are not asking Ministers to reinvent the wheel; we are asking them just to knock the corners off and make it round again. We believe that the Government got it right the first time in the summer of 2012 and that the damping model used has prevented that policy from working. I have met the Minister for Local Government and discussed the matter with him. He has been very fair to us, but I want him now to deliver on fairer funding for rural authorities.

13:53

[Angela Smith (Penistone and Stocksbridge) (Lab)]

I will preface my comments by referring to the speech made by the hon. Member for Tiverton and Honiton (Neil Parish). For reasons I will outline, I do not believe that the real debate should be about rural versus urban areas. I believe that it should be about the fact that local government is being asked to bear the austerity cuts being applied by the coalition Government. That is the real issue.

I wish to put on the record my congratulations to Councillor Steven Houghton, leader of Barnsley council, on recently being raised to Knight Bachelor for services to local government, a well-deserved honour. Steve Houghton has got to be one of the best leaders we have in local government. He has done a great deal to develop local government in this country, including designing the future jobs fund, which has now been abandoned.

Like many other right hon. and hon. Members, I was a local councillor before entering Parliament. I was a member of my local council for nine years and was very proud to be a councillor and a cabinet member for education. I now represent the constituency of Penistone and Stocksbridge, which straddles two metropolitan local authorities, Barnsley council and Sheffield city council. It is an incredibly diverse constituency. A large part of it is rural. Indeed, it contains much of the north-eastern aspect of the peak district national park—it does not get any more rural than a national park—within its boundaries. But other parts of the constituency would best be described as semi-rural, suburban and urban.

In other words, the constituency spreads from the fringes of urban Barnsley and urban Sheffield right out into the valleys of the peak district. In the rural western part of the constituency, one finds all the usual issues: the needs of local farmers and other typical problems, such as lack of access to high-speed internet or a decent bus service, and there are all the other issues relating to affordable housing, employment and access to work.

However, other parts of my constituency, such as the old pit villages of High Green and Dodworth face challenges common to former coalfield areas, as the disappearance of what was essentially a key economic activity rooted in villages has left a huge vacuum in employment and, in High Green, severe social problems. Then there are the urban areas in Sheffield, which carry with them all the seemingly intractable problems we have seen emerge since the deindustrialisation of the 1980s.

[Helen Goodman (Bishop Auckland) (Lab)]

My constituency is similarly dispersed. Does my hon. Friend agree that the cost of services in rural areas is far higher, and was not she, like me, appalled to hear Tory Councillor Nick Worth of Lincolnshire county council defending the closure of more than half the libraries in Lincolnshire?

[Angela Smith]

I completely agree. The closure of libraries really worries me. We face similar levels of closure in Sheffield. We are not applauding or welcoming those closures; we are having to deal with the terrible impact that we know they will have in our area. But we know that the reasons for those closures lie with the lack of funding from central Government.

I have sketched my constituency not because I want to wax lyrical about the area I represent, but because I want to establish a key point that is all too often overlooked when we consider what I call provincial England, meaning England outside London. For too long the debate has been unhelpful, sitting on a platform that polarises the arguments. For too long the argument has been about rural areas versus urban areas, as though the two are literally miles apart. Nothing could be further from the truth, as my constituency exemplifies. As I have already said, I represent deeply rural areas located firmly within a metropolitan borough. I represent rural areas that in the past have supported engineering and coal, railways and ceramics as well as the vital agriculture industry.

My plea to the Chamber today is this: let us start having a more rational and pragmatic debate about the role of local government, let us stop dividing our country up into areas of interest, and let us start representing properly the interests of all the people of England. Let us not have a debate in which we say, “My rural area isn’t getting enough from the Government, so let’s cut the funding for the metropolitan boroughs.” Let us properly recognise that most parts of England, including the metropolitan boroughs, are more complicated than appears to be the case when we just look at a title such as “Sheffield city council.”

[Mr Jim Cunningham]

Whether or not we are talking about local government in rural or urban areas, the fact remains that central Government are weakening local government, because one of their proposals, the new homes bonus, takes discretion away from local authorities and puts it in the hands of local enterprise partnerships, and who are they accountable to?

[Angela Smith]

I accept my hon. Friend’s point. Affordable homes are a key issue in all areas, both rural and urban. It is important that local authorities have the key role in determining, politically, the best way of delivering those new homes—at the city region level in the case of my constituency—across a borough such as Barnsley, which has a lot of green-belt land. In fact, most people will be surprised to hear that the majority of land in Barnsley is green belt.

[Daniel Kawczynski]

The hon. Lady seems to be implying that it is inherently wrong to voice concerns about differences in funding between rural and metropolitan areas, but I represent a totally rural constituency that receives less than half the funding for education services than certain parts of inner-city areas, so the hon. Lady cannot blame us for trying to raise those concerns.

[Angela Smith]

I do not blame anybody for raising concerns about their own constituencies, particularly with regard to education, but that is not the key point in relation to funding for local government services. Metropolitan areas have significant rural aspects. In fact, Rotherham, Doncaster and Barnsley between them are 70% rural. The way in which the hon. Gentleman expresses his argument is not helpful in delivering more resources for his area. I repeat that the key issue is the central Government cuts to local government funding. The difference between provincial England and the capital is another issue that has been completely overlooked.

[Ian Mearns]

Before coming to this place I had the privilege and pleasure of being a local authority councillor in Gateshead for 27 years. Like my hon. Friend’s borough, Gateshead is very diverse: it has a concentrated urban core and a big rural hinterland. Councillors who represented the urban core and those who represented the leafy shire had these types of discussions, but we would never have swapped our social problems, because the differences were stark.

[Angela Smith]

My hon. Friend hits on a key point. That is why I mentioned the old pit villages in my constituency which even now carry the deep scars that were left behind, not just on the landscape but on the lives of the people who were, in effect, abandoned following the wave of closures in the late 1980s and early ’90s. People underestimate how difficult it is for an authority such as Barnsley to rebuild an economy that was built almost entirely in villages. It is not easy to rebuild that type of economic infrastructure once it has disappeared.

Local government provides many of the public goods that our constituents consume, whether they live in rural, suburban or urban areas. These include emptying bins, educating our children and picking up the pieces of shattered lives when things go wrong. Local government is the backbone of our civil society. There is no doubt, however, that it is approaching a crisis that is not of its own making, but that has been made in the offices of No. 10 and the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government.

We have all seen the infamous graph of doom, which shows that councils will eventually run out of resources to run anything except the most basic of services. For my two councils that catastrophe will occur in 2018, when all discretionary spending will disappear and major cuts will have to be made to adult social care and other core functions. Councils up and down the country are being asked to do more and more, but with less and less resource.

In addition, it is clear that this Government decided early on to contract out many of their austerity measures for delivery to local councils across the country. The average cut to departmental budgets has been about 7% in real terms according to the special interest group of municipal authorities, but local authorities have seen their share of funding fall by 27% over the same period, with only benefits and welfare being cut more, which, of course, has in itself had a direct impact on demand for local authorities.

To compound matters for the core cities, while the average loss of Government support in England will be £240 per household in the years 2013-14 and 2015-16, the core cities will see a reduction of £352 per household. On the issue of rural and urban areas, metropolitan areas are bearing a large part of the local government reductions—much more than has been acknowledged so far in this debate—which is not at all helpful in terms of delivering for the rural areas in those metropolitan boroughs. That is on top of the already unequal cuts that core city authorities have experienced since 2010, which have seen them lose a third of their grants from central Government.

If that was not bad enough, these cuts have not been the end of it for many local authorities. The hidden cuts, including those major cuts to grants, are not so obvious to many of our constituents. For example, a £400 million cut occurred when council tax support was transferred to local authorities, and the cut to the early intervention grant removed £430 million at a stroke from local authorities. These cuts are now on a scale never seen before and they are having a chilling effect on local services.

Contrary to the belief of the Secretary of State, local government has not been a place of excess. In fact, it has been recognised for many years as the most efficient branch of government, and that makes it even more likely that cuts to its funding will have to come out of the services it provides.

[Rory Stewart (Penrith and The Border) (Con)]

Will the hon. Lady give way?

[Angela Smith]

No, because I have already taken up a fair amount of time due to interventions.

By the end of this financial year Sheffield will have made savings amounting to £182 million—about a third of its discretionary budget. As many will know, that is because the only part of the budget that councils can actually manipulate is relatively small. In the case of Sheffield, it is about 16% of the overall budget, meaning any savings have to be focused on that relatively small proportion of the available resource. That has had a huge impact on leisure, the arts and environmental and street scene functions. Indeed, the impact is being felt across the country, hence the campaigns springing up against library closures everywhere. In Sheffield it has led to the closing of Don Valley stadium, the removing of funding for leisure centres—the only two leisure centres in my constituency have both closed—as well as a significant reduction in library services and a move to fortnightly bin collections. The story is the same in Barnsley, with the £35 million removed from its budget leading to library and leisure centre closures and cut backs in grants to voluntary organisations and other vital services.

Our local authorities are becoming shadows of what they once were. Local people in my two boroughs are increasingly being asked to travel further to access services such as libraries and leisure centres at a time when funding for local bus services is also being cut by central Government. If this situation continues, how far will people have to travel, paying increasingly expensive bus fares, to get to the services they need?

As has been said, on 1 April the Government introduced the new business rate retention scheme, which fundamentally changed the way in which local authorities receive their resources. Although these changes to the new settlement funding assessment make it difficult to make a comparison between previous and future years, the end result for Sheffield and Barnsley seems to be the same—another round of cuts, with Barnsley having £40 million less to spend up to 2015 and Sheffield facing a further shortfall of £80 million up to 2015, rising to £106 million by 2018. To put those figures in perspective, £80 million equates to Sheffield’s current total spend on libraries, environmental heath, trading standards, refuse collection, crematoriums, street lighting, youth services and services to people with mental health issues.

The new settlement funding assessment, along with the retention of business rates, means that from now on the only way my two local authorities and many others can realistically grow their revenues is through growing the business rate income. Indeed, that is the exact intention of the Government’s thinking. That is great for Westminster, because companies are falling over themselves to locate there, but not so great for Barnsley, given the difficulties it faces. That does not mean that Barnsley does not want to compete or attract new business, or that progress has not been made, but it is hard. The borough, along with its neighbour, Sheffield, still has a long way to go. That is hardly surprising, given the deindustrialisation that it suffered in the ’80s. Even if businesses can be attracted, the work that is required to fill the economic gap left by the contraction of traditional industries is immense. To fill Sheffield’s £38 million funding gap for next year, the equivalent of two new Meadowhall retail centres would have to be built. That is a tall order to say the least.

I started my comments by saying that local government is important. It is also true that more and more people will require the services that it provides. Those who rely most on local authorities are the elderly, the young and the vulnerable. The possibility that councils will run out of money for all but the most basic of services is fast becoming a reality. As I said earlier, Sheffield will run out of money for all functions other than children’s and adults’ services, and will have to start cutting even those key functions, by 2018. Every day, I hear stories of vulnerable people being isolated more and more as councils pull out of the services that they used to provide. I fear the sort of society that we are becoming as councils stop providing the support that they have provided until now.

If the Government continue down the already well-trodden path of exporting their austerity measures to local authorities, many parts of the country will see local services cease. It is the most vulnerable, the elderly and future generations who will bear the brunt. It does not matter whether those people live in rural areas in Devon, Sheffield or Barnsley, or in metropolitan or urban areas—they will suffer.

14:11

[Anne Marie Morris (Newton Abbot) (Con)]

Clearly, we are in tough times. It is therefore absolutely right that we endeavour to get more for less. The Government have been very prudent in doing two things: managing budgets and costs, and pushing down much of the decision making to a local level. I am particularly fond of the localism agenda.

However, I represent a very rural constituency in Devon and I share the concern of my hon. Friend the Member for Tiverton and Honiton (Neil Parish), who secured this debate, that there is a divide in how funding has been allocated. It is to the credit of the Government that they have recognised that divide. As my hon. Friend said, the challenge is in getting the Government to “get on with it”. It is clearly inappropriate that urban authorities have 50% more to spend than more rural authorities. There is a big job to do.

The cuts to local authority funding have been criticised by Opposition Members. I do not know how many of them were listening to BBC Radio 4 two days ago, but it cited an ICM poll showing that there was a good deal of satisfaction with local government services. The areas that were of concern were social care and potholes, which have a particular impact in rural areas and areas with elderly populations.

[Angela Smith]

I am sorry to intervene on the hon. Lady when I have just spoken, but people in my area cannot exhibit any satisfaction with their leisure centres because they have both been closed and they no longer have any.

[Anne Marie Morris]

No survey is perfect, but I do not believe that this one is any less representative than any other. I think that the findings are good.

[Daniel Kawczynski]

My hon. Friend rightly mentions the important ICM survey. Six out of 10 people think that services are better than they were in 2008. Does that not exemplify the point that, by utilising resources more effectively, services can be provided without increasing council tax massively?

[Anne Marie Morris]

My hon. Friend is quite right.

The challenge is to ensure that, in rural areas, we get the job done. As has been mentioned, there are problems with the way in which the Government define rural—whether we should use the shire definition, the rural-80 or the rural-50—and with how damping was applied. There are questions to be asked about whether that was done in an appropriate way. As has also been mentioned, there has been some top-slicing of the new homes bonus, so some money that would have gone to local government is going to local enterprise partnerships. Those are all issues that the Government could sensibly look at.

The Government have said that rural areas must do the right thing. They have said that what they proposed for rural areas was fair because there was still fat to be cut. In Devon, council tax has been frozen for the past three years, 3,000 staff have been lost, spending has been cut by £100 million and 98% of council tax is being collected. Fraud accounts for only 0.003% of the budget, which is a very small amount in the grand scheme of things. Our reserves are also relatively modest. There are two separate pots, but the one for ongoing operational costs covers only two days of operating costs and the other covers planned future development.

I understand what the Government are trying to do—we must clearly manage costs—but Devon has done its best to manage its books. It now has to find £130 million of savings. It has looked hard and is now looking for the last £46 million. It is looking at some of the areas that were mentioned by the hon. Member for Penistone and Stocksbridge (Angela Smith): youth services, day care centres, libraries, residential care, children’s centres and community transport. I absolutely agree with her that those things matter.

The challenge is how we address this matter. I say to the Government: let us walk the walk and not just talk the talk. Let us be honest that there was something not quite right in the funding formula and look at it again. Let us also be honest about the top-slicing of the new homes bonus. My concern is that LEPs have not been running for very long. Although I am sure that some of them are more than capable of sensibly using a top-sliced chunk for infrastructure projects, there are others that are very early in their development. Many councils have been planning infrastructure projects for a long time, but now find that the funding is being moved to another body. That should give us pause for thought.

The two areas of dissatisfaction in the ICM survey were potholes and care for older people. Devon has £700 million-worth of work on the roads that has not been done, never mind the problems that are caused by the winter. If we are to reform local government spending, we must look at the Bellwin formula. The way in which it was calculated meant that it gave Devon only half of what it needed to get the roads back in order. As my hon. Friend the Member for Tiverton and Honiton mentioned, that was partly because we have 8,000 miles of road to deal with.

Buses are another key issue. As my hon. Friend the Member for Tiverton and Honiton said, bus passes costs us £10 million and we then have £5 million left to spend on public buses. He said that many people rely on public buses to get to work. Indeed, whether it is to get to work or for any other purpose, more people use the buses than the trains, so it is short-sighted to fail to provide funding for that.

Of course, we cannot forget education and schools. Devon is almost, although not quite, at the bottom of the league table. It is 145th out of the 151 local education authorities. It receives £395 per pupil below the average. Given the additional costs because of transportation and the size of the schools, that is untenable. The Government have recognised that, but we need them to do something.

The Government have promised to put some money from the NHS into local government. However, there is a lack of clarity about how that will happen and how much money it will be. Without that information, it is difficult for local government to sort out its finances.

Finally, although it is absolutely right that communities should work with local authorities to do what they can together, leaving it to the local community to pick up all the work that cannot be afforded is not realistic. A number of community transport groups have come to me because demand well outstrips supply. They are struggling to cope with the number of people who are trying to get to hospital appointments, many of whom have wheelchairs. There are simply not enough drivers or vehicles. We applaud those in the voluntary sector for the fantastic job that they do, but, as the squeeze comes, we need to recognise that they cannot completely fill the gap and that they need help and support in trying to do so.

14:19

[Mr Clive Betts (Sheffield South East) (Lab)]

First, I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Corby (Andy Sawford) on his new responsibilities as a shadow local government Minister, which are well deserved. I am sure he will do just as well at holding the Government to account as his predecessor, my hon. Friend the Member for Warrington North (Helen Jones), whom I congratulate on her achievements in the job and wish success in her new job.

The Local Government Association, whose figures I believe are accurate—it is a cross-party, Conservative-led group—states that in the course of this Parliament, Government funding to local government will be cut by 43% in real terms, which is more than twice the level of cuts experienced across government as a whole. Why is that? I hope the Minister will respond to that question.

Do Ministers somehow feel that the services that people receive from libraries, sports centres, environmental health, parks and street cleaning are less important than anything else? I suggest that they are not. Do they believe that local government is somehow less efficient and therefore has more ability to make cuts without damaging services? I do not think there is any evidence of that—indeed, the evidence has shown the opposite over the years. Local government has generally been more efficient and more effective in bringing about efficiency savings. Or, in the phrase that my hon. Friend the Member for Penistone and Stocksbridge (Angela Smith) used, is it simply about the Government contracting out the responsibility for making the cuts to somebody else, namely local councils? I suspect that that is probably the reality. Why have local services been picked out for larger cuts than anything else?

My second point is about the distribution of the cuts. We can argue about that, and everyone will have their own view, but it seems slightly unreasonable that Sheffield, despite all the demand for local services from local people and all its problems and challenges, should have received cuts of about £200 per head of population, whereas down in Windsor the cuts are £40 per head of population—five times less. I know the Minister will say that it is because cities such as Sheffield get more in grant, so they have more grant to cut. However, why have they had more grant than elsewhere in the past? We can argue about fine amounts, but essentially it is because they have more problems, more challenges and less resources than areas such as Windsor. That is true of many northern cities, which are the ones that we expect to be the powerhouse for growth and for rebalancing our economy. They are receiving the largest percentage cuts.

We can add in the cuts to the fire service, and there are also the new proposals that will redistribute health money away from cities such as Sheffield, because there will be less recognition of need in the formulas. Cuts in different services in the same areas will multiply the effects.

It is not just Labour authorities such as Sheffield that are saying that the cuts cannot be sustainable but the Local Government Association and Sir Merrick Cockell, who is a very reasonable man. He speaks well for local government as a whole on behalf of a Conservative-led, cross-party grouping that says the cuts are unsustainable. Those comments have been repeated by Conservative authority leaders such as the one in Kent, who says that there is no more capacity to keep on making cuts while keeping local government services sustainable.

The LGA states that, on top of the 43% cuts in this Parliament, there will be a gap of another £15 billion if the cuts continue to 2020, which local government simply will not be able to find. We know from its briefing—I have also had discussions with it about this—that based on the Government’s current forecast, there are 56 councils whose current levels of spend are 15% higher than their income is likely to be by 2015-16. There is a gap of 15p in the pound between their income forecasts and their current levels of spend, so some of those councils will get into serious financial difficulties. They are not councils of any one party persuasion, and they are not solely in metropolitan or rural areas—they are councils across the piece.

We know that the Department for Communities and Local Government monitors that matter, and we hope it is talking to the LGA about it, because it is a serious problem. The graph of doom has been mentioned, and whereas three or four years ago it was a bad idea that might happen at some stage, it is now a serious prospect.

My hon. Friend the Member for Penistone and Stocksbridge mentioned the situation in Barnsley, and I will obviously talk about Sheffield. There will have been £182 million of cuts between the beginning of this Parliament and 2013-14—the council has had to make those reductions. On top of that, we know that in 2014-15 and 2015-16, a further gap of £80 million will have to be bridged. If we take the projections forward to 2018-19—the Chancellor has indicated clearly his intention that there will be no rowing back from further cuts—there will be another £26 million on top. That money cannot be found without cutting into statutory services, because there is no leeway at all on discretionary services.

The figures that Sheffield council has produced for its current spending show that 38% of the budget goes on care for adults and children. What is often forgotten, however, is the contractual commitments that councils cannot get out of. The whole waste collection and disposal service in Sheffield is contracted to Veolia. Modifications can be made at the margins—there is already an alternate weekly bin collection—but long-term commitments in the incinerator and waste disposal contract cannot be altered. Any change made in such contracts has a financial penalty attached to it.

There is also the new private finance initiative scheme in Sheffield. It is absolutely great—the roads in Sheffield are being repaired, and we are delighted with what is being done. I congratulate the Government on supporting the scheme, which the previous Government drew up, and the council on implementing it. However, that PFI commitment is for the next 25 years and cannot be changed. There are also repayments on borrowing for schools and so on, which cannot be ducked out of. Such contractual commitments and debt repayments make up 46% of the budget, so that leaves 16%.

I have given the figures for the further reductions that are in the pipeline through to 2018-19. By then, the 16% discretionary funding that remains after statutory services, contractual commitments and debt repayments have been taken into account will have gone. There will be nothing left. It is not about which libraries will be closed, because no libraries will remain open. That is a serious situation in Sheffield, which is mirrored in other parts of the country. It is not about one authority somehow failing, it is a potential failure of local government as a whole, not through its own fault but simply because it will not have the necessary resources from central Government and will not be able to raise the money itself. It is a serious situation.

[Ian Mearns]

My hon. Friend is making an excellent speech and highlighting the drastic situation facing many councils, particularly in the north and north-east. I am afraid that when I talk to colleagues on the Government Benches, they often seem completely oblivious to the plight of councils such as my own in Gateshead, or those in Northumberland, Durham, Newcastle or Middlesbrough. Local authorities in the whole north-east region are facing average cuts of about £296 a dwelling in the next two years.

[Mr Betts]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right, but I would add that it is not just Labour councils in the north, with all their problems, that will face that situation. A number of smaller councils in the south and south-west will face almost a meltdown situation in the next few years if the same policy is continued.

[Diana Johnson (Kingston upon Hull North) (Lab)]

In his capacity as Chair of the Communities and Local Government Committee, has my hon. Friend given any thought to the effect on the local economy of the reduction in spend by local authorities? In areas such as Hull that are quite disadvantaged in the first place, cuts to local authority spend and procurement will mean that the ability to get growth into the local economy is cut severely.

[Mr Betts]

There is quite a lot of evidence that there is a real difficulty for local economies. In the past, the larger grants were generally directed at authorities with real difficulties, often in areas where industry had been run down. Those areas often had a higher reliance than others on public sector expenditure, and my hon. Friend is right that the reductions in that expenditure are having a disproportionate impact on those communities. As I said, we are in a serious position. I do not think Ministers recognise where we could be heading—perhaps they hope they might be in another job by the time it happens. We can all wish for better things for ourselves, I suppose.

Let me move the debate forward in a slightly different way. We are where we are, but where will local government go in the future? A bit ironically I suppose, the one good point that might come out of this is that local government is now less reliant on Government grants for funding. Government grants have been cut by nearly half, so a bigger proportion of money comes from taxes that local authorities raise. If we are to look forward to vibrant local government, a less centralised state, and localities being less dependent on central Government for funding, and if we are to be localist and look at the balance of power and the things the Political and Constitutional Reform Committee is doing, we must not simply go back to where we were and recreate the grant systems. We must also consider how we can make local government more financially independent in the future.

There will always be an element of redistribution—we have great inequalities in our country so redistribution will always be necessary—and there will always be a case for some element of Government grant. One problem is that, at present, that element all comes from business rates. Because of that, some sensible ideas the Government have had about localising business rates have become convoluted and complicated because those rates both reward development and try to redistribute from those areas with greater resources to those with the greatest need. In principle, however, that is to be welcomed, although in future we will still need an element of Government grant for redistribution.

Why not take up the LGA’s proposals, give the money to local authorities and allow them to distribute it? That would stop councils simply complaining to the Government that they do not have enough money while others have too much. That happens in Denmark, which has a grown-up system. They sit down and negotiate between local and central Government about the amount of money to be passed over, and local government then makes the redistribution between different local authorities. That has worked for a long time. I would have thought most Ministers welcomed with open arms the idea that they would not be responsible for every allocation to every council in the country. Let us see how radical Ministers can be. The LGA was brave in putting forward that proposal, so let us at least look for radical solutions.

The one tax that local government controls is council tax, which is now virtually frozen because of actions by this Government and the previous one. I want to be critical of them both. We had the nonsense of capping under the previous Government—I spoke against that a number of times in the Chamber—and the nonsense of the referendum under this Government. That is not about democracy but about trying to control local government spending. The idea that central Government should have to call a referendum if they want to change income tax or VAT is clearly nonsense and no Government would ever allow it. Local councils ought to be elected and then free to raise the money. If the electorate do not like it, they will vote for somebody else, and that is what democracy at local level should be about. I am against the referendum proposals and against capping.

[Daniel Kawczynski]

The Labour party is making great play about the cost of living. In previous years we saw massive increases in council tax, year on year. I remember in Shropshire under a Labour administration that council tax went up by 16% in one year, which had a devastating impact on people with fixed incomes. Surely the hon. Gentleman understands the importance of freezing council tax in these difficult times.

[Mr Betts]

Of course I understand that and any council would want to try to minimise increases in council tax. However, let us also make clear that cost of living increases can come from a local library closure because people have to buy books instead of borrowing them for free, or from the closure of a leisure centre when a family has to book into a private club that involves a lot of extra cost. Cost of living increases can come in other ways, including through cuts in public services.

I also argue strongly that it is nonsense to have local government’s main tax based on a valuation carried out in 1991, and it is ridiculous that 20 years on we have not had a revaluation. The previous Government, this Government, and the previous Conservative Government all bottled out—it is all too difficult. In the end, we have a completely unrealistic situation. No one understands the system any more, which is an attack on democracy and accountability.

My hon. Friend the Member for Corby (Andy Sawford) in his new role will probably not want to comment on this point, but if we are to reform council tax and make it fairer, the relationship between the value of properties and the amount people pay should be reformed. Those in very expensive, large houses should pay more, but why bother with a mansion tax? All we have to do is increase the higher council tax bands, and ensure that the money that comes in goes to local government and does not get siphoned off by the Treasury for other purposes. That is why I am against the mansion tax—I put that on the record to ensure that I have been critical of what both Governments have done.

[Ian Mearns]

We have an eight-band system, but it is ridiculous to have a national mean of band D when in a borough such as Gateshead around 65% of all properties are in band A. People in that area in modest properties and on low incomes end up paying much more of their personal income as a proportion of local taxation. That is ridiculous and unfair.

[Mr Betts]

There is a case for review on whether band A should be also split, and there is a good argument for that to make the whole system fairer.

We must also look for other sources of funding for local government. I welcome the report by Mr Travers that the Mayor of London has initiated, which is a good contribution to a debate on how local government should be financed. I am not saying I agree with all the recommendations—the report is about London in isolation, although I am interested that the core cities are starting to engage in the argument, which raises questions about the rest of the country—but it is good that the Mayor has stimulated that debate. He has invited me and other Members to meet him to discuss that issue, and the Communities and Local Government Committee may initiate an inquiry into the matter. At least, however, the issue of how we can get more independent sources of funding for local councils has been raised.

Why not look at income tax again? I remember the Liberal Democrats when they were a radical party putting forward new ideas, not just agreeing with the Conservative party about things. They used to promote local income tax. I disagreed with them then because they wanted to replace council tax. I suggest—there was a report on local finance by the Select Committee in the previous Parliament—that we have local income tax as well, and make the local authorities responsible for a bigger percentage of the money they raise.

The Communities and Local Government Committee recently went to Sweden where people’s income tax demands include an amount for central Government, an amount for the county, and an amount for the municipality. The amount paid to the municipality is greater, because the services it provides cost more and are more important to local people. That is how Sweden operates. I know that the Political and Constitutional Reform Committee has looked at designating a certain percentage of income tax for local councils. That is a step forward, but why can councils not vary things? If councils want to vary services and local people want better services and to pay for them, why can there not be differences in different parts of the country? That is a challenge and a debate to be had. There is no one solution at this stage, but at least let us start to think radically about a way forward. We cannot simply go back to the idea that it will all come from central Government and council tax.

We also need to reform capital finances—for heaven’s sake, the cap on the housing revenue account is nonsense. Everyone who has looked at the issue can see that prudential borrowing rules apply to every other aspect of local government finance in the capital, apart from housing. Let local government be free to build the homes that people need, and let Treasury control move back from local government borrowing. The prudential rules exist and can be audited, and local authorities can be held to account.

Let us also hope for Government support for the LGA’s idea of a municipal bond agency, so we can return to a situation in which people can invest in their communities through bonds, with a good rate of return, so they can see where the money is going to improve services locally. There are lots of good ideas. We rightly focus on the impact of the cuts, but we should also look at how we deal with the situation in future.

The cuts the Government are inflicting on local government are unfair. There are not only cuts on local government, but on local services that people greatly value. Those cuts should not be that much greater than the cuts in the rest of government. The distribution of those reductions is unfair. At the same time, we must recognise the current situation and that we have a challenge for the future. How do we address it and make local government more financially independent? How can we give local government greater means to raise resources for their local services? If we can meet that challenge, it will be good not merely for local government and local councils, but for local communities, democracy and accountability. That is well worth debating.

14:39

[Annette Brooke (Mid Dorset and North Poole) (LD)]

I find myself agreeing with the hon. Member for Sheffield South East (Mr Betts) on a large number of his points. I am particularly pleased that he likes local income tax and the mansion tax. We clearly have a lot in common. Perhaps future campaigns will be a little different.

I have a quote on local government: “Local government is looking over a precipice. We will only be able to run statutory services such as adult social care and waste services.” That comes from a Liberal Democrat council leader, but it could have come from a local council leader of any party. We must consider that view—from the precipice or cliff—against the view that it is scaremongering. We need clarity. What is the true position? Every hon. Member who has spoken has identified the lack of transparency in the system, and I shall return to that point.

As hon. Members know, local government accounts for around 25% of all public expenditure. Given that the budget deficit had to be tackled, that was always going to take a big hit from cuts to public expenditure—I am on message now. Local government has shown great skill in reducing budgets. Committed local authorities under all parties have protected front-line services. I should like to put on the record that that is a credit to many councillors throughout the country, particularly given that satisfaction in council services has increased. Many hon. Members were surprised to hear the result of the research reported on the BBC showing that most voters believe that schools, bus services, parks, libraries and bin collections have improved in the past five years even as budgets have been reduced. Credit must be given where it is due.

Many hon. Members have mentioned bus services. I remind the House that I represent a constituency that has every type of council within it—there is a unitary authority in an urban area, and a county council and several district councils in the rural part—so I find it difficult to argue that one area needs more money than another for specific services; it is a difficult situation. Currently, the county council is consulting on the future of bus services, and it is possible that some of my constituents in villages will not be able to get to work or to access health or leisure services. The price of school transport has rocketed in price for the over-16s. That is compounded by the rising age of participation. I shall keep making the point on the Floor of the House that relatively poor hard-working families in the rural areas in my constituency are faced with bills of £450 or £750 per year for their 17-year-old to get to school. Members on both sides of the House have been remiss in allowing the age of participation to increase without putting finance in place for bus services. I urge all Departments— the Department for Education, the Department for Communities and Local Government and the Department for Transport—to talk about that together because it is so important.

Apart from cuts to rural bus services, I am faced with cuts in the urban area on routes where the buses are well used. The bus companies simply take the decision to cut the routes off without consultation, which is shocking. There seems to be no accountability. As far as I can tell, bus grants have been maintained. Some decisions are a ploy to ask for money from the local authority, but some are taken because the bus companies are not there to provide a service for my constituents.

[Ian Mearns]

The hon. Lady makes telling points, but I remind her that, in debates prior to the abolition of the education maintenance allowance, we warned Government Members that there could be implications down the line for people in rural areas.

[Annette Brooke]

The hon. Gentleman might recall that I spoke against scrapping the EMA because I was concerned about the impact on sixth-form choice when there is insufficient help from other services. That needs to be addressed. We have bursaries, but I thought the EMA should be reformed. I do not believe that there is enough support, particularly given the increase in the age of participation. I certainly welcome the fact that the Government reviewed the situation and put extra money into schools and colleges to help the most needy, but there is not enough money to cover the current situation, especially in rural areas.

In June, the spending round announced a further 10% real-terms reduction in core local government grant funding. The LGA analysis of the subsequent consultation covering the settlement funding assessment showed that money received up front will be reduced by 15% in real terms. The Government frequently use the figure of a 2.3% cut for 2015-16. They give the impression of a certain level of cuts, but it is all much more complex. We are told that local government will get extra money for health and social care, but then we discover that that is not all new money. We know there is top-slicing and the extra top-slicing. Councils have the opportunity to bid for lots of different pots of money, but that causes great uncertainty at a time of financial difficulties.

We have had some good news, which I notice Opposition Members have so far not mentioned, such as city deals and growth regions, which will put extra money and opportunities into the core cities outside London. That is exciting decentralisation work, and we must give credit for that important work.

Local government faces both opportunities and threats, although some opportunities can also be seen as threats. The freeze in council tax, and the extra money from the Government to support that, has been an opportunity for local councils in some respects, and I welcome the fact that residents in some of the councils I represent have benefited from the council tax freeze. On the other hand, the freeze removes democratic freedom, which is not a good thing.

A further big opportunity can be found in the merging of health and social care budgets, which is an enormous step forward of which the Government can be really proud. But no council knows how much money it will get back for social care. How can councils plan or operate in a business-like fashion if they do not have that certainty? One of the biggest threats has to be the escalating cost of adult social services. I represent an area with an ageing population, and local government has to be given enough support to bring health and social care budgets together to innovate. Local government has not been backwards in innovating over time—I think it has been the most innovative part of government—but the Government should work with local government to ensure that we bring out all the opportunities that are available.

I agree with hon. Members that top-slicing the new homes bonus is a threat. Allocating that money to a local enterprise partnership is an issue. I am quite in favour of LEPs, but they do not have any democratic foundation. If an LEP covers an area with several councils—a county council and two unitaries, for example—the small district councils that will lose their new homes bonus do not have a seat on the board, because they cannot all have seats on the board. I would like the Minister to address that problem. We have opportunities and we have threats, but it is the Government’s role to support councils in getting achievements from those opportunities.

The rural fair share campaign has been mentioned. I support the campaign and I know the struggles my small district councils have in order to survive, but it has to be part of a bigger re-examination of local government finance. However, it was great to get some movement and support on the problems we can all identify, regarding the extra costs of running a rural authority.

[Mr Graham Stuart (Beverley and Holderness) (Con)]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for her support for the rural fair share campaign. One of the problems is that the Government are looking at local government finance, but they are freezing in, not just damping, the inequities that see people in rural areas, who earn less on average than people in urban areas, pay more in council tax and receive fewer services: 50% more goes per head to urban areas than to rural areas. That cannot be frozen and kept in place at a time of change; it must be unwound, and there must be other reforms.

[Annette Brooke]

I congratulate the hon. Gentleman on the work he has done in leading on this issue. All types of councils have their problems. This is a strong issue, and when there is a problem it does not help to build it in—the whole situation has to be opened out. I mention in passing the concern of parish councils and what will happen to their funding with regard to the local council reduction scheme. Perhaps the Minister will update us on that. I remember attending a meeting with parish councils when the Minister was answering questions on that matter.

In conclusion, local government is facing a tough situation and that has to be accepted. I agree with the hon. Member for Sheffield South East that we should look at what local government does best, pulling local government services together and providing greater opportunities to bring more services together. We believe in localism; let us enable localism to happen. By supporting local initiatives, so much more can be delivered. I agree that local government borrowing that complies with prudential rules should be facilitated. That is a fundamental principle. I want to see more services delivered by local government, not fewer—for there to be a bigger range, with better quality and other services facilitated. Sometime it is right to bring in the voluntary sector, but I agree with my hon. Friend the Member for Newton Abbot (Anne Marie Morris), who made the point that we cannot delegate everything to the voluntary sector.

I hope the Minister will listen. There is a problem. Let us recognise it and support local councils to do what they do best.

[Several hon. Members]

rose—

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Dawn Primarolo)]

Order. A number of Members still wish to speak and the speeches so far have been rather long. I am not going to apply a time limit at this point, but I will ask Members to take no more than 10 minutes, including interventions. If they take longer, the time limit will be reduced considerably to get us to the winding-up speeches at a reasonable time for the Minister to answer what is a full debate. The clock is not going on at this point, but if Members cannot manage it by themselves by watching the clock, I am afraid there will be a time limit. Please do not take longer than 10 minutes, including interventions.

14:53

[Grahame M. Morris (Easington) (Lab)]

I congratulate the hon. Member for Tiverton and Honiton (Neil Parish) on securing the debate and on gaining the support of Members across the House, and I thank the Backbench Business Committee for allocating the time.

I will make some general points, but I would also like to make specific points regarding my region, the north-east, and my local authority, Durham county council. It is tempting to characterise the debate in terms of urban against rural and north against south—I can see the hon. Member for Tiverton and Honiton is smiling. We are not allowed to refer to pictographs, but when we analyse the figures produced by the Local Government Association and the Association of North East Councils, it is clear that it is not simply a rural versus urban issue—and particularly not a north-south issue—because many of the affected regions are in the south-west. Many inner city London boroughs are badly affected, as are our great northern cities.

I shall make some general points to begin with and then get down to some of the specifics about my own area. The Minister on the Front Bench is responsible for the fire authorities so I thought it would be remiss—given that we met representatives of our fire authorities this week and found that they were extremely concerned about the implications of the settlement—not to mention that issue. The scale of cuts that the fire authorities are going to have to make will amount to taking out an entire brigade from the north-east region. I am not suggesting that that would happen, but taking out the whole of the County Durham and Darlington brigade would be the consequence if the cuts fell on a single brigade in our region. The level of cuts is unprecedented. My fear is that austerity is failing, not just our region but Britain. Nowhere is that more apparent than in the evidence of cuts to local government funding.

My local authority has made written representations to the Minister, and I hope he will consider very seriously the points it has made. Indeed, after the comprehensive spending review of 2010, local authorities faced significant spending cuts in the emergency budget. We knew, and warned at the time, that these would inevitably impact on services, jobs and growth. Various figures have been quoted, but my local authority, which is Durham county council, has needed to make savings of £123 million during the course of this Parliament. That has resulted in nearly 2,000 job losses—approximately 20% of the work force—and it has certainly hit front-line services and vital support for the local community.

Along with all local authorities, mine understood that local government would be expected to contribute to reducing the national deficit, but, as a number of Members have pointed out, the consequences of this level of cuts have been astounding. Local authorities certainly did not expect to be targeted for disproportionate cuts when the Government were unable to address the problems that had to be faced in any other way.

I am worried because the Government have missed a number of economic targets that they set for themselves and because the very slow recovery we have seen—probably the slowest for over 100 years—is being exacerbated by the scale of the cuts in local authorities, particularly when it comes to discretionary expenditure. There is no money left for economic development. I see some Government Members shaking their heads, but I am afraid that that is certainly the case for Durham county council. As a large unitary council, it had a successful track record of working in partnership with both public and private sector organisations to deliver major infrastructure projects and to make a contribution towards jobs and growth. Its capacity to do so, however, has been completely taken away by the scale of the cuts.

When the Chancellor of the Exchequer told us that he intended to eliminate the deficit by 2015, he promised in the 2010 comprehensive spending review statement that there would be “fairness”. He said:

“Fairness also means that, across the entire deficit reduction plan, those with the broadest shoulders will bear the greatest burden”.—[Official Report, 20 October 2010; Vol. 516, c. 951.]

Frankly, those strike me as quite nice words, but it was a hollow promise. We now know that the Government will miss their deficit reduction plan, and it seems that the most deprived areas and the most vulnerable people are having to pay most for the Government’s extra years of austerity. Clearly, disproportionate cuts are being imposed on hard-pressed local authorities, particularly in regions such as mine. Durham county council now faces cuts amounting to more than 40% of its budget. It no longer needs to find savings of £123 million; it is now expected to find savings of more than £222 million by 2017. The austerity and spending cuts will extend into the next Parliament.

According to a report by the Association of North East Councils, the north-east region faces a “disproportionately high share” of the £5.5 billion cuts in council budgets that will be made between now and 2016. That means an average cut of £296 per household in the north-east, compared with a national average of about £233 per household. As was pointed out by my hon. Friend the Member for Sheffield South East (Mr Betts), the Local Government Association has forecast that, during the period of the current Parliament, local government’s core funding will fall by 43%. That confirms that councils are being hit harder than other parts of the public sector.

Some councils, especially those in parts of the south, have been relatively unaffected by the cuts, and are able to continue as they were before. However, the Government must listen to local authorities—particularly in areas that face challenges and are experiencing high levels of deprivation—which, along with their parliamentary representatives, are warning that such large cuts are unsustainable, and pose the risk that councils will be unable to provide statutory services.

While funding is being cut, demand for services continues to rise. More than 60% of Durham county council’s expenditure goes towards children and adults services, and the proportion is set to increase in the years to come. That is not because the council is being profligate, but because of demographic changes, an ageing population, and the fact that my area formerly had a tradition of heavy industry such as coal mining, shipbuilding and steelworks. The Government need to recognise that the legacy of that heavy industry continues to push up demand for adult social care for the elderly and disabled. Safeguarding Children is also experiencing greater demand: the number of complex cases requiring co-ordinated interventions by a number of services is increasing significantly.

[Ian Mearns]

My hon. Friend is entirely right. The levels of demand for children’s services, especially in complex cases and those involving a high level of need, has been growing exponentially in some parts of the north-east. In my borough of Gateshead, the number of youngsters taken into care has increased by nearly 50% in the last four years. It may be said that that is disgraceful, but if social services departments leave such children in situ with their families, the consequences are often tragic. Those increased demands need to be taken into account.

[Grahame M. Morris]

That is certainly true.

I am not arguing that certain services should be protected while others should be subjected to cuts, but the structure of the settlement has had a particular impact on services such as libraries and transport, especially school transport. Some Members have said that there is general public satisfaction with the improvements in services, but school transport has been a huge problem for me. Many people in my surgeries have complained about having to contribute to the cost of a service that used to be provided by the local authority.

There are issues around culture, planning and economic development. Vital services that the public rely on are going to have to be cut still further to accommodate great cuts as spending falls. I am very worried that when the Minister and Government Members in general analyse the costs of this, they do so in the manner of accountants, knowing the cost of everything, but not understanding the value of some of these things. The real cost of these cuts is not just to the bottom line of local government budgets, but to services and support that the most vulnerable in society rely upon. That cost is also felt in the impact on jobs and growth, which will stifle employment opportunities in our communities and exacerbate the existing north-south divide in terms of health, education and economic development. [Interruption.]

In order for local authorities to continue their vital work, the Government must stop this relentless attack on local government. The communities that are hardest hit by the economic downturn are now being expected to shoulder the burden and pay for the failures of the coalition Government’s deficit reduction plan. [Interruption.]

There are a number of key messages that I want to leave with the Minister. There are some particular things he could do, such as address issues to do with the new homes bonus and top-slicing. I urge him to reconsider his current approach and to bring forward proposals that would support all councils to protect the most vulnerable in society no matter where in the country they may be.

[Several hon. Members]

rose—

[Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Lindsay Hoyle)]

Order. Some Members are getting rather excited, so let me explain that we have not imposed a 10-minute time limit and I do not wish to do so. I am sure everybody will work towards helping each other by speaking for no more than 10 minutes, and I am sure you, Mr Parish, will not get any more excited about this ruling. I am sure all who want to speak will be able to do so, and if there are any problems, we will impose a time limit.

15:06

[Rory Stewart (Penrith and The Border) (Con)]

It is very easy to feel that the debate about rural and urban funding is somehow trivial or unjustified. Those of us on the Government Benches who have been fighting on this topic for nearly two years often face scepticism from officials and slight scepticism from Ministers. The implication is almost that what rural areas are asking for—0.25% of funding to be shifted year by year—is either based on faulty statistics or will have no impact. I wish to challenge that.

It perhaps feels from London as though the request we are making is very small. It feels like the tiny tip of a lever, but when the lever is 350 miles long and the fulcrum is right here in Westminster, that 0.25% makes an enormous difference, because rural areas are in an especially fragile position—more fragile than those in almost any other country in the world. This was, of course, the first country to industrialise, and the first country to develop a truly urban population. In the mid-18th century, a sixth of the entire population of Britain lived in London. As a result, this is not France; we do not have vigorous, rich rural communities and local democracies and huge local populations. We do not have, as they do in France, 10% of the total population working on the land. Instead, we have been struggling for a very long time.

We must add to that the current perfect storm, which is to do with not simply the Minister’s portfolio, but what is happening to rural areas in health, where we are being significantly underfunded, in education, where we are being significantly underfunded, and in terms of our demography: we tend to have an older population, and we tend to face greater struggles with fuel poverty, with unaffordable housing, and with problems that other colleagues have raised to do with bus services. The Minister is dealing with a situation that is extremely dangerous, therefore.

This 0.25% matters because rural areas are precious. They are precious and they are fragile, and they have never been so fragile. They are being depopulated; we can walk across the English and Scottish borders and see houses abandoned and see parishes that in 1850 had 2,500 people but now have just 300. In those valleys are the very last traces of our history and of our landscape, which we in this House do not wish to turn into a wilderness.

It sounds like a very grand statement to come down to 0.25%. It sounds as if it is perhaps being a little petty to say that rural areas should not make this small demand just because they pay more in council tax, receive fewer services and earn less. But it is a demand that is very consistent with the traditions of my party, of this House and of this country. What I believe we all share in this House is the sense that rural areas should not be seen as marginal victims. Just because we mostly live in cities and just because 97% of the population tend to live in more densely packed areas than almost anywhere else in Europe, we should not patronise those areas.

Eden district council is the most sparsely populated council area, containing the most sparsely populated parish in the whole of England. When we see the kinds of things that Gordon Nicolson, the wonderful leader of the council, or Councillor Kevin Beaty struggle with, we see that they what they are struggling with is not simply being victims, but the possibility of being the future of this country—somewhere we can be proud of, somewhere the Minister and everyone in this Chamber can visit, and somewhere where 9 million tourists a year come to see living Britain. They wish to see not a wilderness but a rich community of houses, schools and living people. On that quarter of 1%, I ask the Minister please to be generous.

15:11

[Mrs Mary Glindon (North Tyneside) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Penrith and The Border (Rory Stewart), who made an eloquent case for rural communities. I congratulate the hon. Member for Tiverton and Honiton (Neil Parish) on securing this debate, as it gives me the opportunity to detail for the Minister the key finance issues facing my local authority, North Tyneside council. I am glad the hon. Gentleman did acknowledge the similarities of the things experienced by rural communities and deprived urban areas such as those in the north-east. I also wish to support the words of my hon. Friend the Member for Easington (Grahame M. Morris) in the case he made on behalf of the fire services. Our group received a presentation from our regional fire services earlier this week, where we saw the devastating effects the cuts are having and the fact that, again, it will be areas of deprivation that are put in more danger because of the cuts.

The Association of North East Councils has found that, nationally, the north-east has suffered the biggest cuts and has experienced much higher reductions in spending power than the national average. That has been said before. In North Tyneside the spending power per household is the worst in Tyne and Wear, as at £2,048 per household it is £468 per household less than our best-funded north-east neighbour, Newcastle. Moreover, North Tyneside council will have to make efficiency savings of £20 million for next year’s budget, which equates to 11% of the net revenue budget. At the same time, it will see a £12 million reduction in the revenue support grant—a reduction of just under 20% for the year. Announcements made in the Government’s spending review mean a 10% cut to core funding for councils in 2015-16, but the Government are now proposing a further £l billion cut for the north-east. For my borough that means a 40% cut in revenue support grant over two years.

The Government’s intention to protect council tax freeze grant might be good news in affluent areas that have higher council tax bases, but it is not in North Tyneside, especially as council tax support grant funding is being considerably reduced. I am not attempting to paint North Tyneside council as a whingeing council; on the contrary, the council has implemented savings over the first two years of the spending review totalling £32 million. By the end of the year, the efficiency savings will be £45 million. Furthermore, the council has implemented many of the saving ideas included in the Department for Communities and Local Government’s “50 ways to save” publication. Further cuts can only mean cuts to services, which will hit the most vulnerable in our communities hardest and will cost jobs in our region that we can ill afford to lose.

Like so many councils across the country, North Tyneside is seeing the rise in demand for adult social care that has been mentioned by so many Members today. The fact that young people with complex needs and many older people are living longer is to be celebrated, but that means that councils have to spend more of their budgets on adult social care. The DCLG must work with other departments and organisations to find a sustainable solution for funding adult social care so that increased life expectancy equates with a good quality of life for all those with social care needs.

The new homes bonus has benefited North Tyneside, providing specific funding to help the council’s economic growth priorities. However, the way in which the scheme is operated has resulted in the redistribution of funding from more deprived to less deprived areas of the country. The effect of that redistribution is that North Tyneside will lose about £1.6 million next year. Furthermore, the council is concerned about the recent technical consultation on the new homes bonus and regional growth fund to transfer 35% of the new homes bonus to our North East local enterprise partnership in two years’ time. Surely the Minister will agree that that goes against a core rationale of the new homes bonus scheme, which is to incentivise local authorities to encourage the building of new homes and to tackle long-term empty housing. That prompts a question for the Minister: where is the localism in making less money available for councils so that they have to make decisions on their spending priorities?

North Tyneside has always been a good, forward-looking council providing good levels of service across important areas, including social care and education. The council is not asking the Government for handouts but, like other councils in the north-east, in rural areas and in other urban areas, is simply asking for a level playing field on funding in these times of austerity.

15:17

[Sir Nick Harvey (North Devon) (LD)]

It is a pleasure to support my neighbour, the hon. Member for Tiverton and Honiton (Neil Parish), who secured the debate, and to echo some of his points. I also want to pay tribute to the hon. Member for Sheffield South East (Mr Betts), who is not in his seat at the moment but who made a powerful speech, drawing on his many years in local government. It was completely impartial in being equally rude about everyone as he set about his exposition of local government and he made some good points.

I am as committed as anyone on these Benches to the Government’s drive to get the deficit under control. It was inevitable that local government would play its part in the deep cuts that had to be made to public services in the course of the past three years. Local government has played its part; big cuts have been made. In my county, Devon, we have seen cuts to bus services, children’s services, libraries, social care and many others. As the polls to which other participants in the debate have referred are showing, we have just about got away with it. The public are still with it and are still expressing confidence in the services that local government is providing, but, looking at the funding settlement for this year and what that will mean for councils in the next three, I sincerely doubt that another poll taken in three years’ time would show anything like that satisfaction level. I believe that councils up and down the country, regardless of their political leadership and of whether they are in rural or urban areas, have set about driving down their costs, have done everything they plausibly can to secure better value for money and have struggled, as far as they are able, to do so without damaging front-line services. But we have got way past the point where they can be expected to do so again without its having a profound impact on front-line services. I simply do not think that the Government will get away with this if they go through with it on the scale they are currently planning.

People have stomached, more or less, the austerity measures of the past three years because they have seen the grim economic picture that has made them necessary, but as more and more Government spokesmen get up and, rightly, talk up the fact that economic recovery is showing signs of getting under way—we would all hope that that continues and gains momentum over the next two or three years—it will become increasingly inexplicable to people that their public services are being eroded to nothing. I echo the comments made by others when I say that people come to my constituency surgery and say, “It is all very nice having a shiny bus pass, but it is not a lot of use if there isn’t a bus that I can catch.”

Speaking personally, the road outside my house has now collapsed on both sides. There is a sheer drop. There is just about a car’s width that it is possible to drive on. I have asked the county council when it intends to repair it and I am told it will not be repaired for two years. If that is typical of what is going on, particularly in authorities that, like Devon, have vast expanses of highway to maintain, the public will not tolerate it, and neither should those who represent them. That reflects the dissatisfaction that we have heard from many Members during this debate.

By 2015-16, Devon county council’s revenue support grant from Government will have been reduced by around 60% in just four financial years. It will have to make another £113 million of cuts in the next three years, on top of the £100 million of cuts that it has already made. We can talk about tough choices as much as we like, but we are going to see complete areas of public service ceasing altogether. I do not believe that the public understand, are ready for or are in any sense willing to put up with that.

The situation for the district council in my area, North Devon district council, is just as bad. It will have experienced a 40% cut in the Government grant to its services, and that will mean that by 2015 the size of its budget will have come down by a third in cash terms since the start of this Parliament.

All this suggests to me that although cuts across the board are absolutely necessary, the Department for Communities and Local Government is taking more than its fair share of the cuts, even in the grim scenario that we are all familiar with.

But the main purpose of my contribution to this afternoon’s debate is to flag up in absolutely clear terms that the disparity between the treatment of rural and urban areas is simply no longer tolerable. It cannot be right that the grant support coming to people living in a rural area is 50% less per head than that going to people living in an urban area. That is £130 a year per head less grant support coming into rural areas than goes into urban areas. In consequence, people are paying £83 more on their council tax bill.

The rural areas of England and Wales are the poorest in the country. That takes a bit of getting one’s head round, but it is a fact. The next-door district to mine, Torridge district council, has the lowest GDP per head of any district in the entire United Kingdom. People come to Devon and Cornwall in the summer; the sun is shining and they think those counties are affluent. They are not. Devon and Cornwall are the two poorest counties in the country.

Now will somebody tell me why the people who earn the least in the country pay the highest council tax, get the least support from Government and get the thinnest and most hopeless level of public services back? It just is not right that public services in our area are so much thinner than they are in other areas. It is not right that there are so few social workers going out to deal with children. It is not right that there are so few buses. It is not right that I have had people moving into my constituency with disabled children who, about a year later, have said, “It is hopeless. It is impossible to bring up a disabled child in this county. We are moving back from where we came.” It has been going on for decades. It was hidden during the years when local government was getting bigger and services were growing, but it is all too horribly visible now, when everything is getting smaller. A number of us warned Ministers this spring, when they pushed their spending settlement through, that they needed to get back to the issue and sort it out before they came looking for our support again next year.

[Mr Graham Stuart]

I congratulate my hon. Friend on a passionate and well informed speech and on his becoming a chairman of the rural fair share campaign. Does he remember that beautiful summer of 2012, when the Government looked again at rural areas and decided that sparsity should get greater weighting, and then at the end of a year damped it all away and now propose to freeze that injustice, that inequity, all the way to 2020? It cannot be tolerated.

[Sir Nick Harvey]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for his intervention. I do remember the Department taking the issue away and coming up with a partial solution. It was going to give greater weight to the sparsity factor. I thought that was a welcome sign. I would not have expected that to happen under a Labour Government, but I was delighted that when the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats formed a Government together, the Department for Communities and Local Government finally had a look at the issue and came up with a workable solution.

What then happened is that the urban lobby beat a path to the Department’s door and said, “Up with this we will not put.” In its place came something called damping. In my experience, damping was meant to damp the effect of a change that was being made. It was, in a sense, a transitional relief so that the adjustment would be made in stages, but the difference that damping has made in these circumstances is that it has completely reversed the effect of what the Department had done and made it ever so slightly worse.

Time is running out. There are a couple of months left before we see the settlement for next year. I listened to my hon. Friend the Member for Tiverton and Honiton explaining the demand of the campaign—that by 2020 we want to have reduced the funding gap from 50% to 40%. Politics is a team game, so I am playing along with the team. I think that is horribly under-ambitious. The Government should sort the whole bleeding thing out straight away, but I am playing a team game.

To conclude, the poorest people are paying the highest council tax, getting the least support from Government and getting the thinnest service. It is not right. Do not ask me to vote for it again in the Division Lobby next spring.

15:27

[Daniel Kawczynski (Shrewsbury and Atcham) (Con)]

I remember clearly in 2004 when Carolyn Downs, the then chief executive of Shropshire council, presided over an increase in council tax of 16.6% when the council was controlled by Labour and the Liberal Democrats. Carolyn Downs has gone on to be chief executive of the Local Government Association, but when she was the chief executive of the council her salary was £160,000. I make that point at the outset because I feel strongly that we need to get back to a system in local government in which there is close scrutiny and checks of individuals’ salaries. A salary of £160,000 for chief executives was unacceptable. There was a massive number of managers involved, and I would go so far as to say that there was a certain amount of empire building. We have to get back to ensuring that the money spent goes directly on providing services.

I am extremely pleased that the Secretary of State, the Department and the Minister have encouraged councils to freeze their council tax and to try to reduce the bloated bureaucracy and excess management in local government. Now we are implementing a certain number of cuts, but when we are back to full prosperity, the economy is growing and the country is doing well, I hope we will not go back, having the comfort of economic prosperity, to the bad old days under Labour, when money was poured into local councils without some form of evaluation and critique of how that money is spent and without ensuring that councils are run like efficient businesses, as other sectors of the economy must be.

[Mike Thornton (Eastleigh) (LD)]

I am surprised that my hon. Friend implies that local councils are over-bureaucratic. I know that I am new to the House, but before that I was a councillor in my borough, where I found that everything was run far more efficiently, far more quickly and far less costly than everything run around here. If the Minister would like to visit Eastleigh borough council to see how to run something efficiently, he would be extremely welcome. Perhaps we should return business rates to the control of local district councils, where the money would be used far more efficiently, effectively and quickly than it would if it was left to bob back and forth to London.

[Daniel Kawczynski]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend, because he leads me succinctly to my next point, which has already been made. An ICM survey has revealed today that six out of 10 people think services are better now than they were in 2008. That raises the following question: how is it possible that the majority of people in the United Kingdom think that services are better today than they were five years ago, when massive amounts of funding were going to local government? I will outline the situation in Shropshire later in my speech, but we must not forget that important survey finding.

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Tiverton and Honiton (Neil Parish) on securing the debate and agree with him wholeheartedly. I would like the Minister to take away our message that more needs to be given to rural authorities. The cost of providing services is massively greater in rural areas than it is in cities and inner-city areas. I have made that point repeatedly to the Prime Minister, because it is something I am passionate about.

My No. 1 pledge to my constituents at the last general election was to try to get the funding formula for education provision changed. Shrewsbury receives £4,200 per child each year for their schooling. Other parts of the country get £7,000, £8,000 or £9,000. Of course we understand that children in very deprived inner-city areas might need a little more than we get in Shrewsbury, but not double. It is completely unacceptable in this day and age to have such discrimination against children in one part of the country. They are receiving less than half what children in other parts get. There are schools in my constituency that have nothing like the facilities that schools in inner-city areas have. There are leaking roofs, problems with insulation and all sorts of other problems, which I think is absolutely disgraceful. I will not stop until the funding mechanism is changed and children in Shrewsbury get a fairer deal.

I pay tribute to the leader of Shropshire council, Mr Keith Barrow, who has managed to grapple with the massive cuts imposed by central Government. He has had to cut £87 million from spending, and there are more cuts to come, but he has done so by cutting waste, reducing the number of senior managers and reducing salaries. All that has been done while council tax has been frozen, which is an extraordinary accomplishment. I receive very few letters from constituents complaining about local council services. Actually, as with the national opinion poll, people in Shrewsbury are rather pleased with local services and understand the difficult situation the council is in.

The point I want to make most strongly to the Minister is one that the leader of my council has told me. It is now starting to sell assets in order to reduce the massive debts to the Government that were racked up under Labour. A large percentage of the council’s expenditure goes on servicing those debts. At the moment, if a council wishes to reduce some of its debts to the Government, it will be financially penalised by the Treasury, because it invokes certain clauses on early repayment, just as paying off a mortgage early incurs certain financial penalties. I think that is wrong. The Minister has to look at the issue and negotiate with the Treasury. If a local council is attempting to reduce its historic debt and pay it off slightly earlier by making difficult decisions on sales and streamlining various services, it is very important that the Minister does everything possible to encourage the council by helping it negotiate with the Treasury on those early payments.

I would also like to pay tribute to Helen Ball, the chief executive of Shrewsbury town council, and Peter Nutting, who has run the council extremely well for many years.

Let us not forget rural broadband. I hope the Minister will talk about what additional support is being given to rural broadband, which is so important to so many of our constituents in outlying rural villages.

I reiterate the point that has been made about the importance of helping rural communities with large numbers of senior citizens. Shrewsbury has been voted one of the most attractive towns to live in. It is in the top 10 in England and is one of the most attractive towns for senior citizens to retire to. Let us not forget the additional expenditure required for areas with a large number of senior citizens.

Shropshire council and Telford council stand side by side. I hope the Minister will explain what incentives—what carrots and sticks—he is using to make sure that local neighbouring councils pool resources. The possibility of a shared chief executive has been mentioned. It is vital that the Department does more to encourage those two Shropshire councils to pool their resources and make cost savings and even to merge, if necessary.

Finally, on fire service provision, the Minister has kindly agreed to meet the local Shropshire fire authority. It has complained about the number of cuts it has had to go through and a fire engine is at threat in Shrewsbury. I hope the Minister will look kindly on us when we go to see him about the very important requirement to save that fire engine.

15:37

[Mr David Ruffley (Bury St Edmunds) (Con)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Tiverton and Honiton (Neil Parish) and the rural fair share group and our chairman, my hon. Friend the Member for Beverley and Holderness (Mr Stuart), who has been the spiritual leader of our campaign to draw Ministers’ attention to the injustice—that is not too strong a word—that many rural district councils feel about the settlements over the past two years, particularly the freezing until 2020 of our iniquitous position.

I want to pay tribute to one particular rural district council in my constituency, namely Mid Suffolk district council. It is a small district council, but under the exemplary leadership of Councillor Derrick Haley from Thurston it has done a lot of what the Government want. It is a Conservative-led council—not that that is a particularly important thing to note—and it has been following the strictures set by the Secretary of State and the Minister. In particular, in less than two years it has effected a collaboration with the neighbouring Babergh district council, so the two councils are still sovereign councils but they operate as a single delivery organisation.

I will give some remarkable statistics on the efficiency savings that Ministers have rightly demanded of Mid Suffolk district council. It is not one of those district councils that is sitting on piles of reserves. The Audit Commission’s financial ratio tools show that the council’s usable reserve levels, compared with gross expenditure, are under 10%. That compares favourably with the district council and statistical nearest neighbour average of nearly 25%.

One result of the work that has been done by Councillor Haley, the chief executive, Ms Charlie Adan, and the rest of the council is that the management headcount is down by 50%, with further reductions projected. There is now one chief executive for two councils, rather than two. There has been a comprehensive review of all other staff and there has been an 11.2% reduction in the staff headcount. There has been a 9% annual net revenue saving. Solely through collaboration with the neighbouring council, Mid Suffolk district council took £1.3 million out of what was already quite a small budget in 2012-13, which is more than was anticipated in its business case. Another £1.3 million of savings is anticipated in 2013-14. That might rise to £1.6 million.

The target of the rural fair share campaign is to reduce the rural penalty from 50% to 40%. I was delighted to hear the hon. Member for North Devon (Sir Nick Harvey) say in his excellent speech that that might even be a little complacent. I am with him in spirit. I look forward to his leadership as the new chairman of the group.

I want to underline an important point that has been made by other colleagues in this well-informed debate. In the 2013-14 settlement, the impact of the sparsity element was approximately doubled. That good news offered a huge ray of hope, as my hon. Friend the Member for Beverley and Holderness said in an intervention. Mid Suffolk district council was pleased with the news. However, nearly all the changes to the formula for that financial year were damped away. The calculation that I have seen is that three quarters of the gains that rural councils expected from that sparsity change were damped away. To put some numbers on that, damping cost Mid Suffolk district council almost £800,000, which amounted to 16% of the council’s grant. I wonder how the Minister can justify that.

The proposal to top-slice a significant sum of the new homes bonus that would have gone to district councils and put it into the single local growth fund for the LEPs will have a severe impact on the medium-term financial plans of Mid Suffolk district council. The inclusion of the NHB in the new growth fund will potentially damage the growth prospects in two-tier areas such as mine.

I understand why the NHB is being vired over to the LEPs: it is meant to facilitate better collaboration between the local authorities in LEP areas. However, there is a justified view that that amounts to a penalty on district councils. Why so? The Government believe that it will reward LEPs in areas where authorities have delivered housing increases. However, it is not easy to see how the LEPs add much value to increased house building, because that is what councils do. Mid Suffolk district council is being bold and saying that new houses are needed in its area instead of acting in a nimby-like fashion. It seems to me that the LEPs are being rewarded with the power to redistribute income that they have not had much to do with generating through the building of more homes.

Mid Suffolk district council’s view, with which I agree, is that if the LEPs are to be given that power, as is proposed, we should measure their productivity to work out what they actually do in exchange. As far as I can see, there is no measure of productivity at all except the number of new houses and the amount of money that will be generated through the new homes bonus, which is what councils do.

Furthermore, it is important to understand that if the money is given to the LEPs—in my case, the LEP covers the whole of Norfolk and Suffolk—it will work against localism, which should surely dictate that the rewards go to Mid Suffolk district council for achieving more house building. They should not be put into a pot for the whole of Norfolk and Suffolk for the LEP to do with as it sees fit.

Mid Suffolk district council is innovative and has helped to deliver the astonishing and heartening statistic in the BBC-ICM poll published last night, which is that in the majority of services—potholes and services for old people are the exception—six out of 10 of our fellow citizens believe that services have got better in the past five years, notwithstanding the fact that austerity started to kick in in 2009 and accelerated from May 2010.

[Andy Sawford (Corby) (Lab/Co-op)]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

[Mr Ruffley]

I am just coming to the end of my remarks, so I will continue if the hon. Gentleman will allow me.

That amazing result is being delivered by go-ahead, innovative councils under great leadership, such as Mid Suffolk district council. On top of my remarks on the new homes bonus and my plea for the Minister to look again at the effect of damping, through which Ministers gave to rural district councils with one hand and took away with the other, I end with a final plea. My hon. Friend the Member for Penrith and The Border (Rory Stewart) rehearsed a statistic that those of us in the rural fair share campaign know off by heart—that a 0.25% shift in the allocation would go a long way towards closing the rural penalty. I particularly look forward to the Minister’s answer to why that 0.25% out of a very large budget cannot be delivered to rural shire district councils, particularly those such as Mid Suffolk.

15:48

[Mr Graham Stuart (Beverley and Holderness) (Con)]

It is a great pleasure to take part in this debate. I apologise for my late appearance.

I begin by congratulating my hon. Friend the Member for Tiverton and Honiton (Neil Parish), who secured it and, I know, led it off ably. I am delighted to follow my hon. Friend the Member for Bury St Edmunds (Mr Ruffley), although I should say to him that I have not ceased my duties as a chairman of the rural fair share campaign but have been joined by another co-chair, along with the hon. Member for Workington (Sir Tony Cunningham). It is a full, cross-party campaign recognising the inequity in funding.

My hon. Friend the Member for North Devon (Sir Nick Harvey) put his finger on the core point in his passionate speech. The lowest incomes are found in rural areas, so there is a social justice argument along with the data that we rightly focus on. That social justice argument is hard to rebut, and Ministers in successive Governments have hidden behind an obfuscation of numbers and data. As he said, the simple truth is that people on lower incomes are paying a higher level of tax to get a much thinner—I liked that phrase—level of services.

[Daniel Kawczynski]

My hon. Friend speaks about his group on rural services being all-party. I hope there are more Labour Members in his caucus than there are in the Chamber today.

[Mr Stuart]

My aim, along with my co-chairmen, is and always has been to try not to have a Labour-urban versus Tory/Lib Dem-rural battle—although that is difficult to avoid—but rather to say that we will get our arguments right. Perhaps that explains the modesty of our requests—too modest, perhaps—but our aim has always been to ensure that a fair-minded Labour Member of Parliament who does not represent a rural area would see the weight of the argument. Having come into politics, as we all do, to try to make a fairer and better society, people should see that we are not making a special, partial interest, but a case grounded in facts that will lead to a more just outcome.

[Karl Turner (Kingston upon Hull East) (Lab)]

Does the hon. Gentleman accept that deprivation levels in the city of Hull are higher than those in his constituency, and that per head of population Hull suffers four times as much as his constituency, which—if we are honest—is pretty well-off?

[Mr Stuart]

Average earnings in rural areas are lower, not higher. It is a myth; there is no rural idyll. In truth, the areas around Withernsea, Patrington and other villages contain people on similarly low incomes to those in the hon. Gentleman’s constituency in east Hull, but who spend a much higher percentage of their income on transport. They are suffering too, and local government funding starts from a much lower base. Is the population more or less resilient? In my constituency, the population in rural areas—in marked contrast to the hon. Gentleman’s constituency—is much older. There are vulnerable elderly people on low incomes who are remote and without access, and who have a council with massively less funding to deliver services.

In no way do I seek to suggest there are not serious social problems in east Hull, or that such problems could be of a different character to those faced by people in Beverley and Holderness. My hon. Friend the Member for North Devon thinks we were too modest in our request, but we are saying that the rural penalty of 50% more per head going to urban areas than goes to an older population with lower incomes in areas where services are more expensive to deliver is just not right.

I have always said that if someone showed me the evidence base that such a system is just, I would not, on behalf of my constituents, love it, but I would hear the case. However, no one, including Ministers in this Government and the previous one, has ever sought to do that because there is no justification for it. If we look at the cost of emptying the bins, supporting domiciliary care for the elderly population and so on, current differences between services that are comparatively well funded in Hull and less so in my patch cannot be justified. However, the point is to avoid a battle or denial of the genuine issues that the hon. Member for Kingston upon Hull East (Karl Turner) faces in his constituency, and to seek to move to a more needs-based system, grounded on people’s real lives, rather than an argument based on a high ideological point.

I have probably already spoken for half the time I am allowed, and I shall seek not to be like some hon. Members who ignore strictures from the Chair and carry on regardless. I know that the person in the Chair will not allow such a thing to happen. However, I make no apology for repeating that, on average, rural residents earn less than those in cities, and they pay council tax that is £70 or £80 higher per head—if we add up the people in each household who pay council tax, it is significantly more, yet urban areas receive Government grants that are 50% higher than those in the countryside.

Last year I led a delegation of rural MPs to meet the Prime Minister. We spoke to him and were delighted. There was no transformation, but perhaps hon. Members remember the summer—the beautiful summer of 2012 with the Olympics, good will; London Underground staff were nice. It was an astonishing and remarkable period. The capital was covered in magic dust. It was lovely. At that time, the Government suggested that they recognised rural sparsity. They did not go all the way we had hoped, but there was a movement in the right direction after years of it being skewed the other way.

Colleagues have said that it was damped away, but it was not damped away—it was stuck in a deep freeze. Damping is a transition mechanism. I would like the Minister to justify the fact that a transition mechanism has been used to shove an inequity that the Government recognise into the deep freeze.

[Stephen Phillips (Sleaford and North Hykeham) (Con)]

For seven years.

[Mr Stuart]

As my hon. Friend says, they have shoved it into the deep freeze for seven years, to 2020. The Prime Minister and the Deputy Prime Minister have been led to believe that there is no fundamental injustice, which they repeat, but the Government recognise the injustice. Perhaps it was just the magic dust, but they saw the injustice last summer. By Christmas—poof!—it had gone. Remarkable! They damped it away, which is inexcusable and cannot be defended.

That is why I am delighted to see this brave and excellent Minister in the Chamber, a man who effortlessly survives a reshuffle, who grows in power and influence, and who works for an even wiser and more sagacious man than he—the Secretary of State. It is those two honest fighters for truth and decency in whom I put my trust, almost entirely. There is no need to nudge such fine people, but if a nudge were required, I can tell my hon. Friend that, as far as my office knows, 115 constituencies have parliamentary petitions calling for a 20% reduction in the rural penalty from 50% to 40%. Many colleagues have spoken today, but many who are not in the Chamber are strongly onside with that campaign. No nudges whatever are necessary to Ministers such as this one. However, I say to him that the patience, even of the most trusting and loyal people such as the hon. Members to whom I am referring, can know a limit. We do not want it tested. We want the Government to do what they said they would do last summer, when the magic dust reigned. Can we return to that?

The Minister smiles, and I trust in him to do the right thing. We cannot allow the freezing of that injustice and inequity until 2020. Having a slow unwinding of a situation that the Government have recognised is wrong will not undermine the move to business rates retention. I therefore hope he does not repeat the suggestion that it will.

I have one final request of the Minister before the end of my speech—I have not quite had my 10 minutes. Will he produce an analysis of the rural/urban funding split? The Rural Services Network, which we work with, has worked hard attending meeting after meeting. The Minister has been in meetings in which he has asked civil servants to produce such an analysis, but for some unknown reason it never quite comes out. I would like to ensure that, whatever the Government decide, we are at least technically on the same page and can agree on where the money goes, as in the percentage that goes here or there and the amount per head, using whatever classification he wants, as long as it is on a rural/urban split. So far, we have heard the Government say, “We don’t split it like that. We don’t recognise your figures.” We ask, “Are you saying that our numbers are not true?”, and the Government say, “We don’t split it like that,” which is nonsense. We now have such experienced and first-class Ministers in the Department that we can expect action. I want to ensure that we are on the same page technically, then we can have the political argument on the right thing to do. All hon. Members, whichever constituency we represent, whether it is Kingston upon Hull East or Beverley and Holderness, want a just settlement that ensures we have decent local services and that supports people, not least those with least.

15:59

[Stephen Phillips (Sleaford and North Hykeham) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to follow my hon. Friend the Member for Beverley and Holderness (Mr Stuart), not only because he made a powerful speech, but because he is the co-chairman of the rural fair share campaign. I am sorry that he is still co-chairman: I had hoped that by now he would have lost his job. I say that not because he does not do a great job, but because I too remember the magic of last summer—the sun shining in the sky, the London Olympics, and the promises from the Government and their recognition that communities such as the one I represent have had a raw deal for far too long. Public services in Lincolnshire and many other shire counties cost at least as much, if not more, to run than they do in urban areas, but urban areas receive this fantastic extra grant from the Government of 50% more per head, while those on the lowest incomes can be found in the rural communities we represent.

Like every other MP with a rural constituency who has spoken, I tell the Minister that we have to do something about this. It does not matter who has been in government, this injustice has gone on for far too long. Our constituents do not deserve the thin services that the hon. Member for North Devon (Sir Nick Harvey) mentioned, any more than constituents in urban areas deserve them. We deserve precisely the same public services and I therefore support in full the campaign that the hon. Gentleman and his colleagues are running and to which I have signed up. It is time that this injustice was removed.

I have nothing new to say to the Minister other than what has already been said. Every hon. Member has recognised that we are in difficult financial times—times of austerity—and has taken solace from the fact that the vast sums of money that were poured into local government evidently did not deliver brilliant public services because the removal of those sums, as we now know from the BBC/ICM poll today, has not made people dissatisfied with the local public services they receive. In those circumstances, in which local councils—especially in rural areas—have made the sacrifices, efficiencies and economies that they were asked to make, is it really too much to ask the Government to give them the settlements that they deserve year on year so that they can deliver the public services that constituents who live in rural communities deserve?

I venture to suggest to the Minister, sagacious as he is—

[Mr Robin Walker]

Good-looking!

[Mr Graham Stuart]

Svelte!

[Stephen Phillips]

Indeed, and the Minister is well able to survive a reshuffle, as we now know. I could praise him more, and if it would get us what we want I would gladly do so. I have nothing new to say to him, because the figures are available. These are the poorest communities in the country and they get the roughest deal. On average they pay £75 more per head in council tax than anywhere else. The Minister has to deal with this. He has heard the strength of feeling on both sides of the House—this is a cross-party campaign, as he knows.

Patience is wearing thin. If the Minister comes to the House next year with a settlement that is fundamentally unfair for rural communities, such as those in North Kesteven district council and in a small part of South Kesteven, and if the funding settlement next year penalises rural communities again, which are already hit hard by the cost of fuel given the amount of travel that people in them have to do, he will not have an easy ride. I very much doubt that he will even find support. Today he needs to stand at the Dispatch Box and tell the House that the magic dust of the summer of 2012 has miraculously been found again and that the damping that has been used to rob Peter to pay Paul, when we were promised so much last year, will be addressed and not entrenched in the way the Government currently suggest for the next seven years.

16:03

[Mr Robin Walker (Worcester) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to follow two such eloquent speeches by my hon. Friends the Members for Beverley and Holderness (Mr Stuart) and for Sleaford and North Hykeham (Stephen Phillips), touched by the very magic dust that they invoked in making their case so strongly. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Tiverton and Honiton (Neil Parish) on securing this debate and thank the Backbench Business Committee for granting it.

The topic of how we fund our local authorities may sometimes seem arcane—a matter for policy wonks or political theorists—but as earlier contributions to the debate have shown, it is in fact intensely practical, with real and direct implications for services in all our constituencies. I am grateful to my hon. Friend the Member for Penrith and The Border (Rory Stewart) for making such a strong case in principle for this small amount of funding that could make a very big difference in rural areas.

In debating this subject, we touch on the very machinery of the country and the whole range of services on which our electorates depend. I do not make the case for endlessly increasing local government funding, as perhaps some Opposition Members have tended to do. My constituents are clear in the belief that local government needs to bear its share of the burden in reducing the deficit and restoring our economic credibility, which was so damaged under the previous Labour Government.

