House of Commons

Thursday 27th February 2014 Commons Chamber

Thursday 27 February 2014

The House met at half-past Nine o’clock

Prayers

Thursday 27th February 2014 Commons Chamber

[Mr Speaker in the Chair]

Oral Answers to Questions

Thursday 27th February 2014 Commons Chamber

The Secretary of State was asked—

[Lilian Greenwood (Nottingham South) (Lab)]

1. What recent assessment he has made of the effects of changes to the energy company obligation on consumers.

[The Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change (Mr Edward Davey)]

We will shortly be consulting on changes to the energy company obligation. We are aware of a number of ECO-funded solid wall insulation projects that are not going forward, but we have been encouraged by the large number of households that have already benefited from ECO measures, which is now estimated at nearly 450,000 properties at the end of December 2013. Moreover, thanks to the package of changes that I announced on 2 December 2013, which included the proposed ECO changes, consumers across the UK are set to see their energy bills reduced this year by an average of £50.

[Lilian Greenwood]

The Secretary of State already knows the devastating impact that his changes are having on thousands of residents in Clifton in my constituency who live in hard-to-treat homes, but what hope can he offer to the 12 local youngsters who, after completing their initial training, were due to start year-long apprenticeships in installing solid wall insulation when his change of policy put their futures and hundreds more green jobs on hold?

[Mr Davey]

I am sure that the hon. Lady welcomes the many ECO measures in her constituency. The ECO measures that we announced in December prolong the programme for two more years and have a particular focus on fuel poverty, which I would hope that she welcomes. We will announce quite soon our proposals on incentives for people who want to invest in green deal measures, through which I am sure she will see real benefits for solid wall.

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

I welcome the news that the energy company obligation scheme will offer targeted support to low-income households until at least March 2017. Does my right hon. Friend agree that it is often the poorest families who live in the worst insulated and hardest-to-heat homes, and that these targeted measures have the potential greatly to reduce energy costs in such difficult-to-reach houses?

[Mr Davey]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. As a result of our changes, we believe that more ECO measures will help more households. The fact that we have managed to ensure that the affordable warmth and carbon-saving community obligation aspects of the ECO will be extended at the existing rate for two more years is extremely good news for our efforts on fuel poverty.

[Mr Mike Weir (Angus) (SNP)]

Last month, in answer to a question from me, the Minister of State, Department of Energy and Climate Change, the right hon. Member for Bexhill and Battle (Gregory Barker), said that he would speak to the energy companies about the fact that under the affordable warmth aspect of ECO, as run by them, off-grid gas boilers are not available. Has any progress been made on that, and will the Secretary of State take action to end that discrimination?

[Mr Davey]

We have listened to several representations on that and other areas. We will shortly publish the consultation document on the ECO, to which the hon. Gentleman might want to respond formally, as well as our fuel poverty strategy, which will cover some of the issues that he raises.

[Mr Speaker]

I call Emma Reynolds.

[Jonathan Reynolds (Stalybridge and Hyde) (Lab/Co-op)]

Thank you, Mr Speaker—

[Mr Speaker]

Order. He does not look like her and she does not look like him; I apologise to the hon. Gentleman. More specifically, I apologise to the hon. Lady.

[Jonathan Reynolds]

This time last year, work under the affordable warmth component of the ECO—the element that helps low-income households—was trading on the brokerage at between 25p and 30p in the pound. Today it is trading at just 6p, which means that a maximum of £840 is available for each job, whereas last year £3,500 would have been available. Given that the Government’s figures on the boiler scrappage scheme show that 96% of boiler replacements cost more than £1,000, what assurances can the Secretary of State give that such work is being done legitimately, safely and responsibly, or even at all?

[Mr Davey]

It is certainly being done in great numbers, and we can contrast the situation with that under the Warm Front scheme that the previous Government introduced. In 2010-11, about 80,000 households received help under that scheme at a cost of £366 million, but in the first year of affordable warmth, 130,000 households benefited at a cost of £350 million.

The hon. Lady—the hon. Gentleman; I am making the same mistake as you, Mr Speaker, so I do not know what it is about the hon. Gentleman today. However, I am surprised that he complains about costs coming down, because I would have thought that he would welcome that. He knows that there is regulation to ensure that standards are met.

[Gemma Doyle (West Dunbartonshire) (Lab/Co-op)]

2. What steps he is taking to help households improve their energy efficiency.

[The Minister of State, Department of Energy and Climate Change (Gregory Barker)]

More than 450,000 homes received energy efficiency improvements in 2013 as a result of the coalition’s pioneering energy company obligation and green deal measures. We expect that figure to grow substantially in 2014 and that the green deal market will continue to expand.

[Gemma Doyle]

I hear what the Minister says, but more than 7 million homes in the UK are without adequate loft insulation and more than 5 million are without cavity wall insulation, so will he explain why the number of households getting help through Government programmes fell last year by more than 90%?

[Gregory Barker]

It is slightly misleading to talk about 7 million lofts with inadequate loft insulation. They may not have the full amount of insulation, but the amount that they lack varies significantly.

[Caroline Flint (Don Valley) (Lab)]

So it is inadequate.

[Gregory Barker]

So it is inadequate. We now need to move on, not just to simple measures such as loft insulation, but to a much broader holistic approach to home insulation—whole house retrofits. They are more complex and more expensive, but they also cannot be done just with subsidy. The Labour party has to make a choice. Do Labour Members want to force up consumer bills giving ever more subsidy to a small number of people, or do they want to work with us to create a genuine new market where people are incentivised to pay for themselves?

[Sir Tony Baldry (Banbury) (Con)]

The green deal has the potential to revolutionise energy efficiency, but we all need to understand how we can ensure that our constituents link into it. What is my right hon. Friend doing to ensure that the green deal is as straightforward and efficient as possible, and that as many people as possible in north Oxfordshire can benefit from it?

[Gregory Barker]

During the past few months we have certainly been taking advantage of the fact that we now have the green deal up and running, and we have been improving the experience of the green deal, both for the consumer and the supply chain. We have now had more than 145,000 assessments by the green deal, and we know that it is getting high levels of customer satisfaction and that more than 80% of people who have had an assessment are moving on to install measures.

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

Since the privatisation of the public utilities, in Yorkshire the gas is now owned by the Germans, electricity by the Chinese and water by the Singaporeans. Should not the six major energy companies be driving this bid? We know that the Government are really lacking in green energy and the green deal. Why cannot the Minister galvanise the six energy companies, or should I ask Mrs Merkel this morning?

[Gregory Barker]

We should celebrate foreign investment in the UK and welcome the fact that the UK, particularly under the coalition Government, is becoming a world centre for inward investment. We are seeing investment in the green energy sector reach record highs—more than £30 billion since the coalition came into government —and seeing the amount of clean energy that we are generating take us up the European league table from the miserable second from bottom place that we used to occupy under the last Government.

[Mr James Gray (North Wiltshire) (Con)]

One of the groups most deserving of benefit, from the warm home scheme in particular, are those who live in park homes, of which we have many in North Wiltshire. Due to the curious anomaly that electricity payers have to match exactly the people listed in the Department for Work and Pensions, they are not eligible for the warm home discount. Will the Minister find some way of getting around this anomaly, so that these deserving people, who live in their own homes, many of which are the coldest that could possibly be imagined, benefit from the scheme?

[Gregory Barker]

I pay tribute to my hon. Friend for his tenacity in raising this issue. He is right. Park home owners and occupants have traditionally had a very poor deal compared with other consumers. We do not have the full answer yet, but I am determined to try to improve their lot, and I will be happy to meet him to try to iron out some of these quite difficult problems where people do not own the meter. There must be more that we can do.

[Mr Philip Hollobone (Kettering) (Con)]

A staggering amount of electricity is used and several large power stations kept running simply to power electronic devices such as televisions and computers that are left on standby. What can the Minister do, perhaps with other Departments, to try to tackle the problem of electronic devices having to be left on?

[Gregory Barker]

My hon. Friend asks a good question. Such electronic devices are largely covered by EU-wide product standards rather than just domestic initiatives. Innovation is the key, and that is what we want to spur. DECC has an innovation fund, and if my hon. Friend has some suggestions, I would be happy to hear them.

[Mr Speaker]

I do not wish to be unkind, but the Minister does perambulate in a mildly eccentric fashion. If he feels that he can face the House in answering questions, that would be greatly to the advantage of both the hon. Gentleman and the House.

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

3. What recent assessment he has made of the prices charged by the six largest energy companies.

[The Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change (Mr Edward Davey)]

We announced in the annual energy statement that Ofgem would work with the Office of Fair Trading and the new Competition and Markets Authority to deliver the first annual competition assessment in late March, early April. These independent competition authorities have set out the remit for this assessment. They have said that they will look at prices, as well as profits and other relevant matters.

I recently wrote to those competition authorities, drawing to their attention three specific matters that have received little attention in the energy price debate but which I consider are of strategic importance, including profits, prices and market share in the domestic gas supply market. It is for the regulators to decide what steps they now wish to take in light of all the evidence.

[Diana Johnson]

Given that 31,000 winter deaths were caused by the cold during last winter and that there will be further rises in energy bills this year, why does the coalition give a higher priority to maintaining the energy cartel’s 77% increase in profits and shareholder dividends than to the lives of vulnerable people?

[Mr Davey]

We do not; I am afraid that the hon. Lady is wrong on many counts. First, the structure she describes as a cartel was created by the previous Government. The big six were created during the consolidation under Labour, so they are Labour’s big six. It is under this coalition Government that we have seen a massive increase in the number of entrants to the market; we now have 20 independent suppliers taking on Labour’s big six. That is good competition that will help people. Secondly, we take winter deaths extremely seriously. If she looks at the data, she will see that winter deaths have gone up and down over a period of years and that the highest figure over the past decade was actually when the Leader of the Opposition was doing my job. The reason they go up and down is that they are related not simply to energy costs, but to health matters such as flu epidemics. We need to ensure that we have a cross-Government approach to tackling winter deaths, which is what we are doing.

[Simon Wright (Norwich South) (LD)]

I am grateful to the Secretary of State for visiting Norwich recently to listen to my constituents about energy bills and for attacking the high profits made by suppliers on gas bills. Will he explain the analysis that led him to send a letter to Ofgem and the CMA concerning prices and profits in the supply of domestic gas?

[Mr Davey]

I pay tribute to my hon. Friend for his sterling work in this area. When Ofgem published segmental accounts in November, combined with figures on market share and other data, we saw for the first time a four-year time series showing some real concerns. It was that analysis that led me to write to the competition authorities, drawing their attention to the problems in the domestic gas supply market, which were never raised by the Labour party.

[Barry Gardiner (Brent North) (Lab)]

The Secretary of State knows that the big six were set up in the way they were because, after the introduction of the new electricity trading arrangements and then the British electricity trading and transmission arrangements, that spread competition in the market. However, Which? has now said that vertical integration has skewed the market, penalised new entrants and impaired competition. Does he not accept that Which? is right and that the Opposition are absolutely right to seek to break up that vertical integration?

[Mr Davey]

I accept that we need to look at the electricity generating market. One of the reasons we support Ofgem’s proposals, which this week it was announced will go forward on 31 March, is that they will contest the vertical integration model for the first time. Again, it is this Government who are challenging the structures we inherited from the previous Government. We are allowing the competition authorities and regulators to take that contest forward, but the Labour party is saying that it must be against the consumer interest, yet it has no real evidence for that.

[Charlie Elphicke (Dover) (Con)]

Does the Secretary of State agree that the high prices we see are not purely the result of the oligopoly set up by the previous Government, and that policy and energy mix are also important? To that extent, has he compared prices in Germany with those in the UK?

[Mr Davey]

There are a number of international comparisons on that basis, and the UK performs very well, by and large, particularly on post-tax analysis of domestic gas and electricity prices. But we should not be complacent; we should do everything we can to help customers and businesses with high energy bills.

[Duncan Hames (Chippenham) (LD)]

4. What steps he is taking to develop community energy.

[The Minister of State, Department of Energy and Climate Change (Gregory Barker)]

This year the coalition launched the UK’s first ever Government community energy strategy. That marks a profound step change for the energy sector and includes a series of ambitious new measures. To take that agenda forward, the Department is setting up a dedicated community energy delivery unit.

[Duncan Hames]

Those are wide-ranging plans that have been long in gestation. I am sure that the Minister is as keen as I am to take specific steps to help clean our energy supply and sustain local communities. What specific measures in the plan will enable local communities to take a lead in developing renewable energy in their area?

[Gregory Barker]

I pay tribute to my hon. Friend’s long-standing interest in campaigning for renewable energy. Let me assure him that there is a great deal of meat in the community energy strategy. We are establishing a £10 million urban community energy fund, providing seed funding for a one-stop-shop information resource, launching a £100,000 community energy saving competition, and setting up an industry-led taskforce to achieve greater shared ownership of onshore renewables. Altogether, it is a bold vision with a plan for delivery.

[Dr Alan Whitehead (Southampton, Test) (Lab)]

The Minister will be aware that a number of community-based combined heat and power schemes that were proceeding exactly on the basis set out in the strategy paper he mentioned have now collapsed thanks to the changes in the energy company obligation that his Department announced recently. Does he intend to take steps to use the resources he has mentioned, as set out in the community energy strategy, to help retrieve those schemes? If not, what message does he think will be sent on the future of the community energy strategy as a whole?

[Gregory Barker]

We certainly want to see more CHP, and we now have a dedicated resource in the Department supporting it. This comes back to the point I made earlier. Labour Members have to decide: are they going to stand up for endless subsidy or support us in driving down the cost of consumer bills? They cannot have it both ways.

[Rehman Chishti (Gillingham and Rainham) (Con)]

5. What steps he has taken to investigate the practice of energy companies having higher charges for non-direct debit customers.

[The Minister of State, Department of Energy and Climate Change (Gregory Barker)]

Energy companies are required under the terms of their licence to ensure that any differences in charges to consumers between different payment methods reflect only the differing costs to the supplier of that particular form of payment. Ofgem is looking at payment differentials, including higher charges for customers who choose not to pay by direct debit, in its competition assessment, which will be published this spring.

[Rehman Chishti]

About 1 million people do not have a bank account. What steps are the Government taking to help those who do not have a bank account and therefore find it impossible to pay by direct debit?

[Gregory Barker]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for raising this important issue. The coalition is absolutely committed to improving access to financial services for the vulnerable, particularly the fuel-poor. As recommended by the Parliamentary Commission on Banking Standards, the Government are seeking a voluntary industry agreement on renewed minimum standards for basic bank accounts. In addition, we have committed nearly £2 million over this year to develop the big energy saving network to ensure that the most vulnerable are getting the best deals they can.

[Nic Dakin (Scunthorpe) (Lab)]

Is not the sluggishness of Ofgem in tackling this discrimination yet further evidence that it is no longer fit for purpose?

[Gregory Barker]

No, it is not. This is an ongoing situation. Ofgem has looked at the issue, but it is not something that one can look at once and then discard. That may be Labour’s approach, but we are maintaining long-term vigilance to make sure that the consumer is looked after on an ongoing basis, month in, month out. It is very important that they will now have the additional benefit of a referral to the competition test.

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

Will my right hon. Friend look at some of the work of Ofgem, and how it allows price rises in the energy sector that are way above inflation whereas Ofwat takes a much tougher line as regards water customers?

[Gregory Barker]

I am aware of the comparison that my hon. Friend makes. However, the fact is that we have an extraordinary requirement for new investment thanks to the dearth of investment, and long-term investment, that we saw under 13 years of Labour. We are now playing catch-up. We require over £100 billion to go into our energy sector to secure our supplies, and I am afraid that that money has to come from somewhere.

[Damian Hinds (East Hampshire) (Con)]

6. What recent assessment he has made of the incidence of fuel poverty in rural off-gas grid areas; and what steps he is taking to tackle such fuel poverty.

[The Minister of State, Department of Energy and Climate Change (Gregory Barker)]

One in five of the fuel-poor does not have access to mains gas, and the majority of those households are in rural areas. We are determined to increase the delivery of energy efficiency improvements to the rural fuel-poor and to achieve far more for rural areas than previous schemes. We are actively taking forward a number of initiatives to deliver on that.

[Damian Hinds]

There are an estimated 10,000 off-grid homes in East Hampshire. I know that the Minister is personally committed to tackling rural fuel poverty where it appears, but what is being done on a practical basis, including on encouraging off-peak buying and ensuring that the code of practice is upheld?

[Gregory Barker]

I know this is an issue about which my hon. Friend feels particularly strongly, so I am happy to confirm to him that we are taking real steps. I will shortly be meeting the biggest seven energy suppliers to discuss improving the delivery of ECO measures, specifically to off-gas and rural homes. We are also consulting on increasing the number of rural low income homes eligible for ECO and incentivising the delivery of measures to off-gas grid, low income and vulnerable households. And—

[Mr Speaker]

It is always useful to have the abridged rather than the “War and Peace” version, but we are grateful to the Minister nevertheless.

[Mr Russell Brown (Dumfries and Galloway) (Lab)]

In many of the rural communities that are finding it so difficult because of fuel poverty, those who get the winter fuel payment would love to receive it earlier. Is the Minister prepared to meet a delegation of the all-party group on off-gas grid led by his hon. Friend the Member for Suffolk Coastal (Dr Coffey) to discuss this matter?

[Gregory Barker]

This has been raised with me and I understand the work that the all-party parliamentary group is doing on it. I am sympathetic to the point that is made, but there are practical problems and costs to doing as the hon. Gentleman suggests. But I am not unsympathetic to him and, of course, I would be happy to meet.

[Jonathan Reynolds (Stalybridge and Hyde) (Lab/Co-op)]

Over half the people in this country who are in fuel poverty live in solid wall properties, and a significant number of those are people living off-grid in rural communities. Again, the changes announced to ECO in the autumn statement mean that no more than 25,000 solid wall insulation jobs a year will be done, whereas a few years ago 80,000 jobs a year were being done. If the Minister really intends to tackle fuel poverty in off-grid areas, how can he do so without an adequate solid wall insulation industry?

[Gregory Barker]

I am afraid the hon. Gentleman is scaremongering slightly about the solid wall insulation industry. The figures he referred to are the de minimis; they are not the maximum. There are other ways in which we will be installing solid wall insulation, not least working with our cash-back. I am surprised he did not mention the cash-back, as we are now offering up to £4,000 for solid wall insulation under the roll-out of the green deal. This has been very warmly welcomed by the industry, including the National Insulation Association, so perhaps he could join us in supporting the supply chain and talking up this market, rather than acting as a little bit of an Eeyore.

[Eric Ollerenshaw (Lancaster and Fleetwood) (Con)]

7. What steps he is taking to promote investment in tidal energy.

[The Minister of State, Department of Energy and Climate Change (Gregory Barker)]

The coalition Government recognise the huge potential for tidal energy in the UK, and have put unprecedented resource and effort into supporting the UK marine energy sector as a whole. This week in Belfast I chaired a meeting of the Marine Energy Programme Board, which regularly brings together all the major companies and entrepreneurs in this exciting sector in which the UK leads the world.

[Eric Ollerenshaw]

Given the regularity, the predictability and, as we have seen lately, the strength of the tides round these islands, is it not about time we had something like a national policy statement on tidal energy to get investment going in what could be a very important sector?

[Gregory Barker]

I fully share my hon. Friend’s enthusiasm for tidal technology. It has huge potential in UK waters and my hon. Friend is right, as usual. A national policy statement is the next logical step for the industry, once it can demonstrate that it can deploy at scale commercially and economically, ideally above 50 MW. I am determined to work closely with the sector to make that happen.

[Mark Lazarowicz (Edinburgh North and Leith) (Lab/Co-op)]

I am sure that like me, the Minister would welcome a decision by the Scottish Government this week to grant £2 million to a tidal power global engineering hub in Edinburgh. Following the decisions about carbon capture and storage this week and earlier grants from DECC for wave energy in my constituency, does the Minister agree that the interests of the Scottish renewables industry are best served by the two Governments working together, with unlimited access to the UK-wide market, rather than any separation between the two countries?

[Gregory Barker]

Absolutely. Undoubtedly we are better together, and the fact that we are seeing increased co-operation between the UK marine energy park in Cornwall and the south-west and the Scottish marine energy park in the waters of the Pentland firth is a clear demonstration of how, together, we are much greater than the sum of our parts.

[Andrew George (St Ives) (LD)]

Following the Minister’s last reply, he will be aware that the UK is the global leader in wave energy, especially in relation to the wave park project off the north Cornwall coast. What can he say to ensure that we retain that position, bearing in mind that research and development in this field is measured in decades?

[Gregory Barker]

My hon. Friend is right. We are leading the global race in wave and tidal energy, and we are seeing increased inward investment into the UK by major international firms that want to be part of the development of the UK marine sector. The marine energy park in the south-west has a key part to play in that. I am delighted with the positive news about Wave Hub and the berths there, and we can look for more positive news as a result of the substantial resource that this Government have put into the sector.

[Graham Stringer (Blackley and Broughton) (Lab)]

8. What recent progress has been made in the roll-out of smart meters; and if he will make a statement.

[The Minister of State, Department of Energy and Climate Change (Michael Fallon)]

Good progress is being made. The first technical specifications have been confirmed and some energy suppliers are installing smart meters already, although most consumers will be offered smart meters from next year. We are on track to complete the national roll-out to 30 million premises by 2020.

[Graham Stringer]

Since the original Mott MacDonald assessment of smart meters, their cost has doubled. It is also estimated that half the meters already installed will have to be removed before 2020. Are we not heading for another IT disaster?

[Michael Fallon]

Absolutely not. I am a little surprised at the hon. Gentleman’s criticism, given that his colleague the right hon. Member for Wentworth and Dearne (John Healey) told this House on 23 April 2012 that our plan

“has a number of world-first features.”—[Official Report, 23 April 2012; Vol. 543, c. 782.]

[Charlotte Leslie (Bristol North West) (Con)]

9. What steps his Department is taking to support the city of Bristol in its role as European green capital 2015.

[The Minister of State, Department of Energy and Climate Change (Michael Fallon)]

I congratulate Bristol on being named European green capital 2015. Ministerial colleagues across Whitehall are working to explore what support we can provide to the city. The Minister for cities, the Minister of State, Cabinet Office, my right hon. Friend the Member for Tunbridge Wells (Greg Clark), will shortly be hosting a business round-table with the mayor of Bristol to discuss the role the Government can play.

[Charlotte Leslie]

Bristol is a hub of green technology and growth and thoroughly deserves its title. However, it is also a city that has very bad traffic congestion problems, leading to carbon emissions. Will the Minister lend his support—possibly working with other Departments —to make sure that the European green capital award provides the impetus for a railway revolution in Bristol and the Henbury loop line in my constituency?

[Michael Fallon]

My hon. Friend is a powerful champion of the Henbury loop. It is for the West of England Partnership to identify that particular rail scheme as a priority in its strategic economic plan. If it does so, it may be considered for funding under the local growth fund.

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

10. What steps he is taking to help households with their energy bills.

[The Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change (Mr Edward Davey)]

Energy bills are a real concern, so we are helping households with them in three ways: direct financial help, energy efficiency measures and increased competition. Direct financial help includes the warm home discount, the winter fuel allowance and cold weather payments. Energy efficiency measures are delivered in a variety of ways, but especially through the energy company obligation and the green deal. Our relentless focus on increasing competition ranges from Ofgem’s retail market review to our focus on new suppliers and making switching quicker and easier.

[Huw Irranca-Davies]

In July 2012, off-grid fuel was selling for as low as 56p per litre, but by December the price was as much as 65p per litre, so a pensioner couple with an average 1,800-litre tank of oil in their garden could have saved £150 if they had bought in July. To put it another way: their winter fuel payment was half wiped out by December. Will the Secretary of State bring forward early payment of winter fuel payments for pensioners on off-grid energy?

[Mr Davey]

We have been working extremely hard and the Minister of State, Department of Energy and Climate Change, my right hon. Friend the Member for Sevenoaks (Michael Fallon) in particular has been leading the work to promote the “buy early” campaign so that consumers can buy oil when it is available at a lower price. Moreover, we have a six-monthly round-table with the industry to make sure we are doing everything we can.