A number of colleagues have mentioned the BBC survey, which shows clearly that it is possible to deliver improved services in difficult circumstances if we work hard at it, something that both Worcester city council and Worcestershire county council have managed to do in the past few years. In recent surveys my association has been conducting across Worcester, the vast majority of my constituents believe that local councils can do more to reduce waste and improve efficiency. Even a substantial majority of those who assign themselves as Labour voters agree with that statement.

What I will make the case for is fairer funding. Each area should get its fair share and should have the best opportunity to deliver services fairly. I am not making the case for each area to pay the same council tax, but it is noticeable that in general, as many colleagues have pointed out, the very rural authorities that are getting funded less are on average paying higher levels of local taxation than urban authorities. Surely it should be a matter for local decision makers to decide what should happen with regard to council tax and to bear in mind the wishes of the people who elect them.

Worcestershire county council has done an admirable job of keeping council tax frozen for a number of years, but it is noticeable that our council tax payers bear a higher share of the burden of the cost of vital public services in our part of the world than they do in urban authorities elsewhere in the west midlands. Worcester city council has made millions of pounds of savings in the past couple of years, but it fears that further cuts will be necessary in the years ahead as a result of not getting a fair share of funding.

I want both our councils to have the best chance of keeping council tax frozen for as long as possible, but to do so we need to ensure that we are getting our fair share of funding from Westminster. I want councils such as Worcestershire to be able to continue to have no library or Sure Start centre closures because they have managed things properly, and to receive fair funding from the Government. As others have already set out, as it currently stands the local government funding formula is not fair and it disadvantages rural areas. The huge gap—on average approximately 50% between rural areas and purely urban areas—is shocking and unjustifiable.

As a member for a city seat it may seem strange that I should be concerned about this, but Worcester, like many county towns, suffers a double penalty by being an urban district in a rural county authority. The vast majority of our funding is granted on the basis of the county unit, with little or no account taken of the many specific urban problems we face. Within Worcester, there are super output areas in the top percentile of deprived wards in the country, yet the overall funding that our local authority receives reflects what might be expected for a green and leafy prosperous county. As other Members have pointed out, rural does not necessarily equate to prosperous.

Worse, and as other colleagues have pointed out, there are additional pressures on all rural authorities, with extra travel costs for almost every part of local government, smaller units covering wider areas and particular challenges for social care. Where these costs are shared among all areas of a county, it is not surprising that the urban core can sometimes miss out. I therefore strongly support a better deal for rural areas and believe it is in the interests of all my urban constituents for the challenges of rural sparsity to be better recognised in the funding system. The local government funding formula is by no means unique in disadvantaging rural areas, as other formulae in education and health do the same. Unfortunately, these effects do not exist in isolation for each individual department, but have a cumulative impact.

In other debates, I have regularly made the case for fundamental reforms to the school funding formula, and I am grateful for the support of both Liberal Democrat and Conservative colleagues. I shall continue to make the case, but as the majority of funding for schools still passes through local authorities, this is not irrelevant to today’s debate. In fact, the growth of academies and the diminution of local authorities’ role in allocating school funding has created additional pressures as lower funded local education authorities struggle to achieve the same economies of scale as they once did.

The so-called education service grant, or the withdrawal of funding from local authorities for the funding of academies, has placed an extra burden on local education authorities in the worse-funded areas, as it has been withdrawn at a national average rate while these areas tend to receive much lower than national average funding. In Worcestershire’s case, this means that we are giving £116 back to the Treasury for every academy pupil, even though the actual funding that it would have spent in maintained schools was £101. Now is not the time for me to fulminate against the outrageous £1,100 per pupil funding gap between pupils in Worcestershire and in neighbouring Birmingham.

[Daniel Kawczynski]

I pay tribute to my hon. Friend for the extraordinary role he has played in this Parliament in setting out the all-party caucus for campaigning on changing the funding mechanism. This change is the No. 1 pledge I have given to my constituents. For the record, I would like to thank my hon. Friend, and I am sure that other hon. Friends would want to do so, too.

[Mr Walker]

My hon. Friend is extremely generous. I believe this campaign has strong support across the Back Benches. It is an issue that we can take forward; we must see real progress made on it. I am grateful for my hon. Friend’s comment, but it is, of course, a team effort in which many others have played their part.

In Worcestershire as in many other counties, the education department shares staff and resources with the broader children’s services area, so wherever education funding is under pressure, it places additional pressure on other aspects of children’s services, including looked-after children and safeguarding—issues raised by a number of Opposition Members. As a long-standing supporter of the f40 campaign and having met Ministers many times to discuss it, I know that reform of the school funding formula is on the way and I have every confidence that we will eventually get a fairer deal, but we need to learn the lessons of what seems to have gone wrong with local government funding and not repeat the same mistakes.

It appears that in this case the Government set out to correct some of the imbalance in funding for rural local authorities, but then introduced a damping mechanism that outweighed the impact of the change—effectively, as my hon. Friend the Member for Beverley and Holderness said, putting the whole thing into the deep freeze rather than simply damping it. In effect, a funding reform designed to move things in a fairer direction has been so watered down as to make the problem worse. That cannot be allowed to happen when it comes to school funding, and it should not be allowed to happen to the wider CLG funding for local authorities.

[Rory Stewart]

Would my hon. Friend touch, perhaps briefly, on health funding, which is one of the other great examples of this problem?

[Mr Walker]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right; it is exactly the problem I was about to move on to. As I mentioned earlier, health funding is another area of major concern. Rural areas tend to have higher numbers of elderly people and a higher life expectancy than the major cities. As so much health funding is allocated according to life expectancy and targeted towards areas of high perceived deprivation, it means that the population of big cities is generally much better funded than that of rural areas.

With an ageing population and more people living with long-term conditions that require regular treatment, this creates enormous pressure on all rural health services, particularly on community health services. Worcestershire as a whole gets lower health funding per person than do more urban areas of the west midlands, but it has an older population, placing greater demands on our health service. Shifting the balance of health funding from mortality to morbidity would help to address this, as would having a more activity-based formula for community health. In health as in education, however, the local structures do not exist in isolation from local government. There are close links between the health and the social care systems, while pressures on both the acute and the community health systems create additional pressure on local authority-run social care. The fact that we are underfunded for health means that our underfunding for social care is a more serious challenge for our local authority.

[Mr Graham Stuart]

If there is an injustice that is greater than in education or local government, it is an injustice in health. Is my hon. Friend aware of the work of Professor Sheena Asthana, who looked at Mid Staffs and other hospitals with high mortality rates and saw a correlation between the hospitals with high mortality rates and the populations they serve, which are typically older, rural and funded on an inequitable basis?

[Mr Walker]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for making that point, which clearly illustrates the problems we face.

I hope that I have shown that the problems of local government funding do not exist in isolation. The Government should strive to provide fairer funding, not just through the CLG budget but through health, education and no doubt many other budgets. We need to make sure that corrections and changes to formulae are delivered swiftly so as to correct the long-standing problems and not water them down so as to make those problems worse.

What else could we do to improve the situation? Our councils, whether they be city councils such as Worcester or great county councils, did not grow up as organs of central government. As my noble Friend Lord Heseltine pointed out in his “No stone unturned” review, the great cities of England were not grown through the diktat of Westminster or the spending of Whitehall. The councils that directed their growth and success raised their own funds locally, invested locally and built up services according to the demands of their own local constituents. We need to rebuild some of that independence and self-reliance. Although there was a great deal with which I disagreed in the speech of the hon. Member for Sheffield South East (Mr Betts), who chairs the Communities and Local Government Select Committee, this is one area on which I think we can agree.

This cannot be done overnight, and there would be significant risks in allowing some areas to raise taxes much higher than others, but it should be a stated aim of the Government to provide councils with more of their own resources over time and to give them greater opportunities to raise local funding. Such has been the growth in responsibilities of local government over the decades that there is little chance of it ever returning to being entirely self-funded, but there is a role for Westminster in re-allocating funding from the richest areas of the country to the more needy, including rural areas. Increasing the proportion of local government funding that is in the control of councils will give them greater flexibility to manage the challenges they face and to deliver localism.

Early policies of the coalition, such as the new homes bonus and the delegation of powers over business rates relief, showed some promise. As Lord Heseltine suggested, the creation of a challenge fund, or single funding pot, also offers some prospect of more locally driven projects. However, I fear that there is a conflict between the desire to empower local enterprise partnerships and enable them to bid for local funding, and the demands of our councils. I urge the Minister to give careful consideration to what has been said about the reallocation of money from planning authorities to LEPS under the new homes bonus scheme.

I believe that in the case of funding for local authorities, as in those of education and health, our Government can do more to ensure that money is allocated fairly. I commend and support the campaign of my hon. Friend the Member for Beverley and Holderness for a rural fair share, and I remind the Government that fairer funding for rural areas affects not just rural constituencies, but county towns such as the one that I am proud to represent.

16:14

[Dr Julian Huppert (Cambridge) (LD)]

It is a pleasure to contribute to the debate, and to follow the hon. Member for Worcester (Mr Walker). As a former county councillor and, now, a vice-president of the Local Government Association, I care deeply about local government, which provides essential services that many people use every day. I always find it strange that the Home Office and the Foreign Office are seen as the best and most important Departments although most people—hopefully—have very little interaction with them and their work, whereas people interact almost daily with the Departments for Communities and Local Government and for Transport.

There are clearly financial problems throughout the country, and there are places where local government spending is inefficient. The same is true of central Government spending, and of spending everywhere else. Improvements could certainly be made. In general, however, local government provides an excellent service, cheaply, affordably and very well.

Is there fat that could be trimmed from local government? Sure—but there is only a certain amount of fat, and many councils have run out of it. That is largely because councils are funded at different levels. Councils such as Cambridge city council in my constituency, which has received low funding for many years—the hon. Member for Beverley and Holderness (Mr Stuart) will be well aware of that, having been a member of the council himself—have trimmed off fat again and again. What is left is muscle and bone, and we are already cutting into that. Cambridge city council faces a cash-terms cut of almost 15% in 2015-16. That figure is much higher than the national average, and it obviously hits residents’ expectations: 15% is a huge amount of muscle and bone to cut off.

Cambridgeshire county council, on which I used to serve, is also very hard hit. Its 2013-14 settlement funding assessment has been reduced by 20.9%, which is the third highest county council figure in the country. That has put the council in a very difficult position, which I accept is slightly worsened by the £33 million that it is to be paid in settlement of a dispute about the guided busway. The busway scheme was rammed through by Conservative and Labour councillors—but that is another story.

We have a particular problem in Cambridge, because the Department for Communities and Local Government is using figures from the Office for National Statistics to work out how many people there are in Cambridge. That would normally appear to be a good thing, because we normally trust the ONS. However, the ONS has previously got the figure for the population of Cambridge completely and utterly wrong. For the last census, in 2011, it estimated that the population had shrunk by 5,000 in the last 10 years. We said that it had grown by 15,000, and the census proved that the council was correct: Cambridge had, in fact, grown. Anyone who has been there lately will have seen all the new houses and flats being built. It is absurd to suggest that Cambridge is shrinking.

We won that argument, and the census figures have been used. However, the ONS is still forecasting that Cambridge will “continue to shrink” over the next 10 years, by about 5,000 people. The fact is that we have accelerating growth: we have many, many more houses, and we expect to see even more than 15,000.

This is a huge problem, because every year the ONS figures, which the Department is using—and I can understand why—put a 2% gap between the number of people for which the Department is funding us and the number of people who are actually there. That does not take account of the fact that new growth costs much more money, and the money never arrives ahead of time. Moreover, it comes on top of the existing financial constraint caused by the Department’s settlement. The Communities Secretary is apparently over-eager to cut his own expenditure, which is very generous to other Departments but comes at great cost to local government.

There are also constraints governing what local government can raise separately. Council tax is an awfully designed tax. It is deeply regressive: the highest payers pay only three times more than the lowest payers, and the tax shot up massively under the last Government. I do not like council tax. It was encouraging to hear comments in favour of our proposal to move towards a fairer local income-based tax and a mansion tax, but while council tax remains it has to be set at a level that is fit for purpose. That has to be supported by central Government.

The rhetoric of a council tax freeze is great. The first year the Government did that, the equivalent money was provided from central Government to cover the difference that year and for the future. So far so good—but for every other year that extra funding has not been made available for councils, so many of them could not take the hit to their long-term budget of a council tax freeze.

Of course, controlling council tax increases by percentages misses the fact that different councils charge different amounts: 1% of a low-tax district council is far less than 1% of a well-funded top-tier council. The Minister described councils as democracy-dodging and trying to undercut democracy if they increase their council tax by just under the 2% limit. That is complete rubbish. How can it be undemocratic for elected officials to operate within the powers made available to them? What is undemocratic is to cut local government funding from the centre and simultaneously constrain what can be raised locally so that elected councils are forced increasingly into a place where all they can do is the statutory responsibilities—they are not free to do more.

I support the LGA’s calls for greater local autonomy to allow local authorities to help secure the financial stability and sustainability of local government. I hope we can explore this further given the Government’s commitment to localism, so we have local decision-making to make communities the masters of their own economic destinies, as the Deputy Prime Minister rightly said.

I welcome the city deal championed by the Deputy Prime Minister. The greater Cambridge city deal is well under development, and assuming the Government do the right thing and agree it, it will be a very good thing for the area. We have three very different councils coming together collaboratively to secure the future of one of Europe’s greatest hi-tech clusters, with 1,600 companies and 56,000 direct jobs in hi-tech and revenues of £13 billion. That will enable us to provide the sustainable infrastructure and the affordable housing we so desperately need to avoid stifling our own success. It will be a huge step forward. It will make it easier for the three councils to work together—although, frankly, I think a single council for the area would probably be a better way forward, but that is not on the cards right now.

The city deal is great, but there is a slight risk to it if the Government go ahead with proposals to top-slice the new homes bonus by £400 million from the councils that were expecting it and had budgeted for it. They were not expecting it to be transferred to local economic partnerships, who were not anticipating it. In our case, the LEP has written to the Communities Secretary to ask for the new homes bonus to be given to the councils, as expected. I hope the Government will agree that if the LEP says the money should be given to the councils, that is clearly right.

We also have issues with housing. In Cambridge we are building a lot more affordable housing at a great rate and some of the first new council homes for a very long time since the rules were relaxed. It is not so easy to build those houses, however. It is great that we can spend right-to-buy money on replacement housing. That should always have been the case. Right to buy was fine, but we have to build replacement homes and Governments did not do that.

The money that there is now is tied up with red tape, however. It can be used to cover only a third of the cost of the replacement, so two-thirds match funding has to be found from somewhere. That two-thirds cannot include any other grant money, however, such as from the Homes and Communities Agency. The money also has to be spent within three years or it goes back to the Government, and the Treasury’s refusal to lift the borrowing cap makes it very hard for councils to spend the money to build the houses. That must be addressed.

There is a further problem with the change in the target rent system. Cambridge took on a debt from the Treasury of many millions of pounds on the basis that it would be able to repay it from the rent. Cambridge had been debt-free and was having to pay a huge amount of, in effect, tax from council tenants in Cambridge to support council housing in the rest of the country. We made a deal with the Government based on the idea that we would move average rents towards the target rents. The Government are now threatening to freeze that process. When a house is empty we have been raising the rent to the target level, as it should be assuming the energy standards are all right. If that is frozen, different rents will be charged for identical neighbouring council houses when new people move into them. That simply does not make sense on a practical level and it would also cost the council and the housing account £22 million over the period of the business plan. More importantly, it breaks the faith that existed. This debt was taken on with an understanding of what the rules would be. If the Government are going to change those rules, it is very hard for us to keep our side of the understanding.

Education is a key local authority responsibility. Cambridgeshire county council and the city council are low-funded, low-council-tax authorities, partly because of all the years of controls on council tax, but Cambridgeshire is right at the bottom of the funding tables for schools. We get £600 per pupil per year less than the English average—that is £250,000 out of the budget of the typical two-form-entry primary school. That is not acceptable and it lets down our pupils. I do not know what pupils in Cambridgeshire have done to deserve it. That underfunding has gone on for three decades; it has been a long-term problem. State schools in Cambridgeshire have a much tougher job than those anywhere else. They do a great job given that background, but the lack of spare resources makes it far harder and we are now seeing greater problems, with people from more disadvantaged backgrounds struggling to keep up. The pupil premium helps and free school meals will help, but against a background of such a huge lack of funding it is hard.

The Government have committed to changing this formula, and I very much welcome that. A number of hon. Members have contributed to that debate, and Cambridgeshire has been particularly concerned. That change has to mean extra money coming into Cambridgeshire’s schools to end this unfair treatment of our young people. But I want to see that money in our schools by the end of this Parliament, as that is how we will know that the Government are serious about it and that they do intend to be fair to our pupils.

Lastly, let me touch on health care, because Cambridgeshire is also grossly underfunded in that area. Most clinical commissioning groups get more than £1,000 per head to spend on health care, but Cambridgeshire and Peterborough is one of the few areas that gets less than £1,000 per head. Is that a fair allocation? Has it just been worked out that we do not have people who need health care? Helpfully, the Government did publish the outcome of their fair shares formula for health allocation, which takes into account factors such as population, age, deprivation and much more. They published the figures, which showed that the amount that Cambridgeshire and Peterborough should be getting will be £46.5 million more than the current figure. We do not want to be right at the top—we would not even be at the average—but give us that £46.5 million and we could start to improve health care in an area where the health economy is really struggling. Today is world mental health day. If we are given that £46.5 million, we can make sure that mental health care in Cambridgeshire gets to the standard that people want and deserve.

Local government faces a number of problems and challenges, and Government after Government have failed to allow local government to be free to deliver what it can do for its citizens in an open and varied way: that must change.

16:27

[Andy Sawford (Corby) (Lab/Co-op)]

It is a great pleasure to speak for the first time as the Opposition local government spokesman on a subject of such importance. It is very close to my heart, as I represent a rural and urban area and a local authority that is a member of SPARSE—the Sparsity Partnership for Authorities delivering Rural Services—and has supported the call for today’s debate and for action.

I congratulate the hon. Member for Tiverton and Honiton (Neil Parish) on securing this important debate and on the way in which he spoke strongly for not just his own area but rural areas across the country. He spoke for some of my constituents and those of many hon. Members, and I was pleased that he said he is not seeking to steal money from urban authorities. On that basis, I can say that, like all hon. Members, I am very sympathetic to the case he has made for a fair deal for his area.

The same case was made also by: the hon. and learned Member for Sleaford and North Hykeham (Stephen Phillips), who spoke knowledgeably about the way in which his local authority is making savings; the hon. Member for Worcester (Mr Walker), who championed localism and devolution in a way that I have sought to do in roles before I came to this place; the hon. Member for Penrith and The Border (Rory Stewart), who painted a powerful and evocative picture of our rural areas and the way they are changing; the hon. Member for Beverley and Holderness (Mr Stuart), who gave us a masterclass in how to win friends and influence people, with his complimentary appeal to the Minister’s good graces; and the hon. Member for Newton Abbot (Anne Marie Morris), who spoke for not only her constituency, but her region, giving a perspective from an area of the country that must be heard and was heard today in this House. I also welcome the way in which my hon. Friends the Members for Gateshead (Ian Mearns) and for Coventry South (Mr Cunningham) made strong interventions to argue that the unfairness is felt keenly in many areas of the country, both rural and urban, because of a range of factors. As the hon. Member for Mid Dorset and North Poole (Annette Brooke) highlighted when she talked about the range of issues that impact on local authorities, there is also an impact on town and parish councils at the first tier of local government. I was pleased to hear her put that on the record today.

My hon. Friend the Member for Penistone and Stocksbridge (Angela Smith) spoke about the rural-urban mix in her constituency. She correctly diagnosed the funding problems as being about the level of cuts overall, rather than what could otherwise be a divisive debate about rural-urban. Had she been in her place, I would have associated myself with the congratulations she offered to Sir Steve Houghton. I had the pleasure of working with Sir Steve in my former life, when I was chief executive of the Local Government Information Unit, and he is a champion for local government.

Like the constituencies of many Members in the Chamber today, my constituency is very varied. Corby is mainly urban whereas east Northamptonshire, in contrast, is a rural area. I remember that just after I was elected I had a conversation with Mr Deputy Speaker, in which we spoke about engaging with our rural areas and farming communities. I know that that is very dear to his heart.

Let me highlight a particular issue faced by my area, which was also mentioned by the hon. Member for Cambridge (Dr Huppert). He spoke about the impact on areas with fast-growing populations of the failure to take proper account of that in the funding formula. Corby is the fastest-growing place in the country and has the highest birth rate. I know that the hon. Gentleman’s constituency is growing too and we hope that the Minister will assure us that by moving away from a formula fixed to the 2012 baseline we can take better account of population growth.

I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Sheffield South East (Mr Betts) for his kind words about my new role and also, in particular, for the opportunity to serve under his excellent chairmanship of the Select Committee on Communities and Local Government, where I learned a great deal from him, as we all did today when he highlighted the scale of cuts faced by local government. With his experience of the sector in this House and as a former councillor and council leader, he warned us and the Government that we are facing a very serious situation indeed.

My hon. Friend the Member for Easington (Grahame M. Morris) illustrated the severity of the cuts when he talked about the 40% cuts his council faces. My hon. Friend the Member for North Tyneside (Mrs Glindon) spoke strongly for her constituency and the impact on her local council as well as on the north-east region. I have been pleased to receive the briefings from ANEC and to hear from many Members from that region today.

The hon. Member for North Devon (Sir Nick Harvey), in a powerful speech, predicted that complete areas of public services would cease. I was pleased to hear him praise the days when councils were properly funded under the previous Labour Government.

It is not just that funding is being cut. We all recognise that this is a time of rising pressures. In particular, Members have spoken about the costs of looked-after children and social care, which are rising. The demands on local authorities are going up while income is coming down significantly—so much so that, as my hon. Friend the Member for Sheffield South East said, the LGA’s Conservative leader, the highly respected Sir Merrick Cockell, has called the cuts “unsustainable”. The Tory leader of Kent county council states that his county cannot cope with further reductions and is “running on empty”. As the hon. Member for Cambridge said, we are now cutting to the bone in many councils.

Ministers know that local government is the most efficient part of the public sector—the Prime Minister has said so—but they decided to reward councils for that efficiency by cutting more from them than from any other part of the public sector. The Institute for Fiscal Studies is clear that the total cuts to local government spending will outpace those in the public sector as a whole. The situation will get worse rather than better. The LGA’s excellent report, “Future funding outlook for councils”, incorporates the additional 10% cut in this year’s spending review, which came on top of the 33% cut that councils face over this Parliament.

No doubt the Minister will tell us that the cut amounts to 2.6%, but councils do not recognise that figure. It does not stand up to scrutiny. The LGA estimates that there will be a £15 billion black hole in finances by 2020, but the Secretary of State has called the cuts to councils “modest”. No wonder the Conservative council leaders of Essex, Buckinghamshire, Wiltshire, Lincolnshire, Leicestershire, Kent, East Sussex and West Sussex wrote to the Prime Minister to complain about the language that is being used by Communities and Local Government Ministers, because the cuts that councils face are not modest; they are massive.

The National Audit Office warned that cuts are having a direct impact on front-line services. It warns that 12% of councils are at risk of being unable to balance their books in the future, with potentially disastrous consequences. The recent Public Accounts Committee report on the financial sustainability of local authorities found that there had not been a proper analysis of the impact of the cuts. The Committee highlighted the unfairness of the cuts to different areas of the country, and it raised serious concerns about some councils simply not being viable, such as Tory-led West Somerset.

What actions will the Government take in the event of multiple financial failures of local authorities? If the Minister will not reply to me today, I am sure that in due course he will reply to the Chair of the Public Accounts Committee, who has rightly put that question to the Government. Do the Government have a plan for what is about to happen?

The impact falls on both statutory and non-statutory services. Too often, it is assumed that statutory services will be safe because they are a legal requirement, but the truth is that councils already, throughout the country and increasingly, are restricting eligibility criteria, so older people in my constituency and those of my hon. Friends who have spoken today are losing their care. Children are losing their transport to school. The brunt of the cuts will fall on the non-statutory services that Members have mentioned, such as road maintenance, cultural and leisure services, street lighting and libraries.

We must be honest that were a Labour Government now in office, of course there would be cuts to local government. But they would not go as far as the cuts that this Government are making, and they would certainly not be allocated to local authorities in such a fundamentally unfair way. It is not just organisations such as ANEC and the Special Interest Group of Metropolitan Authorities that point that out to us; so too has the Audit Commission, which said:

“Councils in the most deprived areas have seen substantially greater reductions in government funding as a share of revenue expenditure than councils in less deprived areas.”

Perhaps it is that kind of speaking truth to power that has caused the Secretary of State to abolish the Audit Commission, which I regret.

In 2014-15, the 10 most deprived local authorities in England will lose six times more than the 10 least deprived local authorities compared with 2010-11. The councils that will suffer the biggest cuts in spending power per head, even on the Government’s own measure, which is designed to mask the real effect, are Liverpool, Hackney, Newham, Manchester, Knowsley, Blackpool, Tower Hamlets, Middlesbrough, Birmingham and Kingston upon Hull. My hon. Friend the Member for West Ham (Lyn Brown), who has also joined the Communities and Local Government team, in Newham, knows the impact of that on her constituents, as I do on mine in Corby and east Northamptonshire.

In contrast, the Prime Minister’s own local authority, West Oxfordshire, one of the least deprived in the country, ranking 316th out of 325 in the indices of multiple deprivation, is getting an increase in spending power of 3.1%. That is all we need to know about the Government’s priorities. And we know that it is not an unfortunate accident; it is a deliberate strategy. The former Local Government Minister, the hon. Member for Bromley and Chislehurst (Robert Neill), put it like this:

“Those in greatest need ultimately bear the burden of paying off the debt”.—[Official Report, 10 June 2010; Vol. 511, c. 448.]

He told us that quite clearly and frankly, and we know that in our communities.

Is that not exactly what this Government are about? They are not interested in the people in the communities that are being hit hardest. They are so brazen about it that when, earlier this year, the additional funding for rural areas was announced, they inexplicably removed Durham—one of the poorest rural areas—from that list.

Do the Government also acknowledge that it is not just councils that are affected? Costs are increasingly being passed on to our hospitals, our prisons, our police service and our welfare system. In my area, for example, the local hospital has found that it has had to pay for care home beds out of the budget for acute hospital services, making a nonsense of the Government’s claim that they have protected NHS spending.

If my party comes to power, as I hope it will, times will still be very tough and we will need to look at what we can do to help councils. First, we will need to make a reality of Total Place—of community budgets—on which this Government have sadly been dragging their heels. People may call it what they like, but the principle is absolutely sound. We must get local services properly joined up, we should put councils in the driving seat to do that, and we need truly to break down the barriers to it, not least in Whitehall.

That is why Labour will look at powers in areas such as training, skills, infrastructure, transport and investment in order to help our local authorities to get their local economies going. That is why we will return the control of back-to-work schemes to councils. That is why we will launch, with our local authorities, the biggest house building programme in a generation and celebrate council house building again across the country. That is why we will give councils the right to grow, with the incentives they need to acquire land and put in the infrastructure, and that is why we will truly integrate health and social care to realise the vision of Nye Bevan, the founding father of the national health service.

That is why we will back those things that councils are doing well, even though money is tight. We want to celebrate good things in local government, but I was very surprised to hear the hon. Members for Shrewsbury and Atcham (Daniel Kawczynski) and for Bury St Edmunds (Mr Ruffley) crowing about the BBC ICM report. I have the full survey here. In not one of the 15 service areas do the majority of people think their services are getting better. In some areas, such as road maintenance—my constituents who experience the potholes every day know about this—66% were clear that they were getting a worse service. I am sure hon. Members will have an opportunity to correct the record of the remarks that they made earlier. One thing that people are clear about in the survey is how frightened they are about the impact of the cuts that this Government are imposing.

Labour councils are working hard to mitigate the impact of the damage being done by this out-of-touch Government. That is why I am delighted that many more Labour councillors were elected earlier this year and many councils turned to Labour control. Whether we are implementing the living wage, schemes to bring household energy bills down, promoting apprenticeships, building social housing or attracting new investment into our local high streets, I am very proud of what Labour councils are doing. It helps us to plan for our return to office in 2015. That is why the work of our local government innovation taskforce is helping to shape the policies of the next Labour Government.

Finally—

[Dr Huppert]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

[Andy Sawford]

I have no more time.

Finally, on funding, we will review the formula. We will make the formula fairer, but for today let us accept that the Government’s approach to local government funding needs to be seen for what it really is—it is unfair and it is unjust. It is unfair to local residents who rely on local services, and it is unjust in the way it hits the poorest areas and the poorest people hardest.

16:42

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government (Brandon Lewis)]

First, I join the Chairman of the Select Committee in congratulating the hon. Member for Corby (Andy Sawford) on his new role. I look forward to working with him and debating with him across the Chamber. I welcome the hon. Member for West Ham (Lyn Brown) to her new role as well.

I was somewhat surprised and a little disappointed that in the speech that the hon. Member for Corby has just made in his new role, he did not get round to outlining where the £52 billion of cuts that his party would make were likely to fall. If I understood him correctly, he said that the funding formula was unfair. I wonder whether he will at some stage explain to the House why, in 13 years, his party did nothing about that and, indeed, made it worse. In his comments about how councils are currently funded and how the spending patterns worked, he did not note the fact that his own council, Corby, despite having the highest spending power per head in Northamptonshire, had an increase of about 4.4% this year, so proving that the formula is fair wherever one is.

I shall try to restrict my comments—

[Grahame M. Morris]

rose—

[Brandon Lewis]

Let me make a start before I take interventions, depending on time. I shall try to restrict my comments to the topic on which the majority of Members have spoken today, which is rural funding, although I note and will comment to some extent on comments from Members across the Floor on local government funding generally. We also moved into NHS funding and Department for Education funding, but I will not take up Members’ time by going too far into that.

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Tiverton and Honiton (Neil Parish) and thank him for bringing this important debate to the House, giving everybody a chance to comment and giving me the opportunity to listen. I have met him and the team from the rural sparsity group on a number of occasions and will be happy to do so again. No doubt we will meet again over the next few months as we get towards the funding settlement. I note that he would like an extra £30 million. I also note the realism in his comment about the chances of the Government finding another £30 million when we are still trying to clear up the debt, the deficit and the mess left by the previous Government.

[Grahame M. Morris]

rose—

[Brandon Lewis]

I will take an intervention in a little while, if I have time.

We heard a number of interventions during the speech by my hon. Friend the Member for Tiverton and Honiton. My hon. Friend the Member for High Peak (Andrew Bingham) mentioned what small councils could do. It is worth stressing—I am happy to put this on the record again—that there are small district councils across the country, and not just in rural areas, running budgets of roughly £10 million or even less. They must look at their situations very closely and consider whether their current format, with their own chief executives, management and silo services, is sustainable. They should consider partnering with other authorities, as around 40 authorities do already, and having shared chief executives and management.

The partnerships between High Peak borough council and Staffordshire Moorlands district council is a fantastic example. My hon. Friend the Member for Bury St Edmunds (Mr Ruffley) talked about Mid-Suffolk district council, and I must say that Suffolk, as a county generally, offers a really good exemplar of the work that can be done. Suffolk Coastal and Waveney district councils are coming together with a shared chief executive. Babergh and Mid-Suffolk district councils and St Edmundsbury borough council and Forest Heath district council are all showing how to come together to make real savings.

The chief executive of a council deal such as Staffordshire Moorlands and High Peak would explain that those kinds of savings can amount to 18% or 20%. When they are running a budget of around £10 million, that is a substantial saving. I argue that small local authorities should be doing that not only because of financial pressure, but because the money could be spent on front-line services, rather than on administration and management.

Several Members mentioned school bus services. I agree that councils should be working very hard to protect front-line services that are important to rural and urban communities. In my constituency of Great Yarmouth, the Labour-led county council has looked at cutting rural bus services, which would mean children having to walk up to 3 miles to get to school, and on major roads with no pathways. That is absolutely unacceptable. It should be looking at the plans that were in place under the previous Conservative administration in order to find the savings it needs and bring in the revenue it needs without slashing those important services. Councils should look at that carefully.

The hon. Member for Penistone and Stocksbridge (Angela Smith) carefully outlined the situation with regard to funding, but we must remember that in the past year councils increased their reserves to £19 billion, the highest level on record. It is important that we also look at options. This Government are not just talking about that; with community budgets we are delivering a transformation in the way services are provided across the public sector, which independent reports show could save this country around £20 billion. Across the country there are community budget pilots, of all political colours, doing some phenomenal work, and that has now been rolled out to a further nine areas.

My hon. Friend the Member for Newton Abbot (Anne Marie Morris) touched on some of the issues relating to education, transport and buses, which I have already outlined. The Chair of the Communities and Local Government Select Committee, the hon. Member for Sheffield South East (Mr Betts), raised some issues about funding and mentioned the 56 councils. I have touched on some of the things that they could be looking at. I am not entirely surprised, although I am still disappointed, that he seems to be making the case for more taxes on people who I think want the cost of living to go down. That is why it is important that we freeze council tax and do not encourage more taxes locally.

[Mr Betts]

The Minister just mentioned reserves. Does he not understand that it is not an issue of rural or urban, or Conservative or Labour? It is about councils looking at the black hole that is coming, as the forecasts show, and which the Chancellor has identified in the spending review, and making prudent decisions on how to spread the money available over a number of years in order to try to do their best to protect services. If Ministers just keep rubbishing that as councils holding on to reserves for their own sake, they do a disservice to hard-pressed local authorities.

[Brandon Lewis]

I am afraid that I entirely disagree. Having led a local council that, before my time, had seen council tax increases of 18% and 16%—they were regularly in the double figures—and in a country where council tax doubled under the Labour Government, I believe that hard-working people think that council tax should be kept low and that councils should be looking at how they spend their money, not just building up reserves and then pleading poverty. If they believe that they are short of money, they should use the reserves they have to invest for income in the future and make savings, as many good authorities are doing.

The hon. Member for Mid Dorset and North Poole (Annette Brooke), in a very strong speech, touched on the new homes bonus, as did a number of Members. It is an issue that we are looking at. There is a consultation at the moment and the Government will of course respond to it. The hon. Member for Easington (Grahame M. Morris) referred to fire authorities, but he should bear in mind that the response to the Knight review is coming. Fire authorities were protected in order to make some of the efficiencies that they should have been making but in too many cases were not.

My hon. Friend the Member for Penrith and The Border (Rory Stewart) outlined in his strong contribution—other Members also commented on this—how he thought the funding gap should be reduced. I say to my hon. Friend that the gap between rural and urban with regard to spending per head has reduced by 4%.

That leads me to an important point raised by my hon. Friend the Member for Beverley and Holderness (Mr Stuart) in his passionate speech. I thought I was doing well with his flattery and compliments, for which I am grateful. He was clearly being sincere until he mentioned the word “svelte”; I knew then that my ego was not being brushed in the way I hoped. My hon. Friend made a clear point about the analysis. While he was away after suffering an unfortunate injury, I met SPARSE and I would be happy to go through this again. We managed to clarify the difference between how it and the Government have calculated the figures. A rural area is different for the Government, because an area such as my county of Norfolk, which would usually be classed as rural, has within it urban areas such as Norwich, Great Yarmouth and King’s Lynn, and that gives us a slightly different calculation. I would be happy to go through the figures with my hon. Friend when we get to them in a few months’ time.

[Rory Stewart]

Will the Minister please consider the broader context? The county of Cumbria is losing £63 million from its health budget and another £1 million from its fire budget. These things cannot be seen in silos. They have to be put together.

[Brandon Lewis]

My hon. Friend makes a reasonable point. I will touch on how these things come together and the work we are doing to deal with that.

The hon. Member for North Devon (Sir Nick Harvey) made a passionate and strong speech about sparsity and disparity and how they need to be dealt with. My hon. Friend the Member for Shrewsbury and Atcham (Daniel Kawczynski) made a powerful point about the chief executive of the Local Government Association, who is clearly disposed towards higher council tax charges for residents, which I think all of us—those of us on the Conservative Benches, at least—want to move away from while we keep frozen and low council tax. In some areas, good Conservative councils are even cutting council tax for their hard-working residents. I noted my hon. Friend’s comment about asset sales. I will look at that, and if he will bear with me I will get back to him on that specific issue.

My hon. Friend was absolutely right to mention incentives to pool and work together. We have put incentives in place and I will touch on them in a moment. Councils such as High Peak, Staffordshire Moorlands, Breckland and South Holland have just this week benefitted from those incentives and the money we announced.

My hon. Friend the Member for Beverley and Holderness continues to make a strong case on this issue. He has pushed it with other Members and comes to see me regularly. I have no doubt that our conversations will continue as we approach the financial settlement period over the next few months.

My hon. Friend the Member for Worcester (Mr Walker) and my hon. and learned Friend the Member for Sleaford and North Hykeham (Stephen Phillips) highlighted the cost for rural areas, particularly with regard to transport. Members representing urban areas often mention issues to do with density and poverty and how they balance out. That issue has yet to be proven with regard to cost differences and we will continue to look at it.

I gently say to the hon. Member for Cambridge (Dr Huppert) that, if Cambridgeshire is so short of funding, he might want to ask how it could afford a huge pay-off and the rather interesting system it has used to reappoint the chief fire office of its fire authority. That happened in the past few weeks and it has raised a number of questions.

[Mr Graham Stuart]

Will the Minister touch specifically on the magic dust of 2012—the damping—and the fact that, instead of a being a transition mechanism, it turns out to be a deep freeze of an inequity?

[Brandon Lewis]

I am about to turn to some more general points and I will touch on the damping issue.

I want to be clear that behind all our thinking is that it is vital for councils to continue to play their part in tackling the budget deficit we inherited from the previous Government, making sensible savings and delivering value for money for the taxpayer, as many good councils are doing. We are providing direct financial incentives for councils to promote growth and jobs in their area. This year’s local government finance settlement set out how authorities can now directly retain £11 billion-worth of business rates and keep the growth from them instead of returning them to the Treasury.

More importantly, and perhaps more relevantly to this debate and the points made by hon. Members from all parties, in the current settlement we accepted, based on the available evidence, that rural areas are comparatively underfunded. We have therefore ensured that there is proper recognition of the additional costs of delivering services in rural areas. We adjusted the relative needs formula to reflect those costs. That was one of only three formula changes in the settlement.

Members have noted the changes, but I will reiterate them. We have increased the weight of super-sparse areas in the formula; doubled the sparsity weight for older people’s social care and district-level environmental protection and cultural services; reinstated the sparsity adjustment for the county level; and introduced a sparsity adjustment for fire and rescue. As a result, funding per head has been reduced by less in predominantly rural authorities than in predominantly urban authorities within all classes. There was a 4% reduction in the gap between 2012-13 and 2013-14. I know that some Members have an issue with how that is classified and I am happy to meet them to go through that when the figures for next year are confirmed.

We listened to the representations of rural authorities on the provisional settlement in the debate earlier this year. That is why we provided a further £8.5 million grant to help rural authorities with sparse populations.

[Stephen Phillips]

North Kesteven district council received £38,000, whereas if the sparsity factors had been properly taken into account and not been damped, it would have received several hundred thousand pounds. I say to the Minister that £38,000 does not butter many parsnips.

[Brandon Lewis]

I do not know where my hon. and learned Friend buys his butter and parsnips, but I understand his point. The Government obviously have to ensure that there is not too much volatility in the system, but the comments on damping have been noted and I will return to them in a moment.

Hon. Members have spoken about incentives. Yesterday, I announced the successful bids to the transformation challenge award. Eighteen local authorities will share £7 million to look at ways of bringing their services and management together and working in innovative ways. We are showing clearly that councils will get what they make, rather than having to take from a begging bowl. We will reward councils that deliver. The new homes bonus and the business rates incentive scheme are part of that. Through the new homes bonus, about 40 councils saw an increase in their spending power this year. I note that one of those councils was Corby borough council, in the shadow Minister’s constituency. There are councils that need to be more efficient still. Some small councils need to do more to share their management and services. We are doing what we can to incentivise and support that.

We issued the “50 ways to save” document. I encourage councils to look at that to find more ways to save and to ensure that they are being efficient in the back office and in their services, and that they are using transparency to cut waste. The best councils are protecting the front line, including weekly bin collections, library services and meals on wheels, while getting rid of waste and inefficiency.

We are aware of the pressures that are coming. We therefore have a £3.8 billion pool of funding for integrated health and social care, a new transforming services fund, a programme that will review the pressures on children’s services, and new flexibility to use capital receipts from asset sales to fund one-off revenue costs for reforming services.

I have heard the clear and passionate comments that have been made today. We will consider them over the next few months as we approach the spending review.

16:58

[Neil Parish]

I have two minutes in which to make some telling comments.

I thank the 14 Members who have taken part in this powerful debate. I welcome the Minister’s remarks, but I go back to my original argument. In 2012, the Government looked at shifting money across to rural authorities. After that they damped it, then they gave us back £8 million and now they say that they cannot even find £30 million. If it was right to do it in 2012, it is right to do it now. I ask the Minister to look at the matter again, because we will mobilise the rural yeomanry to ensure that we get our fair share of funding. We are asking for one tenth of 1% of the total budget to be shifted towards rural authorities. Is that too much to ask of the Government? I do not think it is.

The hon. Member for North Devon (Sir Nick Harvey) made the point that council tax payers pay £130 more for their services in rural areas. We therefore demand better services. Devon is the 245th worst funded area for its schools. My hon. Friend the Member for Worcester (Mr Walker) is running a great campaign on that issue.

We cannot just sit in the House and allow rural authorities and rural people to be treated in this way, so I tell the Minister that we will come to meet him again and will be looking for his cheque book. It is no good just having warm words, because we can put them nowhere. What we actually want is help—as my grandmother used to say, an ounce of help is better than a ton of pity. We want some help, not just warm words, so we look forward to a real solution.

Question put and agreed to.

Resolved,

That this House has considered funding for local authorities.

Kidsgrove Railway Station

Thursday 10th October 2013 Commons Chamber

Motion made, and Question proposed, That this House do now adjourn.—(Gavin Barwell.)

17:00

[Joan Walley (Stoke-on-Trent North) (Lab)]

I am grateful for the opportunity to debate disabled access to Kidsgrove railway station. It is no disrespect to you, Mr Deputy Speaker, if I say that I had rather hoped that Mr Speaker would be in the Chair, because he visited Kidsgrove recently and attended the Kidsgrove youth parliament. I am sure he would have remembered that our young people gave great weight and priority to public transport. Today’s debate is dedicated to them and to those who have set out just how unacceptable it is that, despite the Disability Discrimination Act 1995 and the subsequent Equality Act 2010, services at Kidsgrove railway station are still not compliant with that disability legislation. The debate is intended to put that right.

I am pleased to see the Minister in his place, and I hope he is as committed to integrated transport as his predecessor was. I wish him well in his new role. I hope that by the time he responds I will have convinced him that when he decides which railway stations across the country are to benefit from the welcome £100 million next phase of the Access for All fund, Kidsgrove railway station should be on the list of successful bids.

I will give a little of the background to the debate. When Kidsgrove moved—it did not actually move, but it moved in terms of boundary changes—back into the parliamentary constituency of Stoke-on-Trent North at the last general election, I looked at the issues that needed my support. I quickly identified the importance of making Kidsgrove railway station accessible to all my constituents. I brought together the county council, the borough council, Kidsgrove town council, the train operating companies and Network Rail to see what we could do. At that meeting, I was really disappointed to find that no one appeared previously to have thought about how to include Kidsgrove station in the bids for Access for All funding that were launched back in 2006.

Many stations had got their bids in and received brand-new disabled facilities. I was particularly impressed by the wonderful architectural design at Denmark Hill station, which had new ramps and had been refurbished. I believe that Long Eaton, in my own region, received £1.6 million to install two new lifts, providing step-free access to both platforms. Sadly, Kidsgrove station did not feature. No bid was made, and as I was told in replies to my letters to the previous Minister, and in meetings that I had with him, the money allocated for station improvements for those with disabilities was all spent.

I then set about arranging further follow-up meetings, with the intention of being ready as soon as the next tranche of funding was announced. It was duly announced that bids were being invited for the 2015 to 2019 period and should be received by 15 November 2013, with a ministerial announcement expected in April 2014. I therefore believe that the debate is timely so that we can leave no stone unturned in securing investment.

I say to the Minister that sometimes it is when one does things for the first time that one really remembers them. If this is his first Adjournment debate in his new role, I hope that he will remember our request.

Why is funding needed in Kidsgrove? It is a town where, in 1777, probably the largest civil engineering project ever carried out in Britain up to that time was completed—the construction of the Harecastle tunnel for the Trent and Mersey canal, which was the combined vision and achievement of James Brindley and Josiah Wedgwood. Subsequently, the railways linked up with the development of the area’s industries. In such a town, one can imagine the frustration that today our otherwise well-kept and much-loved railway station lacks access to three out of four platforms.

I called into the station as recently as last Friday, and I was struck by the staff and volunteers who are working so hard to make the station one of which we can all be proud. Volunteers tend the gardens and the public spaces with great care. They keep it spotlessly clean, freshly painted and well lit—Councillor Elsie Bates is doing a wonderful job. The station has a functioning train information display, ticket machines and notice boards—all the things we would expect. It has a spacious well-laid out car park with bike racks and integrated transport, and there is scope to extend that and adjacent land into a public transport hub—something much championed by local councillors and Jon Honeysett MBE, whom I thank for his work on integrated transport. The station also has efficient and friendly staff, and I saw all those things when I visited last Friday.

The station was rewarded when it deservedly won the best small station award at the community rail awards in 2011. Outside its entrance there are two disabled car parking spaces, clearly marked in yellow paint. If someone is disabled, however, or simply young or old, or if they experience difficulty going up and down the flights of stairs that link the four platforms, perhaps with buggies or heavy luggage, they simply would not be able to get access to three out of the four platforms. That is why it is so important that the Minister responds to this debate.

Services from platforms 2, 3 and 4, to Manchester, Derby, London—including for getting to Parliament—and Crewe, cannot be accessed. To get to Manchester, for example, someone must catch a train to Stoke, change, and board another train to Manchester that goes through Kidsgrove. That leads to the absurd situation whereby anyone who is disabled ends up half an hour later exactly where they started.

It is not only about direct travel to those destinations, but about onward travel, including to the north Wales coast—a particularly popular holiday destination for people from the Potteries—the south coast, Scotland, regional airports, and even to towns and cities with clubs in the premier league and the first division, which are increasingly popular destinations for local football supporters. A further point concerns direct and connecting services to Crewe and south Cheshire, and I thank Jenny Baker of Friends of Sandbach Station, who has gone to great lengths to add her support to our campaign.

[Fiona Bruce (Congleton) (Con)]

I thank the hon. Lady for initiating this debate. Her constituency neighbours mine, and news of her effective campaign has reached the Friends of Sandbach Station, who confirmed to me how much it highlights that this is not an isolated problem. I support—of course—her campaign for Kidsgrove station, but may I say that Sandbach station is in a similar situation? It has flat access to one platform, and footbridge access only to three. Therefore, if someone is disabled, they can travel only to Crewe. We have one advantage over Kidsgrove, however, because we have nine disabled parking spaces, not two. Will the Minister also consider Access for All funding for Sandbach?

[Joan Walley]

The hon. Lady’s intervention is helpful because she makes the point to the Minister that the campaign is supported by Members on both sides of the House. The criteria state that it is important that the investment, when it comes, should not be concentrated in London and the south-east. I hope it comes first to Kidsgrove, and secondly to Sandbach and other connecting stations along the line.

On the criteria, let us look at the disability and age demographics. Staffordshire county council’s profile of adult disability in the county from February 2012 shows that there are a total of 4,540 claimants on incapacity benefit and severe disablement allowance in Newcastle-under-Lyme. Newcastle has the highest number of service users in residential care and supported accommodation in Staffordshire. That and the proportion of the 16-and-over population claiming disability living allowance—6,720 is well above the national average—gives a good indication of the demographic profile, which is an added reason to prioritise Kidsgrove station in the forthcoming bidding round.

No bid will be signed off without meeting the station footfall criteria. I have mentioned the history of the railways. Jobs in the heavy industries that gave us the local railway have declined, but they have been superseded by jobs in other areas. That has resulted in Kidsgrove becoming a key commuter station to Manchester and Stoke-on-Trent and, as we have just heard, Crewe, Sandbach and elsewhere. Accordingly, footfall at Kidsgrove railway station has gone through the roof, from just 32,192 in 2005-06 to 158,478 in 2011-12. Furthermore, passenger numbers are expected to grow at 21% per year in the coming years. Moreover, there is every indication that that trend will continue. Staffordshire county council has agreed in principle to allow the former Kidsgrove goods yard, which it owns, to be used for extra car parking at the station, increasing the number of places from 55 to 200—a 400% increase in spaces for a car park that tends to operate at capacity.

Closer integration of rail and bus services is proposed. Currently, the nearest bus stops are at least 250 yards from the station, and their location is not obvious to rail users. Re-routing the four local bus services to within sight of the station forecourt will greatly benefit the station. I am hopeful that that will happen. Getting the direct service to Manchester airport reinstated would drastically increase footfall at Kidsgrove and could be the subject of another debate in the House. All in all, I believe that the demographics of Kidsgrove match the criteria.

On local support, which has to be shown if the bid is to go ahead, I can tell the House that the proposal is fully supported by Staffordshire county council, Newcastle borough council, Kidsgrove town council, the local enterprise partnership, East Midlands Trains and London Midland Trains. East Midlands Trains confirmed to my office this morning that Kidsgrove station is its top priority in the next tranche of funding. Virgin, which does not go from the station, has indicated that ramped access would have indirect benefits for its services.

In addition, Clough Hall technology school, which has a specialist autism unit, has sent a letter of support to me. I hope the Minister makes a note of this. It states:

“As the only Church of England secondary school in Staffordshire, our conversion, together with the new build, will increase the number of pupils attending the school, especially those travelling in from other areas. We value inclusivity and would welcome a DDA-compliant footbridge which would give access to all platforms, so that pupils with physical disability can travel by train to our school.”

I have had many letters of support, including from Kidsgrove town council, Crewe town council and Kidsgrove Townswomen’s Guild.

On top of that, a significant number of local people support the bid. I thank the mayor of Kidsgrove, Kyle Robinson, and his fellow councillors for helping with the petition, which I am sure will get even more signatures as awareness of the campaign grows. I also refer the Minister to the recent Environmental Audit Committee report, which I helped to produce, on transport and access to public services, and in particular our conclusion that services be joined up and that disabled people should not be excluded.

I have one final point to bring to the Minister’s attention. When I set out on this campaign, I was led to believe that it was down to the train operating company to make the bid for departmental funding. Many meetings and phone calls later, I seem to have gone around in a circle, because I am now told that the remit rests with Network Rail. The local delivery group and county council also have a role, and the Minister has the final say when the submissions have been made. The whole system is at the very least opaque. It leaves me feeling that those stations that sit within a defined passenger transport executive area stand the best chance of a successful bid.

Kidsgrove must not be penalised because the station is a junction on the edge of the Staffordshire-Cheshire local authority borders, under the jurisdiction of no passenger transport executive and a long way down the line from the headquarters of its train operating company, East Midland Trains. It is also unclear from the guidance issued how complete the business case, costings and designs have to be at the time of the actual submission, and who actually has responsibility for submitting the bid. I do not mind whether it is submitted by East Midland Trains, Staffordshire county council, as the highway authority, or Network Rail. They have all indicated support for the bid. What I do mind is that no one understands the process so the bid is not made on time.

The local delivery groups have an enormous say in how the bids are made. I would like to hear what communication the Minister has had with those groups and what more can be done to make sure that when the decision is announced—I understand it will be in April next year—Kidsgrove railway station is on the list.

I notice that part of the criteria is a local commitment to offering matching funds in round 5. Our local authorities are under a great deal of pressure and I do not quite know where that matching funding would come from, but I am happy to sit down with the Minister to discover whether matching funds can come from other Departments to help to make our case. We urgently need Kidsgrove railway station to be compliant with disability legislation.

17:17

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Transport (Stephen Hammond)]

I congratulate the hon. Member for Stoke-on-Trent North (Joan Walley) on securing the debate on disabled access at Kidsgrove station. I am delighted to be covering this role tonight in the House and, like my predecessor, I am committed to ensuring accessibility. In recent years, expectations about accessibility have rightly changed, both among disabled passengers and the railway industry, and that is even more the case after the success of our transport networks in providing accessible journeys during last year’s Olympics and Paralympics.

Unfortunately, as the hon. Lady recognised when she gave the history of Kidsgrove station, many of our railway stations date from Victorian times, including Kidsgrove, which first opened in 1848. These 19th century stations were not built with the needs of 21st century passengers in mind, and that has left us with a huge task in ensuring that the expectations of disabled passengers are met by opening up the rail network to them.

Clearly, accessible stations make a huge difference to people’s journey experience, not only for people with reduced mobility, but also for those carrying heavy luggage or pushing unwieldy pushchairs. I am grateful that the hon. Lady acknowledged that we remain committed to making further improvements in this area and have continued to support, and indeed expand, the Access for All programme, launched in 2006 by the previous Government. The programme was worth £370 million in 2004-05 prices, and will deliver accessible routes at more than 150 stations.

To demonstrate value for money to the Treasury and the Office of Rail Regulation, I am happy to confirm that the funding has been targeted at the busiest stations. By using a weighting mechanism that allowed us to look at stations’ footfall figures overlaid with census data on disability, we have tried to ensure that as many disabled people as possible can benefit from funding. Approximately a third of the stations were chosen to ensure a fair geographical spread across the country. We took into account the views of train operators and the proximity to facilities such as hospitals, schools for disabled children and military rehabilitation centres—factors that the hon. Lady raised in her speech.

One hundred and five projects are now complete and we expect the rest of the programme to be substantially complete by April next year, a full year ahead of the initial plans. If we look at the scale of the work and what it has done for the ability to open up accessibility for disabled people, there are some significant engineering projects: Clapham Junction, the busiest station in Europe, is now completely accessible for the first time in its 150 year history. We should not be complacent, however.

The hon. Lady is right to say that last year’s high-level output statement included a further £100 million to extend the Access for All programme to 2019. I hear what she says about the process being opaque. I will touch on this in more depth in a moment, but I think it is relatively well known that it is for local delivery groups—Network Rail and the train operating companies—to liaise with local authorities in making nominations. We have asked the rail industry to nominate stations for inclusion in the new £100 million programme. I recognise the efforts made by the hon. Lady, and both Network Rail and East Midlands Trains are undoubtedly aware of the desire of the local population for Kidsgrove station to be a top priority. I note her comment that East Midlands Trains has confirmed to her today that it regards Kidsgrove as its top priority. I am sure that will help in the nomination process.

The industry has a number of local delivery groups across the country that were set up to administer the national stations improvement programme in control period 4, which is just about to end. We have asked them to expand their role and nominate stations for the Access for All programme, which has been extended with an extra £100 million. Each group contains representatives from train operating companies and Network Rail. While we continue to believe that the busiest stations remain the priority, we also believe that there should be a fair distribution of investment across the country.

I listened to the intervention from my hon. Friend the Member for Congleton (Fiona Bruce) concerning Sandbach station. I recognise that there is a problem, with flat access to only one platform. If the only place one can travel to is Crewe, wonderful though it may be, that is rather a limiting experience.

We want the industry to take into account other factors, such as improving inter-urban journeys. The hon. Member for Stoke-on-Trent North mentioned the availability of third party match funding, which can be used to weight business cases for individual station projects. I am happy to extend to her the meeting she requested, and she is welcome to come to the Department to discuss match funding possibilities for Kidsgrove, which will help us to speed up delivery. I would expect local authorities to take that into account in their submissions to local delivery groups, and I would also expect the views of local authorities to be taken into account by those local delivery groups when they make their nominations.

[Joan Walley]

Will the Minister tell us how the process will work? Who will submit the bid: local delivery groups, operating companies or local authorities?

[Stephen Hammond]

The local delivery group is a combination of Network Rail and the operators within the region, and it is for the local delivery group to make that submission and that nomination. The industry has been asked to complete the nomination process for extended Access for All by 15 November. The Department is receiving nominations as we speak, and the process will be open, as I say, until 15 November. Once we have received them, officials at the Department will analyse all the nominations before a final decision is taken on which stations will receive funding. I hope to be able to announce the successful bidding round, starting at the beginning of the next control period, by April next year.

After the hon. Lady’s comments tonight, I am certainly aware of the access issues at Kidsgrove station—and, indeed, at Sandbach—but I also know that there are many other stations across the network that have seen passenger numbers rising. The impressive increase in footfall at Kidsgrove, seen in the figures verified by the Office of Rail Regulation, will undoubtedly form part of the case made by the local delivery group when it makes its nomination.

I will certainly welcome a nomination from Kidsgrove. I want to put on record the fact that the Department will welcome nominations from as many stations as possible. As the hon. Lady will understand, although I would welcome her nomination, I cannot guarantee that any particular station will necessarily be funded or included in the programme once it has been nominated. What I can guarantee is that it will be considered carefully, along with the nominations of all the other inaccessible stations across the country.

Access for All is clearly an important part of the funding, but it is also important to remember that improved access could be achieved by using relatively small amounts of funding, combined with some innovative thinking by the industry. That would be particularly important if Kidsgrove’s application were to prove unsuccessful, when the hon. Lady might like to consider some of the alternatives I am about to mention. There is an annual small schemes fund of around £7 million a year. It is allocated between the train operating companies and is based on the number of stations they manage and how busy those stations are. Since 2006, more than £100 million of investment, including contributions from the train operators and local authorities, has seen projects delivered at almost 1,100 of the country’s 2,500 stations. A variety of projects have been supported under the small schemes, including better provision of accessible toilets, customer information services, blue badge parking spaces and features such as induction loops at ticket offices.

[Joan Walley]

Will the Minister acknowledge that using small scheme funding for Kidsgrove will not really work? It is at a junction and two lines come through it, and which was constructed in such a way that it has overhead cables, it greatly puts up the potential costs, probably beyond what would be admissible under the small schemes funds. It will have to come out of Access for All funding.

[Stephen Hammond]

I hear what the hon. Lady says. I looked at the diagram of Kidsgrove station so I am aware of her point. None the less, I think that there might be some possibilities under the small schemes, and I would not wish to rule them out. I hope I am outlining some other possibilities to her.

The hon. Lady will also be aware that in 2011 we released £37.5 million of Access for All mid-tier funding to help projects needing a slightly greater amount of support—up to £1 million. A total of 42 such projects have so far been successful. A number of stations considered the issue the hon. Lady mentioned about students at the local college. The lifts at Alton station, for example, which benefited Treloar college for the physically disabled, came into being through this mid-tier funding.

Access for All funding has clearly been a huge success, but I do not want to give the impression that it is all that we are doing because Access for All is over and above the work being done through major investments being delivered by train operators. They are required to invest an average of £250,000 a year under their minor works programmes on improving stations. Most of that is exclusively spent on access improvements. Each operator is also required to have a disabled people’s protection policy in place as part of their licence to operate services.

It is important to understand that Access for All is key. I will look forward to and welcome the nomination, but much else is going on. We are working with the industry to ensure that we have much wider access for—

17:30

House adjourned without Question put (Standing Order No. 9(7)).

Westminster Hall

Thursday 10th October 2013 Westminster Hall

Thursday 10 October 2013

[Mr Joe Benton in the Chair]

Wildlife Crime

Thursday 10th October 2013 Westminster Hall

[Relevant documents: Wildlife Crime, Third Report of the Environmental Audit Committee, HC 140, and the Government Response, HC 1061.]

Motion made, and Question proposed, That the sitting be now adjourned.—(Anne Milton.)

13:30

[Joan Walley (Stoke-on-Trent North) (Lab)]

As always, Mr. Benton, it is a pleasure to see you in the Chair. I thank the Liaison Committee for making time available to debate this important subject, and I especially thank my colleagues on the Environmental Audit Committee, all of whom I regard as friends. I know that only two or three of them can be here today, but they have all contributed to the report, which is a joint effort.

I welcome the Under-Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, the hon. Member for Camborne and Redruth (George Eustice), to his new role. I have just had it confirmed that this is his first outing on the Front Bench in a debate, apart from Environment, Food and Rural Affairs questions this morning. I look forward to hearing his views in his winding-up speech. We always remember the first time we do something; it may be that he will feel he can work with the Environmental Audit Committee on the first issue that he debated as Minister in Westminster Hall. As he is an ex officio member of our Committee, I look forward to seeing him help drive the sustainable development agenda. I also welcome my hon. Friend the Member for Brent North (Barry Gardiner) to the Opposition Front Bench in his new role as shadow DEFRA Minister. It is also appropriate for me to say that we appreciated everything that the Minister’s predecessor, the hon. Member for Newbury (Richard Benyon), did on this agenda. I might not always have agreed with his views, but he was always courteous and constructive.

The background to this debate goes back to an Environmental Audit Committee debate in 2004, when we called on the then Government to restate their commitment to tackling wildlife crime and criticised their refusal to accept it as an issue deserving of committed policing resources. Our 2004 report made a real difference. It led to the setting up of the wildlife crime unit. When the Committee decided in the current Parliament to return to the issue, it was natural for us to stick to broadly the same remit as the previous Committee report. We wanted to concentrate on areas where we hoped our unanimous recommendations could make a difference.

In a relatively short time, wildlife crime has gone right to the top of the national and international agenda. I believe that it was right for the coalition agreement to refer to wildlife crime and the importance of tackling smuggling and the illegal trade in wildlife through the new border police force. Events have moved so rapidly that we now have a far greater understanding of how global wildlife crime and illegal wildlife trafficking are growing threats to nature, the livelihoods of the poorest and international security.

Accordingly, our current report began its life with a call for evidence in January 2012. In response, we received 57 separate written submissions from organisations and individuals, a relatively large number of submissions for a Select Committee, which reflects the importance that the public attach to the issue. We followed up the written submissions with seven oral evidence sessions, which, as might be expected, included Government agencies, Government and non-governmental organisations. We finally published our report in September 2012 and got the Government response in March 2013, so it all seems quite a long time ago.

It is worth putting on the record that we are disappointed by how long it took the Government to respond to our report’s recommendations; I see all my fellow Committee members nodding their heads. I suspect that one reason—the new Minister might help us on this—may have been some delay by the Home Office in getting back to what the Government were doing. I hope that in future, our recommendations will have speedier responses. After we got our response, it was some time before we could get a debate. What with the summer recess, we are having the debate today.

However, it does not matter that it has taken so long to have this debate, as there have been many significant developments in the short space of time since we reported. One is that the links between wildlife crime and serious organised crime are now being widely recognised around the world. It is clear that the poaching of endangered species has rocketed since 2007. The illegal wildlife trade is estimated to be the fifth most lucrative illicit transnational activity worldwide, worth up to £10 billion a year. We are told that increasingly, it is the preserve of organised crime gangs: international criminal networks with links to terrorism, drugs and rebel militia. It is a huge agenda.

[Caroline Lucas (Brighton, Pavilion) (Green)]

I congratulate the hon. Lady on her excellent chairmanship of the Environmental Audit Committee. At the high-level meeting on international poaching and wildlife trafficking in New York last month, it was encouraging that the UK supported the proposal for a UN special envoy on wildlife crime. During that meeting, the President of Gabon commented that illicit wildlife crime is, exactly as she said, not just an environmental problem but a serious threat to peace and security. Does she agree that that is yet another reason why the Government should now commit to funding our excellent national wildlife crime unit beyond 2014?

[Joan Walley]

As always, I am grateful to the hon. Lady for making that point. What President Obama has done, and what has been happening in the United Nations in the intervening time since our Committee reported, is making a huge difference. It shows that we must be able to lead internationally, nationally and locally. I keep returning to this point. If the Minister takes away one message from this debate, it should be that the national wildlife crime unit must be supported properly. I will come to those issues later in my report.

I welcomed the May 2013 UN commission on crime prevention and criminal justice agreement, which called on the nations of the world to consider wildlife and forest crime a serious form of organised crime. As we have just heard, that report to the UN Security Council highlighted the potential link between poaching and other organised criminal behaviour, including terrorism.

All that is happening on the world stage, and UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has prioritised it internationally. Meanwhile, we have many local organisations and non-governmental organisations doing the same thing nationally, operating here as Wildlife and Countryside Link agencies to press the Government to implement in full the recommendations in our report. It is worth putting on record the names of those participating agencies: the Bat Conservation Trust, the Environmental Investigation Agency, Humane Society International UK, the International Fund for Animal Welfare, the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, Whale and Dolphin Conservation, the Royal Society for the Protection of Animals and WWF UK. They are all saying exactly what my hon. Friend said: what we do on the world stage must be matched by what we do here. That is important.

All those organisations have been very vocal and robust in their work, and supportive of the UK Government’s leadership bid to tackle the illegal wildlife trade by hosting a high-level meeting on 12 and 13 February 2014. An action plan will be developed, which will work alongside the Duke of Cambridge’s United for Wildlife foundation. There has been a huge amount of action since we produced our report, which leads me to say that our debate today is perfect timing. I hope the new Minister will lead by showing best practice at home, and the best way he can do that is by revisiting each and every recommendation in our report. That way, he will have total integrity, based on a sound track record at home, at the high-level meeting that the Government are organising. He has everything to gain from reviewing the work in detail, because, with the new wave of activity, some of the Government responses in March are out of date. There would be nothing wrong with the Government saying, “We have revisited it and we’re thinking about things differently.” I hope he will be able to do that cross-cutting and revisit our recommendations.

The first recommendation relates to the national wildlife crime unit. All the evidence told us that it is strategic and co-ordinates wildlife crime enforcement. No one had a bad word to say about it; it was universally praised, which is unusual in a Select Committee inquiry. It obviously has good relationships with UK police forces, Interpol and international enforcement agencies. It has a lot of expertise and is doing a good job in respect of the trade in endangered species, illegal taxidermy and auction sales, bat and badger-related offences, marine species, reptile smuggling, wild bird netting and egg collecting. I cannot get my head around the fact that the sums involved in the unit are very small. DEFRA and the Home Office each contributed £144,000 in 2011-12, £136,000 in 2012-13—the amount is going down—and £136,000 in 2013-14. Those are very small amounts of money, which are making a huge difference.

Given the range and effectiveness of the NWCU’s work, the Committee concluded that it is excellent value for money and punches above its weight, but how can such an agency be run on an ad hoc, year-on-year basis? It cannot plan future expansion, it cannot keep good staff, and every year it spends all its time making the case to DEFRA and the Home Office for the funding to be agreed in the comprehensive spending review, because the money is not in the baseline budget. Why not? It should be. The Committee recommended that the Government reinforce success by implementing long-term funding arrangements for the NWCU. The previous Minister did well to get a one-year extension, but we need permanent funding.

Another issue of a little concern relates to the then newly appointed Association of Chief Police Officers lead on wildlife crime, Chief Constable Stuart Hyde. He gave evidence to the Committee, and we were looking forward to seeing how his ideas on wildlife crime enforcement would pan out in practice. He was suspended from duty in September 2012 following allegations of misconduct, unrelated to the wildlife crime brief, I hasten to add. How has the work that he was to do been taken up and carried on in his absence?

Staying with enforcement issues, we identified the need for reviews of Crown Prosecution Service wildlife crime prosecutions and the penalties for wildlife crime, the introduction of sentencing guidelines for the judiciary and training for magistrates. Most of those featured in our 2004 report. Despite the Government saying in their response to the report that they would not follow those recommendations, the time for the Government to give them a fresh look is long overdue. There are also issues with invasive species, which some of my colleagues took a great interest in, which we must return to and keep under the scrutiny of the Committee.

Moving on from enforcement, I want to discuss the hen harrier briefly. It is arguably the species most at risk of extinction in England and Wales. I notice that DEFRA has a target in its business plan of no extinctions in England and Wales. It is important that Departments do what departmental business plans say they are going to do. We are looking at a range of departmental business plans, but DEFRA has the target in its business plan, so what is it doing?

I could talk at length about the different views that witnesses who gave evidence to our inquiry had on the cause of the decline in hen harriers. We felt that persecution is a key factor in the decline of the hen harrier. I draw the Minister’s attention to five academic studies, by Redpath, Natural England, Summers, Etheridge, and the Joint Nature Conservation Committee. The JNCC found that the most common form of persecution is deliberate nest disturbance, which is why, after a lengthy discussion, we felt that the Government should evaluate the effect of an offence of vicarious liability in relation to the persecution of birds of prey, as the Scottish Government did in 2011, and consider introducing such an offence in England and Wales, to make landowners responsible for the activities of their gamekeepers. The Government said that they would review the matter as soon as statistics were available, and I can tell the Minister that when the Select Committee visited the Green Investment Bank in Edinburgh, we had a brief discussion with MSPs and put that on their agenda. Are the statistics on the impact of the offence of vicarious liability in Scotland available? Will the Government look at the Scottish experience and report back?

All international wildlife crime is serious. We heard that the tiger, the elephant and the rhinoceros all face extinction in their natural habitats due to demand for illegal wildlife products derived from their body parts. Most troublingly, we heard that those body parts are not, as some had previously assumed, mostly used in traditional Asian medicine, but being traded as investments for their scarcity value. The hon. Member for Richmond Park (Zac Goldsmith) has done a great deal to publicise that. As those species draw closer to extinction, the value of their body parts increases. We even heard about a Chinese bank that runs an investment fund based on elephant ivory.

In their response to our report, the Government agreed that “investment and conspicuous consumption” are emerging as significant drivers of demand. We were encouraged to hear how the UK is combating such trends domestically by strictly applying the criteria for the re-export of antique animal products, such as ivory billiard balls of all things, but we could question why those criteria were not applied strictly in the first place.

We can make significant inroads only through international co-operation. We therefore recommended that at the March 2013 CITES—convention on international trade in endangered species—conference of the parties, the Government take the lead in encouraging all CITES member states to enforce wildlife law. In particular, we urged the Government to focus attention on the damaging effect of one-off sales of impounded illegal wildlife products, such as elephant ivory, which serve only to stimulate the market and ultimately drive poaching, and we urged the Government to make the case for an unequivocal ban on all forms of international ivory trade. Will the Minister set out the negotiating position adopted by the Government at the CITES conference earlier this year, and the extent to which it was successful?

Will the Minister comment on decision 16.55, which directs that a decision-making mechanism—sorry to be technical—for a process of trade in ivory be adopted at the next conference of the parties? Why does he not call for an unequivocal international ban on all forms of ivory now? As part of the CITES working group, of which the UK is a member, will he call for the suspension of discussions on the decision-making mechanism? As was suggested in the earlier intervention, the agenda has moved on fast, even since we took evidence. We were heartened by the destruction in the US of stockpiles of ivory, which demonstrates that President Obama and others are taking a serious stance on the matter. We are talking about something that might have been considered impossible last May; the question now is not whether it will happen, but how it will. I do not think there is any harm in reviewing the Government’s position.

[Duncan Hames (Chippenham) (LD)]

I congratulate the hon. Lady on securing this debate on her Committee’s report. Given recent developments and links between the illegal ivory trade, organised crime and terrorism in Africa, does she agree that international Governments should approach the matter with the urgency with which they tackled money laundering after previous terrorist events? Governments seemed to be able to break all sorts of impasses then, and similar success in tackling the illegal ivory trade would be welcome.

[Joan Walley]

I am grateful for that intervention, which illustrates that if international leaders decide to take a lead, drive the agenda forward, and show true leadership, it is possible to start to deal with these issues. Returning to biodiversity, which is inextricably linked to the concerns that the hon. Gentleman mentioned, it is important that we do not lose momentum. We understand a lot more than we did six months ago about the interconnectedness of these issues, which is part of the agenda that we are dealing with. He is absolutely right, and that might give the Minister more ammunition, if he needs it, to drive the agenda forward.

[Neil Carmichael (Stroud) (Con)]

To reinforce the point about international leadership, does the hon. Lady agree that the Antarctic is a good example of where international leadership is moving in the right direction when it comes to protecting wildlife, particularly flora, fauna and marine life?

[Joan Walley]

That intervention highlights the potential for a constructive debate following the publication of a Select Committee report that looked at the question in detail. The hon. Gentleman has great experience on the Antarctic—and, indeed, following our report on the subject, the Arctic—and he has admirably illustrated that there is real scope for leadership. Events in the Antarctic have demonstrated that what happens there affects all of us; what happens in any part of the planet affects all of us. The issues that we are discussing should not be placed in a box labelled “the environment”; they affect everything from governance and war to money laundering. All these things are interconnected. The sooner environmental questions are placed at the heart of international issues, the better.

I do not apologise for the fact that our report is about the detail of what we found in our investigation. We identified a number of absurdities in the implementation of CITES in UK law. Why, for example, should a vet be present when samples are taken from any animal that is suspected to have been trafficked into the UK? That is a reasonable stipulation in the case of a living animal, but given that we cannot even afford to guarantee funding for the national wildlife crime unit, it is a huge waste of resources to require a vet to be present in cases involving taxidermy. It does not make sense. We even heard that a vet would have to be called out before a sample could be taken from a table made from Brazilian rosewood, which is a CITES-listed species of tree. It is difficult for the Government to provide credible international leadership on tackling wildlife crime if they do not put their house in order.

In their response, the Government said that they would attend to the issues relating to the Control of Trade in Endangered Species (Enforcement) Regulations 1997, which implement the international agreement on endangered species, but it would be helpful to know from the Minister what the timetable is. How far has the consultation progressed, and, most importantly, when will a statutory instrument be introduced? I hope it will be before the 2014 high-level summit.

Before I move on, I want briefly to mention tigers. We were concerned about the poaching of tigers, and, as with all endangered species, we recognise that attitudes must change if those animals are to survive. We desperately need new ideas to challenge demand for such illegal wildlife products.

In conclusion, I hope that the Minister, and his new colleagues in other Departments following the recent reshuffle, can see the impact of wildlife crime. As we have heard in interventions, that impact is huge, and it is growing by the day. The new urgency requires a clear lead from Government as they prepare for the high-level summit that they are organising in London in 2014, which we welcome. If the Government revisit our recommendations—this is the nature of Select Committee scrutiny—they could go into that meeting in a much stronger position. Not least, they could think again about our final recommendation relating to the Partnership for Action Against Wildlife Crime. PAW, as it is aptly known, is a multi-agency representative body. Its current membership of 140 organisations includes all significant UK conservation and trade bodies with an interest in combating wildlife crime. It is co-chaired by a DEFRA civil servant and a senior police officer. We called for a DEFRA Minister to take an active interest and give political direction by chairing the body. Our suggestion was dismissed out of hand in the Government response, on the grounds that devolved Administrations were not likely to collaborate in the way that we envisaged—perhaps I am taking a little bit of poetic licence there.

I hope that in this short debate we can set out the need for the Government to be bolder in response to all our recommendations, and not simply the one relating to PAW. WWF UK has expressed concern that the Home Office and the Ministry of Justice are falling behind, while other Departments—DEFRA, Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs and the Foreign and Commonwealth Office—are forging ahead. DEFRA is the No. 1 Department, with lead responsibility for ensuring that all Departments protect biodiversity. Only by giving further consideration to our recommendations—we would be happy to arrange to discuss them with the Minister—can the Minister demonstrate clear strategic direction and leadership in his new career at DEFRA. I am grateful to have had the opportunity to hold this debate.

[Mr Joe Benton (in the Chair)]

I remind hon. Members that the debate ends at 3 pm. I do not know how many people want to speak, but I propose commencing the wind-ups at 20 minutes to 3.

13:57

[Zac Goldsmith (Richmond Park) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to speak under your chairmanship, Mr Benton. I congratulate the hon. Member for Stoke-on-Trent North (Joan Walley) on initiating this important debate, and on making an excellent and impassioned speech, as ever. I take this opportunity to congratulate the Under-Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, my hon. Friend the Member for Camborne and Redruth (George Eustice), on his appointment, and I sincerely thank his predecessor, my hon. Friend the Member for Newbury (Richard Benyon) for his brilliant work on reforming the disastrous common fisheries policy, his work on natural capital and his personal commitment to tackling the illegal trade in ivory.

I recognise that the debate covers an enormous range of subjects, but I would like to focus my remarks on the illegal trade in ivory. Hon. Members probably know that up to 40,000 elephants, on average, are killed every year. That equates to one every 15 minutes. If that rate were to apply continuously, it would render the species extinct in the wild within 10 years. It is a tragedy, by any standard, that Africa has already lost some 90% of its elephants in the past half-century. What makes it an even greater tragedy is that the world so nearly put an end to that madness a few decades ago. In 1989, a worldwide ban on the international trade in ivory was approved by CITES, levels of poaching fell dramatically—not completely, but dramatically—and the black market prices of ivory slumped.