The hon. Gentleman asked about winter fuel payments and he will know that they are a matter for the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions. We are working with the Department for Work and Pensions and other Departments on the fuel poverty strategy, and that issue and others will be dealt with as part of those discussions.

[Alison McGovern (Wirral South) (Lab)]

11. What recent assessment he has made of rises in energy prices.

[The Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change (Mr Edward Davey)]

Energy prices have been rising in the UK and many other European countries for nearly a decade, largely driven by the rise in global gas prices, itself driven by forces such as high economic growth in Asia and higher demand for gas in Japan post-Fukushima.

The other main causes of the rise in energy prices seen in the UK have been the need to fund the investments needed in new generation, including low carbon, and new transmission and distribution networks, as old power stations and networks need replacing. Although we cannot control price pressures from global markets, and although we have to make vital investments to keep the lights on, we are doing everything we can to help people and businesses struggling with this decade of energy price rises.

[Alison McGovern]

Further to the exchanges earlier in this sitting, I am still a little confused about the Government’s position. Will the Secretary of State support Labour’s plan to break the dominance of the big six and require them to sell into a pool, which could have a real effect on energy prices?

[Mr Davey]

The hon. Lady is right to say that there are issues, because the previous Government created the big six. We have acted from day one to put pressure on them.

On the hon. Lady’s last point about selling into a pool, let me explain the Labour party’s policy, because it is already out of date. Because of measures that we and Ofgem have taken, next-day trading has increased dramatically to more than 50% of electricity. That is equivalent to a pool. From talking to independent generators competing with the big six, we know that they are not interested in increasing that more; they are interested in forward markets, because that provides greater liquidity to enable them to compete. That is what Ofgem announced this week. I am afraid that Labour, as always, is completely behind the curve.

[Laura Sandys (South Thanet) (Con)]

On reducing energy prices further, Ofgem estimates that about £1 billion could be saved by reducing peak energy. What sort of strategies of demand-side response are the Government looking at?

[Mr Davey]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right to raise that issue, because there are some really cost-effective and good wins to be had. That is why we introduced the electricity demand reduction strategy in the Energy Act 2013. We will have a pilot—we expect it to go forward later this year—which will be the first ever electricity demand reduction project in this country.

[Jeremy Lefroy (Stafford) (Con)]

12. What support his Department is giving to off-grid homes to reduce their fuel bills.

[The Minister of State, Department of Energy and Climate Change (Michael Fallon)]

This winter’s “Buy oil early” campaign, co-ordinated by my Department, was launched by the industry in September. We have worked with industry to provide consumer guidance on how to form oil buying clubs, which allow savings through bulk buying. I will review its progress at the next ministerial round table in May. The launch of the domestic renewable heat incentive this spring will also provide payments to promote a switch to renewable forms of home heating.

[Jeremy Lefroy]

I very much welcome what my right hon. Friend says. As several colleagues have already mentioned this morning, the cost of heating oil for off-grid homes is a major concern. Will he give us more details of the domestic renewable heat incentive scheme, particularly in respect of domestic biomass boilers?

[Michael Fallon]

The domestic renewable heat incentive scheme is designed to drive forward the uptake of renewable heat technologies, such as biomass boilers. We published details of that scheme last July, and we intend it to be open for applications this spring. It is targeted at, but not limited to, homes that are off the gas grid, because those without mains gas have the most potential to save on fuel bills and to decrease their carbon emissions.

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

Surely one of the biggest problems for off-grid homes is that they are not even entitled to the protection of the fairly weak regulator, Ofgem. Regardless of who created what, will the Minister please tell us why oil customers are not entitled to this most basic of regulatory protections?

[Michael Fallon]

The new code that we have agreed with the industry gives those customers more protection than they have had in the past. We are looking at the operation of the code this winter, and we will review how effective it has been when we hold the next ministerial round table in May.

[Martin Vickers (Cleethorpes) (Con)]

13. What steps he is taking to ensure that energy suppliers check the accuracy of meters.

[The Minister of State, Department of Energy and Climate Change (Michael Fallon)]

Energy suppliers are required to investigate if a customer suspects that their energy meter is not recording consumption accurately. Under Ofgem’s standards of conduct, that must be carried out in an honest, transparent and professional manner. If necessary, a consumer can request that the meter be independently tested by a meter examiner appointed by the National Measurement Office.

[Martin Vickers]

What the Minister has outlined does not appear to have happened in the case of a customer working in my constituency to whom npower recently agreed to give a rebate of £2,548. He is a professional man who is well able to go through the time-consuming process and to afford the £96 fee he had to pay, but the process would have been a challenge for a more vulnerable customer. To add insult to injury, three months after the rebate was agreed, he still has not received his refund. What can be done to improve this unacceptable situation?

[Michael Fallon]

That is a quite unacceptable delay. Any charge should be reimbursed if the meter is found to have been inaccurate. I will take up the matter with the company and it needs to resolve it rapidly.

[Mike Thornton (Eastleigh) (LD)]

14. What recent assessment he has made of the effects of climate change on the frequency of extreme weather events.

[The Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change (Mr Edward Davey)]

The science is clear: we are already seeing some effects of man-made climate change and the future threat from climate change is great, as my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister confirmed in the House yesterday.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change published its fifth assessment last September, which covered the relationship between climate change and extreme weather events. It stated:

“Extreme precipitation events over most of the mid-latitude land masses and over wet tropical regions will very likely become more intense and more frequent by the end of this century”.

It also stated:

“It is very likely that heat waves will occur with a higher frequency and duration.”

With respect to recent events, the UK Met Office’s chief scientist said that

“all the evidence suggests there is a link to climate change”.

[Mike Thornton]

I welcome that response. It seems that extreme weather events are increasingly becoming the norm. Tomorrow, I am hosting a Green Alliance event in Eastleigh to discuss with local businesses, community groups and service providers how climate change will affect our area. Does the Secretary of State agree that such inclusive local approaches are as vital as international agreement?

[Mr Davey]

I do agree with that. My hon. Friend and Eastleigh borough council are leaders in the bottom-up approach. He will know that there are two areas that we need to tackle. First, local communities and individuals must reduce their carbon emissions to stop climate change getting worse. Secondly, communities must work together to make people’s homes and communities much more resilient to the climate change that has already happened.

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

21. Many of us have welcomed the Prime Minister’s acknowledgement yesterday that climate change is one of the greatest threats that we face. Will the Government follow through on the logic of that position, and will the Secretary of State now rule out categorically any weakening of the fourth carbon budget?

[Mr Davey]

The fourth carbon budget review is under way. I will not prejudge that, and the hon. Lady should not expect me to do so. I will say that this Government are leading the international climate change debate in Europe. The 2030 energy and climate change targets, which will be discussed at the European Council in March, are critical in tackling climate change. She will know that we have to work internationally to do that. This Government and the UK have been leading that debate.

[Caroline Flint (Don Valley) (Lab)]

May I congratulate the Secretary of State and his wife, Emily, on the birth of their daughter? I commend him for taking paternity leave, although I know only too well that he will never have been far from the duties of his office.

The Secretary of State has criticised his Conservative coalition partners for undermining the consensus on climate change. Given that the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs said that people should

“just accept that the climate has been changing for centuries”

and that the Minister of State, Department of Energy and Climate Change, the right hon. Member for Sevenoaks (Michael Fallon) said that he has

“not had time to get into the…climate change debate”,

will the Secretary of State tell us whether it was them that he had in mind? Are his comments not a bit rich, given that he voted against setting a decarbonisation target?

[Mr Davey]

I thank the right hon. Lady for her warm comments about the birth of our daughter. May I report to the House that mother and baby are doing well? It is nice to come back to Parliament for a rest.

When I made those comments, I was not talking about my ministerial colleagues; I was talking about some voices on the Conservative Benches, particularly in the other place, who question the science of climate change, and I think that is very unhelpful. The right hon. Lady talks about a decarbonisation target, but it was this Government who brought forward legislation on a decarbonisation target. The Labour party did not have one in its manifesto and neither did the Green party. We took the policy forward and it is in the Energy Act 2013.

[Bob Blackman (Harrow East) (Con)]

15. What steps he has taken to increase competition in the energy market.

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

19. What steps he is taking to improve competition in energy markets.

[The Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change (Mr Edward Davey)]

We have taken a large number of steps to increase competition in the energy market after the consolidation under the last Government that created the big six. We have deregulated the market to encourage the entry of smaller suppliers and more than 20 independents are now competing with the big six on retail energy. We have supported Ofgem in its reforms of bills and tariffs to make them easier and simpler, including through the ending of so-called dead tariffs. We have also supported Ofgem’s reform of the wholesale electricity market which, as has been confirmed this week, will be introduced on 31 March this year. We are also making it easier and quicker to switch.

[Bob Blackman]

On privatisation, some 27 companies were involved in the generation, supply and distribution of electricity, and of course gas. The market was set up to allow new entrants, but under Labour it shrunk to the big six. What action will my right hon. Friend take to allow new entrants to all three aspects of the market?

[Mr Davey]

My hon. Friend is right that we saw consolidation in the energy market under the previous Government, which is when the big six were created. We have acted since day one through deregulation, which has enabled more independent suppliers to come to the market, and through making it easier to switch to the simpler and easier tariffs and bills that Ofgem has promoted. This week’s announcement in the wholesale market will see much greater transparency in forward markets, which will reduce barriers to entry to take on the electricity generation side of the big six.

[Mr Speaker]

Thomas Docherty: not here. I do not know what is going on; the fellow was here earlier and he has now beetled out of the Chamber. How very unfortunate. I call Tessa Munt.

[Tessa Munt (Wells) (LD)]

Given the complaints figures uncovered by Which? recently, which showed that the big six received more than 5.5 million complaints in 2013 alone, does the Secretary of State think the time has come to have a full overhaul of the broken energy market, starting with a full competition inquiry to increase competition after the market assessment has been completed?

[Mr Davey]

It would be wrong of me to anticipate what the annual competition assessment will conclude. We provided evidence for that, which was the right thing to do, but it is for that independent competition authority to decide what the problem is—that is why we have asked it to do it. It is doing detailed work, and when it has analysed the problem, it will decide what remedies are required.

[Caroline Flint (Don Valley) (Lab)]

The Secretary of State asserted in answer to an oral question on 16 January that Labour’s proposals to introduce a ring fence between generation and supply would cause “real problems” and push up prices. The Procedure Committee has ruled that the Secretary of State should provide me with evidence for that claim by 26 February, which was yesterday. Can he tell me today what the evidence says and whether he will publish it?

[Mr Davey]

First, the annual competition assessment will, of course, look at that issue in detail. As the right hon. Lady will know if she has read the details of Ofgem’s wholesale market reforms, for example, there is a lot of work to suggest that it is not at all clear that vertical integration is bad for consumers; it may be in some cases, but it will not be in others. The theory behind this is pretty clear: vertical integration was adopted so that people could hedge the risks between generation and supply. That can lower the cost of capital and lower prices for consumers.

[Caroline Flint]

The Secretary of State has asserted his own view in the House and in the media before Ofgem has even made its assessment, so I think my question stands. Even Government Members think that the Secretary of State is wrong. The hon. Member for Harlow (Robert Halfon) wrote on “ConservativeHome” on 18 February that if companies had separate licences for generation and supply, as Labour has proposed, it would

“shine a light in some of the murky areas”

of the energy market. Apart from some of the big six, can the Secretary of State name a single organisation that opposes a ring fence, and will he confirm that he is ruling out the introduction of a ring fence while he is Secretary of State?

[Mr Davey]

No, I will not do that for the simple reason that we have asked the independent competition authorities to look at the evidence. Unlike the right hon. Lady, I am not prejudging the outcome of independent competition regulators. We provide the evidence and we allow independent authorities to make judgments on that. It is quite odd that the Labour party is now turning its back on independent competition authorities.

[Mr Mike Weir (Angus) (SNP)]

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

[The Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change (Mr Edward Davey)]

Since Energy questions in January we have published Britain’s first ever community energy strategy, which is widely welcomed by the sector. This week we published a review by Sir Ian Wood into our oil industry. I have accepted Sir Ian’s recommendations, and we intend to fast-track his proposals. I am grateful to Sir Ian and his team for their work, which we believe is a game-changer in the management of our offshore oil and gas assets. Finally, we announced a second carbon capture and storage project this week—the world’s first ever commercial-scale gas CCS project—and CCS will play a key part in our decarbonisation strategy.

[Mr Weir]

The CCS project is indeed most welcome; it is a pity it did not get here some years ago. The Secretary of State mentioned the fuel poverty strategy currently under preparation. I appreciate that the winter fuel allowance is for the Department for Work and Pensions, but given the impact it could have on pensioners in rural areas will he press for action to be taken to allow the early payment of the winter fuel allowance?

[Mr Davey]

I say to the hon. Gentleman what I said to the previous questioner who raised this. We are looking at all these matters and we are working across Government—with the Department for Work and Pensions, the Department for Communities and Local Government, the Treasury and the Department of Health—on our fuel strategy, because it touches on all areas of government: benefits, health services, flu jabs and a whole range of issues that need to be looked at. I am not going to prejudge the publication of that strategy.

[Nigel Adams (Selby and Ainsty) (Con)]

T3. The Secretary of State stated in the Yorkshire Post on 14 February that he expects Eggborough power station to remain open, even if it does not obtain his support for converting from coal to biomass. Will he explain his Department’s detailed analysis, specific to Eggborough, that leads to that conclusion? I appreciate he might not be able to do that in the time allowed here, so will he—not just his officials—meet me and representatives from Eggborough to discuss that detailed analysis as a matter of urgency?

[The Minister of State, Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (Michael Fallon)]

My hon. Friend is a consistent champion of Eggborough and its proposed conversion. He will know that I have already met him and representatives from the company to discuss the proposal for converting to biomass. We received a large number of investment projects under the intermediate regime. It was not possible, because of a limited budget, to support them all through the taxpayer, but he will know that Eggborough has a number of other options and routes to consider.

[Julie Elliott (Sunderland Central) (Lab)]

I am very pleased that the matter of Eggborough has been raised. The loss of 850 jobs at Eggborough, with thousands more in the supply chain, is very worrying. What steps is the Minister taking to ensure that his Government’s policies create jobs, not cost jobs, and safeguard, rather than threaten, our energy security?

[Michael Fallon]

The jobs have not yet been lost at Eggborough, which is still producing power. A large number of investment projects came forward under our intermediate regimes involving hundreds of other jobs. It was not possible, within a limited budget, to accommodate every single investment project. Eggborough has been given its provisional ranking and it has other alternatives, such as applying for a contract for difference under the enduring regime.

[Iain Stewart (Milton Keynes South) (Con)]

T5. The Minister will recall visiting my constituency a couple of years ago to look at a green deal project to make houses on the Lakes estate more energy efficient. Will he update me on how many families were able to benefit from the scheme?

[The Minister of State, Department of Energy and Climate Change (Gregory Barker)]

I cannot give my hon. Friend the figure off the top of my head, but what I saw in his constituency, and what he has championed, is at the forefront of what we want to see: energy efficiency measures that genuinely improve not just the fabric of the building but the community, living standards and the comfort of people there—as well as driving down energy bills.

[Graham Stringer (Blackley and Broughton) (Lab)]

T2. The Minister of State previously showed faux concern for communities that are off gas grid. Is not the implication of the Government’s energy policy that many, many more communities will be without gas supply if gas supplies are switched off when the energy industry is electrified? When will he tell those communities that they will no longer be able to have gas?

[Mr Davey]

I do not recognise the hon. Gentleman’s analysis. The idea that the Department has taken the decision to mandate the end of the gas network is simply not true.

[Jeremy Lefroy (Stafford) (Con)]

T6. Later this morning I will take part in a meeting to assess the progress and way forward on implementation of carbon capture and storage. Alstom, from my constituency, will be taking part. Will my right hon. Friend please update the House on how the UK is leading the world in carbon capture and storage technologies?

[Mr Davey]

Yes. The UK is extremely well placed to take forward critical low carbon technology. We have all the experience from the oil and gas offshore industry in the North sea. The North sea has some of the largest reserves of carbon dioxide in Europe, and our universities and companies have some of the greatest engineers and scientists who are able to take forward this incredibly low carbon opportunity for the world.

[Sheila Gilmore (Edinburgh East) (Lab)]

T4. The poorest consumers are among those who use prepayment meters. What steps are the Government taking to ensure that they are not charged more than other customers?

[Gregory Barker]

We take this issue very seriously. We want to ensure that every payment method reflects the cost fairly, and that there is no gaming between the different methods. The issue will form part of our competition test, and we are also working on it closely with Ofgem.

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

T7. CNG is a north Yorkshire success story, serving gas customers, small businesses and small corporations, but it is anxious about entering the domestic market because of the burden of regulation, compliance costs and risk costs. Can we do any more to encourage companies such as CNG to enter the domestic gas market?

[Mr Davey]

I am interested to hear about the company in my hon. Friend’s constituency. If he writes to me giving the details, we shall be able to look into the issue. He may also wish to send those details to the independent authorities which are conducting the competition assessment. We have deregulated the energy markets to reduce barriers to entry to the market, but we want to do more.

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

Will the Secretary of State join me in welcoming the launch today of the fourth GLOBE international climate legislation study, which shows how many more national Governments are taking urgent action to deal with climate change? Given the importance of the climate change debate, will he return to the issue of the review of the fourth carbon budget? Will he recognise that if the United Kingdom and Europe want to continue to take a leading role in climate change negotiations, it makes no sense to have that review now?

[Mr Davey]

I do welcome the publication of the climate legislation study. The United Kingdom, including many parliamentarians throughout the House, has played a leading role in encouraging other countries to enact climate change legislation, and it is encouraging to see how many have responded. I pay tribute to the Members involved, particularly the hon. Member for Brent North (Barry Gardiner).

I cannot add anything to the answer I gave earlier about the fourth carbon budget review, which is currently under way. When we published the fourth carbon budget, it was decided that a review would take place at this time, and I cannot prejudice its outcome.

[David Rutley (Macclesfield) (Con)]

T8. How quickly will my right hon. Friend act on the important findings of the Wood review?

[Mr Davey]

We have already set up an implementation group in the Department, because Sir Ian Wood published an interim report and we were able to study it and make preparations. I asked Sir Ian to chair an interim advisory panel to help us with our work, and he has agreed to do so. We are also keen to introduce legislation during the next Session of Parliament to implement his ideas about new powers for the proposed new regulator.

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

As the Secretary of State will recall, I told the House back in November 2013 that the npower call centre in Thornaby was placing 500 jobs in jeopardy through its proposal to close the centre and relocate on its existing Sunderland site. We now know that more than 400 members of staff have opted for voluntary redundancy because npower’s promises of a relocation package and transport have not come to fruition. What conversations has the Secretary of State had with his colleagues in the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills with a view to mitigating the problems of the Thornaby workers?

[Mr Davey]

I know that BIS considers such issues very seriously, and we discuss them a great deal across Government. We want to ensure that support is provided in the event of large-scale redundancies, whether voluntary or compulsory. I cannot say any more about the specific case that the hon. Gentleman has raised, but I will ask my officials to look into it.

[Andrew Jones (Harrogate and Knaresborough) (Con)]

Many communities in my constituency will be interested in the community energy initiative. How can they find out more in order to promote their local generating ideas?

[Gregory Barker]

Our Community Energy online guide is a great starter tool, opening up the world of exciting community energy projects which are increasing daily under this coalition Government.

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

The German Chancellor is visiting Parliament today. May I invite the Secretary of State to hold talks with her about the support that her Government give to energy-intensive industries in Germany? I am sure that that support is welcomed by those industries, but it makes it increasingly difficult for energy-intensive industries in our country, such as the steel industry, to compete.

[Michael Fallon]

We are already paying emission trading system compensation—some £28 million so far—to 53 companies, including eight steel companies, nine chemical companies and 28 paper companies. I discussed a carbon price floor compensation scheme with Vice-President Almunia in Brussels last week, and I hope that that too will be approved next month.

[Jason McCartney (Colne Valley) (Con)]

I recently met 90-year-old Norah at the Phoenix centre in Holmfirth to learn about the energy bill revolution. Does my right hon. Friend agree, however, that one of the best ways of reducing energy bills for those facing fuel poverty is to insulate their homes?

[Michael Fallon]

I agree completely that energy efficiency measures are one of the best ways of providing long-term sustainable support to the fuel-poor. I completely understand and appreciate the motives behind the energy bill revolution, although hypothecation itself may not always be the most effective way of managing public expenditure.

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

What action is the Secretary of State taking to ensure that the new fuel poverty target will address the specific needs of people affected by severe and devastating rare conditions such as muscular dystrophy and neuromuscular conditions?

[Mr Davey]

I am grateful to the hon. Lady for the question, and that is one of the reasons why, in developing the fuel poverty strategy, we are working across Government. She is right to say some health conditions may require people to be at home for longer, and they may not be of pensionable age and getting the winter fuel allowance. I hope we can look at that issue during the finalisation of the fuel poverty strategy.

[Neil Carmichael (Stroud) (Con)]

With Angela Merkel’s forthcoming speech to both Houses of Parliament in mind, does the Secretary of State agree that it would be very wise and sensible to incorporate energy more thoroughly into the single market, and what steps is he taking to bring that about?

[Michael Fallon]

I discussed these issues with the German Government in Berlin yesterday and I agree with my hon. Friend that completing the internal market, with more interconnection and work on network codes and sharing, is part of the answer to making Europe more self-sufficient in its own energy and in reducing our dependence on fluctuating wholesale costs.

[Barry Gardiner (Brent North) (Lab)]

I draw attention to my entry in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests—and, indeed, also in The Mail on Sunday. The Secretary of State was good enough to welcome the GLOBE conference today in Washington and the fourth legislative study. Will he also welcome the forest legislators initiative that is going alongside that, which is looking into REDD-plus and the expansion of that work in Latin America and Africa in particular?

[Mr Davey]

First, may I pay tribute to the hon. Gentleman for the work he does on forestry and the contribution he has made? I am not aware of the details of the legislative initiative he mentions, but it does sound very sensible. This Government have done a huge amount to support efforts to tackle deforestation in Latin America and elsewhere and I will certainly take note of what he said.

[Tessa Munt (Wells) (LD)]

Under the current business rates arrangements, businesses have very little incentive to increase energy efficiency as investing in premises can lead to higher business rates. Did the Secretary of State see last week’s British Retail Consortium proposals for modernising business rates, suggesting a scheme whereby energy efficiency and improvements are rewarded with lower business rates, rather than penalised? Will he discuss these proposals with his colleagues in government?

[Mr Davey]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for her question. I did note those proposals and I thought they were very interesting. It would be unwise of me to prejudge the work that will be done on them in other Departments, including the Treasury, but the Minister of State, my right hon. Friend the Member for Sevenoaks (Michael Fallon), has a meeting later today to discuss the proposals with business representatives.

Business of the House

Thursday 27th February 2014 Commons Chamber

10:33

[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 will be as follows:

Monday 3 March—Estimates day (2nd allotted day). There will be a debate on managing flood risk, followed by a debate on Government levies on energy bills. Further details will be given in the Official Report.

[The details are as follows: Third Report from the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee on Managing Flood Risk, HC 330, and the Government response, HC 706; Eighth Report from the Energy and Climate Change Committee, on the Levy Control Framework: Parliamentary oversight of the Government levies on energy bills, HC 872.]

Tuesday 4 March—Estimates day (3rd allotted day). There will be a debate on defence and cyber-security, followed by a debate on the private rented sector. Further details will be given in the Official Report.

[The details are as follows: Sixth Report from the Defence Committee, Session 2012-13, on Defence and Cyber-Security, HC 106, and the Government response, HC 719; First Report from the Communities and Local Government Committee, on the Private Rented Sector, HC 50, and the Government response, Cm 8730.]

At 7pm the House will be asked to agree all outstanding estimates.

Wednesday 5 March—Proceedings on the Supply and Appropriation (Anticipations and Adjustments) Bill, followed by a general debate on the Francis report: one year on.

Thursday 6 March—Statement on the publication of the ninth report from the Defence Committee on Future Army 2020, followed by debate on a motion relating to the security situation of women in Afghanistan, followed by a general debate on Welsh affairs. The Select Committee statement and the subjects for both debates were determined by the Backbench Business Committee.