However, only 10 years later, malignant interests were able to have their way, as ever, and so-called “one-off” sales were allowed. For example, Botswana, Namibia and Zimbabwe were allowed an experimental one-off sale of more than 49,000 kg of ivory to Japan. In 2002, a further one off-sale was approved, which resulted in 105,000 kg of ivory being shipped to China and Japan. With so much legitimate ivory, if there is such a thing, on the market, illegal ivory was easy to pass off, and demand simply rocketed. More elephant tusks were seized in 2011 than in any year since 1989, when the trade was banned. Sierra Leone lost its last wild elephant in 2009, and Senegal has only a handful or two—between five and 10—elephants left. Congo has lost 90% of them. I could go on through all the African elephant range states.

This intelligent, thoughtful creature is being wiped from the earth, and not for noble reasons. By and large, they are being butchered so that mindless people—mostly, I am afraid to say, the middle classes in China—can buy trinkets, chopsticks, toothpicks, combs and the like. As my hon. Friend the Member for Stoke-on-Trent North has pointed out, they are being hunted down for purposes that are even more sinister, if that is possible, with ivory tusks and rhino horns being hoarded as investment opportunities that rise in value as the species are depleted. It is hard to imagine anything more revolting, but it is happening.

Blood ivory is big business, and it is increasingly sophisticated. In May, 26 elephants were massacred by 17 poachers carrying Kalashnikov rifles in the Dzanga-Ndoki national park, a world heritage site in the Central African Republic that until then had been considered a safe haven for elephants.

All this matters in itself, but anyone tempted to imagine that it is a remote or secondary concern to people in this country should think again, because, as we have heard, this dark industry fuels terrorism and the worst forms of violence around the world. The Foreign Secretary recognised that in his recent comments at the UN in New York, when he said that

“the illegal trade in these animals is not just an environmental tragedy; it strikes at the heart of local communities by feeding corruption and undermining stability in what are already fragile states. And the profits from the trade pose an increasing threat to security by funding criminal gangs and terrorism.”

Only last month, the Foreign Office stated that it was aware of reports that al-Shabaab, the al-Qaeda-backed Somali terror group, is being funded by ivory. As if to vindicate that, only two weeks later, there were the appalling attacks at the Westgate mall in Nairobi. Some 40% of al-Shabaab’s funding is thought to come from ivory. The issue therefore affects everyone. Blood ivory has helped to finance al-Qaeda. It has funded Joseph Kony’s abhorrent Lord’s Resistance Army, and Sudan’s murderous Janjaweed organisation, and so on. It has to stop.

Although our country is not populated by wild elephants, this Government have a very strong role to play. I was pleased that the Foreign Secretary included a reference to the illegal wildlife trade in the leaders’ communiqué at the G8 summit, and I know that he takes a personal interest in this subject. I am also pleased that the Government will host a high-level London conference on the illegal wildlife trade next February. I hope that the Minister has had time to familiarise himself with, and will tell us more about, the early priorities for the conference.

I know that the Government are considering what support, if any, to provide for the African elephant action plan, which was adopted in 2010 by all 38 African elephant range states, and which represents an agreement on a series of ambitious objectives. It would be useful to hear the Minister’s thoughts about that.

The Environmental Audit Committee report that has triggered this debate said many things, but I want to quote one of its recommendations. I am being repetitive, but this is crucial. In our report, which was unanimously signed off, we said that

“the Government should focus attention on the damaging effect of ‘one-off’ sales of impounded ivory, which undermine the international CITES regime and fuel demand for ivory products, and seek an unequivocal international ban on all forms of ivory trade.”

Given the effects of the partial legitimisation of the trade, this is really a black-and-white issue, and I hope that the Minister will provide the clearest possible endorsement of that.

Finally, the good news is that opposition to the illegal wildlife trade in China is growing. That is clear from the fact that China’s largest online marketplace, Taobao, has banned a range of wildlife products: tiger bone, rhino horn, elephant ivory, bear bile, turtle shell, pangolins—I do not even know what they are—and shark fin are on that long list. That big step would not have happened were it not for a changing tide among Chinese consumers. However, progress clearly is not fast enough. I imagine that the Chinese premier, by one stroke of his pen, could shut down the ivory carving factories. I urge the Government to use every diplomatic lever available to accelerate such a process and to prevent the annihilation of a magnificent animal.

14:05

[Justin Tomlinson (North Swindon) (Con)]

It is an absolute pleasure to follow my hon. Friend the Member for Richmond Park (Zac Goldsmith). Given his incredible wealth of knowledge and passion about this subject, there is clearly no pressure on me to deliver in my short speech. I congratulate the hon. Member for Stoke-on-Trent North (Joan Walley) and her fellow Committee members on their first-class, professional and vital report. This is an important opportunity to debate an incredibly important issue and, in particular, to highlight the absolute urgency of taking real action.

My interest in this subject is combined with my work with the International Fund for Animal Welfare. I had the honour of being the guest speaker at its event on combating international wildlife crime at the recent Conservative party conference. It was like being back at school: I had to read some serious documents and study lots of facts. My wife is incredibly passionate about this subject and does a lot of fundraising to support work on the issues, so I also had to be on my absolutely best behaviour.

The reality is that the number of forest elephants has fallen by 62% in 10 years, with the kill rate higher than the birth rate. As a layman, I initially focused just on ivory, but there are trades in big cat pelts, rhinoceros horns, bush meat, scales, antelope wool shawls, tortoise shells, bear gall bladders, shark fins and caviar. The list of unimaginable horrors goes on and on. Animals are used for culinary delicacies, traditional Asian medicines, pets, decorations, hunting trophies, clothing, leather products, jewellery and traditional crafts.

As senior and important as we all are in our respective communities, I was delighted that John Kerry, of all people, highlighted the issue at a recent conference. He said:

“How shockingly destructive and historically shameful it would be if we did nothing while a great species was criminally slaughtered into extinction. And yet, here we are in the midst of one of the most tragic and outrageous assaults on our shared inheritance that I’ve seen in my lifetime—where an elephant’s dead ivory is prized over its living condition, where corruption feeds on its body and soul, and where money only makes matters worse.”

To put the issue in context, the ivory trade has doubled since 2007 and the price of ivory is now $2,205 per kg, while the price of rhinoceros horn, from an animal which has been brought to the edge of extinction, is now a staggering $66,139 per kg. That is greater than the cost of gold or platinum; a rhinoceros horn the size of a bag of sugar would cost approximately £20,000.

My hon. Friend the Member for Richmond Park was spot on when he spoke about links to terrorist groups. Criminal groups, warlords, militants and terrorist groups are all taking advantage by utilising their drug-smuggling routes. This is large scale; it is a huge problem. The WWF estimates that the trade is worth somewhere between $15 billion and $25 billion, but compared with other transnational criminal activities, it carries a low risk of detection, small penalties and minimal consequences, which are attractive incentives and drivers for groups of smugglers. For example, fines are just £300 in India and £900 in Nepal. We are talking about a $25 billion industry, with the equivalent of a bag of sugar costing £20,000, so it is a no brainer that there are drivers and incentives for going into the trade. Groups are taking advantage of their networks and exploiting local people in abject poverty, because the financial incentives prove so compelling. Smugglers are also corrupting officials, and killing the rangers paid to protect these vital animals. There have been more than 1,000 deaths of rangers in 35 different countries over the past decade.

What are the chances of combating global and terrorist organisations? The Government have made a start, but we need to consider a long-term commitment to the national wildlife crime unit. We do not want it to have to lobby every year to secure funding; we want it to get on with the task in hand. We have an incredible opportunity to build on the forthcoming London summit. We, the British, can lead internationally. The Minister, whom I congratulate on his new position, will do an incredibly fine job. He has a great opportunity to lead on this important issue and to be proud on behalf of the UK.

We need to consider how we can provide viable alternatives for communities in abject poverty. There are opportunities, I suggest, within the foreign aid budget to create sustainable alternatives. We need to look for commercial opportunities. A good example is the work that the International Fund for Animal Welfare has done with whaling in Iceland. Tourists are now flocking to see whales in real life. It would not help that commercial and profitable trade if people were to see them being butchered for meat.

Working with IFAW, we want to see that wildlife crime is treated seriously, on a par with drugs and human trafficking, and that requires international pressure. We want to see other countries prioritise the matter, too. We need to co-ordinate international action, especially on law enforcement capacity and developing effective judicial systems, which come naturally to us but perhaps not so naturally to some other countries where such crimes are prevalent.

We need to encourage, develop and implement regional strategies in areas such as central Africa and the horn of Africa, and recognise the new challenges that come from China. Huge Chinese investment into many African countries brings with it Chinese workers, thereby bringing demand to the heart of the country and removing the need to smuggle the goods. We must take action in those countries and address the growing demand and availability of ivory, as my hon. Friend the Member for Richmond Park highlighted. We saw demand drop, but now it is coming back strongly. Worryingly, 80% of Chinese people do not realise that an elephant has to be killed to get ivory.

Yesterday, the Public Accounts Committee, of which I am a member, took evidence from representatives of the UK Border Force. I am delighted to say that when they were asked about two of their performance targets—the number of seizures under CITES and seizures of products of animal origin—they recognised that more training and support was needed. Next year, additional funding has been found, which is a good thing in such straitened times. In evidence, we were told that it was difficult to recognise the products and when they are recognised it is not always clear what needs to be done, so I welcome more training.

In conclusion, I hope that our new, exciting and fantastic Minister will pick wildlife crime as one of the issues that he can be exceptionally proud of dealing with. I hope he will be articulate and lead at the forthcoming conference, giving this country the opportunity to be at the head of this issue. I want Britain to be proud and to make a difference.

14:13

[Barry Gardiner (Brent North) (Lab)]

It is a great pleasure, Mr Benton, to serve under your chairmanship in this debate. I pay tribute to the Chair of the Environmental Audit Committee, my hon. Friend the Member for Stoke-on-Trent North (Joan Walley), who usually does a sterling job in steering her group of colleagues to impeccable conclusions, and this report is no exception. I welcome the Minister to his new position. I had the pleasure of serving with him on the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee, and I know that he brings to his new role not only a wealth of experience and knowledge but a great deal of passionate commitment, and I look forward to working with him.

It has been a good debate. We have gone over many aspects of the original EAC report, but I still have a few issues to highlight. First, there is a need for the Government to clarify their position on controls of the possession of certain pesticides, in view of the effect that they can have on wildlife and the way they are used in wildlife crime in this country. I refer to the supplementary evidence that was submitted to the Select Committee by the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds and particularly want to draw it to the attention of the Minister. Currently, offences occur as a result of improper storage and use of approved pesticides contrary to the statutory conditions. The improper storage and use of pesticides that have had their ministerial approval removed is, of course, an offence. There are also examples of people storing legitimate pesticides specifically for attacking wildlife in this country, and they are escaping the law at the moment.

Carbofuran is an example of a pesticide that has had its ministerial approval for use removed, but can still be properly stored in England. Section 43 of the Natural Environment and Rural Communities Act 2006 creates an offence of possession of pesticides harmful to wildlife proscribed by the Secretary of State. That is a method of ensuring that we capture the storage of those pesticides for illegal purposes—where they are being used to kill wildlife. An order listing the prescribed pesticides could be made, which would deal with that issue.

In Scotland, a list of eight pesticides has been prescribed—aldicarb, alphachloralose, aluminium phosphide, bendiocarb, carbofuran, mevinphos, sodium cyanide and strychnine—under the Possession of Pesticides (Scotland) Order 2005. We need such legislation in England. We have the provision for it under the 2006 Act, and the RSPB, in its supplementary evidence to the Committee, made a strong case for legislation. I hope the Minister will look at the matter seriously. It is one way in which the pesticides used in poisoning wildlife in the UK could be brought under control. A full enactment of section 43 NERC controls would be a powerful tool in the fight against wildlife crime and the illegal poisoning of wildlife in particular.

As I have said, that offence in Scotland has shown its value with at least 10 successful prosecutions involving at least four of the products on the current list, one of which involved the possession of 10.5 kg of carbofuran. Let me put that in perspective. That amount of carbofuran is enough to poison the entire Scottish population of birds of prey six times over. I recommend that the Minister considers such legislation. It is a remedy that is easily available to him. It has proved its efficacy in Scotland and should be replicated in England.

On the subject of birds of prey, I want to echo the wise words of the Chair of the Select Committee about raptor persecution and vicarious liability. No one should underestimate the true effect of raptor persecution on some of the UK’s most endangered species. According to the Government-sponsored joint nature conservation committee report on hen harrier conservation, 2013 was the first year in which there was not a single successful breeding pair in the UK. That is extraordinary, and I know that the Minister, although new to his position, will take the matter seriously. There is enough appropriate habitat in the UK to support 324 to 340 breeding pairs of hen harrier. Today, we have zero breeding pairs.

As for the peregrine falcon, the goshawk and other raptors, it is absolutely clear that someone is more likely to see a peregrine falcon from the terrace of the House of Commons than they are on a walk through the north-west Peak district. Why? That is a question that the Minister should ask himself. The Committee was entirely right to focus on vicarious liability, because without vicarious liability we will lack a key piece in the puzzle—highly intensive, driven grouse moors with irresponsible owners. At this point, I will say that there are many grouse moors that are sensibly, properly and responsibly managed. However, we all know that there are also irresponsibly managed moors, and the evidence shows that they are having a devastating effect on the populations of some of Britain’s most iconic birds of prey.

The EAC report shows a clear understanding of that problem. Of those convicted of raptor persecution, 70% are gamekeepers. There is no getting away from that fact and it is something that the Department must address by looking seriously at vicarious liability.

[Simon Hart (Carmarthen West and South Pembrokeshire) (Con)]

I take very seriously what the hon. Gentleman says, but I hope that he will also recognise that the population problems—particularly with regard to hen harriers, which he referred to—is not restricted exclusively to areas where there are either amateur or professional gamekeepers. Indeed, I also hope that he will concede that even RSPB reserves have failed to establish any breeding pairs of hen harriers. So, I hope that he is not implying that this problem is purely down to one cause, and when the Minister responds to the debate I hope that he, too, will take that point on board and recognise that the problem is a little more complex than that.

[Barry Gardiner]

I am very happy to accept what the hon. Gentleman says. He is, of course, right that there are many and complex reasons why a species may become extinct in the UK. However, the fact is that the species that I am talking about is on the brink and is being persecuted by some irresponsible gamekeepers. That is absolutely clear.

I welcome all that the game industry is doing in terms of distraction feeding and so on; it is making serious efforts. However, some irresponsible gamekeepers shoot raptors and they have a vendetta against hen harriers in particular. That must stop and the way to achieve that is through vicarious liability.

We are pressed for time and I want to leave the Minister enough time to respond to the debate. Four key points have been raised today by colleagues. First, which chief constable is currently responsible for the national wildlife crime unit? We need to know that, because the person we all thought was responsible has been suspended. Secondly, will the Minister give an assurance that the NWCU will continue beyond 2014, and will he consider incorporating it into the Department’s three-year funding cycle as part of its base budget and stop this nonsense of one-year roll-on? Thirdly, will he commit to running a more effective convention on international trade in endangered species regime domestically, under the Control of Trade in Endangered Species (Enforcement) Regulations 1997? Fourthly, there has been an impassioned plea to stop the illegal slaughter of elephants, as the hon. Member for Richmond Park (Zac Goldsmith) pointed out. Incidentally, I just say to him that the pangolin is a scaly anteater; it is Manis manidae. However, it is a mammal, even though it has scales. The hon. Gentleman pointed out, quite correctly, the connections with al-Shabaab, Janjaweed and the Lord’s Resistance Army. This is big business, and it is big criminal business. For that reason, I heartily endorse his remarks and hope that the Department will take this issue very seriously indeed. If it does not, its staff will look very silly next year at the meeting next February to discuss international wildlife crime, which we are hosting.

14:23

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (George Eustice)]

I am grateful to the Liaison Committee and to the hon. Member for Stoke-on-Trent North (Joan Walley), who is the Chair of the Environmental Audit Committee, for securing this debate. It is a shame that it has taken so long to secure it. She explained to me earlier that part of the reason for that was that, with the summer recess coming, it was not easy to get a slot. She also made the point that it took the Government some time to respond to the Committee’s report. I am able to say that that was nothing to do with me, because I was not in the Government at the time. However, what I can say—a number of people have said this already—is that my predecessor, my hon. Friend the Member for Newbury (Richard Benyon), was absolutely passionate about these issues, so I do not think anyone should read into that delay that there was any lack of interest in the issue of wildlife crime on his part.

As we have heard, wildlife crime is a matter that we all care deeply about. Hon Members are quite right to seek reassurance about what the Government are doing to tackle the issue. Efforts to tackle wildlife crime have moved forward hugely in the last 10 years, thanks to the commitment and enthusiasm of successive Governments, the enforcement agencies and the many non-governmental organisations that willingly share their expertise and experience. We should take a moment to reflect on what has already been achieved, and to put on record our appreciation of the contribution that has been made by everyone who has been involved. Their work has helped to make the UK the envy of many countries around the world on this issue.

The range and nature of the evidence submitted to the Committee’s inquiry—we heard from the Chair of the Committee that there were 57 submissions—showed how interested people are in this issue, and there was a range of perspectives. As the Chair of the Committee said, the threat from the international wildlife trade has come into sharper focus this year. I welcome hon. Members’ support for the action that the Government are taking to work with the international community to tackle this issue. The increasing levels of elephant and rhino poaching, and of illegal trade globally, are indeed very worrying. They not only threaten individual species but governance, national security and development goals.

The Chair of the Committee said that the illegal wildlife trade is the fifth biggest criminal activity globally. The figures that I have been given suggest that it is now the third biggest, behind only drugs and people trafficking. It has now been categorised by the UN as a serious organised crime. As many hon. Members have already alluded to, as part of our commitment to tackling this trade we will host a conference in London on 13 February 2014 to galvanise international efforts to tackle wildlife crime and to secure top-level global political commitment on this issue. In the run-up to the conference—

[Caroline Lucas]

Perhaps I will pre-empt what the Minister was about to say, but I wanted to pick up on the point that the Chair of the Committee made earlier about the London conference, which we all welcome. Can the Minister assure us that in addition to Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Ministers and officials being there and taking a lead as we would expect they would—we know the Minister’s commitment—will he ensure that the Home Office and the Ministry of Justice will play an absolutely key role at the conference too, because unless they are also on board I fear that we will not see the positive outcome that we all want?

[George Eustice]

I was about to go on to say that, although I cannot say exactly which Departments will be represented at the conference, in the run-up to it the Government are collaborating closely with other countries, the royal household, multilateral organisations and major NGOs to agree a way forward and to reach a consensus on the required outputs from the conference.

A number of Members have spoken in the debate. My hon. Friends the Members for Richmond Park (Zac Goldsmith) and for North Swindon (Justin Tomlinson) spoke passionately about the problems of the ivory trade; it is clear that there is a very strong feeling about this issue. The Chair of the Committee asked specifically what the Government’s negotiating position on this issue was when it was discussed at the convention on international trade in endangered species conference. I must be honest; being so new to the job, I will have to write to her specifically to set out the precise position that we took. However, looking at the Government’s response to the Committee’s report I know that they obviously touched on some of these issues and made it absolutely clear that we want to maintain the existing ban on raw ivory, although they also highlight that there is a slight difference with some of the antique ivories, which tend to predate 1947; indeed, they are required to predate 1947. There is a slight difference there, but I will write to her to clarify precisely the position that was taken.

[Joan Walley]

I am sure that our Committee would welcome a formal response setting out that position. However, some of the evidence that we received suggested that the Government’s position might not make any difference to the reduction, or growth, of the particular species that we are talking about. So, before he writes that letter, may I ask him to have a second look at the evidence that we received and accordingly base his reply on that evidence?

[George Eustice]

Given the strength of feeling on this issue—there are Members who have already made that point—we will indeed look at that and we will get back, in detail, on it.

I remember that when I was given this job my hon. Friend the Member for Richmond Park sent me a text message saying that he needed to talk to me about elephants. Now I know what that meant and we are talking about it for the first time here. The Government have been a major contributor to the African Elephant Fund, which funds the African elephant action plan, agreed by all the countries that have African elephants. The first objective of that plan is a reduction in the illegal killing of elephants and illegal trade in their parts or derivatives. There is certainly a commitment on the part of the Government. I welcome and respect the passion that my hon. Friend has brought to that element of the debate.

The hon. Member for Stoke-on-Trent North talked about problems of raptor persecution. A number of hon. Members mentioned hen harriers in particular and problems relating to those. The persecution of birds of prey is of grave concern. Although many of our birds of prey are doing well, their persecution is not acceptable. We remain committed to addressing the illegal killing of birds of prey. Persecution can take many forms, such as poisoning, shooting and deliberate destruction of nests, and it is totally unacceptable.

Bird of prey persecution remains one of the UK’s wildlife crime priorities and we will continue to work to ensure that we take the right steps to take enforcement action in respect of any offences being committed. DEFRA is working with the police and other stakeholders who are best placed to help facilitate a reduction in bird of prey persecution. The group working on this has been looking at types of offence that occur and, earlier this year, established maps that show where incidents of bird of prey poisoning have taken place. This will help detect to trends and inform decisions on where action might be targeted.

A main focus of our efforts will be the hen harrier, populations of which in England are critically low. No nests appear to have been successful this year. Hon. Members commented on the number of hen harriers. There are some breeding pairs in Scotland. Although full details are not available, there are apparently 12 breeding pairs in England and many more in Scotland and Wales. Persecution is regularly cited as a reason for failure for the hen harrier population to grow, so considering how enforcement tools can be best used to protect it is an important strand of work in assisting its recovery in England. Let me assure hon. Members that there is a robust legal framework for protecting birds of prey in England, with penalties including imprisonment for offenders.

There is almost universal agreement—the Committee’s report contained a strong recommendation for it—on recognition for the important work of the national wildlife crime unit. I recognise and appreciate the huge contribution that the unit makes to wildlife law enforcement, both in the UK and internationally. The unit is small, but its impact is big. It has helped raise awareness of wildlife crime and provided professional expertise and support for wildlife law enforcers across the UK, enhancing their ability to identify and tackle wildlife crime. It has also played an important part in a number of Interpol initiatives targeting particular species groups and has lent its expertise to and assisted in global efforts to conserve those species most at threat from illegal international trade. It clearly has strengths and expertise that would contribute to the UK’s response, which is another reason why we need to reach a decision on the future of the unit as soon as possible.

The hon. Lady asked specifically about the Association of Chief Police Officers head of the NWCU, wanting to know who has taken on the role. I am told that it is currently in the hands and under the leadership of acting Chief Constable Bernard Lawson from Cumbria, who took on the role temporarily from Chief Constable Hyde. A new head of wildlife crime for ACPO will take on the role permanently, once they are appointed.

The Committee recommended that long-term funding for the unit should be secured and the Government have confirmed that funding will be provided until the end of March next year. Many hon. Members agree strongly with the Committee—I have listened carefully to the points made, including by the shadow Minister, the hon. Member for Brent North (Barry Gardiner)—about the importance of securing funding for it. I understand the frustration with the fact that it has not been possible to do that so far.

The funding is not as straightforward as it might appear. Hon. Members will be aware that the unit is currently co-funded by DEFRA, the Home Office, the Scottish Government, the Northern Ireland Government, ACPO and the Association of Chief Police Officers in Scotland. All these bodies are considering their position on the future of the unit and recognise how important it is that we come to a decision as soon as we can. We will advise the House as soon as a decision has been made.

The shadow Minister mentioned possession of pesticides, particularly in the context of harrier populations. The Committee raised this concern in its report. Specifically, there is concern about possession of carbofuran and other pesticide ingredients and whether we should follow the Scottish example and the approach taken there. The Committee recommended that possession of such chemicals should be an offence. I am grateful to hon. Members for raising this today, as it gives me an opportunity to clear up this matter.

The hon. Gentleman says that it is legal to store these chemicals, but not to use them. However, the advice that I have been given is that approvals for the use of pesticide containing carbofuran were revoked in 2001, which means that the advertisement, sale, supply, storage or use of carbofuran is already a criminal offence under existing UK legislation. Therefore we do not need to change the law. We simply need to recognise that it is already illegal to store it.

[Barry Gardiner]

Of course, this is not only about carbofuran, but about a range of other chemicals that can be used to poison wildlife, not just hen harriers. I agree that it is not necessary to change the law. There is a perfectly sensible provision, under the NERC Act, that would allow a list of chemicals to be drawn up that can be, and are being, used in this way. The Scottish experience shows that by putting chemicals on that list and applying the law, and then successfully enforcing it and prosecuting people, it is possible to target the criminals who are doing this.

[George Eustice]

I understand the hon. Gentleman’s point—I probed it when looking into this issue—but approval for the majority of pesticides linked to wildlife poisoning cases has been revoked, or they have never been approved for use. Carbofuran tends to be, as it were, the weapon of choice for those who want to poison these birds. It is already illegal under existing pesticides legislation. This legislation, together with the use of amnesty initiatives in place in some areas, already addresses this issue. Therefore there is no need to create a new offence.

[Barry Gardiner]

I appreciate the Minister’s engaging in a dialogue on this point. If prosecutions were taking place under the existing proscription of these chemicals, we would be more confident that the law was effective in stopping their being used for poisoning wildlife. Given that that is not so, and that the Minister will accept that they are still being used to poison wildlife—not just carbofuran, but the other ones I listed—perhaps it does make sense to put them on the list under NERC.

[George Eustice]

If, as the hon. Gentleman says, there is a low conviction rate for the illegal use of these chemicals, that suggests a difficulty in or lack of enforcement, not that the law is falling short in allowing prosecution. There is no material difference between being able to find that somebody is storing a chemical or having it hidden away in the garage or a farm shed and their having possession of it. Therefore that would not change the ability to get convictions on this front.

The Committee recommended that the Government introduce a new offence in England of vicarious liability—mentioned by the shadow Minister and other hon. Members—following the Scottish Government’s decision to introduce the offence in January 2012. The Law Commission has been considering the issue further as part of its wildlife law project. I understand that the commission will publish a report shortly setting out its conclusions following consultation, which will include its views on whether to introduce an offence of vicarious liability. It would probably be prudent to await that report before commenting further.

The Committee also recommended that the national wildlife crime unit be directed and funded to develop a wildlife crime database of incidents reported to the police and of prosecutions. Although I can see why the Committee made that recommendation, recording that information alone is not the answer. To better understand the nature of wildlife crime being committed across the UK, the unit works with Government Departments, police force intelligence bureaux and scientific and other organisations to produce an intelligence-based assessment of current, emerging and future wildlife crime threats, with recommendations for action. That approach ensures the best use of the unit’s time and resources and focuses attention firmly on intelligence, which is consistent with modern policing procedures and practices. I am concerned that if we diverted the unit’s efforts into developing a database, it might take effort and resources away from intelligence and the pursuit of leads.

The unit launched a new website in June 2013 that contains lots of useful information and background, and it is already proving to be a useful resource and source of information. I hope that hon. Members who take an interest in wildlife crime will look at that website, because it helps to share information.

The hon. Member for Stoke-on-Trent North mentioned the rather technical issue of the proposed changes to the COTES regulations and asked specifically when that is likely to be concluded. There is an ongoing consultation, and the tweaks to the COTES regulations are quite technical. We had initially hoped to conclude at some point this year, but since then there have been additional EU directives that the consultation must take into account. As a result, we expect the consultation to be published some time in 2014. The consultation, nevertheless, is under way, which I hope reassures her.

As I draw to a close, I once again thank the hon. Lady for introducing this debate. I also thank all the hon. Members for their thoughtful contributions. Wildlife law enforcement is of course a wide-ranging issue. The law is sometimes complex and overlapping, arising as it does from international, European and domestic legislation. There will always be a balance to be struck, for example, between what we can achieve and where best to focus our combined energies and commitment to deliver the greatest benefit, and I suspect we will never all agree on where our activity should focus. I am absolutely convinced, however, that this is an area where we cannot reduce our effort and where we must continue to work together in partnership.

The UK has a good story to tell on its approach to wildlife law enforcement, and our general approach is widely respected across Europe and internationally. We absolutely cannot be complacent, however, and although the Government cannot accept all the Committee’s recommendations, we welcome the Committee’s interest and engagement in this matter.

14:43

[Joan Walley]

I would briefly like to say how valuable this debate has been. I am grateful to everyone, not just to members of the Environmental Audit Committee but to other Members, for contributing. The debate shows that Parliament has a role in dragging up the Minister’s trouser legs to push the agenda further forward. That was the original intention when the Environmental Audit Committee was set up, in the words of my noble Friend Lord Prescott. The strength of feeling this afternoon shows that this debate is not simply a question of there being a Select Committee report and a Government response—that is it, the matter is closed. What we want to get across is that the agenda is fast changing, and we would welcome the Minister, perhaps in informal discussions with us, reconsidering not just the Government’s response but where we might make further progress. I hope that that can happen.

If I were an elephant in need of a friend, I would want a friend in Richmond Park. I genuinely believe that the contribution of the hon. Member for Richmond Park (Zac Goldsmith) flagged up the importance of everything that we need to be doing. I hope firm conclusions will come from that.

The contribution of the hon. Member for North Swindon (Justin Tomlinson) shows and reinforces the role of Parliament. It is not just the Environmental Audit Committee but the Public Accounts Committee; given what is happening with the UK Border Force and how CITES is going ahead, all of Parliament’s Select Committees have a role. The hon. Member for Chippenham (Duncan Hames) referred to the international aspects. It is not just a matter of this Parliament and its Select Committees; we need to be networking much more closely with select committees in Parliaments across Europe and elsewhere to keep the momentum going on this agenda. This debate is important.

I welcome the contribution of my colleague on the Front Bench, my hon. Friend the Member for Brent North (Barry Gardiner). He rightly raised the issue of carbofuran, to which the Committee gave a lot of attention. The Government’s response has been to dismiss the issue out of hand, and they have been unwilling to consider introducing an order under section 43 of the Natural Environment and Rural Communities Act 2006. As in Scotland, we believe there should be an order of possession. Is it all right for a gamekeeper to have carbofuran in his pocket? Will that protect raptors? That is worth revisiting.

I welcome many of the Minister’s responses to our recommendations, but the Government have not considered the matter in the cross-cutting way that is now needed given the urgent threat to endangered species. I wonder whether there is a small opportunity prior to the 2014 summit for the Minister, once he is into his new role, to bring together Ministers from the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and the Home Office to thrash out how the Government are to show true leadership.

I understand that funding for the national wildlife crime unit is contributed by many different parties, but should it not just be in the basic line of Government spending? The funding should be automatic. Perhaps that needs to be revisited.

This debate has been useful, and I say to everyone who has contributed that the Environmental Audit Committee will not just leave the matter here. We will keep following up. The sooner we start working together on those issues, with Parliament having a say and having influence, the better.

14:48

Sitting suspended.

Work Programme

Thursday 10th October 2013 Westminster Hall

[Mr Charles Walker in the Chair]

[Relevant documents: Can the Work Programme work for all user groups?, First Report from the Work and Pensions Committee, HC 162, and the Government Response, HC 627.]

14:55

[Dame Anne Begg (Aberdeen South) (Lab)]

I am delighted to be given the chance, Mr Walker—five minutes early—to debate the report on the Work programme that my Select Committee published at the end of May this year, and the Government’s response to it.

Other colleagues will arrive, hopefully, in time for when they thought that the debate would start, but in the meantime I extend my congratulations to the new Minister; this is perhaps her first outing in her new role. She may be new to the employment aspects of the role, but she is all too familiar with certain issues that I shall raise this afternoon to do with people with disabilities and their ability, or inability, to get into work. I appreciate that when I refer to “the Minister” this afternoon, it is probably not her that I am speaking about, but her predecessor. I extend my condolences to him, in as much as he proved to be a capable Minister whenever he appeared before our Committee, and he knew his brief well.

The report that we are debating was the result of our second inquiry into the Work programme. The first, in May 2011, was on the contractual arrangements of the programme just before it was introduced. At the time, we said that we would return to the subject, to see how things were working out in practice and whether the Work programme was delivering on its promises. As a result, we carried out a further inquiry into the experience of the people on the Work programme; as that inquiry progressed, we realised that while the programme might be delivering sustained job outcomes for some people, it was not effective in helping those who have major barriers to work, such as those who are homeless, have drug or alcohol problems or, in particular, have a disability or health problem, diagnosed or undiagnosed.

The report is therefore called “Can the Work Programme work for all user groups?” The question mark is important. In short, the answer is no. To be generous, I could say that the answer is not yet, but there would have to be major changes to the way in which the contracts are delivered, and to how the differential pricing structure works, if the Work programme is to begin properly delivering job outcomes for those with the highest barriers to work.

My Committee’s starting point was one of broad support for the programme’s policy intentions and innovative approach. It was a replacement programme—a single one, instead of all the various welfare-to-work schemes introduced by the previous Government. It was to focus on sustained job outcomes and to be a payment-by-results system. Elements such as the differential pricing structure were meant to encourage providers to focus on those who were furthest from the world of work, not just those who were easiest to help.

There was also to be a prime provider model, in which large providers—predominantly from the commercial sector—would bear most of the financial risk of operating in a results-based system, but draw on the expertise of a wide range of subcontractors to deliver services, in particular to meet the requirements of jobseekers with more complex needs.

The debate is timely, in that the Department for Work and Pensions has just published its latest set of statistics on Work programme performance; it is the third set of statistics, covers the period between July 2012 and June 2013 and was published at the end of September. The statistics bear out the conclusion of our report: the performance levels for mainstream jobseekers have continued to improve—some commentators say that they are plateauing, but they have improved after a shaky start—and are now above the Department’s minimum performance levels.

For those claiming employment and support allowance, however, the results remain very poor: only 5.8% get work, which is way below the minimum performance levels, set at 16.5%. Only six people out of every 100 in that group are getting a sustained job. In fact, for that group of claimants—the group that the Government said they would not leave languishing on benefits as the previous Government did—the Work programme is delivering a worse outcome than the previous, specialist welfare-to-work programmes for the recipients of incapacity benefit, such as pathways to work.

Pathways to work varied in different parts of the country, but the programme had job outcomes of between 10% and 30%. The coalition Government, on coming to power, said that those results were simply not good enough—but if the 30% was not good enough, the 5.8% must be a cause for shame. That is why our key conclusion was that differential pricing had not had its intended impact. Creaming and parking persist, and we believe that segmenting jobseekers into payment groups according to the type of benefit being claimed is proving ineffective. We also have concerns about how the prime provider model is operating in practice, having heard evidence that smaller niche providers with the experience to support more disadvantaged jobseekers have received far fewer referrals than anticipated, and in some cases none at all.

Our inquiry was hampered by a lack of transparent data. We were unable to assess from official statistics the level of specialist providers’ involvement in the programme, or how effective those providers are. Publishing official referral and performance data at subcontractor level would not only aid effective scrutiny, but facilitate the development of a more effective welfare-to-work market.

As this debate is about the Government’s response to our report, I would like to turn my attention to some of our concerns about the process for formulating Government responses. The quality of the Government’s response is poor and includes some perfunctory responses to individual recommendations. There is no explicit indication of whether the Government agree with the overall thrust of the report. Some of their actions suggest that they share at least some of the Committee’s concerns, but those are not mentioned in the response, or are mentioned only perfunctorily. I will give a few examples.

The current consultation on Work programme statistics, which accepts the need for the Department to improve the scope and clarity of official data, is not mentioned. The response alludes briefly to a pilot in which Work programme participants who are undertaking or recently undertook treatment for drug or alcohol dependency attract increased outcome payments. That is exactly the sort of pilot we recommended. Clearly, the Government share to some extent our concern that the Work programme pricing structure does not sufficiently incentivise providers to help some groups of harder-to-help claimants. A fuller description of the pilot and how it will be evaluated would have been appropriate. We are aware of a further pilot that tests closer working between the Work programme providers and treatment programmes to support participants with a history of drug or alcohol problems, but that is not mentioned at all in the Government’s response.

The response gives the strong impression that no official in the Department for Work and Pensions has read the report in full. In some cases, it addresses only the text of the individual recommendation paragraphs, instead of engaging with the preceding evidence-based discussion and argument in our report. A particularly egregious example is the Department’s reply to the Committee’s concern that smaller specialist providers seem not to be involved in the Work programme to the extent anticipated. The Department states:

“In fact, the latest stock-take of the Work Programme supply chain shows that 43% are from the voluntary and community sectors, and charities.”

That sounds good, unless our report has been read. The official who drafted that sentence seems ignorant of the fact that in the paragraphs preceding the recommendation the report casts serious doubt on the usefulness of that stocktake exercise. It notes evidence that many organisations included in the 43% cited by the Department for Work and Pensions have received no Work programme referrals at all.

The report highlights the results of a BBC “Panorama” survey of voluntary sector organisations listed as Work programme subcontractors, but 40% of those organisations did not even consider themselves to be part of the Work programme when they were approached, and 73% had received fewer referrals than expected. The stocktake seemed to us to be merely a list of organisations named by prime contractors as being part of their Work programme supply chains, regardless of whether those organisations have received a single client via the Work programme. It was clear from evidence to our inquiry that the stocktake tells us nothing about the availability of specialist support within the programme.

We had other concerns about responses to some of our recommendations. The response to our recommendations on minimum performance levels does not engage with the Committee’s concern that the Government’s calculation of minimum performance levels seems to be based on unrealistic economic forecasts made prior to the launch of the programme. Paul Lester’s independent review, which the Department holds up as evidence that it has dealt with this issue, seems to have concerned itself only with how data on performance are presented, and not with how more realistic performance expectations can be calculated.

The Department’s primary concern seems to be that performance in year one of the Work programme looked low to commentators and the media. Our concern, which was not addressed in the Government’s response, was that performance was in fact low—it did not just seem low; it was low—when measured against the Department’s unrealistic expectations.

This is fundamentally important in a payment-by-results programme. If contractual performance expectations are set too high, they risk starving providers of funding, with inevitable consequences for service delivery. Our recommendation that the Department explore, with independent experts, new methods for setting minimum performance levels that are more responsive to economic conditions and can be more transparently calculated and applied deserved a more considered response from the Government.

We also made recommendations about jobseeker segmentation. It is clear that the Department knew from the outset that segmenting participants predominately by benefit type and using that as the basis for the differential pricing structure was a risk. Everyone accepted that benefit type was only a very rough proxy for claimants’ level of need. There is now strong evidence that segmenting claimants in this way ignores important information that is crucial in making an accurate assessment of claimants’ distance from the labour market. Participants most at risk of not having their needs recognised or addressed include homeless people, those with unrecognised health or disability-related barriers to work, and people with a history of drug or alcohol problems.

The Department says it is

“currently exploring whether we can more effectively identify and segment those claimants who are likely to be particularly difficult to help back into sustained employment.”

However, more details about the Department’s work and the approach it is considering would have been appreciated. We believe it should pilot an initial assessment along the lines of the Australian jobseeker classification instrument, testing its effectiveness in jobcentres. We hope that in that way the specialist help will go to those who are furthest from the labour market.

Another recommendation was that the money that was returned to the Treasury because of the year one underspend should have been redirected to the Work programme. Due partly to the underperformance I have referred to in terms of the data, £248 million was unspent in year one of the Work programme. That could have been used to address some of the programme’s clear shortcomings over the course of the current contracts. The recommendation received the most dismissive of responses. The Department simply told us:

“All in-year under-spends are returned to Her Majesty’s Treasury.”

That might be a statement of fact, but it is despite the then Minister telling us in oral evidence that he had entered into discussions with the Treasury on that very point.

Our view is that it was short-sighted not to use that money to help those jobseekers who are currently being failed by the Work programme. The Government should not lose sight of the fact established by Lord Freud in his 2007 review of welfare-to-work that well-targeted and effective employment support for those furthest from the labour market has the potential to achieve large savings for the Exchequer in the long run.

We welcomed the establishment of a best practice group looking at minimum service standards, which are so vague in some cases as to allow providers virtually to ignore some Work programme participants, if they so chose. However, it is unfortunate that the Department appears to have ruled out a single set of core minimum standards on the grounds that it would in some way inhibit providers’ ability to innovate—the black-box approach, I suppose. We simply do not agree. It is perfectly possible to establish core minimum standards that offer all participants protection and service assurance without being overly prescriptive about the services providers offer.

There is no attempt to address the problem of high adviser case loads. Average case loads are between 120 and 180 participants per adviser, which is far too high to allow an acceptable level of service for all participants. Advisers have no choice but to prioritise certain participants to support. The Department’s response to our recommendation that it, together with providers, consider ways of reducing case loads amounts to fewer than four lines of text. Its assertion that compliance monitoring officers

“provide assurance of service delivery at individual claimant level”

is simply not plausible. Addressing high case loads means finding resources for more advisers or offering alternative provision for some participants. It is not just that the differential payment structure is not delivering for those furthest from the labour market, but that an assurance of service quality is not built into the system, which makes it clear why many advisers are not working with those who are most difficult to help.

The Committee also took evidence about the Merlin standard. Much of it was from subcontractors, many of whom felt they had been unfairly treated by primes. Most had received far fewer referrals than they had been promised; some had received none at all. A number had withdrawn from the Work programme altogether. Many felt that, far from shouldering the burden of financial risk, prime contractors were passing the risk involved in payment by results further down the supply chain. We are concerned that the Merlin standard—the regulatory regime intended to monitor the quality of supply-chain relationships—appears incapable of addressing these very real issues. A review of the Merlin standard is necessary, so we welcome the news that the Department for Work and Pensions, together with the Merlin advisory board and the accreditation service provider, is seeking views from across the sector on the regime’s effectiveness to date. Our strong view is that changes are required to strengthen the regulatory regime.

What should be the future shape of the Work programme? The Committee’s key conclusion—that the programme as currently contracted has the potential to work well for relatively mainstream jobseekers, but that it is unlikely to do so for those facing more severe barriers to employment—has been borne out by the published data, and particularly the most recent data. In line with our conclusion, the Employment Related Services Association—the welfare-to-work industry body—openly accepts that the programme is not working well for disabled jobseekers.

Clearly, changes are required. The Government must decide whether improved support for disadvantaged groups can be achieved through changes to the Work programme’s design, pricing structure and payment model, or whether alternative, specialist programmes are required, so that appropriate support is available for everyone who requires it.

Work programme 2, or whatever programme or collection of programmes replaces the current contracts, will need to be in place by 2015. No doubt the Department is beginning to consider its options. It would have been a good start if the Government had engaged properly with the recommendations in our report.

15:14

[Guto Bebb (Aberconwy) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship this afternoon, Mr Walker. It is also a pleasure to follow the Chair of the Select Committee, who has shown a great interest in this subject, as has her Committee. This is a weighty report, which I am sure the Department will take very seriously.

It is worth clearly stating that there are success stories in the Work programme that we should all acknowledge. Yes, there are issues to be dealt with, and that is the nature of a programme that is as ambitious as the Work programme. However, we should acknowledge the success.

We should also acknowledge—this has been acknowledged by the National Audit Office, for example—that the fact that the statistics were collected at a very early stage has resulted in media stories claiming that the programme has failed. It is worth noting that, of those individuals who have completed the 104 weeks—the first cohort—about 41% are still in employment, which is a significant figure.

It is also important to understand that we—I say “we” because I feel passionately that the coalition Government should be proud of the Work programme—are delivering this programme in the context of the austerity facing the public finances. Yet, it is delivering job outcomes at a rate that is beneficial to economies such as that in my constituency. More importantly, success is being delivered at a cost that is significantly below that of the predecessor schemes. For example, the average cost under the Work programme is about £2,097, compared with about £7,500 under the previous programme.

[Anne Marie Morris (Newton Abbot) (Con)]

Does my hon. Friend agree not only that we have the cost benefits to which he alluded, but that, despite the criticism that the programme did not meet its targets, those targets have been better met than the targets set by the previous Government in their schemes?

[Guto Bebb]

That is a fair point. When people try to score political points on this issue, it is worth bearing in mind that the performance of the previous programmes was not as good as what we are seeing under the Work programme.

[Stephen Timms (East Ham) (Lab)]

I will have something to say about the performance of previous programmes if I catch you eye later, Mr Walker. However, I want to pick the hon. Gentleman up on his point, which I agree with, about the programme’s performance at the beginning being particularly disappointing. With the benefit of hindsight, would he agree that the cliff-edge approach of shutting down the previous programme and immediately trying to set up the Work programme—inevitably, it took many providers quite a long time to get going—was not a good way to go about things?

[Guto Bebb]

In view of the fact that we were looking to shake up the way we were supporting people into work, I am not sure there was any other way around that. The summary to the Select Committee report highlights the fact that it was an achievement on the part of the Department to deliver the Work programme so soon after the announcement in Parliament and after the legislation was passed. Despite the circumstances, the programme was delivered.

The key problem with the statistics that people originally looked at is that there is a natural delay in the system before we can talk of a positive outcome in terms of generating a job for somebody. That delay has allowed the statistics to be used to try to make a political point about the programme. I know for a fact that the trade body representing Work programme providers has been particularly annoyed and upset at the way in which some of the statistics that have been released, which often have not indicated the time lag in the programme’s performance, have been used to try to make a point about the way the programme is performing.

Another interesting, key point highlighted in the report’s summary is about the importance of the relationship between Work programme providers and jobcentres. That relationship is highlighted as a weakness of the programme, but I have to say—I can speak only from personal experience in the area I represent—that one of the key factors behind the success of the Work programme in north Wales has been the positive relationship between jobcentres and Work programme providers. A key recommendation in the report is that different areas of the country, with different providers, should learn from each other. If providers in other parts of the country are having difficulties co-operating with their local jobcentres, and they want to learn some lessons, they are more than welcome to come to north Wales, where the relationship is working particularly well. That is not to say that the figures in north Wales are particularly good, but I will come to that, because there are problems facing the programme in different parts of the country that are not necessarily of the programme’s making. That is something I need to put on record.

Another point I want briefly to touch on is whether the Work programme can support all user groups. One of the programme’s crucial successes is in supporting young people back into employment. We have a youth unemployment problem, although it is not as bad as in some other European countries, and we should be thankful for that. There is no doubt that the youth contract and the financial support we offer employers to engage with young people looking for a job who are on the Work programme have been a success.

The report also highlights the fact that there is sometimes a lack of publicity, and of appreciation of what is happening and the support available to employers who want to recruit young people and to understand the Work programme. There is an obligation on Members of Parliament to highlight the support that is available. It does not matter what political party a Member represents; they will obviously prefer the Work programme to be a success. I wrote to hundreds of businesses in my constituency about the Youth Contract, highlighting the financial support available for young people on the Work programme who were job-ready, and willing and able to work, and explaining that if there were opportunities in those businesses the Work programme providers were ready and willing to help. I am glad to say that the initiative resulted in at least 20 young people securing jobs; I know that because employers have contacted me. That might be a small contribution, but as well as highlighting failures politicians have an obligation, where there is lack of publicity or understanding, to let employers know what support is available; because they are the ones who create jobs.

We have identified those under 24 as needing particular support, because of the challenges that they face in getting access to work. As everyone knows, it is easier to get into a job from a job. A young person without experience on their CV needs support to get a position. The Youth Contract has been a significant benefit to many young people, certainly in my part of the world, but perhaps there is a need to extend such support to other hard-to-reach groups. I have been keen to support young people looking for jobs in my constituency, but I am also aware that the average age of my constituents is among the highest in any constituency in the country, and certainly in Wales. A significant problem that we need to re-examine is how proactively to help those over 50 who are desperate to work. They may, despite having skills, have been out of the job market for some time. There is an argument for something similar to the Youth Contract, if funds permit at some point, to support those people. Perhaps we need to persuade employers that there is an advantage in recruiting such people from the Work programme.

[Anne Marie Morris]

My hon. Friend makes an extremely good point. There is a challenge for older people who have been made redundant. Does he agree that an area in which the Work programme could do better is in helping to provide advice and support to those who could think about self-employment? That seems appropriate for the older person. The all-party group on micro-businesses did a survey showing that only half the Work programme providers could provide such advice and support.

[Guto Bebb]

I agree entirely with my hon. Friend. One of the strengths of the Work programme in rural Wales is the fact that providers have been able to vary their targets for attracting people to self-employment. Originally, the significant targets for self-employment were given to providers in south Wales. However, statistics clearly showed that the self-employment option was not doing well in south Wales, but that in rural and north Wales there was considerable interest in taking that route. There is a significant amount of support available from Work programme providers, but, more importantly, there is flexibility in the system to allow the numbers to be switched, and that has benefited many in my part of the world.

[Stephen Timms]

The hon. Member for Newton Abbot (Anne Marie Morris) raised an interesting point. Does the hon. Gentleman agree that it could be useful if eligibility to the new enterprise allowance were to be extended to participants in the Work programme? It is not available to them at the moment.

[Guto Bebb]

That, indeed, is one of the recommendations that I would make to the Department. I have been a key advocate of the new enterprise allowance. A long time ago I was an adviser to people starting out on the old enterprise allowance scheme. There are still businesses in my constituency that were established under that scheme. It is important to provide such joined-up support. I am not making a criticism; Work programme providers are giving valuable support in my constituency to people interested in self-employment. I appreciate the fact that they have developed strong relationships with local enterprise support providers, which is very important; the black box approach is a key issue for Wales. I agree that it would be helpful if the new enterprise allowance were available, especially when there is flexibility in the programme to allow figures and targets to be swapped between different parts of the country. We must not put barriers in the way of people who want self-employment.

Flexibility is a key part of the Work programme. There is no such thing as a standard client. That flexibility is crucial for reaching those who most need support and are most difficult to place. Work programme providers in various parts of the country have sometimes got access to quite specialist support services for individuals, to ready them for the jobs market, and often that support has been partially funded through European funding. For example, the European social fund has enabled some providers to refer Work programme clients to support schemes to make them more work-ready. The Welsh European Funding Office, an arm’s length body fully controlled by the Welsh Government, has decided not to allow Work programme clients access to any programme partially funded by the European social fund. That has been a great barrier to the black box approach. Indeed, Work programme providers in Wales that I have talked to—and certainly the two operating in my constituency—have been unable to get support for their clients that is available elsewhere. That might be support with numeracy, confidence-building or skills, but the providers are not allowed to refer clients to the programmes because of a decision that in Wales if a project is funded by the European social fund the support is not available to Work programme clients.

That is a matter of huge concern. As the report highlights, Welsh performance levels are not as impressive as those in other parts of the country. It could be argued that the economy and employment level in Wales are not as high as elsewhere, but private sector employment growth there, while not spectacular, has been positive since 2010. An extra 69,000 jobs have been generated in the Welsh economy and there is less dependence on the public sector than for a long time. It is bizarre that people who everyone recognises need to be supported into work—and often the ones who most need support—are denied access to programmes provided by further education colleges and specialist providers, just because they are Work programme clients. I am happy to say that evidence from the Welsh Government and the Department for Work and Pensions to the Select Committee on Welsh Affairs, for its report on the Work programme in Wales, will highlight that discrepancy. It is worth pointing out that often the individuals who are worst affected by the decision not to allow Work programme participants to use the schemes may be exactly those who, according to the report we are considering today, are least well served by the Work programme. There is an issue for the DWP, but I also want the message to go out that the Welsh Government should carefully examine the reason why their definition of additionality in European funding differs so markedly from the one used in England.

I have written to small employers in my constituency; and I do not have many large ones. During the general election campaign the present Chancellor of the Exchequer, who was then the shadow Chancellor, wanted to visit my constituency. He asked for a list of employers with more than 500 members of staff, and I could offer him nothing but the local authority. My constituency is very dependent on small businesses; so I have tried to highlight the support available for small businesses from the Work programme. The other thing we have done in my constituency is to undertake a jobs fair, which was a success. We managed to get significant participation and, again, have seen positive outcomes in terms of jobs created. I said clearly to the local newspaper that if one person found a job as a result of the jobs fair, it was my time well spent. Two weeks later, we are up to seven, which is very positive, with another six interviews in the offing.

The key point from that meeting was the fact that a number of small businesses came up to me and said they were confused by the number of organisations telling them that they offered support. This is an important point that we need to get across: we have to ensure that the streamlined level of support and the understanding of what support is available is also part of the way in which we deliver the Work programme. The last thing we want is for employers to feel that it is too difficult to engage with such an important scheme as the Work programme.

My experience of the Work programme has been positive, but I am not somebody who says there is no way in which we can improve the system. We have had two years, and in my view, the programme is delivering well, but there are problems with specific groups who are being supported by it but are not particularly successful, at this point, in getting into employment. We need to look at such things as why there is a delay before somebody can be referred on to the Work programme. In many cases, the delay is because the job centre will be able to support individuals, because, as everybody knows, the opportunity for people to re-engage with the workplace is much higher when they have recently lost a job than it is after several months.

However, there is an issue about identifying individuals who might have specific barriers in terms of getting back into the workplace. Why would it not be possible for such people to be referred immediately on to the Work programme? I am not sure whether there would be a huge additional cost, but we would avoid the period in which somebody loses their confidence for a period because they are in the job centre system and perhaps feeling increasingly dejected as they are unable to get back into the workplace. When identifying someone as needing particular levels of support, it might be worth considering that such individuals could be referred to the Work programme earlier. If we have confidence, as I do, that the Work programme is adapting and meeting the challenges of helping people back into the workplace, the sooner we can refer some people on to it, the better. I would like people to consider that point.

It is also fair to say that the programme was established quickly. The Select Committee recognises that it was an achievement to get the contracts signed and the programme up and running so quickly, but there is always an opportunity to regroup and readdress some issues. I talk to providers in my constituency and yes, they are very enthusiastic about the scheme, yes, they are confident that they will deliver in due course, and yes, they are frustrated with some restrictions in a Welsh context, but one comment that comes out strongly is that the assessment of individuals based on the benefits that they currently claim is a blunt tool, in terms of identifying the required support.

I understand that the reason why that was the way forward initially was that we needed to get the scheme up and running, and obviously, we assess people in terms of what sort of benefits they qualify for. However, as we have more confidence in the providers of the Work programme—and increasingly, we are confident that in most parts of the country we have Work programme providers who know what they are doing—we need to have an increased level of understanding about individual clients’ needs. Ultimately, if there are barriers because of somebody being categorised for a particular benefit, and that barrier is stopping them getting the support they need, we should, at least, try to recognise that and address it in due course. There is an argument for looking carefully at the way in which we assess individuals in terms of the level of support that they need, rather the using the blunt instrument of the benefits that they are receiving.

We also have to look carefully at the fact that we are now coming to the end of the initial two-year period. Clearly, the aim and aspiration is that the vast majority of people in due course will find employment. Current figures show about 56% being returned to job centres and about 41% going into employment, while some have been lost, or have left the system in some way. That is not a bad performance—obviously, I would like to see a majority gaining jobs—but we need to start thinking carefully about what we do now. Do we extend the programme? I have talked to individual Work programme clients—and advisers—and what has been striking is that a number have said that it has taken them a significant period of time simply to rebuild their confidence, and to feel that they can face an employer across a table and try and sell themselves. The coalition Government and, certainly, the DWP need to think carefully about whether there is mileage in extending the Work programme for particular clients for longer than two years. The two-year period is, again, a blunt instrument, because it is one rule for all, despite the fact that we recognise that some individuals need more support than others.

Nobody would deny that we can look at ways to improve the system, but we should be doing so from the point of view of claiming that there are great success stories and significant developments in the Work programme that are helping people get back into employment. As politicians, we need to be constructive friends of the Work programme. Where concerns exist, we need to highlight them, but we need to do so in the context of acknowledging that with a significantly better value-for-money ratio, the programme is delivering support and delivering people back into the workplace. Can it do more? Of course it can. Do we want it to do more? Of course we do. Can the Government look at ideas about changing elements of the programme to be more supportive of those who find it most difficult to find employment? Yes, I think the Government should, but we should also recognise that to date, the programme is a success story. I only hope that that success continues and is enhanced, and if changes result in that enhancement being even greater, no one would be more pleased than me.

15:36

[Debbie Abrahams (Oldham East and Saddleworth) (Lab)]

I apologise for being a few minutes late, Mr Walker. I had the debate down in the diary for 3 o’clock, but I am glad to be here.

It will come as no surprise that I take a slightly different view from the rosy one portrayed by the hon. Member for Aberconwy (Guto Bebb). In fact, my right hon. Friend the Member for East Ham (Stephen Timms) alluded to a different view in his remarks about the start of the programme. As hon. Members probably know, in spite of the difficult economic circumstances faced by the Work programme—which the report acknowledged—the levels of employment achieved through the programme in the first 14 months would have been achieved without it. For the first 14 months, therefore, it was not a success.

I want to focus on a number of points today. We need a 21st-century welfare-to-work system that reflects not only our current economic reality, but the dynamic economy and flexible labour market that we need for the future. I am afraid that the Work programme fails in that regard on a number of levels. It fails, first, in terms of the efficacy of welfare-to-work providers, and I shall try and pick out a few points on that in a moment. Secondly, in contrast to the remarks made by the hon. Member for Aberconwy, it fails to address the growing number of long-term unemployed, and that was really the thrust of the message in our report. The Work programme is also not helping with the change in our economy. It is perpetuating a low-skill, low-aspiration economy. We need to ensure that a welfare-to-work programme complements the type of economy that we want, but it is failing to do so.

I shall focus now on the Work programme providers. We have seen a pattern across public services of private sector providers delivering public services, whether in the Work programme, in adult care, or, increasingly, in the NHS. I do not have a problem with that where private providers innovate, add value or capacity. However, I do have a problem where private providers put profit before people and the services that they deliver. When that is the case, I find it totally unacceptable. It is not acceptable that staffing levels in some Work programme providers mean caseloads of 120 to 180 jobseekers per adviser. It is not acceptable that advisers are not adequately accredited or qualified to fulfil their role. It is not acceptable—my hon. Friend the Member for Aberdeen South (Dame Anne Begg) mentioned this—that small specialist organisations, which are disqualified from applying for contracts separately because they are too small and do not have the financial capacity to bid for them, are lured in and used as bid candy for contract bids, but are then not used. They have a track record of achieving success, particularly for jobseekers with specialist needs, but are not being used. It is not acceptable that there are no minimum standards other than job outcomes, that there is no effective regulation and that there is a lack of transparency of Work programme data, which prohibits effective scrutiny.

One of the Select Committee’s biggest concerns was that the Work programme is failing to address the growing number of long-term unemployed people, particularly young people. The Work programme was supposedly designed to cater for that through a payment-by-results system, with differential pricing based on the type of benefit that jobseekers received, but evidence received by the Committee shows that that is clearly not working, with those furthest from the jobs market being parked and providers creaming off those who are job-ready and easiest to place.

The Select Committee recommended a more holistic approach to identifying the barriers to work—for example, health problems or housing. A number of specialist providers cater for people who are homeless, and homelessness is an increasing problem. That comprehensive, more holistic assessment must be needs-based, and funding models must be developed that reflect an appropriate level of up-front funding.

Related to that, two years after the Select Committee’s report on the work capability assessment, which highlighted our growing concerns at the time, the Committee took more evidence that the WCA is not fit for purpose. One example involved a claimant with terminal cancer whose life expectancy was shorter than the WCA work-ready prognosis, but who had been referred to the Work programme. What is happening about that issue? It has been mentioned before. We are now two years on, but certainly in my constituency surgery, I frequently encounter such cases. Why are the Government not doing more on that?

I urge the Government to act now and undertake an immediate evaluation of the WCA, with a view to revising the assessment process into work-related and health-related components. That, too, was a key recommendation in the Select Committee’s report. It would identify the help that claimants with health conditions or disabilities need in order to get into work.

Let me move on to consider how we develop a welfare-to-work programme that will help to skill up our economy. The WCA is just one example of how the system is not fit for purpose. The Work programme, as the flagship welfare-to-work programme, is failing to help to develop a high-skilled work force. There are indications that opportunities to train beyond, for example, level 3 skills training are being denied to jobseekers. Instead of that type of training being supported, jobseekers are being told that they must attend the training provided through the Work programme and only that. Our welfare-to-work programmes must be more flexible than that. We must be developing our skills base, not restricting it. Just as our economy demands increased flexibility from our labour market, so must our welfare-to-work programmes be more flexible.

Finally, I want to express my concerns about the Work programme in the context of other welfare reforms. Last month, the National Audit Office published a damning report about universal credit. I see direct parallels in how the Work programme and universal credit have been developed and implemented. A key failing identified in the NAO report was the culture and leadership of the Department, which created what was described as a “fortress” culture. I hope that, in addition to responding to my remarks about the work capability assessment, the Minister can explain how she will deal with that culture and ensure that there is more openness and transparency in her Department.

15:45

[Stephen Lloyd (Eastbourne) (LD)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Walker. I congratulate the Minister on her elevation. The question is, can the Work programme work for all user groups? That is the nub of this debate. I share the broad views of my hon. Friend the Member for Aberconwy (Guto Bebb) and his passion for the programme. The Chair of the Select Committee, the hon. Member for Aberdeen South (Dame Anne Begg), knows very well that I am absolutely passionate about the Work programme. One of the key things that got me back into politics was the whole issue of dignity of work and the challenge for the long-term unemployed, so I feel very strongly about the Work programme and I think that in many ways, despite its bumpy start, it is beginning to deliver and is making a significant difference for a lot of people.

The challenge—this is the nub of our report; this is what it focuses on—is whether the Work programme works for all user groups. My view is that, as currently configured, it does not, and I urge the Minister, in her concluding remarks, to deal with the specific issues that have been mentioned. The Department has already had an opportunity to respond to a number of the key recommendations, but I do not feel that it has responded properly.

In the first report, we clearly supported the principle of the programme, but we flagged up two key concerns. The first was whether the differential pricing would be sufficient to incentivise, and the second was whether the Work programme supply chains would be suitably managed to ensure adequate specialist services. The Work and Pensions Committee recognises, as we all do in this area, that for many people who either are a long way away from the job sector or have very specific impairments and disabilities, the best way to help them into work is for them to receive support from those very specialist and often quite small groups that really understand the issue. One of the concerns about the configuration of the Work programme was that we were not confident that the supply chain, when it came down to it, would include all those specialist groups. The Committee made a commitment to return to the Work programme a year later to see whether our concerns in those two specific areas had held water or had been dealt with.

Let us consider differential pricing. I am slightly frustrated about this, because before I came into politics, a lot of the work that I did with Governments of both colours—Labour and Tory in the old days—was in this area. The whole issue of creaming and parking, as the hon. Member for Aberdeen South knows, is old hat. It has been around a long time, so I was very hopeful that differential pricing would crack it, and that this time we would head towards the sunny uplands. Unfortunately, that has not happened, or not to the extent that I would have liked. I need the Government to address that. I need the DWP to be quite fierce about it with the Work programme providers.

I shall give a local example. In Eastbourne, my constituency, the first tranche of those who unfortunately are called two-year returners are coming through the sausage machine. I have had a meeting with a number of the local training providers. Like my hon. Friend the Member for Aberconwy, I work incredibly closely with my local training providers, the chamber of commerce, Jobcentre Plus—you name it—and I am discovering that a fair number of those individuals have had very little support indeed. I am talking about a couple of face-to-face meetings in two years, and then follow-up phone calls. They have been parked. The reason why I am so hopping mad about it is that under the Work programme, those individuals each had a £600 attachment fee. I want to go to the local Work programme providers—my subcontractors, as it were—and, on behalf of the Department for Work and Pensions, claim back £550 per person so that I can feed it into other training operators and get those people jobs. There are issues with differential pricing.

My hon. Friend the Member for Aberconwy talked about benefit versus impairment. I agree strongly—it was one of the recommendations in the report—that how benefit is assessed needs revisiting. I am not urging the Government to revisit the attachment fee at present; however, I do not believe that Eastbourne is any different from any other part of the country, other than that it is the sunniest town in the UK, and for some early people there, the attachment fee has not been used properly. I am disappointed that in some instances, the primes clearly used specialist providers on the list to help them get contracts, but did not use them properly after that. The DWP must look closely at that.

I do not want to tar all providers with the same brush. Like everything else in life, there are good ones, middling ones and bad ones. One thing that I liked about the business model for the Work programme is that the DWP and the Secretary of State always said to us that as time went on, the better Work programme providers would be rewarded and the worse ones penalised. I want to see that happen, and I want the Department to be absolutely vigorous. I am quite prepared to have competition in this challenging and difficult area, but I want it to be genuinely robust, so that better Work programme providers are rewarded and worse ones are not.

The other challenge that we face is helping people with disabilities back into work. I am disappointed—every Government has failed on this issue—but I share the view of my hon. Friend the Member for Aberconwy that we will get better at it. I feel strongly about it. It is difficult. If someone has been out of work for 10 years with a mental health problem and is in the Work programme, it is hard for them. Anyone who says that it is not is in denial. I appreciate the challenge, but I am disappointed that 90% of people with a disability do not succeed in getting a job through the Work programme, and only 6% of those on ESA get a job. I know the issue well, and I know how challenging it is, so I will not jump up and down on the Government, but I demand that we do it differently. All of us—the Select Committee on Work and Pensions, the Opposition and Government Members—know that it has been a crime. It is a waste of human capacity and ability. I urge the Minister, in her response, to take on board the fact that more needs to be done on disability and helping disabled people into work.

Our report made numerous specific recommendations, as the Chair of the Select Committee mentioned. I will focus on two, to keep it simple for the Minister when she responds—the two that the Government did not address. The first was on the accuracy of the work capability assessment. To quote the report, the Committee

“heard some quite shocking examples of participants referred to the Work Programme who had clearly been incorrectly declared fit for work following a WCA. We recommend that DWP work with providers to agree a process by which participants whom providers believe are clearly unfit for work can be referred back to Jobcentre Plus.”

However, we also recognised that a system was needed so that providers could not game the system by saying, “These people are too difficult; send them back to Jobcentre Plus.”

We saw that the situation would get worse, and it has. The coalition Government have done a lot of work around the Harrington report, so it is better than it was a few years ago, but the number of people coming down the pipe is huge compared with a few years ago, so I do not believe that that is good enough. I never had the automatic loathing of Atos that a lot of my constituents and the media have, because I know that we are talking about a difficult task—and, frankly, Atos was appointed by the previous Government. I had hoped that after the Harrington report, Atos would improve and fewer clearly unsuitable people would be passed. The situation is not good enough. I have come to the point where I do not think that Atos is meeting its contract to a level with which the Government should be satisfied. I urge the Minister to take a serious look at that provider. I am seeing too many personal cases.

I have been involved with disability for many years, and if someone with a disability says, “I have a disability; I can’t work,” I have no problem telling them, “Yes, you can. Have you tried it?”. I am quite firm about it, but I get extremely angry when I see what has happened in my constituency over the past 18 months to some people who are clearly not fit for work. I even send one of my casework officers to tribunals more often than not. The Government must address that seriously.

The other recommendation to which the Department did not respond involved provision for unsuccessful participants. I have already mentioned the people coming down the pipe after two years—two-year returners. As the Chair of the Committee will know, we identified them as a concern. I remember personally addressing the Secretary of State about it a year or so ago, and asking for confirmation that a proper system would be in place to manage the people who had not got a job after two years and to keep them going in the direction of travel to get a job, rather than just emphasising their sense of failure. I was given an absolute commitment that the JCP would have a set of programmes ready, but it does not. Things are patchy.

Again, I acknowledge the comments made by my hon. Friend the Member for Aberconwy. Certain JCPs are working well—to be honest, mine are; I get on extremely well with the middle managers there, who work extremely hard—but there is no systemised process, which means that there can be a rubbish service in one constituency because there is no systemised instruction from on high, and a good one nearby because an MP or councillor is enthusiastic about it, or the JCP has a good manager. We must get service provision up to speed right now. I had 31 cases three weeks ago and 12 the week before that, and I have 26 coming down next week. They are beginning to come out of the pipe.

I have met a lot of people who have been on the Work programme and did not succeed in getting a job. Hon. Members will be unsurprised to learn that their emotions vary from enormous rage to a sense of deep shame, depression and so on. I understand that. If I were them, I would be feeling all those things. This is a crucial challenge, to which I urge the Minister to respond in a way that makes me confident that the Government will do some serious thinking about how they can make a difference in helping those people into work.

I will share something that I am doing in Eastbourne, because it might help. Forgive me, but I am liberal: I do not buy and never have bought the concept of the workshy poor. It is dim and ignorant, and it shows no understanding of what things are like. That does not mean that I believe everyone out there is perfect—it does not work like that—but I know that if I had not worked for three or four years, my self-worth would be extremely low. I would almost certainly be taking some nonsense that the doctor had given me for depression, and I would be anxious and nervous about getting a job. The last thing that I would want to be told is that I was workshy vermin and that the only thing that would work was for me to be forced to get a job.

If the Government told me that I had to employ those people, as a good orange booker and someone who has employed dozens of people over the years, my first thought would be to tell them, in words of few syllables, to get stuffed. That is not how things work; this is a free country. I would say, “I am an employer and I am not going to take on these people who have not worked for five years.” To help those folk to get a job, we need to make a difference. We need to step up to the plate as a country, a nation and a Government.

I will tell the Minister what I am doing in Eastbourne. Straight after the election, I launched “100 apprenticeships in 100 days”. I had it all organised because I hoped I was going to win, so I was the first new MP to get going, and the programme has been a huge success. We got 181 apprenticeships in 100 days. The latest figures show that there are 2,500-plus Eastbourne apprentices, and that unemployment is down to 3.9%. I am pounding the town and I have everyone on board in a big tent—I even have Tories in the tent—all working to transform the economy of the town and get people jobs.

Over the past few months, I have begun to meet the people who did not get a job in the past two years, and they are a challenging group. I would be the same if I had not worked for years. I am going into town and saying, “I want 100 work experiences in 100 days”, because the only way that those people will have a prayer of getting a job is with work experience. There will be people who used to be employers. An employer will not employ someone who has not worked for five or seven years—they are not a charity—but if that person has work experience and has done 100 hours’ work experience, that will give them discipline and perhaps tick a few boxes for an employer.

The scheme will work, as long as the MP and the whole town go to employers and say, “Do it for Eastbourne. Do it, not because they’re losers, but because they are our friends and neighbours. They are our family, for God’s sake. Let’s do it because we are all in it together”—excuse me for misquoting the Prime Minister. In fact, I am certain that it will work. I start in a couple of weeks and I look forward to coming back to the DWP and saying, “Listen, this is a way we can make it happen. Please, for the love of God, don’t either say you are going do something and not do it, or demonise this group.” Yes, I know that there will be people who game the system, but the majority are people who feel, for one reason or another, that they are failures. What is happening is just not good enough and I have had it up to here.

I have addressed a few issues to which I would like the Minister to respond. In this very partisan place—I am not very keen on partisanship, but that is probably because I am from a business background—the Work and Pensions Committee was pretty united over this issue. Even when we disagreed, we understood and supported the basic premise of the Work programme, but we want to make it better. We want to make it work, not only for the group of people who, after losing their job, are turned around quickly, but for the challenging group of people who have been stuck for a long time, and for the tens of thousands of people with disabilities, who have tremendous resources and skills to give to the country, which we need. If we do not give the right level of support, we will have failed, despite successes at getting those at the top end into work.

Finally, this debate is important, and not only in this place. The topic exercises the views, personalities and thoughts of literally millions of people. The Select Committee produced a good report. I look forward to the Minister’s response on some of the areas where I think the Government can do better.

16:04

[Stephen Timms (East Ham) (Lab)]

I apologise for missing the first minute or two of the debate. I very much welcome the Select Committee report and the telling observations made by the Chair of the Committee, my hon. Friend the Member for Aberdeen South (Dame Anne Begg), in her opening speech. I also welcome the contributions from the other members of the Committee—my hon. Friend the Member for Oldham East and Saddleworth (Debbie Abrahams) and the hon. Member for Eastbourne (Stephen Lloyd); and indeed from the hon. Member for Aberconwy (Guto Bebb).

I share the Chair’s disappointment that the Government’s response was so cursory and did not address many recommendations fully, but we cannot blame the new Minister for that. I warmly welcome her to her new role. I congratulate her on her appointment. I look forward to debating these matters with her in the coming months. I hope that we will get a little hint from her this afternoon that she recognises the extent to which the Work programme is underperforming at the moment and the fact that it needs change, as the hon. Member for Eastbourne said. I am not denying that good things are happening in the Work programme, but it is underperforming and needs change. We need to look for a major change when the current contracts end.

The hon. Member for Eastbourne talked about those who had left the programme. There were 74,630 people referred to the Work programme in its first month, June 2011, but 53,720 of them returned to Jobcentre Plus after two years without a job. That is a disappointing outcome after two years’ effort. The hon. Member for Aberconwy is right to say that the Work programme got off to a slow start, which was predicted and could have been avoided, but unfortunately was not. I hope that we will see a significantly better performance over the coming months, but of those referred in that first month, more than 50,000 were badly served, with a few of them getting only a couple of face-to-face meetings and a phone call or two, as the hon. Member for Eastbourne described. I am sure that is part of the reason why we saw such a big rise in unemployment at that point.

[Guto Bebb]

According to House of Commons Library figures, 96,000 participants have completed 104 weeks, of which 54,000 have returned, meaning that 40,000 have gone into employment.

[Stephen Timms]

The numbers I have are slightly different, but we can look up the figures. Certainly, 50,000 people spending two years going back to the jobcentre is a disappointing start, but I hope that we will see better figures in future.

I was struck forcefully by something that the Chancellor of the Exchequer said in his spending review statement about the task facing the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions. He said:

“That will require a difficult drive for efficiency, and a hard-headed assessment of underperforming programmes.”—[Official Report, 26 June 2013; Vol. 565, c. 314.]

The Select Committee is right to address key issues underpinning the underperformance of the Work programme identified by the Chancellor. The Centre for Economic and Social Inclusion has been commissioned to carry out the official evaluation of the Work programme, and I think that it will produce an interesting piece of work. In its analysis of the 26 September on the most recent performance data, it points out that two years in, the Work programme is not performing as well as the flexible new deal. The percentage of those over 25 entering the programme who secured a job in two years is 35%; it was 38.9% under the flexible new deal. The Minister’s predecessor but two used to castigate the flexible new deal. It turns out, according to CESI observations, that it was better than the current programme.

One thing that would help, and that the Minister could do quickly, would be to lift the ban on providers publishing data about what is going on in their areas. The ban was introduced—let us be frank—to safeguard the career prospects of the then Minister who introduced it, to whom I recall that the present Minister was Parliamentary Private Secretary, and in that it was successful. The right hon. Gentleman was promoted to his current post in September 2012 and a few weeks later we saw the first Work programme performance data, by which time he was safely off the scene. The ban means that information about what works well has been disseminated much too slowly and the underperformance that concerns the Chancellor, and I suspect all of us, would have been less if providers had been free to publish their performance data, as they were in the past.

The Government’s “Open Public Services” White Paper says:

“To make informed choices and hold services to account people need good information, so we will ensure that key data about public services, user satisfaction and the performance of all providers from all sectors is in the public domain”.

Actually, we had a complete ban on any data at all for the first 18 months of the Work programme. There are still no data, as the Select Committee has pointed out, about subcontractor performance. The “Open Public Services” White Paper, published by the Cabinet Office, uses the phrase

“all providers from all sectors”,

but we have still had nothing at all from the subcontractors. From that quote, I want to pick up the point about user satisfaction, which the Select Committee report also mentions. The Select Committee called, quite rightly, for regular surveys of user satisfaction on the Work programme, which would be valuable information. The “Open Public Services” White Paper had an effusive foreword written by the Prime Minister and the Deputy Prime Minister, in which they signed up to its goals. We should understand the user experience on the Work programme. The Government’s response to that recommendation is simply to tell us that there will be a couple of surveys of people who have been on the Work programme. That is not what the White Paper stated was going to happen. There should be much more information about what people are experiencing. The fact that there is not is one of the reasons for the underperformance that the Chancellor has pointed out.

The hon. Member for Eastbourne was absolutely right to highlight concerns about the performance of the Work programme for people on employment and support allowance. The Work programme invitation to tender stated that if nothing was done, 15% of those people would find a sustained job outcome within two years. The minimum performance standard was set at 10% above that, which is 16.5%. Paragraph 3.18 of the invitation to tender states:

“DWP expects that Providers will significantly exceed these minimum levels.”

They have actually achieved, as the hon. Gentleman stated, 5.8%. The Royal National Institute of Blind People tells me that 690 people with sight impairments were referred to the Work programme in its first 22 months, and 20 of them got sustained job outcomes. St Mungo’s has sent us a briefing for the debate, which tells us that 54% of homeless people surveyed for St Mungo’s, Crisis and Homeless Link reported seeing their Work programme adviser once a month or less frequently. It is not surprising, therefore, that very few of those who face serious hurdles—people with health problems and people who are homeless—have got into work.

I was in Australia last week, where I talked to people about those issues. There are quite a few providers that operate both in Australia and in the UK, and they said that the Work programme model was wrong and that “creaming and parking” was endemic; the hon. Member for Eastbourne has touched on that. I agree with the Select Committee that specialist voluntary sector providers have not been used enough. They have been squeezed out. In Australia, I was told that 50% of provision is from the voluntary sector, and I think in the Work programme it is about 20% and going down. As others have said in this debate, some good resources are not being utilised. St Mungo’s is a very good example. It had a contract with several prime providers in London, which was signed when the Work programme started in June 2011. By April 2012 it had not had a single referral, and it had to pull out and give up.