Friday 7 March—The House will not be sitting.

The provisional business for the week commencing 10 March will include:

Monday 10 March—Remaining stages of the Care Bill [Lords] (Day 1).

Tuesday 11 March—Conclusion of the remaining stages of the Care Bill [Lords].

Wednesday 12 March—Remaining stages of the Intellectual Property Bill [Lords], followed by, if necessary, consideration of Lords amendments.

Thursday 13 March—Business to be nominated by the Backbench Business Committee.

Friday 14 March—The House will not be sitting.

I should also like to inform the House that the business in Westminster Hall for 6 and 10 March will be:

Thursday 6 March—A general debate on the contribution of women to the economy.

Monday 10 March—A general debate on an e-petition relating to stopping female genital mutilation in the UK.

[Ms Eagle]

I thank the Leader of the House for announcing the business. We have all been watching the dramatic scenes unfolding in Ukraine and, as the new Cabinet is installed in Kiev ahead of May’s presidential elections, there are worrying reports of Russian troop movements on the border and ongoing signs of volatility, not least in Crimea. Will the Leader of the House give us his assurance that the House will be kept up to date with the situation as it unfolds over the coming weeks?

Next week, we will discuss estimates and focus on the particular issues chosen by the Liaison Committee. Does the Leader of the House agree that the process for dealing with estimates is arcane, obtuse and in need of reform? Will he support my call for new forms of effective financial scrutiny for the House?

Next Saturday is international women’s day. Will the Leader of the House tell us how he plans to mark the occasion? Judging by the Government’s record at the moment, I do not think we can expect too much. We have had the notorious all-male Front Bench, and we have learned that the Tory manifesto will be written by five men who went to Eton and another man who went to St Paul’s. And the Defence Secretary is unable to tell the difference between two women in the shadow Cabinet—and it was not me and my sister.

I am sure that everyone will wish to welcome the German Chancellor’s visit to Parliament today. She is certainly getting better treatment than the French President did; he was taken to a pub near the airstrip. There are many on the Tory Back Benches who will be especially interested in what the German Chancellor will say on the question of Britain’s relationship with the European Union. Given that the Leader of the House is a front-runner in the betting relating to the EU commissioner role that is about to become vacant, I am sure that he will take his own special interest too.

Last year, the Prime Minister was forced by his Eurosceptic Back Benchers to announce that he was going to hold an in/out referendum in 2017. Last month, however, the French President dismissed that arbitrary timetable for reforming Europe, telling us that treaty change was “not urgent” and “not a priority”. On Sunday, the Foreign Secretary had to admit that no negotiations were currently under way on an EU treaty. Is it not the reality that the Prime Minister is powerless to make good on his grand, impossible promises to the growing band of Eurosceptics in his own party?

This week, Conservative central office launched an outlandish rebranding exercise, as the chairman of the party attempted to claim that it was now “the workers’ party”. So it is out with the huskies and the hoodies and in with the Bullingdon Bolsheviks. They have claimed to be the most family-friendly Government ever. They have also claimed to be the greenest Government ever and the most transparent Government ever, but their claim to be the workers’ party has to be the most laughable yet. Real wages are down by an average of £1,600 a year, record numbers of people are working fewer hours than they would like, millionaire hedge-fund donors are busy writing policies to slash rights at work and the Work and Pensions Secretary spent the hours before this latest rebrand defending zero-hours contracts. Will the Leader of the House arrange for a debate in Government time on this latest Conservative mis-selling scandal?

The National Audit Office has this morning published a report on the Government’s supposed reorganisation of disability benefits. The report finds that the new personal independence payments will cost three and a half times as much to administer and double the amount of time to process as the disability living allowance.

This Government’s incompetence is causing real hurt and distress to disabled people. This week we learned that the Department for Work and Pensions has stopped employment and support allowance reassessments because it cannot cope with the volume, and it did not even have the guts to announce it to the House. The disastrous introduction of universal credit stumbles from bad to worse. Today, the Work and Pensions Secretary is trying to justify, in a written ministerial statement, why we are set to have 400,000 more children in poverty by the next election. After the criticisms made by dozens of bishops last week, it seems that even divine intervention cannot prevent the incompetence at the DWP. Will the Leader of the House give us a debate, in Government time, on the growing chaos at the Department?

The Government tell us that they have increased flood defence spending when the national statisticians say they have not. They have an Environment Secretary who does not believe in climate change and a Deputy Prime Minister who thinks that he has a right to be in Government for ever. I think this Government might be living in a parallel universe.

[Mr Lansley]

I am grateful to the shadow Leader of the House for her words. I entirely agree with her first point. This House has viewed the events in Ukraine with a degree of shock. None the less, it must be for the people of Ukraine to determine their future, and to do so, hopefully, in a democratic and peaceful way. Everyone else must give what support they can and should, while fully respecting the territorial integrity of the country. The Foreign Secretary made a statement to the House on Monday, and he will continue to update the House as and when necessary.

On the issue of financial scrutiny, while estimates days give us an opportunity to debate issues of importance that the Liaison Committee has identified from the estimates to be debated, this is less about the structure of estimates days and more about the work of Select Committees. As a former member of the Health Committee, I recall that there was, and there continues to be, an annual inquiry by the Select Committee into the expenditure of its Department. I do not know whether that is replicated elsewhere. As the hon. Lady will know from the work being done by the Public Accounts Commission, the future strategy of the National Audit Office prioritises the availability of its support to Select Committees to undertake work relating to the expenditure of Departments. As I have made clear at this Dispatch Box, we in the Government welcome that financial scrutiny, as we continue to strive to deliver the greatest possible effectiveness from public expenditure.

I look forward to international women’s day at the end of next week and its theme of inspiring change. As I announced in the business statement, the House will have opportunities to debate a range of issues of importance to women and to all of us, and I look forward to taking part and listening to those debates and to celebrating the role of women not only in inspiring change but in leading in the economy. We have more women in employment than ever before and more women establishing jobs. Like the Prime Minister, I particularly value women who set up businesses and are entrepreneurs and create jobs in our economy.

Talking of enterprising and impressive women, we very much welcome Chancellor Merkel here to Parliament later this morning. I look forward to hearing her speak to the two Houses of Parliament, especially about how our two countries together are working in partnership to deliver a more complete single market, greater competition and more free trade across the world. Those are things that we all value, and that are absolutely necessary not only to us but to the eurozone countries and the European Union as a whole.

The Prime Minister and the Foreign Secretary have made it perfectly clear that, following the review of the balance of competences, it is the Prime Minister who, as leader of a party, will be setting out what he is seeking to achieve through the process of renegotiation leading to a referendum in this country. That is something for him to do as leader of the party and as current Prime Minister, but not on behalf of the Government, as neither the renegotiation nor the referendum are the policy of the coalition Government as a whole; they are the policy of the Conservative party and will be presented in that context.

The idea of the Conservative party as the party for workers in this country is not new—it is important but it is not new; I recall that in 1987 more trade unionists voted for the Conservative party than voted for the Labour party. I suspect that this week, at the end of which the Labour party will get together with the trade union bosses, many trade union members and many workers in this country who are not trade unionists will recognise that the Conservative party has their interests at heart. It is a party that is cutting their taxes, creating jobs and giving them a sense of security for the future. That is very important, because it is the Labour party that is in denial about all this. It is in denial about the deficit; the shadow Chancellor, in particular, simply will not accept that the Labour Government got anything wrong before the last election. I have to say in all kindness to the Labour party that we learnt painfully that if you do not understand why you lost, you stand no chance of winning.

[Mark Pritchard (The Wrekin) (Con)]

As we look forward to international women’s day on Saturday, may we have a debate on encouraging more women into chemistry, given that two leaders of the free world have previously been research chemists—the late, great Baroness Thatcher and, of course, our guest today in Parliament, Chancellor Angela Merkel?

[Mr Lansley]

My hon. Friend makes a very good point. I am always in awe of those who are very good at chemistry, having achieved what in those days was described as a grade 9 in O-level chemistry. Fortunately, the Secretary of State for Education is planning for a grade 9 in O-levels to represent success, but in my case it was abject failure and so I am in awe of those who have abilities in chemistry. Those who excel in chemistry often have exactly the kind of analytical intellect that enables them to succeed in many other walks of life.

[Kelvin Hopkins (Luton North) (Lab)]

Since the privatisation of the railway industry there has been an explosion of capital works costs, both in track renewals and maintenance. Debt in the industry is reaching crisis proportions, and as and when interest rates begin to rise that crisis will surely be precipitated. May we have a full and urgent debate on the finances of the railway industry?

[Mr Lansley]

I cannot offer an immediate debate, but the hon. Gentleman will know that the House has often recently had occasion to ask questions about the rail industry and, in particular, to note the scale of the Network Rail investment in prospect. We are talking about a £38 billion investment, which is the largest rail investment in this country since the Victorian era. It is not just about High Speed 2—that is not even the largest part of it; there are schemes across the whole country, in response to the fact that the number of passengers on the railways has more than doubled since privatisation.

[Pauline Latham (Mid Derbyshire) (Con)]

Bombardier’s recent contract award for Crossrail will employ 30 graduates and take on 80 apprentices from around the Derby area. With next week being national apprenticeship week and with youth unemployment falling, will the Leader of the House facilitate a debate on what further steps this Government are taking to tackle youth unemployment?

[Mr Lansley]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for that, as she is absolutely right. There is some extremely good news in her constituency and neighbouring constituencies, and I am glad she is in a position to highlight that in the House. We are never going to be complacent about the number of young people who are not entering employment. That is why we are putting so much effort into apprenticeships, with 1.6 million apprenticeships planned during this Parliament, which is a significant increase. That will make a very big difference to young people in accessing the jobs that are coming through. Encouragingly, at the same time as we have record numbers of people in employment, we also have record numbers of vacancies, so people can be very optimistic about their prospects.

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

Council tax rises are one factor in the cost of living crisis, so may we have a debate on how the coalition’s funding distribution is giving the biggest cuts to the most disadvantaged communities and is deliberately calculated so that no matter what efficiencies are found by councils such as Hull’s, they are still having to increase council taxes and cut local services too?

[Mr Lansley]

I am surprised that the hon. Lady should raise that issue because at the moment councils across the country are taking difficult decisions while demonstrating that they can sustain, and in some cases improve, the public’s experience of local government services at the same time as they freeze the council tax. This complaint about council tax rises comes from a party which when in government saw council tax double, as I know from my own constituency. Under this Government, the resources being provided and the incentives to freeze council tax mean that hard-pressed home owners and those paying council tax are finding that their local government services are not costing them a great deal more, as they did in the past.

[Mr Robert Syms (Poole) (Con)]

I do not like to be critical of the Government, but we have a lot of statements about things that have either gone wrong or allegedly gone wrong, and we do not have enough statements about all the very good things that are going right. This coalition Government are doing a fantastic job, many things are going right in the economy, and those on the Front Bench should do far more to boost this country and to put the optimistic case forward.

[Mr Lansley]

I accept my hon. Friend’s chastisement. I will encourage my colleagues to make more statements of the character that he describes, but I point him towards the Budget statement on 19 March, which I know will be an opportunity to present to the House many of the things that he and I recognise, and the House should recognise, have been a success under this coalition Government.

[Jim Sheridan (Paisley and Renfrewshire North) (Lab)]

Will the Leader of the House arrange for the appropriate Minister to make a statement on the long-term future of the Gangmasters Licensing Authority and, in particular, on whether there is any intention to extend its remit into other sectors, such as construction?

[Mr Lansley]

I will of course discuss that matter with my hon. Friends. I do not know whether there is any plan of the kind that the hon. Gentleman describes. However, I will discuss the matter with them and see if they can not only reply to him but inform the House, as he requests.

[Tessa Munt (Wells) (LD)]

May we have a debate on recent reports by Global Witness about Congolese conflict gold being traded through Dubai and then into Switzerland, where it goes into the European supply chain? Will the Leader of the House speak to his colleagues in the Government to ensure that the UK supply chains are robust and not vulnerable to conflict gold?

[Mr Lansley]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for that question. I will of course have that conversation with my hon. Friends at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, because we always want to do whatever we possibly can to prevent such resources—conflict gold, conflict diamonds and the exploitation of mineral wealth—from feeding conflicts that are doing such immense harm to the people of those countries from which those resources come.

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

Recently I received an answer from the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills about the number of overseas territory students studying in the United Kingdom. The answer refers to “the Falklands (Malvinas).” Can we have a statement from the Government as to whether or not there is a change of policy towards Britain’s overseas territory?

[Mr Lansley]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for that question—[Interruption.] The hon. Gentleman, I mean. I spend so much time talking to him that it just seems like he is an hon. Friend.

I hope the hon. Gentleman is aware there is no change in the Government’s position where this matter is concerned. It is the Falklands, it continues to be the Falklands and its constitutional status will remain the same.

[Philip Davies (Shipley) (Con)]

May we have a debate on the proper role of Governments and shareholders in the setting of pay and bonuses in the private sector? We seem to be in a ridiculous situation where the Government want to lecture profitable companies in which they have no shareholding about their pay and bonuses, and yet they equally appear to be sitting idly by and allowing a company in which they are a majority shareholder to pay more than £500 million of bonuses, despite the fact that the company is costing the taxpayer more than £8 billion a year?

[Mr Lansley]

I will, of course, talk to my hon. Friends at the Business, Innovation and Skills Department. However, I have to say to my hon. Friend that I do not think we are lecturing companies. We are being clear about what we regard as social responsibility, and that companies have a responsibility that extends not only to their shareholders and employees but to the wider society. All companies should recognise that. Where the Government have a substantial shareholding in a company, of course we should use that shareholding similarly—in a socially responsible way. We are aiming for, and have seen, a substantial reduction in bonuses in the banking sector, which I know is occurring in those companies in which the Government have a shareholding.

[Nic Dakin (Scunthorpe) (Lab)]

May we have a statement from the Health Secretary about the possibility of improving outcomes for pancreatic cancer patients through Abraxane?

[Mr Lansley]

I will ask my right hon. Friend the Health Secretary whether there is any opportunity to update the House. A diagnosis of pancreatic cancer continues to be very serious. The hon. Gentleman knows that survival rates for pancreatic cancer are very low in comparison with those for many other cancers, on which we have made considerable progress. In the Cancer Research UK laboratories in my constituency, I have seen the work being done on potential routes to the diagnosis and treatment of pancreatic cancer, but it is early days and I fear that the number of projects with good lines of inquiry are still few.

[Robert Halfon (Harlow) (Con)]

The shadow Leader of the House says that we should have a debate on which is the workers’ party. I say to my right hon. Friend the Leader of the House: bring it on. Perhaps we can examine the record of the Labour Government, who drowned the country in debt, left 2.5 million people unemployed, and abolished the 10p tax rate, and compare it with the record of this Government, who cut taxes for 20 million lower earners, increased apprenticeships by 1.5 million, and extended the right to buy.

[Mr Lansley]

The workers in Harlow know who represents them.

[Mr David Winnick (Walsall North) (Lab)]

May I ask our proletarian comrade, the Leader of the House of Commons, whether, in his new capacity as a workers’ leader, he will arrange for portraits of the Tolpuddle martyrs to be displayed prominently in the House of Commons? Is it true that Tory central office is saying that those trade unionists, who were punished and deported to Australia, were leading officials of their local Conservative association?

[Mr Lansley]

I hesitate to get into a debate with the hon. Gentleman on these issues. I certainly know that, during the 19th century, there were many reasons why people were appreciative of a Tory Administration who brought in protection for workers through the Factories Acts and the like. In any case, his question about portraits is probably a matter for the Speaker’s Advisory Committee on Works of Art, rather than the Leader of the House.

[Sir Tony Baldry (Banbury) (Con)]

Will my right hon. Friend ensure that on Tuesday evening, the House finishes its business promptly at 7 o’clock, so that we can all get home, finish our pancakes, and have an early night, as on Wednesday, the first day of Lent, at 7.45 am, the Archbishop of Canterbury is celebrating Holy Communion in the Undercroft chapel? Everyone working in the Palace of Westminster is very welcome to attend.

[Mr Lansley]

I am grateful to my right hon. Friend, and I am sure that the House appreciates the opportunity to go to the Ash Wednesday service that he advertises. I think that there is nothing on the Order Paper at the moment that would require us to extend our proceedings beyond the moment of interruption at 7 o’clock on Tuesday.

[Valerie Vaz (Walsall South) (Lab)]

I am disappointed that I have not received a response to my question to the Leader of the House of two weeks ago about the European solidarity fund. In the meantime, may we have an urgent debate on what “Money is no object” means, and whether it could apply to those waiting for personal independence payment assessments?

[Mr Lansley]

I endeavour to secure replies for hon. Members, but not inevitably within a fortnight; sometimes it takes a bit longer. I will endeavour to get a full reply to the hon. Lady.

[Jack Lopresti (Filton and Bradley Stoke) (Con)]

I speak as a genuine working-class Conservative. [Interruption.] My local health authority is making a real mess of the reorganisation of health provision in my constituency, so could we have a debate on health provision across South Gloucestershire, especially in relation to Frenchay hospital, my local hospital?

[Mr Speaker]

Hon. Members should not be discourteous to the hon. Gentleman. I have known him for more than 20 years, and I can testify, from personal knowledge, that he was a distinguished ice-cream salesman in Bristol.

[Mr Lansley]

Thank you for that, Mr Speaker.

I will, of course, ask my colleagues in the Department of Health to respond directly to my hon. Friend. I know from personal experience how long and difficult the issues surrounding the reconfiguration of services have been following the developments at Southmead and the reduction of services at Frenchay. He has taken a considerable interest in these issues for several years, and rightly so, and I shall encourage my colleagues to respond to him.

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

May we have an early debate about accident and emergency closures? The Leader of the House has a nice flat constituency, whereas I have a hilly one, and threats of the closure of the Halifax and Huddersfield A and E departments are serious for an area such as ours. May we have a debate about the importance of high-quality care, not of saving £50 million?

[Mr Lansley]

My constituency is fortunate in that it contains Addenbrooke’s hospital, with its fine accident and emergency department, but in the past year or so, the Government have invested additional resources to support A and E departments. Sir Bruce Keogh’s review for NHS England on the configuration of future accident and emergency services is not about cuts, but about improving services and ensuring that people are able to get the service they need, including specialised services, at the right place and the right time.

[John Glen (Salisbury) (Con)]

In July 2012, Sir John Holmes carried out an independent review of the national defence medal for the Cabinet Office. Since then, my constituent, Tony Morland, has been waiting patiently for the outcome. Will the Leader of the House make time for a Defence Minister to report to the House on progress so that Mr Morland will stop e-mailing me?

[Mr Lansley]

The Government, like my hon. Friend, recognise the great sacrifices made by all members of the armed services past and present. He referred to Sir John Holmes, whom the Prime Minister appointed to carry out a review of the rules and principles governing the award of military campaign medals. The first recommendations on recognition were for those serving on the Atlantic convoys, in Bomber Command and during the Yangtze incident, which were announced by the Prime Minister on 19 December 2012. Sir John continues to work on further campaigns and the broader policy behind the five-year and the double medalling rules.

[Jonathan Ashworth (Leicester South) (Lab)]

May we have a debate on the role of the banks in our communities? Santander has announced that it will close 11 agency branches throughout Leicestershire and Leicester, including the branch at Highfields in my constituency, which is a densely populated area of some deprivation. Many of our constituents are getting fed up with how the banks operate.

[Mr Lansley]

The hon. Gentleman is right that these issues are difficult. Many Members will have constituents who are worried about the closure of bank branches—it is not just Santander, because Barclays has also announced closures. Of course, the situation is partly the result of changes to the structure of the industry because of the use of online and telephone banking. If I may, I will ask my Treasury colleagues to reply to him. Determining the structure of the banking sector as the changes I describe come into play is not a responsibility of the Government, but my colleagues will have an interest, as do Members on both sides of the House.

[Christopher Pincher (Tamworth) (Con)]

May we have a debate on exporting because as we rebuild our economy, we need to sell more goods in the international marketplace? Such a debate would help to highlight the value of such things as the Queen’s award for exports and the help that UK Trade & Investment can provide to companies in my constituency such as the Malted Waffle Company, which exports waffles to Dubai, and Cargo Marketing Services so that they can do better business abroad.

[Mr Lansley]

I give my congratulations to the Malted Waffle Company. I was involved in such things years ago when I was in the then Department of Trade and Industry, so I know that the Queen’s award for exports is not lightly given. The award suggests that a substantial achievement has been made, as was the case when the Cambridge Satchel Company, which is in my constituency, secured a Queen’s award. I do not know the size of the Malted Waffle Company, but it is interesting and encouraging that more medium-sized business are growing not just through the domestic market, but by developing their export markets. A British Chambers of Commerce report on companies throughout the country that was published about a fortnight ago showed an encouraging increase in companies’ confidence that they would increase their export orders in the months to come.

[Mrs Madeleine Moon (Bridgend) (Lab)]

The Law Society has a rigorous conveyancing qualification for solicitors, but some mortgage lenders now require solicitors to undertake the conveyancing qualification scheme run by themselves and have a £5 million bond for negligence rather than the £2 million required by law. May we have a debate on how lenders are adding to the costs of conveyancing, reducing choice for consumers and driving small solicitors out of conveyancing?

[Mr Lansley]

We are keen to ensure that consumers have access to competition and choice, and hence the lowest possible cost. I am not in a position to comment on the particular points that the hon. Lady makes, but I will talk to my hon. Friends and see whether they can assist her in how she might take that forward. She may find that she has the opportunity to seek to raise this matter on the Adjournment at some point.

[Rehman Chishti (Gillingham and Rainham) (Con)]

May we have an urgent statement on the Government’s commitment to the virtual court scheme? I have just learned from Medway magistrates court, an excellent local court, that the Ministry of Justice has not confirmed funding post-31 March. It is important that it should have clarity and certainty on that. I would be grateful if my right hon. Friend came back to me specifically on that court.

[Mr Lansley]

Yes, I will. I will raise it directly with the Ministry of Justice. I realise that Saturday is 1 March, so time is short. My hon. Friend must be concerned that the services in his constituency that he appreciates and are valued continue to be supported. I will ask my hon. Friends what the situation is.

[Steve McCabe (Birmingham, Selly Oak) (Lab)]

May we have a debate on the Government’s expectations of joint commissioning teams, particularly with regard to respite care? I am concerned that in Birmingham they seem rather unaccountable and have a suspect strategy that does not seem to make financial sense and could result in the closure of purpose-built facilities, such as Kingswood bungalows, which are less than 15 years old.

[Mr Lansley]

The hon. Gentleman will recall how right from the beginning under this coalition Government we secured additional resources, notwithstanding all the pressures, for the provision of respite care. In the current circumstances, looking towards the new financial year, the better care fund, available to local authorities working with their NHS commissioners, offers £3.8 billion across the country specifically to try to join up health and social care, in which respite care, from the point of view of sustaining people in care in the community rather than frequent hospital admissions, can play a significant part. I encourage him to talk to his local authority about how it plans to use the better care fund for that purpose.

[Mark Pawsey (Rugby) (Con)]

My right hon. Friend has already referred to local government finance, but may we have a debate on how councils can better manage their affairs? Conservative-controlled Rugby borough council set its budget this week, and this successful district council, working effectively as part of the two-tier system in Warwickshire, is not just freezing council tax, but going further and reducing it by 3%—[Interruption.]—yes, 3%, without any reduction in services or staff redundancies. Does my right hon. Friend agree that other councils should follow Rugby’s lead and look harder to find savings?

[Mr Lansley]

I am very pleased that my hon. Friend has asked that question, because it might suggest that, presumably at their own expense, councillors in Hull, following the question earlier by the hon. Member for Kingston upon Hull North (Diana Johnson), should take a little visit to Rugby to see how it is done. The Government very much applaud those councils that are doing this and we are supporting them. As I said, we are providing extra funding for a council tax freeze in the next two years, which will make a total of £5.2 billion for five successive years of council tax freezes, which will be worth up to £1,100 for the average household—further help for hard-working families from this coalition Government.

[Steve Rotheram (Liverpool, Walton) (Lab)]

The Leader of the House will be aware of a small lobbying group called the Football Supporters Federation, which wishes to see the introduction of what it spuriously calls safe standing areas in British football stadiums. Will he make time for a debate on the vexed issue of a return to standing, so that the merits and considerable demerits of any such move can be aired?

[Mr Lansley]

I am indeed aware of that important point and agree that it should be debated. I cannot promise a debate at the moment, and a BackBench business debate might be better for the matter, rather than one in Government time, which is limited, but I will raise it in any case with my right hon. and hon. Friends in the Department for Culture, Media and Sport so that they are aware of it.

[Andrew Jones (Harrogate and Knaresborough) (Con)]

The number of apprenticeship starts in my constituency is one of the highest in the country, and the companies I have spoken with that have taken on an apprentice have told me about the difference it has made. Next week is national apprenticeship week, so may we please have a debate on the role that apprenticeships play in tackling our country’s skills gap? That would allow the House to celebrate the work of apprentices and highlight the fact that there are still more employers who are yet to take on an apprentice than there are those who have.

[Mr Lansley]

My hon. Friend makes some good points. Youth unemployment is lower now than it was at the last election, there are now vacancies and we will have 1.5 million apprenticeships over the course of this Parliament, all of which is very encouraging. I hope that it is increasingly understood that apprenticeships are not just for those who are not capable of academic achievement, because increasingly they are being recognised as a viable career move for those who might have had an opportunity to go to university but chose not to. I have met many apprentices who started working under an apprenticeship scheme, acquired additional qualifications in the fullness of time, up to and including degree qualifications, and were then extremely well equipped to move on to senior positions in the company they worked in.

[Lilian Greenwood (Nottingham South) (Lab)]

Many dozens of my Clifton constituents have written to ask me to raise their cases in this House after the Energy Secretary’s panicked energy company obligation changes scuppered their much-needed solid wall insulation scheme, and indeed cost local jobs and apprenticeships. When can we have time to debate properly this Government’s disastrous policy, because at Energy and Climate Change questions this morning Ministers were in utter denial about the impact?

[Mr Lansley]

I was not here when the hon. Lady asked her question, but I will of course look at the record to see what reply my hon. Friends gave.

[Martin Vickers (Cleethorpes) (Con)]

My flood-hit constituents are mystified at why the Government do not seem to be applying for EU funds that could assist them. May we have a statement to clarify the situation?

[Mr Lansley]

That relates to the point the hon. Member for Walsall South (Valerie Vaz) made on the use of EU structural funds. I will of course ask my hon. Friends about that. As my hon. Friend will recall, the Prime Minister explained at Prime Minister’s questions just over a fortnight ago that there are issues relating to the overall scale of the damage that gives rise to a claim for EU funds. There is also a concern about the impact such claims would have on the British rebate, as I remember from the past, so taking European money in those circumstances is not necessarily a cost-free option.

[Chris Williamson (Derby North) (Lab)]

The overwhelming majority of the British public supports the Hunting Act 2004, which abolished hunting with dogs, yet that civilising piece of legislation, incredibly, is opposed by many Government Members, who want it repealed. Can we have an assurance today from the Leader of the House that any proposal to repeal the Act will be subject to a vote of the whole House, not an obscure Statutory Instrument Committee?

[Mr Lansley]

I am not aware of any circumstances in which what the hon. Gentleman describes might happen. The coalition programme was clear that the intention was for the question of the Hunting Act to be brought forward for a free vote of the whole House.

[Jason McCartney (Colne Valley) (Con)]

I would like to add my voice to the calls for an urgent debate on the provision of A and E services at Huddersfield royal infirmary, which is in my constituency, and Calderdale royal hospital. I do not know whether the hon. Member for Huddersfield (Mr Sheerman), who also asked about that, actually uses the HRI, but I had to use it last summer when I fractured my elbow while running the Honley 10 km race, and I was given excellent service. Please bear in mind that my constituents’ memories are scarred after the downgrading of maternity services at the HRI under the previous Government.

[Mr Lansley]

I remember, not least through having spent time with my hon. Friend in his constituency, the issues that arose on the downgrading of maternity services. To reiterate the point I made earlier, in that case it was far from clear how the changes that were to be undertaken would deliver an improved service for the patients and communities served, which is what we are setting out to do as regards A and E. I cannot comment on the circumstances in Huddersfield and neighbouring communities, but I know what Sir Bruce Keogh’s report said about the issue, because I was involved at the outset in understanding the nature of the problems in A and E departments. Those problems are often caused by a large number of patients with the most serious conditions being brought into A and E departments that do not necessarily have the specialist skills required to give them the most effective treatment as rapidly as possible. We need to deliver that treatment while not limiting access for the great majority of patients to A and E services in their local community.

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

The Prime Minister speaks highly of the work that food banks do in all our communities, so will a Minister, or even the Prime Minister, explain why Tory MEPs voted against a £3 million fund for food banks? Thankfully, the Tories lost heavily by 592 votes to 61, but even so, the Prime Minister still will not allow UK food banks to apply to that fund. Why?

[Mr Lansley]

I am not familiar with the vote in the European Parliament or with the character of the European fund. While we absolutely welcome and applaud the work that food banks do, the hon. Gentleman will understand that with any European scheme there are issues that relate not to the desirability of the objective but to the appropriateness, on the grounds of subsidiarity, of a European scheme for the purpose.

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

Non-payment of television licence fees represent an estimated 12% of all magistrates’ cases, with more than 190,000 cases in 2012 alone. May we have a debate on the burden on the state of prosecuting those cases? May I draw my right hon. Friend’s attention to the new clause I have submitted to the Deregulation Bill that would decriminalise non-payment of the television licence, making it instead a civil offence? We should end the ludicrous situation whereby those who genuinely cannot pay are criminalised merely for being poor.

[Mr Lansley]

My hon. Friend, who has put forward an amendment to the Deregulation Bill, makes a point that I know will interest Members of the House. If I may, I will defer to my right hon. Friend the Deputy Leader of the House, who is serving on the Bill Committee and will have an opportunity in due course to respond to my hon. Friend on this issue.

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

For those of us in a state of disbelief at the Conservative party’s claim to be the party of the workers, may I invite the Leader of the House to demonstrate this new-found commitment by intervening in the pay deal that has been offered to the staff of this House, who keep the business of this House going? After four years of a freeze, they have been offered 1%, but actually it is not even 1% because they are being asked to work two more hours, so their hourly pay is going down. Will he intervene and sort this out?

[Mr Lansley]

The hon. Gentleman may be aware that as a member of the House of Commons Commission I am one of those whose responsibility it is to employ members of staff of this House. We continue to regard the staff of this House as among its principal assets. We value what they do. The pay award that is now available to them is one which we believe brings it into line, as we are statutorily obliged to do, with the pay environment in the civil service more generally; that is particularly true in relation to hours. But we also think that it is as generous as we can make it, and I think it would be in the interests of members of staff of this House to accept it.

[Bob Blackman (Harrow East) (Con)]

In the run-up to the Indian elections, it appears that opponents of Narendra Modi will stop at nothing to smear him, including using rooms in this House to publish thoroughly scurrilous reports attacking him personally. May we have a debate on the relationship between Britain and India—and in particular on the Indian elections—which would give the Foreign Secretary an opportunity to welcome Narendra Modi as the next Prime Minister of India?

[Mr Lansley]

India is the world’s largest democracy, and the question of who should be its next Prime Minister is one for the people of that country to decide. I do not think it is one for the United Kingdom to interfere in, or even that it is proper for us in government to debate the merits of that. That is for them to decide. We enjoy excellent relations with politicians in India from across the political spectrum and a number of Indian Chief Ministers have visited the United Kingdom in recent years. We have very much welcomed them.

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

With all the passion for working people demonstrated on all Benches in the Chamber today, I am sure the whole House will want to celebrate with me the birthday of the only party ever set up to represent working people 114 years ago today—the Labour party.

Ministers gave cast-iron, black and white guarantees that the independent expert panel report on the failed badger culls would be produced to this Parliament before the end of February. That gives us today and tomorrow. Does the Leader of the House have any news?

[Mr Lansley]

The hon. Gentleman will be aware that, as the expert panel is an independent body, the timing of the completion and submission to Ministers of its reports is ultimately a matter for that panel.

Backbench Business

Thursday 27th February 2014 Commons Chamber

Welfare Reform (Sick and Disabled People)

Thursday 27th February 2014 Commons Chamber

11:22

[John McDonnell (Hayes and Harlington) (Lab)]

I beg to move,

That this House calls on the Government to commission an independent cumulative assessment of the impact of changes in the welfare system on sick and disabled people, their families and carers, drawing upon the expertise of the Work and Pensions Select Committee; requests that this impact assessment examine care home admissions, access to day care centres, access to education for people with learning difficulties, provision of universal mental health treatments, closures of Remploy factories, the Government’s contract with Atos Healthcare, IT implementation of universal credit, human rights abuses against disabled people, excess deaths of welfare claimants and the disregard of medical evidence in decision-making by Atos, the Department for Work and Pensions and the Tribunals Service; urges the Secretary of State for Health and the Secretary of State for Education jointly to launch a consultation on improving support into work for sick and disabled people; and further calls on the Government to end with immediate effect the work capability assessment, as voted for by the British Medical Association, to discontinue forced work under the threat of sanctions for people on disability benefits and to bring forward legislative proposals to allow a free vote on repeal of the Welfare Reform Act 2012.

We are making history today. This is the first time in the history of this Parliament that people with disabilities have secured a debate in the Chamber on an agenda of their choosing, so let us pay tribute to the War on Welfare campaigners. They initiated the campaign, drafted the petition that we have before us in the form of a motion, and worked hard for a year to gather more than 100,000 signatures in order to secure this debate. They are heroes and heroines who worked, many of them despite their disability, to ensure that this campaign was a success.

MPs may speak in this debate, but it is the voice of the WOW campaigners and petitioners that will be heard. What do the WOW campaigners want from this debate? They have said that they want a serious debate. They want MPs, party spokespeople and Ministers to listen, and to listen well to the statements that they have made. What do they want us to say? I have asked WOW petitioners what they want me and other MPs to say in today’s debate. They said, “We want you to get across as best you can what the welfare changes brought in over the last four years have meant to us and our families—the stark reality.” Why do they want that? Perhaps naively, they believe that if MPs and Ministers really knew what it is like, what disabled people are going through, they would not stand by and let fellow human beings suffer and be degraded in this way.

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

I congratulate the hon. Gentleman on securing this important debate. Ahead of the debate, the Brighton Housing Trust sent me some alarming data of 25 cases it had looked at concerning claimants of employment and support allowance. All of them won their appeal and had the decision overturned. In 72% of cases the decisions were overturned on the basis of a mental health condition, and 32% of that sample group stated that the process had caused an increase in suicidal intention. Does the hon. Gentleman agree that the implications of the policy are literally a matter of life and death?

[John McDonnell]

I agree completely. The figures in Brighton are echoed around the country and have been reported for a number of years.

We met some of the disabled campaigners this morning. One of them said, referring to Ministers, “Do they realise that many of us feel terrorised by what the Government are doing?” Another disabled campaigner said to me this morning, “Can you tell them that they call their programme fulfilling our potential, but we feel that many of us simply won’t survive this round of cuts? A generation is going to be lost.” The central demand of the petition is straightforward: the motion is, in essence, a call for a cumulative impact assessment of all the welfare changes that have been introduced by this Government. The argument that campaigners put forward is that if politicians and society only knew the full effect of all the changes on the lives of disabled people and their families, surely they would not let that happen in a civilised society. Let us see whether we can move hearts and change minds in this debate.

Let us run through some of the figures. There are 11.3 million people with a disability in the UK, 4.5 million of whom have a significant disability that entitles them to a disability benefit such as the disability living allowance or the attendance allowance. The group the welfare cuts are hurting the most is the 2.7 million people with disabilities who live in poverty.

I remember the Prime Minister’s statements in 2010 when the Government launched their austerity programme to cut public spending. In October 2010, he said that

“it is fair that those with broader shoulders should bear a greater load”,

that the greatest burden would be placed on the better off, and that the cuts would be fair. Well, the reverse is the case.

I urge Members to read at least one of the relevant reports. In “Counting the Cuts”, Simon Duffy, the director of the Centre for Welfare Reform, explains that disabled people in poverty are bearing the cuts four times worse than the average, while the burden on people using social care is nearly six times that on the average person. Other reports escalate the figure and say that the burden on people with disabilities is perhaps 20 times the average. The reason for that is that disabled people are being hit by a combination of cuts in funding for social care and support and by wave after wave of cuts—almost annually—in welfare benefits.

Let us look at the cuts in care and support. Many disabled people rely on local authority social care and support. By next month, £2.68 billion will have been cut out of adult social care budgets across the country. In 2012-13, 320,000 fewer disabled people and 37,000 fewer adults aged between 18 and 64 with physical impairments received local authority care and support than in 2005-06. The number of adults with mental health issues receiving care and support has reduced by 30,000.

[Liz Kendall (Leicester West) (Lab)]

Does my hon. Friend agree that decent social care is about not just helping people cope with their disabilities, but helping them live an ordinary life that the rest of us take for granted—being able to get up, wash, dressed and fed, spend time with their families and go out into the community, as well as being able to work, if they can? Is that not why the cuts in social care have been so devastating?

[John McDonnell]

That is exactly why people feel that the impact is so harsh. Many local authorities have changed the eligibility criteria—that is the problem—to cover only those with substantial needs, which automatically cuts out about 100,000 people from receiving any form of social care whatever.

[Chris Williamson (Derby North) (Lab)]

Does my hon. Friend agree that this is very much a false economy, because cutting back on social care will inevitably lead to people’s conditions tending to deteriorate, meaning that they will need more urgent care and that many of them will find themselves in hospital? Consequently, the cost to the public purse is substantially greater as a result of this false economy and these cuts, which are so devastating to disabled people.

[John McDonnell]

That is exactly right. There are three consequences from what is happening. First, disabled people are being forced more and more to rely and depend on care from their own family members, who are themselves, to be frank, overstretched in providing that care, especially as local authority respite care is now being cut back so dramatically. Startlingly, as we found in a previous debate, a large number of these carers are children caring for their parents. A year-long investigation by Carers UK confirmed that carers, who save this country an estimated £119 billion a year in care costs, are about to lose £1 billion in benefit cuts.

Secondly, the care needs of many disabled people are simply not being met. A recent inquiry by the all-party groups on local government and on disability found from the evidence they took that four in 10 disabled people are failing to have their basic social care needs—which my hon. Friend the Member for Leicester West (Liz Kendall) has mentioned—met.

Thirdly, as my hon. Friend has said, the withdrawal of social care and support services is cutting many people off from any form of social contact with the outside world. Many are driven back into their homes, while others are forced out of them, losing all their independence, and into residential care or even hospital care as a result.



Alongside cuts to social care, there are the mounting cuts in welfare benefits. Like most hon. Members, the vast majority of disabled people whom I have met are, like any other employed person, desperate to work and support their family with a regular wage. For some, the tragedy is that their disability is so severe that they will never be able to work and will have to rely on welfare benefits to ensure that they do not live in poverty, while others need positive and sensitive practical support to help them to get back into work or to work in the first place.

The system introduced during the past six years to support people in securing work or the appropriate benefits could not have been better designed to undermine disabled people’s ability to get into work or receive the appropriate benefits to assist them. The previous Government started the process of reassessing all those on incapacity benefit to see whether they could be assisted back into work, and if not, to ensure that they had the right level of financial support. They introduced the work capability assessment, and brought in Atos to implement it. That might have been well intentioned in theory, but in practice, thousands of disabled people have been caused untold suffering, humiliation, stress and, at times, absolute despair.

[Mrs Anne McGuire (Stirling) (Lab)]

Does my hon. Friend recognise that the introduction of the work capability assessment under our Government was phased? Part of the distress he mentions was due to the fact that the contract was renegotiated to go for a big bang of assessments and reassessments of everyone on incapacity benefit.

[John McDonnell]

The work capability assessment was flawed from the start. It stemmed from the work of the American insurance company Unum, and the so-called biopsychosocial model of disability assessment. That was exposed as an invention by the insurance companies simply to avoid paying out for claims. My right hon. Friend is, however, absolutely right that Atos was brought in and then given a contract to churn through large numbers of assessments very rapidly—as fast as possible. The staff employed in order to achieve that often had minimal medical or professional qualifications, and their expertise or experience was often totally unrelated to the condition or disability of the people they assessed.

Assessments largely disregarded people’s previous diagnosis, prognosis or even life expectancy. The recent “Panorama” programme “Disabled or Faking It?” exposed the scandal of seriously ill patients—people diagnosed with life-threatening conditions such as heart failure or end-stage emphysema—being found fit for work. The so-called descriptors, or criteria, on which assessments are based bear no relation to the potential employment available, take little account of fluctuating conditions and are particularly unresponsive to appreciating someone’s mental health issues.

According to all the Department for Work and Pensions figures, the appeals roll in—on 40% of decisions—and most appeals are now successful. The test has been condemned by the British Medical Association and the Royal College of Nursing. The report by the president of the appeals tribunal to the Government denounced the test as

“failing to coincide with reality”.

Even when someone wins their appeal, there can be a lengthy wait before their benefits are reinstated. In one period, 37,000 people were waiting up to a year to receive benefits after they had won their appeal.

[Yvonne Fovargue (Makerfield) (Lab)]

Does my hon. Friend agree that the cuts to the legal aid system—taking away the right to get legal aid for welfare benefit appeals—have caused additional distress to the sick and disabled people who are seeking an appeal?

[John McDonnell]

Interestingly, all the statistics prove that people who are represented win their appeal in vast numbers, while those who are not represented are suffering. To be frank, it is no wonder that 84% of GPs have reported that patients have presented with mental health problems, such as stress, anxiety and depression as a result of undergoing or the fear of undergoing the work capability assessment.

For all those reasons, the BMA has called for an end to the WCA “with immediate effect”, believing that it should be replaced with

“a rigorous and safe system that does not cause avoidable harm”.

Such systems are used in other countries, so why can we not use one of them here? That is why the motion calls for the WCA to be scrapped.

People assessed as capable of work and put on employment and support allowance within the work-related group now lose their contributory ESA after 12 months. Some 700,000 disabled people are losing a total of £4.4 billion as a result of the 12-month cut-off. There has been a massive escalation in the use of sanctions against people who are on ESA or jobseeker’s allowance; some 900,000 people were sanctioned last year.

[Sheila Gilmore (Edinburgh East) (Lab)]

Is it not ironic, at the very least, that the people who are most affected by the one-year cut off are those who, for instance, have a working partner or small savings—the very hard-working people whom the Government say they want to protect?

[John McDonnell]

People thought that they were contributing to a scheme that they would see the benefits from. They now find that they have contributed, but that they will no longer get the benefits. That is unjust.

One in five of the people on JSA who were sanctioned is disabled. Sanctions mean the loss of benefits altogether for weeks or even months. That is compounded, as my hon. Friend the Member for Makerfield (Yvonne Fovargue) said, by the increasing difficulty in securing advice or advocacy to appeal or challenge sanctions.

[Debbie Abrahams (Oldham East and Saddleworth) (Lab)]

I wonder whether my hon. Friend is aware of the case of one of my constituents. He was receiving ESA, but had a heart attack during his assessment and was sanctioned as a result of leaving it. I called on the Government to hold an independent review of the inappropriate use of sanctions. They committed to do so in the Work and Pensions Committee, but are now reneging on that. Is that not a disgrace?

[John McDonnell]

Members have brought forward example after example like that one. We are simply looking for some compassion and logic in the governance of the system. The Government have ignored that, tragically.

Many people report that, as a result of sanctions, they are dependent on doorstep loans and are using credit cards for everyday items. Some people have fallen into long-term debt. Some Members met a representative of Disability UK on Monday. He described all this as a route into destitution for many people.

Disabled people who are on ESA are placed on the Work programme and offered support from Work Choice. The latest figures on the success rate of the Work programme in finding employment for disabled people show that only 5.3% of them secured employment. That is a 95% failure rate. Work Choice is meant to assist those with complex needs, but it has helped only 58 people since 2011. The forced closure of the Remploy factories under this Government has taken away the opportunity of sheltered work for many thousands of disabled people.

[Dame Anne Begg (Aberdeen South) (Lab)]

I visited my local Work Choice provider the other week. I was amazed to discover that everyone who was there to participate was on jobseeker’s allowance. They were not on a disability benefit, even though they had disabilities. I did not think that that was what Work Choice was meant to be about.

[John McDonnell]

That is exactly what is reported by constituency Member after constituency Member after their visits. I am concerned about time, so I will press on and take no further interventions, if Members do not mind.

Let me turn to the personal independence payment. Some 3.2 million disabled people receive disability living allowance. DLA is not a work benefit; it is meant to help with the additional costs caused by disability. It allows disabled people to get by and to overcome some of the restrictions that are forced upon them by their disability. From April 2013, DLA was supposed to be replaced gradually by PIP. I urge Members to read today’s National Audit Office report that assesses the roll-out. It states:

“Backlogs have developed at each stage of the claimant process. Both the Department and assessment providers have processed fewer claims than they expected”.

It states that by October,

“the Department had made only 16% of the number of decisions it expected, over 166,000 people had started new claims for Personal Independence Payment and 92,000 claims had been transferred to the assessment provider and not yet returned to the Department”.

Who is the assessment provider? After the WCA debacle, it is hard to believe that the Government allowed Atos to share the contract with Capita.

The report goes on to say:

“Claimants face delays, and the Department is not able to tell them how long they are likely to wait, potentially creating distress and financial difficulties.”

It states:

“Citizens Advice has found that claimants are concerned about paying for their care, covering housing costs and having enough money to pay for necessities such as heating, electricity and food.”

The Demos-Scope study calculates that 600,000 people will be impacted by the introduction of PIP, with a total loss of £2.6 billion.

Among the many eligibility changes, there have been changes to the eligibility for the mobility component. That means that 148,000 people will lose out on that additional benefit. It also potentially denies access to a Motability vehicle, and we know today that many people are having their Motability cars removed. The irony is that, as a result, they cannot get to work.

Disabled people are especially vulnerable to other benefit changes, and they will be disproportionately hit by the bedroom tax. Some 72% of affected households include someone with a disability or major health problem, and 420,000 disabled people will lose on average £14 a week in housing benefit. One in three disabled people is refused the discretionary housing payment. Shockingly, local councils have rejected applications from disabled people living in adapted properties who are unable to downsize. Last week, it was also revealed that the £347 million local welfare assistance fund to local councils had quietly been cut by the Government.

The Welfare Reform Act 2012 also changed the uprating of benefits basis from the retail prices index to the consumer prices index, costing some families receiving DLA and the carer’s allowance £80 a week. It has been estimated that 142,500 disabled people will be hit by the benefit cap, costing £2 billion. Universal credit looms over all of this. Research by the National Association of Citizens Advice Bureaux estimates that 116,000 disabled people could lose £40 a week; that 230,000 severely disabled people who live alone or with only a young carer will get between £28 and £58 less a week; and that 100,000 disabled children will lose £28 a week.

What do all these figures add up to? Although the Government have refused to undertake a cumulative assessment of the effect of all the benefit changes on disabled people, others have done so. The Demos-Scope study calculated that disabled people will lose £28.3 billion by 2018. Dr Simon Bamber concludes that disabled people in poverty, who make up 4% of the population, will bear 13% of the cuts and lose £4,660 a year. People using social care who make up 3% of the population will also bear 13% of the cuts, and lose £6,409 a year.

In conclusion, what do these changes mean in reality? They mean poverty for many. They mean not enough income for someone to heat their home adequately—there are nearly 1 million disabled people now in fuel poverty. They mean someone choosing not to eat so that their children can do so, and their feeling shamed and humiliated by having to rely on the generosity of others and support from the food bank. I urge people to look at the website, Calum’s List. For some it is all too much and they become another in a coroner’s report whose suicide is associated with the loss of benefits. Many of the disabled people I have met say the same thing. They tell me they feel hounded by the media, by politicians and by this Government, just for being disabled and claiming the benefits they are entitled to receive.