I agree with the suggestion that we should have a proper jobseeker classification model, which we do not have at the moment. There are many things that should be said, but I will conclude with this. The Chancellor of the Exchequer is right: the programme is underperforming. The Minister, who I welcome once again to her new role, has the opportunity to address that underperformance. Some of it can be addressed quite quickly, and the Select Committee report can be a real help. I wish the Minister well in her new role and I look forward to her reply.

[Mr Charles Walker (in the Chair)]

The Minister may now speak, but I will call Dame Anne Begg at 4.28 pm on the nose.

16:14

[The Minister of State, Department for Work and Pensions (Esther McVey)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Walker. I thank all hon. and right hon. Members for welcoming me to my new position, and I thank the members of the Liaison Committee for securing the debate. Can the Work programme work for all? I believe it can and it will. We are on a learning curve, and we have to make things better.

Hon. and right hon. Members will be pleased to know that I met all the providers this morning. I told them to watch the debate and listen to all the contributions, because the Work programme is work in progress, and there are things that they can take away from the debate. The comments of the prime providers are quite pertinent, particularly as the hon. Member for Oldham East and Saddleworth (Debbie Abrahams) mentioned low skills and low aspirations. A representative from the Shaw Trust said that they had been working in the field for 35 years, and the system was the biggest and most rigorous ever; they had never been monitored or measured so much. They took great pride in what they were doing, the journey they were going on and how they were helping the most disadvantaged into work.

According to Serco, the Work programme must be viewed not over a year—that would not be correct, because it is a two-year programme—but within the five to seven-year cycle. A representative from Ingeus said that the work was about helping people, and that, fundamentally, individuals are being helped by people who care. They made the point that people who work in the profession chose it, they know what they are doing, and although it is tough, it is what they want to do.

I know that the Chair of the Work and Pensions Committee has to speak, but before I answer the many questions that have been asked, I want to emphasise what a massive step change the Work programme has been. It is bold and ambitious, and I want to set out the motivations behind it. When people ask, “Is it failing?” that is fundamentally the wrong question. To fail would be to do nothing at all. To fail would be to leave people on benefits without even reaching out to them. I believe that the fact that we are on a journey and we have to get it right must be the start of success, and the Work programme must not be viewed from a perspective of failure. We are on a journey together.

I take on board all the points that the Select Committee has made; some of them drive a hard message home, and we must listen to them. The Work programme is evolving as we speak. What did we have before the Work programme? Hon. and right hon. Members have talked about the performance of various previous programmes, but I have different statistics. Those programmes covered a different mix of claimants, using a different measure, in a different time frame. Pathways to work can be classed as a failure because they could not have been rolled out nationally; they would have had zero positive impact if they had been. The previous approach was piecemeal, and people tried and failed to get it right. We have to continue with what we are doing now and make sure it works.

The individuals who are on the Work programme are the hardest to help. When I looked at their journey, I saw that out of every 100 people who go on to jobseeker’s allowance, almost 90 will leave before they reach the Work programme. That core group of people—approximately 10 out of every 100—will end up on the Work programme. Those are the people whom we are trying to support, and it is a difficult task. I have talked about the length of the contract and how we are continually refining it. Our approach is about continual improvement; we have to work with it, monitor it, adapt it and improve it.

I can see that time is running short, and I must allow time for the Chair of the Select Committee, the hon. Member for Aberdeen South (Dame Anne Begg), to speak, so I will move on to answering the questions. The Committee Chair talked about the annual underspend being held back, but the system does not work like that. We have negotiated a sum of money, and the programme is about performance-related payment on results. We have used some of that money to look at new pilot schemes, to see how we can expand our provision to incorporate people who have had prison sentences, for example.

When we talk about the flexibility of the system, we have to understand the people we are talking about well. I hate using such words, but there has to be multi-segmentation or multi-differentiation. We have to look at health and other conditions, including attitudinal factors, and anything that holds people back. We are doing that, not only with people who have been in prison, but with those who have had addictions. We are also helping and working with them, which adds to what we are doing.

The improvements made since the report came out are key, and I must acknowledge the work of my predecessor, my hon. Friend the Member for Fareham (Mr Hoban), whose changes have had a significant impact. Since the report came out in November 2012, the results of the adaptations he made, including the new pilots, can be seen in the numbers that are coming through. We have a set of numbers going back a bit more than a year, and the figures have quadrupled in that time, so there have been significant changes.

I want to pick up a couple of points made by my hon. Friend the Member for Eastbourne (Stephen Lloyd). He mentioned the attachment fee, but there is a fundamental misunderstanding about what it is and what it is for. It was designed to provide cash flow in the early years to get businesses going and to support providers, but that money was only ever given on the basis of payment by results. There was therefore nothing that, as he would see it, could be moved round or taken elsewhere. I needed to state that, because that involved a fundamental misunderstanding about how the system works.

My hon. Friend is quite right that we in the coalition Government are doing the right things. He mentioned relations between employers, employees and the Government, and people must understand what we can do as the Government, what employers can do to provide jobs, and what I hope employees can do. We are actively engaged in a two-year Disability Confident campaign with 430 employers across the country, including 35 of the FTSE 100 companies. It involves asking what we can do, and we should all get involved with it. From the point of view of spending, people talk about the figure of £80 billion, and the purple pound or the disability pound. We should ask what companies can do, including with would-be employees and their families and the extended community. That is something we are looking at, and it is positive that 1.4 million new private sector jobs have been provided, as have 1 million new apprenticeships. It needs to be put on the record that everything my hon. Friend is doing in Eastbourne totally reflects what the coalition Government are doing.

My hon. Friend the Member for Aberconwy (Guto Bebb) mentioned a key point about how we can help people in north Wales who would not otherwise receive full support, and how we can ensure that we are not preventing people from receiving additional support. We are actively involved with and talking to the devolved Governments to see what can be done. The key factors are flexibility and engagement with employers, as well as getting segmentation to work, so that individuals’ particular needs are given support.

Another key factor is the new enterprise allowance and how it fits with the Work programme—a point that has been mentioned. It does work, although not exactly in the same way. There is flexibility in the Work programme, so support can be given by providers to encourage people to set up in business. I wanted to ensure that that was the case and, fortunately, because this is fundamentally about people, I have some examples. They both involve people called Emma, so if someone’s name is Emma and they are on the Work programme and want to set up a business, it looks as though they have a high chance of success. Emma King said that she had never thought about setting up in business before, but now has, having been supported by A4e. Her goal now is to get other people like her into work. Emma Thompson, whose home is in Anfield, has said that if she had not met Dawne, who helped her through the Work programme, she would not now have her own business and would not be on a totally different path, one on which she feels she has self-esteem and self-confidence and can look after herself.

Another key point made by the hon. Member for Oldham East and Saddleworth was about people’s low esteem in starting-off or primary jobs, but in most instances the process is about getting promotion from those jobs, and the question is what we can do to get people through that process. Getting a job is the start of a journey, but getting a better or improved job is another. Some of the people we have worked with—including young men who have just got a child, and who have never worked before or never had a job—have some very positive stories about how they have got on the ladder, got through the process and got a good outcome through their own drive and the support of the Work programme.

I am painting some of the positive stories, and it is correct to do so. We appreciate that some things have not worked as well as they might have done, but we have been on a journey together. As I said, this is the biggest ever programme of its kind, and it has taken time, effort and energy. We have used the whole notion of transparency, and decided to have a black-box approach, because that would give flexibility to providers, particularly at the start of their journey, so that they could better understand people’s needs and see what they could do with the money. However, there are measurements, processes and monitoring within the system, and because we need to reach out to those who are hardest to help, there is also a payment structure so that the most difficult to support get the appropriate amount of money. All that is being developed at the moment.

We therefore take it fairly and squarely on the chin when we are asked whether the Work programme is working, and whether we are working with the hardest-to-reach people. We are now asking people and key providers to get back to us on which issues they found the most difficult, and to tell us what support we need to give them. Yes, a lot is being done, but there is still a lot to do.

The Work programme is not perfect, but it is a major step forward in supporting some of those who are hardest to help. I want to make sure that the programme reaches its full potential, and I am committed to fixing the bits that do not work. Many questions to me today have been about whether we are committed to doing that, and we certainly are. Another question raised was about culture and leadership. Transparency is key, as is bold ambition, hard work and determination to reach out to those who most need our help, and I give a commitment to those things today.

16:28

[Dame Anne Begg]

This has been an excellent debate. We had extra time through starting early, but we needed that time, and might have used even more.

There has been quite a lot of agreement across the party political divide. Much of what the hon. Member for Aberconwy (Guto Bebb) said reflected comments from members of the Select Committee. He waxed lyrical about the youth contract, which is not of course part of the Work programme, but helps to illustrate that there is a need for specialist help, including for more specialist help to be directed to certain people. Both he and my hon. Friend the Member for Oldham East and Saddleworth (Debbie Abrahams) said that there is a real problem with the rigidity of Work programme rules, meaning that access to training can be quite difficult, even when it is available. The Committee was certainly clear that such access is needed.

The hon. Member for Aberconwy mentioned that some people should have early referrals, but that would of course require a proper classification system, which was one of our main recommendations, while another recommendation was to extend referrals for some clients. Both the hon. Member for Eastbourne (Stephen Lloyd) and my hon. Friend the Member for Oldham East and Saddleworth mentioned the failure of the work capability assessment. That and the differential pricing structure are simply making life very difficult for prime contractors, which is why it is so hard to deliver on the most difficult-to-reach group.

The Minister suggested that we are saying that the Work programme does not work for anyone, but nobody is saying that. It does work for many people. The examples she gave could have been given at any time in the past 15 years; the real test of the Work programme is not how it works for the easy to reach, but how it works for the most difficult.

16:30

Sitting adjourned without Question put (Standing Order No. 10(13)).

Written Statements

Thursday 10th October 2013 Written Statements

Thursday 10 October 2013

Competitions and Markets Authority

Thursday 10th October 2013 Written Statements

[The Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills (Vince Cable)]

The Competition and Markets Authority will be a new non-ministerial department created by the Enterprise and Regulatory Reform Act 2013. The authority will become operational on 1 April 2014 and exists as a legal entity from 1 October 2013. It replaces the existing Competition Commission and Office of Fair Trading which will close on 31 March 2013.

There is a need to meet the cash requirement for the Competition and Markets Authority from 1 October 2013 to pay for staff costs. Although Parliament has already approved the specific enabling legislation, the resources to fund the creation of the Competition and Markets Authority are currently within the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills.

Pending the commencement of full operation in April 2014, when the budget for the Competition and Markets Authority will be delivered from the existing budgets of the Competition Commission and the Office of Fair Trading, immediate expenditure estimated at £1.6 million for staff costs will be met by repayable cash advances from the contingencies fund.

If further costs arise that would be irregular for BIS to pay on behalf of the CMA, between now and March 2014 when the Supply and Appropriation (Anticipation and Adjustments) Bill achieves Royal Assent, I will return to the House.

Parliamentary approval for resources of £1.6 million for this new expenditure will be sought in a supplementary estimate for the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills. Pending that approval, urgent expenditure estimated at £1.6 million will be met by repayable cash advances from the contingencies fund.

Money Services Businesses

Thursday 10th October 2013 Written Statements

[The Financial Secretary to the Treasury (Sajid Javid)]

Annual remittances from the UK stand in excess of £15 billion with up to 65% flowing to developing countries. The UK has one of the largest money transfer markets in Europe and the largest number of money transfer operators (MTOs).

Globally, some major banks are withdrawing bank accounts from MTOs because of the reputational and regulatory concerns. A number of UK banks have recently chosen to close accounts for a number of money transfer companies which has resulted in concerns being raised about the continued viability of remittance flows to a few developing countries, including Somalia.

The Government are acutely aware of the importance of remittances to these countries and to UK residents. The Government are committed to doing the utmost to ensure that remittances continue to flow through secure, legitimate channels.

We recently asked our officials to convene stakeholders to discuss possible actions the Government could take. A round table was held at the Department for International Development (DFID) on Friday 27 September 2013. The round table was co-chaired by senior officials from HM Treasury and DFID. It was attended by Government, the money transfer industry, NGOs and international organisations.

The purpose of the round table was to agree a set of actions to be taken by Government, supervisors and industry to promote a safe, secure and compliant UK money transfer sector that continues to support legitimate remittances while maintaining effective measures against money laundering and terrorist financing.

As a result of this meeting, and the continued cross-Government effort to find solutions, the Government can today announce a range of actions which they are committed to taking forward. These actions include:

The UK Government will form an action group on cross-border remittances, which will include relevant stakeholders.

The action group will draft guidance on applying a risk-based approach to anti-money laundering and countering the financing of terrorism when banking money transfer companies.

The National Crime Agency will provide more detailed and specific risk assessments and alerts about the sector to banks and money transfer companies, to help differentiate the risks involved in dealing with different money transmitters.

DFID will take forward a pilot project to help develop secure remittance channels to Somalia.

HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC) will increase “days of action” with law enforcement and the number of risk-targeted supervisory visits they undertake to provide further confidence that non-compliant money transmitters are being required to improve or are removed from business.

HMRC will also provide further training to money transmitters to help them achieve an effective level of compliance.

The full list of Government and supervisor actions with respective timelines has been placed in the Library of the House.

Securing a sustainable future for the UK remittance market will require all of the stakeholders to work together. The Government remain committed to playing their part in this and we hope these clear actions will be a key step in the right direction.

Local Planning and Renewable Energy Developments

Thursday 10th October 2013 Written Statements

[The Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government (Mr Eric Pickles)]

Planning works best when communities themselves have the opportunity to influence the decisions that affect their lives.

My Department published new planning practice guidance in the summer to help ensure the planning concerns raised by local communities are given proper weight in planning decisions on onshore renewable energy 29 July 2013, House of Lords, Official Report, 162-164WS. The national planning policy framework includes strong protections for the natural and historic environment. Yet, some local communities have genuine concerns that when it comes to developments such as wind turbines and solar farms insufficient weight is being given to local environmental considerations like landscape, heritage and local amenity. The new guidance makes it clear that the need for renewable energy does not automatically override environmental protections and the views of local communities should be listened to.

The new planning practice guidance has been published to assist local councils and planning inspectors in their consideration of local plans and individual planning applications. Of course, planning is a quasi-judicial process, and every application needs to be considered on its individual merits, with due process, in the light of the relevant material considerations.

I want to give particular scrutiny to planning appeals involving renewable energy developments so that I can consider the extent to which the new practice guidance is meeting the Government’s intentions. To this end, I am hereby revising the appeals recovery criteria and will consider for recovery appeals for renewable energy developments. This new criterion is added to the recovery policy issued on 30 June 2008 and will be applied for a period of six months from today after which it will be reviewed.

For the avoidance of doubt, this does not mean that all renewable energy appeals will be recovered, but that planning Ministers are likely to recover a number of appeals in order to assess the application of the planning practice guidance at national level.

Nuclear Liabilities Financing Assurance Board (Triennial Review)

Thursday 10th October 2013 Written Statements

[The Minister of State, Department of Energy and Climate Change (Michael Fallon)]

I am today announcing the start of the Nuclear Liabilities Financing Assurance Board (NLFAB) triennial review.

Triennial reviews are part of the Government’s commitment to ensuring that non-departmental public bodies continue to have regular independent challenge.

The review will examine whether there is a continuing need for NLFAB’s function and its form and whether it should continue to exist at arm’s length from Government.

If there is evidence of a continued need for the body, the review will also examine whether NLFAB’s control and governance arrangements continue to meet the recognised principles of good corporate governance.

I will inform the House of the outcome of the review when it is completed.

European Environmental Council

Thursday 10th October 2013 Written Statements

[The Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Mr Owen Paterson)]

The Council meeting will open with an exchange of views on a proposal to amend regulation (EC) No. 1013/2006 on shipments of waste. The Commission is concerned by the uneven standard of enforcement across member states against illegal shipments of waste and would like to strengthen the requirements for enforcement. The Commission has issued a proposal to amend the regulation to require competent authorities to prepare and publish inspection plans. The amendments would introduce provisions for competent authorities to request proof from an exporter where it was suspected that they were exporting waste in the guise of a product in order to evade the controls, and also to request evidence that material exported for recovery had been recovered in an environmentally sound manner in the destination country. The amendments would also allow the Commission to adopt delegated acts on technical and organisational requirements for the practical implementation of electronic data interchange for the submission of documents and information. The UK supports the principle of strengthening the enforcement of the regulations, but has concerns about some of the detail in the proposal.

After a series of AOB points, the Council will then seek to adopt non-legislative Council conclusions on preparations for the 19th Session of the conference of the parties (COP 19) to the United Nations framework convention on climate change (UNFCCC) and the ninth session of the meeting of the parties to the Kyoto protocol (CMP 9). COP 19 will take place in Warsaw, Poland from 11 to 22 November 2013, and these conclusions will form the basic framework of the EU’s negotiating position at COP 19.

Ministers will then break for a working lunch, during which they will discuss green infrastructure. In May 2013, the Commission adopted a communication on an EU-wide strategy on green infrastructure, which foresees a series of actions that provide an enabling framework, combining policy signals, technical or scientific actions, and better access to finance. The strategy will be implemented within the context of existing legislation, policy instruments and funding mechanisms.

In the afternoon the presidency will present a compromise package of amendments, determining how vehicle manufacturers will achieve existing long-term CO₂ targets for cars. Some member states have expressed reservations with the deal following concerns raised by industry, and discussion of the package and possible compromise amendments are expected.

Over the course of the day, the following topics will be covered under “any other business”:

Information from the Commission on the EU emissions trading scheme/aviation.

Information from the presidency and the Commission on international meetings and events.

Information from the Commission on a system for monitoring, reporting and verification of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from international maritime transport.

Information from the Danish delegation on a political declaration concerning the use of industrial gas credits under the effort-sharing decision and from the Commission on facilitating a global HFC phase-down agreement under the Montreal protocol.

Information from the Hungarian delegation on the “Budapest Water Summit” (8-11 October 2013).

Urgent and Emergency Services

Thursday 10th October 2013 Written Statements

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Health (Dr Daniel Poulter)]

My noble Friend the Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department of Health, Earl Howe, has made the following written ministerial statement:

We have today laid before Parliament “Government Response to the House of Commons Health Select Committee report into Urgent and Emergency Services: Second Report of Session 2013-2014”, Cm 8708.

We believe the NHS is world class when it comes to the quality and ease of access to urgent and emergency care. However, as the Committee has identified, the system faces increasing pressure. We welcome the Committee’s recommendations and the opportunity to explore and discuss the issues highlighted by the report.

This response describes the comprehensive initiatives, both short-term and long-term, the Government have put in place to assist the NHS in meeting ever-growing demand for urgent and emergency services. These range from the provision of an additional £500 million for this winter and the next, to the NHS England review of the urgent and emergency care framework.

Copies of the Government response are available to hon. Members from the Vote Office and to noble Lords from the Printed Paper Office.

International Prisoner Transfer

Thursday 10th October 2013 Written Statements

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Justice (Jeremy Wright)]

On 26 April 2012, the Special Court for Sierra Leone (SCSL) convicted Charles Taylor, the former President of Liberia, on 11 counts of war crimes, crimes against humanity, and other serious violations of international humanitarian law, including, murder, forced labour and slavery, recruiting child soldiers and rape. On 30 May 2012, the SCSL sentenced him to 50 years’ imprisonment. On 26 September 2013, the SCSL dismissed former President Taylor’s appeal against that conviction and confirmed the sentence. Following a request from the President of the SCSL to the United Kingdom, former President Taylor will now be transferred to a prison in the UK to serve that sentence.

The United Kingdom’s offer to enforce any sentence imposed on former President Taylor by the SCSL was crucial to ensuring that he could be transferred to The Hague to stand trial for his crimes.

The International Tribunals (Sierra Leone) Act 2007, which allows for SCSL sentences to be enforced here, was passed with wide cross-party support in June 2007. During the passage of the Bill it was made clear, and accepted by the House, that former President Taylor could serve his sentence in the UK should it be required, and that Her Majesty’s Government would meet the associated costs.

International justice is central to foreign policy. It is essential for securing the rights of individuals and states, and for securing peace and reconciliation. The conviction of Charles Taylor is a landmark moment for international justice. It clearly demonstrates that those who commit atrocities will be held to account and that no matter their position they will not enjoy impunity.

HS2 Ltd

Thursday 10th October 2013 Written Statements

[The Secretary of State for Transport (Mr Patrick McLoughlin)]

I am announcing the appointment of Sir David Higgins as chair of HS2 Ltd. Sir David will be taking over the role from the current chair, Sir Doug Oakervee, as of January next year.

A revised HS2 Ltd framework document which sets out the governance and sponsorship arrangements between the Department for Transport and HS2 Ltd has been published. Copies of the document will be placed in the Libraries of both Houses. Any future revision to the document will also be placed in the Libraries of both Houses.

The document is available online at:

https://www.gov.uk/government/policies/developing-a-new-high-speed-rail-network and http://hs2.org.uk/.

New Better Bus Areas

Thursday 10th October 2013 Written Statements

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Transport (Mr Robert Goodwill)]

My noble Friend, the Minister of State for Transport (Baroness Kramer), has made the following written ministerial statement:

I am delighted today to announce the designation of four new better bus areas (BBAs) in Merseyside, York, Nottingham and the West of England partnership region (comprising Bath, Bristol and south Gloucester).

Last year the Government announced plans to reform the way in which we directly support the bus market through the bus service operators grant (BSOG). The reforms included our intention to create a limited number of new BBAs, the first of which was designated in Sheffield earlier this year. A competitive process was then held across the summer allowing other local authorities to submit proposals for achieving improved bus services in partnership with their local operators.

BBAs have been created to trial new ways of supporting the bus market. Within these areas the BSOG paid to operators of commercial bus services will gradually be reduced to zero across a four-and-a-half-year period, with the equivalent amount devolved to the relevant local authority together with a top-up fund worth 20% of commercial BSOG. This money will allow local authorities, working in partnership with bus operators, to tackle the issues negatively impacting on local bus markets.

Total funding for the four new BBAs amounts to some £16.5 million across the full term of the scheme; this is in addition to the £18.5 million that the Sheffield BBA will receive up to 2017.

We will work closely with the new BBAs to monitor progress and to ensure these grants target bus subsidy to the areas where it is most needed.

DSA Tests

Thursday 10th October 2013 Written Statements

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Transport (Mr Robert Goodwill)]

I have today announced that, from April 2014, foreign language support for candidates taking driving tests will no longer be available. The Driving Standards Agency (DSA) undertook a consultation on this issue between February and April 2013.

Candidates have previously been able to take the theory test in 19 languages, in addition to English and Welsh, and can attend for theory and practical tests with an interpreter. We are making this change to:

Improve road safety—in response to concern about the ability of non-English or Welsh speakers to understand road signs and other advice to drivers.

Enhance social cohesion—to help individuals’ integration in society by learning the national language.

Reduce fraud—to address the issue of an interpreter attending for test with a learner driver and giving information in addition to a translation of the theory test questions or the instructions given by the examiner.

Reduce costs—there will be modest savings to DSA from not paying a fee to the theory test service provider for the annual update of voiceovers.

DSA has issued a response to consultation report, which can be found at: https://www.gov.uk/government/consultations/driving-test-language-support.

Grand Committee

Thursday 10th October 2013 Grand Committee

Thursday, 10 October 2013.

Co-operation Council for the Arab States of the Gulf

Thursday 10th October 2013 Grand Committee

Question for Short Debate

13:00

Asked by

[Lord Luce]

To ask Her Majesty’s Government what is their assessment of the United Kingdom’s relationships with the countries of the Co-operation Council for the Arab States of the Gulf.

[Lord Luce (CB)]

My Lords, this debate provides an opportunity to focus on the Government’s relationship with members of the Gulf Co-operation Council. I look forward to the contributions of noble Lords and to the Minister’s response. Much of the Middle East is in serious turmoil at a time when Britain’s role in the world has become more modest. It makes sense, therefore, to concentrate on areas and issues which best serve Britain’s interests. The stability and prosperity of the GCC states are a clear British interest, and I commend the Government for their positive approach to this region.

The Gulf is of major international economic importance. It is likely to remain so, even as international flows of oil and gas change with time. The GCC states possess 30% of the world’s crude oil reserves and 23% of natural gas reserves. Their sovereign wealth funds hold up to $1.5 trillion of assets. GCC investment in Britain was more than $2.25 billion in 2012. Our exports to these countries are more than £10 billion per annum and are increasing steadily. We have 166,000 British ex-patriots in the GCC working to strengthen our links in many areas. There are tens of thousands of students from the GCC studying in Britain.

In the wider Middle East, GCC states are now playing a major and influential role. Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Kuwait are key backers of the new Egyptian regime. Saudi Arabia and Qatar have provided vital support to elements of the Syrian opposition. Oman’s dialogue with Iran has recently taken on new significance. Britain’s relationship with these six states remains unique. We have historic connections going back, in some cases, more than 200 years. When Britain finally withdrew from responsibilities in the Gulf in 1971, there were many who forecast a quick demise of the new Gulf states, and that Iran under the Shah would be the strong, stable nation in the Gulf. As we know, the out-of-touch Shah was overthrown in 1979, to be replaced by a theocracy. The rulers of the GCC have not only survived, but remained reliable allies safeguarding the flow of oil and recently providing vital staging facilities for operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.

I first visited the Gulf in 1959. I still find it hard to grasp the scale of the transformation from traditional societies with just a few outward-looking trading ports to nation states with unimaginable wealth, modern cities and influence in the world. It is as though they had jumped like a grasshopper out of an historic Middle East into the modern world. In recent years, my only interest in the Gulf has been as patron of the Sir William Luce Trust at Durham University, where we have worked since 2005 with Chatham House and Ditchley Park to try to understand the pressures for change in the GCC and how those countries are dealing with it.

Earlier this year, I accompanied Richard Muir, the chairman of the trust, on a tour of Gulf countries. This visit, two years after the Arab spring, reinforced many of our conclusions since 2005. These monarchies and peoples are our historic friends; for the most part the rulers still command the confidence of those who live in their state. We must continue to give them our strong support. However, this should not be uncritical, provided we speak as friends to friends and with an informed understanding of the task and dilemmas these rulers face in bringing about change.

We need at the same time to acknowledge that each Gulf country is different. The events of spring 2011 sent a shockwave through the Gulf. Some have called it a “youthquake”, as 50% of GCC citizens are under 30. These events were a catalyst for these young people for the first time openly to question, criticise, challenge and aspire to play a role in their countries. Each Government had their own reaction. A combination of political, economic and, in some cases, repressive moves has for the time being preserved order, and these states remain basically stable. Saudi Arabia has injected $130 billion into its public sector and offered funds to help Bahrain and Oman take similar action. However, the underlying challenges for Governments are today greater than ever before. Resources of oil, gas and water are finite and being rapidly depleted, while subsidies drive up demand. Low-cost imported labour, mainly from Asia, is becoming controversial. At the same time, there is still high unemployment among the indigenous population, particularly the young, with a sharp contrast between wealth and poverty, job discrimination and some corruption.

Money on its own cannot satisfy aspirations, and Syria shows the path down which repression can ultimately lead. The GCC Governments all recognise that further political as well as economic change is an essential part of the way forward. As Lampedusa wrote,

“If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change”.

Each of these states is seeking to evolve, each in its own way and at its own pace.

Kuwait faces a challenge as to how its Government and lively Parliament can reconcile their respective roles constructively. In Saudi Arabia, 30 women have been appointed to the Shura Council, and women will participate in the next municipal elections. Qatar might benefit from a little less foreign venture and more constitutional development, led by its new ruler. The UAE, in addition to constitutional development at state and federal level, faces the need to develop a fully independent judiciary and transparent mechanisms for handling human rights cases. Oman continues to evolve its two-chamber Parliament, which can now propose legislation and review audits. Oman has given its judiciary and national human rights commission independence and authority.

Bahrain is at a most critical stage and perhaps provides the real litmus test for peaceful evolution. That country has an historic tradition of tolerance between religions and sectarian groups, but faces a major challenge to remove discrimination against the Shia majority to enable all political parties in its Parliament to play a constructive role and, above all, to complete implementation of all the recommendations of the Bassiouni Independent Commission of Enquiry, so bravely set up by King Hamad. Its national dialogue between government, political parties and civic society must continue to be strongly encouraged by the British. I invite the Minister to comment on those developments.

The GCC states cannot be immune to the cross currents of the Middle East, ranging from turmoil and civil conflict in Egypt and Syria, historic Sunni-Shia tensions, the Persia-Arab rivalry, particularly between Saudi Arabia and Iran, and the broad struggle between political Islam and theocracies and secular forces. Inevitably, all these events may strengthen the voices of those who are opposed to further change. People in the Gulf value stability and are aware that they are living in young states never previously at peace within stable borders and which have moved within a generation from tradition to modernity and from poverty to great wealth. They know, too, that they are an integral part of a region still full of raw, secular, sectarian and tribal tensions.

But things cannot and do not stand still. During my tour of the Gulf states in February, I was impressed by the quality of some of the key institutions that have already evolved—including elected and appointed assemblies—the recognition by some key Ministers, parliamentarians and officials of what needs to be done, and the frankness of many of them, including some in very senior positions, in private discussion about the enormous challenges they face and their need to face up to them.

As we have recently seen elsewhere in the region, change when it comes can be violent, and violent change does not guarantee a democratic outcome. I share the view that successful transformation requires a long haul. After all, we have experienced our constitutional development over 500 years and it is hard to disagree with those in the Gulf who advocate continuous dialogue as the only means to make progress, and that this must take into account at all stages the Arab experience of the tested Majlis or Shura system of consultation. Our interest is to support this approach along a path of relentless and constant constitutional evolution and to seek to assist wherever we can with ideas, encouragement and practical help. However, we should also recognise that our action will be far more effective if it is against a background of strong friendship built on mutual respect and confidence, and that the most valuable advice may be that given in private. An absolute key is to develop a personal rapport with the leadership in all these countries and to be constructive in our relationship. The Foreign Secretary has set a good lead on this and our Arab Partnership Fund is a good framework within which HMG can work positively with our friends. I look forward to hearing from the Minister how this important strategy is working.

13:10

[Baroness Falkner of Margravine (LD)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Luce, for the opportunity to have a debate on the countries of the Gulf Co-operation Council, and the United Kingdom’s relationship with them. This is not a frequently debated topic in our House: we spend a lot of time on the Middle East, but not so much on this particular part of the Middle East, which is, as the noble Lord pointed out, one of the most interesting, particularly during its current transformations.

I begin with some personal reflections. This morning I was involved in a seminar with a group of young Arab PhD scholars, because I sit on an advisory board which is facilitating higher education from these regions into the UK. It is led by President Martti Ahtisaari, the Nobel prizewinner and former President of Finland. When we started on this venture a few years ago, at the time of the Arab awakenings, we wanted to build capacity for leadership. The need for that was evident in the countries we were looking at in the MENA region—Tunisia, Libya, Syria, Egypt—rather than in the Gulf, where we thought that state finances were such that they did not need help. In this area we were looking to instil leadership through education, by opening mindsets.

This morning, as we were talking to the 20-strong group of scholars from universities across the UK—though principally London ones—what came home to us was that two and a half years ago, when we started this venture, these countries were in transition to democracy. Today they are all in a state of actual or impending conflict. I share that observation because it leads me to the three things I want to say about the Gulf Co-operation Council region.

The UK’s relationship with countries in this region, following our colonial past, has been seen through the prism of three substantive issues. One is energy: our energy needs, and their economic productivity through the output of oil wells and so on. The second is the region’s economics and in particular trade. The third is its security needs, and that comes back to our trade with them in terms of defence co-operation and so on.

That is all very good, although there are problems lurking in all three areas, which I will touch on briefly. However, it is because we have these narrow silos in our approach to the region that we fail to see the need for strategic depth in the most important and overarching issue in this region, which is political and constitutional governance and the requirement for reform in those areas.

In energy, particularly after its early, and I would say easy, phase of development—when infrastructure, roads, airports and so on were built—the region has failed to invest its enormous oil wealth in strategic development. Yes, you have glittering towers, but the substantive development of social and economic capital—investing in people—has not happened in the way that it might have done, given that the region has had 40 years of the enormous largesse of oil coming out of the ground.

The region is incredibly hungry in terms of its own consumption of hydrocarbons. People’s lifestyles are predicated on many gas-guzzling cars, air-conditioned public buildings and private homes, and so on. According to a House of Lords research paper, the UAE and Qatar have the highest per capita energy consumption in the world.

If Saudi Arabia continues with its current hydrocarbon needs, given the developing energy self-sufficiency of the United States—which, through fracking and further oil exploration, is moving closer than we expected—there will be a real budgetary crisis in the region. All countries reacted to the Arab spring or awakening—whatever word you use to describe it—by hugely increasing public subsidies and public expenditure. If one were to be kind, one would say that it was an attempt to ensure that their populations did not become restive. Some might say, more cynically, that it was an attempt to buy off unrest. The result of the dramatic increase in public expenditure is that by 2030 Saudi Arabia will require an oil price of $320 a barrel. Bahrain, which has far more significant problems—as the noble Lord, Lord Luce, mentioned—would require an oil price of $112 per barrel to break even. The oil price over the past six months has been in the range of $100 to $105 a barrel. Therefore, this is clearly not a sustainable method of continuing to evaluate development.

On the economic needs of the region, the demographics suggest an emerging crisis—an iceberg, if you will—with 50% of the population between 25 and 30 years old. Those in the 50% are far better educated than their predecessors, are accustomed to modernity and have access to information in a different way to the old, hierarchical systems that existed in the region. Coupled with this demographic time bomb is the budgetary problem of the lack of an income tax base in the region, and the problem of citizens’ employability in the private sector, which is fairly low, for a less than entirely obvious reason. It is low because it is easier to hire in the experts you need than to grow your own. Productivity in both the public and private sectors is significantly lower than in private sectors where non-nationals are employed.

There is also the issue of ghost jobs, where quotas are put in place by some of these countries to ensure that employers have to hire a certain number of nationals. That is done in terms of bookkeeping, but the nationals are not really hired; they are paid money to stay at home. The incentives are focused on numbers, which tends to distort the results. A good example was given in a Chatham House paper of a Saudi student who chose to read philosophy in order to sit on a waiting list for a public sector job. He could show that as a philosopher he could not get a private sector job but would wait for a public sector job, which would give him a better lifestyle: one-third more generous in terms of salary, and with far more time off, security of tenure, and so on. Moreover, the legal system, which requires nationals to act as agents for international companies, results in pure rentier behaviour in economic terms. Why would you engage in productive employment if family connections enabled you to get the contract to allow a foreign firm to be based in that country?

The final issue is the prism through which we see the region as a security dilemma. Iran has been mentioned but I wonder if too much weather has not been made of the threat from Iran. My own view is that Iran has been used as a means of ever greater defence purchases rather than as a real attempt to find peace. Surely if we do get a de-escalation of the crisis in Iran the peace dividend should result in these countries being able to look towards improving some of the other things I have mentioned.

In conclusion, I would argue that the region appears superficially to have a veneer of stability, indeed a gloss of prosperity and well-being, but a clearly defined path of economic and social development is critical. I accept the need for incremental moves and I understand that Arab society is evolutionary and not revolutionary. Unless we have moves towards better governance, greater constitutionalism and, above all, the rule of law and a respect for human rights—again, I am not asking for something revolutionary—alongside the things that these countries have pledged through the Arab charter on human rights, we will not see a stable future in the region.

13:21

[Lord King of Bridgwater (Con)]

My Lords, I join in congratulating my noble friend Lord Luce on showing a proper hereditary interest in this region in which his family’s involvement is well known. I also congratulate him on his timing. Everybody who knows the Gulf Co-operation Council and our many friends within it, with whom we have had the pleasure of working over the years in many different roles, will recognise that this is a critically important time for it. I also congratulate the Government, including the Prime Minister, the Foreign Secretary and the much regretted Alistair Burt. I am sorry to see that he has moved because I think he was extremely energetic in the work that he did but I wish Hugh Robertson well in the new responsibilities that he takes on. The Prime Minister gave a lead when he became Prime Minister in recognising and improving the contacts that had lapsed a little too much with this vital region.

It is impossible to overstate the seriousness of the present situation. One of the leaders, who had better be nameless, of one of the countries involved said that his worry was that there would be a conflagration that would split on sectarian grounds all the way from Beirut to Mumbai. Actually, I think he was wrong because the threat runs from Mali to Mumbai. The situation in Libya, echoed in the news today with the kidnapping of the Prime Minister, and the chaos in Egypt with the suggestion that ex-President Morsi might be executed, show what a tragically difficult situation those countries face. And the situation in Syria looks increasingly awful in terms of the refugee numbers, which are becoming overwhelming. They pose a real threat to Lebanon and to Jordan—not just the question of whether you can feed and nurture and provide health cover for the enormous number of refugees, but the fact that many of the refugees coming over the border into Jordan are taking any jobs they can get at any price and thus causing unemployment in Jordan to rise quite sharply. There are obvious tensions in that area. We have lost the stability of a major regional power in Egypt. Iraq gives us not much cause for confidence at the present time. At the moment, by and large, the GCC countries have managed to maintain their stability but they obviously face very real pressures—both the demographic pressure of the number of young people there and the threat of unemployment. I recall that when the original demonstrations took place in Tahrir Square in Egypt a huge number of people there were demonstrating about unemployment and the lack of jobs. Of course, we know that the chaos and confusion since have made their prospects vastly worse then they were even then. That will be reflected across other countries as their populations and the number of young people have increased. They face major challenges.

There are those demographic challenges, and then the challenges of what we might call social networking. Now, for the first time, whether it is Facebook, Twitter or the internet, a whole lot of people who previously were completely isolated from any adequate method of communication suddenly have these new channels of communication which are described in a very good brief from the Lords Library as “irreversible” and are a major challenge.

It is against that background that this country has an important role. There is no question that the relationship of some of these countries in the Gulf with the United States has changed. I do not know whether one is reading too much into the refusal of Saudi Arabia to make a speech at the United Nations or whether it is a sign of great displeasure with the United States’ failure to, as Saudi Arabia sees it, support it both in Egypt and in Syria. That is a new development. Of course, if it is true that the effect of shale gas and oil discoveries will be that the United States is exporting more oil than Saudi Arabia by 2020, and given the fact that China has now become the major customer for Saudi Arabia, there will undoubtedly be some change of commercial interest. It is against that background that our position and long-standing relationships give us a particularly important role to play. We must support serious reform, as my noble friend has said, but we must try to ensure that it comes without the catastrophic collapse that has imposed such great hardship on the people of the countries affected.

It is against that background that we must make progress through diplomatic means. I welcome the peace conference in Geneva on the Syrian issues, and hope that it will be successful. How much better than bombing Syria to see people sitting down to a peace conference; I hope that that can make progress. I am delighted that, in the next debate, my noble friend will renew the pressure on United States Secretary of State John Kerry to launch now the initiatives to get real progress on Israel and Palestine. I also welcome very much the new initiative of my right honourable friend the Foreign Secretary, William Hague, for his proposal to establish a relationship with Iran.

I know that our friends in the Gulf will have the greatest concerns about that initiative. They may fear that we are somehow going to betray them or let them down. Of course, one must be aware of the challenges and dangers. We must do this with our eyes open and not necessarily believe everything that Iranian leaders may say at this time. However, we must make the effort, and I warmly congratulate the Government on taking that initiative. I hope that that is one of the items that might add to future stability. Any countries with continuing governance all have a continuing interest in greater stability in that region. We should try to bring them all to the table and work as closely as we can with them all.

13:28

[Lord Stirrup (CB)]

My Lords, I, too, am most grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Luce, for securing this debate. The UK has long had important relationships with the Arab states of the Gulf Co-operation Council, and our interests remain as heavily bound up in that region as ever.

Our relationships are, of necessity, conducted largely on a bilateral basis with the states involved. The Gulf Co-operation Council, despite its name, is as much a vehicle for competition and rivalry as it is for co-operation. Nevertheless, it fulfils an important function and deserves our full support.

There are many dimensions to the UK’s relationships with the GCC states, but at the moment two issues seem to me to stand out from the rest. The first is the domestic situations in those states and the concerns within them over the continuing political developments within the region. I am thinking here less of the member states’ reactions to the events around them and more of their own political pressures although, of course, these are closely linked.

The status of the Shia majority in Bahrain—which the noble Lord, Lord Luce, has covered—is the most obvious example but the other states are experiencing their own pressures to varying degrees, as we have already heard this afternoon. The question is whether and how these internal political issues should shape our approach to the various states concerned.

We could adopt a boisterous, cheerleading approach and wave the flag for democracy. This would be a mistake, for many reasons. First, democracy can take many forms and mean different things to different peoples. After all, we cannot even agree between ourselves quite what it means. Secondly, too heavy a hand when dealing with the internal affairs of another nation can have unintended and quite counterproductive consequences. We need to tread warily. On the other hand, I do not accept the argument made by some that democracy, even in its loosest definition, has no place in certain societies and cultures. If, by “democracy”, we mean a stake in and some degree of say in the governance of a country, it seems that this is a near universal aspiration in developed and developing societies.

The shape of that democracy, however, is quite another thing. Anyone starting with a blank sheet of paper would not come up with our model. It works for us—after a fashion. Any system needs to grow from and be rooted in the culture it serves. Our understanding of the cultures of the Gulf states can be rather superficial.

It seems that we can best serve both our interests and the interests of the international community by being supportive rather than condemnatory; by being gently persuasive rather than hectoring; and by focusing more on long-term progress than on short-term moralising.

I am not suggesting that we turn a blind eye to repression and to abuses of human rights. However, I am suggesting that our responses should be more nuanced than has sometimes been the case. To those who would say that such an approach ignores our moral responsibilities, I would reply that it is about ways and means. Do we want to achieve our strategic objectives in the region, including our hopes and aspirations for the peoples concerned, or are we just interested in scratching tactical itches? For my part, I vote for the strategic approach.

The second issue, which is external to the GCC states, is their concern—their very real concern, I believe—over Iran. The status of Iran’s nuclear programme is very much in the news, and is certainly the wolf closest to the sledge. It is, however, a symptom of a wider regional tension over the perceived development of a Persian hegemony. Religion plays into this and increasingly manifests its role through a burgeoning Sunni-Shia cold—and sometimes not so cold—war. However, that is not the only fissure between Iran and the GCC. For the regimes in the smaller states it is an existential issue. For Saudi Arabia it is more about regional dominance.

We are all concerned about Iran, but the GCC countries see the issue through a different prism from us—and, indeed, in many cases, from one another. It is important that we understand this. We all hope that recent developments within Iran, and between Iran and the international community, will produce positive results—although we would be wise not to get carried away by the more acceptable face that Iran is seeking to present to the world.

In all of this, however, we should remember our partners in the Gulf and recognise how much more closely all of this touches them. I hope that we are talking to them regularly on these developments and, more importantly, listening to them. We have expended much effort over recent years in trying to persuade our friends in the region that we have their interests at heart, that their security matters to us and that we take seriously their concerns over Iran and its nuclear programme. Those reassurances will ring somewhat hollow if we neglect their views and opinions on recent and future developments.

There are many other issues on which we should be, and frequently are, engaging with the GCC countries. However, the final point I should like to make takes my earlier plea for a more strategic approach to political development into the wider arena. It probably seems quite clear to most of us that our crucial national interests are not only closely engaged in this region today but have been so for a great many decades. But if we were to examine the practical handling of our relationships within the region over those decades, would we reach the same conclusion? Far too often we have sent conflicting signals in this regard. We have engaged, disengaged and re-engaged. We have busied ourselves, distanced ourselves, and then dived in again. Is it any wonder that some of our friends in the region get a bit confused about where we actually stand?

If we are serious about the region, and I think it is in our national interest that we should be, then we must take a more strategic, longer-term view of our relationships within the region. Just as important, we must give such an approach practical effect on the ground. If we want to have real presence, to have real influence, then our friends must believe that we are not only there, but there to stay.

13:36

[Lord Triesman (Lab)]

My Lords, I join others in congratulating and thanking the noble Lord, Lord Luce, for providing this opportunity and for the fine analysis which he provided—as, indeed, have other noble Lords. I, too, have visited the region many times and been struck by the amount of change that one sees almost visit by visit. I share with the noble Lords, Lord Luce and Lord King, the view that turmoil in the region is due to a very apparent set of difficulties. Indeed, I have avoided using the words “Arab spring” because I am not sure that I see it as a short-term seasonal, flowering thing; there is a very long-term set of issues to be resolved, which possibly go back to the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and other factors.

However, these are nations that are key allies. We have perhaps given them too little attention, and that may well have been true in almost the whole period from 1981 onwards. They are under stress from their neighbours and the crisis in the neighbourhood; that is clear. Yet these nations are also strategically vital for the region and for potential conflict resolution in the region. It has been said this afternoon—and it is plainly right—that economically they are important; more than half the world’s oil and gas resources are there. That is especially important for the economies of India and China, and their development in the world economy.

Everyone seems to think that this region represents a vital energy issue for the United States, but when I look at the patterns of energy supply and consumption in that country I very much doubt that that is true. West Africa—as well as fracking and issues to do with other important resources—is probably a rather more significant issue for the United States. However, the region must be important for the United States, because the state of the world economy in general is important for the United States, as we all try to trade together successfully.

Over the years I have also observed the degrees of difficulty and competition between Saudi Arabia and Iran. I suspect that since Iraq ceased to be the quarantining environment in which Iran operated, we are also seeing some traditional geopolitical issues regarding regional domination being played out. We often describe it as being simply a Sunni and Shia issue. Actually, I suspect that there is rather a more orthodox and traditional geopolitical contest going on, in which Qatar has also involved itself.

The issues may well become tighter. The noble Baroness, Lady Falkner, talked about the price of a barrel of oil. Some people in the futures market are predicting that we may be looking at prices way below $100, perhaps going down to the $50 to $60 range—a matter which will concern the Russians as much as anybody else. I do not know what will happen in those economies in those circumstances.

The members of the co-operation council often have grand plans, but have those plans been realised to any significant degree? It took until 2008 to create any version of a common market, and it is not a strong current theme. Diversification has not been particularly successful, as has been shown by some recent LSE studies, and the members’ external trade relationships outside the energy sector remain very difficult. Perhaps the discussions between the European Union and the co-operation council, which have not prospered so far, may be one of the ways in which international trade relations could be improved. Is it the Minister’s view that this country’s best interests are served by bilateral discussions or through the European Union’s attempts to get a common arrangement; and does she think that that will have an impact on the way in which sovereign wealth funds are deployed given the opportunities which may be present in a much wider setting? There seems to be no prospect of agreement on a common currency. I do not advocate it but it obviously makes trade relations in the council area more of a possibility.

Security is plainly vital to the council. It has obviously no wish to remain wholly dependent on the United States, but it is also significantly divided on what its common interest is and how that interest could be deployed in the region. There is no co-ordination as yet. Does the Minister have a view on that and on whether the tensions which I observe between, for example, Saudi Arabia and Qatar about who they should involve themselves with in Syria are not creating greater division than co-ordination? The possibilities for discussing political reform referred to by the noble Baroness, Lady Falkner, and others seem to me very important. They have proved to be a source of difference. The shape of reform is obscure but what is plain, as has been said today, is that it is a key strategic issue. Some of the methods used in the Gulf to impose order have revealed what one might describe as the default methods of ensuring that things remain stable. I say with great respect to the noble and gallant Lord, Lord Stirrup, that it is inevitable that we will comment on some of those human rights issues. I think he said that too. We could hardly do otherwise given the kind of Parliament that we have.

What view should we take? A stronger organisation would be of great benefit to the United Kingdom. It would also be of great benefit to the European Union if we think of it in terms of the broader economic circumstances. For the strategic reasons that have been identified this afternoon, I suspect that we would all wish to see further steps taken in modernising and evolving, particularly in constitutional arrangements, which may in the long term and with a much younger population help create the circumstances for greater stability. Young populations often do not respond as well to repression as they do to understanding what their status and location are in the organisation of the country in which they live. I hope that the Minister will identify the top few objectives of the United Kingdom Government. As I said earlier, would they be best handled by the United Kingdom or would they be handled more appropriately by the EU? I am not making this point to reawaken our discussions on the European Union but rather to consider what gives us the best opportunities to create the circumstances in which we might all advance. Without seeking to interfere in the affairs of these countries, are there areas where we could more appropriately offer friendly advice on security co-ordination or economic co-ordination? What might we learn from the countries? I do not think that giving advice is a one-way street. You often get a lot of advice, which is just as valuable if we take it as seriously as the advice that we might tentatively offer to others.

I conclude by saying that I hope that we can make real progress. I do not know whether the ambassadors from the Gulf states get together in London. There is a great depth of experience. The Kuwaiti ambassador has been the Dean of the Diplomatic Corps for a great many years and is a very knowledgeable ambassador. It may be that some of the fora in this country might help us in these developments. I certainly hope so, and I believe that that would be to the benefit of us all.

13:45

[The Senior Minister of State, Department for Communities and Local Government & Foreign and Commonwealth Office (Baroness Warsi) (Con)]

My Lords, I should like to start by thanking the noble Lord, Lord Luce, for calling this debate. It has provided a welcome opportunity to take stock of the UK’s relationship with a region that is of enormous importance to this Government, and with which we are very close friends and partners. I pay tribute to the noble Lord for his constructive engagement with countries in the region, and my noble friend Lady Falkner and the noble and gallant Lord, Lord Stirrup, for contributing so insightfully to today’s debate. I also thank my noble friend Lord King for his warm words for my colleagues, especially Alistair Burt, who we shall all miss. This debate is also timely for me personally, having recently returned from a visit to the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Kuwait and Qatar, which served to highlight again that our relationships with the Gulf countries are as strong and diverse today as they have been for generations.

The debate has also served to demonstrate the complexities, contrasts and opportunities that the region presents. Over 160,000 of our nationals currently call the Gulf their home. We work with our Gulf allies on energy security, we value their help in the fight against terrorism, and they represent one of our largest global export markets. The region is home to over a quarter of the world’s sovereign wealth, a significant portion of which is invested in the UK. This shows the strength of the bilateral relationship, but of course we support discussions with the Gulf Co-operation Council at the EU level to benefit trade between the two blocs. However, our bilateral relations remain strong and important.

In response to the noble Lord, Lord Triesman, we meet regularly as a bloc. In fact, my right honourable friend the Foreign Secretary hosted his GCC counterparts at a lunch at the end of September, and the GCC ambassadors meet on a regular basis to connect with each other and with parliamentarians. I have been invited to a number of those occasions. We also work with the Governments of the Gulf to help us achieve our foreign policy priorities in Libya, Syria, Egypt and Yemen, to name just a few examples. So ours is a multifaceted relationship and, as the variety of issues raised today shows, one to which an hour-long debate can hardly do justice. However, I shall try to deal with some of the broader issues.

The UK’s engagement with the Gulf is at a high point. Through the cross-Whitehall Gulf Initiative, launched by my right honourable friend the Foreign Secretary in 2010, we are expanding our co-operation to unprecedented levels across the full range of issues, from culture to defence, commercial interests to education, and of course on regional security issues. We are engaged at the highest levels, with over 150 royal and ministerial visits to the region over the past two years, and frequent visits by our Gulf counterparts in the other direction, not least of which have been state visits to the UK by the President of the United Arab Emirates in May this year, the Emir of Kuwait in November 2012 and the then Emir of Qatar in October 2010. Our engagement with the region has been strengthened by the launch of formal dialogues with the UAE, Kuwait, Oman and Bahrain as part of our Gulf Initiative. Visits and dialogues are a substantial commitment, but they are a vital investment and I am pleased that they are already bearing fruit. In a highly competitive global landscape we are building strong links between our businesses, our educational institutions and our militaries. I have taken note of the words of the noble and gallant Lord, Lord Stirrup, who said that we have to take a long-term approach.

Your Lordships have heard today that the Gulf states represent a growing market for our goods. Since 2010, our trade in goods with every country in the region has increased by up to a quarter. It was worth over £11 billion last year in the region as a whole, £5 billion of that with the UAE alone. Since 2009, we have increased our exports in goods by 10%.

Gulf countries are building their infrastructure, improving their healthcare and investing in education. They are doing all of this with the help of British companies. I should add that it is over and above the normal day-to-day business support campaigns that UKTI teams in our embassies are working on to deliver British business success in that region. Inward investment, too, is growing substantially. Qatar alone has invested over £22 billion in the UK, creating jobs here and bolstering our economy.

The Government are constantly seeking new and innovative ways to work together to increase prosperity on both sides. I am delighted to say that the UK will play host to the ninth annual World Islamic Economic Forum in London at the end of this month—the first time this meeting has been held outside the Muslim world. This is an important step in our commitment to cementing the UK’s reputation as a centre for Islamic financial services.

I discussed the forum meeting and broader Islamic finance issues with Ministers, senior officials and finance professionals across the region during my recent visit. In Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Doha, Manama and Kuwait City, the message was clear: the potential for Islamic finance is huge and growing. The interest in working with the UK is there. I am committed to ensuring that the UK benefits from this growing market.

Of course, our prosperity goals will be best achieved in a secure and stable environment. Our Gulf allies sit in a troubled region. The problems were eloquently set out by my noble friend Lord King and the noble and gallant Lord, Lord Stirrup. We are proud to have stood by our Gulf allies at times of crisis and need, most notably in Kuwait in 1991. We have strong defence relationships, with military assets and personnel based across the region. The UK continues to provide expertise and equipment. We value the contribution that Gulf countries make to our security too, particularly through our close co-operation on counterterrorism issues. We share a common threat from international terrorism, which we deal with together. Gulf countries are showing leadership in countering the threat. Both Saudi Arabia and Abu Dhabi have established impressive models. We are also expanding our co-operation in international aid, working on joint aid projects with Qatar in Sudan and with the UAE in Somalia and Afghanistan, to name but a few.

Our strong friendship with Gulf nations enables us to have open and honest discussions where our views differ, in particular on the important issue of human rights and democracy. We are always ready to speak out as a matter of principle, and the Foreign Office’s annual report on human rights pulls no punches. We continue to press, at every level of diplomatic engagement, for practical, realistic and achievable reforms to improve the human rights situation across the region. Gulf states were not immune from the growing hopes which spread across the region in 2011. Countries in the Gulf, as elsewhere in the world, are finding ways to adapt to the changing aspirations of their people.

I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Luce, that the Bahrain Independent Commission of Enquiry was an unprecedented move by the Bahrain state, and King Hamad in particular. We are committed to supporting a Bahraini-led reform process, and have provided assistance in torture prevention, the judicial process, community policing and civil service capacity building, to name but a few. We welcome the progress that has been made, but we are also clear there is still more that needs to be done. We will continue to press the Bahraini authorities for further action.

Since the Arab spring we have emphasised to our Gulf partners the importance of stability based on the building blocks of democracy: a voice, a job, an independent media and the rule of law. We are constantly pressing for progress—I know because I have done so myself—and we are supporting our Gulf colleagues when we see it. However, we also understand that reform takes time. We are seeing Kuwait building a more vibrant Parliament; Saudi Arabia has, for the first time, appointed 30 women to the King’s advisory council, and we are helping Bahrain by training the police and supporting the judicial system.

I am also grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Luce, for his kind words on the Arab Partnership Participation Fund. Through this fund, administered by the Foreign Office, we will provide UK expertise, technical support and seed funding to a variety of Gulf state countries to build the capability of public servants to respond effectively to the changing economic and political challenges facing the region.

Every time I visit the region I am struck by the genuine affection in which Britain is held. My Gulf counterparts speak fondly of the UK and their memories are long. Many of them have spent time here and see it as their second home. Our relationships have strong foundations of a shared history, but the focus of this Government is about making sure that we use those strong foundations to build a strong future. Our allies sit in a complex part of the world, one which is undergoing seismic shifts. It is a region of great diversity and of great promise, and we will continue to work tirelessly to ensure that the UK remains a key partner and a strong ally.

13:54

Sitting suspended.

Israel and Palestine

Thursday 10th October 2013 Grand Committee

Question for Short Debate

14:00

Asked by

[Lord Stirrup]

To ask Her Majesty’s Government what assessment they have made of prospects for progress towards an agreement between Israel and Palestine on a two-state solution.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

My Lords, before we start, two speakers have scratched. This would allow us to stretch to four minutes for the other speakers, if that huge addition to the length of their speeches might please noble Lords.

[Lord Stirrup (CB)]

My Lords, I am most grateful for this opportunity to discuss the current status of the Middle East peace process, and I am particularly grateful that so many eminent and knowledgeable noble Lords will be lending their expertise to the subject over the next hour.

An hour is of course far too short a time in which to do justice to the importance and complexity of the issues involved. Nor would I expect the Minister to disclose the detailed nature and status of the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian negotiations, even if the UK was aware of them, which I rather doubt. We must trust that the US Secretary of State and his team will do their utmost to secure a successful outcome, recognising that we have little direct influence on the process.

However, if that is so, then what purpose might we set ourselves in this debate here today? We could, of course, remind ourselves of the many difficulties involved: the delineation of boundaries, the settlements, the status of Jerusalem, the right of return and so on. For my part, however, I will focus on three issues where I think we could and should go beyond just enthusiastic support for Secretary Kerry, where UK intellectual effort, advocacy and, in some cases, practical involvement might add value to the whole endeavour.

The first of these issues concerns the fundamental proposition that there should be a two-state solution. This has been questioned in the past, and there continue to be voices, perhaps increasing in number, arguing against it. The Foreign Secretary has himself suggested that time may be running out for a two-state solution. That must of course raise the question of what happens if time does indeed run out: what comes next? Some suggest that the time for such a solution is in fact long past—that some sort of single-state solution is the only realistic way forward. Many of these voices, although by no means all, are in Israel. But is it conceivable that an Israeli state that incorporated the present Occupied Territories could remain both Jewish and democratic?

If the right of Palestinian refugees to return to their previous homes is a device to undermine the state of Israel through demographics, as some would argue, then surely a one-state solution would achieve the same end, perhaps even more decisively. The UK Government remain committed to a negotiated two-state solution. This leads me to two conclusions. The first is that the UK needs to engage intellectually with those who argue against such a proposition. We should add our voices to a continuing international effort in this regard, rather than just assuming that the argument has been won for good and all. The second is that we need to do all we can to ensure that the window for a two-state solution remains open for as long as is necessary. While of course we want to engender a sense of urgency, we should be careful about suggesting the existence of cliff edges—or closed windows, if you prefer—lest we paint ourselves into an intellectual corner.

We all hope that something substantive emerges from the current negotiations, but long years of weary experience counsel us to rein in our expectations. In situations such as this, one has to combine long-term optimism with a grimly realistic short-term outlook. However, if the UK view is truly that the window for a two-state solution will soon close, then long-term optimism becomes Panglossian, and we should therefore be thinking now about alternatives, unpalatable though they might be. Is this truly the ground on which we wish to stand? I rather doubt it, and I certainly doubt the wisdom of even hinting at such a thing. The lessons of history suggest that, in cases such as this, one must never give up, never despair, no matter how dark the road might become.

The UK’s position, and therefore its message to others, should surely be that no matter how long it takes, no matter the setbacks, the international community must and will keep coming back to the issue, will keep bringing the parties back together, and will keep banging their heads against the brick wall until the wall one day starts to crumble.

The second issue that I want to raise concerns an important precondition for any enduring agreement between the Israelis and the Palestinians. In political negotiations such as these, it is not sufficient for the leaders to agree upon the terms of a solution. They have to be able to carry with them sufficient of their constituents to enable them to turn any agreement into political reality on the ground. They will never convince everyone, but they need sufficient popular support to sustain them through what will no doubt be difficult and controversial times.

Much of this task will of course fall to the politicians on either side, but I suspect that they will need all the help they can get. So we should think hard about which international actors could wield the kind of influence necessary to condition the debates within both Israel and Palestine. The United States certainly has a role to play here. However, it no longer, I suggest, has quite the economic and moral strength that in old days might have helped it move heaven and earth. The UK is certainly no better placed in terms of direct influence; but perhaps our influence with third parties might be of some use in such an endeavour.

The contribution of the Arab League nations, even when somewhat divided, was an important factor in the recent resumption of talks. They and other countries in the region will continue to be important in the development, and particularly in the acceptance, of any solution. We have many friends among these countries with whom we might constructively engage over the coming months, in support of both the peace process itself and the means by which any agreement might be implemented.

With regard to the Israelis, I regret that we have even less direct influence than with the Palestinians. We seem to have allowed relations between our two countries to enter a sort of limbo. Indeed, it took me most of my tenure as Chief of the Defence Staff to persuade the Foreign Office that I should be allowed even to visit my Israeli counterpart.

I am pleased to say that things have improved somewhat in recent years but we are still playing catch-up, and we are seeing today the difficulties that playing catch-up presents for us when we seek to influence invents within the world. We do, though, have many individuals in the UK who maintain important contacts within Israel. Perhaps we need to think about mobilising this community in support of the current process, and exploring how it might contribute to the debate in Israel. This is no doubt already happening in an ad hoc fashion, but is there not some way we can mobilise this important resource to make up, at least in part, for our lack of direct national influence?

The third issue that I want to touch on is the question of security. One does not have to be a military genius to understand that Israel’s pre-1967 borders were a strategic nightmare. If we were simply to return to this situation, give or take elements of land swap, without providing a greater degree of defensive depth for Israel, then we would be putting in place an inherently unstable arrangement—one that in time would be highly likely to fail. On the other hand, Israel’s demand to exercise unilateral control over Palestinian airspace and in the Jordan Valley does not sit comfortably with the notion of Palestinian sovereignty.

Some have suggested that the answer is to involve NATO. However, the Israelis are very sceptical about such an arrangement. They view with an understandably jaundiced eye the international community’s record in the Lebanon, and would be loath to put their security in the hands of such a force in the Jordan Valley. I believe that the question of airspace control can be worked out relatively easily. There are many examples of allies—which is what Israel and Palestine would have to be—pooling responsibility for air defence and putting in place the necessary arrangements for unified airspace.

With regard to the Jordan Valley, only a degree of international involvement is likely to soothe Palestinian sensitivities. However, international involvement has to be what the Israelis are prepared to accept, even if reluctantly. This is an issue on which General Allen, the previous Commander of US Central Command, is currently working for Secretary Kerry. It is also an issue in which the UK has great expertise and to which it might make a significant long-term contribution. With that in mind, has the Ministry of Defence undertaken any discussions on the subject with the Pentagon? Has the ministry begun any assessment of the likely contribution that the UK might make to an international force? Of course these are early days, and we would not want to get ahead of ourselves, let alone of the negotiations. However, it is an area where some preliminary analysis could be of value, and certainly it is an issue on which we should be liaising closely with the Americans.

There is much else to be said about the Israeli-Palestinian negotiations, but I will close with a wider observation. We seem to be witnessing—finally—the unravelling of the San Remo decisions and of the other attempts to tidy away the detritus of the Ottoman Empire after the First World War. The UK played a major role in that process. Although we may now be somewhat diminished on the international stage, we have an obligation to do all in our power to help address the consequent problems. Practical support for a continuing and enduring effort to resolve the Israel-Palestine issue must surely be the cornerstone of such efforts.

14:11

[Lord Judd (Lab)]

My Lords, I am sure that I speak for many in the debate when I say that it has been a particular privilege to hear the noble and gallant Lord introducing it so masterfully, with a résumé that was a showpiece of objectivity and constructiveness.

I declare an interest as chairman of the Middle East Committee of the Inter-Parliamentary Union, where we try to bring together Palestinian and Israeli politicians for dialogue. I have just returned from one such meeting. It also gives me the opportunity to visit the region, which I have done several times in the past year, meeting a good cross-section of parliamentarians, and indeed of political leaders, both in Israel and the Palestinian territories.

I will make a couple of observations. The first is that we should have learnt by now that enduring peace cannot be imposed, and that the danger is that if outside interests, however powerful, significant and critical to the outcome, slip into the error of thinking that they can manage the situation and manage a solution, we will be making trouble for the future. I think that the noble and gallant Lord was arguing that a solution has to belong to a sufficient cross-section of people; it must be owned. I look no further than Northern Ireland, where we have a very good example from our own history of putting that principle into practice. There is a difference between facilitating and masterminding negotiations; we forget that at our peril.

The second thing to remember—again, Northern Ireland is an extremely good example—is that if you are to have a successful outcome, a lot that is going on at ground level is important. It has often been overlooked, but in the lead-up to the initiating of the peace process in Northern Ireland, a lot of work went on among women, for example, at community level. This was terribly important in drawing more people—we have never been able to draw everybody—into a feeling of positive participation in the process, and in enabling them to influence events. Therefore, if we are to make a contribution—the noble and gallant Lord was absolutely right—we must not sit around agonising like a Greek chorus but must get on with offering practical advice and help.

One thing that we should facilitate is round-table discussions on issues such as women’s issues, climate change and its implications, and the problems of youth, into which we should draw, as far as we can, representative people from key elements in both communities. That could be immensely helpful, but, again, it can be done properly only if we have an endorsement of the process by the leaders in both countries, otherwise it looks as though we are just meddling and interfering.

An interesting thought I have heard expressed recently is that we might try to encourage, in third countries, scholarships and support for youngsters from Israel and the Occupied Territories in order that they can experience higher education mutually and together in the same place among others. This could make a powerful contribution.

I have made these observations, but of course there are many other issues such as human rights, the treatment of youngsters in the conflict and so on, which are acute problems that have to be resolved because they are aggravating everything. However, I suggest that the contextual elements in the process are indispensable.

14:15

[Lord Palmer of Childs Hill (LD)]

My Lords, I have just come back from a visit to Israel and the West Bank, visiting many places including Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, Ramallah and Rawabi. I thank the noble and gallant Lord, Lord Stirrup, for tabling this debate and for his forensic analysis and detailed strategy which I unhesitatingly agree with. It is extremely positive that the two sides are back in the room. This is the first time that there has been a formal and sustained bilateral negotiation since 2008. Both sides have expressed their commitment to bringing about a final resolution to all aspects of the conflict. Although the parties face considerable challenges, there are reasons for hope. This is the feeling I have brought back from Israel and from the Palestinians. Both sets of negotiators are experienced in the process. Israel’s lead negotiator, Tzipi Livni, is Israel’s leading advocate of reaching an agreement with the Palestinian Authority. Her party’s election campaign stressed the importance of finding a solution to the conflict based on two states.

Prime Minister Netanyahu has, not always but repeatedly, spoken of his commitment to a two-state solution, which was so well advocated by the noble and gallant Lord, Lord Stirrup. He has spoken increasingly of the threat to Israel arising from the emergence of a binational state that could threaten Israel’s existence as a majority Jewish state. That is the clearest indication yet that he believes in an agreement based on two states for two peoples. It is in Israel’s best interests as well as those of the Palestinians. I must also acknowledge the work of the US and the personal commitment of US Secretary of State John Kerry.

An example of how a viable Palestinian state is being created came in a heartwarming visit last week to Rawabi, the first Palestinian planned city. It is the largest private-sector project ever to be carried out in Palestine. Initially, it will be home to 25,000 residents, and ultimately to 40,000 people. It is located 9 kilometres north of Ramallah and it needs a wider access road and a more assured water supply—points that I took up with the Israelis and our own helpful embassy in Tel Aviv.

A much improved atmosphere between the Israelis and the Palestinians has been created by the resumption of talks. A joint press conference was held following a meeting at the end of September of the Ad Hoc Liaison Committee on economic support for the Palestinian Authority at the United Nations in New York. It was attended by Israel’s Minister for Strategic Affairs and the finance Minister for the Palestinian Authority. The cordial nature of the joint press conference would have been unimaginable just a few months ago. Israel announced a number of measures to assist the Palestine economy, which included 5,000 new permits for Palestinians to work in Israel, bringing the total number of Palestinians earning a living from the Israeli economy to 100,000. It has extended the opening hours of the Allenby crossing between the West Bank and Jordan for goods and people, and it has already implemented 4 million extra cubic metres of water for the West Bank and had promised 5 million cubic metres more a year for Gaza. It has also agreed Abu Mazen’s request to allow the import of building materials to Gaza.

There is much more, which I will probably not have time to list even though our three minutes has been extended. However, I agree with the noble and gallant Lord that three issues exist and that we must all continue to emphasise a two-state solution, not allowing anyone to get off the track, wherever in the world they are, whether in Israel or among the Palestinians. It has to be an enduring agreement, and I hope that my noble friend the Minister will reply with a cautious, positive assessment of prospects for a lasting peace.

14:20

[Lord Hannay of Chiswick (CB)]

My Lords, ever since President Obama’s new Secretary of State, John Kerry, began, as his top priority, to reassemble the well-worn components of that oxymoron known as the Middle East peace process, he has been subjected to a deluge of denigration, disparagement and weary cynicism from the serried ranks of pundits, many of whom have broken their teeth on that problem over the years. Now, with the removal of Syria’s chemical weapons and the convening of a Geneva 2 conference aimed at ending the Syrian civil war taking centre stage, that chorus is, if anything, louder. Is that disparagement justified as simple, common-sense realism, or is it a short-sighted unwillingness to recognise an opportunity where one really exists? I unhesitatingly argue the latter, which is why I welcome the noble and gallant Lord’s initiative in initiating this debate.

One reason for thinking that there is an opportunity, oddly, is because the Arab-Israeli dispute is not, for once, the focus of diplomatic preoccupations in the Middle East. That could be an advantage. In the past, excessive public focus on the issue has often led to the rhetorical radicalisation of the respective negotiating positions of the parties. Perhaps all concerned should reflect on whether they can be quite so sure that the outsiders on whom they rely will be ready to pull their chestnuts out of the fire in some future conflagration.

That thought could concentrate the minds of the Israelis, whose US backers seem increasingly dubious about any direct military involvement in the Middle East. It could also concentrate the minds of the Palestinians, whose Arab backers are focusing their efforts on other problems—domestic in the case of Egypt, and international in the case of Saudi Arabia. It could also influence Hamas, which is increasingly bereft of external support. If those trends get the direct parties to the dispute to focus on their own negotiating positions, and on compromises that they will need to strike if a peace deal is to be achieved, the prospects for progress could be improved.

Then there are more classical arguments for giving this renewed effort to reach a negotiated solution a real chance. We should not delude ourselves; the fact that the Arab-Israeli dispute is not currently centre stage does not mean that it has lost any of its explosive potential. Indeed, the fact that we almost certainly face several decades of instability in the Middle East, as the aftershocks of the Arab awakening work themselves out, only increases that potential. Meanwhile the continued Israeli settlement building on the West Bank inevitably pushes the situation towards insolubility and drives Israel towards something that it is no hyperbole to call an apartheid regime. These outcomes must surely be avoided if they possibly can be.

Are there any new elements that could usefully be injected into the process without destabilising it? One such idea might be to give more serious consideration to the guarantees that could be entrenched, both for Jewish minorities in a future Palestinian state, and for Arab minorities in Israel. This aspect has been neglected for far too long. Does it really make sense to think that every single Jewish settler will need to be removed—by force if necessary—from the territory of the Palestinian state, and that the substantial Arab population of Israel should be treated for ever as second-class citizens? I doubt it. That said, the logic of the situation is that outsiders—influential as they inevitably are and will be, and necessary as effective supporters and perhaps guarantors of any negotiated solution—should be less prominent than they have been in the negotiating process. Rather than negotiating, they should be talking with all those who will need to be party to any settlement. I urge—as I have done an awful lot of times—that we should be ready to talk to anyone who is prepared to operate within the scope of the Arab peace initiative. That should include Hamas.

It will be interesting to hear the Government’s views on this, and I hope that we will not remain, as we were in the past, too chained to the axle of American policy. The US is in a different position from us and I hope that we will be able, with our European partners, to play an active role in the months ahead.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

My Lords, we are very tight on time. If noble Lords could be very strict in sitting down as soon as they see the four minutes come up, I should be grateful.

14:25

[Lord Anderson of Swansea (Lab)]

My Lords, another US-sponsored peace initiative; again hopes are raised. I follow the noble and gallant Lord in his theme of “never despair”, but it was sad to learn that the Foreign Office tried to put obstacles in the way of him visiting his Israeli counterparts. The broad lines of a settlement are clear; the logistics are not. The international community has tried unsuccessfully the politics of little steps and the politics of the big bang.

I pose three questions. First, is there any serious alternative to a two-state solution? Surely, one state based on the federal principle or a parallel state structure is politically unrealistic. Nor is the status quo a long-term alternative. I recall sitting recently on a beach in Tel Aviv witnessing families enjoying the good life. One can see the short-term attractions of that, but demography puts a major shadow over the longer term. For Israelis, any alternative has major risks. Golda Meir said something like, “If our enemies destroyed their weapons, there would be peace. If Israel did so, there would be no Israel”. Israel points out, of course, the divided Palestinian groups, the reaction to the Gaza withdrawal and the constant Palestinian anti-Israel propaganda. Palestinians see the settlers increasing their stranglehold on both the West Bank and Israeli politics.

The second question is what, then, are the difficulties in making progress? Last year, Tom Phillips, a former British ambassador in both Israel and Saudi Arabia, wrote a most perceptive article in Prospect magazine, with the headline:

“There may never be peace”.

He gave 10 reasons why the chances of a solution had grown bleaker over the past six years. Surely the fundamentals of the problem remain the same. John Kerry is certainly very active but even the great persuader, President Clinton, failed, and there is no Rabin or Olmet on the scene.

Are there any signs of hope? Clearly at the margins, there are indeed such signs. Negatively, the PA has not, as threatened, taken Israel to the International Criminal Court after the authority’s victory at the UN. Secondly, President Netanyahu has released some prisoners and promised more investment, both in the West Bank and now in the gas fields in Gaza. There are welcome developments in the PA economy. The signs that Iran is coming in from the cold, an “Iran spring”, may remove a perceived existential threat to Israel—as may the promised removal of chemical weapons from Syria. The Arab peace initiative has just been reaffirmed. The Arab spring can, of course, work either way.

Yet with all the problems, the efforts are worth while, as the noble and gallant Lord has said. The precedents of Northern Ireland and South Africa are encouraging but it is difficult to counter persuasively the pessimistic conclusions of that old Middle East hand, Tom Phillips, who concluded:

“Failure is the most likely outcome”.

14:28

[Lord Williams of Baglan (CB)]

My Lords, I welcome this debate and commend the noble and gallant Lord Stirrup for tabling it. Like all Members of the Committee, I welcome the efforts of Secretary of State Kerry in taking forward this process. One is conscious, however, of the many other crises he is handling—above all, the Syrian civil war with all its appalling ramifications throughout the Middle East. For progress to be made on a Middle East settlement, President Obama will need to use substantial political capital, which may be depleted as a result of the current congressional and budgetary crisis.

It is important to remember that we have been here many times before. I myself participated as part of the British delegation at the Annapolis conference called by President George W Bush in November 2007. Talks subsequently followed, led by the then Secretary of State, Condi Rice, with the Israeli Government of Ehud Olmert coming close to a temporary agreement in its dying days in office. I am conscious of the fact that none of the speakers before me have mentioned the quartet—the body which is seen to oversee and support the Middle East peace process. I wonder if that is the right body to do so any longer. It is one which curiously excludes one member of the P5, namely China, and also Arab countries. I believe that if Arab countries were involved in a remodified quartet, it would lock the Arab peace initiative of 2002 into the negotiation process.

I take this opportunity to welcome the prisoner releases that have been made by Prime Minister Netanyahu, which were truly painful for him and for the Israeli Government, and I look forward to a further 26 releases on 29 October. I welcome, too, the economic progress that is being made in the wake of the reinvigorated peace talks. This is long overdue. We have been here before and the outcomes have not always been what we would have hoped and certainly fall far short of economic transformation. This morning’s edition of the Financial Times carries very welcome news that a long-stalled project which involves a British company, BG, off the shores of Gaza, has now received positive support from the Israeli Government. I would welcome any news that the Minister might have in that regard. If this is confirmed, I would see it as a strong signal and I would encourage the Israeli Government to be more generous on economic and social measures that it could make on the West Bank.

It is often said that time is running out on the Middle East peace process. My own view is that time is running out for Israel on this. Earlier this year we lost a Palestinian Prime Minister, Salam Fayyad—a former IMF economist and a man of extraordinary stature—who resigned. Abu Mazen, President Mahmoud Abbas, is now well into his late 70s. How long will he remain as Prime Minister? It is doubtful whether any significant Palestinian leader after these men can command the political presence to push forward a peace agreement, a process which will be as painful for the Palestinians as it will for the Israelis. A future leader will not have the political strength to do this. Now is the time to move forward and this will require great political courage on all sides, above all from the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

14:33

[Lord Turnberg (Lab)]

My Lords, according to the polls, most people in Israel and Palestinian territories strongly believe that a peaceful two-state solution is highly desirable and, although expectations are very low, there may be one or two reasons to be slightly less pessimistic. First, talks are going on in secrecy and so far there have been no significant leaks, so that gives no one an opportunity to start sniping. Secondly, expectations are very low so no one will be too surprised at failure. Thirdly, the Arab League seems keen to see some resolution to the terrible impasse that has bedevilled Middle East politics for so long. Fourthly, Hamas might be in a less strong position to undermine any peace deal as they have been significantly weakened by the recent actions by the Egyptians to block their arms-smuggling tunnels.