What the War on Welfare campaigners are demanding today is the truth. They want a cumulative impact assessment of all welfare changes, so that the truth of their plight can be revealed. They believe—perhaps naively—that if the truth is told, no decent society would allow its most vulnerable members to be treated in this way. That is why I supported the petition and tabled the motion before the House, and why I will be pressing it to a vote.

[Several hon. Members]

rose—

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Dawn Primarolo)]

Order. There will be a six-minute time limit on Back-Bench speeches starting now. It will be necessary to reduce the time further if it takes longer to get through the speakers, and because there are two debates today, this one must finish promptly.

11:43

[George Hollingbery (Meon Valley) (Con)]

Thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker. I have prepared a shorter version of my remarks, so I hope Members will forgive me if there is not as much detail as I might like to have given.

The motion before the House

“calls on the Government to end with immediate effect the work capability assessment”

and if I may, I would like to look at the WCA in some detail.

It is a simple fact of government that policies designed to deal with the general often struggle with the specific. Despite the need for a clear structured process to assess whether someone qualifies for a benefit, I acknowledge that no responsible Government can approach something like the WCA as if it is some sort of industrial quality control test. This is not a question that can always be answered with a simple yes or no because decisions taken have a clear effect on people’s lives, and reaching the wrong decision can be devastating. However, the Government have not approached the test that way.

The test was created in 2008 by the previous Labour Government, as incapacity benefit was designed to be replaced by the employment and support allowance. The coalition Government have carried that programme forward, including the key commitment that the WCA testing regime needed annual review and improvement for at least the first five years of its life. There have been four such reviews: three under Professor Harrington and the latest under Dr Paul Litchfield, which was published in December. Of Professor Harrington’s cumulative 49 recommendations, 35 were accepted in full and a further 10 in principle. Of the 35 accepted, 29 have been fully implemented and three partially implemented. A further three are still in progress. Of the 10 accepted in principle, five have been fully implemented, two partially implemented and three are in progress. We are making progress on improving the WCA.

On 12 December, the evidence-based review of the WCA was published. It compared the results produced by the WCA and those of an alternative designed by a consortium of experts and disability representative organisations, with a panel of experts reviewing each case. Many cases were looked at more than once. The report makes for interesting reading and two conclusions jump out: the WCA creates a much more consistent result than the proposed alternative; and the WCA is significantly more likely to accord with the judgment produced by the expert panel reviewing each case than with the proposed alternative.

The conclusions are important because they tell us how the WCA should work as a whole. We know that it is pretty much impossible to find a single general test that fits all eventualities. What we have is a system with an appeal mechanism that clearly anticipates that the WCA, even with Department for Work and Pensions staff interpretation and other evidence overlaid, will not always produce perfect results. That is why there will be a considerable number of successful appeals. That is exactly how the system should work, and it does.

The review of WCA found that the expert panel judged that about 26% of all cases presented were borderline, even with full access to information. If that is the case, we would expect an appeal process, which after all consists of expert opinion, to alter some decisions. They do so at a rate that is very similar to the rate the panel found as borderline in the review process. That should surprise nobody.

[Dr Julian Huppert (Cambridge) (LD)]

The hon. Gentleman is making some interesting comments. I have been very concerned about the effect of the WCA on people with mental health problems, which are particularly badly assessed, and have taken people to see the Minister. Did the study look at mental health issues, which are particularly hard to assess with a single snapshot?

[George Hollingbery]

Indeed it did. The expert panel that sat to adjudicate on every single one of those test cases took the advice of mental health experts. A number of mental health specialists are now provided with specialist training in the testing regime. I think the figure is 30, but that is off the top of my head and it may be as many as 60.

In the fourth report, Dr Litchfield largely endorses the position I outline. He says:

“Any ‘test’ is necessarily a trade-off of many factors and the WCA appears to be a reasonable and pragmatic tool.”

There remain those who call for its abolition, but suggestions for what to replace it with are rarely forthcoming. No test is ever perfect, but the WCA has been designed with considerable rigour and is subject to a process of continuous improvement.

I hope that hon. Members will forgive this slightly tortuous journey through the WCA, but it is very important to show just how much trouble and care has been taken to design and improve it. It is not perfect and it will not always produce fair and just results, but that is what the appeals process is for and there to catch. That it is necessary to have some sort of objective test to help decision makers seems to me to be undeniable. Hence I cannot support the motion’s call for the abolition of the WCA.

[Ian Murray (Edinburgh South) (Lab)]

The hon. Gentleman is giving a very technical analysis of the WCA. My constituent, Mr McArdle, who runs the Black Triangle campaigning group, has on his website and Facebook page a whole list of human stories about how the WCA acts in practice. I wonder whether the hon. Gentleman would mind looking at that after his speech today to get some of the human side, because it is not just about a technical analysis of how these things work.

[George Hollingbery]

I hope the hon. Gentleman will acknowledge that in prefacing my remarks I made it clear that this cannot be a mechanistic process, like some sort of quality control process. It has to involve the human. I acknowledge that there are many cases where results have been, shall we say, questionable—there is no doubt about that. Nevertheless, that it is necessary to have such a test is, I think, undeniable: the Government cannot, will-nilly, go judging entitlement to benefits without any test of any sort. Yes, it is difficult to make the case that I am making without sounding dry and technocratic—I take his point absolutely.

In the time remaining, I would like to draw the House’s attention to some real outcomes produced by my local providers, which I hope the hon. Gentleman will take as a human face of what can be a reasonably successful programme. My local providers are the Shaw Trust in Portsmouth and A4e in Southampton, which is run by a team led by George Gallop. I hope that we can all celebrate some of the results of their work.

Alex, aged 20, was diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, and found it almost impossible to settle down to any kind of work. A4e’s relationship with Harsco, a large building services company, was crucial in enabling Alex to train for a certificate under the construction skills certification scheme, and to become a scaffolder. Alex said:

“I felt like nobody would ever employ me. I didn’t even know what 1 was doing wrong…it is the kind of job that sets you up for life and I love it. If 1 look at how my life has changed in the last year I can’t believe it”.

Daniel, aged 19, was homeless and unable to look after his young family because he suffered from depression. He was one of the first young people to enter Radian Housing’s “proving talent” programme, delivered by A4e in Southampton. He came through the scheme, and now has a permanent job in technical services with Radian. He said:

“it feels amazing to be back on track, in employment providing for my family and feeling good about myself.”

Sandra, aged 45, was a proud working mum of two, trapped in a wheelchair. Because of ill health, she was made unemployed and became dependent on employment and support allowance. At first she resented being referred to the Work programme, but her advisers and trainers helped to motivate her, and to give her the confidence and skills that she needed in order to return to work. She said:

“Now I think about what I can do, instead of what I can’t”.

David broke his back in an accident in 1997, and received incapacity benefit for more than 15 years. At an ESA work-focused interview in December 2012, he was asked when he had last had a good laugh and when he had last smiled. He replied that what had saved his life was a passion for his reptile collection. David and his wife have now signed off from ESA, and have set up their own business in a shop in Copnor road, Portsmouth, selling and boarding exotic pets.

To me, those are inspiring stories of people afflicted by disability and sickness who, with the right help from the right people at the right time, have managed to find their way back into employment, and, in so doing, have rediscovered their sense of self-confidence and self-worth. Of course there is much more to do and many improvements can be made to the system, but surely those are outcomes that we should all celebrate.

Is all rosy in the garden? Of course not. There are still many challenges, and many changes are required. There are still too many people who do not find permanent employment. There are many whose benefit applications and assessments take far too long to process, and who are left without an income in the meantime. As has already been said, the transition from disability living allowance to personal independence payments is proving to be a challenge. For all that, however, the evidence that I see on my visits suggests that many of our fellow citizens are being given a new lease of life by the Government’s approach to welfare, and the central assumption that there is nothing compassionate about—

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Dawn Primarolo)]

Order. The hon. Gentleman’s time is up.

11:52

[Dame Anne Begg (Aberdeen South) (Lab)]

I too, pay tribute to the WOW campaigners not only for securing more than 100,000 signatures to the petition, but for securing today’s debate. If anything could be said to illustrate the effectiveness of social media in opening up the lives of disabled people and allowing them to connect with other people throughout the country, it is an event such as this, inspired by the ability to connect with others who may be experiencing similar trials and tribulations—in this instance, at the hands of the Department for Work and Pensions.

The Government say that they are not picking on disabled people and those with severe health problems. Let us look at the evidence. The main benefits that are paid to people with disabilities and health problems are ESA, benefits paid following work capability assessments, and the new personal independence payment which will replace the disability living allowance. Every one of those benefits is currently undergoing enormous changes and reforms, initiated by the Welfare Reform Act 2012.

We know that those reforms are not going well. Only this week, we learnt that the work capability reassessments had been suspended, and that Atos, the company delivering them, wants to end its contract. We are hearing rumours that a face-to-face work capability assessment in the home is taking up to six months to arrange. We know that those who are lucky enough to receive ESA, if they are in the work-related activity group and claiming the contributory element, will receive the benefit for only a year.

Also, as has been mentioned, the people who are in the contributory ESA group are the ones who have worked all their lives—who have paid their national insurance and who thought they were paying into an insurance scheme that would look after them if the worst came to the worst and they were not able to work any more. Interestingly therefore, it is not just those who come from the poorest backgrounds, and whose whole families have perhaps depended on benefits, who are suffering under this Government—although that group most definitely is—but it is also people who thought they had done the right thing. It is people who have done what previous Governments asked and have worked and contributed and have done as well as they could.

The National Audit Office report published today shows that the roll-out of PIP seems to be in chaos as well. There are huge backlogs, and there are constituents of mine who have been waiting for over six months to get a determination after they have had their face-to-face interview.

[Caroline Lucas]

The hon. Lady is making a powerful point. These delays in PIP payments in particular are causing so much stress. Does she share my horror that, for example, in Brighton some front-line services have been doing their own surveys of how long people have been waiting, and the advice centre in Brighton and Hove found that only three of 60 clients—fewer than 5%—have actually been assessed? Does she agree that that causes massive uncertainty and stress?

[Dame Anne Begg]

Yes, and it is particularly difficult for people who have quite progressive diseases. For those with terminal illnesses, there is an attempt to get payments out quite quickly, but even then it takes longer than normal. I have a constituent who has very aggressive multiple sclerosis who is desperate for this help but who cannot get it because he does not fall under the special measures category.

The benefits I have mentioned are those that everybody knows are specifically for disabled people and people with health problems, but there are other benefits, too, and other changes to benefits that fall disproportionately on that group. Which single group is hardest hit by the changes to housing benefit and local housing allowance? It is disabled people and those with health problems. Which single group is hardest hit by the bedroom tax? Surprise, surprise, it is disabled people and those with health problems. Which group is hardest hit by the removal of the full council tax relief? Again, it is disabled people and people with health problems. That is because all these changes fall on people of working age, and the people of working age who are most likely to be on these benefits are people who cannot work because of a disability or a health problem.

Who is the hardest hit by the overall benefits cap? The Government said it would not be disabled people, and it probably is not them, but it is their carers, particularly if they are family carers. Who is hardest hit by the social care cuts that mean that local authorities are not able to provide the social care that people need? Of course, it is disabled people and those with health problems. If universal credit ever comes in, severe disablement premium goes, which was paid to people who are single and living alone.

Because it is not just the obvious benefits that go to disabled people that are being cut or are in chaos or not working, but all these other benefits and changes that are also affecting people who have a disability and their families, there is an absolute need for a cumulative impact assessment. I have been calling for a cumulative impact assessment for a number of years now and that is because no one knows precisely the full force of everything that may be falling on individual families and individual households. Unless we do that cumulative impact assessment, we will never know, and in the meantime those families and households are struggling to make ends meet, falling into debt and having to make the choice between eating and heating. They are having to make choices we should not have to make in 21st century Britain. That is why I am very happy to support this debate this afternoon.

11:59

[Mr Alan Reid (Argyll and Bute) (LD)]

I congratulate the War on Welfare campaign on its petition and on securing this debate. I also congratulate the hon. Member for Hayes and Harlington (John McDonnell) on introducing it today. Although I have not supported every detail of the Government’s welfare reform, I certainly support the overall thrust of what they are doing. Under Labour, the welfare budget had spiralled out of control and become unsustainable. Liberal Democrats in government are building a stronger economy and a fairer society so that everyone can get on in life. We are fully committed to enabling people with disabilities to have the same opportunities and choices in life as everyone else. It is important to note that disabled people are moving into jobs at the rate of more than 100 placements every working day.

[Liz Kendall]

Why does the hon. Gentleman support the bedroom tax, which has affected 2,300 people in Leicester? The council has overspent the discretionary fund by £100,000 this year because there has been such demand for it, and it had to increase it from £212,000 last year to £813,000 this year because of a tax that he supported. Why does he support it?

[Mr Reid]

The hon. Lady’s question is based on the wrong premise. I actually voted against the bedroom tax. As I said in my introduction, I did not support every detail of the Government’s proposals.

It is interesting to note all the opposition from Labour Members to everything the Government are doing. I look forward to hearing what the Opposition spokesperson says about this later, because I understand that Labour do not propose to spend any more on welfare payments than the Government are doing. It will therefore be interesting to hear what the official Labour line is, as opposed to all the complaints that we are hearing from its Back Benchers.

As well as tackling the economic mess that Labour left behind, Liberal Democrats in government have blocked the excesses that a Conservative-only Government would have implemented. For example, we prevented the Conservatives from freezing disability benefits. Instead, they are going up by 2.7% this year. Assessment of applications for disability benefits is an integral part of welfare reform, and this Government have improved on the system left behind by Labour. Thanks to Liberal Democrat amendments to Labour’s Welfare Reform Act 2007, the Government are required to conduct five annual independent reviews of the work capability assessment. In government, we are now acting on those reviews to improve the system. Professor Harrington completed the first three reviews, and found that our efforts to improve the WCA were making a difference.

[Sheila Gilmore]

For the purposes of putting the record straight, the requirement for independent assessments of employment and support allowance was in the original legislation, pre-2010.

[Mr Reid]

I did not catch the year that the hon. Lady mentioned. The WCA was introduced by the Labour Government, and this Government have improved on it.

Following Professor Harrington’s reviews, the Government gave Department for Work and Pensions decision makers more flexibility to request additional evidence, such as a letter from an applicant’s consultant. The fourth independent review was completed in December 2013 by Dr Litchfield. He found that the DWP had made good progress on implementing recommendations from the previous reviews, which have made notable improvements. However, despite all the improvements to the system, and having a system that looks fine in theory, we all know from our constituency work that, in practice, Atos has failed miserably to carry out the assessment contract. Appeals have been upheld for 40% of the original decisions. That shows that there is something wrong with the initial assessments and that more improvements to the assessment system must be made.

We are all aware from our constituency case load of people waiting for many months for their assessment to be carried out. That applies to assessments for personal independence payments as well as for work capability assessments. The limit for PIP assessments is supposed to be 30 working days, but Atos is clearly failing miserably to meet that target. I was contacted recently by the Bute Advice Centre in my constituency. It pointed out that it, and the client, have three weeks from the initial phone call in which to complete and return the application form. The centre and the client have met the deadline on every occasion, but then the long wait begins. One client who has been waiting since 2 July 2013 has heard nothing from Atos. Two other clients on Bute have been waiting since early October. The advice centre tells me that phone calls to the Department for Work and Pensions get a helpful response, but the DWP puts the blame on Atos, and from Atos there is complete silence. That is utterly unacceptable.

Another constituent has e-mailed me to say that her current employment and support allowance claim started last May and she submitted her medical questionnaire in July. After many months of waiting, she was eventually told by Atos that her work capability assessment would be conducted two days after her contribution-based ESA ends if she is placed in the work-related activity group. Such delays make complete nonsense of the system.

It is true that any benefit awarded will be backdated but, as my constituent points out, a claimant may have been eligible for the support group at the time of their application. If their health improves over the year, they may be placed in the work-related activity group backdated to the time of their application, yet if the assessment had been conducted quickly, they may have been placed in the support group. If the person has savings, their ESA will stop after a year, and that may well be before it has even started to be paid. That just makes nonsense of the system.

The long delays are very unfair to claimants, putting them under increased financial pressure and stress. Their suitability for work could be wrongly assessed as the assessment is completed such a long time after the application was made.

As I have said, the system looks fine in theory, and the Government have made improvements, but Atos has clearly completely failed. As we all know, it has announced that it wants to throw in the towel. The Government must get the mess created by Atos’s abject failure sorted out as a matter of urgency, appoint a company that can do the job properly and get the backlog cleared as quickly as possible. People applying for disability benefits deserve their application to be assessed speedily and accurately.

[Simon Danczuk (Rochdale) (Lab)]

Does the hon. Gentleman take any responsibility for the Government whom he supports?

[Mr Reid]

The hon. Gentleman should remember that Atos was appointed by the Labour Government. It was an appalling decision by the previous Labour Government, and this Government inherited the contract.

I support most of the Government’s welfare reforms. They are fine in theory, but in practice, there is a huge number of problems. Atos has failed completely. The Government must get the mess sorted out urgently, and I hope that the Minister will be able to reassure us on that point today.

12:07

[Ian Mearns (Gateshead) (Lab)]

I am grateful to my hon. Friends the Members for Hayes and Harlington (John McDonnell) and for Easington (Grahame M. Morris) for securing this debate via the Backbench Business Committee and for bringing to our attention the fact that the WOW campaign has gathered 104,000 signatures on its petition on the Directgov website.

The fact that this motion has to be considered by Parliament is an indictment of our political system. It is an issue and a cause that I brought to the House’s attention via a debate in Westminster Hall a little over a year ago. I am pleased to say that it continues to receive the deserved consideration of this House as a wrong that needs to be righted. The truth is that we do not need an independent cumulative impact assessment to tell us what is going on. Every week, Members in this House have to deal with the devastating damage caused by the so-called welfare reforms.

In my own constituency of Gateshead, the reforms are having a profound impact on people’s lives, disproportionately affecting disabled people, their carers and their families. The policies and their implementation are causing immeasurable anxiety and tangible human suffering. We all know what the effects of them are. We support this motion as a means of exposing the truth, which is that the Government are driven by one consistent ideological principle—a determination to protect the privileged by demonising and attacking the poorest and most vulnerable in our society.

[Guto Bebb (Aberconwy) (Con)]

rose—

[Ian Mearns]

I will not give way for the moment.

How else can we explain the fact that of the £63.4 billion of public expenditure cuts forecast by 2015, 29% of them fall on disabled people who make up only 8% of the population? Even worse, how else can we explain the fact that those with the most severe disabilities, who make up only 2% of the population, have to endure 15% of the cuts? In the face of that, can we continue to regard ourselves as a civilised society? What kind of civilised society seeks to finance its deficit recovery programme out of the suffering of the poorest and most vulnerable while managing to target tax cuts to the most privileged?

Thirty-one people died in the three years to October 2011 waiting for their appeals against the assessments which said that they were able to work. The BBC’s “Panorama” programme reported in July 2012 that, on average, 32 people died every week whom the Government had declared could be helped into work in the medium term.

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

My hon. Friend is making some excellent and powerful points. Does he agree that the work capability test is not fit for purpose and that taking a template from an American health care model on the descriptors is absolute nonsense?

[Ian Mearns]

I am about to discuss that, and I could not agree with my hon. Friend more.

Put bluntly, this Government, the Department for Work and Pensions and their agencies are telling us, repeatedly, that people who are dying are fit for work. Between January 2011 and November 2011, some 10,600 employment and support allowance claims ended and a date of death was recorded within six weeks of the claim end. This Government have repeatedly refused to release updated 2013 statistics on deaths within six weeks of the end of an ESA claim, calling such requests for information “vexatious”. Four people a day are dying within six weeks of being declared fit for work under the WCA—it is scandalous and an indictment of this place. Some might consider this bad taste, but I am told that there was a story doing the rounds that when the bones of Richard III were discovered in Leicester, Atos carried out an assessment and judged him fit for work. It would be funny if it was not so sad. It is a sad truth faced by 12,000-plus families who every year face their own personal tragedies of this nature—it is a reality.

As if not bad enough, workfare and welfare reforms are of course only part of the impact; cuts to local government expenditure also have the heaviest impact on the most vulnerable. The largest share of adult social care users—older people, people with physical disabilities and people with mental health problems—have to bear the brunt of reductions in social care. The recent joint inquiry by the all-party groups on local government and on disability showed that four in 10 disabled people are failing to have their basic social care needs met and that nearly half of disabled people say that services are not supporting them to get out and about in the community. Three quarters of the 4,500 respondents to “The Tipping Point” survey said that losing some of their disability living allowance income would mean they would require more social care support from their local council, at a time when the councils with the largest numbers of chronically sick and disabled people are suffering the largest cuts in grant funding from central Government.

In my youth I was actively involved in many Amnesty International campaigns, such as those on Chile and South Africa, and those against oppressive regimes in central and Latin America. I never would have imagined then that in 2014 the UK would be the subject of an Amnesty campaign, yet at its annual general meeting in 2013 Amnesty UK passed a resolution recognising that the human rights of sick and disabled people in the UK had been dreadfully compromised.

The convention on the rights of persons with disabilities, which the UK ratified in 2009, makes provisions for access to support services, personal assistance access to social protection, and poverty reduction programmes for disabled people and their families. The Government’s cold and callous welfare changes are in direct contravention of all those stipulations. The time has come for a grown-up debate, to move beyond the smearing of poor, disabled and chronically sick people—demonising them should stop. We need to move to a debate on how we design a society where all UK citizens are supported and given opportunities to contribute. I utterly support today’s debate and I will vote in favour of the motion.

12:14

[Graham Evans (Weaver Vale) (Con)]

I am pleased to have the opportunity to speak on this very important subject, and it is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Gateshead (Ian Mearns).

As a member of the Work and Pensions Committee, I understand that the benefit system is an extraordinarily complex one. The system was born out of a desire to provide support to those who need it the most. However, years of mismanagement, and well-intentioned but ill-thought-out additions and changes, have left the system in a shocking mess. Listening to accounts of mismanagement, wrong payments and the relegation of people who are taught that there is no role for them in the workplace has shown me that reform is not only important but essential.

This Government’s reforms offer responsible protection for those who need it the most, while supporting those who can move back to work. First, let me say that this Government are committed to supporting those with disabilities. Here in the UK, we are committed to spending more than £40 billion a year, which is more than Italy, Germany or France spend, and is a fifth more than the European average.

We have taken the strategic view that it is not enough to think of disability as a singular issue. Instead, we have chosen to work across Departments to look at transport, employment and social involvement. The Opposition enjoy flashing big figures; they go for the headline and do not fill in the detail. Let me give them a few figures to consider while we look at the rationale. The amount of disability living allowance underpaid per year is £190 million; the amount of DLA lost through fraud and error between 1997 and 2010 was £10 billion; and the amount that welfare payment increases between 1997 and 2010 cost the average hard-working family per year is £3,000. These stark figures show that something has gone seriously wrong in our support system.

[Grahame M. Morris]

I note the figures that the hon. Gentleman has given, but does he recognise that in the UK in 2009 we spent 2.9% of our GDP on disability and sickness while nine of our OECD neighbours spent an average of 3.2% of their GDP? Far from spending more than our OECD partners, we spend less.

[Graham Evans]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for that intervention. I was talking about the current spending. I also point out to him that in 2009, 1 million more people were in relative poverty; 500,000 more children were in relative poverty; 200,000 more pensioners were in relative poverty; 150,000 more people were unemployed; 25,000 more young people were unemployed; and 1.3 million fewer people were in work. These figures show that the Government’s policies are working.

I will return to my original point. When 71% of claimants are given indefinite awards, with no need for reassessment, it is no surprise that changes in conditions are not picked up. In fact, a third of people with an impairment or a long-term health condition in one year report that they do not have it a year later, according to the Office for National Statistics. People’s conditions and needs change all the time. It is no surprise that people feel that they have been paid off and forgotten when no one takes the time to look at how their lives have changed; it is no surprise that those with deteriorating conditions do not receive the support that they are entitled to; and it is no surprise that those who have conditions that are improving are not helped out of a state of dependency and back into work.