However, there are very many problems, of which I shall mention just a few: Israel is distracted by the greater danger to its survival from Iran and Syria and may not be giving these negotiations their full priority. It is also painfully aware that its experience of withdrawal from Gaza was not a complete success. Its demands for security on its eastern border with a new Palestine will be very tough—they may indeed be too hard for the Palestinians to swallow. Withdrawal from the settlements and re-housing of huge numbers of settlers will not be a trivial task. Optimism in Israel is not running high.

On the Palestinian side, they are in an even more difficult position. The population desperately needs peace and a land of its own, but the leadership has not always shown willingness to accept a Jewish state. Its rhetoric in the state media has been all about a return to the whole of the land occupied by Israel as well as the West Bank. Perhaps significantly, it cannot be unaware of the impact that a peace deal with Israel would have on its relations with its Arab neighbours to the north. All those regard Israel as the sworn enemy that they seek to remove from the map of the Middle East. Mahmoud Abbas must know how dangerous a peace deal would be to him personally as he remembers the assassination of Sadat when Egypt signed a peace deal with Israel. Hamas is unlikely to make life comfortable for him even in its weakened state.

Against this pessimistic background, what might the UK usefully do in support of a two-state solution? We are of course very limited, but there are some things that are worth our effort. First, we should exert what influence we can on the Arab League to support Abbas and convince him that it will stand by him if he strikes a deal—here, I echo the noble and gallant Lord, Lord Stirrup. Abbas desperately needs that support, and we have some influence with those countries.

Secondly, we should encourage the USA to keep at it despite its Syrian and Iranian distractions, and make sure that it impresses on the Israelis how important it feels it is that they should do a deal now. It should explain that America’s interest in the Middle East may not be so strong in the future as it becomes less dependent on its oil. The opportunity for American support for Israel may not last all that long. Meanwhile, we should refrain from levelling unhelpful criticism at either side while they are in this tricky phase of discussion. We need to think carefully about whether the criticism will help or hinder the discussions.

These negotiations give little room for optimism, but the fact that they are going on at all is vastly better than a continuing stand-off. Meanwhile, we should use what limited resources we have to help both sides.

14:37

[Lord Weidenfeld (CB)]

My Lords, if Britain and Europe wish to influence the course and outcome of the talks between the leaders of Israel and Palestine, diplomatic pin-pricks and untimely press attacks can have only an adverse effect. The European boycotting of Israeli goods, remotely traceable to beyond the Green Line, is a great mistake and controversial because it also hits Arabic economic interests.

The Israelis feel that that their gesture of releasing 26 Palestinian prisoners serving long, enduring life sentences has so far been accepted without reciprocation or appreciation. A closer look at the biographies and charge sheets of the released prisoners reveals a roll call of the most heinous crimes, resembling some of the horrors to which we have now, alas, become accustomed on the Syrian front.

President Abbas in his recent speech to left-wing members of the Israeli Knesset on a visit to Ramallah said remarkable, reassuring things about the current negotiations. He thought that peace could be achieved within nine months; he tactfully avoided such themes as settlements, right of return or an international campaign against Israel at the United Nations. These are all very good things, but it is important to remember one thing—here, I must disclose that I have all my life been very much involved with Israel. At a very early stage, I was even involved as the chef de cabinet of President Weizman and had a ring-side seat at some of the negotiations with Abdullah of Jordan, who came very close to an agreement then. I can say that the idea of a two-state solution was a dogma of the Zionist redemption. One of the great tragedies was that after the 1968 war, which was imposed on Israel, there was an absence of any agreement on the part of the Arabs about what they wanted. There were the three “noes” in Khartoum—no to peace, no to recognition, no to negotiation—that created a sort of no man’s land at the beginning of the settlement issue. On the other hand, General Sharon’s remarkable feat in getting all the Israeli settlers removed from Gaza shows what can be done.

I think that Prime Minister Netanyahu, who I know extremely well and who has been on an ideological odyssey, is now absolutely determined that a two-state solution is the only possibility. I think that this country and Europe could alleviate the situation by being much more lenient and understanding of the affairs of Israel. The initiatives now being undertaken in Ramallah and the negotiations between Tzipi Livni and the Palestinians’ opposite numbers have a chance of success. We have to stand by and be genuine neutrals and sympathetic, not partisan spectators.

14:39

[Lord Triesman (Lab)]

My Lords, I am grateful to the noble and gallant Lord, Lord Stirrup, for giving us the opportunity of having this conversation. We remain firmly in support of the two-state solution. I do not think there is a difficulty in holding a discussion of other kinds of plans, of alternatives, but I would be disappointed if we were distracted by that process from the two-state solution.

I have tried in the past few days to get a careful, hard-headed assessment of current prospects from those who are most closely involved. I want to focus on two elements, one political and the other economic. On the political one, it is hard not to say anything other than it is great to see the three-year hiatus in the peace negotiations finally broken by the efforts of Secretary of State John Kerry and his intention to reach a deal—comprehensive, as he described it, rather than interim—by April 2014 and to know that there are more frequent meetings taking place in which the United States has a far greater involvement and is very pro active. Those who are closest to the process have described John Kerry as being plainly, personally, deeply committed in driving the process. I use the words that they have used to me, and I applaud and congratulate that.

Of course, it may fail. The point has been made today that past predictions of breakthroughs have not always come on stream as we would have wished. Condoleezza Rice expressed that view, as many of us will remember, in 2008. But this is a serious United States push. That is what we demanded they should do, and that is where we should offer our encouragement.

On the economic front, which is being led by Tony Blair on behalf of the quartet, it may very well be that the quartet’s role is now being expressed more in the economic construction, and that is a very useful thing to do. Any political success will have to be underpinned by economic advance. People will feel an ownership of a new kind of economy. They will have an interest in each other’s success. That is vital. The eight-point plan in the economic initiative—and I strongly recommend it to the noble Lords: it is well worth reading—covers construction, including the institution of personal mortgages; agriculture; tourism; telecoms; power; water and light manufacturing. These are all building blocks of a viable economic future. They have been drawn up with the active engagement of the Palestinians and the Israelis. They have been supported by the global investment world and by international donors. The United Kingdom has a proud record of being a significant international donor in that environment. We should be proud of that.

Building two states will, of course, focus on land, boundaries and security, but it should also focus on economic and other institution-building. That is where there is going to be a chance of designing a real future and resilience in that future. The plan that has been guided by the work of leading global consultants is perhaps the most serious that we have seen yet. It is a plan: it is accomplishing a plan which is the hard thing; making one is often the easier part of the process. It is absolutely critical, however, and I hope that in our Parliament we will be cautious about any further name-calling or unhelpful criticism, rather than putting our shoulders behind what seems to be the most serious effort that we have seen in a very long time.

14:45

[The Senior Minister of State, Department for Communities and Local Government & Foreign and Commonwealth Office (Baroness Warsi) (Con)]

My Lords, I would like to begin by thanking the noble and gallant Lord, Lord Stirrup, for giving us the opportunity to debate this subject. I know that the Middle East peace process is a subject of deep interest to those here today and to the House generally. I would also like to thank the noble and gallant Lord for leading the UK delegation with Sir John Scarlett at the recent UK-Israel security seminar held at Wilton Park. This is important work that enables us to better understand Israel’s security concerns and explore how these could be resolved in the context of the Middle East peace process. We look forward to the next conference in January of next year.

As my right honourable friend the Foreign Secretary has made clear, progress towards peace through the two-state solution is needed urgently. The ongoing events in the Middle East that have so consistently dominated world media continue to focus all of our minds on the need for peace between the Israelis and the Palestinians. We therefore warmly welcome the resumption of talks between Israeli and Palestinian negotiators in Washington on 30 July, and the resumption of formal negotiations on 14 August, with a view to resolving all final status issues.

The UK firmly supports a negotiated settlement leading to a safe and secure Israel living alongside a viable and sovereign Palestinian state based on 1967 borders with agreed land swaps, Jerusalem as the shared capital of both states, and a just, fair and agreed settlement for refugees. This is the only way to secure a sustainable end to the conflict, and it has wide support in this House and across the world. We strongly believe that achieving such a solution is in the interests of Israel, the Palestinians and the wider region. Of course I note the worries of the noble Lord, Lord Anderson, and the concerns voiced by the noble Lord, Lord Williams, but as I said earlier this year, this is a decisive year; this is the best chance in a decade—and perhaps the last chance—of ending this conflict. Britain will be there every step of the way. I hear the concerns of the noble and gallant Lord, but as the situation on the ground continues to deteriorate, it is increasingly clear that time to achieve a two-state solution is now running out.

It is with this in mind that the American Administration have carefully set out the foundations for negotiations to begin. Secretary Kerry worked hard with both parties leading into the resumption of negotiations, emphasising the difficult choices that lie ahead. We do not underestimate the challenges involved, a point that we have made clear to both parties. We continue to applaud the commitment Secretary Kerry has made. I echo the words of the noble Lord, Lord Triesman, on Secretary Kerry: his passion, determination and commitment were obvious for all to see when he spoke at the United Nations General Assembly.

It is also the courageous leadership shown by both Prime Minister Netanyahu and President Abbas, and the commitment of negotiators on both sides, that has enabled these negotiations to resume. In this regard, we welcome the decision taken by Israel on 28 July to release 26 Palestinian prisoners in advance of talks. The noble Lord, Lord Weidenfeld, referred to this. The negotiating parties have been disciplined in maintaining a coherent single-track model of negotiation. They have been meeting regularly. At the negotiator level, they have had several rounds of direct bilateral talks, and the US special envoy has been party to a number of these. At the same time, information about the discussions has been well protected from release to the outside world, which we believe is both positive and necessary to reduce the risk of disruption to the process. We continue to support the aims and objectives of the quartet, which we believe are aligned with UK interests.

The noble Lord, Lord Turnberg, asked about the Arab League. The UK is working closely with the Arab League countries in support of the peace process. We agree on the importance of working with all international partners to achieve a successful deal and it is clear that the Arab states have an important role to play. We warmly welcome the Arab League’s decision earlier this year to reaffirm the Arab peace initiative and its contribution to the resumption of talks. We are closely engaged with Arab partners and others in the international community to support efforts to achieve a just and sustainable peace.

Looking ahead, it is clear that determined leadership from the United States will remain critical in the months to come. I note the practical suggestions of the noble Lord, Lord Judd. Britain will do all it can to support the parties and the US in their efforts to achieve a negotiated peace, and we have already played an active role. In September, President Abbas visited London for meetings with my right honourable friends the Prime Minister and the Deputy Prime Minister. In both cases, the Middle East peace process was at the very top of the agenda. President Abbas also met my right honourable friend the Foreign Secretary and Secretary Kerry. In his subsequent statement, my right honourable friend the Foreign Secretary reiterated to President Abbas that Britain is committed to supporting,

“the Palestinians, Israelis and the United States to achieve this agreement and the lasting peace that the people of the region need and deserve”.

We will continue to work with all our international partners, including the quartet, the Arab League and the European Union, to support efforts to achieve a just and sustainable peace. Of course, we know the path ahead will be difficult. As Secretary Kerry has noted:

“There is no shortage of passionate sceptics”.

So the immediate political focus between the Israelis and the Palestinians should be on building trust as they take forward the negotiations. Reaching agreement on final status issues necessarily involves detailed discussion about refugees, Jerusalem, borders, security arrangements and Jewish settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. These issues, especially that of refugees in Jerusalem, are complex, and making progress on them will require difficult choices to be made by both sides.

To avoid drift, Secretary Kerry has explicitly required negotiations to be concluded within nine months, and maintaining the momentum is crucial to meeting this deadline. We therefore welcome Secretary Kerry’s recent announcement that talks are due to intensify in the coming weeks. We will continue to support Palestinian state-building efforts ahead of a deal, including by fostering private sector-led, sustainable economic growth in the West Bank. We also welcome the steps taken by Israel referred to by my noble friend Lord Palmer and the noble Lord, Lord Weidenfeld. These steps are positive and we look forward to further progress in the days and months ahead, including on some of the issues to which noble Lords referred, such as the rights of minorities, which were mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord Hannay.

I conclude by thanking noble Lords again for their participation in this debate. We will take every opportunity to promote a peaceful two-state solution, which is important not just for the security of the immediate region but of the UK too. The groundwork has been laid, so we now look to President Abbas and Prime Minister Netanyahu to continue their strong political leadership, and we will provide support wherever necessary. In parallel, we will continue to call on the European Union, the Arab League and other international partners to unite behind Secretary Kerry’s efforts and do everything possible to support decisive moves for peace.

We are at a critical juncture. Either there is a movement towards peace with strong regional and international support or all of us face an uncertain and potentially dangerous future. Developments since the Arab spring have made progress even more pressing, not least in light of the threat posed by the conflict in Syria and the current events in Egypt. Maintaining the status quo is neither desirable nor practical. The Government therefore remain committed to supporting the efforts of the parties and their shared commitment to reaching a permanent status agreement within the agreed goal of nine months. We firmly believe that if both parties continue to show bold leadership, peace via a two-state solution is achievable.

14:53

Sitting suspended.

Transport: Bus Services

Thursday 10th October 2013 Grand Committee

Question for Short Debate

15:00

Asked by

[Lord Bradshaw]

To ask Her Majesty’s Government what plans they have to increase the use and quality of bus services.

[Lord Bradshaw (LD)]

My Lords, I thank all noble Lords for their magnificent punctuality, which should be the precursor of this debate. It is my great pleasure to welcome my noble friend Lady Kramer as the Minister. I am sure that her advent here will be warmly welcomed throughout the House. It is also a good thing to note that the Department for Transport has today issued a statement about the Better Bus Area Fund, with new additions to it in Merseyside, York, Nottingham and the west of England. This money has been competed for and is to go towards improving bus services according to those proposals put forward by authorities which were deemed to be the best.

I shall start by talking about the reimbursement of concessionary fares. This is still a bone of contention. I remember when the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, was the Secretary of State, he invited a party of bus operators to see him. We had a full and frank discussion, but unfortunately it did not actually result in anything. The consequence is that there is a lot of ill feeling among bus operators that they are not getting a fair return for the services rendered. They should be neither any better off nor any worse off, but some of them are in fact considerably worse off. Unfortunately, that disadvantage is felt most severely by small and medium-sized operators, not the big five. They have the opportunity to cross-subsidise and utilise the swings and roundabouts. However, I have received a letter from a bus operator in Norfolk who is quite adamant that his operation is not getting adequate reimbursement. The letter states, “Certainly in my area, now with the highest proportion of over-60s among its population of anywhere in England, there are longer routes where the scheme comprehensively underpays any reimbursement, and this is causing services to be reduced or cut entirely”. I think that we are all conscious of the fact that it is not fair or reasonable to offer elderly people bus passes on the one hand and to remove their bus services on the other.

I want to ask the Minister whether she will take another look at what is going on and possibly meet with some more bus operators with, I hope, a better result than was the case after my last meeting. This is an important issue. I know that all the political parties are gearing themselves up to offer, at the next general election, to do something about young people’s fares. There is much justice in that, particularly following the raising of the school leaving age and so on. However, bus operators will not co-operate unless they feel that they are being treated fairly in respect of concessionary fares. Again, it is important that something is done about this because we should be reaching out to people when they reach the age when they can buy motor cars. It is rather important that they do not buy them because of the congestion that affects many of our towns and cities. This is the first issue I want to bring home, and I hope that the Minister will agree that we should have some discussions with operators.

The second issue that I wish to debate is profitability. The word “profit” has been bandied about recently as a thoroughly dirty word, yet any enterprise that is progressive needs profit to invest money. The bus companies have not been slow to invest money. They have much more modern, environmentally friendly and cleaner vehicles than they had a few years ago, which—thinking of the next debate—cannot be said of all train operators. However, some people are now describing “profit” as a dirty word.

I have been involved in the management of bus companies. I know that bus companies in both the public and private sectors have to earn a profit, otherwise they will not have money to invest. Where profits are at a reasonable level and companies are investing money, we should not pretend that allowing the public sector to take over the routes, which was more or less set out by Maria Eagle at the Labour Party conference, is a way forward at all. Reducing the bus operators to penury is not a very good policy. I can remember—because I am very old—what Greater Manchester buses were like when they were in public ownership. The buses ran late; they were filthy-dirty; the staff were thoroughly disobliging; and the service cost the ratepayers a lot of money.

We know that the authority in Tyne & Wear, for example, is trying to go forward with a quality contract scheme. The arithmetic of it seems to be very faulty. I know that there is a procedure that has to be gone through to convince the senior traffic commissioner that a scheme is good and will benefit taxpayers and bus users. The Government should be very careful that they get good, sound reasons for any change that takes place. I fancy that it will be a long struggle. The bus companies believe that their rights are being sequestrated without compensation, and the likelihood is that the case will go right to the Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg if the scheme is not properly formulated.

Competition is necessary, but all attempts to regulate it through competition authorities have proved very expensive and ineffective. If the Minister looks back through the records of the Office of Fair Trading and the Competition Commission, she will see that they investigated the bus industry probably more than all the other industries in the country put together. It cost a huge amount of money and took up a huge amount of management time, and I do not think that any result was worth a row of beans.

Could not the traffic commissioners have a more active role in regulating any predatory behaviour that arises? The commissioners have to accept a registration. Before they accept that registration, they will know that Bill Bloggs proposes to run a bus three minutes in front of Bill Smith’s, after which there will be a long gap. That sort of thing does not need a genius to spot, and is extremely destructive of the network and public confidence.

Local government has a very active role in keeping streets clear of obstructions, be they parked cars or road works which seem to infest all our roads. I believe that when a traffic commissioner calls in a bus operator for not operating within the margins—margins which are going to be tightened up to mean no minutes early and nearly 100% on time, which is a very high target—the traffic commissioner should also summon the local authority at the same time to make sure that it is playing its part in the bargain because, unlike with the railway, the streets are separate from the operator. At least with the railway they fall within one armful with the Office of Rail Regulation.

There are a few things that might interest the Minister and I would be very happy to talk in more detail. This is the time of year when I raise the question of the bus industry which needs consideration.

15:10

[Baroness Scott of Needham Market (LD)]

My Lords, I start by thanking my noble friend Lord Bradshaw for tabling and introducing today’s debate, which has become a sort of annual fixture. It is a real pity that the importance of buses to the public is not reflected in the interest that the House takes in public transport generally and buses in particular. It is not just a courtesy at this point to say how much I welcome the presence of my noble friend Lady Kramer at the Dispatch Box. I have known the noble Baroness for many years and I know that her hands-on experience of transport, particularly the financing of it, is going to be of real benefit to the House, to the department and to the Government, so she is very welcome.

I wish to focus my few remarks today on the question of rural bus services, which is a topic close to my heart. Like many Members of this House, I split my time between my home in the country in a village of fewer than 200 people, and my flat in London, which is close to a main road along which around a dozen services run about every five minutes during the day and then continue to run through the night, so the contrast is very stark. About seven years ago when the gentleman who is now my husband first came to see me in Suffolk, he asked the Londoners’ question: “When is the next bus?”. “Thursday”, I told him. “We don’t need real-time passenger information; we just need a calendar”. Now my village does not have a bus service at all and I do not have a problem with that. When I was first elected to the county council in 1993, I recall looking at bus routes where the per-passenger subsidy was greater than a taxi fare, and that is clearly untenable. However, people who live in small villages still need to access services and not everyone can run a car. In my village the answer has come in the form of demand-responsive transport. It is called Suffolk Links and it is run by a not-for-dividend-profit organisation called Optua. Using a mixture of paid and volunteer staff it provides a very good service to villages like mine and, while it is not as convenient as a car, it is very much better than a weekly bus and much cheaper than a taxi.

These demand-responsive services are suffering from a combination of local authority cuts, regulatory burdens and an unhelpful financial regime, so I would appreciate it if the noble Baroness could perhaps write to me setting out what the Government’s current thinking is on the demand-responsive transport sector. It is becoming quite urgent as there is now very real pressure on these services because of the withdrawal of bus services from larger communities which in my day on the council would not have been considered marginal. Central government cuts to local authorities and to the bus operators’ support grant, along with changes to the concessionary fares scheme, have meant that many services are no longer seen as viable. Close to us in Suffolk is the village of Stowupland. It has a population of around 1,800 so it is a decent size. Due to its previously good bus links—it had an hourly service—it has a large population of retired people. There are also quite a number of people in the village living in socially rented housing. Having lost their weekend and evening services some time ago, First has recently announced the withdrawal of all bus services from the village. This is a terrible blow to the many people who rely totally on buses will have a major impact on the fabric of the village.

Lest noble Lords think that I am focusing too much on Suffolk, North Yorkshire County Council is consulting on a proposal to cut a further 25% of bus support, and Dorset 28%. In Norfolk, the popular Coasthopper service is to be cut by a third; that is perhaps what my noble friend Lord Bradshaw was referring to. These are all rural counties and many small communities will be badly hit by this level of cuts. We need to remember that 10% of the rural population does not have access to a car. Those people will suffer increased isolation and have real problems trying to access essential services. It is all very well for the Chancellor to stand up at his conference and say that jobseekers are going to have to go to the jobcentre daily, but how on earth are rural claimants to get there? There is a desperate lack of joined-up thinking in all of this.

As another example, most Suffolk villages, even the smallest, have a group of a dozen or so council houses which were built after the war. They were built at a time when land was cheap and families were larger, so on the whole they are quite big. It is therefore not always easy to find tenants for them. Having no access to bus services is not going to make it any easier to find tenants for these houses, especially when you couple that with the changes to housing benefit, which are making larger properties much harder to let.

I would like the noble Baroness to outline for us how the Government’s role in bus policy is currently being defined. Is there still a role for government or is it simply being left to a combination of market forces and cash-strapped local authorities to deal with? I wonder whether the Department for Transport is aware that there is a real perception that the Government are no longer supportive of the bus industry and its needs. We have heard the questions about the changes to the concessionary fares scheme and the bus service operators grant, which have not helped the bus industry one bit. The mood music really is important. For example, Eric Pickles’ proposal that people should be allowed to park on the road for 15 minutes is just plain daft. A succession of cars parking for 15 minutes is as bad as one being parked there for the whole day. If it blocks the road and makes the smooth running of buses and cars and safe pedestrian crossing more difficult, it is a very silly idea. Billing it as a pro-high street measure reveals a failure to understand the dynamics of people and traffic on high streets.

There is another area about which I am concerned, and I would be interested to know whether the department has had consultations and discussions with the Department for Education and the Department for Transport on home-to-school transport. In rural areas this has always been provided by a combination of large and small operators using the same buses on the school runs and the service runs. As the services are disappearing, the school runs by themselves will almost certainly not be viable for the operators. This is particularly key where there are smaller operators in the rural areas, because they are the ones who are finding the going tough and withdrawing from the industry altogether. Councils have a statutory obligation to provide home-to-school transport, so they could, ironically, end up having to run a bus fleet in order to get children to school, which would be very much more expensive than subsidising transport. I would like to know a little more about that.

Finally, it would of course be churlish not to welcome the Government’s Better Bus Areas programme, particularly the announcement today. My heart sings for Merseyside and so on. However, my plea to the Government, particularly to the noble Baroness, is not to forget rural areas. People rely on buses and they will be badly impacted by these changes.

15:18

[Lord Berkeley (Lab)]

My Lords, I am grateful for the opportunity to say a few words in the gap. It is extraordinary hearing the noble Lord, Lord Bradshaw, and the noble Baroness, Lady Scott, talk about rural bus services. Where I live in Cornwall, exactly the same thing is happening: buses are being cut. I do not have a car; I have a bicycle, but not everybody who does not have a car can go by bike. The problems are the same in my area.

This also comes back to the debate we had on the Question in the Chamber yesterday about new roads, the problems of resurfacing existing roads, filling in potholes and so on. The Minister who answered for the Government, the noble Lord, Lord Popat, said that local authorities have got a big budget for this. However, the problem is that local authorities’ budgets are being cut all the way round and that applies to the budgets for buses and road surfacing. I do not buy into this continuing mantra, which comes not just from this Government but has been going on for years, that everything central government does is perfect whereas everything done by local authorities is rubbish and should be cut down or given to somebody else because they can do it better. We have a long way to go in this regard and the problem with rural buses is extremely serious.

I also want to refer briefly to bus lanes, particularly in the context of city centres. I do not think that we have discussed them recently, but there has been a lot of debate over the summer, particularly in London, about cyclists being killed by trucks and trucks being required by the mayor to put extra safety equipment in place. I refer particularly to tipper trucks as opposed to articulated lorries. The safety equipment is a good idea and may possibly help to prevent a few accidents. However, the real problem is enforcement. These trucks are allowed into London and I believe that they can be fined £200 a day if they do not have the right equipment fitted. How will the mayor ensure that the enforcement is sufficiently rigorous to make the owners of these trucks comply with the regulations? How will he ensure that bus lanes are kept free for buses, and for cyclists if they are allowed in them?

Pedalling or driving round London, whether in a bus or a car, you see endless examples of cars, vans and trucks being parked in bus lanes when they should not be there. They may be 24/7 bus lanes or they may apply just in the morning and evening rush hours, but illegal parking in them dramatically constrains the reliability of buses. The bus drivers are very good and do their best, but the whole point of bus lanes is to provide greater reliability for passengers, drivers and operators. However, that does not exist. Before we bring in too many more regulations in this area we should have a strong go—government, local authorities, police; whoever’s job it is—at making sure that the existing regulations are properly enforced and are seen to be enforced by the public. I would love to see a car illegally parked in a bus lane have a ruddy great big ticket put on it and be subject to a big fine. The driver would not do that again, but at the moment, most people think, “Well, what’s the point?”. I shall be very interested to hear what our new Minister has to say. I warmly congratulate her on her appointment and I look forward to working and debating with her in the future.

15:22

[Lord Rosser (Lab)]

I start by thanking the noble Lord, Lord Bradshaw, for securing this debate. His comments seemed to have as much to do with Labour Party policy as government policy. I agreed rather more with the thrust of the comments of the noble Baroness, Lady Scott of Needham Market, and, of course, with those of my noble friend Lord Berkeley. I also take this opportunity to congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Kramer, on her appointment as Transport Minister, a subject on which she has considerable knowledge and experience, not least through the prominent positions she has held over a number of years as a Liberal Democrat in London. If, by any chance, the Minister feels that she has had to wait a long time since becoming a Member of this House to speak in a debate from the government Dispatch Box, then, like the proverbial comment about the arrival of buses, she now finds that, after the wait, two debates have arrived together one behind the other. In warmly welcoming the Minister to transport debates, I take this opportunity to express my thanks to the noble Earl, Lord Attlee, who, as a Whip, has spoken for the Government up to now on transport matters, and who in my experience has always been a very courteous and approachable person with a genuine sense of humour.

Some questions have already been raised in this brief debate about the Government’s policy and their approach to the bus industry, and we wait to see whether the Minister’s arrival is likely to mean any change in approach. I should like her to confirm that there will be no change in one area: that neither party in the coalition Government has any plans to withdraw the current concessionary bus passes for senior citizens. It would be helpful if she could confirm that that is the position.

We know that, outside London, local bus passenger numbers fell again last year, this time by 2.5%, with bus mileage outside London also falling again, this time by just under 1%. Mileage on services financially supported by local authorities, accounting now for 20% of the total, has fallen even further: by an estimated 8% over the latest year and 17% in the past two years. There is no need to guess which government policy has led to that state of affairs. If you make cuts of a quarter in local transport funding and a fifth in direct subsidies to support essential routes, it is bound to have an adverse impact, as has already been said in this debate.

The Campaign for Better Transport has said that a great many local authorities have looked or are looking to buses as an area in which to make cuts, with some councils planning to lose all their supported services. A fifth of such services have already gone. The position in London is different. Around half of all bus journeys in England are made in London, where the 2012-13 total was broadly unchanged from the previous year at approximately 2.3 billion, following years of growth. Likewise, vehicle mileage is up in London. In London, bus services are operated by private companies but regulated by Transport for London. In England outside London, services are operated on a purely commercial basis or with financial support from transport authorities.

The Department for Transport produces regular statistics on the bus industry. The most recent statistics, I think dated last month, appear to tell us that total costs in 2012-13 were at broadly the same level in real terms as in the previous year, and that operating costs for local bus services in England outside London have fallen by 2% since 2008-09. However, the next paragraph in the document, unless I have misread it, tells us that, despite this, the latest figures show that bus fares continued to increase at a rate greater than inflation in the year to March 2013. The heading for this very brief paragraph on bus fares is, “continued above-inflation increases”, which may of course be the explanation for why the paragraph on fares has been kept so brief by the Department for Transport.

What the official statistics also tell us is that women are more likely to use buses than men, that males and females aged between 17 and 20 made more bus journeys than any other age group among the categories within the DfT’s statistics in 2012, and that those in the lowest household income group make the most bus journeys, accounting for more than half of all bus journeys in Great Britain. It is therefore not clear on which groups who are not qualified for free concessionary travel the impact of—I use the Department for Transport’s own wording—“continued above-inflation increases” falls most heavily at a time when we continue to have the cost of living increasing at a faster rate than wages.

The Government also claim that they are trying to get young people into work or full-time higher education, while ignoring the fact that the Government have trebled university tuition fees, scrapped the education maintenance allowance and hammered the Future Jobs Fund. The Department for Transport statistics also tell us that the “continued above-inflation increases” in bus fares have a disproportionately greater impact on the very group—namely, the 17 to 20 year-olds who the Government say they want to get into education, employment or training, and who may well need to travel by bus to do so—than on any other age group. If bus fares are too costly, the opportunities for young people to take up opportunities in education, work or training are going to be reduced and restricted. That in itself imposes further costs on the nation and on taxpayers. The Government can hardly claim that bus deregulation outside London has been successful, except perhaps for the five major bus companies who control more than 70% of the UK bus market and do not appear to be feeling the pinch to the same extent as many of their passengers. I note, however, the comments by the noble Lord, Lord Bradshaw, about the position of smaller operators and concessionary fares, and await with interest what the Minister has to say in response.

The noble Lord, Lord Bradshaw, has given his views on Tyne and Wear. Tyne and Wear is pursuing quality bus contracts to get a better deal for passengers. Contrary to the tenor of the comments of the noble Lord, I believe that they should be encouraged, as should other local transport authorities who want to go down the same road: planning the local bus network, raising the level of services and tackling the issue of fares, including fares for young people.

Other local transport authorities may prefer partnerships with local bus companies, and there are examples of where this has been very successful. However, it should be for the local transport authorities, who are accountable, to decide which road to take. The Government should not appear to side with bus companies, who do not seem to like quality contracts, through funding arrangements which militate against local transport authorities that want to go down that path.

Government policy on buses has been a failure. One hopes that the reason the Minister has been brought in to replace her Liberal Democrat colleague in the department is to oversee a change in policy which leads to increasing passenger usage of buses outside London and to a better deal for bus passengers, who, while in the main not well off, are among those bearing the brunt of the cost-of-living increases.

15:31

[The Minister of State, Department for Transport (Baroness Kramer) (LD)]

My Lords, I thank your Lordships for the debate so far. It is an extraordinary privilege for me to be here today. I could not open in any other way than to thank the noble Earl, Lord Attlee, who so stalwartly responded to questions, many of them from people present at today’s debate. He may not have a large shoe size, but his are nevertheless large shoes to fill; I feel that as I stand here.

I also had a joke to open with. However, the noble Lord, Lord Rosser, has taken advantage of me and talked about my facing two debates today already. Instead, I will make just one statement, because I want it to be absolutely clear: this Government have no plans to withdraw concessionary fares for older and disabled people. They are enshrined in law and that remains the position. I want to make that clear before we discuss any other issues.

We can all agree that buses play a vital role in our economy: 4.6 million bus journeys were made on local buses in England in 2011-12. They are essential for people to get to work and to education. They are a lifeline for many people, enabling them to socialise. Over half of those outside London who rely on the bus do not have access to a car. Studies such as those from the University of Leeds have reinforced the importance of buses to a healthy and growing economy, and that is surely something we all support.

While there has been some suggestion, particularly from Lord Rosser, that the situation is bleak, I suggest that there is evidence to the contrary. Customer satisfaction with bus journeys is high: 84% of passengers are satisfied with their service. We all want to see that figure improved, but let us not deny that that is a mark of success, particularly compared to the past. Under-21s make up a third of bus passengers; as a group they are often fascinated by the car, yet they are accepting the bus as a way to travel. Use among the over-60s is also increasing, especially as a result of the national concessionary pass.

Moreover, the Government remain committed to improving bus services, and expenditure on buses reflects that. This year the Government spent £1 billion on the concessionary travel entitlement and £340 million on direct subsidies to bus operators in England. We have allocated over £300 million to major bus projects in the last year, and we have provided £70 million, through the Better Bus Area fund, for improvements in 24 local authority areas.

Let me pick up the issue of demand-responsive transport, raised by my noble friend Lady Scott of Needham Market. We have allocated £20 million to support community transport. This is an area of real interest and challenge because it is going to take an intelligent and innovative approach to work out how to provide transport to areas where demand is irregular and sporadic. It means that local authorities will have to bring together the community, so that many others in the community—the voluntary services and stakeholders—can try to look for answers to this. It is one of the reasons why the Government have said that the answers have to be found in the local community, which understands the local problems, rather than imposed constantly from Whitehall. She also raised the home-to-school transport issue. I need to understand that better, and I promise to try to do so.

The Government have provided £600 million for the Local Sustainable Transport Fund and £95 million for four rounds of the Green Bus fund, but we can still do better. The Government’s Green Light for Better Buses sets out our plans for buses. The proposals include reforming bus subsidy, improving competition, improving local authority capability in tendering—and let us not underestimate the difference that can make—incentivising partnership working and multi-operator ticketing, which is a particular interest of mine, and making access to bus information and ticketing easier for all. Perhaps some of that is a result of my London experience.

There is no doubt that we are operating in challenging economic times. The Government must ensure that the bus market is still attractive to all operators, large and small—precisely the point raised by my noble friend Lord Bradshaw. They must find ways to allocate funds fairly, while keeping in mind the best value for money for taxpayers. There is a balance and it is not necessarily an easy set of answers.

The bus service operators grant, paid to bus operators, has historically been provided in a blunt, untargeted way, related to fuel consumption. But from January 2014, the bus subsidy previously claimed by operators of non-commercial services will be devolved to local authorities. I hope that that will drive forward that kind of innovation and new thinking. That money will be ring-fenced until 2017 to ensure stability and will allow local authorities to make the best local-level decisions about the provision of non-commercial bus services.

As several noble Lords around this table have said, some local authorities have argued that they can make the bus subsidy deliver better value for money by working in partnership with their bus operators to grow the bus market. We can all agree that Reading and Nottingham are fine examples of the sort of excellent bus service that can be achieved through that kind of partnership. The noble Lord, Lord Rosser, acknowledged that. It is precisely what the four new Better Bus Areas, which I announced today in a Written Ministerial Statement, are intended to test; I thank my noble friend Lord Bradshaw for his kind comments on that. The policy relies strongly on partnership with commercial bus operators, rather than contractual relationships. That is a significant element of a more positive approach.

As the noble Lord, Lord Rosser, has said, Better Bus Areas are quite distinct from quality contract schemes, where, in effect, the local authority follows something much closer to a London model. I feel very strongly that local authorities and local communities should be making the decision about which way they should go on this. If I understood the noble Lord, Lord Rosser, he took that position as well. Some will go one way and some will go another, but I believe that it is absolutely vital that Whitehall does not try to pretend that it understands the needs of each local community. Providing that flexibility to go in two directions seems to be something that we should see as a strength, not as a weakness.

I also want to stress that the Government are committed to protecting the national bus travel concession. I talked about that and made a very clear statement. I love my freedom pass; I suppose I should declare that I have one in case that could be considered a conflict of interest. I know that it changes people’s lives.

A number of people, including the noble Lord, Lord Rosser, recognise that there is a serious issue of young people’s travel, and it is a complex area. While there is no statutory obligation to provide discounted travel to young people, many commercial and publicly funded reductions are available. I make it clear that this is an area that I want to explore. I think that we could do a lot more work in this area and see what possibilities there are, because I take on board many of the issues that have been raised here. I congratulate those local authorities—I think that Brighton is one example—which have provided discounted fares to young people. We therefore have a beginning point for seeing what the impact is and for putting a great deal more thought into this.

Let me try in the minutes that I have left to make sure that I have covered some of the issues that were raised—where I have not, I will of course write to noble Lords. My brain is not yet trained to grasp every point in the way that it should be and, I hope, eventually will be.

On the reimbursement of concessionary fares, the underlying principle, as the noble Lord, Lord Bradshaw, said is: no better off and no worse off. It is an EU regulation and there is plenty of guidance around all this. I am very happy to meet those who think that it is not working effectively, but I should point out that, at the end of a process, bus operators can appeal to the Secretary of State on this issue—indeed, during the past two years, the number of those appeals has fallen, so this may be less of a problem than we might initially fear. I agree, however, that getting that sorted is very helpful if we are going to start thinking through the issue of concessions for young people.

On traffic commissioners and their role in competition, I am sure that I was handed a note and, if I was, I cannot find it. However, I shall pick that up; I am not yet familiar with the issue of traffic commissioners and what they do. Obviously, because they are regional, they can have an impact in a way that I should be aware of, so I will come back and answer that question.

The noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, talked about bus lane enforcement. In London, on TfL roads, that is obviously a matter for the mayor; otherwise, it is a matter for local authorities. From personal experience, I think that most people seem to regard enforcement as ruthless rather than soft. There are certainly successful examples, such as in York, which has employed enforcement officers. This is another area where we must look to local communities to work out how it can be done within their own community. I would be hesitant about Whitehall trying to suggest that there is one way to carry out enforcement, but I take the point that the noble Lord makes.

I again apologise if I have missed any points that noble Lords may have made. I will cover them in letters—we will go back through Hansard and make sure. I assure the Committee that the Government believe in buses. Our vision is for a better bus service with more of what passengers want. We want punctual, interconnected services; we want them greener; it is essential that they become fully wheelchair-accessible; and we need widely available smart ticketing. I know from the experience of London what an impact some of those “soft issues” can have on the effectiveness, the attractiveness and the success of a bus service. A more attractive, more competitive and greener bus network will encourage more passengers, cut carbon and create growth. I believe that those are grounds on which we can all agree.

[The Deputy Chairman of Committees (Lord Faulkner of Worcester) (Lab)]

I am afraid that I shall have to ask noble Lords to contain their impatience until 4 pm. The rules of the Grand Committee do not allow the next debate to start before the appointed time, even though I look around and see that every speaker is here. I am afraid that I have no discretion on that.

15:44

Sitting suspended.

Railways: East Anglia Network

Thursday 10th October 2013 Grand Committee

Question for Short Debate

16:00

Asked by

[Baroness Scott of Needham Market]

To ask Her Majesty’s Government what plans they have for investment in the rail network in East Anglia.

[Baroness Scott of Needham Market (LD)]

My Lords, I thought that I would start with a Michael Caine moment. Not a lot of people know this, but the east of England is one of only two regions that make a net contribution to the Treasury. That is quite interesting, because when people talk about English regions, they talk about Leeds, Manchester and Newcastle. They do not think about Norwich, Chelmsford and Ipswich. It is a really impressive feat, particularly when you consider the rather poor investment in road and rail infrastructure that the east of England has had for the past half-century.

I wish to focus my comments today on just part of the region: the counties of Norfolk, Cambridgeshire, Essex and of course my home county of Suffolk. I am really pleased to see that those areas are all represented by speakers in today’s debate. Hertfordshire and Bedfordshire are of course within the eastern region in government terms, but in rail terms they are quite a separate region, so I will leave them to one side. I want to try to make the case for more strategic investment in our region. Given her background, I know that the Minister will bring a real understanding of the issue and of the importance of investment.

Many parts of our regional rail infrastructure have had no modernisation in the past half-century. Much of the rolling stock is now 40 years old. Recent problems with the franchise holders and now with the franchise process itself have resulted in a miserable passenger experience for far too many people in our region. Passengers are being asked to pay higher fares every year, but experience a worse service overall. The award of an interim franchise to Greater Anglia, which has now been extended for a short period, has meant that investment in rolling stock, which is so desperately needed, cannot be made. It has improved the reliability of the service, but faces an uphill struggle against problems caused by poor infrastructure; notably signalling, which brought the entire line into London to a complete halt on Tuesday this week. I would appreciate an update from the Minister on the question of the franchise for our region.

It does not have to be like this. A few years ago, one of the very worst areas in our region was the misery line from Southend to Fenchurch Street, which has now been transformed by new investment. Right through the region and particularly on the main lines, keeping costs down in the old BR days resulted in a number of inadequate stretches of track. I am really pleased that some of these false economies have now been rectified. It is not on the tip of everyone's tongue, but the completion of the Beccles loop, which cost £4 million, has been transformative. On the East Suffolk line, usage has gone up 12% since December, because the Beccles loop and the associated signalling have enabled an hourly train service to run. That indicates how a relatively modest investment can pay dividends.

The eastern regional economy is driven by centres of growth in Cambridge, Norwich, Ipswich, Colchester, Chelmsford and Southend, supported by the market towns and their rural hinterland. Our region also plays a key part in driving forward the capital’s economy. That is especially true of Essex. At its most basic, without the tens of thousands of people who endure a daily commute into London from Essex, our entire economy would grind to a halt. Cambridge, Norwich, Ipswich, Colchester, Chelmsford and Harlow are already hubs of science, innovation and new technology.

East Anglia’s ports have an unparalleled opportunity to develop the offshore energy industry. Felixstowe is already the fourth largest container port in the world and has created around 40,000 jobs in the area. If it is to compete with Antwerp and Rotterdam, it needs infrastructure that is fit for purpose. Some improvements have been made, but further improvement to the Felixstowe to Nuneaton freight corridor is an essential part of ensuring the continued growth, given the congestion on the adjacent A14. Investment in the Ipswich chord is another good start but we need to continue investing. I am very pleased to see the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, in his place today and speaking in this debate. He has done more to keep rail freight on the agenda than anyone else in the country.

East Anglia is one of the fastest-growing parts of the UK. Both commuters and long-distance travellers are growing in number on all the routes under discussion, both to London and between towns and cities in the region. More housing is planned—about 360,000 more houses in the four counties over the next planning period. When I talk to planners across the region, they say that they are concentrating the building, the new-housing growth, in areas with good access to the rail network. Of course, this is good transport planning, but only if the network has the capacity to cope with the growth.

Network Rail is currently basing assumptions on a 75% growth in passenger use over the next 30 years. This simply does not accord with the growth in recent years, and is considered by people who know to be a serious underestimate. The burgeoning economic strength of the region is being increasingly threatened by gridlock, congestion, and capacity shortfall on the network. Local business and quality of life are being undermined. Rail investment has transformed other parts of East Anglia.

I have mentioned the misery line, but the introduction of the Cambridge express service and other improvements on the King’s Lynn-to-London route have made a massive difference. They can unlock areas for sustainable housing and business growth. We need significant but not unrealistic investment in additional infrastructure and rolling stock, including tackling congestion in and around London Liverpool Street and lines to the north through north London, Essex, and Hertfordshire.

In Cambridgeshire, the Ely North junction is a bottleneck which causes problems throughout the network in our part of the region. This really needs to be unlocked to allow the growth of regionally significant routes, including freight. In Suffolk, a passing loop at Wickham Market would further improve the East Suffolk line and will be absolutely essential if Sizewell C gets the go-ahead. This needs to be coupled with more frequent inter-regional services.

A longer-term aspiration for the region, and one which has been talked about since long before I first came into local government in the early 1990s, is the east-west rail link, a link between Cambridge and Oxford. It is not about linking the two old rivals but about providing access between the south-west and south Midlands to the east of the country in a way which bypasses London and releases valuable capacity there.

The rolling stock on the main line is simply not fit for purpose. The Great Eastern main line is badly in need of new intercity stock or new and refurbished trains. We have a hotchpotch of rolling stock which has been scraped together from the rejects of other areas. It has an average age of 25 years. Greater Anglia has made some improvements in cleanliness which are greatly welcome, but, with the uncertainty of the franchise in recent years, travelling on our main line trains can be a pretty unpleasant experience, with tatty seats, malfunctioning doors, and, even worse, malfunctioning toilets.

It is not really just about the links between the main towns and cities. I live close to a market town, and I am very well aware not only of how important rail is to the prosperity of my town but also of the importance of branch lines to many of the smaller market towns. These lines across our four counties offer commuter, tourism, and everyday travel opportunities for communities. This connectivity can be further exploited to offer further economic opportunities and housing growth if the services were faster and more frequent.

Services are operated with basic trains, which, in many cases, have serious accessibility constraints. Line speeds are often poor and impaired by issues such as single sections and level crossings. Experience has shown that improving core services, frequency, speed, and so on vastly increases rail usage. The many different users of the lines to Southminster, Braintree, Sudbury, Harwich, Felixstowe, and so on would all increase in number if these constraints were improved.

These lines have been much promoted by thriving community rail partnerships, such as the Crouch Valley, the Gainsborough, Mayflower, Wherry, and Bittern lines. There are 11 community rail lines in Suffolk which have been really successful in raising the profile of the railway locally and in some cases doubling the number of passengers using them. Just to echo the point made by the Minister in the previous debate on buses, they really show the value of harnessing local involvement, because community rail partnerships are harnessing this enthusiasm, recruiting volunteers to work with local authorities in the rail industry, securing improvements to the appearance of stations, and so on. It has involved a lot of hard work by dedicated people.

But they can only go so far and in the end it comes down to the need for the continuation and security of local authority funding to keep the work of these community rail partnerships going, and the need for additional rolling stock to accommodate the greater number of passengers being carried.

I hope I have been able in this brief time to make a case for more investment in our thriving region and for the fact that it could produce even more revenue for the Exchequer than it currently does. I look forward to hearing contributions from other noble Lords and from my noble friend the Minister.

16:09

[Baroness Jenkin of Kennington (Con)]

My Lords, I thank my noble friend for securing this debate and for giving us the opportunity to explore some important issues. My interest in this debate is that of a passenger—a regular passenger but thankfully not a commuter—on the London Liverpool Street to Norwich line. My own station is Hatfield Peverel between Chelmsford and Witham. As my husband is the Member of Parliament for Harwich and North Essex, I am even more acutely aware of what a big issue this is for all MPs and commuters on this line. The annual season ticket from Hatfield Peverel is now £4,696, which out of taxed income is a lot of money for an unreliable and very overcrowded service.

The eastern regional economy is driven by the centres of growth in Cambridge, Norwich, Ipswich, Colchester, Chelmsford and Southend and supported by smaller market towns. This burgeoning economic strength is increasingly threatened by the hopeless gridlock, congestion and capacity shortfall on our transport network. Local businesses and quality of life are undermined. Commuters on the Greater Anglia franchise who commute on the Great Eastern main line have long been let down by underinvestment and the whole of the east of England has suffered for too long from the effects of this underinvestment. These commuters are effectively paying to subsidise rail services elsewhere as the franchise hands £110 million a year over to the Treasury. They also suffer from frequent delays and problems on the line as congestion and signalling problems impact on them on a regular basis. Indeed, I was in the Clerk of the Parliaments’ office earlier this week and was told by the PA who travels from Hatfield Peverel of the terrible delays on Tuesday due to signalling failure, as mentioned by the noble Baroness. The region’s passengers deserve a better service and value for money for the fares they pay.

Investing in infrastructure and services—such as improvements to tracks to boost capacity and to reduce delays and congestion, new trains, and better passenger services such as wi-fi and refreshments—could potentially unlock £3.7 billion of economic growth for the region. This economic analysis was put together in the GEML capacity study report. I congratulate the region’s MPs who have all got together to publish a rail prospectus to further the campaign for investment in rail services and infrastructure. The prospectus outlines the measures needed to support economic growth and job creation in the region through the railways. These measures are intended to deliver regular services between London and Ipswich with journey times brought down to 60 minutes and between London and Norwich with journey times brought down to 90 minutes—also known as the “Norwich in Ninety” campaign. The prospectus has been supported by councils, business groups and rail user groups in the region and I understand the Secretary of State for Transport has been engaged with this process, meeting MPs and organisations to discuss the plans.

In Network Rail’s strategic business plan for control period 5—investment period 2014-19—it has committed to spending around £2.2 billion in the east of England. The infrastructure improvements include works to signals, new switches and crosses, and the remodelling of Bow Junction near Stratford to increase capacity. The region will also benefit from Crossrail coming to Shenfield. All these investments are welcome but further investment is needed to boost this economic corridor. In particular, commuter and freight capacity on the GEML will be enhanced considerably by introducing four-tracking north-east of Chelmsford. I am sure my noble friend Lord Hanningfield will have more to say about that. This new infrastructure could be put in place to coincide with the development of Beaulieu Park and a proposed new station being constructed there. I pay tribute to my honourable friend in the other place, indeed my own Member of Parliament, Priti Patel. She has been working closely with Essex County Council, Chelmsford City Council, the Essex chambers of commerce, Network Rail and Abellio Greater Anglia to develop a strong economic case for this new infrastructure, recently holding a meeting with them in Chelmsford. Other improvements that are being pressed for include: new, refitted or fully refurbished rolling stock; an increased frequency of services; improvements to branch lines; increased parking capacity at train stations; and track upgrades throughout the GEML to enable services to travel at 110mph to speed up journey times. The new Greater Anglia franchise is due to be in place from October 2016. The franchising process also presents an opportunity to secure new improvements to the train services in the region.

The east of England has suffered for too long from the effects of underinvestment in its rail network. The time is now overdue to rebalance this regional anomaly. Modern growth demands effective rail links to drive a balanced innovation economy, to facilitate sustainable housing and development, and to support an international transport network. I look forward to the Minister’s response to the points that I and others raise in this debate.

16:15

[Lord Berkeley (Lab)]

I am very grateful to the noble Baroness for achieving this debate. For me, the East Anglia rail network is one of the most important parts of the network in our country. I declare an interest as chairman of the Rail Freight Group. I will not talk just about freight but about Sizewell, which is in the region. Most speakers have commented on the lack of sufficient track on most of the network. Most places are two-track, except the Felixstowe branch which is a single track. As the noble Baroness has said, Felixstowe is a very successful port.

In spite of that—I say “in spite of”, although there is an hourly passenger service on the Felixstowe branch—Felixstowe is achieving 30 trains in each direction on the single track, which is a credit to the port, Network Rail and others. The noble Baroness mentioned the chord that allows the trains to go straight from Felixstowe to Peterborough and Nuneaton without reversing. I call it the bacon factory chord which is a much nicer name. It will make a great difference to the volume.

It is a lovely challenge to have all the jobs at Felixstowe but the intermodal traffic by rail is forecast to at least double, probably more, in 20 years. Whether it will go to Felixstowe, London Gateway or Southampton is a matter for debate. I know that the port will work very hard to get a good market share of that. A new rail freight terminal has just opened at Felixstowe. I do not know whether any noble Lords went to the opening. I could not go myself but I was told that it was very good. However, there Felixstowe is, connected to a single track, which needs to be doubled quickly. It is not a difficult job as it goes mostly through fields. A lot of improvements have already been done to the bacon factory chord, Ipswich, Nuneaton through Peterborough. The gauge has been enhanced to take the nine-foot six-inch boxes on standard wagons and the signalling is being improved. A few other things also need doing.

The next stage is to have the line electrified. Around six months to a year ago, the Government announced an electric spine from Southampton, which will be very useful for freight and which we all welcome. However, there should also be an electric spine from Felixstowe, which would improve the capacity. It would obviously reduce the emissions that there are from the diesel trains. It would also enable more freight trains from Felixstowe to the Midlands and the north-west to avoid going along the North London Line in London. Our colleagues in London are not very happy about having all those freight trains. It is rather odd to have freight trains going through virtually the centre of a major capital city. That suggestion would help a great deal.

Electrification needs to be on the agenda in a firm programme, whereby the train operators will invest in the electric locos necessary. It is really good news that in the past month Direct Rail Services announced the order for the first new electric locomotives probably for 25 years. The beauty of them is that they also have a diesel donkey engine in them so that they can do the last mile into terminals. It needs doing, and it needs doing properly and planning in advance. For me, freight is a very important part of the East Anglia region. I am sure that those who are keen to see better passenger services will be pleased that more freight in the future will probably go a different way rather than through London.

As regards Sizewell, a big nuclear power station will probably go ahead and will employ a large number of people. I have been talking to EDF, the developer, about whether it could try to avoid too much damage to the local roads in Suffolk and the area by making more use of the railways. I know there has been an improvement in Beccles, which is good but it probably needs double tracking, where there is none, from Woodbridge or somewhere around there.

There are two reasons for doing this. One is to get the workers to work. Why cannot they go by bus or car? Of course they can, but in a great big traffic jam, which would be very bad for all the other users. Why could there not be a bit of a link? It would be the old, original link to Aldeburgh, extended into the Sizewell site to run passenger services for the workers—the commuters, if you like—from Ipswich or wherever. I see that as a big Section 106 improvement, which I hope the local authorities will push for. I think they will.

The second reason for making more use of the railways is, of course, to try to stop too many deliveries coming by road. This was done very successfully in the construction of terminal 5, and it was done reasonably successfully for the Stratford Olympics. All the bulk materials can come and go—they can go by sea as well now. In the construction of terminal 5, when it came to bringing things such as desks, basins and all the smaller things that you would not necessarily bring by rail, there was a series of consolidation centres around the country, wherever was convenient for the manufacturing or supply. The contractors called up for what they wanted the day before, and the goods were sent down by train overnight. It just needed a rail terminal in the area.

The combination of passenger and freight benefits for Sizewell and for the residents who live around there would be immense. I hope the Government will encourage EDF to look at that very positively when it comes to the planning process, and make it all part of a Section 106 agreement. Again, I am very pleased to welcome the new Minister to this debate and I look forward to what she has to say.

16:21

[Lord Bradshaw (LD)]

I do not live in East Anglia, but because one of my grandchildren has recently gone to University in Norwich, I have sampled the passenger service. It was really quite a shock: it was so shabby—I think that is the word I would use to describe it. It did not seem to be like an inter-city service at all. The point I want to make is that the new franchise is due to be let in 2016. It is important that plans are made to find new rolling stock. Rolling stock off the east coast, which is called mark 4 rolling stock, is pretty good and would be very good if it were refurbished. It could be used to revolutionise the East Anglian service and the electric locomotives could go there as well, because the department has ordered the IEP trains—the express inter-city trains from Hitachi—to work the east coast services. I will not go into that saga—it has been much discussed—but whichever this franchisee is, it should be in the position where it negotiates with the suppliers of the rolling stock. This is not a process in which the Department for Transport needs to be or should be involved.

Rolling stock companies were set up and they were supposed to own or provide the rolling stock. The train operator was supposed to be what is called “asset light”. It was supposed not to own the track and not to own the rolling stock. Therefore, it could make decisions about hiring the rolling stock which was best for that route. I hope that the franchising process can be put in train sufficiently early for the potential franchisees to agree with the rolling stock companies what they want to do the job. There will be surplus rolling stock which they will be able to use. It is not the sort of thing for which the department has the skills necessary to actually make this happen. I am sure that these trains, if refurbished, would be a huge lift to the area because they have half their life left. I know that is not as good as new trains but it would be an improvement.

I urge the Minister to get the franchising process moving and, when the franchise is let, to let it for a longish period. Particularly in recent years, franchisees have been given short-term extensions during which they cannot possibly be expected to invest. They might apply a coat of paint, clean the trains and hire a few staff, but they cannot invest. The problem is the disjuncture between the long life of railway assets—40, 50, 60 or 70 years—and the very short franchises. The franchise should be long enough for the franchisee to see some return on his money. However, the franchise should not be extended unless there are means in place by which the franchisee is held to account for punctuality, cleanliness and reliability. Reliability is particularly important, because it is the long delays that upset people. Let us have a sort of quality partnership, whereby the franchisee gets a long franchise in return for achieving what is expected, both in return to the Treasury and in quality.

16:25

[Lord Hanningfield (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, I too thank the noble Baroness, Lady Scott, for obtaining this debate. It gives us all the chance to voice our views and suggestions on how we might improve railways in the eastern region. I also congratulate the Minister on her appointment. As this is one of her first debates, I hope that she will take a particular interest in improving railways in the east.

I am getting on a bit in years, and I have probably been using the railways in the eastern region longer than anyone in this Room. My mother came from a little town called Holt in north Norfolk. The only rail service in Holt today is a steam engine you can take from Sheringham to Holt. I used to go regularly to Holt with my mother during the war, and I have cards sent by my mother to my father saying: “Paul and I will be at Chelmsford station at two o’clock on Saturday afternoon”; I was a two year-old at the time. Since then, I have been using the trains very frequently, coming to London to attend meetings of the National Farmers Union, local government—as most people know—the Association of County Councils, the Local Government Association, and now the House of Lords. I have been a regular user of the railways in the east for 70 years.

I do not think the railways are as good now as they were when I was a two year-old. The service is very unreliable at times. Most people have mentioned the signalling problems. I was one of those caught up in them on Tuesday; the delays were initially an hour. Most Lords have mentioned reliability, and we do not have reliability in the eastern region. Every week there is a disruption to the train service. On Tuesday it was pretty bad because the signals problems were not just in Chelmsford, but in Rochford as well. The whole of Essex, and right up to Norwich, was at a standstill for a long while on Tuesday morning.

It seems to me that in this day and age improving signalling should not be beyond us. Surely, given the technology we have now, signalling could be improved, and virtually all these delays are due to signalling. If some investment could be put into signalling now, we might have a better and more reliable service without billions of pounds of investment. As noble Lords have said, the eastern region is a net contributor, so money spent on signalling now might solve the problems in the short term.

The noble Baroness, Lady Jenkin, mentioned the station at Chelmsford. That is another improvement that could solve a lot of problems. The developers will build the station, at no cost to the national Exchequer or even to the rail companies serving the station. There needs to be is a loop just north of Chelmsford back towards Witham. Then the trains could sit in the loop while others came up and down the line. There will be a large car park there which will stop the enormous congestion in Chelmsford at peak times. That could solve a lot of the problems in the eastern region, so I hope that the Minister will take that one up and pursue it, because that could do a lot of good.

Many noble Lords have mentioned rolling stock. I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Bradshaw, that our service is pretty shabby, but we could do with a few more shabby coaches rather than none at all. Often, the trains are very short. I now often catch the train at Ingatestone. This was not first thing in the morning, it was about 10 am. The lord-lieutenant and I were standing on the platform, two elderly Peers. We got on the train and there was nowhere to sit down, so we both had to stand up. I felt ill and collapsed on the floor and the lord-lieutenant was holding me up, trying to support me. Initially, no one gave us their seats or anything. Then we were offered a seat and, fortunately, I was helped off the train at Stratford. I must say that the attendants at Stratford station were very good. It was because of the size of the train at 10 am that we had to stand up. So it seems that we could do something better with rolling stock now, rather than waiting years for it.

Those are the particular issues: the rolling stock, the station at Chelmsford and please can we get someone to do something about signalling? Everyone has spoken about the growth in the eastern region. As an Essex man, I know about the growth in Essex in Chelmsford and Witham and, as the noble Baroness, Lady Jenkin, said, the whole of the county is buoyant. At 6 am, the platform was virtually six deep with people waiting to come to work in London. This is one of the new Minister’s first debates. Let us have her take a particular interest and see whether we can solve some of our problems in the eastern region as soon as we can.

16:31

[Baroness Brinton (LD)]

My Lords, I, too, congratulate my noble friend Lady Scott of Needham Market on securing this debate, and the noble Baroness, Lady Kramer, on her appointment as Minister. It has been fascinating listening to noble Lords who are much more expert on the complex technical issues of the rail network than I am or will ever be. However, there is one area in which I have become more experienced than I might have wished over the past few years, and that is disability access to trains and stations, where more investment in the rail network is essential. But it is not just about money; it is also about attitude at the top of the train operating companies. I hope that your Lordships will allow me to stretch the scope of the Question for Short Debate today to include the train operating companies that cover the east of England region, despite the earlier comments of my noble friend Lady Scott, not least because my experience is over the whole of the east of England and I think that some points bear comparison.

I shall start by saying that the staff of whichever train operating company I have had to ask for assistance have been unfailingly helpful. Sadly, the services offered are somewhat mixed. Starting with wheelchair access, the east of England train operating companies all set out their offer on their websites and are proud to say that most of their larger stations are step-free and have barriers suitable for a wheelchair to go through, but that is only as good as the lifts at the station. Intermittent faults on a lift are an irritant to someone with a stick and a case, but to someone with a wheelchair, that station becomes a no-go zone. At Watford Junction, a lift went out of service 10 days ago and we were told at the time that it would be mended within three days. It is still out of service. We have been told that someone has written off for a part, but we have no idea when service will resume. The alternative route to that platform, which is the main west coast line down to London, means that you have to come out of the station, go all the way round it and under a tunnel, climb up a steep hill into the car park, and then get a member of staff to unlock the gate for you in order to access the platform.

Then there is the vexed issue of ramps on to trains. Disabled passengers travelling home in the evening can usually find support at the London terminus, but people tell me that they have occasionally arrived at their destination and there is no staff member to meet them, certainly not to put up a ramp. A staff member pointed out to me that it was helpful that I lived at a main station with 24-hour staff. What people do when staff are there for only part of the day or, worse, at unmanned stations, is a real issue. At another station that I have had occasion to use, if you are in a wheelchair you have to wait until the train has left the station to be escorted down a ramp, across the rail track and up the ramp on the other side. That is clearly not safe in this day and age.

Not all disabled people are in wheelchairs. I tend not to use a wheelchair on trains unless I have to. Many disabled people rely on sticks and crutches. The modern trend for beautiful forecourts—King’s Cross, Watford Junction and, just out of the region, Birmingham New Street—rightly addresses the issue of flat surfaces and wide, automatic doors. However, the amazing new hall at King’s Cross, which I use frequently, has positioned the disabled priority seats for waiting in a place where you cannot see the departure boards. The seats are right underneath them, so you have to get up and move to find out the platform your train will arrive at. They have not thought about the walking disabled and how they will get to and from the station. The taxi drop-off at King’s Cross is great, but if you want to get a taxi once you have come off a train at King’s Cross, you have to stand and queue with everyone else. I have done that for up to 15 minutes.

The recently opened forecourt at Watford Junction had neither a disabled drop-off point nor a pick-up space near the station. The new provision removed the disabled spaces beside the forecourt and put them on the other side of the bus station. When I first inquired about that, I was told that all disabled people use wheelchairs, and that wheelchairs and access do not matter as long as there is a path. Let me tell you that after four months they now have a disabled drop-off and pick-up point, but they had real problems in understanding that people with blue badges carry the badges with them, so people coming to pick them up do not have the badge. When they are accosted, they have to say—my husband is expert at this—“My wife will be along in a minute and will show you her badge then”. Good practice in this area includes Euston and St Pancras, where they have separate queues and priority access for disabled passengers, and it is well signposted.

I will move briefly to access on trains. The old rolling stock seats are really difficult for people who have difficulty getting up and down. If you use a mobility buggy rather than a wheelchair, some companies ask you to move into a seat. I would be in real trouble if that happened because I find getting up and down difficult. All companies now have priority seat arrangements. However, they rely on the public understanding the little sign behind the seat that says, “Please give up this seat if available”. More often than not, I have to ask people to give up their seat. Southern Trains and London Midland labels are easily accessible. Those on Greater Anglia and First Capital Connect services are a disgrace. In the rush hour, it can be even harder. The commuting public do not want to look at you if you need a seat. I have been reduced to tears on two occasions. Staff were brilliant at helping, but, again, often on a crowded train they are not there. The TOCs feel better because they offer priority cards, but they need to do more than publicise where the seats are and they should have advertisements to encourage people to give up their seats if they are needed. The @nogobritain campaign, run by Channel 4, has been brilliant at exposing these problems.

The report card on access is very mixed. Where is the accountability? Can government departments help to join up the thinking to get the train operating companies to provide a good service? We need more trains that are a smooth ride, not a stop-start service held at a red signal, for people with disabilities.

16:38

[Lord Marlesford (Con)]

My Lords, I am grateful for the chance to say a few words in the gap. When I was a schoolboy after the war, living in Suffolk, we had a wonderful stopping service. It was a direct line between Liverpool Street and Lowestoft. I would get out at Wickham Market and change to a little steam train that went to Framlingham. I would get out at Marlesford. Sometimes I was allowed to stand on the footplate, and I would be met by my mother with a pony and cart at Marlesford station.

My next real experience of rail was that for five years I was on the board of British Rail Anglia. It was the worst commercial experience I have ever had; it was so frustrating. The quality of the management was just not there—and the key is management. There has been talk about producing good franchises. When considering who you should give a franchise to, it is necessary to look at the management and the targets that they are prepared to set themselves. Let them be judged by those targets. Interview the management. We all know that if you are in the advertising world and you decide to hire an advertising agent, you do not just see the agency, you see the person who is going to handle the account, so insist on that. It is a matter of buying a good franchise by doing it properly, and that has not been done.

In the old days when you had the wonderful non-stop service from London to Ipswich and Norwich, you could guarantee an hour between London and Ipswich. Now, however, it is different. One of the things that I had as a non-executive on the board was a first-class free ticket to wherever I wanted to go, but I virtually never used it on my own line if a journey was time-sensitive. As has been said, reliability is crucial. Trains are about reliability. You cannot blame someone else when you are in a car, but you jolly well can when you are on a train. That is another factor which should be properly taken into account.

The noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, was absolutely right to say that something has to be done about Felixstowe. We should have a new target for the amount of freight that is carried; I think that it is only about 20% at present.

[Lord Berkeley]

I think it is about 30% now. It is one of the best in the country.

[Lord Marlesford]

Well, it wants to have a new long-term target, maybe 50%, and in my view let us forget about HS2.

I shall end on a positive note because I am allowed only two or three minutes in which to speak. At least the difficult communications that we have to East Anglia have kept Norfolk and Suffolk the very beautiful counties that they are, and I proudly declare an interest as president of Suffolk Preservation Society.

16:41

[Lord Davies of Oldham (Lab)]

My Lords, I warmly congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Scott, on securing this debate, but even more so on the trenchant way in which she made her opening remarks and set the scene. She posed a series of questions that I hope the Minister will respond to because they established a position that was greatly reinforced by subsequent contributions in the debate. I also welcome the Minister and congratulate her on her new position. I am sure that she will enjoy the role enormously, although I have to say from bitter experience that I always found these debates the most difficult to respond to, given the constraints of time. I will therefore make my points fairly brief and give the Minister the maximum opportunity to concentrate on the real issues.

I am grateful to my noble friend Lord Berkeley for ensuring that in this debate about rail we have discussed the issue of rail freight as well, because it is particularly important to the eastern region. After all, there is the obvious claim that the eastern region is a net contributor to the Treasury, and Felixstowe bears a considerable responsibility for that. That is why we should cherish that area of the developing economy and the successes of recent years, and ensure that it goes from success to success. My noble friend is also right to identify how important the issue is with regard to Sizewell.

I reinforce the point that additional investment in our rail service is necessary. Difficulties on many lines have been identified today, along with the inadequacy of the service that is provided at present. Anyone who travels in East Anglia will be all too aware of those difficulties. In a moment I shall comment on an area that has not thus far been commented on, but I have every sympathy with the points that have been made. The expectation is that rail passenger numbers will increase by more than 40%, which makes one realise the level of necessary investment that we have to make just to stand still. The trouble is that at present the trains do stand still on occasion, which is not much help to any of us. We want an improved passenger service and we want the trains to run on time.

I have to say that one despairs. In the area where I am, which I would guess in comparison to Suffolk, Norfolk, Broxbourne and the East Anglia area would be looked upon as Hertfordshire, the line up through Harlow might be considered to be somewhat blessed. After all, Stansted is a crucial dimension of the line. Any idea that having an airport as one dimension of the line improves the service on it has to be thought about again. It certainly sets a benchmark which the noble Lord, Lord Marlesford, identified. He said that it is a benchmark for service to the airport, which makes very great demands upon the service. After all, it is the only airport in Britain where over 50% of its passengers arrive by public transport. We need to build upon that. While we realise just how significant the rail is, if you have a line to Stansted that is not a dedicated one—far from it—but has to give considerable priority to the Stansted Express, the implications for the other areas along the line are quite critical. Mention has been made of the significance of places such as Harlow, which is an important economic development area of the eastern region. However, Harlow finds its service affected, as do so many others, by the fact that many trains which are destined for Stansted do not stop there.

We have to recognise that where there is the possibility of additional capacity, we should exploit it. The great bottleneck, as ever for East Anglia, is access to the London terminals for so many of its operations. All the London terminals were created in the 19th century and the bottleneck problem is reflected in them all. Yet it is the case that, coming out of Liverpool Street into the area over which the Stansted line operates, there is extra capacity in the form of land that is spare and owned by the railway. Surely we could follow the pressure of local authorities and communities to bring an extra line or two into that area that would lead into Liverpool Street and thus free up Stansted. It would certainly give priority on a line which serves not just Stansted but, of course, King’s Lynn. I was on a train heading for King’s Lynn the other evening—mercifully, I was only going as far as Bishop’s Stortford—when I heard the classic apology that you get on really good trains: “We apologise for the fact that this train is running late. There is a slow train in front of us”. Wow—what a delight it was for us all to have a slow stopping train in front of a supposedly important express that was going quite a good distance. Liverpool Street to King’s Lynn is one of the longer journeys that one can make in East Anglia.

I hope that the Minister recognises that real issues have been raised in this debate. I say to the noble Lord, Lord Marlesford, that if it is a question of good management, then how about looking at this test? The directly operated railway on the east coast main line—the one which is in fact being run by the department after that franchise collapsed—has returned a very significant profit. Yet there was no consideration by the Government that that should be used for the two-year period which emerged once the franchise collapsed as far as National Express is concerned. I wonder why? If the Government took the management issue and the targets referred to by the noble Lord, Lord Marlesford, to heart, it might be that they could learn a lesson from them. They could then do a better job on franchises in the future than has been done in the recent past.

16:48

[The Minister of State, Department for Transport (Baroness Kramer) (LD)]

Thank you, my Lords. I have learned enough between debate one and debate two to realise that I have a lectern available to me, so we are definitely making progress. My heart obviously sank as this debate progressed, when I realised that so many Members of your Lordships’ House suffer regularly from this line. I can tell your Lordships that as we went through it, my empathy increased with each additional speech. I, too, thank the noble Baroness for securing this debate because the East Anglia rail network is clearly a topic of real concern to any of us who are involved in the world of transport.

Investment in these services is vital for economic health in the east of England. It unlocks the potential of important regional centres such as Norwich and Ipswich, to which a number of speakers have referred, including the noble Baronesses, Lady Jenkin and Lady Scott, and maintains links between rural communities. It supports the position of Cambridge as one of the leading centres of high-technology in the UK.

I shall try to address questions that have been raised in this debate. If I miss anything, we will definitely follow up with a written response, so I hope that noble Lords will bear with me.

As the noble Baroness, Lady Jenkin, said, there has been an ongoing dialogue between the department and the key stakeholders in East Anglia on many of these issues. I wish to commend the work that went into Once in a generation—A rail prospectus for East Anglia, and the way in which so many different stakeholders came together to support a united vision around that document. It is now being updated, and I hope that it can be an important mechanism for raising some of the capacity issues that we talked about today. It will be the basis for continuing engagement between the department and stakeholders in East Anglia. The noble Lord, Lord Bradshaw, brought up issues around the quality of service and, more specifically, around rolling stock; I am not sure to what degree it will look at rolling stock in quite that technical sense, but quality of service should be very much embedded in that discussion. As others have said, the Secretary of State has been to Ipswich and been very engaged in this process.

I understand the concerns that investment in rail in East Anglia has been delayed because of the pause in the rail franchising programme last year. The important result is that the Government have a full timetable covering all rail franchises for the next eight years, and it will let us get that programme back on track. To allow the programme to be robustly delivered, and following the recommendations of the Brown review, the timetable contains a number of direct awards that let us stagger the start of the new franchise competitions. The Greater Anglia franchise will receive one of those direct awards. It will be important as we look in the short term and the long term and have those discussions with the rail network to determine whether an economic case can be made for infrastructure improvements to expand capacity. The Greater Anglia direct award goes from the current contract in July 2014 to the start of the next competed franchise in October 2016. We do not yet have the term for the long-term franchise; that is still under discussion. We are concerned that the direct awards do not become a rationale for delay in the long-term franchise. That will be an underpinning issue; it is not expected that the direct award would be required to extend beyond October 2016.

Any improvements will be assessed for affordability and the level of value-for-money that they provide. They must also lay a suitable groundwork that will support the terms of the competition for the next franchise. It is key that the franchise competition remains free from preset obligations so that it can achieve the best possible long-term deal for both the passenger and the taxpayer. But I take on board the comments made about rolling stock; the Government are not necessarily the party to make rolling stock decisions, and I will feed that back into the franchise discussions, although I am not the Minister directly responsible for those. But the need for short-term improvements in rolling stock has been expressed very clearly in this conversation. I want to confirm that we are actively working with the operator, Abellio, to see what improvements can be made to the rolling stock during the short-term direct award period. I do not think that anyone can make any promises; it is certainly unlikely that initiatives will provide the level of improvement that everybody would like to see. But we may be able to get some meaningful and positive changes that generally improve the passenger environment as a whole. I know well that there clearly are issues in the prospectus that was put forward such as power points on the trains, which have been underscored as being very critical to the passenger experience, and we have tried to take those kinds of issues on board.

I will move on to the issue of freight, which has been raised by many people, primarily by the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, who is one of the great experts on this in the House. The growth of Felixstowe and Thamesport places renewed pressure on rail freight services, so that is a good reflection of growth in the economy. I know that he is appreciative of the changes that mean that freight can now move from Felixstowe through to Peterborough rather than coming down and going through London. As a Londoner who lives fairly close to the North London line I can see the benefits of that. I also say to the noble Lord, Lord Davies, that preventing freight coming down into London increases passenger capacity in many ways, so it is one of the mechanisms that provides something of an answer. Electrification clearly has to be considered for this part of the route. It will be part of CP6—it will be considered as part of that—but obviously, as we are only beginning that process and the consultation I cannot comment on what the conclusions will be. However, I want to assure noble Lords that that is being recognised and is definitely one of the issues that we will look at carefully.

I have to admit that my knowledge on the issue of Sizewell C is very limited, particularly compared to the knowledge of the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, so I will write to him on that issue. I am struck by the canny approach that he suggested, which sounded like a win-win, both for the community, for the rail services, and in the end for Sizewell C, so we will take a look at that. I will have to write back to those noble Lords who raised the issue of an east-west rail link and also on community rail partnerships, which are areas that I am less familiar with.

The issue of disability is such a serious one, and I want to spend significant amounts of time looking at disability issues. Again, I am very conscious, from my background in London, that attitude is extremely important in the culture of the organisation. It affects the kind of services that people have. As we go forward into the franchising process it is critical that the issue of disability is at the forefront of people’s minds. By planning around the needs of people who have disabilities and recognising how important their mobility is, we deliver a better system rather than constantly retrofitting, which has been one of the pains and suffering of much of the rail system here in the UK. The noble Baroness will be aware that rolling stock must be compliant with persons with reduced mobility—that is a regulation that comes into effect by 2020—so that will definitely help drive the improvements on the trains. The department is committed to trying to deliver accessibility both on trains and in stations. She might be interested to know that the department is working with Network Rail on the delivery of specific schemes under the Access for All programme. It will not answer all problems but it could try perhaps to deal with issues such as ramps, which she pointed out are absolutely key in this process.

Noble Lords have made various comments about the station at Chelmsford. That is an area on which I will choose to write to a number of noble Lords as I have to confess a lack of familiarity with it. I was going to say to the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, who talked about disability, that perhaps she might be willing to meet with me to talk more extensively about this issue, and perhaps we might even take a trip or two together so that I could see the situation first-hand with someone who goes through some of these awful experiences and find out what could be done, particularly in this arena.

The Brown review into franchising recognised the benefits of setting clear franchise specification outputs and giving franchisees flexibility in how they are achieved. That picks up a lot of the points that the noble Lord, Lord Bradshaw, made, so I want to give him that reassurance. We must take into account the views of stakeholders—I am glad that the stakeholders have been so articulate—although I would perhaps have wished to have been more knowledgeable about the system before I had to face them in debate. That has been very good and salutary for me. When we consult on the new franchises in late 2014 I hope very much that those voices will make sure that they are heard, and we will make sure that they are listened to. We want to ensure that the passenger is at the heart of rail services in the east of England; that has to be right in terms of the community, economic growth and the success of our increasingly improving and very important rail system. I think I am being told that I am out of time.

Immigration: UK Citizenship and Nationality

Thursday 10th October 2013 Grand Committee

Question for Short Debate

17:00

Asked by

[Lord Roberts of Llandudno]

To ask Her Majesty’s Government whether they have plans to revise their requirements for those who apply for United Kingdom citizenship or nationality.

[Lord Roberts of Llandudno (LD)]

My Lords, I appreciate the opportunity to bring up the question of residency and access to the United Kingdom, and to ask the Government to look again at the requirements of those seeking UK citizenship: residency conditions; evidence of their good character; English language ability; and a matter that I have raised in the past, the Life in the UK test. A friend from Texas took this test several months ago. These were the questions she was asked: first, whether Elizabeth I handled her Parliament badly or had good relations with the legislature; secondly, whether UK citizens were renowned for backing individual liberty, intolerance, inequality or extremism; and thirdly, was it true or false that in 2002 Sir Winston Churchill was voted the “greatest Briton of all time”.

I should like to take the Minister up on an offer he made during Questions in February to meet interested groups in order to devise a more relevant and practical set of questions. As he will know, Dr. Thom Brooks of Durham University makes a number of recommendations for change. First, the handbook should make it clear which sections are to be tested. It contains about 3,000 facts—far too many for anyone to memorise—and the whole matter could easily become a pub quiz. There are inconsistencies and omissions that need to be rectified. The Government should decide what the rationale is for the test. Is it to be a stumbling block or a ladder in the immigration process? It appears totally unfair that it is used as part of the Government’s plan to reduce immigration. That is not what the test is there for.

Many of the current questions could be omitted. It does not help us at all to know when wives were granted the right to divorce their husbands. Let us make the test far more local: on the basic history of the community where the applicant lives, on where local schools, pharmacies and hospitals are, and so on. It would be interesting if we set up a parliamentary citizenship quiz—perhaps the Commons versus the Lords—on the Life in the UK handbook. If it succeeded here, we could then roll it out across the UK to see how many long-serving, ordinary UK citizens could answer the questions asked. Perhaps the Minister could set up a ministerial team to tackle these questions. The answers to irrelevant questions should play no part when one is making decisions about a person’s suitability for citizenship. I ask again: where is the necessary information about the NHS, how to report crime, or which subjects are taught to our children? We have to have someone looking at this new set of questions, and perhaps Dr Thom Brooks could do just that.

In 2008 the noble and learned Lord, Lord Goldsmith, said of the test that it created a deep impression of unfairness among those who had to sit it. I agree with him but I would go further. I suggest that an accurate impression of the UK’s current immigration system is one that is deeply unfair and riddled with inequalities. I know many folk representing immigrant societies, trying to help them in their present situation, and the general impression is that the whole situation is shambolic.

There is much talk about how we must attract the brightest and the best. Is that done by restricting our immigration further? I have a Bill before the House to reduce from 12 months to six months the time within which those seeking asylum in this country will be able to work. Is it by indefinite detention? Is it by reassessing the family migration rules? These can be barriers but they can also be bridges.

Only 26 of the 193 countries in the United Nations have an average personal income of more than £18,600, which is the sum called for before people can take up their place in our community. You see families with far less than this. In Nigeria the average income is £1,022 and in India it is £935. We are setting impossible targets. How on earth can people raise this sort of money? How can they send their children to somewhere where they can fulfil their dreams? We rely so much on people from India, Nigeria and other countries in order to run our National Health Service. I looked at the list of consultants in the three north Wales general hospitals and a third of them come from outside the UK and outside Europe. If we had these sorts of limits when they were struggling in their own countries, our health service would have gone a long time ago. There could be a very real crisis and if we establish them now and insist on them, that crisis is waiting for us in the future.

Today’s new Immigration Bill, of which I have had a brief view, makes nonsense of the dreams of the past. When the Statue of Liberty was erected, what was written on it? It stated:

“Give me your tired, your poor,

Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free”.

In the UK today we say: “Stay where you are. The barriers are up; the bridges are destroyed. Forget the hopes and dreams for yourself and your children”. Of course, if you are a wealthy entrepreneur, you can buy residency here if you have £20,000 or £50,000 or £200,000—you can buy your citizenship in the UK—but if you are a little child, with tremendous potential, in one of the African countries, hard lines. The world will never benefit from what you could contribute.

On 25 March the Prime Minister said that he wanted the brightest and the best to come here, but what chances are there for so many? Do we not have an opportunity here to provide them with an opportunity? One thing we could do is to improve at an early stage our links in twinning with schools in places like Africa. There is a lot that can be done and perhaps in the new Immigration Bill we will be able to take up that opportunity.

I think of the vans that went out—they were actually lorries more than vans. The Home Office paid for posters. How effective were they? In the Commons today, it was revealed that only one person took advantage of that offer: one person from Pakistan. There was nobody else. Despite all the cost and the unease produced by the posters, they had such little effect.

This morning, I heard Mrs May trying to create a hostile environment for undocumented migrants in the UK. In an earlier debate, the noble Earl, Lord Attlee, said that denying asylum seekers the ability to work makes it difficult for them to integrate into our society, which is what we want.

I suggest that the whole culture and attitude is one that we must deplore. It is the new attitude. I imagine that when the Welsh dairymen came here more than 100 years ago, they were not really welcome, and that there was hostility. “Taffy” was one insult for the newcomers.

In 1938 the Daily Mail headlined its story: “German Jews are pouring into this country”. It went on to print:

“‘The way stateless Jews from Germany are pouring in from every port … is becoming an outrage. I intend to enforce the law to the fullest’. With these words, Mr Herbert Metcalfe, the Old Street magistrate, yesterday referred to the number of aliens entering this country through the ‘back door’—a problem to which the Daily Mail has repeatedly pointed”.

That was in 1938. The attitude was hostile. Where did it end? It ended in the Holocaust.

The response in 2013 can be much better than that. We should ask the Minister to look again at the contents of this test, and at the whole raft of immigration legislation.

[Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon (Con)]

Before my noble friend rises, perhaps I may remind noble Lords that this is a time-limited debate, with contributions limited to six minutes. If any speech exceeds that, it will eat into the Minister’s time, and the time of the opposition Front Bench, so I would appreciate it if noble Lords could keep to time.

17:12

[Baroness Gardner of Parkes (Con)]

My Lords, I feel that I am a strange person to be speaking in this debate because I am not a British citizen. I have thought about it a few times, but in the days when I thought about it the Australians would have revoked my Australian citizenship. Because I was here before the immigration laws, I had the right of abode. However, I can tell you that that right has become a bit of a nightmare, because you have to renew it every time you renew your passport. You are required to send in an unbelievable number of documents, all in their original form, including my husband’s parents’ birth certificates, his birth certificate, our marriage certificate—there is a whole list—and they must all be in their original form. Some of them are now so old that if I live long enough to get another passport, I am not sure that they will be in any state to be sent to the office.

I have spoken to the department about this. The man dealing with it is in Liverpool. He said, “I can’t imagine why we have to have originals every time”. Clearly they do not want someone forging all the documents, but Germaine Greer told me that when they told her that they required 10 documents a year and that she had been here for many years and therefore needed 40 documents, she told them that she could not produce 40 originals, and in the end gave up and became British. I thought that it was interesting that that seemed to be the easiest way out; but surely it would be easier to say, “Once we have a document, we will keep an official record of it”. I can see that you have to be sure that someone is not forging documents, but these things should be simple and they are not.

Nationality is an interesting thing. I have helped some people here get British nationality. One woman from Colombia had been illegally here for 27 years. In the end, we were very fortunate. Originally she came legally as an au pair. You did not have to have a visa but came as a guest of the people who invited you to come and be part of their family. I know that well because at one time I ran an au pair agency. I was at home with my own children and could not get anyone to help, so I set up the agency and discovered that all you had to do was invite someone. This woman was fortunate because in her then illegal years she had looked after the parents of one of the very well known Lords here. She told me about this man—“Sir” someone—but it never occurred to me that he was a famous Law Lord until she brought a photo. Then we were able to get going, he supported her, and she got her right to be here. She legally stayed here for five years 20 years ago. However, the five years have to run since you received your permit to be here. Now she has two more years to go, and I want to live so long to help her.

She resents terribly, and so do a lot of other people, all the people who come in, supposedly as asylum seekers. They go to the same English classes and are not interested in learning anything at all. All they want is to be here. A lot of people who want to become British citizens feel cheated because they feel there are quick ways in which people are getting in without any of the bookwork that was referred to—learning.

Now, my right of abode, apart from anything else, costs more than my Australian passport. The other situation I found through the woman I helped is that of moving the goalposts. I have raised this at meetings that Mrs May has attended. You arrive here at a time when there is four years or six years to wait or whatever it is. By the time you present yourself, it has moved up two more years. By the time you have waited another two years before you can apply, it has moved up another two years. So in cases that I came across, applicants from Latin America had found that the goalposts had moved three or four times. That does seem to be very unfair.

A few other matters should be mentioned because time is very short, such as retention of passports. I know that there is a big backlog but people who are here on specialist visas are highly talented people who we want. Their passports are taken to some department and hung on to up to for a year before they are returned. No matter how big the backlog, something has to be done about that. If they need to go abroad during that time, they have to apply to get their passports back. They can get them back, but then they go back to the bottom of the queue and start another year. It should be possible to have the equivalent of what they used to give out in cinemas, a thing that let you reserve your place, and you could leave and go back in. I think there are so many departments all involved in citizenship—the Border Force, the Passport Office, the Post Office for your passports—and so many tests, many of which are quite unrealistic. It is time that people looked at the actual wording of these forms and simplified them so that people could understand the procedure and the ball game did not change by moving the goalposts.

00:00

[Lord Judd (Lab)]

My Lords, listening to the noble Baroness, it seems to me that one thing that is absolutely certain is that anyone who, at the end of the day, is still in the game and wanting to be a British citizen must be really committed to that objective. I was tempted to think, as I listened to the noble Lord, Lord Roberts, who is an old friend on these issues, that I should just get up and say—in the Welsh tradition of non-conformism—“Hallelujah!”, and sit down. However, the issue is too important for that. I want to make just a couple of observations.

I am always impressed how, within a broad sweep of history in Britain, each wave of immigration has added to the vitality of our life. There are difficulties, but it takes time. If we are determined to narrow ourselves down into a small group of people and to limit ethnic variety, geographical and other backgrounds, we will be shooting ourselves in the foot because previous generations have made a tremendous contribution. One looks at the public services. We encouraged people to come and be part of us. My God, there are large parts of the public services that would never have survived if those people had not been here and provided their service and in many ways become cheerful, positive members of our community. Yes, there are difficulties, and it is no good looking at these things just in terms of five or 10 years—we need to look at them for longer than that—but, looking at the broad sweep of history, I am certain that the outcome will again be positive.

We should look not only at the public services but at higher education, in which I am involved as a university member of court and an emeritus governor of the LSE. Some members of our ethnic minorities, as we like to call them, are doing incredibly well in higher education and are adding to the quality and prowess of our society. What is all this about? Is it about putting obstacles in the way of citizenship or is it about encouraging people to become citizens without bearing a grudge or feeling exasperated, having been through a sensible, rational process of learning how you become a citizen? We used not to have all these arrangements. I think that it is clear to anyone outside that they are not about learning about citizenship but about limiting the number of people who obtain citizenship. We need to separate out these issues. I do not believe that it is possible to have an open-door immigration policy leading to citizenship; that is just not rational or possible. Ideally, it would be lovely but it is just not possible. However, what we should not do is aggravate and alienate people as that leads to dissension and frustration. That is not a good way to create harmony and achieve the best possible outcome. The process should be open and just.

I am very worried about the financial barrier, as is the noble Lord. If it is a mix, it is a mix. What may seem hardly petty cash to many Members of this House is a very heavy cost indeed to many ordinary people in our society who play a constructive part in our community. What are we doing with that? As regards the test, what I worry about is how we will assist integration, harmonisation and the future well-being of our mixed society if we indulge in hypocrisy. I ask noble Lords to please go to an average football match, cricket match, commuter train, airplane or place of employment and say to people, “You claim to be a British citizen. How many wives did Henry VIII have?”. How many unquestioned members of our society would be able to say how many wives Henry VIII had just like that? However, we expect newcomers to our society to answer questions that we know a large number of people in all parts of our social system would be unable to answer.

The noble Lord, Lord Roberts, put my next point extremely well. It seems to me that if we are to have a citizenship test—in many ways I wish that we did not have to have one—it should ask questions about the character of our society. It should ask imaginative questions which test people’s understanding of our society and the stresses and strains within it rather than simply asking technical questions. My wife has spent her professional life teaching history at an advanced level. When she heard the question about how many wives Henry VIII had, she hit the roof. She said, “What does that tell us about the story of British life and British citizenship?”. It is not an essential dimension. From that standpoint, I ask that we please do not base our policy on hypocrisy.

17:24

[Lord Avebury (LD)]

My Lords, my noble friend Lord Roberts has a proud record of supporting the rights of people who are entitled to British citizenship. I am grateful to him for this opportunity to talk about citizenship. He has seen the Long Title of the forthcoming Immigration Bill, but he cannot tell me whether it contains anything about citizenship. I understand that it does not, and that after several years in which there have been no Bills to revise citizenship, we are again not to be given an opportunity in this Session.

There are some residual problems left over from measures agreed by Parliament in 2002 onwards to equalise the transmission of citizenship between fathers and mothers, with which we have dealt before. Citizenship is automatic for children of a British father, but it requires registration while the child is a minor when it is the mother who is British. If the mother forgets or dies, the right is forfeited. This could be rectified by providing that, where the mother has not registered the child during the child’s minority, she has the right to register herself on attaining her majority.

Another example was given by Wesley Gryk solicitors. It concerns a client, Mr A, who was born in Bermuda in the 1950s to a mother who was then a citizen of the United Kingdom and Colonies. She became a British Overseas Territories citizen on 1 January 1983 by virtue of Section 23(1) of the British Nationality Act 1981 and a British citizen by virtue of Section 3(1) of the British Overseas Territories Act 2002. The Home Office says:

“There is no registration option for people who would have become British Overseas citizens or British Dependent Territories citizens on 1 January 1983 if women had been able to pass on citizenship before that date and who, as a result, might now have had entitlements to British citizenship under other provisions”.

However, Mr A’s cousins, the children of his mother’s brothers and similarly born outside the UK, are now British citizens. That is a clear case of gender discrimination in the operation of British nationality law and ought to be corrected.

Another anomaly that has been raised several times is the status of the Chagos islanders. If they had not been kicked out of their homeland by our Government in the late 1960s, their descendants would by now have become British citizens. Descendants born here are still British, but those born overseas, mainly in Mauritius, are not. In some cases, a member of the family who is British may come here, but can only bring in members of his family if he can demonstrate that the dependents will have no recourse to public funds immediately on arrival. This results in split families and in British citizens being permanently exiled because they cannot or will not leave their families.

The Immigration Law Practitioners’ Association proposes that Chagos islanders born in exile should be able to register as British citizens if they have a single parent, man or woman, who was born on the islands. The same right should be extended to children of those who registered as British citizens under Section 6(1) of the British Overseas Territories Act 2002.

There is the whole question of stateless persons, for whom the UK restated her commitment to the 1961 convention at the 50th anniversary UN event in Geneva in December 2011. However, a British citizen born outside the UK and British Overseas Territories is British by descent and therefore unable to transmit his or her citizenship to the next generation or bring the children to the UK without surmounting major obstacles. In addition, there are the children of people living in a foreign country who acquire British citizenship after the birth of their children, where the state of residence prohibits the acquisition of its nationality to the children, often on racially discriminatory grounds, so the children are then stateless.

Finally, I need to mention the British overseas citizens who renounced their Malaysian citizenship when advised falsely by solicitors that they could then claim full British citizenship. After they found this was wrong, they languished here stateless, destitute and without the right to work for many years. After much correspondence and many meetings with the Minister for Immigration, he said that he had negotiated an agreement with the Malaysians for these people to return there and reclaim their former Malaysian status. When pressed for details, the Minister wrote yesterday saying that the persons concerned will be allowed a five-year residence pass to return to Malaysia, and that at the end of that period they could apply for permanent residence. However, he did not say how much longer they would have to continue stateless or explain what conditions they would have to satisfy before they could regain their original citizenship. The Minister says that he will publicise the arrangements only after at least a couple of successful returnees have demonstrated that the process is running smoothly, but even if that happens, I imagine that most of the people concerned would sooner have another five years of statelessness here in this country than return to Malaysia and face a 10-year period of statelessness there.

17:30

[Lord Noon (Lab)]

My Lords, I am very grateful to be speaking today and I thank the noble Lord, Lord Roberts, for securing this important Question for Short Debate. I am myself an immigrant to the United Kingdom, having come here in the late 1960s to set up a business. I started with very little except for my drive and ambition, and a determination to succeed. I worked hard and grew a successful international business that now has a wide range of foods in most of our major supermarkets. This success was possible because of the opportunities that the UK provided, and I remain proud and grateful to be a UK citizen, able to take advantage of the opportunities that this great land gives everyone. It is a wonderful aspect of life in the UK that, if you come here and work and integrate into society, you will have the opportunity to become a British citizen. So it saddens me and makes me angry to see some people trying to abuse these opportunities. We must cherish and protect our citizenship from those who come here but do not intend to work hard and contribute or, worse, those who come here to do harm. We must also ensure that our borders are monitored properly and that we know exactly who is coming in and going out of the country.

There is a list of requirements that you must comply with before you can apply to become a British citizen. In the short time available, I want to talk about one of these requirements: that people must be of good character. Let me quote from the UK Border Agency website on what it means to be of good character:

“We consider you to be of good character if you show respect for the rights and freedom of the United Kingdom, have observed its laws and fulfilled your duties and obligations as a resident”.

Being of good character, as the UK Border Agency states, means fulfilling your duties and obligations as a resident. Those duties and obligations include working hard, paying taxes and giving something back to society. I have spoken before in this House on the need to ensure that we protect the values and freedoms of the UK. Immigration controls are an essential part of how we do that. We need to ensure that the requirements for gaining entry and citizenship to the UK are strong and robust enough to work as they are intended to.

For example, a number of noble Lords have spoken before about the ineffectiveness of the citizenship test. I agree; how can knowing at what age you can be asked to serve on a jury or where Father Christmas comes from possibly show whether you are of good character or even understand the values and culture of this country? These questions tell us nothing about the character of the person. We should be asking people to demonstrate their commitment to the UK’s values and we should be expecting people to have at least a reasonable command of the English language and the prospect of a job waiting for them. Can the Minister tell us if there are any plans to review the citizenship test once again in order to make it more applicable? At the moment, the test is made up of questions about a range of obscure facts that do not have much to do with the day-to-day experience of living in the UK. Citizenship is something that is attained by birth or earned over time. It is then retained by being a contributing member of your community. Allowing and embracing immigration ensures the future of our dynamic and interesting country.

Perhaps it would be more helpful if the citizenship test focused on people having a knowledge of our laws, customs, history and culture, and also accepting our way of life. It should be focused on the practical things that immigrants should know to help them navigate living in Britain. Someone’s level of historical knowledge should not be a determinant as to whether they are a good or a bad citizen. What matters is the character of the individual, not only their general knowledge of the British Isles.

It is my belief that we must enforce these requirements much more strongly. There are too many people coming to the UK who expect the benefit but not the hard work that goes with it. They take advantage of our system but forget their obligations. If people cannot prove their good character through their family, friends and behaviour, they have no right to be here. Why not ask people to state their beliefs and how these concur with the values of the UK, or even to explain what they will contribute to the United Kingdom? The vast majority of immigrants to this country come here to make a better life for themselves and their families, and they bring a lot of knowledge and experience which help this great country to grow and prosper. We should welcome hard-working immigrants who wish to become British citizens, and we should make the Life in the UK test focus on real questions of how to navigate living in the UK rather than asking questions that most indigenous Britons may have difficulty in answering. I thank noble Lords for listening to me and I look forward to hearing more on this essential debate.

17:36

[Lord Watson of Richmond (LD)]

My Lords, international students account for almost half of current immigration into the United Kingdom. I wish to focus on the impact of UK immigration policies on the student population, postgraduate and staff. I declare two interests. From 2007-11, I was president of the British Accreditation Council, which, during those years, acted along with the British Council as the principal accreditation agency for Tier 4 entry into the United Kingdom, assessing colleges and offering education to foreign students against very stringent criteria. In 2011, this role was taken over by two other agencies—the QAA and ISI. This was a costly reorganisation and it has effected little change, with both those agencies reaccrediting 99% of the colleges which we had accredited originally. This is relevant because if the Government are to effect their aspirational cap of no more than 100,000 immigrants a year into the United Kingdom, there is a real risk of a significant further reduction in the number of foreign students. The other interest that I declare is that I am high steward, or deputy chancellor, of Cambridge University which both attracts substantial numbers of foreign students, especially postgraduates, and needs to attract researchers and teaching staff from overseas.

As we all know, in 2011 the Home Secretary broke up the UK Border Agency as unfit for purpose. It has been replaced by the Border Force. This successor agency is now headed up by Sir Charles Montgomery, who is currently appearing before a number of parliamentary Select Committees. He is already grappling with the demands of his agency, demands of such complexity and tenacity, including the establishment of e-borders, that I am not surprised that his predecessors heading up the Border Force did not stay for very long. Sir Charles Montgomery is, however, crystal clear on the strategic aims of the Border Force. As he said before the committee, they are to provide security and to promote British prosperity. There is, to put it mildly, a creative tension between these two objectives. Security is, of course, the priority and must be provided, although how best to do this, given the complex multifaceted terrain of insecurity, will continue to vex not only the Border Force but all our security agencies. But Sir Charles’ second strategic objective of promoting British prosperity is also vital, and this is my focus.

While the case for the value of immigration to our economy is well made, including by the CBI, the value of immigration to Britain’s economy by the international student education sector is much less well known. This sector contributed £17.5 billion last year and BIS quite rightly wants to increase this by 20% in coming years. It is not only the revenue raised but the significant value added, in skills, research and teaching, as testified to by the universities. Cambridge University, for example, is somewhat frustrated by the residential qualification for a visa application, which applies to T4 entrants with their dependants. We are losing very important people to universities abroad because the dependants cannot come here if the course is under 12 months long.

Therefore, we encounter a truly dangerous dilemma: if the Government are to achieve their overall cap of 100,000, they will have little option but to further curtail international student immigration into the UK. I urge great caution on the Government in this matter. We need international students—economically, intellectually, academically. Striking the right balance is not only a challenge for the Home Secretary and for the Border Force, it is also a challenge for our society because we will harm ourselves if we succumb to the rhetoric of an island fortress submerged by waves of immigration—rhetoric so beloved by some of our newspapers and politicians.

17:41

[Baroness Smith of Basildon (Lab)]

My Lords, I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Roberts, on his persistence with this issue, and welcome his efforts to secure today’s debate. The excellent speeches we have heard do great credit to your Lordships’ House. The noble Lord, Lord Taylor, and I have had a number of debates over the years we have been in our respective positions on the issue of immigration and citizenship, and that reflects the public and political interest in this issue. It also highlights the great responsibility of government.

The timing of today’s debate is interesting as it is against the backdrop of this week’s news that the Government’s “ad van” campaign on immigration was banned, not because it was an ill-judged political stunt but because the facts it deployed were wrong. Then there is the highly critical report by the independent Chief Inspector of Borders and Immigration on the chaotic failings of the e-borders programme. The Government have refused to allow the Home Affairs Select Committee to see that report in full. Then today we have the publication of the Immigration Bill. After the comments by the noble Lord, Lord Roberts, I look forward to seeing what amendments he puts forward to that Bill.

Those events set today’s debate in the context of the wider interest and show how difficult and complex these issues can be. Clearly, it is a key government responsibility to ensure that immigration is good and beneficial to the UK and its citizens. I think that the noble Lord, Lord Noon, used the phrase “of good character”. In the case of asylum, the Government are under a moral imperative; the Minister has made that clear on a number of occasions, and I thank him for it. However, the Government have a right—I think that the noble Lord, Lord Noon, referred to this as well—not to grant citizenship, or leave to remain, to those they consider will not contribute appropriately or will pose security problems.

I want to put that in context and to make just two points. One is about responsibility and policy. We should recognise that when we talk about immigrants we are not talking about a cohesive, identifiable group but a whole range of people of different nationalities who for one reason or another are seeking permission to live, and possibly work, in the UK. They include students—as the noble Lord, Lord Watson, mentioned—together with people involved in businesses, and workers and families. There is the separate issue, which concerns us all, of those who enter the country illegally and have no right to live here.

It is therefore right that we have a genuine debate about the kinds of immigration that we need and can sustain. Policies on this issue must be evidence-based and define the boundaries and the benefits or the disadvantages to the UK. Like the noble Lord, Lord Watson, I struggle with the Government’s test of success as being a fall in the level of net migration. It is a crude measure which, bizarrely—I am sure this was not the Government’s intention—means that if more UK citizens leave the UK than immigrants enter the UK, the Government will have succeeded. The noble Lord, Lord Watson, highlighted an alternative way the Government could achieve their aims which I think would be equally damaging to the UK. That is not success, and the Government’s current policies can lead to all kinds of problems and concerns. The Minister has heard this many times during questions and debates in your Lordships’ House in relation to universities and businesses. For example, the Government’s approach does not even start to address the different kinds of immigration, and the different impacts they have for the immigrants and for the country.

The other crude measure that gives me cause for concern—I have raised this with the noble Lord before, and other noble Lords have raised it—is the income threshold for British citizens who want to sponsor their spouse or family to live with them. I say at the outset that I fully agree that if an individual wishes to bring their family to settle in the UK, they should never assume that they will have state support. That is why there is already an absolute requirement for them to show that they have sufficient funds to support their family. There could have been greater clarity around that because it requires discretion and investigation on the part of entry clearance officers. We do not propose greater clarity there, but a blanket threshold that does not take into account any other relevant factors will not have the effect that the Government intended.

I recall a conversation with a gentleman who lived with his parents in the New Forest. He did not earn £18,600. In order to earn that in his profession, he would have had to move to London. In that case, his housing costs would have increased to such an extent that his disposable income would have been significantly less—but he would have fulfilled the Government’s requirements for allowing his wife to enter the country, even though it would have been much more difficult for him to support his family.

On the issue of asylum, the noble Lord himself said that there was no question of the UK not being a safe haven for those who genuinely face persecution in their native country. The example of young Malala from Afghanistan, whom many of us will have seen on “Panorama” this week and who is currently living in the UK with her family, should be a source of great pride. We should take pride in the fact that a woman of this amazing capacity—a quite exceptional young woman—is living, being treated and learning in the UK. Some 70% of people in the UK agree that we should offer asylum to those fleeing persecution.

There are other exceptional cases of people who have risked their lives to help UK interests and who face continued threats now. The Minister will have heard the comments made in your Lordships’ House about the Afghan interpreters who now face threats from the Taliban as our troops withdraw. Of course, the Gurkhas have been welcomed into this country.

The Minister said in your Lordships’ House, in a short debate on the citizenship test, that,

“the whole purpose of the exercise … is … to provide facts on which people can base a life of settlement and, indeed, citizenship in this country”.—[Official Report, 26/2/13; col. 954.]

Other noble Lords have spoken about this. I appreciate that I am getting close to my time, but perhaps I may direct noble Lords to the report from Dr Thom Brooks of Durham University, which makes it quite clear that the citizenship test is not fit for purpose. The Prime Minister failed it on national television. I am sure that I would fail it, and I regard myself as a very loyal and committed citizen of the UK. It is more like a pub quiz or a game of Trivial Pursuit.

I hope that the Minister has found this debate useful, and that we will have many more debates on issues around immigration as the weeks go on. I hope that he will take back some of the concerns raised in the debate today by noble Lords who have only the interests of the UK at heart and are really concerned about the citizenship test and about some of the other barriers that we put in the way of those who will be a great asset and benefit to the UK.

17:48

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Home Office (Lord Taylor of Holbeach) (Con)]

My Lords, I thank my noble friend Lord Roberts of Llandudno for securing this debate, which has been wide-ranging. Indeed, to some extent we have ranged beyond the strict subject of the debate. I hope that noble Lords will forgive me if I focus to some degree on the essence of the debate, which is nationality and citizenship. I assure noble Lords—it is important that the noble Baroness, Lady Smith of Basildon, accepts this—that the core of the Government’s policy is that the UK should continue to welcome individuals coming to work, study or join their family, and to provide a place of safety for refugees.

Reducing net migration is not about encouraging more Brits to leave than foreigners to come; it is about achieving a sustainable level of migration. All political parties are working towards a consensus on this issue. The Government are succeeding, because the levels of non-EU migration are at their lowest for 14 years.

My noble friend Lord Roberts of Llandudno pointed out that today we have published a number of important reforms to the immigration system through the new Immigration Bill, which is going to be a subject to which we will all be returning, I have no doubt. Everyone who has spoken in this debate, I am sure, will be back to talk through that Bill. It is a Commons starter, so we have got a bit of time to limber up for it. I hope noble Lords will not object if I try to answer specifically the questions and points raised on the questions of citizenship and nationality. They are all set out in the British Nationality Act 1981, so it is quite a long-standing Act. It has not been particularly changed. The citizenship test has changed. The one introduced by the previous Government has been brought up to date. Although there has been some criticism, notably from Dr Thom Brooks at Durham, about that test, it has been designed to make it much more real to the people who are sitting the test, and it has been widely welcomed.

The 1981 Act reflects the principle that citizenship should be acquired on the basis of a close and continuing connection with the United Kingdom. Although there are some registration routes for those who already have a link, and we will perhaps discuss areas where they have worked and where they perhaps do not work so well, the majority of those seeking to become citizens will do so through naturalisation. We are rightly proud of our British citizenship. It is a privilege, not a right. We expect those applying to naturalise as British citizens to have demonstrated a commitment to the United Kingdom through a period of lawful residence of five years, coupled with knowledge of the English language and of our culture, history and democratic government. Those living in Wales, as my noble friend will know, being a Welsh speaker, will already be able to demonstrate a knowledge of Welsh or of Scots Gaelic. Additionally, they should be of good character and, in most cases, intend to make the United Kingdom their permanent home. The Government consider that these remain the right criteria, although changes to particular requirements are planned.

First, the Government have looked at the way in which applicants for naturalisation demonstrate the required knowledge of language and life in the UK. If a person wishes to make the United Kingdom his or her permanent home and to become a British citizen, it is reasonable to expect that an individual will show, among other things, that they are committed to learning English and have an understanding of British history, culture and traditions. The ability to speak English and an understanding of the traditions and democratic principles underpinning UK life are essential for successful integration.

The noble Lord, Lord Noon, is nodding. There is no better example than himself of somebody who has done just that and contributed so much to British life. This can be demonstrated by taking the Life in the UK test in English, Welsh or Scottish Gaelic, or by obtaining an English for Speakers of Other Languages qualification, which can be at a very basic level. This means that some individuals have been able to naturalise without sufficient English to communicate and integrate with the wider community. The new Life in the UK test, to which there has been much reference today, places the emphasis on British history, culture and democratic government. Despite what some noble Lords have said, the vast majority of feedback on the new test has been positive. I cannot agree that the questions asked are irrelevant or that the test should concentrate on more practical matters.

The test is being taken by individuals who have been in the UK long enough. They have to be resident here for at least five years to qualify for this test and they should know about day-to-day practical issues. The aim of the test is to help new residents appreciate British traditions and understand how democracy developed in this country. The new test was informed by a user survey of 664 people who had taken the previous test. Most respondents were already aware of the practical aspects of UK life, but wished to have more information about history, government and the legal system. The test was designed to meet that request.

My noble friend Lord Roberts said that it should be made clear in the book which sections should be studied. It is intended that the whole book should be studied, but it is made clear that readers need not remember dates, including birth dates, or things of that nature. It is designed to inform, but the companion publication assists individuals in becoming familiar with the type of test that they are likely to face. With any book of this nature, it is possible for some details to become out of date, but we have deliberately moved away from the inclusion of statistics or similar information that could become irrelevant. As I said, the test is generally taken by people who have been in the UK long enough to know about practical issues. The handbook aims to provide information on British history, culture and democracy in an accessible, interesting way. Questions are no longer asked about dates: for example, “When did it become possible for wives to have the right to divorce?”. Instead, the questions are about principles, such as the principle that men and women have equal rights.

Further changes come into force on 28 October. From that date, applicants will be required both to pass the Life in the UK test and to have a speaking and listening qualification in English that shows that they can communicate at an independent level. Nationals of the majority of English-speaking countries will not be required to show a formal speaking and listening qualification. However, they will still be required to pass the Life in the UK test. This revised knowledge of language and life requirement will apply to all applicants unless they are exempt on the basis of their age or physical or mental condition. I say to the noble Lord, Lord Judd, for whom I have the greatest regard, that the whole point of the test is that it should be fair, reasonable and just, as he asked for it to be.

It may interest your Lordships to hear a few figures about how many people have taken the test and what the pass rate was. In 2012, 201,087 applications were decided. Of these, 97% were successful. Clear guidance limits the number of people for whom the test would be inappropriate. Of the 678 cases that were refused, 103 were refused because the applicant had insufficient knowledge of English or life in the UK. The failure rate is very small. The whole point is that candidates should prepare themselves by reading the publications that are made available for them.

We have a number of proposals coming forward in support of the Citizenship (Armed Forces) Bill, which will amend nationality Acts with respect to those serving in the Armed Forces overseas. I can tell my noble friend Lady Gardner of Parkes that the average processing time for a nationality Act application is nine weeks, and in that time it is possible to get your passport if you choose to do so. They just make a note of the details and return it to you; it is not kept.

I am going to run out of time so I will have to write to my noble friend Lord Avebury. He raised a number of interesting issues on which I would like to inform him, including the question of the children of British mothers, Chagossians and stateless persons. I will make sure that that letter is sent to all Members who participated in the debate. I enjoyed the tribute paid by my noble friend Lord Watson of Richmond to Sir Charles Montgomery. If any man can tackle the problems facing the Border Force, it is Sir Charles, and I have every confidence that he will do so. I thank noble Lords and I am sorry if I have been caught out of time. This debate has raised a lot of issues and I have found it very interesting.

Committee adjourned at 6 pm.

House of Lords

Thursday 10th October 2013 Lords Chamber

Thursday, 10 October 2013.

11:00

Prayers—read by the Lord Bishop of Oxford.

Introduction: Baroness Manzoor

Thursday 10th October 2013 Lords Chamber

11:08

Zahida Parveen Manzoor, CBE, having been created Baroness Manzoor, of Knightsbridge in the London Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, was introduced and took the oath, supported by Lord Lester of Herne Hill and Baroness Jolly, and signed an undertaking to abide by the Code of Conduct.

Introduction: Lord Wrigglesworth

Thursday 10th October 2013 Lords Chamber

11:14

Sir Ian William Wrigglesworth, Knight, having been created Baron Wrigglesworth, of Norton on Tees in the County of Durham, was introduced and took the oath, supported by Lord Rodgers of Quarry Bank and Lord McNally, and signed an undertaking to abide by the Code of Conduct.

Abortion

Thursday 10th October 2013 Lords Chamber

Question

11:19

Asked by

[Baroness Knight of Collingtree]

To ask Her Majesty’s Government what steps they intend to take to ensure that medical professionals offering to perform abortions on the grounds of gender are prosecuted.

[The Advocate-General for Scotland (Lord Wallace of Tankerness) (LD)]

My Lords, where it is suspected that abortions are being authorised in circumstances which do not comply with the Abortion Act 1967 and the matter is referred to the police, a full investigation will be carried out. The Crown Prosecution Service will review any cases referred to it by the police in accordance with the two-stage test set out in The Code for Crown Prosecutors. Where there is sufficient evidence for a realistic prospect of conviction and it is in the public interest, such cases will be prosecuted.

[Baroness Knight of Collingtree (Con)]

My Lords, is it not the case that, whatever else can be denied, secondary reasons may come into the decision? However, when the main reason for the terminations about which I am questioning the Government is that the coming child is a female, it seems to me as a human being and a female, as it does to millions of others, that that cannot possibly be right. Does my noble and learned friend accept that those of us who took part in the debates on the Abortion Bill in 1967 did not dream for one moment that it was necessary to put down an amendment to protect girl babies? Had we done so, I do not think that the Bill could ever possibly have been passed. Finally, is it not extremely dangerous that the law of the land should allow killing on gender grounds at any stage?

[Lord Wallace of Tankerness]

My Lords, I know of the long-standing interest that my noble friend has had in this issue, going back, as she indicated, to the passage of the initial legislation. Given the reporting, people might well think that this case was about medical practitioners offering abortion on the basis of the gender of the child. In those circumstances, it would seem incomprehensible that the full force of the criminal law was not being brought to bear on a practice which most of us would consider abhorrent. However, if one reads the full note provided by the Director of Public Prosecutions earlier this week, which I will make available in the Library, one will see that on the facts of the case it would not have been possible to prove that either doctor authorised an abortion on gender-specific grounds alone. It is a far more complex case than that. Indeed, the criteria used were those set out in Section 1 of the Abortion Act 1967.

[Lord Morris of Aberavon (Lab)]

My Lords, first, there have been differing reports as to whether there was a realistic prospect of prosecution, and I wonder whether the Minister could clarify that again. Secondly, on the public interest point, did the director consult the Attorney-General on this very issue, and what exactly were the public interest points against prosecution in the case which has been very much in the newspapers?

[Lord Wallace of Tankerness]

My Lords, with regard to the first point that the noble and learned Lord raises, the note that the Director of Public Prosecutions has set out indicates that the evidence was not strong and that the prospects of conviction would not have been high but that, on balance, there was just sufficient prosecution to provide a realistic prospect of a conviction. As the noble and learned Lord well knows, there is a second test—the public interest test. The view taken by the Crown Prosecution Service was that the jury would have had no independent yardstick of professional practice by which to assess the facts of the case—hence the need for the greater clarity which is now being sought. On the other question that he asked, the Director of Public Prosecutions did not consult the Attorney-General before the decision was made not to prosecute. My right honourable friend the Attorney-General has obviously had subsequent discussions with the Director of Public Prosecutions in the context of the review and, without in any way wishing to infringe on the independence of the prosecutor, he believes that the decision was taken in a proper and conscientious way.

[Lord Walton of Detchant (CB)]

My Lords, does the noble and learned Lord accept that there are a number of potentially lethal genetically determined diseases which are transmitted by an X-linked recessive mechanism and hence affect only boys? Does he therefore accept that, unless the availability of pre-implantation diagnosis were available, a female carrier of such a potentially lethal gene would be fully entitled to abort an affected male foetus?

[Lord Wallace of Tankerness]

My Lords, I certainly bow to the medical knowledge of the noble Lord—I do not pretend to come anywhere near it. However, there is reference in the BMA’s code of ethics and law regarding this factor, where there may be issues that could relate to gender and a medical condition. Indeed, my understanding is that in the two cases that have given rise to the current controversy, the patient concerned indicated that she had had previous serious difficulties in a female pregnancy due to genetic abnormalities. That is why it was not possible, in the view of the Crown Prosecution Service, to prove that the procedure was conducted purely on the grounds of gender selection.

[The Lord Bishop of Chester]

My Lords, does not this case, and in particular the letter from the Director of Public Prosecutions, taken together with the overall fact that, I believe, nearly a quarter of recognised pregnancies are deliberately ended in the womb, call for a comprehensive review of the operation of the Act in its entirety?

[Lord Wallace of Tankerness]

My Lords, I am certainly cognisant of the strong views that are held about this Act and its operation. One of the clear things emerging from this case is the great need to have clearer guidance for doctors on how to carry out their functions and the tests that are set down in Section 1 of the Abortion Act. I am confident that that will now be addressed. Certainly, the Crown Prosecution Service stands ready to assist in any way to provide that clarity.

[Lord Steel of Aikwood (LD)]

Does my noble friend agree that it is very difficult to see how any prosecution under the Abortion Act could take place if no abortion has taken place? Does he accept that gender selection by abortion is wholly repugnant and that therefore we must hope that the General Medical Council will issue ethical guidance on this important matter as soon as possible?

[Lord Wallace of Tankerness]

My Lords, I entirely agree with my noble friend that gender selection as a ground for abortion is wholly repugnant. It is quite clear that that is the very strong view of Members of your Lordships’ House. While abortions did not take place in this particular case, attempting to commit a criminal offence—that is, doing something that goes further than just preparing to commit it—is a crime in its own right and it is on that basis that the Crown Prosecution Service looked at the facts of this case. I do not know yet when the General Medical Council will come forward with any revised guidance; I have indicated that I think that it is necessary. However, the Chief Medical Officer will be writing again very shortly to all doctors involved in abortion provision, setting out the Department of Health’s views on sex-selection abortions—making it clear that sex-selection abortions are not acceptable—as well as pre-signing of certificate forms and other relevant issues, highlighting the need for doctors to keep up to date with legal provisions in the Act.

House of Lords: New Peers

Thursday 10th October 2013 Lords Chamber

Question

11:27

Asked by

[Lord Foulkes of Cumnock]

To ask the Chairman of Committees what logistic and financial adjustments are proposed to take account of the recent list of new Peers.

[The Chairman of Committees (Lord Sewel)]

None at this stage.

[Lord Foulkes of Cumnock (Lab)]

Needless to say, that is a disappointing answer. I want to make it clear that I do not associate the Chairman of Committees in any way with the Government’s cynicism in failing to abolish this House and now packing it with placemen and women. However, he is in the forefront of facing the consequences. Will he confirm that we are now reaching a new peak in membership and that new working Peers are—quite rightly—attending more frequently than those who have left or have died off?

[Noble Lords]

Oh!

[Lord Foulkes of Cumnock]

I mean, more than they used to attend. This is resulting in higher expenditure on allowances and greater demand on all our resources and facilities. Quite frankly, this cannot be achieved on a fixed budget.

[The Chairman of Committees]

My Lords, it is not part of my job to defend or attack government policy. I just try to keep the show on the road, with the helpful advice and support of the noble Lord in particular. To give a few facts, after the general election in 2010 there were, I think, 117 new creations. Since then, the net increase in the size of your Lordships’ House has been seven. It is difficult to put this: it is likely that the new creations are more active than those who are no longer with us. It is virtually impossible to find a nice set of words to convey those facts.

However, it is worth pointing out that in December the House Committee will consider whether to make any additional provision for any net increases in the membership of the House and in attendances, when it considers the forecast outturn for the current financial year and the budget for the next year.

[Lord Cormack (Con)]

My Lords, does the Chairman of Committees agree that it is crucial that we give our new colleagues the sort of warm welcome we all enjoyed when we came to this House? However, it is equally important that the Government recognise the problems that exist. Would it not therefore be an absolutely admirable gesture if they were to support the Bill to be introduced in another place on Friday 18 October by Mr Dan Byles, which incorporates the Bill that the noble Lord, Lord Steel, got through this House last year?

[The Chairman of Committees]

My Lords, we are again venturing into policy areas and, as Members of your Lordships’ House know, I have no views on such policy issues. If I did, I certainly would not express them.

[Baroness Royall of Blaisdon (Lab)]

My Lords, I would be grateful if the Chairman of Committees could ask the Leader of the House if the rumours circulating at the highest level about another list are true. Will he also convey to the Leader that there would be great anger and dismay in this House, and in the country as a whole, if those rumours were proved to be true?

[The Chairman of Committees]

I do not think that I have any need to ask the Leader of the House that question as I am sure that he heard it directly from the Leader of the Opposition.

[Lord Grocott (Lab)]

My Lords, the Chairman of Committees has been here a long time. Will he acknowledge that normally when a list is prepared during the course of a Parliament, as opposed to lists that come after a general election, there is careful attention to the effect of the list on the party balance within the House, particularly between the Government and the Opposition? Will he confirm that this time around, the net effect of the new list is a very, very substantial—I repeat, very, very substantial—increase in the Government’s political majority within this House? As far as I can discover, for that to be engineered half way through a Parliament is entirely without precedent. Will he comment?

[The Chairman of Committees]

I am being tempted again to comment on policy issues and I am reluctant to do so. Of course, the actual size and composition of the list is a matter for the public record and people can see the party composition of the present list.

[Lord Campbell-Savours (Lab)]

My Lords, will the Chairman of Committees confirm that savings through the freeze on staff salaries that has gone on for several years, savings on the freeze on existing Members’ expenses, high catering prices, cuts in House of Lords publications and other savings that are being made are being used to fund the new membership coming into the House?

[The Chairman of Committees]

Not really. Two things have to be borne in mind; namely, the budget and what has been referred to as the savings target. In December 2010, the House adopted the policy that:

“We will aim not to increase our resource costs, in real terms”—

compared with 2010-11—

“throughout the period of the plan”,

which is to 2015,

“despite the increased size of the House”.

That decision was made in December 2010. In July this year, that policy was quite significantly modified to read:

“To make best use of … financial resources we will … Adhere to the savings target of not increasing the resource budget in real terms (compared with 2010/11)—

and here is the new bit—

“subject to the need to maintain the ability of the House and its Members to carry out their parliamentary functions in changing circumstances, including increased attendance”.

That is a clear commitment to ensure that in future when budgets are being constructed overriding concern is given to the maintenance of the House’s functions and the activities of Members.

Gibraltar

Thursday 10th October 2013 Lords Chamber

Question

11:35

Asked by

[Lord Luce]

To ask Her Majesty’s Government what measures are being taken to safeguard the interests of Gibraltarians in the light of recent Spanish activities in British Gibraltar Territorial Waters and on the border between Spain and Gibraltar.

[Lord Luce (CB)]

My Lords, I beg leave to ask the Question standing in my name on the Order Paper, and I declare an interest as a former Governor of Gibraltar.

[The Senior Minister of State, Department for Communities and Local Government & Foreign and Commonwealth Office (Baroness Warsi) (Con)]

My Lords, we continue to uphold the sovereignty of British Gibraltar territorial waters through the Royal Navy’s response to unlawful incursions and our diplomatic protest to the Spanish Government. We are maintaining strong diplomatic pressure on the Spanish Government to de-escalate tensions and to remove unlawful additional checks at the border. The European Commission sent a monitoring mission to the border at our request on 25 September, and we await its conclusions.

[Lord Luce]

Does the Minister agree that as democratic partners in the European Union and NATO, the Spanish Government, rather than embarking on a policy of undemocratic Francoist type bullying of Gibraltarians, both at sea and on the border, would do well to follow the example of the previous Spanish Government, which embarked on constructive policies of joint economic collaboration between Spain and Gibraltar bringing advantages to the citizens of both Gibraltar and Spain in that region? To that end, will she say whether the Spanish Government have agreed to proposals to resume a dialogue and, if that is to take place on practical issues to do with Gibraltar, will the Gibraltarians be full participants in these discussions?

[Baroness Warsi]

I pay tribute to the work of the noble Lord in relation to Gibraltar, during his time at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and as Governor of Gibraltar. He is incredibly familiar with incidents that arise between Spain and Gibraltar. We are entirely clear that this matter should be resolved politically. I take the noble Lord’s point about both of us being members of the European Union and I completely take his point that this matter has to be resolved in accordance with the wishes of the Gibraltarians.

[Lord Bach (Lab)]

My Lords, the House should thank the noble Lord, Lord Luce, who was a very distinguished Governor of Gibraltar, for raising this issue. Her Majesty’s Opposition support, and will continue to support, the Government as long as they continue to give Britain’s full support to the citizens of Gibraltar in the face of intimidation and threats. What is Her Majesty’s Government’s view of how the present situation will develop and what can they do to prevent these outbursts of mid-summer folly; this unacceptable behaviour?

[Baroness Warsi]

There is, of course, a trilateral process which allows all parties to have discussions, but we are incredibly clear about the sovereignty and the sovereign position of the Gibraltarian people. It is nice to hear that the Opposition now share this view.

[Baroness Hooper (Con)]

Would my noble friend care to comment on the fact that the mayor of La Linea has also joined the protests to the Spanish Government about the delays and disruption which are affecting the Spanish workers moving on a daily basis to Gibraltar to work? Does this suggest that the Spanish people, particularly those of the region closest to Gibraltar, do not have the same attitude as the Spanish Government?

[Baroness Warsi]

My noble friend makes an important point. There have been huge delays on the border, in relation to the crossing of both people and materials. There have been questions in relation to harassment at the border. At their height, some of the delays were unfortunately up to seven hours long. This is causing misery to both the Gibraltarians and to the Spanish people who travel between the two regularly, especially Spanish workers.

[Lord Anderson of Swansea (Lab)]

The Spanish Government are linking with the Argentine Government to bring joint pressure on us in international fora. Our friends in Gibraltar are members of Commonwealth institutions. To what extent are we ready to use the Commonwealth as a means of countering that international pressure?

[Baroness Warsi]

There will always be politics in international fora, but it is the responsibility of the Government to respond to the reality on the ground. There have been a number of discussions at the highest levels between the Prime Minister and the Prime Minister of Spain and the Deputy Prime Minister and the Deputy Prime Minister of Spain, and discussions with the President of the European Commission. We feel at the moment that discussions are ongoing. We also have the Royal Navy Gibraltar Squadron, which makes sure that those waters are properly protected.

[Lord Chidgey (LD)]

My Lords, when the UN decolonisation committee met in June, what representations did the Government make in attempting to have Gibraltar removed from the UN list of 16 remaining non-self-governing territories? In that context, what progress have the Government made in convincing the UN General Assembly that Gibraltar has now achieved the maximum possible level of self-governance short of independence that the UN recognises as non-colonial in nature?

[Baroness Warsi]

I do not know what representation was made, if any, but I will write to the noble Lord in detail.

[Lord Boyce (CB)]

My Lords, will the Minister not agree that were this Government not to have depleted our destroyer frigate force to anorexic levels, we would be able to demonstrate better and in a more consistent way our resolve in a time-honoured and effective way? By the way, a patrol boat in the Gibraltar squadron is not as effective as a destroyer.

[Baroness Warsi]

I hear what the noble and gallant Lord says, but we have never had to deploy that kind of force in Gibraltar and we do not anticipate that we will have to. The annual Cougar deployment that has been taking place is long planned and well established. It is a large Royal Navy force of frigates and aircraft carriers that exercise in the region in the summer.

[Lord Marlesford (Con)]

My Lords, can my noble friend explain the relevant difference between the British presence in Gibraltar and the Spanish presence in north Africa?

[Baroness Warsi]

I am trying incredibly hard to decipher that situation. May I return to what I think is the basic position in relation to Gibraltar? The Gibraltarians have a right to determine their future political will and we support them in that.

[Baroness Royall of Blaisdon (Lab)]

My Lords, in answer to a question from my noble friend Lord Bach earlier, the Minister said that the Opposition now support the people of Gibraltar. I would like to make it clear, and have it on the record, that my party has always supported the citizens of Gibraltar and their self-determination.

[Baroness Warsi]

It is incredibly heartening to hear that. It therefore puts my mind at rest, certainly in relation to the potential sovereignty crisis that could have been caused in 2002.

Literacy

Thursday 10th October 2013 Lords Chamber

Question

11:42

Asked by

[Lord Addington]

To ask Her Majesty’s Government what assessment they have made of the effect of hidden special educational needs and disabilities on levels of literacy in England and Northern Ireland, in the light of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s recent low ranking of England and Northern Ireland in terms of literacy.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Schools (Lord Nash) (Con)]

My Lords, there is a gap in literacy and numeracy levels for pupils with SEN, some of whom have their needs identified late. Twenty-three per cent get grade A* to C in GCSE English and maths compared with 59% nationally. All pupils need high quality teaching in the basics. Our focus on phonics is playing a key part in that. It also supports earlier identification of issues such as dyslexia, so that schools provide effective support in line with our SEN reforms.

[Lord Addington (LD)]

I thank my noble friend for that Answer, especially as this Question was tabled at such short notice. However, would he agree that teachers do not receive enough training both initially and in service to have a good chance of identifying those who are finding it difficult to learn to read, particularly when they are on the less extreme end of the spectrums that they encounter? Will he consider that we should, at the first available opportunity, try to improve this level of training and awareness in the teaching profession?

[Lord Nash]

My Lords, Teachers’ Standards requires that all teachers have a clear understanding of the needs of all pupils, including those with SEN, and must be able to adapt their teaching to meet those needs. All teachers must also now receive IT in synthetic phonics, and Ofsted inspects against that. Also, the draft SEN code of practice that we published on 4 October requires that teachers’ ability to meet SEN is included in schools’ approach to professional development and their performance management arrangements. We have invested heavily in SEN training, educational psychologists and other programmes over the past few years, but I am sure there is more to be done.

[Lord Quirk (CB)]

The issues highlighted by the OECD of course go far beyond the SEN cases that this Question addresses. Why is it that almost 40 years after these grave problems in the English educational system were starkly identified by James Callaghan, successive Governments have failed to address the problems concerned?

[Lord Nash]

This Government’s approach is to focus on that core issue, to ensure that all our students leave school adequately qualified in literacy and numeracy. That is why we have a focus on much more rigorous exams. Our new national curriculum will promote high standards of language and literacy by equipping pupils with a strong command of spoken and written language. Our phonics programme is an integral part of that; it is showing good results, with the number of pupils reaching the expected standard in year 1 rising from 58% to 69%.

[Lord Winston (Lab)]

My Lords, while these figures are, indeed, appalling, will the noble Lord consider whether perhaps one of the reasons for these very poor scores is because of the accuracy of the way we keep our figures in the United Kingdom generally? That is one issue. Also, does the noble Lord agree with me that one of the key problems in our educational system is the lack of support for children in the home with literacy, reading and mathematics, and that we need to concentrate on getting more parents involved with the school education?

[Lord Nash]

I am grateful to the noble Lord for his question. There are different schools of thought about the accuracy of the statistics. A study on this was published recently by the Sutton Trust. However, the overwhelming conclusion from these statistics is that other countries have overtaken us and that we have a lot of work to do quickly to improve our schooling and our literacy and numeracy.

As far as home support is concerned, we all know, of course, that the number of words that a child experiences in early age is terribly important, and can be too little. We do all that we can to support parents; however, it comes down basically to improving schools, which have to do so much more because of poor parenting.

[Lord Tebbit (Con)]

My Lords, without detracting in any way from the rightful concern of our noble friend Lord Addington for those children with special needs, is it not clear that there are special educational needs among the teaching profession, which no longer seems capable of teaching basic literacy or numeracy to children in the way that always was done in the past?

[Lord Nash]

We now have the highest quality of teachers entering the profession that we have had for many years. I am afraid that I have to disagree with my noble friend. We are doing a lot to support the teaching profession; it is the most noble profession, in my view, and the issues are much more complicated and deeper than that.

[Baroness Jones of Whitchurch (Lab)]

The noble Lord quite rightly made the point that high quality teaching is essential to identify the needs of children with special educational needs at an early stage. How does that marry up with the fact that the Government now allow unqualified teachers in schools? Will the Government now reconsider that policy and insist that all teachers, whatever they are doing and at whatever level they teach, should be properly trained and qualified?

[Lord Nash]

The noble Baroness is quite right that we allow unqualified teachers in academies. There are some remarkably good success stories of teachers in academies. We will continue with this programme because we have many examples of people coming into the teaching profession after successful careers in other industries. We need all the talent we can get in our teaching profession.

[Baroness Walmsley (LD)]

Is my noble friend aware that many of the young people in custody have these hidden disabilities? In many cases, indeed, that is part of the reason that they are there in the first place. There is wonderful work being done in prisons by charities such as the Cascade Foundation, but the problem is that their funding is not secure. Will my noble friend work with the Ministry of Justice to address this problem?

[Lord Nash]

My noble friend is quite right on this issue. We are working with the Ministry of Justice in relation to the Children and Families Bill to see what further support can be given for people in custody with SEN.

Defamation (Parliamentary Proceedings) (Amendment) Bill [HL]

Thursday 10th October 2013 Lords Chamber

First Reading

11:50

A Bill to reform the law of liability and defamation proceedings for reports of parliamentary proceedings and to repeal Section 13 of the Defamation Act 1996.

The Bill was introduced by Lord Lester of Herne Hill, read a first time and ordered to be printed.

Business of the House

Thursday 10th October 2013 Lords Chamber

Timing of Debates

11:50

Tabled by

[Lord Hill of Oareford]

That the debate on the Motion in the name of Lord Layard set down for today shall be limited to 3 hours and that in the name of Lord Kennedy of Southwark to 2 hours.

[The Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster (Lord Hill of Oareford) (Con)]

My Lords, I beg to move the first Motion standing in my name on the Order Paper. In doing so, I should explain that this follows your Lordships’ agreement to the Procedure Committee’s second report of 25 July. That included the provision that where one balloted debate has at least twice as many speakers as another, a maximum of half an hour can be reallocated from the debate with fewer speakers to the more popular debate.

Motion agreed.

Prisoner Voting

Thursday 10th October 2013 Lords Chamber

Motion to Agree

11:51

Moved by

[Lord Hill of Oareford]

That, notwithstanding the Resolution of this House of 14 May, it be an instruction to the Joint Committee on the draft Voting Eligibility (Prisoners) Bill that it should report by 18 December 2013.

Motion agreed.

Mental and Physical Health: Parity of Esteem

Thursday 10th October 2013 Lords Chamber

Motion to Take Note

11:51

Moved by

[Lord Layard]

That this House takes note of the implications of parity of esteem for mental and physical health, as required by the Health and Social Care Act 2012.

[Lord Layard (Lab)]

My Lords, by an extraordinary coincidence, today is World Mental Health Day, so I wonder whether it is not due to ballot rigging that we are having this debate today. This is also the time when the Government are preparing the next mandate for the National Health Service, so the timing of this debate could not be better.

Of course, we would like to be in a situation where we did not need to debate parity of esteem, but I start from one simple fact. We have 6 million adults in England suffering from depression or crippling anxiety disorders, and of them only a quarter are in treatment. You can compare that with people with physical conditions where, in most cases, more than 90% are in treatment. The same is true of children: only a quarter of those who would be diagnosed as mentally ill are in treatment. That is not parity of esteem; it is a really deplorable situation. What is the reason? The reason is the lack of parity in the provision of care; that is the central reason.

Of course, medication is available for most people who come forward with those problems, but most of them would prefer, or would want in addition, psychological therapy. We have excellent psychological therapies with 50% recovery rates for anxiety and depression conditions, for children’s disorders and so on, and NICE has reviewed all of them and recommends that psychological therapies ought to be offered to all patients with mental health problems. However, that recommendation is largely disregarded in huge areas of the country where those therapies are not available. Let me give just one extra argument why they should be available—other than the obvious humanitarian argument that we should treat people who are ill; that is why we have a health service. In this case, there are also huge savings to be had if we treat them. Those savings in welfare benefits and extra taxes would pay for the cost of the psychological therapy. That is a complete, 100% offset. Another probable 100% offset is in the cost of additional physical care that mentally ill people demand.

So the argument for making those therapies available is overwhelming, but it is happening very slowly. As Sir Mike Rawlings, the former chairman of NICE says, this is the area in the whole of the NHS where NICE recommendations are the most flagrantly and casually disregarded. If the same thing happened with cancer or heart disease, there would be uproar. That is why what happened in this House two years ago was so important. It was the landmark moment for millions of people because the amendment that we passed in this House introduced the principle of parity between mental and physical health. The issue that we must discuss today is what that means. That was not said in the Bill. We need to discuss exactly what that means and how we would know if we got there.

I want to suggest two simple principles. First, NICE guidelines should be as faithfully implemented for mental illness as they are for physical illness. That is a very simple principle. Secondly, treatment should be provided speedily when it is needed, as it generally is in the case of mental illness. Those two basic principles should guide the way forward. How do we get from here to where we need to be? The mandate, which is now under discussion, is the key. I very much hope that the Minister can help us with some improvements in the draft of the mandate which has been circulated for comment.

Let me start with waiting times. It is shocking that there are waiting times for hospital treatments and no waiting times for psychological therapy. This is not acceptable. Depression and anxiety are pressing conditions; more pressing than some physical conditions, although obviously less pressing in most cases than cancer. With cancer we talk about two weeks. It seems clear that we should be aiming at a maximum wait for access to psychological therapy of 28 days. Many people have argued this. I very much hope that that can be included in the mandate.

Of course, that raises the question of what scale of service would be needed to achieve that objective. The main provider of psychological therapy in the NHS is Improving Access to Psychological Therapies—the programme known as IAPT, launched in 2008. It has been very energetically and faithfully supported by Ministers from all political parties, for which everyone is extremely grateful. The programme grew rapidly, but 80% of those treated still wait for more than 28 days. Some wait for more than 12 months. Waiting lists are rising as people become aware that there is some hope in their lives.

How large a service is needed to implement the NICE guidelines for all who need them? By 2011, in the third to fourth full year of the programme, the programme was seeing more than half a million people. But that of course is only 10% of the 6 million with the condition. Since 2011, the programme has stalled due mainly to poor priorities on the part of local commissioners, the dislocation of the messages coming down to them and the pressure on them from the higher levels of the NHS as it is being reorganised.

I think we can all agree that 10% is a completely unacceptable figure. The Government have already committed to 15% by 2015, but even that deals only with the tip of the iceberg. From our experience in the first three and four years of the programme, it would be feasible to reach a figure of 25% by 2020. I would urge the Government to be thinking in those terms.

The Government, rightly, will want to have people not only treated but recovering. That is the right way to be thinking and that is where the IAPT programme is so strong because we know how many people recover. Patients are monitored on a meeting-by-meeting basis and there is now a 45% recovery rate for the patients who have two or more sessions. The Government target is 50% and the right way to express a vision for 2020 would be the numbers of people who have recovered as a result of treatment.

So I hope that the Government will be giving some indication of that longer term perspective in the mandate. It is really important because we can get good people to train as therapists for the service only if they see that the number of jobs will go on expanding. We will get commissioners to commission this service at an expanding rate only if they see that they are expected to do that and block in increasing sums. Too many of these commissioners have concluded that they have done what they need to for IAPT, which is how it has stalled. It has to be restarted, so I urge the Minister to include at least some phrase in the mandate, if he can, such as “continuing expansion of access up to 2020, linked to 50% recovery rates”. Some phrase of that sort would show that the Government and the service are serious about this. We know that the good will is enormous towards IAPT on the part of the coalition Government, but can they please set this down in some concrete way that commissioners can read and see that they have to act on?

There are of course financial constraints and commissioners are always tempted to dumb down in areas which look like soft targets. Incredibly, one commissioner will not pay for any patient receiving more than two sessions unless they can be shown to have recovered. This is an outrage but there are many who will pay only up to a maximum of six sessions for any one patient, as if they would cut an operation short if it happened to need more than the standard time. This is absolutely unacceptable discrimination and it is rife throughout the commissioning system. How can we deal with it? It would be by pressure of all kinds from above and, of course, with a constant emphasis on outcomes. I place great hope on the measurement of outcomes as the ultimate source of pressure on commissioners. When we get to outcomes-based payments, which we may in a few years’ time, we must again resist the pressure to dumb down by leaving the tariff price free for the local commissioner. There has to be the national reference cost, otherwise this will again be the soft area which gets dumbed down.

I have one final comment on the IAPT programme. It is currently in the list of 10 services suitable for “any qualified provider” treatment, together with incontinency services, wheelchairs and a few other things. Is the treatment of depression and anxiety really worthy of being treated like that? A recent study from the World Health Organisation compared the disabling effect of depression with that of angina, asthma, arthritis and diabetes. I hope it is not surprising to Members of this House that depression was 50% more disabling than each of those four conditions. One wonders why those four were not included in the list, together with incontinency and wheelchair services. If there is confusion about parity of esteem at the centre, no wonder there is even more confusion at the local level.

I have concentrated on depression and anxiety disorders. There are many other mental health problems for adults, and of course for children as well, which I am sure other noble Lords will talk about. But I want to mention just one general point: research. According to the WHO, mental illness accounts for 38% of all illness when weighted by severity in this country and 23% of the total burden of disease, including premature mortality. But what percentage of health research goes on mental health? It is 5%. We need much more mental health research. We need more trials on therapies other than CBT and many more on therapies for children. For adults we do not even know about effective group treatment, which could be very economical and effective compared with individual treatment, and so on. Most trials in mental health are very short follow-ups compared with the decade-long trials for treatment of physical illness. All this should be changed and there should be some statement about it at this point, although it cannot be changed overnight.

I hope that the Minister will reassure us on the four points I have raised—the 28-day maximum wait; the commitment to continued expansion; taking psychological therapy out of the degrading position of coming under AQP, which leads to many of these terrible commissioning decisions; and more research for mental health, especially psychological therapy. We know that the political pressures coming for psychological therapy are trivial compared to the pressures on politicians from those who suffer from most physical illnesses—especially, of course, those which are helped by the pharmaceutical industry—but one third of all families include someone with a mental health problem. Many are silent because of shame, but I think that they will privately thank any politician who shows that they understand their problems.

It is an amazing fact that mental illness, as the surveys show, causes more misery in our society than physical illness does, causes much more than unemployment or poverty do and costs the Exchequer £60 billion. It is extraordinary that it still has such a low priority on the ground. I think that we still live in the materialistic shadow of William Beveridge. As noble Lords know, he identified five great giants—poverty; unemployment; undereducation; poor housing; and physical illness—but he omitted the problems of the human spirit within. This has caused us decades of unnecessary misery. It is time to name the sixth giant, the great, hidden problem in our society, and that is mental illness. If it had parity of esteem, it would have its own Cabinet Minister, like the other subjects I just mentioned. Perhaps the best test of when we eventually have parity of esteem is when we have a Cabinet Minister for mental health. I beg to move.

12:07

[Lord McColl of Dulwich (Con)]

I thank the noble Lord, Lord Layard, for initiating this important debate. As a medical student I was rather surprised to hear professionals refer to patients with psychiatric conditions as “nutters” and “away with the fairies”, among similar comments. As the noble Lord, Lord Layard, said, we do not ridicule people with heart failure or cancer; why do we do it with mental illness? This made me rather interested in psychiatry and I did think of entering that profession, or trying to enter it, but that came to an end when I presented a patient to a psychiatrist, who shall be nameless, having spent a lot of time taking a history from the patient and writing it all up carefully. I started presenting it to the psychiatrist and half way through, he started laughing. I said, “What’s the joke?”. He said, “He’s a psychopath”. I said, “I know he’s a psychopath but what exactly is the joke?”. “Well, we can’t do anything for him.” I thought that was totally inappropriate and I learnt later that the psychiatrists call that “incongruity of affect”. Anyway, that put me off psychiatry.

It is not surprising that people with psychiatric problems feel isolated and abused and find it very difficult to talk about their problems, so all credit to Alastair Campbell, Stephen Fry and others who have spoken openly about their own illness. This has encouraged others to do the same. There is, of course, great misunderstanding about so much of mental illness. Take, for instance, Alzheimer’s. Over the years I have been consulted by many people, some of them in this House, about their relatives with Alzheimer’s and how they find it so irritating that they keep asking the same question and so on. The principles are quite simple: you do not ask a patient with Alzheimer’s any questions and you do not argue with them. When they do things that seem very inappropriate, you ask the question, “Does that matter in terms of eternity?”. I remember that once a patient was frying bacon in honey. I was just a very junior registrar in cooking, and I was not sure if this might be some recent recipe. The meal was delicious; it was impossible to clean the frying pan afterwards, but that did not seem to matter. I have also found it important that they have as much independence as possible. That sometimes means taking risks, but it is well worth it.

In the old days, in the 1950s and 1960s, I found it very difficult to get psychiatrists to come to the accident and emergency department. I do not know why that was, but they would never come. One day I was in trouble and I needed help in A&E. I rang the psychiatric department and a lady answered the phone. When I explained that I was in difficulty and asked her to come and help, she said, “I would be delighted to come”. I nearly fell on the floor; I had never had that response before. She was terrific. Her name was Ros Furlong, and she became a very distinguished psychiatrist. I mention that because it seemed to me that when women started coming into psychiatry, it changed things. Mind you, if you go back to 1945 or 1946, before there were many women in medicine, medical schools were a bit of a rough house. On one occasion a lecture was about to start and ex-Wing Commander Twistington-Higgins said to ex-Able Seaman Smith, who was wearing bell-bottomed trousers, “Smith, you’re improperly dressed”, whereupon ex-Able Seaman Smith stood up, picked up the ex-wing commander and knocked him straight out. However, when women came into medicine, the whole thing became rather more civilised.

My wife had Alzheimer’s for the last five years of her life. I pay tribute to the Maudsley Hospital, which was superb in all its help, especially Professor Simon Lovestone, who is a brilliant psychiatrist and a most kindly man. I got to know him quite well, and I told him the story of how I wanted to be a psychiatrist but was put off by the psychiatrists themselves. He said, “My experience is exactly the reverse”. He had wanted to be a surgeon but he met a psychiatrist called Colin Godber, who was a psychogeriatrician—the crème de la crème of the psychiatric world. Colin Godber asked him if he would like to come and visit a patient at home. They went there, the patient prepared a nice cream tea and then played the piano for half an hour, and then they went home. He said to Colin, “He didn’t seem to be much of a patient”. “Oh no, he wasn’t the patient,” said Godber, “It was his wife. I looked after her, and this week is the anniversary of her death. She died two years ago, and on the anniversary I always go and have tea with him”. Simon Lovestone was so amazed by this that he said, “That’s what I want to be; I shall be a psychiatrist”. It worked the other way round for him.

As the noble Lord, Lord Layard, has mentioned, one-third of the population has had a psychiatric illness. I have often wondered why that is so. A group of 50 ladies in their 40s met, and they all had eating disorders. Each of them told their story, and all of them as children had been sexually abused. At a meeting in No.10 Downing Street some years ago, there were 20 of us in a room discussing this very problem. Without thinking, I said, “Of course, at least 10% of children are sexually abused”. They were horrified and just would not believe it. In fact, one of them said, “There are 20 of us here. Do you mean that two are involved?”. I said, “Well, it does go across the board”. We now know that it is much higher than 10%. We know that one in four women is abused in one way or another, which means that millions of men are smashing up millions of women. It also means that millions of other people know about it and do nothing.

Mental health and well-being is a priority for this Government. The overarching goal is to ensure that mental health has equal priority with physical health and that everyone who needs it has timely access to the best available treatment. We have enshrined in law the equal importance of mental health alongside physical health. The Health and Social Care Act 2012 sets out the equal status of mental and physical health. We have made improvements in mental health and treating mental disease is a key priority for NHS England. One of NHS England’s 24 objectives is to put mental health on a par with physical health and close the gap between the two. On 29 June the Royal College of Psychiatrists published Whole-person Care: from Rhetoric to Reality, which is well worth reading. There is so much to be done in this field and we all have a role to play in encouraging the population to do its bit towards helping with this problem.

12:16

[Lord Stone of Blackheath (Lab)]

My Lords, there is a great deal of expertise here today on this subject. I am no expert, but I have two perspectives based on my particular experiences. The first is as chair of the award -winning health charity DIPEx. We have spent 10 years researching, in depth and on camera through the Health Experiences Research Group at Oxford University, patients’ experiences of illness. We publish them on the internet for free as www.healthtalkonline.org and www.youthhealthtalk.org. We have completed 75 separate modules of different illnesses, each with more than a year’s interviewing.

We have covered a wide range of physical illnesses, including most of the cancers, heart conditions, diabetes and osteoporosis. We have also researched mental conditions such as depression, experiences of psychosis, dementia and life on the autism spectrum, and we are about to launch a recently completed module on the use of antidepressants.

I want to relate here some of the observations from patients’ perspectives. First, patients living with physical, mental and social needs must be seen as actor-agents in their own recovery. The Centre for Mental Health has said that we should ensure that people using mental health services are equal partners in their care and support, with full respect for their needs, wishes and human rights.

Secondly, our senior researcher Susan Kirkpatrick, conducting interviews with the www.healthtalkonline.org patients from the recent antidepressant module to be launched in November, says that while people feel that an antidepressant may be helpful, most say that they benefit most from a combination of medication and therapeutic help. However, the effectiveness of therapeutic treatments seems not to be proven to the satisfaction of those prescribing these medications. The new charity, MQ, has said that to achieve parity of care, we must also have parity of research. MQ is one of the few organisations in the field that does not take sides. It believes that medication and therapies deserve equal research, and says that there is a huge gap between the cost of mental illness and its research funding, as has been mentioned. The UK should capitalise on its role as a leader in research and become one in developing better treatments for mental illness.

Thirdly, as my noble friend has mentioned, for some patients a long waiting time for therapeutic help proves frustrating and even debilitating, and in some mental health cases can be fatal. Here is a disparity. It seems that the system can understand the urgencies in a case of physical illness but with mental illness it feels that the patient can wait. The Centre for Mental Health has observed, as have many people whom we have interviewed, that appropriate waiting times must be established so that people with mental health problems know the maximum waiting time for a treatment, just as people with physical health problems know the longest that they can expect to wait for a treatment.

The NHS constitution has no requirements on waiting times for people with mental health problems, and in particular many psychological therapies are NICE approved and recommended in NICE clinical guidelines. However, due to the NHS constitution, people are not entitled to them in the same way as one is entitled to drugs approved by the NICE technology appraisals. That means that commissioners are not obliged to commission psychological therapies. Even when they do, as has been said, often a maximum number of treatments are prescribed. Can noble Lords imagine, for drugs for a physical illness or chemotherapy, being told, “When you’ve had a maximum of 20 of these injections or radiotherapy sessions, you’re on your own, mate”? Why should that be so for treatment for mental illnesses?

To return to medicines versus therapies, my second viewpoint is from my involvement in mindfulness practice. For centuries we have understood that there are practices we can adopt at an early age for our physical well-being that can be preventive and stop us getting ill, so that even if we contract an illness our physical fitness helps us to recover faster or at least helps us live more comfortably with the condition that we have. We have only recently become aware that the same is true for our mental health. With mindfulness-based practices, one can have a healthier, more enjoyable and productive way of life, and mindfulness can prevent depression and anxiety. It has been proven to NICE that to prevent people slipping back into depression, mindfulness practice can be more effective than drugs or talking methods.

Again, the Centre for Mental Health has said that we need to narrow the gap in the way people’s needs are met in physical and mental health, not only in health and social care but in education, employment and the criminal justice system. A mindfulness strategy for the UK is being designed and developed by my honourable friend Chris Ruane MP and my noble friend Lord Layard and others. It builds upon the work currently being done in this field by universities such as Bangor, Oxford and Exeter. They are working on mindfulness in the education system, for students and teachers in schools and universities, so that it exists in the same way as we have physical training, and are also working in the criminal justice system where, as has been said, we have systemic issues with mental health. Mindfulness practice could be enormously helpful for offenders and police.

Noble Lords may wish to know that in addition to the gymnasium for one’s physical health on the Parliamentary Estate, a mindfulness course operates in this building, including Members of the other place from all parties and a number of Peers. The course is conducted by Professor Mark Williams and Chris Cullen, using their scientifically proven method of training. We have a new series starting here next week, which noble Lords may wish to join. Mindfulness will allow people to understand that mind and body are one and that we should care for each for the development of the other. Thank you.

12:22

[Baroness Tyler of Enfield (LD)]

My Lords, I want to start by saying why this is such an important debate and thank the noble Lord, Lord Layard, for securing it. Some of the biggest inequalities in health today are faced by people with mental health problems. Nothing illustrates that more starkly than the fact that we know that people affected by serious mental illness die on average 20 years earlier than the rest of the population from preventable physical health conditions—something I am sure we all regard as a scandal. Thus I strongly welcome the Government’s very clear commitment to achieve parity of esteem for mental health. The 2011 strategy document, No Health Without Mental Health, made an unambiguous commitment to parity of esteem and set a clear objective that more people with mental health problems will have good physical health, fewer people with mental health problems will die prematurely, and more people with physical ill health will have better mental health. In addition, of course, as we have heard, the NHS mandate commits to achieving this and will carry out a progress report in 2015.

I think, however, that in this Chamber we would all accept that there is still a long way to go. To make a reality of these very good intentions I contend that three things need to happen. First, people with mental health problems must have the same access to treatment and services as those with physical health problems; secondly, they must have the same rights within the NHS constitution; and thirdly, they must have equal patient voice as those with physical health problems. What more, then, can be done in practice?

I will start with something that I regard as very positive indeed, which we have heard spoken about so eloquently by the noble Lord, Lord Layard. I refer to the Improving Access to Psychological Therapies programme. We all know that in many places this programme has provided an invaluable service. It has achieved high recovery rates and has helped people both get back to work and stay well. Indeed, an IAPT service user recently told the mental health charity Mind that:

“Receiving psychological therapy turned out to be the best thing that could possibly happen for me, it was exactly what I needed … a place for me to finally look at my past and put the pieces together and come to understand why I felt the way I did”.

I shall now talk about how this affects people with complex needs. It was, of course, hoped that focusing additional resources on the more common mental health problems, such as anxiety and depression, would free up waiting lists and resources for other forms of therapy for those with more complex needs, such as people with substance misuse problems and those with more severe mental health problems. As ever, there have been unintended consequences. It is worth emphasising that IAPT was never intended to act as a comprehensive service delivering all forms of psychological therapy. Indeed, Department of Health guidance made it clear that IAPT money should not be used to replace funding for other psychological therapies. Despite that, in 2010 the We need to talk report showed that this was happening in a number of areas, where non-IAPT services were either having their funding cut or being entirely decommissioned, so that IAPT was replacing, not improving, the provision of psychological therapies.

If this were a physical health problem we would not tolerate the lack of choice and treatment options given to people with mental health problems. In some places we are in danger of reaching the point where if you do not get better after a course of CBT there is simply nowhere else for you to go—and we all recognise that for some people, CBT is not the right choice of therapy in the first place. There are other NICE-approved therapeutic interventions that should also be available.