The personal independence payment, which is being introduced gradually to ensure that there is a responsible change to protect disabled people, will involve regular assessments. This means that people will receive funding that is tailored to their individual changing needs. In actuality, this will result in the proportion of people receiving the highest rate for both components increasing to 20%, and the proportion of people receiving at least one component at the highest rate increasing to 56%.

The Government’s Work Choice programme has already helped 9,500 people to move into employment. The new enterprise allowance will support disabled people moving into self-employment, and my hon. Friend the Member for Meon Valley (George Hollingbery), who is no longer in his place, gave us some good examples of that. The £15 million investment in the Access to Work scheme will ensure that small businesses do not have to bear the costs of additional aids or equipment when taking on disabled staff. This programme helps more than 30,000 disabled people to gain mainstream employment, and stay in employment, every year.

The steps taken by this Government bring back the core principles of the welfare system: to provide support where it is needed; and, just as importantly, to enable those who can go back to work to do so. I am proud to be a member of a Government who are taking logical steps to address the fact that each person is individual, that conditions change over time and that each person in Great Britain has a place in our society.

12:19

[Mrs Anne McGuire (Stirling) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Weaver Vale (Graham Evans). This is not the first time that the House has called for an assessment of the cumulative impact of welfare reforms on disabled people, but this time it is being called for by not only disability organisations and the official Opposition, but by the more than 100,000 people who signed the War on Welfare petition. Like others in this House, I encourage and congratulate the people who signed it, and who made us bring this issue to the Floor of the House.

I recognise, as did my hon. Friend the Member for Hayes and Harlington (John McDonnell), that this is probably an historic occasion: it is the first time that disabled people have framed the agenda in this House. I hope that we can respect that, regardless of our views.

I recognise some of the good work that the Minister of State, Department for Work and Pensions, the hon. Member for Hemel Hempstead (Mike Penning), is trying to do, including with employers, to fulfil potential. His heart is probably—I was going to give a caveat, but I will not: his heart is in the right place. The difficulty that we all have is not with his heart, but with his and his Government’s proposals for welfare reform.

It is with sadness that I note that we are yet again asking for a cumulative impact assessment that the Government should have undertaken when they introduced their welfare reform package. Since then, there has been a pretty crude campaign of vilification of those in receipt of disability benefits. The Government have attempted to conflate the tiny proportion of claimants who defraud the system, with whom none of us in this House have any truck, with others. The hon. Member for Weaver Vale fell into that trap when he talked about fraud and error. Those are two completely different things. The Government have conflated those attempting to defraud the system with those legitimately in receipt of a range of benefits. As we all know in this House, that has resulted in an increase in disability hate crime.

I also feel sadness because the Prime Minister made the following commitment in 2010:

“people who are sick, who are vulnerable, the elderly—I want you to know that we will always look after you”.

He even assured us that cuts would be made in a fair way, and that we would ask

“those on higher incomes to shoulder more of the burden than those on lower incomes.”

Yet the reality is that disabled people lose nine times more than most others, according to the Centre for Welfare Reform, and those disabled people with greater needs sometimes lose up to 19 times more than other people.

Opposition Members are not against welfare reform; indeed, as many have pointed out today, we started it when in government. In opposition, we have offered on more than one occasion to work with the Government in a consensual way to try to find a way forward. I know from conversations with disabled people that they are not against welfare reform, but they are against what has happened over the past three years, because the welfare package fails on various counts.

The Prime Minister’s comments about looking after the most vulnerable run counter to the fact that the Government’s welfare package disproportionately affects disabled people, who are hit simultaneously by various changes, as my hon. Friend the Member for Aberdeen South (Dame Anne Begg) pointed out. There is the employment and support allowance, universal credit, the bedroom tax, the benefit cap, the change from the disability living allowance to the personal independence payment, and the changes in social care provision that others have pointed out.

I want to turn briefly to PIP, because we were told that it would help the most severely disabled people. If that had been the outcome of the policy change, perhaps we could have understood it, but the Government started with a number and framed a policy around that number. The National Audit Office report published this morning is devastating; it shows that the Government went into a reform of benefits that affects the most disabled in our community without knowing where they were going, or how they would implement the reform. According to the report, on the first day of the claims process, the Government met their target, but when we get to the claims being passed to the assessment provider, that information is not recorded. The expectation is that assessments will be completed in 42 days, but 64 days is what is actually being delivered. Worst of all, the terminally ill—those who have a life expectancy of no more than six months—are having to wait 28 days. The Minister may tell me that that has changed, and I hope that it has, but it seems that a sixth of those people’s total lifespan will be used up while they are in the bureaucratic morass of the PIP assessment.

[Mark Durkan (Foyle) (SDLP)]

My right hon. Friend has described the effects of the Welfare Reform Act 2012; is she concerned that it was cast in a way that gives the Government scope, without the need for further primary legislation, to make serious changes to terms and interpretations relating to the benefits that we are talking about, including PIP? With the changes that the Chancellor is promising in relation to annually managed expenditure, there will in future be more times when a number is fixed on, and people are squeezed off benefit to reach it.

[Mrs McGuire]

Yes. I could not agree more with my hon. Friend, and I am delighted that he has made his point.

The Minister got quite agitated just now. I hope that he will give us some facts and figures about the implementation of PIP, because there has been a wall of silence. We all know what is happening in our constituencies, but we are accused of giving anecdotal evidence; he is in a position to give us the real evidence.

Since 2010, it obviously has not mattered what was said to the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions about his welfare reforms. He has become a victim of his rhetoric and is obsessed by the idea of his legacy. We used to have beneficiaries of the social security system; now many people feel that they are victims of that system. I ask the Secretary of State to put his cumulative impact assessment where his reforms are. I say to him, “Do the assessment, and prove me and 100,000 people out there totally wrong, if you have the courage.” I say categorically that if he will not or cannot do that, we are entitled to ask why he is still in his job.

12:27

[Guto Bebb (Aberconwy) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to follow the right hon. Member for Stirling (Mrs McGuire). I pay tribute to the hon. Member for Hayes and Harlington (John McDonnell) on securing this debate and representing the 104,000 petitioners. The National Audit Office report published this morning on the implementation of PIP is a disappointment, but it is important to point out, at the outset, that the report talks about the implementation, rather than the policy aims. That is important. The report is not a criticism of the policy aims. It makes it very clear that it is far too early to give any view of the implications of the policy change that is being implemented through PIP.

This issue and this debate are framed in the context of the idea that changes to the welfare state are being undertaken in response to the need for austerity. I would argue that the issue is far more important than that; it is very important that it is dealt with, not because of austerity but despite it, because we have a failing welfare system. Anybody in this Chamber who argued that, prior to 2010, we had a system that we could be proud of would be very brave indeed. It is to the credit of the Government that the welfare reform agenda is being implemented not primarily to save money, but to ensure that the system does not trap people in a way that is unproductive and unfair.

Today’s debate highlights the significant problem that the Opposition have in relation to welfare reform. When I spoke to Welsh Labour Members last night, I was surprised to hear that they were on a one-line Whip for this debate. I am staggered by that, and I am pleased to see the hon. Member for Bridgend (Mrs Moon) here. Given that the Welsh Labour Government have produced significant documents—they are not particularly impressive, when one reads the detail—complaining about the impact of welfare reform in Wales, I would have expected Labour Members from Wales to highlight their concerns in a debate as important as this one. Surprisingly, they are not here. Perhaps that is because they know full well that the Labour party is committed to a zero-growth spending review. We have heard Members express a lot of passionately held points of view today; it is important to point out that in a zero-growth spending review, it is very difficult to envisage any increase in the welfare budget. That is a point that any honest Member should be happy to make from the Opposition Benches.

My hon. Friend the Member for Meon Valley (George Hollingbery) highlighted the fact that work capability assessments, the abolition of which the motion calls for, have been changed and reformed throughout the Government’s period in office. Most of the recommendations of Professor Harrington’s reviews have been accepted, and the number of complaints coming through my constituency office has reduced. The implication of Labour Members’ speeches is that there should be no work capability assessments whatsoever, although I do not think that that is Labour’s policy. Are they saying that there should or should not be some sort of work capability assessment? If we have work capability assessments, as I believe that we should, any responsible Government should obtain medical advice from experts and implement their recommendations, which is exactly what the Government are doing.

Is the system perfect? Clearly not yet. Is it a problem that 40% of cases are won on appeal? I take it as a badge of pride when I win an appeal, but of course the figure of 40% is too high. However, we are implementing the changes that have been recommended, and it is irresponsible to call for the abolition of any work capability test because that is not in keeping with the whole purpose of welfare reform—to target support at the poorest in society.

The hon. Member for Hayes and Harlington talked about the impact of removing the spare room subsidy—the so-called bedroom tax—on people with disabilities, and Labour Members told us that the policy has had a tremendous effect in many local authorities throughout England. I take a keen interest in the issue and regularly speak at length with my local authority in north Wales. Figures for Conwy county borough council and Denbighshire county council, which are both close to my constituency, show that the discretionary housing funding will probably not be spent in full and that rent arrears in north Wales housing associations are falling in two out of three cases. The statistics shows that more than two thirds of discretionary housing awards have been made because of a need arising owing to factors outside welfare reform. From listening to Opposition Members, one would think that every single change is having a huge impact, yet figures from a Labour-controlled local authority clearly show that that is not the case.

The Work programme is a success. It attempts to treat people as individuals and is getting people back to work. However, on getting people back to work, I want to highlight a disgraceful fact. Wales has European-funded projects that give people training and skills, and ensure that they get closer to the workplace, yet the Welsh Labour Government have denied any Work programme client access to those training programmes. If Labour were genuine about helping people back into work, they would allow disabled people in Wales who need training and support to access those programmes.

12:33

[Mr Dennis Skinner (Bolsover) (Lab)]

Just after 1970, when I was first elected, I remember speaking in a debate about social security with Sir Keith Joseph, the arch-right winger of the Heath days. We all believed at the time that he was going to hit the poor, and of course—in a marginal way, compared with today—he did. However, remarkably, in the Macmillan era and even the in Heath-Keith Joseph era, the welfare state was by and large a status quo. I have to say—I will probably never say it again—that even in the Thatcher years this chaos did not happen. She did a lot of things—she privatised all the public utilities, smashed the pits and all the rest of it—but, by and large, we never had capability assessments or a march by 3,000 blind and disabled people, which was what heralded the beginning of this coalition.

I had never seen such a march. I was on crutches at the time, having had a hip replacement, so I thought that as I qualified for the march, I had better get on it. Blind people were telling me then about what was likely to happen. I hardly believed them, but we now know the truth about the mess that has been created for the people I met at the Atos headquarters last Wednesday. It was not a trade union gathering; it was a different gathering altogether. There were more wheelchairs than there were police. Fancy speaking to a crowd of 70 to 100 people surrounded by wheelchairs. Those people had been crippled for years. Like my constituent, David Cowpe, many of them had been turned down after their work capability assessment, although they were too disabled even to get out of their wheelchair without help.

That crowd I was speaking to was totally different from those at the meetings I took part in at Tower Hill, Pentonville jail and wherever. These were disabled people who wanted someone to speak up for them. There are many of them in the House of Commons today. We met some this morning and there are loads of them—I am told I am not supposed to refer to them—in the Public Gallery, and they are different. This country is made of money, so we are told. The Prime Minister tells us that money is no object—that was what he said—and that was what I told those people last Wednesday. I said, “You know, I wish he’d say money was no object for disabled people.”

It really is a scandal. When I used to do the tribunals for the National Union of Mineworkers, I would represent five people and there would be probably only nine in total at a meeting in Nottingham, but we regarded that as a busy day. Now, with this business of Atos, that lousy, rotten firm that is in charge—for a while anyway, so I am told, before it moves on to other pastures—literally hundreds of thousands of people are being turned down. When I represented people at tribunals, it used to be that we would have an appeal in four weeks and I would be off to Nottingham with those miners, but David Cowpe had cancer and waited 10 months for an appeal, and he died before he had a chance. It is high time that people understood that that is the chaos we are living in today and got rid of this mess.

We need to realise that this is a country with enough money to give those on millionaires’ row a tax cut of more than £150,000 a year. There is enough money for Trident and all kinds of things that Governments love to do, but here we are with an ageing society and a lot more disabled people—what is wrong with that; we should be providing for them—and the reason they are on demonstrations like they never were before is that they are desperate, desperate people who want us to do something to help them. That is what this debate is really about. It is about that Atos demonstration last week when people were saying—not cheering me on, but asking me—“Dennis, do something about it,” and that is what we should be doing today.

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Dawn Primarolo)]

Order.

12:40

[Dame Angela Watkinson (Hornchurch and Upminster) (Con)]

Follow that, as they say. I promise not to play to the Gallery, but it may disappoint the hon. Member for Bolsover (Mr Skinner) to know that I share his poor, working-class credentials.

The motion has three elements. The first calls for a cumulative impact assessment on a wide range of social services, which would be extremely complex. The spectrum of disability alone includes those that are unchanging, those that are progressive—there is constant change—and those that are variable, such as multiple sclerosis and bipolar disorder, where people have peaks and troughs, feeling well and extremely unwell. Such an assessment would also have a wide range of contributors, including local authorities—in particular social services departments —children and adult services, the Departments for Work and Pensions, for Communities and Local Government and for Health, care homes and charities. Collating all that information would be an enormous task.

The hon. Member for Hayes and Harlington (John McDonnell) referred to Remploy and I want to relate a visit that I made to a large Marks & Spencer distribution centre in Castle Donington with which Remploy works closely. It does not provide jobs itself, but it works in partnership with Marks & Spencer, directing people with a wide range of disabilities, including ex-servicemen who had suffered injuries, people with disabilities and everything between those two points that could possibly be imagined. There was a very good training element, with each newly employed person going through the training centre and having their strengths and weaknesses observed so that they could be placed appropriately. I would like to see such a system replicated throughout the country.

We must also remember carers in general, but in particular children who care for disabled parents and have duties to perform before they go to school in the morning, often coming home at lunchtime rather than taking part in school activities, and shopping on the way home. They prepare meals and take on all the other domestic responsibilities. It is a huge burden for young children. When they come to the end of statutory education, they have a big decision as to whether to go on to further education and think about their future career or to stay at home and care for their disabled parent. They need special attention.

For the findings of such a wide-ranging assessment to be useful they would have to be collated over a set period, and it is too soon in the welfare reform process for the results to be meaningful.

The second part of the motion, in calling for the abolition of the work capability assessment, rather conflicts with the element of the motion that says that we should improve support for people who are not in work. The whole purpose of the assessment is to look at the level of disability of each individual and the impact that it has on their work capability, and, where possible, to provide opportunities for them to acquire work skills and get back into work and achieve independence, which is infinitely preferable to being benefit dependent.

The problems with the Atos contract are well documented and have already been referred to. The work capability assessments are important and should continue, but accuracy is essential, waiting times should not be excessive, there should be proper use of supporting medical opinion, and assessors should be of a sufficient calibre to ensure that the process is carried out accurately, helpfully and properly. Standards throughout the country need to be consistent, and we need to recognise that some people have lifelong conditions that will never change or improve, so there is no point in their having repeat assessments.

People with learning disabilities need extra help to get into work. A very good project in my constituency does exactly that. I am running out of time; I do not know where it has all gone. Welfare reform is right in principle. We should support those who cannot work— that is non-negotiable—but identify those who can and should.

12:45

[Yasmin Qureshi (Bolton South East) (Lab)]

This is one of the most important debates that we have had, certainly since I have been a Member of Parliament, because it concerns 11.3 million people who are the most vulnerable in our society. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Hayes and Harlington (John McDonnell) and those who signed the petition on securing the debate, and the Backbench Business Committee on providing time for it. We know that the mark of a decent society is how it treats the vulnerable—the sick, the disabled, the elderly. There may be a case for reforming welfare and introducing reforms, but reforms that impact most on the disabled are wrong. I will not go into the statistics because they have already been referred to, but I think it is universally accepted that the benefit cuts hitting the disabled mean that they are about 30% worse off than other people. My mind boggles as to why we should put the greatest burden of cuts on the disabled and the unwell—the vulnerable in society. That is why I welcome the opportunity to debate this matter.

I want to refer in detail to the effects on deafblind people. The changes—the stress from the form filling, the assessment and the convoluted process, and the changes in the payments—are having a tremendous impact on the 365,000 people who are both deaf and blind. A mother of two deafblind adult sons describes how one of them uses the disability living allowance. She says:

“I worry that MPs don’t understand how deafblind people communicate and just how important communicating is to them. It can be very lonely and frustrating for the deafblind person and can ultimately affect the deafblind person’s mental health. My eldest son uses his DLA to pay for his 1-to-1 support; that money gets him the life he wants. Before he had the right support, he exhibited very difficult behaviours because he was frustrated.”

She says that he could cause danger to himself and to others, but when he got his one-to-one support, his life completely changed. She continued:

“My son is a sociable friendly man who is now able to take a full part in everyday life and make decisions for himself, the difference is amazing! It would have been a waste of money”—

and obviously cost more—

“to place him in the secure residential accommodation.”

He is now much happier and his family is happier as well. We must always remember that saving money at one end might mean spending more money later and so be a false economy.

I also want to mention the closure of Remploy factories. I used to visit my Remploy factory in Bolton all the time. The people there were really happy to have a job to go to. They wanted to work and earn a living, not to take state benefits. The closures were very much an ideological decision by the Government. There were difficulties in the Remploy system, but they were with the management at the top of the hierarchy, who were keeping a lot of the money. The changes that were needed to make Remploy more effective should have been made at the top, where money was being wasted. The ordinary disabled person working in the factory was not causing that waste. Rather than looking properly at how to make Remploy work better, the Government managed to abolish it. As a result, many of the people who worked there have ended up unemployed. They are sitting at home, claiming state benefits and getting incredibly depressed, because—let us face it—with so many people unemployed, their chances of getting a job are negligible.

Lastly, I want to talk about work capability assessments and Atos. Much has been said about that in Parliament. My constituent, Mr Jason Froggatt, lost his job because of illness, but Atos then said that he was fit to work but needed to do so near a toilet—that was actually in the assessment. He, his wife and their son now face losing their home because they do not have enough money. I wrote to the Secretary of State a few weeks ago about that case but am yet to receive a response. We have heard many other examples of people who are very ill being told that they are fit for work.

[Madam Deputy Speaker]

Order.

12:51

[Jim Sheridan (Paisley and Renfrewshire North) (Lab)]

I, too, congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Hayes and Harlington (John McDonnell), my hon. Friend the Member for Easington (Grahame M. Morris) and all those responsible for securing this debate, which deals with the concerns of real people out there in the real world. I should clarify, for the benefit of the Opposition Whip—his knuckles are about to explode in anticipation—that I intend to join my hon. Friends in the Lobby this afternoon.

Life experiences and events change and influence our lives. I want to talk about two events in my life that influenced my political thinking significantly. The first was being unemployed for three years, through no fault of my own, simply because I had been blacklisted as a result of my trade union activities. I was not a shirker, because I wanted to work and support my young family, but I could not get employment.

The second experience was talking with a former Remploy worker who was about to lose his job. I remember him telling me that he was fit to work but that his face was so badly disfigured that he could not go out in public without getting a terrible reaction. I remember him saying, “Mr Sheridan, where can I work? Where can I go? If I get on a bus, people will get off. If I go into a restaurant, people will walk out. So where do I go?” The only enjoyment that man had was going out in his disabled person’s car to get some privacy. That was taken away from him. This is about treating people with respect and dignity. The people who conduct the Atos assessments do not take those things into consideration.

When I was unemployed and trying to look after my young family, I was not a shirker, as some Conservative Members might have portrayed me. This debate shows how putting workers against the unemployed and public against private is a sinister but typical policy of the coalition Government.

[Mr Reid]

The hon. Gentleman will recall that it was a former shadow spokesperson from his party who used the word “shirker.”

[Jim Sheridan]

Well, whoever said it, I was certainly not a shirker, because I was desperate for work but could not get it.

I look at the Minister and must say that—I sincerely hope this will not damage his career, or indeed my reputation—as Conservatives go, he is quite a decent man. I hazard a guess—it is no more than that—that he would not mind being shifted to another portfolio. Those on benefits are demonised, and no consideration is given to the circumstances behind why they are claiming. There are some in this place and in the popular press who are obsessed with demonising people on welfare or disability benefits, which I think is unfortunate.

[The Minister of State, Department for Work and Pensions (Mike Penning)]

rose—

[Jim Sheridan]

I hope I did not offend the Minister.

[Mike Penning]

The hon. Gentleman might have destroyed his career by saying such nice things about me. I wanted to say that he is very generous.

[Jim Sheridan]

The Minister is safe in that regard, because I do not hold out any hopes for career prospects.

Welfare reform has not only encouraged the “shirker” myth about the sick and the disabled, but made life increasingly difficult for them. The Minister will probably say that the Government have put in place this legislation to ensure that the right people receive benefits, but it is a tactic to divert attention from the gross abuse of power by those with money in this country. Reference has already been made to the obsession with people receiving welfare benefits, but for those with money—the tax avoiders and evaders—life goes on as normal. If only a fraction of the resources used and the time spent on chasing down those on welfare benefits was diverted to tackle tax avoidance and evasion, some people might understand the rationale behind it.

Like many colleagues here today, I have had many constituents come to me with various concerns about the proposed reforms. There are so many different problems that it is difficult to know where to start. The move from DLA to PIP has been a particular concern. Since that move began, fewer than one in six people who have applied have had their claims decided. As other Members have indicated, some people have died before the process is complete. That reminds me of the cases some years ago when people were dying after being diagnosed with mesothelioma cancer but while still waiting for compensation. At that time, their claim died with them.

Inclusion Scotland has highlighted the case of the father of an applicant who was told that they would have to wait at least 10 months for any kind of decision, and perhaps even for a first assessment. A constituent of mine who is undergoing cancer treatment has been told that the eight-week time frame given by DWP is an unrealistic amount of time in which to process an application and offer an assessment slot. When my staff called the MPs’ hotline, they were told that they simply cannot process the number of applicants as there are not enough staff. They also say that most people who have applied for PIP will not be entitled to it, even before individual cases have been looked at. If that is the mindset of the staff processing the applications, it is hard to see how balanced decisions will be made.

When people finally hear about their assessments, there is not much hope. Only 15.4% of new claims have received a decision, and only 12,654 of the 220,300 people who have made a new claim since April 2013 have been awarded some rate of PIP. A constituent of mine got in touch because her father had been diagnosed with lung cancer. Because there is a possibility that his treatment will work, giving him a life expectancy of up to five years, he has not been classed as terminally ill. He is not well enough to attend a medical assessment and so will have to wait longer for a home visit. It appears that letters from his GP, cancer doctor and cancer hospital are not enough to prove the seriousness of his illness.

Like many people in this House and outside it, I had the pleasure of hearing my hon. Friend the Member for Bolsover (Mr Skinner) explain clearly where this Government’s priorities lie. Even under Mrs Thatcher we did not treat people like this. I wonder why, even given these austere times, we are now treating people in this country in that way.

12:59

[Dr Eilidh Whiteford (Banff and Buchan) (SNP)]

I congratulate the hon. Member for Hayes and Harlington (John McDonnell) on securing this debate.

I pay special tribute to the campaigners who are with us today, particularly John McArdle and Susan Archibald, who have travelled from Scotland and who have done so much over a long period for disabled people’s rights and well-being. The main thing we talked about this morning at the breakfast meeting was the ongoing Atos debacle and the consequences for the lives of sick and disabled people of the abject failure of the work capability assessment. I was told that in 2011 over 10,000 people died within six weeks of being placed in the work-related activity group or being found fit for work.

We have known for a long time that there are major problems with the assessment process, and I am sure that all MPs have seen constituents in their surgeries about it, but to get it so very wrong so many thousands of times frankly beggars belief. The Government need to take their head out of the sand and start listening to the experiences of very sick and disabled people whose lives are being made worse by the callous disregard of the system.

The other key issue is the roll-out of personal independence payments and the expected reduction in the number of eligible claimants. The Government are looking at this through the wrong end of the telescope. Raising the bar on eligibility will not make anyone any less sick or any less disabled; it will just make it more difficult for them to function in society and place more pressure on those on whom they rely for their care and support.