I shall ask the Minister two questions. First, do the Government recognise the need to provide a full choice of evidence-based psychological therapies on a sufficient scale to meet the requirements of people with more complex mental health problems? Secondly—this echoes something that the noble Lord, Lord Layard, said—what plans do the Government have to introduce standards for waiting times for mental health equivalent to those for physical health, and, in particular, to amend the NHS constitution to ensure the availability of psychological therapies within 28 days of a referral?

I now turn to preventive approaches, and in particular to intervening early in a child’s or a young person’s life. There is now clear evidence of the importance of intervening early to promote resilience in young people, to prevent mental illness and to promote well-being. The children with the poorest life chances of all are those who have early-starting behavioural problems. They are 19 times more likely than their peers to be in prison by their mid-20s, and have high rates of school exclusion, unemployment, gang membership—especially among girls—suicide, and a range of physical health problems during their lifetime.

Cost-effective parenting programmes are now available for families whose children have behavioural problems, to help them manage them from an early age. These include family nurse partnerships for the most vulnerable families and parent training programmes. Of course, availability of these programmes is patchy and they are not always delivered as intended for maximum effectiveness.

For parity to extend to children with behavioural problems, two things are necessary. First, maternity services, health visitors, GPs and schools should regularly look out for families at risk and routinely assess healthy child development to identify children with early signs of behavioural problems. Secondly, parenting programmes should be made available to families who really need them, targeted towards those in greatest need but with easy referral routes to prevent them from becoming stigmatised.

I now turn to how primary care and mental health services are configured. I do not think that it will be a surprise if I say that they often do not work well together. How could primary care services be designed so as to encourage better integration with mental health services? There are three potential big improvements. The first would be mental health support for the 4.6 million people in England with major physical conditions, such as diabetes, heart disease and cancer, and a concurrent mental health problem—most likely to be depression—by offering psychological therapies, as I described earlier, and help with self-management. The second would be physical health support for people with severe mental illness—for example, those who may need help with weight management, particularly those on anti-psychotic medication, and with smoking cessation. Finally, there is care for people with medically unexplained symptoms. At least one-quarter of hospital outpatients who have physical symptoms with no explained physical cause may very well benefit from psychological support.

Breaking down the barriers between primary care and mental health is vital to achieve the changes that we want to see. I contend that GPs need clear incentives to address the overlaps between physical and mental health—for example, through the Quality and Outcomes Framework for general practice—and that payment systems for mental and physical healthcare need to be better aligned to prevent mental health budgets being raided when there is pressure on acute hospital spending. On that issue, we hear almost daily of the pressure on A&E departments. There are growing concerns about the quality of care and support that people with mental health problems receive when in crisis. Recently published research showed that people using mental health services were twice as likely as others to present in A&E, causing all the problems that we have heard so much about.

In the comprehensive spending review of June 2013, the Chancellor committed to every A&E department having constant access to mental health professionals to ensure that people with mental health problems got the best possible care. That is something that I very much support. It is vital that all hospitals put in place comprehensive liaison psychiatry services, available 24/7 to all hospital wards for people of all ages, from children with emergency admissions for self-harm to older people with dementia. Can the Minister update us on progress in this area?

I stress the very important and key role that family, friends and the wider community can play in mental health and well-being. In many areas, we have seen good projects and approaches. There is support and care for the families and carers of those with mental health problems, as well as, in some cases, carers having their own recovery plan, which is a very interesting idea. Finally, I emphasise the important role that health and well-being boards should be playing to embrace mental health, seeing it as a key aspect of public health. I know that in local government its profile is being raised, and some local authorities are now having a local authority mental health champion. That is very positive—to have a member who can champion mental health issues in every single area of council business—and I hope that we hear of more such examples today.

12:30

[Baroness Murphy (CB)]

My Lords, the sustained commitment of the noble Lord, Lord Layard, to improving mental health care has had a profound impact on mental health services since 2008, and I admire him for it. If today I challenge some of the priorities, this in no way detracts from his remarkable achievements in addressing the needs of a long-neglected group of patients who, after all, make up the vast majority of a GP’s mental health load. But I return to patients with severe mental illness, including schizophrenia, the recurring psychoses, and those with mixed substance abuse and psychosis. As the noble Baroness, Lady Tyler, said, the importance of achieving parity of access and healthcare for them is shown starkly by the increased mortality and physical morbidity that they suffer. As Professor Graham Thornicroft from the Institute of Psychiatry has memorably observed, patients with long-term psychoses have third-world mortality in a first-world country, dying on average 20 years earlier than the general population, often of preventable smoking-related diseases and treatable cancers as well as the obvious suicides and accidents. This is completely unacceptable in a country such as ours, so I would like to know what are we doing for them and whether we are truly prioritising those greatest in need.

There have been considerable successes in the mental health strategy that has been adopted in recent years, and I mention in particular the increased services for people with dementia, which has undoubtedly risen up the Government’s awareness scale. That has been a great help for families which have a person with dementia. We have also had some success in trying to improve the assessment of risk to others posed by some severely mentally ill patients. This year’s annual report of the National Confidential Inquiry into Suicide and Homicide by People with Mental Illness by Professor Louis Appleby and his colleagues shows that homicide by mental health patients has fallen substantially since a peak in 2006. The most recent figures are the lowest since data collection began, albeit in a setting of a national reduction in homicides. This is especially true for people with schizophrenia. The homicide statistics are tiny, in spite of what might have been heard on the news in the past week—they are now extremely small—but they are very important as an indicator of the cultural attitude of mental health workers to assessment of risk.

But all is not well. Suicide by mental health patients has risen again. There were more than 1,300 deaths in England in 2011, after a previous fall. The rise partly echoes the rise in suicide in the general population, probably related to the economic downturn, as has happened in every previous recession that we can measure. But in recent years there have been more suicides in those undergoing home treatment or crisis resolution than in-patient care, which used to be one of the areas with the greatest risks. A substantial proportion of these deaths occurred in patients who live alone, have refused treatment, or are accepting only partial treatment. Services simply are not providing enough round-the-clock care of the right kind to the very severely ill. The mantra of home treatment needs better thinking through if we are to keep patients out of hospital and safe.

So we have made substantial gains in some areas but are losing pace in others. I have concerns about the direction that mental health services are now taking. I do not want to disparage the value of treating patients with common mental health episodes with cognitive behavioural therapy and other NICE-recommended therapies, but we have to be aware that the budget for psychological therapies has gone up from £100 million annually to £400 million without even reaching a high proportion of sufferers of the milder forms of distress, as the noble Lord, Lord Layard, has said. I do not dispute the efficacy of such treatment; with good CBT, faithful to the model delivered by a good therapist, 40% get better, of those who accept the offer of treatment, which is 15% better than doing nothing. For mildly to moderately unwell patients it is effective. But we have to recognise that the studies do not include patients who never accept treatment because of chaotic lives, intrusive events, a dislike of sitting down and talking, a failure of faith in the referrer, which is all too often the case, and sometimes also because people have learning disabilities and are unable to value the treatments, in spite of those patients having a very high order of risk of depression and anxiety. These factors significantly reduce the efficacy of treatments. We would surely get better value for money from addressing the problems which still beset people with more serious long-term mental illness. I accept the economic argument from the noble Lord, Lord Layard, for treating lesser forms of disorder; it is very compelling. But the only true justification for treating patients is the overall reduction in patient suffering and the burden of disability overall in the community, which is worse for those with the most severe illness.

The USA introduced a parity of esteem law in 1996. It was meant to improve the investment in mental health services through Medicaid and other insurance and to bring it up to the level of physical health services. I accept that managed care solutions funded by the public purse in the United States are not entirely analogous to publicly funded systems here, but they are similar enough. There is now worrying evidence that, in the States, the greater access to services for the less severely affected has impacted negatively on the care of the seriously mentally ill. A recent study by the well-known sociologists David Mechanic and Donna McAlpine, who for many years have been experts in the United States on the provision of mental health care, demonstrated that this apparent increased democratisation of mental health has simply shifted money from the severely ill to the lesser forms of illness, away from those with the least chance of ever being able to work and those with the highest excess mortality and suicide rates.

These findings are deeply worrying and should give us pause. There is some evidence that this is already happening here. In 2011-12 there was a reduction in spending on crisis resolution and on outreach services for those in acute crisis, while spending on psychological therapies rose by 6%. Total spending on mental health has increased by a massive 60% in real terms over the decade. That is something for us to celebrate, but now we are beginning to see a fall in investment in the acute care end.

It seems to me that the NHS and social care services should listen more to Mind, Rethink and SANE, and listen to what their priorities are. If true parity of esteem is to be promoted then we must look at the way that these acute and crisis services are running. Four in 10 trusts have staffing levels well below established benchmarks. There are serious issues around safety, respect and dignity in in-patient care. There are still insufficient non-hospital options.

As long as 10% of patients with schizophrenia kill themselves, we have not got our priorities right. As long as the rate of psychosis in prisons is 50 times higher than in the general population, then we have not got our funding priorities right. If we are really to make headway with mental health services, we must first and foremost concentrate on those who pose the highest risk to themselves or the highest risk to others, and try to improve the lives of people whose lives are truly blighted by long-term psychotic illnesses.

12:41

[Lord Alderdice (LD)]

My Lords, I also congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Layard, on achieving this substantial debate and indeed, as he himself mentioned, on the timing of the debate. He has been pressing the case for some time, and in doing so he has my support and that of many in this House. I identify myself very much with the speeches of my noble friend Lady Tyler of Enfield and the noble Baroness, Lady Murphy. I wish to touch upon many of the things that they mentioned and I strongly support others, although I will not refer to them.

As was said by the noble Lord, Lord Layard, in many ways this debate comes from the crucial decision by your Lordships’ House to press the case for parity of esteem between physical and mental illness to be included in the Bill which passed through this House. I well remember that reassurances were given, both in negotiations outside the House and on the Floor of the House, that this was not necessary. I pay tribute to my noble friend Lord Howe, who has made it very clear on a number of occasions since the Bill became an Act that it does make a difference, that it is a legal requirement, that health commissioners now have to address this question, and that others who need care can turn to it in various ways as a matter of law in this country. We must now press the case as strongly as we can. I welcome this debate because it is part of the process of pressing the case.

The noble Lord, Lord McColl of Dulwich, reminisced about his experience as a medical student, and inevitably encouraged me to think in the same way. I remember quite a different experience. As a young medical student I went to work for a psychiatrist, Dr Artie Kerr, for a number of weeks. I was enormously impressed by the way in which he could understand what was going on behind the scenes with the patient. He was able to pick up—and to help me to understand in a way that I simply had not seen at all—how sometimes the person who came along smiling was actually deeply depressed inside, and how in fact much could be done even with those people who had been ill for a long time, not least in caring for them when you could not cure them.

What an extraordinary business it is that we think that if you cannot cure someone with a mental illness you should not bother to look after them. If this was a patient with diabetes, which we cannot cure, would we say, “Ah well, we should forget about it”? Take a child with cystic fibrosis. We know that they are likely to die early, but should we say that we should not bother putting any money into caring for them? Yet if someone has a mental illness, and they are not going to get better in a short time or perhaps not at all, then caring does not seem to matter. It is all about cure. Let us not be seduced by those kinds of arguments. They take humanity out of our service, and they take humanity out of ourselves. It was that understanding from Dr Kerr which made me feel that that is the kind of work which I want to pick up on.

As a junior psychiatrist I used to spend a lot of time going round NGOs and charitable bodies, giving lectures and doing radio and television work at home in Northern Ireland, trying to get across this whole question. I remember very well doing a programme with a very senior surgeon, Professor Rodgers. He had been a surgeon all his life, and was a very eminent man. He listened to me for a little while, and then he said, “You know, I have treated many people with terminal illnesses, very painful illnesses, who were having a very hard time. Very, very few of them ever decided to end their life; some did, but very few. But I know that a large percentage of people with mental illness find life so intolerable that they want to bring it to an end. In many ways, the suffering of mental illness is so much greater than the suffering of even some of the dreadful cancers I have had to treat”. I have never forgotten that. It was a very human response, and a very real one.

One of the striking causes of mortality in mental illness is of course when people take their own life, in suicide or in self-harm that goes further. We are talking about something that really does mean a life-threatening disturbance. That is why I was commissioned, with a number of colleagues, by the royal college to produce a report on suicide and self-harm, and what we can do for patients. That report was produced in June 2010, and it was not just a matter of a few of us sitting down and thinking about it. We did a survey of a large number of members of the Royal College of Psychiatrists, and we concluded that,

“there is enough evidence to demonstrate that we are far from achieving the level of care that service users need or the standards set out in policies and guidelines. Poor assessments, relying too much on risk issues, staff unskilled in dealing with patients who harm themselves, inappropriate discharge arrangements, lack of follow-up of patients, lack of care pathways, insufficient access to psychological treatments and poor access to services for particular groups amount to inadequate standards of care that impact on the lives of service users and their families. There is a serious problem relating to the deployment and availability of senior staff, with adequate psychotherapy and psychiatry training. It is likely that because of these services and staffing defects, the majority of self-harm remains invisible until a crisis occurs, adding to human misery and to the stress on hospital services.”

The noble Baroness, Lady Murphy, pointed out that since that time in 2010 the incidence of suicide has actually increased rather than decreased. I therefore ask my noble friend the Minister if he would agree to meet with me and a small number of colleagues from the Royal College of Psychiatrists to look at how far the findings of that report have been taken up and implemented by Her Majesty’s Government since then and how far they have not, and to explore how some more progress might be made on the findings of that report.

While something dramatic such as self-harm or suicide is clearly a crisis, there are all sorts of ways in which mental disturbances differ from each other. This is not a homogenous group of people with a homogenous group of disorders, which is one of the reasons why we run into problems. On the physical side we are very aware of the difference between symptoms and a disorder. If I run up the stairs to the Principal Floor I will probably be breathless; I am not terribly fit, you see. That is a reaction to physical exertion, but it is not a sign of illness. It is a sign of unfitness, but not a sign of illness. However, if I am sitting on the Bench here and I become breathless, that is wholly another matter.

There are many ways in which we experience psychological symptoms. It always seems curious to me that we accept that we will all have physical illnesses, mild and more severe, during our lives, yet we pretend to ourselves that we will not have mental and emotional disturbances—every single one of us, not just the ones who have to be referred for treatment. However, many of the emotional reactions that we have are not a sign of illness or disturbance. If someone is down and depressed and is not sleeping very well three weeks after the death of their spouse, that is not a sign of illness; it is a sign of an appropriate reaction to a bereavement. If, three years later, they are in the same state, that is another matter. However, we have to differentiate those people who can get better with a little help from their family and friends and whose condition does not need to be medicalised, as well as those who suffer from relatively moderate disorders, from those who have very severe disorders, as the noble Baroness, Lady Murphy, pointed out. It is clear that if we do not do that, we will be so swamped that it will be impossible to deal with the problems. What will happen is that those with the more severe illnesses will end up being set to the side because they have illnesses from which it is difficult to get better. That is a very serious problem for us.

I should like to believe that we have begun to think not only about treating the illnesses but about how to prevent them. We are clear that government policy should say that we should not smoke, drink too much or eat too much and that obesity needs to be addressed. However, what about bullying behaviour in government departments? It sometimes almost seemed to be a policy approach that the way to increase productivity was to drive people into the ground, and I have absolutely no doubt about the adverse mental health impacts of that. Surely preventive health plays a part in the way that we approach things in government and set as an example to people outside government.

Worst of all is the feeling that somehow things are getting worse—that we are taking less of an interest in certain areas. I shall give your Lordships one example and, from that, pose a question to my noble friend. In the early 1960s, a chair of mental health was created at Queen’s University in Belfast. For the next 30 or more years, psychiatry and mental health was developed as a crucial component of the training of young doctors in Belfast. There is now no professor of psychiatry or mental health in Belfast. Massive amounts of money go into cancer research but there is not even a professor of mental health. Will my noble friend approach the GMC and ask it to insist that no medical faculty trains young doctors without having a professor of psychiatry in its medical faculty? It seems a very simple thing to ask.

12:52

[Lord Adebowale (CB)]

I start by thanking the noble Lord, Lord Layard, and the noble Earl, Lord Howe, for bringing forward this debate on what is a vital issue not only for our health and social care systems but for society more widely. I should declare my interest as the chief executive of a health and social organisation called Turning Point, and I will draw on some cases that Turning Point has come across to illustrate why parity of esteem is so important. I should also declare my interest as a non-executive director of NHS England. Many of the points made by other speakers, including the noble Lords, Lord Layard, Lord Alderdice and Lord Stone, and the noble Baroness, Lady Murphy, I take to heart, and they can be assured that I will be making those points around the table of NHS England.

The strategy, No Health Without Mental Health, and the subsequent implementation framework make it clear that mental health is everyone’s business: one in four adults and one in 10 children in the UK are experiencing mental health issues at any given time; 30% of the 15 million people with a long-term health condition also have mental health problems; and, as has been pointed out by the noble Baroness, Lady Murphy, within a prison environment up to 90% of the population experience one or more mental health conditions, often alongside substance misuse and/or a learning disability. Given this and the costs of mental health, calculated by the Centre for Mental Health to be £105 billion, it is frankly shocking that huge disparity still exists between those with a diagnosable mental health issue and those without. As has already been mentioned in the debate, this results in there being an unacceptable difference in the life expectancy of those with a severe mental health condition and those without of between 16 and 25 years.

I want to illustrate my contribution to this debate from the perspective of people who have mental health issues, and perhaps I may do so by presenting to the House three very short vignettes. The first is a case that has come to the attention of Turning Point. It illustrates a lack of consideration of an individual’s whole needs. It concerns a chap called Fred, although I have changed his name. He has a learning disability and a history of poor eyesight, which staff assessed as contributing towards his high levels of anxiety. Staff working closely with Fred arranged for him to access specialist optical services. It was found that he had a detached retina and cataracts were diagnosed, leading to surgery. Following this surgery, a decrease in what had been perceived as “challenging behaviour” was clearly evidenced. This is someone who, because of a physical illness, had been classed as severely problematic.

The second case concerns professionals failing to work together. Alan had enduring mental health issues when he experienced a stroke and was admitted to the local hospital from one of our residential services. While in hospital undergoing rehabilitation, Alan had all medication reviewed by a ward doctor. The doctor, knowing that Alan had a mental health condition, decided without any discussion with him, the care manager or psychiatrist to stop his medication, even though it had a multiple purpose. It could be used to reduce mood swings and also to treat epilepsy. The hospital doctor stated that, as Alan did not have epilepsy, the medication could be stopped with immediate effect. This had a detrimental effect on his mental health—something that the doctor appeared to be ambivalent about, having not once discussed anything other than Alan’s physical needs with any member of his care team.

The final case is, I think, the most shocking example and most immediate in case we have any doubt that these issues are taking place right now. It involves a support worker who just happened to be at the bedside of one of our clients. They noticed that the file was open and that there was a “Do Not Resuscitate” note in it. Luckily, the care worker knew that no such thing had been discussed with the individual’s next of kin. The support worker challenged hospital staff and was told that because the individual was a mental health patient and under a Home Office order, he had “no priority of life”. Because our member of staff challenged this, the DNR note was removed, but the fact that it was there in the first place highlights the discriminatory treatment that people with a mental health condition can face, which is compounded when other complex needs are applicable, such as offending behaviours or a learning disability.

The implications of introducing parity of esteem are wide-ranging and they highlight the vast amount of work still required to make it real. Rhetoric, commitments and case studies have highlighted the need for parity but there are certain things that have to happen if this is to be embedded throughout the health and care system.

We will simply not achieve parity of esteem without first addressing equality of access and experience. This means breaking down the cultural barriers that still prohibit people from black and minority ethnic communities receiving the support that they need. As the Mental Health Foundation has found, people from BME groups are more likely to be diagnosed with mental health problems, more likely to be diagnosed and admitted to hospital, more likely to experience a poor outcome from treatment—this has been repeated in annual surveys of people in mental health institutions —and more likely to disengage from mainstream mental health services, leading to social exclusion and a deterioration in their mental health.

Staff at all levels of the health system, including GPs and A&E staff, must receive adequate training in mental health. So, too, should the police—something that was brought very much into my experience when I chaired the Commission on Mental Health and Policing. The police are too often the first point of contact for people experiencing a mental health crisis.

The commission reported that one of the clearest examples of disparity between physical and mental health was in regard to how the police and ambulance service respond to a crisis. If I or one of your Lordships had a heart attack—heaven forfend—I can guarantee that an ambulance would arrive within eight minutes. If I had a mental health crisis, it is more likely that I would be carted away by the police and it is highly likely that I would be put in the back of a police van. Such disparity has led to the deaths of too many people, particularly from BME groups. Responding to crisis is a whole other debate but, for me, it is the very start of any definition of parity of esteem. If you cannot have parity of esteem when you are in crisis, when can you have it?

Finally, I turn to something that I spoke about a lot when the Health and Social Care Bill was going through the House: the issue of integration. Until we have a health and care system that looks at the whole person and designs, commissions and delivers services in conjunction with the community to ensure that they are fit for purpose, fragmentation will persist. People will continue to receive disjointed care where their mental health issue is not considered alongside their physical health condition because it is not a priority or is not understood well enough.

The implications of embedding parity certainly will be challenging and require people to work differently, but if we do what we have always done, we will get what we have always got, and the experiences of the people that I have highlighted show why this is no longer acceptable.

13:00

[Baroness Warwick of Undercliffe (Lab)]

My Lords, I thank my noble friend Lord Layard for providing this opportunity on World Mental Health Day to focus our attention on how we treat mental health in our National Health Service.

The prevalence of mental illness in the UK was starkly set out in the Government’s mental health strategy, No Health Without Mental Health. I have no expertise in this area, but the figures are desperately worrying. Others have mentioned them, so I will just single out three: almost half of all adults will experience at least one episode of depression during their lifetime, and depression affects one in five older people; about 10% of children have a mental health problem at any one time; the UK has one of the highest rates for self-harming in Europe—400 per 100,000 population. Perhaps I should add that only one in 10 prisoners has no mental disorder.

These numbers have far-reaching impact. As we have been reminded, people with severe mental illnesses die on average 20 years earlier than the general population. People with mental health problems often have fewer qualifications, find it harder to find and stay in work, are more likely to be homeless and have poor physical health. We know that higher levels of insecurity and stress due to the recession, the poor job market and major upheavals in the welfare system have all had an impact on the mental health of the nation in recent years. It is no wonder that mental health services—what my right honourable friend the leader of the Opposition recently called the “afterthought” of the NHS—are straining at the seams.

As others have noted, mental illness is responsible for the largest proportion of the disease burden in the UK at 22.8%, larger than cardiovascular disease at 16.2% and cancer at 15.9%. Yet only 11% of the NHS budget was spent on NHS services to treat mental health problems for all ages during 2010-11. While figures show that investment in mental health services for adults of working age has increased by 1.2% in cash terms, this in fact amounts to a real-terms decrease.

My noble friends Lord Layard and Lord Stone drew attention to the poverty of investment in research into mental health issues, on which I hope that the Minister will comment in his reply.

A report last month from the Mental Health Foundation, Starting Today, showed how demand is rising just as investment in mental health services is falling. It reminds us that these services face even greater pressures in the future: a growing and aging population, increasing levels of simultaneous mental and physical health problems and, of course, funding constraints that have no end in sight. One of its key findings was the need for mental health to be treated as a core public health issue, with a public health workforce that sees mental health as one of its core responsibilities so that,

“it will be as normal for everyone to look after their mental health as it is to look after their physical health”.

This finding is at the heart of today’s debate. I support the Mental Health Foundation in its call on the coalition Government to prioritise investment in our nation’s mental health services. There is an overwhelming need for the aims of parity of esteem to be speeded up and given even higher priority.

The MHF report generated some useful media coverage. However, I am afraid that many more people will have read the stories just days later about the appalling “mental patient” and “psycho ward” Halloween costumes briefly released by two supermarkets, Tesco and Asda, offering customers the chance to dress up as a terrifying, straitjacketed crazy person covered in blood and brandishing a meat cleaver, or in an orange boiler suit, complete with jaw restraint and optional machete. The retailers withdrew the products and apologised with donations to the charity, Mind.

However, then came this week’s front-page headline in a tabloid newspaper, the Sun, giving a shock figure about the numbers “killed by mental patients” over the past decade. The headline plays on precisely the kind of prejudice that people with mental health problems have come to fear most, implying that they are violent, unstable monsters. Of course, the reality is that people with mental illnesses are three times more likely to be victims of crime than the general population, they are five times more likely to be victims of assault and severely mentally ill women are 10 times more likely to be assaulted.

Appallingly, victims say that their reports to the police are often dismissed or disbelieved. So it was good to see, earlier this summer, that there is to be an extension of the pilot scheme for mental health nurses to accompany police officers on emergency calls, to try to improve the way that people with mental health problems are treated during emergencies. This might go some way to avoiding incidents such as those referred to by the noble Lord, Lord Adebowale, and one that a friend of mine recently reported to me. A colleague of hers had a husband who was finding it difficult to manage his bipolar medication. He had gone missing during a particularly distressing bipolar episode and the wife’s sister, a GP, had alerted the local police about his condition. Nevertheless, when he was found, banging on the locked door of a church, he was handcuffed, mistreated and kept in a police cell overnight on the assumption that he was drunk and would be sober in the morning.

We must tackle the stigma attached to mental illness. That stigma feeds prejudice and can lead to discrimination, particularly at work. For me, this comes close to home. A senior member of my staff told me only years later that she had left out her own brief history of clinical depression on the HR department’s health declaration form, for fear of being considered not capable of doing the job. That fear of discrimination remains. As someone told me recently, “If you phone work saying you’re staying in bed for a few days with flu, employers will be understanding. You’re not likely to get the same response if you say you’re staying in bed because you’re depressed, or feeling suicidal”.

Stigma and discrimination ruin lives and prevent people with mental health problems using their full potential and playing an active part in society. Mind and Rethink Mental Illness are campaigning to change this, but, sadly, it is still true that we view mental illness differently from physical illness and that has a direct, negative impact on people with mental illness and on the understanding and services that they receive.

The Mental Health Network says that parity of esteem for mental health will happen only if services and organisations work together. The Royal College of Psychiatrists’ trenchant Whole-Person Care report earlier this year sets out what it believes a parity approach should look like. Crucially, it emphasises that there should be investment in the prevention of mental health problems and in the promotion of mental well-being, in proportion to need. Yet only five strategic health authority regions were able to report increased investment in mental health in 2011-12. Underinvestment in the mental health care system, when those in most need often miss out on essential care, is a disgrace. While we have heard much about the Government’s commitment to ensuring parity between services for physical and mental illness, it is abundantly clear that we need to do much more to bring this parity about. There used to be a taboo about speaking about cancer —“the big C”—as which, thankfully, has now disappeared. The same must happen with mental illness.

To end, I will echo the concerns of my noble friend Lord Layard about the new commissioning systems. Will the Minister, in his reply, tell us how the new GP commissioning process, as a front-line service, will respond to the need for parity? How will CCGs be helped to improve their mental health commissioning capability and the quality of the mental health services that they are commissioning? What assurance can he give us that the new NHS commissioning systems will truly deliver for mental health?

13:09

[Baroness O'Neill of Bengarve (CB)]

My Lords, I think that we are all very grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Layard, for securing this debate. It is a theme of such enormous dimensions that it is almost tempting to avoid how centrally serious it is. He has concentrated on this area for many years, and I am sure that many of us have learnt from his work. I declare an interest as chair of the Equality and Human Rights Commission, which has among its responsibilities helping to reduce—of course, one hopes, to eliminate—unlawful discrimination on the basis of disability, including unlawful discrimination on the basis of mental health disability.

Speaking in June this year, the Minister with responsibility for care services, Norman Lamb, commented on the Royal College of Psychiatrists’ report, to which reference has been repeatedly been made, Whole-Person Care: From Rhetoric to Reality (Achieving Parity Between Mental and Physical Health). He said:

“What do we mean by parity of esteem? … I think the report—in its definition and vision for parity—has it right. It’s about equality in how we think about mental health and physical health care—it’s about how they’re valued. We need to ‘close the gap’ with physical health services—whether that’s a gap in access, in quality, in research, or even in the aspirations we have for people”.

As the Minister made very clear, this is an extremely large agenda ranging from the commissioning of services and the integration of services to interventions to reduce premature mortality among those suffering from mental health conditions. It is also an agenda that stretches far beyond the NHS. Indeed, it is an agenda to which anybody and everybody, particularly employers, communities and schools, can make a large contribution.

Parity of esteem is not just a matter of ensuring that different conditions are treated with the expertise appropriate to them, although that is, of course, central. It is not just a matter of concern within the health and care systems that the people who suffer these conditions are treated with dignity and respect. It extends far beyond medical treatment and care, and many non-medical approaches are also of great importance.

First, I shall give a brief reminder of how stark and bitter the absence of parity of esteem and all that goes with it can be for those who suffer mental health conditions and for their friends and family. I have been permitted by a colleague to quote from an account from a family with two sons who are both young adults. One is in an advanced stage of muscular dystrophy and the other is diagnosed as chronically mentally ill. The family said:

“The son who is physically disabled has many special needs. He gets emotional support everywhere he turns. His handicap is visible and obvious and the community, family and friends open their hearts to him and go out of their way to make his life better. My other son, on the other hand, is misunderstood and shunned by all. He is also terribly disabled … but his disability is not visible.”

At least, it is not visible in the same way. The extended family,

“all think that he’s lazy, stupid, weird and naughty. They suggest that somehow we have made some terrible mistake in his upbringing. When they call on the phone they ask how his brother is and talk to his brother but they never inquire about him. He upsets them. They … wish that he’d go away”.

That is poignant and sad, and shows how stark the absence of parity of esteem and all that goes with it can be for those who suffer mental health conditions. That probably is an extreme case, all the more poignant for being in one family, but it reminds us of a lot.

Of course, these conditions and their diagnoses are complex and highly varied. Many conditions have both mental and physical aspects. For example—I know that this also is a very large area of need—difficulties with communication are not easily classified as mental or physical, and there are many other conditions that combine both sorts of symptom. We have to agree that there are physical conditions—for example, disfigurement —where sufferers may encounter reactions from others that are as harsh as those sometimes faced by people with mental health conditions.

We also have to remember that there are many conditions which people do not want to disclose. We have very little idea how many of those we live among may be coping on a daily basis with physical and mental conditions that are invisible to us, that they manage more or less adequately and that they try to keep to themselves, be it diabetes or depression, digestive problems or severe phobias. Nor do we have much idea how much physical or mental pain, or both, others are often managing, whether day-in, day-out or episodically. Much of the burden of disease is invisible to others, and much of it is not solely mental or solely physical.

We also must not forget the cases where the conditions are all too visible. One of the difficulties is that the person who has the condition becomes invisible because people focus on the wrong thing. One only has to witness the many terrible stories of the condescension to which wheelchair users are subject, as though the use of a wheelchair somehow rendered one incapable of speaking.

For all those reasons, I believe that, while changes in the way in which we organise health and social care are essential for securing parity of esteem for persons with different sorts of health conditions, much also depends on the social and economic arrangements that we have, and in making sure that they recognise and include those with varying health conditions.

I shall make just a few illustrative comments on the way in which wider employment and community arrangements can make a difference. Let me start with something that perhaps is mainly a concern of schools; namely, speech and language difficulties. It has long been recognised that this is a major area in which complex interventions and social support matter greatly. The Bercow report, A Review of Services for Children and Young People (0-19) with Speech, Language and Communication Needs, was published a few years ago but its findings bear repetition. It states:

“Approximately 7% of five year olds entering school in England—nearly 40,000 children in 2007—have significant difficulties with speech and/or language. These children are likely to need specialist and/or targeted intervention at key points in their development. Approximately 1% of five year olds … more than 5,500 children in 2007—have … severe and complex”,

difficulties in this area.

“They may not understand much of what is said to them … may have very little spoken language”,

and are at risk of other mental health conditions.

Specialist intervention is, of course, what is important for such children and young people but again it is not all that is needed. For those with communication difficulties, the reaction of others can be one of the worst hurdles. The parents of such children,

“expressed concern that their children’s ability to communicate, to speak and to understand was taken for granted”.

They said that,

“their children often looked like any ‘normal’ child and yet behaved differently”.

One parent commented:

“They don’t think quickly and they can’t express themselves quickly, but they look as if they can manage. All my children stare at people because they are looking for cues, and that causes fights”.

Here we can see very clearly that a great deal of what matters for partly invisible conditions is inclusion; that is, including the child with communication difficulties in activities, in school, in play, in the community and, later, in the workplace.

A final example is one that employers can foster. I believe that the example of really energetic ways to develop flexible working can make a great difference to many people. The British Telecom report, Flexible Working: Can Your Company Compete Without It?, states:

“At BT, flexible working is business as usual. Already seven out of 10 people work flexibly and nearly 10% are home-based. It has saved the company millions in terms of increased productivity and cut costs. It has also motivated our people and released more potential … we are attempting nothing less than the complete transformation of the way in which the company runs, the way we communicate, and the way we work together”.

For BT, that saves costs and improves productivity. I think that we must all acknowledge that it is in an advantageous position because telecommunications allows for distant working more easily, but remote working, even if harder in other areas, can have many benefits—above all, the benefit of the possibility of including many people who either could not travel to work or could not work as many hours as some others. It has great benefits for carers, including the benefit of a working life of self-respect and money they have earned.

There are many other examples of businesses making creative and effective use of specific disabilities, including mental health disabilities. There are companies that have found ways to use the distinctive capacities of some people with high functioning autism spectrum disorders to carry out tasks that require focused accuracy and have given them preferential employment in these areas. For example, the Danish company—I may mispronounce it—Specialisterne, is almost entirely staffed by people with autism spectrum disorders. They specialise in the high precision task of quality checking software. Apparently, those of us who do not have those disorders would be less good at it.

The benefits of inclusion matter greatly for those with mental conditions as well as those with physical conditions. We should make efforts to secure as much inclusion in schools, at work and in community life for those with disabilities of all sorts as we possibly can.

13:20

[Lord Carlile of Berriew (LD)]

My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Layard, has taken a long and influential interest in mental health; not least as a leading economist, he has made a powerful economic case for parity of esteem. We are very grateful to him for securing this debate.

I notice that the noble Lord is sitting alongside the noble Lord, Lord Bragg, on what I suppose one could describe as the polymath Bench this afternoon. This morning, the noble Lord, Lord Bragg, presented a most interesting Radio 4 programme featuring the life of Galen, the extraordinary second century Roman doctor. Galen discovered many things about medicine. One was that he realised that much of the variation in physical health and in human behaviour can be explained by temperament and stress, as he put it. He identified the inseparable links between physical pathology and psychopathology 1,900 years ago. To some people suffering from mental illness in this country and in particular to those who live with them, it can sometimes appear as though little more has been learnt in the past 2,000 years.

Of course, that is unfair. Generally speaking, huge advances have been made in the treatment of mental illness. Drugs are available which, for example, have vastly improved the quality of life for patients suffering from bipolar disorder and, more recently, for patients suffering from acute schizophrenia and other conditions. Therapies, not always involving drugs, have had a remarkable and beneficial impact on many individuals—albeit, I am afraid, with patchy availability in this country. I had the privilege of serving as Member of Parliament for a constituency in rural mid-Wales for some years. This is a bit historic, but even today I understand that the availability of therapies is very uneven in an area like that. You can get a therapy, but not necessarily the right therapy. Providing the correct therapy is extremely important.

The stigma of mental illness remains an obstacle to progress. The fear of telling an employer of a psychiatric diagnosis remains much greater than revealing a physical illness, however serious. In my own legal profession, I have seen careers destroyed by a psychiatric illness of limited duration, whereas a physical illness of similar duration has been received with sympathy and patience and people have been able to return to practice.

There has been some progress. The media have taken a commendable lead. I do not only listen to the noble Lord, Lord Bragg, on the radio; sometimes I watch television drama. Storylines in recent crime noir series, in “Homeland” and elsewhere, have highlighted that anyone, including the at least apparently heroic, can suffer from a mental illness and still lead a perfectly normal life and provide service to society.

Recently, I enjoyed the privilege of co-chairing with Professor Dinesh Bhugra an investigation for the Mental Health Foundation into the future of mental health services. Our report, Starting Today, was produced last month. There is not enough time in a debate such as this to go into the detail of the report, but one of its foundations was pleasure at the 2011 English mental health strategy, which rightly committed this country to parity of esteem. However, the declaration, welcome as it is, has not been matched by progress, which has been variable and not yet quick.

The Mental Health Foundation report has headlined a number of issues which could develop parity of esteem in the coming years. I will refer to a few of them. We certainly took the view that we need to look at fresh ways of implementing known best practice alongside developing technology. Above all, I would like to highlight mental health in primary care. GPs should become—but in only a few cases have become—leaders in mental health care, providing quickly accessible services in their surgeries.

I referred earlier to rural mid-Wales. I know of one practice which years ago introduced a psychotherapist into the health centre in a small Welsh market town. It had a remarkable effect. It meant that the doctor could say to the patient, “I think you need to go down the corridor and talk to my colleague”. An intervention was made which beneficially affected the life of the patient concerned. We need to see more of that. By the way, a two-week wait for an appointment with a doctor just will not do for someone suffering from a growing mental condition. GPs need to know as much about mental illness as about physical illness. So far as possible, primary and secondary mental health services should merge to produce early treatment and the value for money that the noble Lord, Lord Layard, has identified in some of the work he has done over the years on mental health.

The Mental Health Foundation report also found that there is value in self-management. So far as possible, patients in a personalised service should be encouraged to take training in the management of their own care in partnership with therapists and clinicians. A stake in your own recovery is a real incentive for a person who is suffering from mental health problems, but it needs some formal help.

Turning to crisis care and community support, every accident and emergency facility should be equipped to deal with emergency mental health issues, to be followed up by community support. They are not. All over the country, they are not equipped. That is not acceptable.

On collaborative working, I emphasise something that I have encountered in other areas, such as child safeguarding, which is the sharing of information. When somebody with a mental illness goes into an accident and emergency department, a solicitor’s office, a police station or a school, they go into a silo. That is not acceptable. Data protection is used as an excuse for not sharing information. Actually, it is near criminal not to share information for people who have needs that are demonstrated by mental illness. We must ensure that those who have information to share do not sit in silos and that the ability to pool funds from different funding streams into a single integrated care budget, shared protocols and partnership agreements, co-location of services, multi-disciplinary teams and liaison services becomes a reality.

The Mental Health Foundation report also emphasised the beginning and the end of life as key areas where mental health interventions should be made available quickly and fully. Early interventions in schools can identify mental health issues that affect not only the child but the child’s parents and carers. Many cases have been highlighted in some terrible reports that have been produced after fatal events that show that to be the case.

The final issue that I want to raise in the time available concerns the elderly. Perhaps this is an issue that we can raise comfortably in your Lordships’ House because so many of us are OAPs these days. There is a growing issue, as we all know, about elderly care. Many of us have enjoyed having parents who lived into their late 90s and indeed, happily, there are Members of this House in their late 90s, but we know that this issue needs a great deal more work than it has received. It will enable elderly people to lead a full life albeit while suffering from some incipient dementia.

There are many challenges and this debate highlights them. It allows us to show Parliament’s determination that parity of esteem should be a must and not merely a phrase.

13:30

[Baroness Hollins (CB)]

My Lords,

“No health without mental health”,

was the strap line adopted by the Royal College of Psychiatrists during my presidency and now for the Government’s mental health strategy. Dividing a person’s health into either physical or mental is a false dichotomy and one that has for too long encouraged us to focus on parts of a person rather than on that person as a whole. I remember as a medical student being asked to, “See the spleen in bed six”. Things have moved on a little since then, but psychiatric patients still find themselves being referred to as schizophrenics or manic depressives.

Parity of esteem is not, of course, a new concept. As long ago as 1946, the World Health Organisation defined health as,

“a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity”.

Some 67 years later, billions of pounds in resources have been poured into physical health. We have created sophisticated cancer drugs, mapped the human genome and surgery can be done through tiny incisions. We do not even think of these things as remarkable any more. But the unequal allocation of funding and resources has left mental health some way behind physical health. Parity is not just about increasing resources for those with serious mental illness, but about attending to the physical health of people with mental illness or people with learning disabilities and attending to the mental health of people with physical illnesses.

As an example, GPs receive a payment for offering a health check to people with learning disabilities each year, but although this has been policy for some time, less than 50% of people with learning disabilities have yet had one—no wonder their life expectancy is so much lower than others when the reactive approach to physical health and mental health does not take account of the extra needs of some members of society in order to achieve good health. I would welcome a comment from the Minister about this point.

Parity is something that most people have not even started to think about. The BMA Board of Science, which I chair, is preparing a report on parity of esteem for its members at the moment. But as a colleague at the BMA recently commented, giving parity to mental health is a massive paradigm shift, which will have huge effects for many years to come. Despite the Equality Act, few healthcare staff understand that it applies to disabled people, including those with mental disorders, who are using mainstream health services. Sadly, discrimination is too often alive and well with respect to mental illness and learning disability.

Parity will have an effect on the training and education of all healthcare staff. It will have an effect on the commissioning and organisation of whole person healthcare. Just think: the time may have come to employ psychiatrists in acute hospitals, not just as part of liaison teams, but on the same terms and in the same numbers as other consultants so that more timely assessments and treatments can be offered. There could be psychiatrists who work with children, women, pregnant mothers, older people and adults, working alongside paediatricians, obstetricians, physicians, in the accident and emergency department and so on.

To focus so many of our resources on merely one aspect of health not only leaves other aspects untreated, it makes it difficult to treat physical illness properly. To use an analogy, it is like a three-legged stool, which supports the physical, mental and social health of a well-functioning human being. To take any one of those legs away or to shorten one leg is to leave the stool unbalanced and potentially unable to stand up at all.

I have spent most of my working life in the field of learning disability, both as a psychiatrist and as a parent, and I have often said that if you get it right for people with a learning disability, you will get it right for everyone. People with learning disabilities have complex needs and the interplay and overlap between physical and mental health is inescapable in this patient group. Not only that, but people with learning disabilities have higher levels of both physical and mental health needs than the general population. For example, they are twice as likely to suffer from depression and three times as likely to suffer from schizophrenia. The life expectancy of someone with a learning disability is 20 years less than the general population, even when factors directly related to the learning disability are removed. One in five people with a learning disability will not see their 50th birthday, and half of all people with a learning disability will die from pneumonia, often caused by choking on the wrong type of food or drink or aspirating it and getting pneumonia as a consequence.

This health inequality is often caused by a failure to consider both physical and mental causes of a deterioration in functioning, or to attribute any difficulties to the underlying learning disability—a type of diagnostic overshadowing in that it must be due to the learning disability. The health needs of this group are significant, but if you get it right for them, you get it right for others too.

Take, for example, John. John was admitted to hospital for an investigation of his physical deterioration, but in order to investigate the problems fully, he needed some investigations, some of them uncomfortable, unpleasant or painful. The staff made an attempt to get John to comply, but they were busy and did not know what to do. They shouted at him, begged him, offered him chocolate and called the consultant, but they did not make effective reasonable adjustments to facilitate his care. They did not understand his particular needs. After two weeks, John had had no investigations and his bed was needed, so he was sent home.

Once back at home, John remained listless, tired and kept losing weight. His worried carers eventually persuaded John to go to his GP where he was diagnosed with depression. He took anti-depressives but, crucially, was also given the time to talk about the things that were worrying him. That is unusual, because few psychological therapists have developed the skills to adapt their treatment to meet the individual communication needs of people with learning disabilities or autism.

The second time he went into hospital, because he continued to deteriorate, John had a hospital passport. This is an innovative idea to give hospital staff some guidance about his particular needs. He also had an understanding of what to expect and his depression had been treated. This time he had a successful hospital admission. He was diagnosed with cancer of the bowel, fortunately quite early. He was operated on and has made a successful recovery.

I do not just tell noble Lords that as a story with a happy ending—it could so easily have been different. The importance of this story is that you absolutely cannot adequately treat someone's physical illness without an understanding of that person as a whole. People with a learning disability are often unable to tell us in words about what is wrong and that is why we need to be alert to all the reasons why someone may be ill. But if we get that right, how much easier it will be to remember to ask other people about themselves as a whole.

Failures such as Winterbourne View and Mid Staffs happened because people were not seen as whole people. No one took the time to find out what the problem really was or how to fix it. In the case of Winterbourne View, it was so much easier to send people away to some specialist service than to really think about what was wrong.

You would not build a stool with only one leg and you absolutely cannot build an effective, equitable health system by focusing just on one aspect of health—by not giving parity of esteem to mental health. I have one word of caution. Our mental health is not all down to good assessment and good treatment. Prevention, and mentally healthy lifestyles, are key. That is why cross-government initiatives that recognise the relationship between, for example, poverty, unemployment and mental illness, are important.

In congratulating the noble Lord, Lord Layard, on securing this debate, which manages to coincide with World Mental Health Day, and for his sustained commitment to mental health, I would like to add my support to his suggestion that a senior Minister for mental health be appointed to work across all relevant departments. This is not just a matter for the Department of Health. Will our Government’s foresight in committing to achieve parity of esteem be demonstrable in our international policy and influence as well?

Finally, I hope that the Minister will agree with me that DfID really could help to influence attitudes internationally. There are estimates that 20% of the world’s population will be seriously depressed by 2020; yet only 1% of aid budgets has been committed to mental health services. Can that be right?

13:40

[Lord Bragg (Lab)]

My Lords, I, too, thank my noble friend Lord Layard for securing this important debate and for his comprehensive and definitive speech, one of many erudite and moving contributions. Mental health—or, rather, its opposite—is a subject that impinged on me personally and crucially, some years ago. It was partly for that reason that I joined Mind and eventually became its president for 15 years. I handed over to Stephen Fry a year or so ago. I have talked to my friend, Paul Farmer, Mind’s chief executive, about this debate.

The bleak statistics have been set out clearly by many of your Lordships. The list of lacks is long. Six million adults suffer from different forms of depression; the cost of poor treatment is pain, distress and, we are told, £60 billion. As we have heard eloquently and graphically today, the injustice is intolerable, the neglect is shameful and the effects are often disastrous and on many levels.

The cleverness of this proposal, in my view, lies in the phrase “parity of esteem”. That is key; it opens up several doors, some of which lead to better prospects than others. We all agree that this parity must be based on parity of treatment with physical illness, as has been well said again and again. Progress depends on investment, but it also depends on something just as important, which is a fundamental change of attitude and the will to bring it about. The ancient stigma is dissolving, but very slowly, and is still, I suggest, however unconsciously, the major impediment to the parity that my noble friend Lord Layard seeks.

In terms of investment there is a deep problem; perhaps that is the elephant in the Chamber. We have an outstandingly good health service. I experienced it recently through myself, my family and two of my friends over the past 18 months, in the north-west of England, in Edinburgh and here in London. In every case we met high skills, courtesy and care—and still free, as Bevan intended. It is an amazing asset and a flagship for this country’s decency.

Today, however, this is accompanied in general terms by a rarely and uneasily articulated, yet growing, fear that this noble ideal—this vow in our country to deliver such a service, from however difficult a childbirth to however lingering a death—is now under serious threat, failing, falling and going. The extensive and inclusive nature of our health service is both its greatness and, in some people’s view, is proving to be its weakness. From the latest intricate and expensive surgery to looking after dumb Saturday night drunks; from the increasing flood of the complex ailments of old age to cosmetic surgery; and from dialysis to a small bruise, it serves a multiplying range of complaints and demands. As the needs increase, can we continue to afford it? Do Governments want to afford it? We read about subtraction, but rarely about additions: cutting is the sound of the day.

In that context I suggest that at present, sadly, mental health is low down on the list of priorities. It is a very demanding aspect of national health and of the utmost concern to all of us here, as it should be to everyone in the country. All of us here are trying to improve the position of those afflicted, at whatever level. Although we must keep up the pressure, it seems that we cannot merely reach out to the Treasury. We have to find other ways, if only as interim measures.

The direction to which my noble friend Lord Layard points us is as much in the human as in the economic sphere. Mind’s steady encouragement of people in the public eye to admit to mental health problems is one useful method. I did so myself when I became president of Mind 17 years ago; the public reaction was one of overwhelming relief. “I found that I was not alone”, people said, again and again. Too many people still are alone.

Next to increased investment, one of the best ways to meet this challenge is to find parity in the workplace, which gives people esteem in the eyes of others and of themselves. The knock-on effects are extremely encouraging. This has already been tried and encouraged by Mind. I will give one example. As part of Mind’s employee support programme, EDF offered psychological support—cognitive behavioural therapy—to employees and trained more than a thousand managers to recognise mental health problems among staff and develop support strategies. Job satisfaction has already, over a couple of years, risen from 36% to 68%. There also have been marked savings through increased productivity and increased profits. All this is a reason for some optimism this afternoon.

This programme could be developed further and would benefit from a higher profile. Does the Civil Service, do local authorities and do we here in Parliament take on and help people in the workplace with mental health problems in that way? Could we introduce legislation to move that along? It could help, and would be widely welcomed as a positive move; it could set an example. Could we not find a way to develop that?

In short, we need more money, more understanding and more resources. However, we also need more attempts to integrate people into the workforce and to educate those more privileged in health to understand and throw out a new lifeline. Parity of esteem might come most surely of all from friends at work and the respect gained by working with other people. I believe that many people in this country are ready to support that.

13:46

[Lord Addington (LD)]

My Lords, this is one of those debates in which, having put down your name to speak, by halfway through you are convinced that you do not have much to contribute. However, the main thing that attracted me to the debate in the first place was that it concerned parity of esteem between mental health and physical health. It has always struck me that the two are absolutely inseparable: you cannot remove one from the other. This is not just about the healthy mind and the healthy body; it is about the fact that you cannot access either one without paying attention to the other.

As has already been said in the debate, we had the problem that mental health was something that happened to other people and thus was something that did not concern us. We removed ourselves from it as a society. It is only over a comparatively recent time that we have started to realise that it is a mainstream problem. The similarities between that and some of the work I have done in other fields—for instance, on hidden disabilities, particularly dyslexia—are many. If what I do is normal or what I perceive to be normal, everything else will not be addressed. There are two things going on: the perception that it is nothing to do with me—I do not understand it, and I do not want to understand it because it is unpleasant—and the idea, as has been referred to in the debate, that we all know exactly what the mentally ill are like. They are basically people running around with meat cleavers and chasing around or shrieking at people on buses; they are not people who are in a state of depression. I almost said “unhappiness”, but it is being depressed, or functioning below par. Perhaps it is making the lives of those around them unpleasant; not fulfilling their greatest function; not interacting with family members. With depression, the field is far too wide to cover everything. That person is more than likely to be the standard person who has a mental health problem; he is not somebody who is in any way dramatic. That person is also going to be very bad at getting over the fact that he is ill and suffering from a long-term condition. As has been mentioned before, the life expectancy of those with mental illness is considerably lower than those without it.

So how do we get into this? Part of the work, clearly, has already been done by the noble Lord, Lord Bragg, who started off by saying that this is not that unusual, please open your minds to the possibility that this could be a very normal part of life. Furthermore, the rest of us will have to work a little harder, first, to take on new ideas and, secondly, to access the potential of those people to get the best out of it for us—the economy and the selfish principle within it. If those people are to have an episode of depression, for example, they will get over it, particularly if we give them the correct help and understanding and do not decide, “Oh, they have had a bout of depression. They will never be able to hold a job again”. If we can get over that, we will do well. We will benefit from that as a society. In my work outside dealing with hidden disabilities, I have found that embracing small changes in attitude and approach benefits the whole of society, not just that person. That process is not easy.

I must make a small confession to the noble Baroness, Lady O’Neill. When I first heard in my work with disabilities that mental health was to be put in with disabilities, I was a little frightened. I thought, “Wait a minute. With illness, you either get better or you die. It is not something that is with you for life”. I was rapidly disabused of that, because the prejudice that goes with it will be with you for life, as with cancer, which has been mentioned. The idea that it marks you out as different and other is incredibly important. I came to the conclusion: “It ain’t a perfect fit, but it—putting them together—is definitely the best show in town”.

We must try to get this across and start to engage with the rest of society about it. On the similarity between physical conditions and mental ones, I discovered many years ago, backed up by my personal experience, that many things that we do to prevent physical ill health work for mental ill health. There is lots of evidence, as Mind has recognised, that physical exercise releases hormones that help with many conditions. If you are physically healthy, you are considerably less likely to suffer from many forms of mental ill health. Encouraging physical activity can help many mental health conditions. The interrelationship between the two types of health is so close that it is ridiculous that we have to go through this process, but we clearly do.

The Government have taken this on board and are moving forward. I hope that we are not merely travelling with the tide but trying to inject some pace ourselves—running up a sail or putting an oar in the water—to go a little faster than general public opinion. There is a time lag within government and certainly in legislation. When Parliament becomes aware of a problem and then has to do something about it, it tends to jump ahead on the problem. I hope that we are seeing the first stage of that here. I am reasonably convinced that we are, but unless the Government now act and use the tide of public opinion, we will always lag behind.

We are dealing with a normal process here, a normal part of society. Unless the Government not only take the administrative steps but add to public awareness, we will be missing an opportunity to deal with a problem that will be with us for a long time. It is not going to go away, and unless we take coherent and sensible action now, we will be dealing with it for ever, normally within our prisons and hospitals.

13:54

[Baroness Meacher (CB)]

I should like to begin with a very brief response to my noble friend Lady Murphy. The answer to this debate, in my view, is not a redistribution of resources from the secondary mental health services to the primary but, rather, to seek to focus resources on to or into NICE-recommended treatments in both the primary and secondary sectors. An enormous amount can be achieved if we really focus on that objective.

Despite having worked in the secondary mental health services for about a quarter of a century, on and off, I shall concentrate my brief remarks on the lack of parity of esteem in the availability of treatment for children with mental as against physical disorders. I applaud the Government for at least introducing the objective of parity of esteem. I think it is fair to say that we have never had it before.

I have the benefit of access to the draft of a new book on mental health to be published by my noble kinsman Lord Layard and David Clark. You could say that I have access to insider information without which I should not be making this particular speech but doing something completely different.

The need for psychological treatment services for children is overwhelming. Indeed, the evidence suggests that the incidence of emotional and behavioural problems in 15 and 16 year-olds approximately doubled between 1974 and 2004—a 30 year period, of course—and has remained fairly stable since. Today, about 10% of 15 and 16 year-olds suffer with emotional or behavioural problems.

We now have a situation where these problems can be resolved but, tragically, generally they are not. My noble kinsman Lord Layard has talked about the undertreatment of adults, but for children the situation is equally bad. We know that nine out of 10 children with a physical illness will be treated. As my noble kinsman mentioned in relation to adults, only a quarter of children with a psychological problem will be treated. We are talking about children who are just not treated for a problem.

In 2010, Britain’s Royal College of General Practitioners conducted a survey of its members. One question was: “When children are suffering from depression or another disorder requiring specialist psychological therapy, are you able to get them the treatment within two months?”. The results were truly appalling. Only 6% of GPs could get the service they needed for their child patients within the specified time. The timeframe is important, just as it is for physical illness. We have maximum waiting times for specialist treatment for physical conditions, but none for depression and anxiety. Can the noble Earl give the House some reassurance that the Government will extend maximum waiting times to psychological therapies for children, not only for adults?

I applaud the coalition Government’s establishment in 2010 of a new priority for early intervention for children at risk. That followed the release of figures for the number of suicides. However, within two years there were cuts in half of our mental health services, which have surely undermined the Government’s objective. Again, can the noble Earl give the House any assurance about reversing that trend?

Why is our failure to prioritise children’s mental health so important? The answer is simple. Children with mental health problems go on to become adults with mental health problems. Surely it is better to treat children when the problems arise, rather than waiting for them to waste years of their lives in misery and unable to contribute effectively to society. That is obvious from the point of view not only of the individual but of the taxpayer. Our failure in this field is extremely costly. To give just one example, a child with a conduct disorder will cost the taxpayer roughly £150,000 more than if the child did not have the behaviour disorder. We can look at it the other way. If we spend £7,500 on a child with a behaviour problem, the cost is absolutely zero if a mere one in 20 of those children is helped. Of course, the figures are much better than that.

Some might think that the reason that the Government do not invest in those treatments is that they do not work, but we now know that, for children too, there are psychological treatments that have been shown to be effective. The treatments are very similar to those recommended for adults—cognitive behavioural therapy, in particular, and interpersonal therapy—for the common mental disorders. For conduct disorder, however—the single most common mental health problem in childhood —there is now a well established treatment, which is structured parent training. One of the biggest trials in England showed that after seven years the children whose parents had this treatment were 80% less likely to be defined as having oppositional defiant disorder than those not treated. This is a huge success rate. Even for the most difficult children, multi-systemic therapy has produced good results. So there are effective treatments available, if only they are commissioned, for our children. In 2008, however, less than half of children’s services were implementing NICE guidelines—hence my point at the beginning of these short remarks. In another survey, half the therapists said they use CBT for less than one fifth of their patients.

The Minister, as always, knows all these arguments. It will be very encouraging if he can give some assurances to the House today that improvements are being made to the availability of NICE-recommended psychological therapies for children. We are, of course, aware of the IAPT programme for children. I hope the noble Earl can assure the House that this programme will reach all our communities in sufficient depth to ensure that nine out of 10 children with psychological problems can be helped, just as their friends with physical problems are helped in nine out of 10 cases.

14:00

[Lord Hunt of Kings Heath (Lab)]

My Lords, like other noble Lords, I very much welcome this very high quality debate. I pay tribute to my noble friend Lord Layard not just for the speech he made but for his outstanding work in this area.

Many noble Lords have articulated current inequalities in service provision and poor outcomes for so many people affected by mental illness. The statistics are striking. There is no question that people with serious mental illness have increased levels of morbidity and are at greater risk of premature death. A link between smoking and mental health is stark. For example, some 42% of all cigarettes smoked in England are smoked by people with a mental health condition, including alcohol and drug dependency, and up to 70% of people in mental health units smoke. It has been estimated that around 30% of those suffering from a long-term physical health condition simultaneously have a mental condition. This is equivalent to around 4.6 million people in England alone and about 46% of people with mental health problems. People with schizophrenia may die up to 25 years before the average. People with a mental illness are almost twice as likely to die from coronary heart disease as the general population, four times more likely to die from respiratory disease, and are at higher risk of being overweight or obese.

I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Adebowale, that these kinds of figures are shocking. In the context of parity of esteem, they suggest that we need, as the noble Lord described it, a whole-person care approach. For 65 years we have had an almost tripartite system of meeting one person’s need through not one service but three services—the mainstream NHS, mental health and social care. We have also had a different funding system between health and social care, often with perverse incentives towards getting an integrated approach. This cannot go on.

As we live longer and the demographics change, people’s needs become a complex blur of the physical, the mental and the social. Wherever people are in this disjointed system, some or all of one person’s needs are being unmet. Every noble Lord brought forward illustrations of where that need is not being met. We know, as some noble Lords have said, that in acute hospitals social and mental health needs can be neglected. It may explain why we have so many problems with older people in our hospitals, how their condition can go downhill, and how they can often get stuck in an acute hospital because discharge becomes so much more difficult. In mental health care settings, people can have their physical health overlooked, which in part explains why those with serious mental health problems die younger than the rest of the population.

I am convinced that we need to integrate services and budgets, but we also need to see immediate action on parity of esteem. I will put a number of questions to the noble Earl, Lord Howe, about how he considers the Government and the health service are going to ensure that parity of esteem is actually delivered.

First, what are the Government’s intentions about securing fast and fair access to mental health treatment? The noble Earl’s honourable friend the Care Services Minister has already acknowledged that it is unfair that waiting times for psychological therapies are not given the same importance as those for hospital treatment. The noble Lord, Lord Layard, mentioned this in his opening remarks. We know that long waits can do enormous damage, particularly for children and young people, as the noble Baroness, Lady Meacher, pointed out to us. Yet clinical commissioning groups are not required to secure treatment within a fixed timescale. There is a real question to the Government about whether NHS England will be asked to set out meaningful standards for access and waiting in order to place this on a par with other services.

The second question is about how the Government will ensure that mental health crisis care is given the same priority as other urgent care services. Recent reports have highlighted the paucity of mental health crisis care. Too many people in a mental health crisis end up in police custody. People with mental health problems also attend A&E at twice the average rate and 24/7 access to crisis resolution home treatment teams is still patchy. I understand, and the noble Earl will know, that NHS England is carrying out an urgent care review which follows on from the current problems within A&E. As part of that urgent care review, will mental health crisis care be treated on a par with other issues?

In the West Midlands, indeed in Birmingham, we have a system called RAID, which has been developed to ensure that there is consultant psychiatric presence within A&E departments. That has proven to be successful but has also highlighted that, unless there is a service or a facility to which a patient who has come into A&E and is diagnosed as having mental health problems can be referred, you are still left with the problem about what to do with this patient. If we are going to solve the urgent care crisis we have to bring in mental health services and mental health commissioning as equal partners.

I want to ask the Minister about funding. My noble friend Lord Bragg said that funding for mental health is too far down the list of priorities. The noble Earl will know that the recent national survey of investment in adult mental health care showed the first real-terms fall in a decade. This was especially pronounced in older people’s mental health care. Of course, we do not have a tariff for mental health services. What will the Government do about this? I have heard that the department has discontinued the national survey of investment in mental health services. Can the Minister confirm that? If it is true, I ask him to reconsider. Surely it is very important for us, if we are going to be able to indentify whether parity of esteem is actually implemented, that we have the facts to look at the funding relativities between different health services.

I ask the Minister for his response to my noble friend Lord Layard and the noble Lord, Lord Stone, about how we can extend parity to investment and research. In the health service the research budget is very skewed towards medical research. Clearly medical research is very important. We have had debates about the investment in nursing research but we have not focused very much on research in mental health services. The point has been put persuasively here that, given the scale of mental health illness in this country, to starve ourselves of a large mental health research capacity seems to be a real mistake. I hope that the noble Earl will be able to say something more about this.

My noble friend Lady Warwick, the noble Lord, Lord Carlile, and the noble Baroness, Lady O’Neill, talked very movingly about the issue of stigma. There are some wonderful examples of how people have sought bravely to cope with the issue of stigma and have been very successful. There is, however, an awful long way to go. I would be interested to know how the Government think they might encourage this in the future.

Clinical commissioning groups clearly have the main responsibility for commissioning mental health services in the future. Is the noble Earl satisfied that CCGs have the capacity and, if not, what are they going to do about ensuring that they are given access to people who can help them commission services effectively? The noble Lord, Lord Carlile, asked about primary care capacity in terms of both accessibility and the skills of primary care physicians and other staff. Again, perhaps the Minister could say something about that.

The question that my noble friend Lord Bragg raised about employment was very important. In the main, we have been talking about services but we know that the links between employment and good health are very strong and I wondered whether the Department of Health was working with other government departments to encourage employers to be much more progressive in the way that they treat mental illness.

Finally, I declare my interests as chair of a foundation trust, a consultant trainer with Cumberlege Connections and the president of GS1.

14:11

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department of Health (Earl Howe) (Con)]

My Lords, I join other noble Lords in thanking the noble Lord, Lord Layard, for his tireless efforts in ensuring that evidence-based psychological therapy is available for everyone who needs it, and for convening this debate and providing me with an opportunity to assert once again this Government’s commitment to parity of esteem for mental and physical health.

The Royal College of Psychiatrists, in its recent report, Whole Person Care, describes parity as,

“valuing mental health equally with physical health”.

Equality is certainly the principle which underpins parity. As the noble Baroness, Lady O’Neill, said, equality is not just how we think about mental and physical healthcare but how they are valued. Parity of esteem is not just an abstract concept. It is the subject of an active and ongoing programme between the Department of Health and its system partners, dedicated to closing the gap with physical health services and to translating rhetoric into reality. We made our commitment explicit in the Health and Social Care Act 2012, as my noble friend Lord McColl reminded us, where we enshrined in law the equal importance of mental health alongside physical health. My noble friend Lord Alderdice was right to say that this explicit statement in statute does matter.

The noble Baroness, Lady Warwick, asked how we will improve the skills of GPs and the ability of CCGs to commission mental health services. We have made putting mental health on a par with physical health one of NHS England’s key priorities, as well as ensuring that everyone who needs it has timely access to the best available treatment. The mandate to NHS England is strong on mental health. It makes it clear that everyone who needs it should have that timely access to evidence-based services, and I can tell noble Lords that we are determined that mental health should play a similarly pivotal role in the forthcoming refresh of the mandate for 2014-15. Of course this needs investment, a point which again was made by the noble Baroness, Lady Warwick. We must remember the role of government here: as she knows, the Government set the outcomes that they expect the NHS to achieve in the NHS outcomes framework. There are a number of outcomes specifically for people with mental health problems and others about the quality of services, and patients’ experience of them, which apply equally to mental health services.

One crucial measure is that of excess mortality. It is up to commissioners to prioritise their resources to meet these outcomes for the population, based on assessments of health need, while taking into account the mandates requirement to make demonstrable progress in achieving parity of esteem for mental health services. We will hold the NHS to account for the quality of services and outcomes for mental health patients through the outcomes framework but it is worth noting that in 2011-12, the total invested in mental health services for working-age adults was £6.629 billion, or £193.30 per head of weighted working-age population.

The noble Lord, Lord Layard, my noble friend Lady Tyler and the noble Lord, Lord Hunt of Kings Heath, raised waiting times for mental health and the noble Baroness, Lady Meacher, was particularly concerned about waiting times for children. We are clear that mental health treatment should be available for those who need it and we have asked NHS England, through the current mandate to the NHS, to look into waiting times for mental health treatments. We will be expecting progress on this and my honourable friend Norman Lamb will be taking a close interest in the progress that is made.

The noble Baroness, Lady Murphy, reminded us that too many people with mental health problems die prematurely. We know that people living with significant or persistent mental illness have significantly reduced health and quality of life. They live on average 16 to 25 years less than the general population. That is why reducing premature death in people with serious mental illness is defined as an improvement area in the NHS outcomes framework and why the NHS operating framework specifically focuses on the physical healthcare of people affected by mental illness for the coming year.

The noble Lord, Lord Adebowale, reminded us of the disproportionate burden of mental illness experienced by people from BME communities. We know that black and African-Caribbean men are more likely to be detained under the Mental Health Act. The reasons for this are complex. I can present him with no simple answers; we recognise that more work needs to be done to establish the causes of higher rates of mental illness in some communities and how communities access early intervention services. We are in discussion with a number of BME leaders and influencers on this. I recognise the concerns about incidents in recent years where someone with a mental health condition has either died or been seriously injured after police contact. I welcome the report of the independent review led by the noble Lord, Lord Adebowale, and I echo his view that it is important to get to the truth of matters with clarity of focus and to remove any excuses for not taking the chance to improve practice.

I listened with care to the noble Baroness, Lady Murphy, who called for more psychiatrists. We are supporting local organisations in taking effective action to improve mental health. Our mental health strategy and implementation framework and our suicide prevention strategy focus on specific actions which specific local organisations can take to improve mental health across the life course in their areas. We are investing more than £400 million to give thousands of people, in all areas of the country, access to NICE-approved psychological therapies. The mandate to NHS England makes it clear, as I have said, that everyone who needs it should have timely access to evidence-based services. This will involve extending and ensuring more open access to the Improving Access to Psychological Therapies programmes, in particular for children and young people and for those out of work. My honourable friend the Minister of State for Care Services will be meeting system partners monthly to ensure that IAPT is being delivered.

My noble friends Lady Tyler and Lord Carlile and the noble Baroness, Lady Meacher, spoke about the importance of parity for children and adolescents. Children’s mental health is a priority for the Government. We are investing £54 million over four years in the Children and Young People’s Improving Access to Psychological Therapies programme, giving children and young people improved and timely access to the best mental health care. It will of course be up to NHS England, working with local commissioners, to decide how to spend this money in the most effective way.

Parity is also core business for the reformed health and care system. Key bodies within the system are addressing this. NHS England is working with national clinical directors and others to develop a programme of work with the dual objectives of delivering parity of esteem across the health and care system and supporting NHS England, as an employer, to promote parity of esteem. The priorities here include: support for people with mental health problems following early diagnosis, particularly through appropriate use of primary care and supporting the roll-out of health checks; ensuring people have access to the right treatment at the right time; and measuring and publicising outcome data for all major services by 2015. In other words, they are making every contact with patients count. There will be a statement very soon from NHS England on this. I obviously cannot pre-empt that here but it will set out the detail of this programme of work.

In that context, I pick up a point made by the noble Lord, Lord Stone, about NICE. NICE clinical guidelines are, I put it to him, in no way inferior products to technology appraisals; they often perform a valuable role in putting NICE’s technology appraisal recommendations into the context of the overall care pathway for patients.

My noble friend Lord Carlile rightly emphasised the importance of attending to the mental health of the elderly, but here again it is right for me to point out that the mental health strategy No Health Without Mental Health is an all-age strategy: that is the approach that it adopts and it means that its focus is equally on all members of the population from the young to the old—all are equally important.

My noble friend Lady Tyler spoke about those with complex needs, particularly those who indulge in alcohol and drug misuse. Improving co-ordination between mental health, drugs and alcohol services is vital for improving outcomes for the most vulnerable and excluded. Practitioners may also be involved in the design, planning and delivery of high quality services and are well placed to help GPs and local partners in commissioning high quality services.

My noble friend Lord Carlile spoke of the need for therapists in the community and I listened with care to what he said. Secondary mental health services have been reorganised to improve care in the community and in hospital and timely care and treatment is increasingly offered in the most suitable and least restrictive environment. Even though there are more people being treated in secondary mental health services, the proportion who needed to be admitted to in-patient psychiatric care fell by 2.9% in 2010-11. Acute beds have got to be there for those who need them, but providers have a responsibility to listen to patients and offer care in the community as well as in hospital.

Public Health England is embedding mental health across its work, including developing a national programme for public health mental health. This will support No Health Without Mental Health, prioritising the promotion of mental well-being, the prevention of mental health problems, the prevention of suicide and the promotion of well-being for people living with and recovering from mental illness. I refer to an issue raised by the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, about a focus on reducing smoking. Public Health England’s work plan in relation to mental health and well-being will include a specific part on smoking cessation.

The noble Baroness, Lady Murphy, and my noble friend Lord Alderdice spoke about suicides. Suicide rates in England are low compared to those in other European countries but we are not complacent about these figures, which is why we launched the new suicide prevention strategy in September of last year. The strategy can help sustain and reduce further the relatively low rates. As well as targeting high-risk groups, improving the mental health of the whole population can, of course, prevent suicide and the mental health strategy has that all-population approach, as I mentioned earlier.

Supporting parity is also a key objective of Health Education England. The Government’s mandate to Health Education England recognises the importance of professional culture to achieving parity. It tasks them with ensuring that the mental health workforce has the skills and values to improve services and to promote a culture of recovery and aspiration for their patients. It also notes the importance of mental health awareness in the wider health workforce. My noble friend Lady Tyler argued that maternity services need to look for early signs of mental ill health; I do, of course, agree with that. Mental health is a matter for all health professionals including midwives and health visitors. The Government’s mandate to Health Education England includes the commitment to ensure that all healthcare staff are equipped to treat mental and physical conditions with equal priority.

The noble Lord, Lord Layard, referred to the need for research. As a prerequisite for parity of esteem, ensuring that we have the right data, the right measures, is absolutely essential. One of the most important roles the centre can play is gathering and distributing information about mental health in order to inform evidence-based commissioning and service delivery and that is why NHS England and Public Health England are jointly working to establish a national mental health intelligence network which will be a key driver of continuous improvement in mental health intelligence and information. The noble Lord, Lord Hunt, asked whether the Government are discontinuing the adult psychiatric morbidity survey. The department and the Health & Social Care Information Centre are currently discussing plans for the next survey which should take place in 2014.

My noble friend Lord Carlile spoke about stigma. True parity also requires a shift in attitudes, not just in service providers but across society as a whole. That is why we are investing up to £16 million in the Time to Change programme, supplemented by a further £4 million from Comic Relief. This ground-breaking programme works to empower people to talk about mental health problems and to tackle the discrimination that they face. We aim to make Time to Change reach 29 million people and increase the confidence of 100,000 people with mental health problems to challenge stigma and discrimination.

I say to the noble Lord, Lord Bragg, that the mental health needs of people in the workplace have not been overlooked. Helping people with mental illness find and sustain work is a priority across the health and care system. A measure of employment for people with mental health problems features in all three outcomes frameworks. We are also challenging the stigma and discrimination experienced by people with mental health problems, as I mentioned, in the Time to Change programme and I regard that programme as very much aimed at employers and those whom they employ.

The noble Lord, Lord Layard, suggested that there should be a Cabinet Minister for mental health. While there is not a Cabinet Minister whose sole responsibility is mental health, this does form an important part of the portfolio of the Minister for Care and Support, my colleague Norman Lamb, and I know that this is also one of his personal priorities. We are actively encouraging every government department to pledge its support for the Time to Change campaign and ensure that mental health issues are taken into consideration in policy-making and planning across government.

I hope that the noble Lord, Lord Layard, will think I am right to celebrate some of the achievements to date, but the scale of the challenge ahead should not be underestimated. It will require significant changes to the way mental health services are delivered locally, based on a clear understanding of local needs and with the accent firmly on delivering better outcomes for users. There are exceptional services that others can learn from, but as we move forward a focal point must be more effective collaboration between public services, to enable early identification of mental health problems and to provide more co-ordinated care.

In that context, I pick up a point raised by the noble Lord, Lord Stone, about the police and their interactions with those with mental health issues. I referred to this briefly earlier. We know that we have to have an effective emergency mental health response system in place and we have asked all the relevant organisations, including the Home Office and the Association of Chief Police Officers, to draw up an agreed plan to tackle this problem. Street triage teams, currently being piloted around the country, partner mental health clinicians with police officers to attend emergency responses involving those with suspected mental health problems.

Of course, more needs to be done for acute and crisis care, a point made by the noble Lord, Lord Adebowale. Improving acute mental health services is a key priority for the Government, as identified in the first mandate to NHS England and underpinned by the outcomes framework. As I have said, we are clear that where someone needs an acute bed, it has to be there for them and there has been significant capital investment in the mental health in-patient environment in the past decade.

All of this matters, because achieving parity is a challenge which extends far beyond health and social care. It requires a genuinely cross-government approach, involving all aspects of public service delivery as well as many partners across the voluntary sector. Momentum is gathering and over the months to come I am confident that we will progress further and faster towards our end goal.

14:34

[Lord Layard]

My Lords, I thank everyone who has spoken in this substantial debate. We have had 15 excellent contributions and somehow, miraculously, they have been almost entirely complementary to each other, so in some way we have written a pretty good textbook on the subject in these three hours. As everyone has said, this issue is a massive problem, which is why we are all extremely grateful to the Minister for taking this problem seriously today, and indeed I know that he takes it seriously on all occasions.

I am grateful for what people have said and I agreed with almost everything, including most of what the noble Baroness, Lady Murphy, said, on which I, too, would like to comment. It is quite misleading to suppose that there is something called the mental health budget, which is then allocated between psychotic illness and common mental health problems. We have never argued for more expenditure on anxiety and depression at the expense of severe mental illness. What we have pointed out is the remarkable fact that a mentally ill person with a physical illness of given severity costs the NHS 50% more in physical healthcare than someone without mental illness in the same physical condition. If we can cure the mental illness or alleviate it, there is an awful lot to be saved on unnecessary physical healthcare.

Most commissioners should be able to fund the extra psychological therapy out of the savings that they can expect from their physical healthcare bills, particularly their references to the secondary sector. One could document how those are affected immediately when someone’s mental health improves. There is a huge amount of evidence on all that. On top of that, of course, taking the Government as a whole, there are the savings on benefits and lost taxes. When we can say that it certainly costs the Government—and probably costs local commissioners—nothing to expand treatment for people with depression and anxiety disorders, which are extremely serious problems, it makes no sense to say that we should be concentrating only on people with even more serious problems. Both groups must be helped.

As I said, there have been many wonderful speeches. I thought that the letter read out by the noble Baroness, Lady O’Neill, really says it all; it caught the basic point that everyone is making. I was also delighted when the noble Lord, Lord Alderdice, raised the issue of the comparative suffering from mental and physical pain. I have been trying to look into that topic and have found quite a lot of research on it. Many studies show that when people are asked how happy they are with their lives and then record the different dimensions of their health situation, it is found that mental pain reduces happiness more on average than physical illness. In a way, we have to justify our argument for parity of esteem, and I think that that is the justification: these are extremely serious conditions affecting the well-being of the people affected. Many people have made that point, and it is a central argument for parity.

I think that if in decades hence we look back on where we are today, we shall be able to see a lot of progress. I think that people will be amazed when they look at how mentally ill people were treated, even now, and they will find it quite difficult, just like we find it difficult to believe how slaves and so on were treated, to believe that we treated mentally ill people with as much blindness and cruelty as we have been up till recently.

Motion agreed.

Housing: Co-operative Housing

Thursday 10th October 2013 Lords Chamber

Motion to Take Note

14:34

Moved by

[Lord Kennedy of Southwark]

That this House takes note of the development of the co-operative housing sector in the United Kingdom.

[Lord Kennedy of Southwark (Lab)]

My Lords, it is with great pleasure that I open this debate on the co-operative housing sector in the United Kingdom. I congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Stowell of Beeston, on her appointment as Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State at the Department for Communities and Local Government. In her time in this House she has proved herself to be an able communicator at the Dispatch Box, and I wish her well in her new job and the great responsibilities that it brings.

It is also a great pleasure for me to speak in this House as a Labour and Co-operative Member of the House of Lords. The Labour Party and the Co-operative Party have an electoral agreement going back to 1927, and today there are 32 Labour and Co-operative MPs and 17 Labour and Co-operative Lords. The Co-operative Party can quite rightly claim to be the fourth largest party in Parliament.

I have been a co-operator all my adult life, and I firmly believe that co-operation and co-operative values and principles are playing an increasingly important part in the economy, business and the community and have a really important role to play in the social housing sector. I grew up in social housing in the 1960s and 1970s, and as a family we were very lucky: we always lived in a home that was warm, safe and dry. Southwark Council, as the biggest social landlord in London and one of the biggest in the country, always sought to deliver for its residents in often very challenging circumstances.

I believe that everyone should have access to a home that is decent, safe and affordable to buy or rent and to maintain or run. I am delighted at the commitment that Mr Ed Miliband made to build more homes by 2020. Homes are desperately needed by young families, older people and key workers. The present situation is desperate, with demand far outstripping supply. House building is at its lowest ebb since the 1920s. Struggling families are being squeezed by house prices beyond their means, rising rents, housing benefit cuts and inaccessible mortgages.

The crisis in the supply of and access to affordable housing is a major political and social issue facing the country. It is of particular concern to the many squeezed households for whom the only housing option is high-cost, low quality, insecure private rented housing. A growing number of people are worried about the ability of their children to afford a decent home. Increasing numbers of newly formed households are stuck in the high-cost private rented sector, and do not consider that they will ever be able to buy a home of their own.

There has been a decline in the number of first-time buyers. Saving the now typical 20% deposit required for first-time buyers to buy their first home is currently impossible for many working households. Statutory homelessness is increasing, and ever greater numbers of people are being forced into substandard housing. Poor housing is linked to poor health and poor educational outcomes, leading to increased costs to the state.

The post-crisis landscape presents all concerned with affordable housing supply with new challenges that demand new solutions. The role of co-operative housing models in meeting those challenges has not been recognised. Co-operative housing could be making a contribution to achieving a housing supply that was more stable and sustainable. Around 10% of Europeans live in housing co-operatives, compared to 0.6% in the UK. This alone shows the contribution that housing co-operatives can make.

There are different models of co-operative housing available, giving the opportunity to deliver housing tailored to local need, be it developing market-value mutual retirement co-operatives specifically designed for the changing needs of older people or to meet the housing needs of students and young people, or limited equity co-operatives for squeezed families priced out of the housing market. The work to achieve this needs to be inspired and kick-started by government action, better access to finance and local authorities supporting co-operative housing projects to deliver solutions in each of these areas.

There are three types of housing co-operatives that the Government should seek to support: market-value co-operatives, where members are free to trade their legal right of occupation at a free market price, subject to the rules of the co-operative, giving older people the opportunity to release capital and move into a home that can be adapted to their changing needs while also gaining assistance from other members of their co-operative community; limited-equity co-operatives, such as mutual home ownership, where members own a limited equity stake, allowing squeezed families currently stuck in the private rented sector unable to get on to the housing ladder a chance to build property equity; and rental co-operatives in which members rent their home, having democratic control over service budgets and how their homes are managed, but do not have an equity stake, which offer an affordable alternative to those who wish to have greater freedom and control over their housing.

In the UK, the role of community land trusts has emerged with the potential to provide a better balance of housing supply. They work in rural and urban areas and are a flexible tool to meet a variety of community needs. They offer not only a number of options for rent and low-cost home ownership, but also provide a mechanism for generating an income stream for reinvestment by the community. In areas where a rising population, economic investment and limited stocks of affordable homes threaten to exclude people from the areas in which they live and work, community land trusts could ensure a supply of affordable housing through the control of housing costs and resale prices.

This model can make a significant contribution to the supply of homes. It separates the cost of the land from the purchase price by taking it out of the market place through a community land trust. It ensures affordability through flexible monthly payments that are based on an affordable percentage of income. Any public subsidy is locked in and preserved for future generations due to the structure of equity arrangements.

Unlike individual home ownership, where residents have a personal mortgage loan to buy a home, homes in this case are financed by a corporate loan borrowed by the co-operative. The value of the buildings is divided into shares. When members leave the co-operative they are entitled to take the equity that they have built up with them. The net value of the shares is calculated by reference to a fair valuation formula set out in the departing members’ occupancy agreement or lease, which is the same for all members. The valuation formula in the lease requires resident members to look on property ownership in a new and different way. Mutual home owners will be at far less risk of falling into negative equity, where their houses are worth less than the outstanding mortgage loan. They will also have the benefit of lower transaction costs when they move into and out of their home.

There needs to be greater understanding by national and local government of the role that these models can play in bringing balance back into meeting the goal of everyone being able to find and afford a decent home in a good neighbourhood. There is a growing body of evidence to show that housing co-operatives are good for people and society. In particular, studies show that co-operatives outperform all other types of social landlord on all measures of performance. They create housing in neighbourhoods that are socially, economically and environmentally sustainable. Housing remains community-owned and affordable for future generations. Their grassroots nature helps co-operatives to create community buy-in. They help to maintain the independence of older residents through mutual aid and support, reducing the demand on the state.

With community support, co-operatives can achieve more for less by helping to bring into use public land assets that would otherwise not be developed for housing. Co-operatives have the capacity to increase the supply of housing that is genuinely affordable for working households, enabling the Government to deliver greater numbers of affordable homes.

Co-operatives contributing an average of 25,000 additional new affordable homes per year over the next two Parliaments is a realistic and achievable vision if it is given the support needed. Given the right framework for success and proper support from the Government, people could have the opportunity to participate in creating co-operatives to help meet local housing needs. Through their active involvement they will be committed to making their locality the best that it can be.

Co-operatives and mutual forms of ownership can ensure that homes remain permanently affordable and give residents an equity stake. Instead of paying increasingly high rents for housing over which they have little control, people could enjoy housing that benefits them and wider society. Through housing co-operatives and other mutual organisations, tenants and residents have taken control over decisions that affect their lives and created strong and cohesive communities.

All the available evidence shows that co-operative forms of housing perform well in terms of value for money compared to housing association and local authority provision of housing. Additionally, they have proved themselves to be a successful model of genuine community empowerment, providing a range of social and community benefits due to the large framework of mutual support that they create.

Lack of secure tenure has emerged as a big issue with the growth of the buy-to-let market. In a co-operative, the members are in control and have the security of their democratic rights and the security of the contract, which currently has to be a tenancy because of a lack of appropriate co-op housing legislation. In a co-op, a long-term, enduring right of occupation of a member’s home is always granted. This can be ended only if the member is in breach of its terms and the co-op has obtained an order for possession from the court. This is a very secure form of occupancy. Although not protected by statute, it has the protection of a member’s democratic rights.

Local authorities have a vital role to play in restoring balance to the supply of housing in their areas. The strengths and weaknesses of the housing supply situation vary from authority to authority, and across the country and in different localities. There is a marked difference between the north and the south of England, and in Scotland and Wales.

Co-op housing is a model of community housing to which people will aspire because of the significant benefits it brings. Councils need to develop an understanding of the different ways in which co-operative housing models can help them fulfil their responsibility to ensure a balance in the mix of housing available in their areas and to achieve strong communities. Local councils have the power to help, through ensuring that their local development frameworks include references to the development of community land trusts and co-operative mutual housing models as a means of increasing affordable housing.

Where local authorities hold ballots on stock transfers, residents should have the option to vote for community-led stock transfers under a co-operative model, such as the community mutual, which was developed by the think tank Mutuo, is endorsed by the Welsh Assembly and offers active membership opportunities to all tenants, the community gateway model, which was developed by the Confederation of Co-operative Housing and Co-operatives UK—there are currently community gateway housing mutuals in Preston, Watford, Lewisham and Braintree—or a hybrid mutual scheme such as has been developed in Rochdale.

Local authorities, housing associations and housing mutuals can also convert to a mixed-tenure version. Residents in this type of mutual home-ownership development would be able to start on a standard rented tenancy with the right to buy equity shares as and when their income permitted them to do so. They would have the right to participate in the democratic governance of their home just like any other member of the mutual. The right to buy equity would mean that the home would not become unaffordable for future generations of occupants.

In some areas, tenants will prefer their housing to remain under local authority control. Where this is the case, tenants could be encouraged and assisted to form tenant management co-operatives to take control of the management of the council-owned housing in their neighbourhood. The right to manage could be extended to housing- association tenants, who could also be given the support and encouragement to take over control and management of their homes through management co-operatives.

The Government have an important role. Among other things, it includes recognising co-operative housing in law and placing a duty on local councils and the Homes and Communities Agency to promote mutual housing and report annually on how they are doing. It is important to ensure that new co-operative homes are as affordable as possible for squeezed working households.

I could go on. We are in a housing crisis. Co-operative housing has an important role to play in helping to solve the crisis. It is for both local and national government to recognise the important role that they can play, and to provide support and the tools to do the job. I look forward to contributions from all noble Lords in this debate, to which we will come back again and again. I beg to move.

14:47

[Baroness Eaton (Con)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Kennedy of Southwark, for initiating this debate. I also warmly welcome my noble friend Lady Stowell to the Dispatch Box.

In the past 25 years the co-operative housing movement has demonstrated that the application of the co-operative principles to the provision and management of housing delivers cost-effective housing services and creates sustainable communities. As the noble Lord, Lord Kennedy, has said, in spite of its proven benefits the housing co-operative sector remains small.

Housing co-operatives are concerned to ensure that members are educated and informed about the principles and practices of co-operation. This can be demonstrated in a concrete way. One example of the success of a tenant management co-operative is in Glasgow. It dramatically illustrates the benefits of housing co-operatives. The Speirs Housing Management Co-operative has successfully managed its council-owned housing at the end of one street for 20 years. It is a vibrant community contributing to the wider regeneration of the neighbourhood. At the other end of the street, council-managed housing, which has received the same capital investment as that managed by Speirs, has been vandalised, abandoned and ultimately demolished. This is a classic demonstration of best value being delivered by a housing co-operative.

The various types and models of co-operative and mutual housing operate across a range of tenures. The various forms of co-operative and community-led housing are united by having a democratic community membership that has control over their housing in some way. It is from this community membership that the benefits derive.

There are many social and community benefits to providing homes through co-operative and mutual housing, including: the development of community self-responsibility and self-help; much higher levels of satisfaction compared to other housing providers; good, if not better, management, quicker repairs, and so on; provision of forms of intermediate housing that could be attractive to those who would formerly have been first-time buyers; development of local care and community support networks that combat loneliness and help to support active, independent living; and the development of local community vision and of entrepreneurialism, which often inspire people who would not otherwise have been motivated to make local change.

There are a number of models of co-operative housing, some of which have already been mentioned by the noble Lord. Ownership housing co-operatives are co-ops that are owned, managed and controlled democratically by their members and tenants, and usually all tenants are members of the co-op. The majority of ownership co-ops are, at least partially, funded through the government organisation the Housing Corporation, which monitors them in the same way as housing associations. Ownership co-ops are traditionally quite small, but they give the greatest amount of control of any of the housing co-op models. Research carried out in 1996 found that they were the most successful housing providers in the country. We have tenant management organisations—TMOs—which are democratic organisations that are formed by tenants to take on the management of their homes. Council tenants have a legal right—the right to manage—and access to specific funding that enables them to set up a co-op. These regulations were simplified for everyone’s benefit in 2012.

A management co-op has a management agreement with their landlord—the council or housing association, or in some cases both—and receives a management allowance that enables it to run the co-op. Self-build co-operatives are housing organisations where the tenants have been involved in the building of the properties. The labour that they put into the building of the properties gives them equity, and they pay rent for the rest. We also have short-life co-operatives. These take over properties that are in some way unlettable, for a fixed period of time that can sometimes extend for many years. The co-op does not own the properties but has a lease with the landlords. Tenant-controlled housing associations also have a major contribution to make. There are a small number of housing associations registered with the Housing Corporation which are tenant-controlled, having a majority of tenants on the board of the association alongside other representatives.

If your Lordships are particularly interested in specific examples of co-operative housing, Redditch Co-operative Homes provides new-build affordable housing through a co-operative. Winyates Co-operative, one of the self-managed neighbourhoods in Redditch, won an award for innovation and excellence in 2010 and currently manages 57 properties in an area that is home to approximately 14,650 people. Kensington and Chelsea TMO manages around 10,000 properties on behalf of the council and is also an ALMO, which was set up in 1996. Rochdale Boroughwide Housing, formed in 2012, took over housing formerly run by the council. It is a membership organisation owned by staff and tenants and is a charitable registered provider of social housing. The organisation owns and acts as landlord for 13,700 homes in the borough.

The Government are particularly interested in and concerned about tenant involvement in housing, and the Homes and Communities Agency has issued a regulatory framework that places a focus on co-regulation. This means that landlords are responsible for the delivery of housing in line with regulatory standards. It also means that tenants should have opportunities to shape service delivery and to hold the responsible boards and councillors to account. There is a standard on tenant involvement. The HCA is responsible for enforcing proactively against all standards for registered providers. Local authorities are required to meet the consumer standards set out in the framework. However, the HCA will intervene only in cases of serious detriment.

To support the establishment of tenant involvement and tenant panels, the Local Government Association, of which I am a vice-president, worked with the Tenant Participation Advisory Service and other housing bodies on the publication Tenant Panels: Options for Accountability, which sets out the role tenant panels can play to ensure that tenants are provided with a meaningful route to shape service delivery, as well as resolving complaints locally under the new democratic filter set out in the Localism Act.

As we as a society anticipate the need for suitable housing for older people, co-operative and mutual housing for older people could be a more suitable alterative to some of the more current models. If the housing demand in this country is to be satisfied, there will need to be a plural approach to the housing provision, using a variety of approaches to provide homes. There is a need for a greater diversity of supply and for people and communities to be able to innovate, both in tenure and products, to give people more options and flexibility. There is a particular need for greater supply for non-profit driven housebuilding models that enable communities to determine how many houses are needed and for them to be built.

14:56

[Lord Shipley (LD)]

My Lords, I, too, welcome the debate initiated by the noble Lord, Lord Kennedy of Southwark, which is a welcome opportunity to discuss what might be done by developing co-operative housing in the context of our overall housing policy. I also welcome the new Minister, the noble Baroness, Lady Stowell of Beeston; I am sure that she recognises the importance of housing and in particular affordable housing, and how important it is to social inclusion. I wish her every success in her new ministerial position. Since my noble friend Lady Hanham is sitting on the Benches, I thank her enormously for her contribution as a Minister of DCLG for a number of years. It has been hugely appreciated by all of us.

It is clear from opinion research that housing is moving up the list of concerns of the general public; in a recent poll I saw it had entered the top five. It is some years since that was the case. That reflects a growing realisation on the part of the general public that we do not have enough homes to meet need or demand; that owner occupation has been in decline in recent years; that house prices are very expensive; that it is very hard for young people to get on to the housing ladder right across the UK; and that building for social rent has been inadequate for many years, with a million social homes lost since 1977.

I am therefore grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Kennedy of Southwark, for reminding us of a number of things. One is the amount of co-operative housing in Scandinavia—some 18% of homes in Sweden and some 15% of homes in Norway—and the potential that might, therefore, exist in the United Kingdom, where the figure is below 1%. There are also the statutory issues that affect the expansion of the co-operative model here, together with the variations possible under a co-operative model, which I do not seek to repeat.

First, I will put this debate into its context. House prices are rising again and we seem to be at the start of yet another housing bubble. The underlying problem is lack of supply. Housebuilding is less than half of what it needs to be to match the rate of household formation and this imbalance now seems likely to continue for three years at least. Last year saw the lowest house completion rate since 1923. However, since 1990, annual housing completions have never exceeded 170,000 and have averaged 140,000, of which four out of five homes have been for owner-occupation. At present the Government expect to increase the rate of building to 170,000 new homes in 2015, but even if they achieve that, we need to go much further.

Important as Help to Buy is, unless supply is increased prices will rise, putting further pressure on young people and putting the potential of home ownership out of reach for even more of them. Demand will then continue to grow in the private rented sector, pushing up rents to unaffordable levels for many. Despite the 22% increase in private housing starts this year, and despite the many initiatives the Government have taken, which are certainly helping to increase demand, there remains an urgent need for more social housing for rent.

There are 1.8 million families on social housing waiting lists. In addition, many people who are on low incomes and subject to the new under-occupancy rules want to move to a smaller home but they cannot because the smaller homes do not exist. We simply must build more homes for social rent, and if part of the solution is the co-operative housing sector, that is a very good thing, as would be raising the borrowing cap on local authorities, which would also increase the pool of rented homes.

Around a third of households will need to rent for the foreseeable future despite Help to Buy, with its mortgage indemnity or shared equity requiring 75% of a property’s value to be in the form of a mortgage. Inevitably, Help to Buy will reach only those who can afford to pay a mortgage.

The shared ownership proposals recently published by Shelter should be commended, because they would help buyers to take out the maximum share that they could afford on a mortgage, with the remainder rented, so that their share of ownership might be as low as one-eighth, or 12.5%.

We should welcome last month’s announcement on self-build, under which more people who want to start a building project, including affordable home projects, will receive support. It will prove an important element of the Government’s drive to increase affordable housing, with new grants from a budget worth £65 million, and with redundant public sector land available for self-build projects. I understand that some 50 councils are already coming forward with sites. In the past year some 11,000 homes were self-built. This could double within a decade. Presumably many of these self-build homes could be constructed on the co-operative principle.

The Government have done a lot to promote localism, and co-operative housing should be seen as part of their localist agenda. Devolution comes in many forms. In housing, owner occupation is the purest form of devolution from the state because it empowers the individual. Being a tenant dependent on a landlord is not empowering, despite a variety of legal protections. Co-operative housing, too, should be seen as empowering for tenants, because those tenants would exercise control, not a landlord.

There are three reasons why I hope the Government will consider further support for this sector. First, it could increase housebuilding. Secondly, it would exist for the benefit of its members, not of somebody else. As we have heard, a fully mutual housing co-operative has all its tenants as members, and all its members as tenants. They decide equally and together how the co-op is to be run. The third reason is that the sector is a success. As we have also heard, it performs well in terms of member and tenant satisfaction.

However, I understand from the noble Lord, Lord Kennedy, and from some of my reading, that there is not full recognition of co-operative housing in law, because tenure is based on landlord and tenant law, which limits the ability of true co-operative principles to work. In law, repairs lie with landlords because members are legally defined as tenants. That does not seem right. A dedicated new form of tenure would help to create a truly co-operative environment, building on the successes of a wide variety of existing co-ops, tenant management schemes, trusts and mutuals.

There are currently some 200 housing co-operatives registered with the Homes and Communities Agency to provide affordable homes and, as we have heard from the noble Lord, Lord Kennedy, they are building around 25,000 a year. There are 200 housing co-operatives registered, but it strikes me that there could be many more. Just think what that might mean for the potential for an increased housebuilding programme. If there were many more housing co-operatives, think of the gain in terms of sustainable communities—because we would be building social capital, with all that that implies for the strength of our neighbourhoods.

15:05

[Lord Graham of Edmonton (Lab)]

My Lords, it is a joy and a pleasure to take part in this debate—and, of course, to pay a warm tribute to the noble Baroness, Lady Hanham, for all that she has done in local government and here, on the Front Bench and on the Back Benches, over many years. I am grateful to be able to pay that tribute to her, and also of course to welcome the noble Baroness, Lady Stowell—who is always known to me as Beeston.

I have been bowled over by the tenor of what the earlier speakers have said, and by their knowledge of the problems. I can go back to 1939—a long time ago—when I worked for the Newcastle Co-operative Society. One of our departments was the mortgage department, in Newgate street, where the headquarters of the society were. At that time the co-ops in Newcastle were involved in encouraging their members to take out mortgages, under proper safeguards. I remind the House that the Nationwide Building Society was emerging out of the Co-operative Permanent Building Society in the 1950s and 1960s, when for their own good reasons they changed the name. The Co-operative movement, which is well known to me and to many others, has long been involved in dealing with what I would simply call the desperate need of people to be well housed.

I cannot imagine that there is anyone in this Chamber today who would not say that, on the whole, they are well housed. But I recall, twice in the 10 years for which I was the Member of Parliament for Edmonton, going out to my car after my surgery and crying. I cried because of the tales told to me by my constituents about their desperate need for better housing—or indeed for any housing. That memory has always stayed with me. We in this Chamber are fortunate to have the kind of largesse that we have enjoyed for many years.

The illustration of co-operative housing that I want to give to the House comes from an organisation called CDS—the Co-operative Development Society. It has just had a change of chief officer. For 33 years its chief officer was David Rodgers, who was a power in the land for co-operative housing—and not just in this land but internationally, because he was the chairman of the International Co-operative Alliance housing division. The new chief officer is a lady called Linda Wallace. I welcome her. She has a good record, having been a managing director of the Notting Hill Housing Trust and a great many other things. I look forward to the CDS continuing to do its good work.

Although there are politics in housing, this is not a political debate. It is a debate in which attention is drawn to a provision that could be improved and extended within the limits. We all know what the limits are, and I will not bore the House by going through them all. By Ministers and civil servants, the difference between a co-operative and non-co-operative entity has yet to be fully grasped and understood. The Co-operative movement, as everyone here knows, has a fine record in most communities, where they change their names and allegiance. I say to the Minister that I am not here with a stick to beat her good self—and I know what would happen to me; she would fight me back. I am here to support the idea that many things can and should be done to extend the principle of co-operative housing.

Most people gravitate towards the idea of becoming, and hope that they can become, an owner-occupier. As the leader of the Enfield Council 50 years ago, I remember the interest and the place that good housing played in people’s lives. Then we had the sale of council houses, and how welcome that was to those who were able to buy their council house. But the whirlwind sown by that has now been reaped by their children and grandchildren. Inevitably, the council house that has been sold has then been sold on and on, and one that was bought for £6,000 or £7,000 in Edmonton is now retailing for £200,000. That is not a good idea.

A co-operative ethos is something that we ought to encourage. The Minister will see this in Hansard, but I ask her and her colleagues to reflect on what we see in the Co-operative movement and the ways in which the Government could become more involved in stimulating the co-operative aspect. I shall have to rattle through these ideas. We want legislation to create co-operative housing tenure as a distinct form of tenure in UK property and housing law. We want to enable the creation of a financial intermediary to raise and manage institutional investment in developing co-operatives in mutual housing and operate an insurance fund to reduce investment risk.

One problem in co-operative housing and in other areas is the excitement that people have when they get a little power and involvement. Very often their heart rules their head. There needs to be some thought given by the Government to make it possible for education, guidance or stimulation—call it what you will—on the structures. Very few housing co-operatives to my knowledge go out of existence because of bad management, but there are some. We need to avoid the waste of public money and other money in that way.

I am very heartened by the debate so far. A small but select band of parliamentarians are simply trailing their coat in front of the Minister and the civil servants, who play a vital part in priorities, simply to say that we have a good record in co-operative housing, and there is better to come. The democracy of co-operative housing is very important indeed, with one member, one vote. There is democracy in the CDS, which I mentioned; it has a management committee of 15 members, and half of them are actual occupants of the properties, not just committee members, and are involved in giving their ideas and making suggestions.

A point that I have raised in other debates is about the assistance to make land available for communities wanting to develop co-operative homes. That is something that we should encourage. The profit that is made from the sale of land is obscene; no matter how you look at it, it is awful. At the end of the day, the people who pay for that will be either tenants or owner-occupiers. If it is possible to have land gifted to a community on the basis that it is theirs in perpetuity, I think that that is one of the ways in which we should go. I know which way I should go—my time is up.

15:16

[Lord McKenzie of Luton (Lab)]

My Lords, like other noble Lords I start by welcoming the noble Baroness, Lady Stowell, to her new role, and offering our congratulations on a promotion thoroughly deserved. Like other noble Lords, I also say that we on these Benches will miss the good humour and engagement of the noble Baroness, Lady Hanham, on the Front Bench, but I have no doubt that she will continue to play a role and deploy her expertise—born of many years of local government service—in the cause of her party. Let me also thank my noble friend Lord Kennedy for initiating this debate, which has been short but excellent. It is wonderful to hear from my noble friend Lord Graham of Edmonton, a lifelong supporter of the co-operative movement, and somebody who has been an integral part of its rich history.

All families deserve a safe, secure and affordable home. Debate around any aspect of housing is important given the undoubted crisis we face at the present time. It is timely to focus on co-operative housing, to examine its current contribution and what further contribution it might make to alleviate that crisis. We know that the number of households in England is projected to increase to 5.8 million by 2033, an increase of 232,000 each year. Yet in the year to 31 March 2013, this Government’s policies led to only 108,000 completions, just matching a similar dismal output in 2010-11. This is significantly below the 170,000 completions achieved by the previous Government in 2007-08, which was still too low, as I think was intimated by the noble Lord, Lord Shipley. Moreover, a report last year identified that English local authorities are planning some 270,000 fewer homes than were provided for under the 2010 regional spatial strategies; a worrying prospect indeed.

The lack of new houses being built combined with the biggest squeeze on living standards in a generation have meant that home ownership has moved out of the reach of many families. It is difficult to see the Help to Buy scheme—details of the second phase of which were announced earlier this week and greeted with underwhelming enthusiasm—doing much to help, other than to push up prices in the housing bubble referred to by the noble Lord, Lord Shipley, so we have the rise of generation rent, with more and more people living in the private rented sector, which is now bigger than the social sector, where too many lack security, have to pay ever increasing rents and suffer poor-quality accommodation.

The inevitable consequence is that homelessness is on the rise, as are rough sleeping and the number of families living in temporary accommodation. Nearly a third of privately renting households are families with children, almost half are over 35 and for many of them the sector does not provide the stability they need. It is inevitable that for the foreseeable future the private rental sector will grow and will play an important part in meeting housing need. However, there must be a system of a national register of landlords, with powers provided to local councils to drive up standards.

Of course, on coming to office the Government cut the budget for new affordable homes by 60%, leading to the collapse in affordable housing starts. They fell to under 16,000 in 2010-11. Funding from an 80% of market rent programme has exacerbated housing benefit numbers, but is a formulation which is simply not affordable in many parts of the country. As the Co-operative Party points out, the housing crisis is particularly acute in London, with the added dimension of overseas buyers pushing up the cost of buying and renting. It says that the majority of Londoners are being squeezed out because house prices and rents are increasing faster than incomes, and not enough houses are being built. With high rents in the private sector and so-called affordable rents for new homes and re-lets in the social housing sector, a growing number of working households depend on housing benefit to meet their rent. This is of course at a time when such benefits are being cut, and the horrors of the bedroom tax are played out on a daily basis.

It did not have to be like this. We have set out how an enhanced affordable homes programme could be funded, and Labour councils are now leading the way in building new council houses for rent, providing not only homes but jobs. The crisis in the supply of and access to affordable housing is a major political and social issue facing our country. I think the noble Lord, Lord Shipley, referred specifically to it moving up to number five on the list of public concerns. The reality is that it will require action on a number of fronts, and we are strongly supportive of the approach which embraces co-operative housing models. As my noble friend Lord Kennedy explained, we are of course instinctively supportive of co-operative principles. The Co-operative Party is our sister party, and we share its values and its commitment to social justice as well as its history.

We have been greatly helped for this debate by information from the Co-operative Party itself and by the House of Lords briefing material. The latter in particular contains key extracts from the independent Commission on Co-operative and Mutual Housing, which was launched in 2008 to research the English co-operative and mutual housing sector and to draw conclusions about its relevance to national housing strategy. This research showed that the sector in England is tiny—less than 1% of housing supply—in stark contrast to a number of other European countries. This is attributed, among other things, to the dearth of information and support for those who would be minded to adopt a co-operative model.

There are of course different models of co-operative and mutual housing, about which my noble friend Lord Kennedy and others, including the noble Baroness, Lady Eaton, have spoken knowledgeably. However, the common factor is that they are democratically and legally owned and controlled by a service-user membership. This has a fundamental benefit: by taking responsibility, people develop a sense of belonging and identity, as well as ownership, and this leads to high levels of satisfaction. The co-operative model gives residents democratic control of the property in which they live and a greater say over its management and maintenance. The noble Baroness, Lady Eaton, spoke strongly about the benefit of that ethos. It is acknowledged that the Government see this approach as in tune with their localism agenda, with powers being returned to communities and local neighbourhoods. However, like so much of that agenda, we need to see it working in practice.

Like the commission, we do not consider that co-operation and mutuality are the only routes to a community-based approach, but we acknowledge the powerful opportunity that they present. Other benefits which it brings include stimulating individual and community resilience through active and democratic citizenship, and enabling collective influence over what happens beyond the immediate boundary of an individual while supporting the individual household interest in housing.

What seems clear is that the proposition that housing policy can develop only along one of three routes—ownership, social rented housing or private sector renting—is too restrictive in the current environment. Where people are priced out of ownership and cannot afford escalating private rents, and where the wait for social rented housing can be interminable, there needs to be another way.

What has to happen to enable a co-operative and mutual housing sector to play a greater role? It certainly needs the co-operative movement itself to be more focused on housing possibilities. The commission refers to housing remaining the poor relation of the co-operative family, and it looks that way. There is a strong English co-operative and mutual sector, with nearly 5,000 businesses democratically controlled and owned by some 11 million people, but this strength has not yet manifested itself in the housing sector. Perhaps more can be done by the movement to use its financial, organisational and political strength to encourage the development of co-operative housing.

That should obviously entail embracing new developments, be they community gateway associations developed in response to the large-scale voluntary transfer of local authority housing stock, community land trusts or mutual home ownership, as well as the existing models of rental housing co-ops and co-ownership associations. As well as support from the co-operative movement itself, it requires national and local government to develop supportive frameworks. It is particularly suggested that it requires legislative change to create a co-operative housing tenure as a distinct form of tenure in UK property and housing law. Several noble Lords referred to this.

The Minister will be aware of the debate initiated in the other place by Jonathan Reynolds MP following his unsuccessful introduction of a 10-minute rule Bill. That debate, in July last year, focused on the consequences of the Berrisford decision, which, it was suggested, undermined the type of tenancies commonly available in housing co-operatives. The problem arises because co-operatives cannot grant secure or assured tenancies, and the Supreme Court determined that the periodic tenancies could in fact be treated as tenancies for life. In responding to that debate, the Minister in another place put forward the view that legislative change was unnecessary and advised that, if the guidance of the Confederation of Co-operative Housing were followed, tenancies could be structured in such a way that they could be brought to an end. Can the Minister give us an update and say whether this is still the Government’s view?

Can the Minister also confirm the position with regard to housing benefit? Is this in principle available, assuming of course that other criteria are satisfied, for what were assumed to be periodic tenancies pre the Berrisford decision?

Funding will always be an issue, and we acknowledge that funding opportunities remain available from the HCA through various funding streams, including the affordable homes guarantee. Perhaps the Minister can say something about the emphasis that the HCA currently places on inculcating co-operative housing strategies in its support for affordable housing and whether the Government would wish to see more done in this regard.

More generally, if it is the Government’s declared aim to support the spread of strong, financially robust and democratically accountable housing co-operatives—an aim that we would share—can the Minister spell out for us the details of that support?

Given the huge challenges that we face in tackling the country’s housing crisis, it is more important than ever that we grasp the opportunities for a greater contribution from co-operative housing. My noble friend Lord Kennedy is right to focus our attention on this and we give him our thanks.

15:33

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Communities and Local Government (Baroness Stowell of Beeston) (Con)]

My Lords, I am very grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Kennedy, for initiating this debate. I will say straight away to him, and to all noble Lords, that the Government support the co-operative housing sector. I will speak in more detail about how we support it and why in a moment.

Some noble Lords have raised matters in their contributions that I plan to address in the next debate and I will try not to steal the thunder of that debate by addressing them now. However, if there is any matter that I do not come to in my responses today, I will follow up in writing.

Before I get stuck in to all of that, I thank all noble Lords for their very warm welcome to me in my new responsibilities as Minister at the Department for Communities and Local Government. I also echo the very warm tributes that have been paid to my noble friend Lady Hanham. I saw her slip away very quietly just a few moments ago, but that will not deter me from putting on record just how fantastic she has been as the Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State whom I have the great pleasure to follow. She has been in that position, as we know, for three years, since the Government were first elected. She has been on the Front Bench in opposition since 2000—I think that most of her time in the House so far has been on the Front Bench. As other noble Lords have acknowledged, she brought to her role at the DCLG a huge amount of experience, both leading and serving on Kensington and Chelsea council. I am grateful to her for her personal support to me and for her ongoing involvement in these areas—as the fact that she was here for most of the debate today indicates—which is of great benefit to your Lordships’ House. I am delighted that she was here and able to keep her eye on this matter and we look forward to her contributions in the future.

She leaves very big shoes to fill and I might lack some detail today in responding to this debate. If I do, that responsibility is all mine. I have a lot to learn but I have already been briefed on the Government’s housing strategy and the impact of it. As this was raised by the noble Lord, Lord McKenzie, and my noble friend Lord Shipley in their contributions, I would like first of all to offer some headlines about the Government’s work on housing, as I take exception to some of the doom and gloom that has been put forward by the noble Lord, Lord McKenzie.

On the supply side—to be clear, we are talking about housing in general—334,000 new homes have been built over the past three years. Housing starts are actually up by 33% on last year—I think that the noble Lord, Lord McKenzie, suggested the opposite. The Chartered Institute of Purchasing and Supply has stated that homes are now being built at the fastest rate for 10 years. More homes are being approved through planning. The latest quarterly figures show a 45% year-on-year increase in the number of planning approvals for new homes. In saying all that, as my noble friend said, the fact that we are making great headway is to be welcomed, but I recognise that there is always more to be done.

On the demand side, the Help to Buy equity loan so far has helped more than 15,000 families to reserve a new-build home. The Help to Buy mortgage guarantee was brought forward and launched only this week and has been warmly welcomed, contrary to what the noble Lord, Lord McKenzie, said. The number of first-time buyers is at a five-year high and there is no evidence of a housing bubble across the country, as transactions remain 40% below pre-crunch average and in many places prices went up by less than inflation last year.

In the context of this debate, my intention has been to find out what this Government are doing to help provide housing in the social sector and homes for those who, for various reasons and in different ways, need assistance to make them affordable. I always enjoy listening to the noble Lord, Lord Graham of Edmonton. I am pleased that he calls me “Beeston” because, as he knows, I like to fly the flag for Beeston, so I am grateful to him for that. Contrary to what he said—I know that this is not something of which the opposition Front Bench want to be reminded—under the previous Labour Government, the number of affordable rented homes fell by 420,000, whereas, and in stark contrast to what the noble Lord, Lord McKenzie, has said, since this Government came to office, 150,000 new affordable homes have been delivered.

Investment of £19.5 billion of public and private funds will deliver 170,000 new affordable homes by 2015. In the next spending period, a further £3.3 billion of government investment and £20 billion of private finance will deliver 165,000 more new homes over three years from 2015. We plan to start construction on 200,000 new affordable homes over the four years from 2014-15, which is the highest number of new-build homes in any four-year period for the past 20 years.

However, this issue is not about just building. In terms of the changes that this Government have brought in, local communities are getting greater control over what happens where they live, which will mean that people are able to build the houses that the community needs and not what someone else dictates. Just over a year ago, the Localism Act gave communities access to a number of new rights: the right to challenge, the right to bid, the right to manage and the right to build. The combination of these new rights and access to funding has led more than 700 communities to get together to start neighbourhood planning and to make decisions on what gets built and where.

As we have heard, those who take this initiative are committed people who know what development they want and they want to retain control over that development. Under the umbrella of what we are referring to as community-led housing, the co-operative housing movement has never had a greater opportunity to show what it can do and to make its contribution.

The noble Lord, Lord Kennedy, gave a comprehensive summary of how co-operative housing groups operate, and their value to their local communities and to their members who are living in co-operative housing. That was echoed by all noble Lords who contributed to today’s debate. My noble friend Lady Eaton drew a comparison with housing run by local authorities and that run by co-operative housing groups. She gave a stark illustration of one in Scotland. Noble Lords have put forward a compelling case about co-operative housing. As I have said, this Government really do support co-operative housing. We want it to make as much of a contribution as it can to affordable housing and the housing sector generally in this country.

My department, DCLG, has a good relationship with the Confederation of Co-operative Housing and Nic Bliss.

[Lord Graham of Edmonton]

I know him.

[Baroness Stowell of Beeston]

I am very sure that Nic Bliss knows the noble Lord. He is chair of the Confederation of Co-operative Housing and was moved to set out his experience of working with this Government in a statement to my noble friend and predecessor. He said that,

“we are pleased that the Coalition Government has worked with our sector to demonstrate its ongoing support for community-led housing”.

I am happy to share his statement in full by placing a copy in the Library.

Perhaps I may highlight two points that he made. He made the specific point that by working with this Government, along with others, and because of new initiatives, the co-operative housing sector will meet and hopefully exceed its own targets for new homes by 2017. He referred positively to a recent meeting with the former Housing Minister, Mark Prisk. Basically, I am trying to make the point that we are working with the co-operative housing movement and that we support it very much.

Indeed, the noble Lord, Lord Kennedy, referred specifically to community land trusts. I welcome the support for community land trusts. My honourable friend Nick Boles, the Minister for Planning, has recently visited the St Clements CLT in Bow and Dittisham in Devon.

In order to realise their ambitions, community-led groups were able to access the initial affordable housing programme, which I have already mentioned. However, in starting that programme and making it accessible to community-led groups, we knew that not all such groups would be able to put in a bid at that time, so we set aside £25 million for them to bid when they were ready. Some community-led housing schemes have already taken advantage of this. One such group is the Bomarsund Co-op, which started a scheme this year in Seghill, Northumberland, providing 12 new two-bedroom apartments. Another is Queen Camel Community Land Trust in Somerset, which has funding to develop 20 affordable homes. These are communities that have identified that they need more homes. They have worked together to develop a scheme that meets their needs, and their hard work and commitment are now being rewarded with delivery on the ground.

There is also £17 million available to support these groups in the hard task of getting their proposals to planning permission. I would encourage co-operatives to apply for that funding so that they can get to the point where they are in a strong position to move to the next stage. I would also encourage groups that are interested in pursuing their ambitions more generally to note the latest fund which was launched in the summer, the Affordable Homes Guarantees Programme, which provides £65 million for new housing. The Homes and Communities Agency is available and ready to help and assist in that area.

Noble Lords raised some very specific points in the debate. The noble Lord, Lord Kennedy, and others raised the issue of a new legal tenure for co-operatives. This is something that others have argued for—indeed, they believe their arguments have been strengthened by the Supreme Court’s decision in the case of Berrisford v Mexfield. The noble Lord, Lord McKenzie, asked specifically what the Government’s position is. We have no current plans to introduce a new legal tenure. It is worth making two points. First, any change to tenure could not be applied retrospectively so would not assist co-operatives in resolving issues that may have been raised by the decision in the case that I have just mentioned. It is worth being clear about that because there is a tendency to think that a new legal tenure would be able to address any historic issues, when that would not be the case.

I am also aware that the idea of a new legal tenure has been raised by the Law Commission as a possible matter for review. I am not in a position to comment on that at all. The Government’s position has not changed, but this is clearly of ongoing interest to people and I am aware of that.

The noble Lord, Lord Kennedy, asked about allowing communities to vote for community-led organisations on a stock transfer. All stock transfers require a majority of tenants in favour. We will shortly introduce a new statutory right for council tenants to take forward transfer from a local authority landlord.

The noble Lord, Lord Graham, raised a number of points on which I will reflect carefully, but I am able to respond to a couple of them now. He asked about the proposal for an investment fund. Officials at the Homes and Communities Agency have been working closely with the Mutual Housing Group on the proposal for an investment fund. That group is chaired by Nic Bliss, whom the noble Lord, Lord Graham, says that he already knows.

The noble Lord, Lord Graham, also raised the issue of access to public land for building purposes by the co-operative housing groups. We have identified land with capacity for more than 100,000 homes and to date we have released land with capacity for more than 58,000 homes. Ministers have met with community-led affordable housing groups to discuss how they can access land from this source. Basically, the noble Lord raises an important point, which we are live to. We are already trying to take steps to release land where possible.

My noble friend Lord Shipley talked about local authority borrowing and lifting the cap. He ventured into an area which has a level of detail that is currently beyond my day-three-in-the-job capacity. But I can tell him that the 167 stock-holding authorities have just under £3 billion borrowing headroom. As I am sure he knows, the Government’s first priority is to reduce the national deficit. That is why borrowing arising from self-financing must be affordable within national fiscal policies as well as locally, which the prudential borrowing rules do not address. Additional local authority borrowing could have broader macroeconomic implications for the Government’s deficit reduction programme. Some councils that are subject to the cap are building new homes now and obviously we welcome that. We all acknowledge that the building of new homes is important and something that we want to continue to increase.

This Government have recognised that the co-operative housing movement can play a part in meeting housing need. We have a strong record in working with the housing sector to ensure that communities, including co-operatives, can access funding. The funding is there. Support in getting planning permission is there and I know from all noble Lords’ contributions today that the enthusiasm is most certainly there. The challenge now is to get the houses built. Indeed, in doing so, co-operative housing has the Government’s full support.

15:47

[Lord Kennedy of Southwark]

My Lords, first, I join in the tributes to the noble Baroness, Lady Hanham, that were made in the House. I should have said that in my earlier remarks. I thank all noble Lords for speaking in the debate today. I agree with many of the comments made by noble Lords on all sides of the House. I am delighted that the Government support co-operative housing. I look forward to seeing the sector grow, in that case, which would be good. Co-operative housing has an important role to play and if the Government support it and create the conditions in which it can flourish, it can make a positive difference to many people’s lives.

Some of the statistics put forward by the noble Baroness, Lady Stowell, are interesting and only time will tell on these things. Lots of people living in social housing do not particularly believe that the Government are on their side at the moment. We need only look at the decisions that have been taken in the three years that they have been in office. Having said that, I thank all noble Lords for their contributions to the debate today, which have been very useful. I will certainly come back again and again on this issue.

Motion agreed.

Housing: Impact on Child Development

Thursday 10th October 2013 Lords Chamber

Question for Short Debate

15:48

Tabled by

[Baroness King of Bow]

To ask Her Majesty’s Government what assessment they have made of the impact of low-quality housing on child development.

[Lord Kennedy of Southwark (Lab)]

My Lords, with the leave of the House, I will open the debate on behalf of my noble friend Lady King of Bow. Her surrogate is presently in labour so she cannot be in the House this afternoon.

When my noble friend was first elected to the other place 15 years ago, she was inundated with pamphlets and reports from her constituency and beyond. One grabbed her attention. It was called, I Mustn’t Laugh Too Much.

Now I, like my noble friend, like to laugh a lot. She wanted to understand why anyone would post such silly advice to people. As she read the report, she discovered that the title was based on advice given by a doctor to a young woman in a cold, damp and overcrowded flat at the top of a tower block on the Ocean estate in Stepney. The report went on to detail the housing conditions that the family was living in. Despite the heating being on constantly, everyone suffered from the cold in the winter and frequently fell ill. There were no drying facilities and clothes had to be dried in the bathroom and hallway. There was severe damp which produced black mould and the windows were always dripping wet. The three eldest children had asthma and used inhalers; the youngest boy had heart trouble and had suffered from persistent colds and coughs since birth. The doctor warned the family that asthma attacks could be precipitated by fits of laughing—hence the doctorly advice.

My noble friend grew up in north London. She had already seen plenty of run-down housing before becoming Labour’s candidate in Bethnal Green and Bow in 1997. Families on low incomes are as proud as anyone else and always tried to put on a good show when visited during that first election campaign. The intense and grinding daily impact of living in such conditions was really only truly brought home to her for the first time on reading that report. In surveys of 100 families on the Ocean and Limehouse Fields estates, it calculated the number of days lost in work or school through sickness and described the extent of damp throughout badly constructed and poorly maintained tower blocks. It revealed that many buildings were running alive with mice and cockroaches; exposed that the lifts were constantly broken and took weeks to repair; and showed that the stairwells of those blocks were plagued by drug users. Most of all, it painted a vivid picture of how bad housing affected the health, education and well-being of children and undermined their long-term life chances. At that moment my noble friend became a complete convert to the central importance of decent, secure and affordable housing in ending child poverty.

In the years that followed 1997, the blocks in which the young woman and her neighbours lived were demolished and replaced by excellent, family-sized social housing built by Bethnal Green & Victoria Park Housing Association under the single regeneration budget programme—the kind of homes Nye Bevan would have been proud to be associated with.

In 2000, my noble friend received a follow-up research report, A Drop in the Ocean, which showed that the health gain of the families who had moved into the first new homes on those estates was already dramatic. Finding and staying in work continued to be a problem, but the children were healthier and doing much better in school. Its most important recommendation was that that the SRB needed to be extended to benefit families in the rest of Stepney too.

My noble friend was delighted when the Ocean estate was included in the New Deal for Communities programme, with a £55 million budget to transform the area. Thanks to that initiative and much extra schools funding besides, the exam results at Stepney Green and Sir John Cass secondary schools are now well above the national average. Those children have a real chance to fulfil their potential.

The ideas behind the single regeneration budget and the New Deal for Communities programme were not new or even very innovative. The East End is the birthplace of council housing; many of you will have heard of the Boundary estate. Some of you even may have read Arthur Morrison’s novel A Child of the Jago, which was based around life in the Old Nichol slum on which the estate was built. The London County Council built the Boundary estate out of its desire to improve the squalid and overcrowded housing conditions in which children were growing up. The challenge then, as now, was how to roll that out borough-wide, city-wide and nation-wide. Our predecessors in central and local government determined that a decent, secure and affordable home was essential for children to fulfil their potential. The funding followed that political priority.

At some point in the 1980s or 1990s, however, those governing our country—and some local authorities—lost sight of that objective. Investment was salami-sliced away and councils stopped building. I would be the first to admit that it took the Labour Government whom I supported far too long to rediscover that objective. However, rediscover it they did, especially after the 2004 spending review, to the extent that almost 50,000 new social homes were completed in England in 2010-11 —more than 1,000 of them in Tower Hamlets alone. Tower Hamlets Council was granted a further £43 million to complete the physical regeneration of the Ocean estate and was promised £222 million to bring its remaining council homes up to a decent standard.

My noble friend tells me of the Liberal Democrat MPs who stood alongside her in many debates, calling for Labour’s Ministers to increase investment in housing. All that makes the housing policy and budgetary decisions taken by this coalition Government the more dispiriting. There has been a two-thirds cut in the Homes and Communities Agency’s budget; a benefit cap that punishes tenants for the greed of their landlords; “affordable” rents at 80% of market levels, which most of my noble friend’s former constituents who are working cannot afford to pay and so do not bid for; and an end to proper security of tenure in social housing.

There are clearly individuals in this Government who recognise the value of building social housing to give children the home they need to succeed in life. But the Deputy Prime Minister’s hopelessly inadequate announcement last year of just £300 million—a fig leaf for tearing up Section 106 agreements for social homes—shows that he is not one of them.

This country urgently needs a proper housebuilding programme. I am delighted that the leader of the Opposition, in his excellent speech to the Labour Party conference last month, promised that we will deliver it. Two hundred thousand new homes a year is double the number achieved by the coalition in any of its years in power.

The report to which I referred at the beginning of my speech was written by Professor Peter Ambrose. Some of your Lordships may know Peter through his tireless work and support for the Zacchaeus 2000 Trust campaign on behalf of families in poverty. Sadly, Peter passed away last summer. His passion and compassion are sadly missed, especially in Stepney, but I and my noble friend are confident that his work will continue to inspire a new generation campaigning on behalf of homeless and overcrowded families. Over the summer, my noble friend received a briefing note from the Zacchaeus Trust reminding us that 2 million children still live in bad housing. They live in cold, damp homes that result in their missing far too many school days off sick and falling behind in their studies, or growing up in overcrowded conditions of three or four children to a bedroom, with no quiet place in which to study. For those children who go on to secondary school, the overcrowding at home will make it almost impossible for them to find the quiet space that they need to concentrate on their homework properly and study for exams.

The cuts to housing benefit mean that homeless families are again spending months on end in totally unsuitable bed-and-breakfast accommodation, cooped up in single rooms where babies do not have even the space to learn to crawl and toddlers are at risk from all sorts of hazards in the communal areas, as well as inside the room. The previous Labour Government banned that practice for a reason, but the coalition Government allow it to arise again and again. Mr Pickles’s offer of £1.9 million to all councils struggling with the pressures of increased homelessness was totally inadequate. It was no surprise that Ministers gave Tower Hamlets not a penny, while Westminster Council got another big wodge of cash.

I am very grateful for the chance to initiate this debate on behalf on my noble friend and look forward to the contributions of others. I urge Ministers to think again about the devastating cuts to the Home and Communities Agency budget and to start building the homes that our children need so that the next generation of children does not have to worry about laughing too much.

15:56

[Baroness Eaton (Con)]

Again, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Kennedy, for introducing this important debate today.

The quality of the home has a substantial impact on health. A warm, dry and secure home is associated with better health. In addition to basic housing requirements, other factors that help to improve well-being include the neighbourhood, security of tenure and modifications for those with disabilities. Poor quality housing, which could include overcrowding, dilapidation or dampness, can impact on children’s development in a range of ways—on their physical and mental health and educational attainment—and can have a knock-on effect in adulthood as well as causing them problems in childhood.

The list of health conditions associated with bad, damp housing is indeed distressing, and a reason why we should all be committed to the provision of good housing stock. Poor housing conditions increase the risk of severe ill health or disability by up to 25% during childhood and early adulthood. Children in overcrowded housing are up to 10 times more likely to contract meningitis than children in general. Children living in overcrowded and unfit conditions are more likely to experience respiratory problems such as asthma and wheezing. Overcrowded conditions have been linked to slow growth in childhood, which is associated with an increase in coronary heart disease in later life. Almost half of all childhood accidents are associated with physical conditions in the home. Mental health issues such as anxiety and depression have been linked to overcrowding and unfit housing. Children living in bad housing are more susceptible to developing behavioural problems such as hyperactivity and aggression.

Bad housing affects children’s ability to learn at school and study at home. Children in unfit and overcrowded homes miss school more frequently due to illness and infection. The lower educational attainment and health problems associated with bad housing in childhood impact on opportunities in adulthood, including increasing the likelihood of unemployment or working in low-paid jobs.

In 1997, there were 2.1 million houses owned by local authorities and housing associations which did not meet the decent homes standard. By the end of 2010, 92% of social housing met the standards of being warm and weatherproof with reasonably modern facilities. The Local Government Association, working with ARCH and other housing providers, surveyed local authorities with their own stock last year. Councils reported that their top priority was investment in their existing stock to ensure that it meets and maintains the decent homes standard. In many cases, local authorities are going beyond this standard. In the private rented sector, energy efficiency has improved in recent years, but 11.4% of properties received F and G ratings for energy efficiency compared to 7.7% across all tenures.

The incidence of homes failing to meet decent homes standards is highest in the private rented sector. HHSRS safety hazards were present in 21% of private rented sector dwellings compared to 7% in the social sector. They also have a high incidence of damp problems, linked to the age of the stock. Where quality standards reach unacceptable levels, local authorities have regulatory and enforcement tools available with regard to the private rented sector. Using these tools is often a last resort with a focus on engagement with good quality landlords through forums, accreditation schemes and training. Councils will seek a dual approach, where good behaviour is encouraged through licensing and support to follow enforcement processes. The other side of this is action against poor behaviour, for example by using powers under the Proceeds of Crime Act.

There are a number of ways that the Government could support local authorities in their work with the private rented sector. They could help reduce the amount of bureaucracy involved in working with the private rented sector to raise standards and free up front-line services. They could be realistic about the scale of the challenge. Any new requirements for local authorities on the private rented sector must be properly resourced and funded, without creating additional burdens. We should help create streamlined and improved enforcement tools so that local authorities can tackle criminal landlords, for example in the rise of illegally rented outbuildings or “beds in sheds”.

It is quite clear from what I have said so far that poor quality bricks and mortar have a detrimental effect on children’s health. What is also of great interest is the work of John Pitts, Professor of Socio-Legal Studies at the University of Bedfordshire. He has done considerable research into the well-being of children and has come to the very interesting conclusion that the neighbourhood where a child lives has more influence than the family circumstances. A child from a family that works hard to provide a good home with good parenting will develop less well if the neighbourhood is a bad one than where a child from a bad or dysfunctional family lives in a good neighbourhood. Of course, housing conditions are very important. I am in no way understating their importance, but other things seen and observed can be as, if not more, damaging to a child. Bad neighbourhoods where there is a gang culture, low educational attainment, high levels of addiction, a dependency culture, and poor schooling will be equally, if not more, damaging to child development.

There are complex links between housing and education; however, disentangling the relationship between them is difficult. Neither housing nor education operates in discrete ways and each is affected by a range of other cross-cutting areas, such as health, transport, unemployment, crime and anti-social behaviour, as well as the state of the economy, political decisions and allocation of resources. The work established by the current Government, working with troubled families, is showing many ways in which society can help families which have found the provision of a stable and health background for their children difficult. The emphasis in the Localism Act on giving communities more control over their future existence helps to create safer and more suitable environments, with areas and neighbourhoods in which to bring up children.

Housing is a crucial element and while we can argue about the figures—I know that the statistics are always a difficult area—as we have heard, supply is now at its highest in new housing since 2008-09. New orders for housing are at their highest level since September 2013, with £19.5 billion having been invested in affordable housing, creating 160,000 new affordable homes for rent and ownership. There has been £15 billion invested in the voluntary sector and £4.5 billion in the public sector, while more council houses have been built under the present Government than under the 13 years of the previous Government.

Regenerating housing is a critical policy and the present Government recognise that good quality homes in a safe, clean environment provide all children with the best start in life. We have heard from my noble friend Lady Stowell, as the Minister, of a number of ways in which the Government are addressing and are committed to the development of safe, affordable housing. They are rising to the challenge.

16:06

[Lord Graham of Edmonton (Lab)]

My Lords, first, I have to say how very sorry I am not to have my noble friend Lady King here with us today. There are obviously reasons but, relatively speaking, I have known her for a very long time. I will leave that pun for your Lordships to ponder.

I want to congratulate the Library of this House which, in preparation for this debate, made available a document that was, substantially, prepared by Shelter. It is on the impact of bad housing on physical health, mental health and education. It is very timely and while it is a horror story, it is a bestseller and I soundly urge any Member who is interested in this aspect of our work to ask for a copy because it will certainly come in handy.

I referred briefly in the debate earlier this afternoon to background: where we have come from and what we can expect. We are cocooned in this Chamber and we have got where we are, on either side of the House, because we have some substantial attributes. However, during my life as a Member of Parliament for Edmonton many years ago and as a councillor in the same part of the world, I came across situations which are very much reflected in the report from Shelter. I want to quote from it at length and I hope that the House will understand.

As far as physical health is concerned, the report says that:

“25 per cent of children who persistently lived in accommodation in poor state of repair had a long-standing illness or disability compared to 19% who lived in this type of bad housing on a short-term basis … Children living in bad housing are almost twice as likely to suffer from poor health as other children … Children living in unfit and overcrowded accommodation are almost a third more likely to suffer respiratory problems such as chest problems, breathing difficulties, asthma and bronchitis than other children … There is a direct link between childhood tuberculosis and overcrowding … Fifty-eight per cent of respondents to a Shelter survey said their health or their family’s health had suffered as a result of living in temporary accommodation”.

Those are the impacts as far as health is concerned. For mental health there is another grim picture:

“Mothers living in bad housing are almost three times as likely as other mothers to be clinically depressed … Homeless children are three or four times more likely to have mental health problems than other children … More than 60% of respondents to a Shelter survey said that living in temporary accommodation had worsened depression and other mental health problems”.

As for education:

“Children living in bad housing are nearly twice as likely as other children to leave school without any GCSEs … Children living in acutely bad housing are twice as likely not to attend school as other children … Children who live in bad housing are five times as likely to lack a quiet place to do their homework as other children”.

I shall finish my quoting there. There must be 35 conclusions. It is a brilliant piece of research and quite frankly, until I read it I had not appreciated just how desperate the situation is. The report also tells us that there are 1 million children living in what we might call poverty. My heart bleeds for them. I have a background on Tyneside, where from 1930-39 my father was out of work. I was the eldest of five children. I passed what was called the secondary school exam—I was going to an elementary school then—but could not go because my dad was out of work. I finally made it to a degree through the Open University, for which I say very many thanks. The fact that one is born into poverty or lives in poverty does not exclude you from rising above your poverty, by one means or another, and making an impression in some place or another. All I can say to the Minister, and I am grateful that she is here in her capacity, is that these are not sticks to beat the Government or to beat society. I believe that the value of this report is that as it is used by politicians and others it should strike a chord somewhere among our communities.

At the end of the day, I know all about resources, priorities, budgets—I have been involved in those all my adult life—but the situation we face is that the generation that is coming through our schools and living in our conditions now, as outlined in that report, have a very steep hill to climb. I hope that the Government have some kind words to say about their priorities and initiatives because our children and grandchildren will need them very badly.

16:13

[Lord Touhig (Lab)]

My Lords, it is a privilege to follow my noble friend. He comes to this House with many years’ experience, but he can talk with passion, understanding and experience of being brought up in poverty, and that enriches our debate and helps us understand the difficulties that many families face.

This debate is of fundamental importance because of the poor standard of housing that thousands of children will return home to this evening, housing that will adversely affect them and society for years to come. The World Health Organisation notes that early childhood development is the most important factor in,

“the quality of health, well-being, learning and behaviour across the life span”.

The impact of low quality housing upon these youngsters in their early years is both severe and lasting. In the short term, it adversely affects their health and well-being and hinders their learning. In the long term, it diminishes their chances and opportunities, causing problems which society must later address. A clear example of this is the disruption that overcrowding causes to children’s education and learning.

The Catholic Children’s Society (Westminster) recently highlighted cases not so very far from this Chamber, where a shortage of adequate social housing for families means that children simply do not have the space to sit and study at a table. In one household, typical of many, the two youngest children share a room with their parents, while the teenaged children have to lie on their beds and do homework in a cramped adjoining room. For any effective studying, they must find space at school early in the morning or before it is locked up in the evening. How can they realistically be expected to keep up with classmates who have the simple benefits of a desk, a work surface or some quiet space in their own home? How can they properly develop the skills and knowledge required to compete in a difficult job market when their physical surroundings obstruct their studies? Children in these circumstances are being dealt an unacceptable blow to their life chances from a young age. However, the true impact is likely to be even wider, as pressure on the education system increases and employment opportunities are hampered.

Overcrowded housing not only causes immediate harm to children but causes long-term societal problems, whether in our schools or, eventually, in our economy. A 2003 study considering the cumulative lost earnings of children growing up in poor quality housing compared to their peers projected that the figure would stand at £14 billion. This figure starkly illustrates how the childhood impacts of low-quality housing continue into adult life and the hard cost of needlessly diminished life chances and lost opportunities.

The correlation between substandard housing and poor health is indisputable, with the burden more often than not falling upon the National Health Service. I shall give just one example, that of a family in Liverpool who are helped by a charity, Nugent Care. Its report on them shows how problems of poor housing blight the health and well-being of entire families. Over the years this family had reported various problems to their housing officers, from damp and cracked walls to the front door not shutting properly and the windows being smashed by a local gang. The mother, Anne, informed her support worker that she had given up on painting and decorating as she simply could not see the point any more. She had come to despair of her own home, if it could be called a home. Every time she put up new wallpaper or freshly painted, it simply cracked or peeled off due to damp and poor construction. At the age of 17, her daughter Leanne developed severe clinical depression, which, according to the Nugent report, was,

“possibly brought on by her mum’s depression, possibly by her own experiences and certainly not helped by sitting in an unloved house in need of repair”.

Not only is this a tragedy for Leanne and her family, tarnishing what should have been happy and formative teenage years, but it also requires considerable public healthcare provision, otherwise unnecessary if she had simply been given the decent housing that every child deserves.

The impact of low quality housing on the mental health of children and young people is shocking and tragic. The impact on children’s physical health is, sadly, just as shocking. Multiple housing problems increase the risk of illness or disability by up to 25%. Children living in cold homes are more than twice as likely to suffer from a variety of respiratory diseases than those with adequate heating, and children living in damp and mouldy homes are up to three times more prone to coughing and wheezing.

Of course, no one is under any illusion about the scale of the challenge that we face when it comes to ensuring that children grow up in an environment that nurtures their health, education and overall well-being. It is imperative not to make the situation worse, particularly with regard to policies where all the indications point to significant long-term harm. An impact assessment carried out by the Department for Work and Pensions in 2010 on the local housing allowance found that families,

“could be affected by overcrowding, particularly where they downsize to find affordable accommodation. This could have an adverse affect on health and mental well being … For children, particularly those of school age, overcrowded conditions could hamper their ability to do homework and affect educational attainment”.

It went on to warn of particular dangers for the children of younger mothers, stating that,

“Even if their re-housing is managed so they do not become homeless, teenage mothers affected are at risk of mental problems as a result of their isolation in their new location and poorer outcomes for their children”.

In spite of such warnings, the housing allowance changes were implemented and we are now witnessing the consequences, particularly in London, where instances of overcrowding are already worryingly high and the stock of decent, affordable homes is exceptionally low.

Based on a freedom of information request to local councils, the Caritas Social Action Network recently projected that in more than 20,000 households across London whole families are now sharing a single room, with potentially serious implications for their well-being. Beyond the immediate human impact of this, it is a concern that there has been little or no official analysis of the costs that will be incurred by the public services as a result of this. Factoring these in, it is likely that some of the cost-saving measures under way at present may in fact be having precisely the opposite effect.

It is therefore essential that as further changes to housing and welfare policy are considered and undertaken, the full range of short-term and long-term impacts on children are properly accounted for. The impact of low quality housing on the health, well-being and education of children across their entire lives, and for the whole of society, is stark. Proper accounting is morally and economically sound, and I hope that today’s debate will underscore the urgency of taking it into consideration. The Government must do more than take note. They must act.

16:21

[Baroness Sherlock (Lab)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to respond to this brief but important debate. It is also notable that we are having two debates on housing back to back on a Thursday. This may tell us how important the issue has become, not just in the lives of politicians, but in the country as a whole.

It is a pleasure to engage with the noble Baroness, Lady Stowell of Beeston, on her first day out. She has certainly been put to work on day one of the new brief. I am sorry not be facing her across the Dispatch Box on DWP matters any more, but she has already noticed that although she has moved she has failed to escape the expert and determined ministrations and opposition of my noble friend Lord McKenzie of Luton, who is following her wherever she goes.

I am delighted to respond to this debate put down by my noble friend Lady King of Bow. I know that she will be disappointed not to be here, but she will be assiduously reading Hansard. When she next goes back, she can look her former constituents in the eye, having raised in the House of Lords those issues that she saw so early on in her political career. I pay tribute to my noble friend Lord Kennedy, who is doing double duty by staying on after his own debate on housing to introduce this debate so effectively.

At the heart of this debate is a moral issue. We are a developed country, rich by global standards, whose children should be able to live in homes that are fit for human habitation. It is, or should be, part of the social contract that we have with our citizens that families can expect to have a secure, warm, decent home to call their own is or should be part of the social contract that we have with our citizens. Thinking about this debate, I was reminded of the promise made by Lloyd George, almost 100 years ago, of “homes fit for heroes”, and I am sorry to see the Lib Dem Benches empty today. I was thinking of that coalition a century ago and wondering whether today’s coalition might have aspirations even a fraction as ambitious as those of that coalition Government so long ago.

In 2013, it is sad to think that we are still hearing so many horror stories, as my noble friend Lord Graham of Edmonton put it so well, of children’s home lives. We have heard a compelling case today from all the speakers about the impact of poor quality housing has in damaging outcomes for children. Many speakers have developed the themes that describe graphically the impact on children’s physical and mental health, their educational outcomes and their aspirations for the future. The noble Baroness, Lady Eaton, and my noble friend Lord Touhig were very clear in setting out the impact on a child’s mental as well as physical health. This is something that we need to take very seriously.

My noble friend Lord Graham gave us those very worrying statistics from that rather impressive Shelter report about the risks to children. They are twice as likely to have poor health and asthmatics are twice as likely to live in a damp house. The report looked at the impact on children who live in temporary accommodation and at how much they suffer. The worry must be not just that these illnesses affect these children in childhood, but that these conditions follow them through into adulthood. There is a scarring effect on both the physical and mental health of children, and on their achievement, that goes right through into their adult lives.

We have also heard some horror stories about the impact on parents and children of living in an overcrowded home. I was shocked by the statistic from Caritas shared by my noble friend Lord Touhig. The idea of 20,000 families in London living in single rooms should be genuinely shocking to all of us. The noble Baroness, Lady Eaton, and my noble friend Lord Touhig looked at some of the impacts of living in crowded accommodation: disturbed sleep, poor diet, and we know that children are more likely to have behavioural difficulties such as hyperactivity or aggression. Living in a tight space is stressful; children are more likely to have stress-related problems such as bed-wetting and soiling. Overcrowding affects family relationships as well as the mental health of both parents and children. It is challenging to keep happy and cheerful when your housing is insecure or your home or succession of homes is inadequate, damp or simply inappropriate.

Low aspirations are common for children in poor housing. I take the point made by the noble Baroness, Lady Eaton, about how complex it is to understand the inter-relationship of factors. However, the evidence is pretty strong about the connection between housing and aspirations and outcomes. Even if we think about ourselves, how many of us would be confident that we could maintain morale and raise the aspirations of children if we were one of a couple raising two kids in a one-bed flat in a high rise building in a very hostile environment? I was also very glad to hear the comments made by various noble Lords, my noble friends Lord Kennedy and Lord Graham in particular, about the impact on children’s educational development and standards. I was very worried to hear the idea that children are five times more likely to have no quiet space for homework. Has anyone told Mr Gove? This must be rather worrying. We put such an emphasis as a country on the importance of homework and of children being given homework, and yet some of our own children are unable to do it because they do not have the space.

Children are missing school because of the ill health that is associated with bad housing, as we heard earlier. I also wish to highlight the difficulties caused by children who experience disruption to their schooling caused by moving homes, a point that was touched on by my noble friend. It is a particular problem for the 1.2 million families who live in the private rented sector, where the tenancies tend to be short. Moving repeatedly can cause children to miss more school, and as we heard earlier, parents can become depressed and the children insecure.

We have heard some real horror stories, but I was very moved to hear my noble friend Lord Graham describe how he was unable to go on to secondary school because his father was unemployed. Like my noble friend Lord Touhig, I find it a real privilege to hear him share his experience with us. I can only say to him that if his father is looking down now he must be so proud of what he has done and what he has come to, as indeed we all are to be sharing these Benches and, I am sure, this Chamber with him.

As well as hearing horror stories about specific cases, the truth is that we are living through the biggest housing crisis of a generation. Families are struggling to afford decent homes because of the combination of the crisis in living standards and the simple lack of housing. This debate has surfaced two or three key issues which I will be grateful if the Minister would respond to. First, on the point I just raised about the insecurity for children and families, tenancies in the private sector last on average 19 months. Many of them, of course, as a condition of the mortgages given to those who own them, are limited to a maximum of 12 months. However, families with children now make up a third of renters, so some solution has to be found to enable families with children to have longer tenancies, because the welfare of their children depends upon it. Will the Minister tell the House what the Government propose to do to ensure more secure tenancies for families?

Secondly, all noble Lords raised the issue of the quality of the housing stock, again, especially in the private rented sector. The consequences—the outcomes for children—have been very clear. However, we also know that some landlords are making plenty of money but are failing in their responsibilities to invest in maintaining their properties to a decent level. With so many new people entering the buy-to-let market, what are the Government doing to inform them and to enforce the responsibilities of landlords, and what are they doing to ensure that rogue landlords are tackled properly?

The broader issue of the role of local authorities in this area was raised by the noble Baroness, Lady Eaton. I shall be interested to hear how the Minister responds to her. I also wonder whether she has had the opportunity to look at the work of local authorities such as Newham, which has sought to tackle the problem of rogue landlords and poor quality housing head on, by measures such as establishing licence arrangements, fining unlicensed providers, setting clear expectations and standards and improving enforcement. Newham has found that families moving into the borough seeking cheaper housing has caused quite a lot of churn, so it has also been trying to find ways of supporting stability in those communities, to improve the quality of life for families. However, those problems cannot be tackled locally, so will the Minister please tell us what the Government are doing at a national level?

Finally, the biggest question is: what are the Government doing about the desperate shortage of housing in this country? I arrived at the end of the previous debate just in time to hear the Minister share a positive barrage of housing statistics, and I am sure that she will not want to repeat them. However, I shall simply put one statistic on the table: the number of households in England is projected to rise by more than 230,000 each year, yet David Cameron has presided over the lowest level of housebuilding of any peacetime Prime Minister since the 1920s.

I know what the next Labour Government will do to turn that round; we have been very clear about this. We are committed to increasing the supply of new homes by 200,000 a year by the end of the next Parliament. We will give councils “use it or lose it” powers to stop land hoarding, we will build the next generation of new towns and we will support communities that want to grow. We have asked Sir Michael Lyons to chair a housing commission to draw up a road map for delivering on these promises. But for the sake of this country, and of all those children we have heard about, I do not want to wait until May 2015 to see some action. I look forward to hearing from the Minister what the Government will do right now.

16:31

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Communities and Local Government (Baroness Stowell of Beeston) (Con)]

My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Kennedy, for introducing this Question for Short Debate on behalf of the noble Baroness, Lady King of Bow, and I join others in wishing her and her family well. I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Sherlock, for her remarks about my new role, and I welcome her to her leading role on Department for Work and Pensions matters on the Opposition Front Bench.

As I said in the previous debate, I always listen carefully when the noble Lord, Lord Graham of Edmonton, contributes to our debates in this House. He is someone of huge experience and great wisdom, and I shall certainly reflect on the points that he made about those who have experienced poverty but have been able to go on and enjoy great success, and about how we must support people in their escape from poverty and acknowledge their achievements. I can tell the noble Lord that a person who offers me great inspiration in that regard is my own mother. I have someone in my own family whose experiences I am regularly reminded of, and reflect on.

There is no doubt that low-quality housing can have a terrible impact on child development. In 2006 Shelter conducted some powerful research that conclusively demonstrated the links between poor housing and poor outcomes. It is intuitive that that should be so, but Shelter provided evidence—much of which others have already mentioned, so I shall just mention a couple of points. Children living in damp housing are more likely to develop respiratory conditions, unsafe housing is linked to greater numbers of accidents and injuries, and children who become homeless are more likely to suffer with mental health problems and to struggle at school. None of this has any place in a modern society today. Every child deserves the best possible start in life and the best possible home in which to grow up to help them develop and achieve their potential.

There is much that the Government are doing to address the problems of endemic and intergenerational poverty that forces people to live in poor housing, whether by addressing the factors that trap people on benefits by helping them into work, or by tackling the failures in education that have meant that the children who most need the best schools have instead been let down for too long. There are also steps that we are specifically taking to ensure that every child grows up in suitable housing, and the first and most important is by simply building more homes. The noble Baroness, Lady Sherlock, mentioned the detailed summary that I provided in the last debate about what the Government are doing in this area. We are doing a huge amount to increase the supply of new homes, both in the private sector and in the social housing sector. I shall not take time by going over them all in great detail. But while I take on board what the noble Lord, Lord Graham, said about housing and poverty not being political issues—and I agree with him on that—I still think that, if we are going to trade statistics, as we do in these debates, I have to respond to some of the points that are put to me.

It is worth reminding the House that the numbers for social housing fell under the last Labour Government and that, under this Government, we are taking big steps to reverse that decline. I shall not go through all the numbers and the stats again in detail, but that is an area in which we are reversing the trend substantially and making it a huge priority. As was mentioned in a previous debate, this is something of huge importance and great concern to everybody.

As has also been acknowledged, we do not just have to build new homes—we also have to improve the standard of the existing homes and ensure that all social housing meets a minimum standard of decency. We have invested £2 billion in this spending round to bring the remaining 127,000 of what were rather shockingly 217,000 non-decent homes up to standard. I note that my noble friend Lady Eaton referred to the efforts in this area that the local authorities are making. The funding that has been made available so far has led to more than 58,000 homes being upgraded which means that, outside of London—and London is slightly different—we are now nearly at 100% of council homes meeting the formal standard of decent homes. There is more work to do in London, and we have announced additional funding for London in the next spending round. Clearly, the noble Baroness, Lady King of Bow, if she was here, would be interested in what we are doing in that area, because of her personal history in representing Tower Hamlets.

Addressing supply and the quality of existing stock will not alone address the immediate problems of demand and overcrowding. It is worth noting that overcrowding is quoted extensively in the latest Shelter briefing, to which the noble Lord, Lord Graham, referred. Overcrowding is perhaps referred to more than anything else as one of the main factors for children suffering from a wide range of concerns and conditions. It was highlighted by all noble Lords, especially the noble Lord, Lord Touhig, in his contribution. It is important to recognise the facts here; waiting lists for social housing have doubled since 1998; there are now 1.8 million households on waiting lists. Nearly 250,000 of social homes in England are overcrowded, while nearly 390,000 are underoccupied by two bedrooms or more.

Overcrowding—a very important issue—was behind two important new measures in the Localism Act 2011. The first gives councils more freedom to innovate and develop local solutions, and make the best use of limited stock by using the private rented sector when it makes sense to do so. This gives councils more flexibility. Part of this involves making sure that we get the best use from what is available to us. The second measure gave councils powers to match the length of tenancy to the household need, and made it easier for social tenants to move house as their needs change.

It goes without saying that housing is a complex issue. Clearly, I am discovering this personally, having just taken over responsibility for the DCLG in your Lordships’ House. It is clear that there are no easy solutions, and we need a range of measures. It is fundamental to make the best use of all that is available, and to treat everyone fairly. I must say that, because of noble Lords’ focus on the issue of overcrowding, I am somewhat surprised that as far as I can recall no noble Lords have raised the Government’s decision to remove the spare room subsidy. That decision was very much part of a range of measures to tackle overcrowding, and the Opposition have now committed to reintroducing it.

It is probably worth placing some facts on the record, not least because this is the first time that I have raised this in my new role. The housing benefit bill doubled between 2000 and 2012-13, and we are now spending almost £24 billion per year. There are approaching 1 million extra rooms paid for by housing benefit for working-age social sector tenants. The removal of the spare room subsidy applies only to working-age people in receipt of housing benefit, and it means that the benefit meets the cost of accommodation appropriate to the household’s needs. Removing this subsidy brings estimated average savings of £500 million a year.

In removing the spare room subsidy we bring social sector benefit entitlements into line with long-standing private sector entitlements, which I think is really important. Before making this change there was a difference in treatment. People receiving housing benefit who live in private rented accommodation have not enjoyed the subsidy that those in the social sector have had for more than 20 years. This has not been tackled before. We believe that it is appropriate to do so, because it will reintroduce the important aspect of fairness between people in different kinds of housing. This must continue if we are to make the best use of the available stock.

In making those changes, there are of course special mitigations in place to safeguard the needs of particularly vulnerable children. There are also measures in place for disabled children. We have a special fund available, £180 million in this year alone, to enable local councils to make discretionary housing payments to ease the transition. This is about making sure that funding is there to deal with those special cases that may need proper attention by the local authorities in that area. We will measure the impact of these changes, and the first report is due next year.

This is an important area. Housing is absolutely essential. Noble Lords have raised several issues to which I have not had an opportunity to respond, and I will do so in writing. Finally, I will make a couple of brief points.

The noble Baroness, Lady Sherlock, raised an important point about the range of housing available and the effect on some families of what she described as insecurity through being housed in private rented accommodation as opposed to social sector accommodation. I would say two things to her on that. First, we recognise that, where possible, people want to own their own home—it provides the security and stability that is so important to families. That is why we are very committed to the right-to-buy scheme. Secondly, we have also introduced a new scheme called the right-to-rent fund, which is about providing £1 billion of investment for the building of specifically designed accommodation for rent. This new accommodation will be for rental and will not be subject to subsequent on-sale. Something that we have not done in this country until now is to create a market that people can take advantage of where renting is the only option for them, or indeed an option that they choose, but we have to make sure that it is done professionally and that it is never seen as second rate compared with owning the property.

All children deserve, as well as need, a safe, secure and loving home. The Government are committed to addressing the causes of child poverty and are doing so by helping parents to get back into work, improving education and building more new affordable homes. We are delivering, although there is still more to do. This issue is very important. I am grateful to all noble Lords and I shall certainly reflect on all the comments that have been made here today.

House adjourned at 4.46 pm.