Several times now I have met a great group of young people with learning disabilities in Fraserburgh. They call themselves People First, they are very vocal, and they are very concerned about the impact of welfare reform on their lives. A number of them have had problems with Atos assessments and the benefits system more generally. Most of them have at various times been on courses to improve their employability, some have done work experience placements, and some have had supported employment, but the challenge is to find employers who can take them on and give them a proper job. I have been working with employers and talking to social enterprises, but the number of opportunities does not match the number of adults looking for work, and the work capability assessment does not cut them any slack. It is all very well to place adults with learning difficulties in the work-related activity group, but we need to be honest with them about the real barriers they face in the workplace.

Almost all the adults I meet in this context are living at home with older parents or living in supported accommodation with a lot of family support. Carers are having to attend assessments, fill out forms, and answer questions. If people find a work placement, they have to get support in doing so, yet carers are also having to pick up the tab if people are sanctioned. Research by the Scottish Government on the sanctions regime shows that the most vulnerable claimants are the most likely to be sanctioned, and that is very worrying.

In Scotland, a cumulative impact assessment has already been carried out. It shows that £4.5 billion of cuts are resulting from welfare reform, but it is much harder to assess how much of that is falling directly and indirectly on disabled people. Citizens Advice Scotland estimates that disabled people stand to lose £1 billion in benefits payments alone, but, in a sense, that is the easy bit to calculate. It is important to understand that it is not just changes to disability benefits that affect disabled people. We debated the bedroom tax at length yesterday, and I will not dwell on that, except to repeat that 80% of households in Scotland affected by the bedroom tax are the home of a disabled person. The vast majority of people paying the bedroom tax are disabled, so the steps we have taken in Scotland to mitigate its impact will primarily benefit disabled people. Similarly, the decision to mitigate the cut in council tax benefit for over 500,000 households will be helping disabled people, along with other low-income households. However, working disabled people—probably about half the working-age disabled population—are also likely to have been badly affected by changes to tax credits, especially if they have children. Disabled people are more likely to be in part-time or low-paid jobs and therefore more likely to depend on extra support, and they are likely to be worse off overall because of changes to the tax and benefits system.

Citizenship and dignity need to be at the heart of our tax and benefits system. No one in this room today can say with any certainty that the relative affluence that we enjoy might not end at any time due to unforeseen health problems. We do know, though, that the majority of us will become carers at some point in our lives. In that respect, we are all stakeholders in this debate, and we all want to know that there is a safety net should we need it. Over recent years, that safety net has been eroded to the point that it is no longer functioning.

One of the most profoundly disheartening experiences for me as an MP since being elected in 2010 has been the relentless way in which disabled and sick people have been vilified and stigmatised in the public discourse about welfare reform. Those who had very little responsibility for the financial collapse and subsequent economic problems have nevertheless had to carry the can. The attempt to discredit disabled people in order to justify harsh and punitive cuts in their already fairly paltry incomes is quite shameful. It appals me that the most disadvantaged have been asked to pick up the tab disproportionately for the profligacy of others. As we look to the future, we see further cuts of £12 billion, at least, promised in the years ahead. For disabled people in Scotland, the choice between two very different futures is opening up before them: one with decisions on welfare made in Scotland, or one where further cuts slash their incomes even more. That choice must seem very stark indeed.

If this motion passes, it will be the third time this year that the Government have been defeated on a welfare-related motion. On two previous occasions, the Government have ignored Parliament in this respect; perhaps today it will be third time lucky. The cumulative impact assessment that the motion calls for is just the first step. I urge the Government to listen.

13:05

[Katy Clark (North Ayrshire and Arran) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Banff and Buchan (Dr Whiteford), who always makes very informed contributions on this subject.

This is the third time this week we have debated issues to do with benefits. In all these debates, the position of people with disabilities should be one of the major considerations. Earlier in the week, we debated the change from the retail prices index to the consumer prices index in the uprating of benefits. That has a big impact on many people with disabilities, who, in effect, will be getting less than they would have if we had kept to the old system of uprating. Yesterday, as has been said, we discussed the bedroom tax, which is another policy of this Government that disproportionately impacts on people with disabilities.

Today, as a result of the campaigning work of many disabled people and many disabled people’s organisations, including Disabled People Against Cuts and the WOW petition campaign, we are debating a motion that has come about as a result of the work of people campaigning on these issues who are at the sharp end and have disabilities themselves. It is a huge step forward that we are able to get debates of this nature. In the previous Parliament, before the reforms that led to the introduction of the Backbench Business Committee, there would have been no way for people outside campaigning on issues that they know about to get their words discussed in this place. I therefore strongly welcome this debate.

I was elected in 2005. Since the general election in 2010, I have seen a massive increase in the number of people with disabilities and those who are sick contacting my office because of the Government’s various welfare changes. I would like to focus on two constituents who have been in touch with me and, I think, illustrate routine problems of the kind that people are facing. My constituent John Scott was diagnosed with cancer in the summer of 2013 and sent in his application for personal independence payment soon afterwards. I raised his case in Parliament on 13 January, when he was waiting for his initial medical assessment. At that point, he had had no payment, never mind a decision in his case. Since then, he has been in for an operation and had his bladder removed owing to the extent of his cancer, and cancerous cells were found in the muscle tissue in his prostate. He is still recovering, but to date has not received a medical assessment to see whether he qualifies for a personal independence payment. He has therefore not had a payment since July last year, although he has obviously been struggling with household bills and accruing arrears, and has had to carry on without any assistance.

Another constituent, Brian McAllister, last year had his benefits stopped and was found fit to work by Atos. He put in an appeal and was placed in the work-related activity category. He believes that he should be in the support group, as he has an inoperable back problem and has also been diagnosed with brain injury and has related mental health issues. He is separated from his partner, but they have a child and therefore found it mutually beneficial that he stay in the house to supervise the child while his former partner was at work. However, the Department for Work and Pensions thought that they were co-habiting and sanctioned his benefits. We found out last week, of course, that one in five people in receipt of jobseeker’s allowance who are having their benefits sanctioned are disabled. My constituency office is increasingly having to deal with people who face that problem.

As a result of the fact that the DWP thought it inappropriate that my constituent stay in the house, he moved from Largs to Dalry—there are a number of miles between them—which has put more strain on the family and, obviously, led to more child care problems. He submitted an appeal against the decision to place him in the work-related group and he has been waiting four months for a decision. His paperwork was lost—which is quite common, as I am sure many Members are aware—and the case has been passed around the country. It has been dealt with in different offices in England and Scotland and he still awaits a decision. These are very normal cases, which any constituency Member will have come across. There is a very high success rate when people appeal and that rate is far higher when they get representation.

The Government have let down some of the most vulnerable people through their changes to the welfare system since 2010. They are also letting some people down at the most vulnerable point in their lives. I therefore support the motion, which calls for a cumulative impact assessment, and all those who are campaigning against the attacks on the sick, the vulnerable and the disabled.

13:11

[Ian Lavery (Wansbeck) (Lab)]

I want to humanise the debate somewhat. I spoke to a number of disabled people this morning and what they had to say was amazing. Over the past couple of years or so, my surgeries, like those of most Members present, have been visited by lots and lots of disabled people who want to discuss the benefits system. The reality is that many disabled people have given up. A lady said to me this morning, “Mr Lavery, do you understand what it’s like to be treated like an animal?” That rocked me. Why are disabled people being made to feel as if they are being herded into a corner and treated like animals?

That is how they feel. They do not even feel that they are counted as a statistic in life anymore, other than as being an embarrassment to society. They feel as if they are personal rejects—total outcasts from society—because they are disabled and unwell. We should not be making people feel like that in one of the richest countries in the world.

The attack on the disabled and the vulnerable is relentless. Disabled people, the sick, people who have been sick for many years and those who might have just become sick or disabled in the past few years need a voice. We should not forget that it is fantastic being able-bodied and well in health, but some of us are just around the corner from being poorly, disabled, sick, unwell or perhaps terminally ill. We should not forget that when we make decisions in this place to hammer the disabled and the vulnerable, because we could be next.

We should put ourselves in some of these people’s shoes: they become ill or have been ill; they attend test after test; and they attend the Atos centres, which are like the scene in “Little Britain” where “Computer says no.” There is no flexibility and they have to try to explain their problems to somebody who is not even medically qualified.

[Grahame M. Morris]

I apologise for interrupting a very passionate speech, but is my hon. Friend aware that the Department for Work and Pensions is facing a court case because of its failure to provide proper information and support to blind and partially sighted people whom they are supposed to be helping to get into employment?

[Ian Lavery]

I thank my hon. Friend for that intervention. I am very much aware of the fact that there are a number of cases proceeding through the courts, but as we have seen over the past couple of weeks the courts do not seem to be terribly in favour of the disabled or the disadvantaged.

I want us to put ourselves in the shoes of the people who face these tests. After they leave the test centre, they wait for weeks and weeks—in fact, they wait for months and months—for the envelope to drop through the door and tell them whether they have been accepted for benefits or not. Can Members imagine how these people, particularly those with mental health problems, feel every morning, waiting for that envelope?

People who are looking for employment and support allowance or jobseeker’s allowance are being sanctioned for different reasons. A constituent of mine was sanctioned by the DWP after he attended a hospital appointment because he has a severe heart condition. As a result of being sanctioned, he did not have any money to put food on the table for months. It has been suggested that people have been sanctioned when they are in a coma in a hospital bed in intensive care. Is that any way to treat ordinary human beings? The answer is, of course not.

Let us look at the other legislation that has been introduced. Just in the past few weeks, up to 50,000 people in this country had to pay the bedroom tax. A lady committed suicide because of the bedroom tax and then her family got a letter from this Government saying they were sorry, but she should not have had to pay because she was covered by the pre-1996 housing benefit regulations.

Universal credit is a failure. It has been rolled out in two or three places and is an absolute car crash, but it is not the DWP or Members of Parliament who are suffering; it is the disabled people who rely on these benefits who are anxious and suffering as a result of this Government’s absolute nonsense and chaotic organisation.

People who make ESA applications have to wait to learn whether they are in one group or the other. How many have appealed? I believe that 40% have appealed successfully, and others are waiting to appeal. The hon. Member for Argyll and Bute (Mr Reid) mentioned how long they are waiting. People’s conditions change before their appeal is heard. It is utter nonsense. The way in which we are treating these people is an absolute disgrace.

A lot of facts and figures have been mentioned today. The 11.3 million disabled people—8% of the population—are bearing 29% of the cuts. Those with the severest disabilities—2% of the population—are bearing 15% of them. It is an absolute outrage.

To sum this up, people are dying as a result of the Welfare Reform Act 2012. Disabled people are being evicted from their homes and people are being forced into the arms of unscrupulous lenders. Is this really the sort of country we want to leave to the next generation? This is IDS UK.

13:19

[Simon Danczuk (Rochdale) (Lab)]

Let me start by thanking my hon. Friend the Member for Hayes and Harlington (John McDonnell) and those who have campaigned so passionately for this debate to take place.

I want to read out a letter that was recently received by one of my constituents:

“Dear Miss HOLT,

You are now approaching the end of the 1st Stage of your Intensive Job Focused Activity. We hope that all the activity or training intervention completed so far has not only supported you to achieve your aspirations but has moved you closer to the job market.

You will shortly enter the 2nd Stage of your Intensive Job Focused activity.

Sessions and Workshops may vary depending on the centre you attend.”

The letter was sent to my constituent Sheila Holt on 30 January. I am sad to have to inform the House that Sheila will not be able to attend the second stage of her intensive job-focused activity because she has been in a coma since December. Members of her family have repeatedly informed the DWP and Seetec that she is not well, but those organisations have continued to harass them.

To recap, Sheila has suffered from severe bipolar disorder since childhood and has regularly had traumatic experiences. She has not been in employment since she was 16, but she was pushed into the Work programme before Christmas. She found it extremely difficult, and she was also concerned about having to pay more tax because of changes to council tax benefit. On 17 December, she was sectioned under the Mental Health Act, because she was struggling to cope. While in hospital, she had a heart attack, which caused her to be in coma. Now, at the end of February, I can report to the House that Sheila is still in a coma, but is in a stable condition in the Floyd unit at Birch Hill hospital. Her sister and family continue to visit her daily and, at their request, I have also visited her.

The important point is that before the election, the Prime Minister often toured the TV studios to talk about “broken Britain”. I must say that if his idea of fixing broken Britain means hounding disabled people suffering from mental breakdowns and harassing their distressed relatives, I would prefer the broken Britain that previously existed.

My hon. Friend the Member for Hayes and Harlington mentioned the bedroom tax that will punish disabled people who need extra rooms for carers, and the scrapping of crisis loans on which disabled people rely. This Government have demonstrated that helping disabled people is simply not a priority. I am also concerned by the continuing uncertainty about the future of the independent living fund. The Greater Manchester Coalition of Disabled People has brought to my attention that at least 873 people in Greater Manchester currently rely on it. Will the Minister tell us whether that fund will remain available for disabled people?

Mr Deputy Speaker, you will not find anybody in this House who is more keen on welfare reform, but to make such reforms the right values must be in place. From what we have seen during the past three years, it is pretty clear that this Government cannot be trusted to reform welfare fairly, and people such as Sheila Holt are paying the price. I want to end with a comment made by Sheila’s sister Linda, who said:

“Sheila can never live a full life again”.

That is a reminder that although the people of this country will have an opportunity to get rid of this Government next May, the damage that the Government are doing will last for decades.

13:23

[Mark Lazarowicz (Edinburgh North and Leith) (Lab/Co-op)]

I am grateful for the chance to speak briefly in this debate, and I thank the hon. Members who arranged it. As my hon. Friend the Member for Hayes and Harlington (John McDonnell) said in the opening speech, in this debate we in Parliament are giving voice to the thousands of disabled people and many others throughout the country who are concerned about the impact of Government welfare policies on those with disabilities.

Like many hon. Members, in preparing for this debate I thought that the most useful thing I could do was to highlight the experience of, and briefly quote, some organisations who work daily with disabled people in my constituency. The welfare rights officer at the Royal National Institute of Blind People Scotland, whose Edinburgh office is in my constituency, has told me:

“The main issues that we are seeing in the RNIB service are long delays in the applications for PIP. So far I have only had one decision out of 9 claims made between July and November of last year… Clients making PIP claims are waiting 3 months and longer for medical assessments…also, if assessment has been carried out still not getting a decision from DWP.”

I am sure that hon. Members are aware of the report published today by the National Audit Office, the spending watchdog, which has highlighted, as one would no doubt understand, that such experiences are not unique. In its words, thousands of disabled people are facing “distress and financial difficulties”, because claims for the new personal independence payment are taking too long to process. Most claimants are waiting more than three months for their cases to be decided, rather than the target of 71 days, while terminally ill patients are waiting up to a month, instead of getting a decision, as they are meant to do, within 10 days.

I have been told by Waverley Care, a charity that provides care and support to people living with HIV or hepatitis C, that as a result of the overall benefit changes, the case load of staff dealing with benefits has increased dramatically, especially regarding appeals. It says that an increasing number of people are going to it for help because they find it too daunting to deal with the Department for Work and Pensions. Demand has also gone up sharply for the food parcels that it distributes, as has demand for help from its hardship funds. Typically, it has found that people are struggling to pay for food, toiletries and fuel. One reason why the demand for food parcels has increased is that people are running out of money between benefit payments, often because they have been switched to a benefit on which they receive less money, but also because, in the process of being switched from one benefit to another, there is a gap of two to three weeks during which they do not receive any money.

I have received similar information and reports from HIV Scotland, and reports from Citizens Advice Scotland again highlight that such experiences are not unique to my constituency, as I am sure hon. Members would understand and expect. I have spoken not only to organisations, but directly to disabled people who are going through those experiences daily. On the national day of demonstrations about Atos, I went along to join disabled people at the demonstration outside its Edinburgh headquarters, which happens to be situated in my constituency.

Like colleagues across the House, I of course hear the experiences at my surgery every week of people whose lives are being turned upside down by the impact of Government welfare policies, of people who are sanctioned without any apparent cause and—in relation to all the problems of the work capability assessment procedure, which many hon. Members have mentioned—of people who are rejected in spite of having the clearest medical advice that they are incapable of doing the work that they are expected to do.

I contacted Inclusion Scotland, which represents a wide range of organisations involved with disability issues, and I am afraid that its report just highlights the fact that although we have so far seen chaos—as well as inhumanity and, bluntly, cruelty—the way Government policies are going suggests that the worst is yet to come. It highlights that the consequences of those policies, taken together, will be incredibly damaging for so many disabled people in this country. In Scotland alone, 80,000 working-age disabled people will lose some or all of the mobility allowance to which they would otherwise have been entitled if the DLA entitlement criteria were still used, while 90,000 fewer disabled people in Scotland will qualify for the assistance with their care needs and daily living costs to which they would otherwise have been entitled under the DLA eligibility criteria.

The same experience is of course true across the entire UK. Under this Government’s welfare reforms during the past four years, we have had chaos, misery and a bureaucratic nightmare, as well as a waste of money with the bedroom tax, as we are increasingly seeing throughout the country. The policies are fundamentally wrong and they need to be reversed.

13:29

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

Like other Members, I pay tribute to the hon. Member for Hayes and Harlington (John McDonnell) for securing this important debate. I also pay a huge tribute to the petition proposers and supporters, and all the people who are watching this debate, either in person or on Twitter. They will have noticed that the number of Members on the Government Benches has gone up to three—it was two until a few moments ago. Sadly, that reflects the priority that Government Members give to this issue. I pay tribute in particular to Francesca Martinez, who has done so much to bring forward the petition that we are discussing this afternoon.

I will focus on the work capability assessment, which was introduced by the last Administration in 2008 and has so very clearly failed people in need. The British Medical Association’s GP committee voted unanimously in 2012 that, after four years, the policy had been a failure. It was clear when it was introduced that it was part of an attempt to appear to be hard on benefits and to be clamping down. It happened at the same time as things were being made harder for lone parents, with more and more conditions being piled on. It is part of the rhetoric about the deserving poor versus the undeserving poor that, sadly, we still hear today.

I was disappointed that the hon. Member for Leeds West (Rachel Reeves), on taking up her post as shadow Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, used the opportunity of her first interview to say that she would be tougher than the Tories on people on benefits.

[Kate Green (Stretford and Urmston) (Lab)]

My hon. Friend the Member for Leeds West did not say that. She said that she would be tougher on welfare spending, not on people on benefits.

[Caroline Lucas]

I am grateful to the hon. Lady for the clarification, but, to be honest, it does not make much difference. In my view, benefits should be payable on the basis of need, not on the basis of an arbitrary cap. It is on precisely that point that the official Opposition and I part company. It will be deeply disappointing if the official Opposition abstain on this motion. There is a lot of sound and fury from Labour Members, but that must be followed through in a vote. I cannot understand why the official Opposition would not vote for this motion.

[Sheila Gilmore]

Does the hon. Lady agree that there are some forms of welfare spending that we should bring down? In my view, one of those is the excessive amount that is paid to private landlords through housing benefit. I am certainly in favour of reducing that form of welfare spending. Is she not?

[Caroline Lucas]

I am very much in favour of that if the hon. Lady wants to put it under the heading of welfare spending, but I am not sure that most people would. We can argue about the precise language, but the official Opposition will demonstrate later this afternoon that they are sitting on their hands. That is a great shame.

Let me make some progress, because the purpose of my speech is not primarily to attack the official Opposition, but to attack the Government. This afternoon, the Government have witnessed hon. Members giving case after case from their own experiences of the impact of the welfare reforms that the Government have introduced. I will talk about what the figures mean for Brighton and Hove, and tell the House about the local advice agencies in Brighton and Hove that came together to produce a powerful report on their experiences of working with ill people and people with disabilities. Those agencies include the local citizens advice bureau, Advice Brighton and Hove, Age UK and the Federation of Disabled People.

To illustrate the reality behind the figures, I will talk about two local case studies from Macmillan that were included in the report. It mentions Mr C, a 56-year-old single man who, following cancer of the spine, lost his mobility and became confined to a wheelchair. Mr C was forced to stop work owing to ill health and constant pain. Macmillan made contact to start the PIP application process last September. To my knowledge, it is still not resolved. At the same time, an application was made for ESA. That application followed a similar path to the PIP application. Mr C is still being paid the assessment phase rate of just £71.70 a week, with no information from Atos as to when it will assess him further. Four months on, we are still counting and he is still waiting.

Macmillan also relayed the story of Mr J, a 32-year-old who is suffering from advanced bowel cancer and who came to the charity for help. It took more than 10 weeks for him to be assessed. His wife was acting as his full-time carer because he was so ill. She was also looking after their baby and young child. The report states:

“Throughout this process both Mr and Mrs J were very anxious and suffering serious financial hardship. Mr J at this time was seriously ill, vomiting day and night plus major issues re fatigue due to chemotherapy etc. Both also felt throughout the period that they were not believed and had been labelled scroungers and benefit cheats by the DWP.”

The work by Advice Brighton and Hove makes it clear that people who are applying for PIP—some of the most vulnerable people—are being left without adequate finances. That is having a massive impact on their physical and emotional well-being. The cases in the report are dreadful, but they are no longer surprising. I have multiple examples of sick and disabled constituents who have been awarded no points, but have then been assessed for benefits under the Government’s regime.

The DLA regime is being tightened, even for disabled children such as my five-year-old constituent who has cystic fibrosis and needs constant 24-hour care to prevent her from falling and being a danger to herself and others. Her DLA has been cut from the higher to the lower rate. Just before Christmas, her parents asked for that to be reconsidered, but it still has not happened. As well as the loss of essential financial support, the family have lost their eligibility for things such as the blue badge.

Another of my constituents has, at last, got a date for a medical assessment in March, after submitting her application in August last year. In the meantime, funding for her electric wheelchair has been stopped. She managed to get funding for three months through the council’s discretionary fund, so she has not lost it yet, but she is extremely worried about what will happen if her claim is not processed in time.

I hope that the House will forgive me for taking up a little more time, but I want to give the example of a constituent who suffers from severe mental ill health. After months of delays, which caused her extreme anxiety, and with support workers very concerned about her suicidal state, an application for benefits that was submitted in August last year has only recently been resolved. She has rightly been placed in the support group, which means that the DWP recognises that she is definitely unable to work. Despite that, she was put through months of unnecessary anxiety.

Many people feel that the system is extremely counter-productive, in the sense that it makes people who are already ill much more ill. We hear example after example of that. I hope that the Government will not ignore them. If advice agencies are getting together to assess these problems, it must be about time that the Government looked at the impact of their own policies.

The conclusion of the report by my local advice agencies is that people are going through what they call “awful experiences” while waiting for their claims to be processed. Advisers are spending disproportionate amounts of time making calls to the DWP and the privatised PIP providers. That is frustrating and is a drain on resources. Claims that need to be followed up are taking more than double the amount of time that is usually allocated to such work. The advice sector in Brighton and Hove has made it very clear that the situation is untenable. It is looking to the Government to sort it out. In the meantime, it is asking for local contacts within the DWP and Atos so that organisations do not have to keep wasting huge amounts of time contacting DWP and Atos nationally. I hope that the Minister will respond to that specific request. It is quite a small one, but it would make a huge amount of difference to the time that is spent following up claims.

Finally, other hon. Members have given the shocking figures on the number of people who are dying while appealing against a decision that they are fit to work. Not every death will be related to fitness for work or to the stress of an unfair or wrong assessment. If a link could be proven, there would be a case for corporate manslaughter. However, Ministers cannot ignore the strong likelihood that significant numbers of people are being assessed as fit for work by the Government when, in reality, they are very close to death. That has to change.

13:30

[Sheila Gilmore (Edinburgh East) (Lab)]

Like other Members, I have supported the call for a cumulative impact assessment and voted for it in this House. I do not know why it is so difficult for the Government to work out the impact of their policies. The people who are affected know what the impact is.

Jean and Jim are in their 50s, which is a typical age for illness to strike and is the age that has the highest uptake of many benefits. They are losing ESA because Jim’s contributory benefits are running out. Jean has part-time employment. That is another reduction of £91 a week in their household income after they have already lost his earnings. They have also been affected by the bedroom tax, because they are in a two-bedroom house. They have put a lot of money into that house over the years. When they first applied for discretionary housing payment, they were turned down because, with Jean’s earnings and Jim’s DLA, they had too much income to be eligible, despite his clear disability. I am glad to say that that has changed, due to extra money being made available.

That is what is meant by an impact assessment. That is the kind of interlocking effect that we are asking and reasonably expecting the Government to look at. Governments should look at what is happening to people. A piece of research was commissioned by the previous Government and published in 2011, but it has never been followed up by this Government. One very worrying statistic from that research is that 43% of the people who had been found fit for work were neither in employment nor on any out-of-work benefit after a year. The percentage of that cohort who were in work after a year, 23%, was hardly higher than it had been after three months, at 22%. That is a whole lot of missing people, and those are the sorts of facts and research that a Government should commission. It is disappointing that the Government chose not to follow through on those sorts of studies.

I will pre-empt what I know the Minister will say, which is, “Labour introduced the WCA, you introduced Atos, and therefore it is all your fault”, but that is not good enough for a number of reasons. In my maiden speech I mentioned ESA and WCA, and said that whoever formed the Government, I would be raising that issue. There have been points over the past nearly four years when the Government could have changed tack. They did not have to extend Atos’s contract or proceed with the migration of people from incapacity benefit to ESA as fast as they did, without looking again at what the first few years had told us.

The Government have been adamant until now that they had to carry out frequent reassessments of people, and they would not stop even when cases were clear cut. “Oh no, we have to do these reassessments”, we were told, but now they are suddenly in a panic because the assessors cannot cope, and it is, “Actually we don’t need to do these reassessments after all, but we won’t bother telling people that they might not be called up in the next few months. We won’t even bother telling MPs.” The Minister was here on Monday for Work and Pensions questions, and he never breathed a word about it.

The personal independence payment, however, is entirely this Government’s baby, and the problems go back to the beginning. This change was driven by finances, not by any research or understanding that a change needed to happen, and it had to be geared to financial savings. There was an urgent—and shortened—consultation on the changes, which many people complained about at the time. Despite the demographic changes, the straw man of too many people receiving DLA was erected, and there were assertions that DLA was granted constantly without medical evidence and that hardly anyone was ever reassessed. That ignored the big changes that had taken place in the previous 10 years, and the fact that increasingly, new awards were time limited.

If we start with poor evidence, and with arguments and assertions rather than fact, we end up with a flawed proposal. In 2013 we saw the start of the personal independence payment, and the delays and assessments have been growing exponentially. It is not just Atos, because Capita is having exactly the same problems. The flaw is in the system that has been set up.

People in the Government and elsewhere have said a number of things about why that is happening, and in December the Minister said to the Work and Pensions Committee that every single assessment for PIP was being audited internally. That suggests either a lack of training or a lack of confidence in their own staff. We are now told that each individual assessment is taking twice as long as expected, and that far more face-to-face assessments are having to take place. Might that be because the forms are not very good and the information is not coming in? Those are all things that a proper pilot would have tested. Instead of that, however, many thousands of new applicants—not just a few hundred—are being treated like guinea pigs in a system that the Government did not scope out or test properly; they did not look to see whether the people they had asked to do the assessments had the capacity to deliver them.

13:43

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

I congratulate all right hon. and hon. Members who have participated in this debate, and I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Hayes and Harlington (John McDonnell) for introducing it. I also thank the many groups and individuals who have taken the trouble to lobby their MPs and come to Parliament today and earlier this week. I give a special mention to Jason Roche from the Royal National Institute of Blind People in my constituency, who does such sterling work raising issues for the blind and partially sighted, to Simon Duffy from the Centre for Welfare Reform, and to Philip Connolly from Disability Rights UK. They have done a terrific job and we should acknowledge the efforts of disability activists and supporters in this campaign in collecting such a huge number of signatures to secure the debate.

The dedication shown by members of the public in getting this debate held in Parliament’s main Chamber indicates the strength of feeling and the widespread concern about the extent of the Government’s cuts. We are short of time, but there are issues such as housing, the bedroom tax, income cuts, policies such as changing RPI to CPI, the social care cuts highlighted by my hon. Friend the Member for Leicester West (Liz Kendall), and the general cuts to public services that directly impact on people with disabilities. People with disabilities tend to rely more heavily on libraries and other public services, and it is ironic that in my constituency an organisation called EDPIP—the East Durham Positive Inclusion Partnership—which is a charity set up some years ago to support some of the most disadvantaged families, is closing today. That is another indicator of the pressure that disabled people, their families and carers are under.

This is a trust issue, and I hope the Minister will take note of that because the Prime Minister pledged that the cuts would be made fairly. He said that those with the broadest shoulders would bear the greatest burden, and that people who are sick, vulnerable and elderly would always be looked after. We must remember that the sick, the vulnerable and the disabled were not responsible for the economic crash, yet they seem to be bearing the brunt of the economic burden.

We have heard from other Members about the impact of the loss of income and services. Disabled people are suffering nine times more than those who are not disabled, and disabled people who require social care 19 times more. If the cuts had been made fairly, they would have fallen on the better off, and the changes contradict the promise made by the Prime Minister that those in greatest need of help would not suffer under austerity.

A measure of the civilisation of any nation is how well it treats the weakest members of society, and by that standard the Government are failing miserably. Rather than being protected in a time of hardship, sick and disabled people seem to have been targeted. The services they rely on are being attacked from all directions, resulting in greater inequalities, poorer health and a growing sense of anxiety, fear and trepidation over their future. The cuts have not been made fairly, and they are not spread evenly across public services or entitlements. The cuts have been targeted, with more than 50% falling in just two areas—benefits and local government—affecting sick and disabled people disproportionately.

[Ian Mearns]

Does my hon. Friend share my massive concern that the company that has been delivering the flawed—as we have heard many times today—work capability assessment, has now been given the job by the Government of harvesting the whole population’s health data from their GP practices?

[Grahame M. Morris]

I think that is cause for alarm. It certainly alarms me that Atos, which has been involved in the debacle of the work capability assessments, and which has raised concerns and asked to be released from its contract, is apparently being awarded the contract for the collection of highly sensitive care data from GPs, but that is another Minister’s responsibility.

Social care for children and adults makes up 60% of all spending over which local authorities have any control. The huge 40% reduction in local government funding spells disaster and will have a huge impact on adults and children who depend on vital public services. An interesting statistic is that by 2015 and the next general election, £8 billion will have been cut from social care in England—about 33% of the total. Last year, 320,000 fewer people received local authority brokered social care compared with 2005. As my hon. Friend the Member for Hayes and Harlington said, one reason for that is the change in the eligibility thresholds that many local authorities have been forced to make. As well as being unjust and denying people adequate social care, that has unsustainable consequences. It is a false economy. By removing care in the community, we are putting pressure on other public services, for example accident and emergency.

At the same time, changes to benefits are having an appalling impact on those who rely on them. Other hon. Members have touched on the consequences of the abolition at the end of the year of the independent living fund, which currently supports more than 21,000 people with severe disabilities. Funding cuts already mean that in many areas services for sick and disabled people are reduced to a minimum.

With such large-scale and rapid change to the services that disabled people depend on, the Government owe it to those who have been affected to have an understanding of what the impact is. That is why I support the War on Welfare campaign’s call for the Government to commission an independent cumulative assessment of the impact of the changes in the welfare system on sick and disabled people and their families. We were not elected to this House to represent and fight for the interests of the powerful and privileged. Without a cumulative impact assessment, the Government will be failing in their responsibilities.

13:51

[Mrs Madeleine Moon (Bridgend) (Lab)]

I start by declaring an interest. My husband is in receipt of disability allowances.

My hon. Friend the Member for Wansbeck (Ian Lavery), in his very powerful speech, said that we can be one day away from a disability. It was not even one day for me. One day, I went home to a husband who was perfectly fit and healthy and who lived an outdoor life—everything one could hope in terms of a fit and healthy man. Within a matter of days he was terminally ill. Life can change, but that change can be softened by knowing that financial security is there for the future. That is why this debate is so important.

I was disappointed when the hon. Member for Aberconwy (Guto Bebb), who has not been in his place for most of the debate, commented that I was the only Member from Welsh Labour in the Chamber. If he had stayed in his place he would have seen how many Welsh Labour Members are in the House working. They are not able to take part in the debate because it is time-limited. The comment was made that it was a one-line Whip. This is a Backbench Business debate: there is always a one-line Whip for Backbench Business debates. I want people who are watching this debate to understand that if people are not here today, it is due not to a lack of interest or a lack of understanding, but a lack of time. Those who perhaps are most passionate are the ones in the Chamber today, but those who are not here are giving us the space and time to make the important points we want to make.

We are here to ask for a cumulative impact assessment. People have said that no one knows the cumulative impact. I do not think that is true. I think we do know, because of the people who come through our doors. They are ringing our offices every day to tell us of the horrendous impact on their lives. I think the Government do not want to undertake an assessment because they cannot face the reality and horror of what they have done, and to be in denial gives them grounds to continue. We have been facing cuts to social care, cuts to disability benefits and cuts to housing benefits. What has been created is a climate of fear, a climate of social outcasts and a climate where the understanding of the sick and disabled has gone. They are seen to be the undeservingly ill. We need to focus on the human stories. Some 2% of the population have faced 15% of the cuts brought in by this Government, the same Government that gave tax cuts to the rich, and poverty and fear to the sick and the disabled.

I want to address briefly the work capability assessment. One of my constituents was told that she could work because she could make a shopping list. A lady who was unable to leave her house because she constantly needed to be able to go to the toilet was told that she could work from home making jewellery. The impact of the work capability assessment on people’s lives is horrific. There is a lack of respect for the terror in their lives. The humility they face in just trying to survive every day is being undermined and dismissed by such glib statements.

I want to look briefly at personal independence payment assessments. A lady who came into my surgery on Friday has multiple sclerosis but, because of her age, she will not face an assessment until 2017. She tells me that she wakes up every day with a black cloud of terror over her life. She fears that she will lose the money that allows her to live with some form of dignity. How can we justify that in this place? How can we allow people to live with such terror?

Finally, there is the bedroom tax. I want to talk about one lady, Mrs Evans. In 2009, her son was horrifically injured in a road traffic accident. She was forced to move from the property she had lived in since the 1970s to a specially disabled-adapted property. This has meant that she is no longer eligible for relief from the bedroom tax. To avoid it, she would have had to have lived in the same property since 1996. She has a two-bedroom property. Her son lives downstairs, but she needs to have one of the bedrooms for her daughter, who allows her some relief at night. Because she cares for her son and not her husband, she is not eligible for relief from the bedroom tax.

We are living in a cruel and callous world if we cannot support people’s lives when they have been destroyed by sickness and disability. That has to change.

13:57

[Jeremy Corbyn (Islington North) (Lab)]

I apologise to my hon. Friend the Member for Hayes and Harlington (John McDonnell) and the House for not being here at the start of the debate. I was holding an advice bureau in my constituency, where all the problems that we have been discussing today came vividly to light. I compliment my hon. Friend on securing the debate and those who put the petition together.

I draw attention to what my hon. Friends the Members for Bridgend (Mrs Moon) and for Wansbeck (Ian Lavery) have just said: disability can happen to any of us. At any time we can be a moment away from a major accident or a day or two away from the diagnosis of a terminal illness. The whole idea of not having an assessment of the effects of cuts in welfare spending on those who are sick and disabled is something that I feel very strongly about.

I hope the House agrees to the motion. If it does, I hope the Government accept that it is incumbent on them to carry out the independent review and assessment that is called for in the petition. It is a good part of the reality of parliamentary life now that groups of concerned citizens can get together and, with a sufficient number of signatures on a petition, force the House to address an issue. That is a good thing. Addressing an issue in a debate is only part of the process: what is done to follow up afterwards is important and I hope the Minister will understand the feelings that many people have on this matter.

Like many Members, I deal with a large number of cases relating to welfare payments, social security and disability. When the Government introduced an emergency Budget in June 2010, many were confused by the size of the cuts and the devastation to local government, education and so many other areas. What was not fully realised, however, was the impact of the changes to the welfare benefit system on those with disabilities, and the unfair way in which 15% of the cuts would fall on 2% of the population.

A number of us will have experienced the misery of following up return-to-work interviews. We see constituents who are manifestly incapable of undertaking any normal work. Following the closure of Remploy factories in constituencies including my own, people have no opportunity to undertake work of that kind, and then they are put through the stress of return-to-work interviews. Those whose applications for benefits are subsequently rejected go through a period of incredible stress, and some, sadly, take their lives during that time. Applicants who appeal usually win. Why are we putting people who are already in a vulnerable position through this dreadful, appalling stress?

Others have mentioned the lack of proper assessment of people with mental health conditions. The House now debates the issue of mental health every year, and that is a good thing. Attitudes to mental health are changing in society, and that is a good thing too, but why has it not affected the DWP’s attitude to return-to-work interviews? I have come across people who experience mental health “episodes”. On some days they are okay, and on some days they are not; on some days they have a terrible time, and on others life is more stable for them. It is when such people undergo the additional stress that results from being told that they may be forced to go to work when they are clearly not able to hold down a job that terrible things happen. The numbers of suicides that have resulted from this system are a shame on the country, and a shame on the overall welfare benefits system that we have introduced.

Those who campaigned for—and secured—the principles of universal benefits and the welfare state throughout the 20th century, which culminated in the strong principles behind the National Assistance Act 1948, envisaged a society in which we would protect people from destitution, and would have particular concern for those with disabilities, work-related illnesses, or sicknesses that prevented them from working. Sadly, we now have a system under which many are denied benefits to which they ought to be entitled, and who are living in destitution as a result. Some of them simply cannot cope with that, and suicide results. The situation is compounded by the NHS cuts that have made it so much more difficult for people to get appointments, and the enormous cuts in local government budgets—particularly social services budgets—that have reduced the availability of support mechanisms.

We need to develop a society that protects all, and does not punish people who are suffering from disabilities or long-term sicknesses. It is incumbent on the Government to ensure that the cumulative assessment takes place, so that we can be shown the real impact of what we have done to our society over the past three years.

14:03

[Kate Green (Stretford and Urmston) (Lab)]

This important debate is very welcome, and I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Hayes and Harlington (John McDonnell) and the Backbench Business Committee for arranging it. Like others, however, I pay particular tribute to the 104,000 people who signed the War on Welfare petition that forms the basis of the motion, and who were the driving force behind today’s debate. The volume of signatures is testimony to the strength of public feeling about these matters. I have had the opportunity to meet War on Welfare campaigners in my constituency and here at Westminster, and I can testify to the anger and fear that many feel about the impact of the Government’s policies on disabled people. It concerns non-disabled people as much as disabled people, which is not surprising in view of the fact that—as my hon. Friend the Member for Bridgend (Mrs Moon) so powerfully reminded us—only one in five disabled people is born with a disability.

It is to our shame that, in all walks of life, disabled people face injustice and unfairness. They are twice as likely to be treated unfairly at work as non-disabled people; they are more likely to be victims of crime; they face additional living costs associated with their disabilities; they are twice as likely to live in poverty; and they are less likely to be in work. Today the employment rate among disabled people is 45%, while the rate among the working-age population as a whole is 71%. The hon. Member for Banff and Buchan (Dr Whiteford) rightly identified some of the labour market barriers that disabled people face. Moreover, shamefully, they are on the receiving end of a virtually non-stop flow of hostile and abusive rhetoric.

One would expect that, faced with that grim picture, the Government would focus their efforts on tackling the injustice and discrimination that confront disabled people, but the policies of the current Government so often make matters worse. That is why Labour wholeheartedly supports the call for a cumulative impact assessment of the effect of those policies on disabled people, and why we called for such an assessment last year.

The Government have argued that Labour never carried out such an assessment, but Labour never unleashed such a deluge of negative policies on disabled people. Let me say to the hon. Member for Aberconwy (Guto Bebb) in particular that our record speaks for itself. [Interruption.] He should listen to this. Poverty among disabled people, which stood at 40% when Labour came to office, subsequently fell to about one in four, and the employment rate among disabled people rose by 9 percentage points. We introduced a host of measures to strengthen the rights of disabled people. We passed the Disability Discrimination Act 2005 and introduced the Equality Act 2010, we formed the Equality and Human Rights Commission, and, in 2009, we signed the United Nations convention on the rights of persons with disabilities.

Let us contrast that with the damaging policies of the current Government, which have been highlighted today. Cuts in local authority budgets have meant swingeing cuts in social care. The independent living fund has been closed to new applicants, and its future remains unclear. The Work programme is failing disabled people badly—only 5% of disabled participants have found work—and the Work and Pensions Committee has established that there is just one specialist disability employment adviser for every 600 people in the work-related activity group.

[Guto Bebb]

If the hon. Lady is so proud of the record of Labour, can she explain why training and skills programmes financed by the European social fund in Wales are not being made available to Work programme planners because of a decision by the Welsh Labour Government?

[Kate Green]

I can tell the hon. Gentleman that exactly the same is happening in my constituency. I am glad that he mentioned training and skills, because this Government are placing the future of residential training colleges in jeopardy. They closed 33 Remploy factories last year, and 12 months later two thirds of former Remploy employees were still out of work. Funds from the closures were promised to help those former workers into jobs, but they seem to have disappeared.

[Grahame M. Morris]

I am sorry to interrupt the flow of my hon. Friend’s speech. She is presenting some excellent arguments. She mentioned specialist support. Northern Rights provides bespoke support in my constituency, but it cannot secure a contract from the DWP because of the prime contractors who are operating in the area.

[Kate Green]

It is so often the way that organisations which have a specialised knowledge and understanding of the labour market barriers that confront disabled people, and can identify with those people, are themselves shut out and deprived of the opportunity to set up post-Remploy work settings or provide support through the Work programme.

Damaging changes in the benefits system have also had a devastating effect. As was pointed out by my hon. Friend the Member for Aberdeen South (Dame Anne Begg), that applies both to cuts in benefits provided specifically for disabled people and to other cuts that affect them disproportionately. Employment and support allowance is in trouble—decisions are taking longer—and problems with the work capability assessment persist. About one in 10 decisions are appealed against successfully. The hon. Member for Meon Valley (George Hollingbery), who is no longer in the Chamber, appeared to think that the fact that people could appeal was a sign of the success of the system, but surely it would be better to get the decisions right in the first place.

It is clear that Atos cannot cope. I know that the Minister will say that Labour made the contract, but four years and four independent reviews later—independent reviews which, I should tell the hon. Member for Argyll and Bute (Mr Reid), are required under Labour’s legislation—things are going from bad to worse.

[Mr Reid]

Will the hon. Lady give way?

[Kate Green]

No I will not.

The Minister has, of course, been commendably frank about his plans to replace Atos with other providers—that was called for initially by my right hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Hodge Hill (Mr Byrne)—but we need root-and-branch re-purposing and reform of the work capability assessment, as well as improvements in the process. Those improvements should include systemising the collection of evidence in all cases, including evidence from GPs and other clinicians, providing suitable, accessible settings for assessments, and ensuring that recordings of interviews are always available to claimants.

[Caroline Lucas]

Will the hon. Lady give way?

[Kate Green]

Not at the moment.

I do not apologise for our intentions when we introduced the ESA and an assessment of people’s capacity for work. We wanted that to be a supportive and facilitative process, but, as my right hon. Friend the Member for Stirling (Mrs McGuire) pointed out, the renegotiation of the Atos contract by the current Government has rebalanced the system to be punitive, not facilitative. The Minister’s plan to replace Atos with other providers goes nowhere near to meeting the need for wholesale reform.

However, I do part company with the motion in its call for the WCA to be scrapped. I know that will disappoint many disabled campaigners listening to the debate. In my view, the assessment should be the first step in a process of identifying and assembling the right support, including financial support. I say to the hon. Member for Brighton, Pavilion (Caroline Lucas) that I have never thought there should be no assessment or reassessment, and I do not think it now. Justified criticisms were made of people being left for years on incapacity benefit without any support or any check on their progress or the deterioration of their condition, and we should not go back to that. Yet just this week, as my hon. Friend the Member for Edinburgh East (Sheila Gilmore)—who has had to leave the debate to attend a Bill Committee—pointed out, we learned that Ministers are going to leave people on ESA in exactly that position for the next two years without reassessment, and apparently planned to keep both claimants and MPs in the dark about it. I hope the Minister will be able to clarify exactly the background to that extraordinary decision today.

[Caroline Lucas]

I think people with disabilities will be disappointed to hear what the hon. Lady says, because the current work capability assessment has become so tainted by being linked to a Government who are very clearly trying to reduce the amount of money they give out that if a new Labour Government wanted to redesign the assessment, which would still obviously need to assess whether or not people are eligible, they should call it something else. By sticking to the name “work capability assessment” and not being able to support the motion, the hon. Lady is doing people with disabilities a disservice.

[Kate Green]

The hon. Lady largely made a very helpful contribution, but there is an important point about the legitimacy of the assessment process—a legitimacy that disabled people will themselves recognise confers on them the entitlement to the benefits they receive. It is very important that we do nothing to undermine the public’s perception of entitlement.

Meanwhile, as we can see from today’s National Audit Office report, the roll-out of PIP is also in trouble. Terminally ill patients and disabled people have to wait weeks, if not months, for a decision, leaving them stranded financially, and anxious and uncertain about their claim. Why on earth Ministers awarded a PIP contract to Atos, given its failure to manage the WCA contract properly, is simply beyond my understanding. What on earth were they thinking of?

The replacement of the DLA with PIP also comes with a 20% budget cut, leaving disabled people and their carers facing the loss of vital financial support. Some will lose their Motability vehicles, and some will fall out of work as a result. The Disability Benefits Consortium has suggested that if 50,000 people leave work as a result of losing the mobility payment, that could cost the Exchequer £464 million in lost taxes and national insurance and in additional benefits.

It is not just about cuts to benefits specifically for disabled people either, because other benefit cuts affect them disproportionately too: the bedroom tax; the introduction of the benefit cap, which will also significantly impact on carers, many of whom cannot take paid work to escape it; the localisation of council tax support; the removal of funding for local assistance schemes; and, as my hon. Friend the Member for North Ayrshire and Arran (Katy Clark) pointed out, the decision to uprate benefits by CPI, which impacts particularly harshly on disabled people, who face substantial additional living costs.

As my hon. Friend the Member for Gateshead (Ian Mearns) said, in times of austerity it is disabled people who are bearing a disproportionate burden, and the Government’s responsibility is to work hand in hand with them to protect and strengthen their independence, their dignity, their choices and their right to live free from stigma, hardship and fear. As a first step to doing that, it is high time that Ministers undertook a proper cumulative impact assessment of the effect of their policies, took action and faced up to their devastating effects.

14:09

[The Minister of State, Department for Work and Pensions (Mike Penning)]

I apologise as I had to pop out of the Chamber for a second—nature called—but I came straight back and I think I caught most of the speech of the hon. Member for Stretford and Urmston (Kate Green).

[Ian Lavery]

It’s down to age.

[Mike Penning]

Yes, it’s an age thing; the hon. Gentleman is absolutely right—and that is no doubt the voice of experience.

I welcome the debate and congratulate the hon. Member for Hayes and Harlington (John McDonnell) on securing it from the Backbench Business Committee. This is the sort of debate that should take place. I also agree that it should be a non-whipped debate; that is right and proper. We may not all agree about what has been discussed, but it is, frankly, in my opinion something the Whips should stay out of, and we should have proper debates. I will probably get shot when I leave the Chamber for saying that.

There are also some parts of this very long motion with which I have a great deal of sympathy, and there are parts of it with which I do not agree, as Members on both sides of the House will realise, but perhaps we can try to work on what I do agree on and what we can do together to make the benefits regime better for the people we are trying to represent and the lobby that is here today.

Some 24 Members including myself have now taken part in the debate and it is a shame that it was time-restricted, but I understand fully why that was the case. We could have spoken for a great deal longer and have had longer contributions, however. Many Members on both sides of the House have raised specific constituency cases and my officials are in the Box and will have taken note of them. I will write to the Members concerned directly after this debate and see how we can progress those matters forward. I will also take a personal interest in certain cases, and in particular the case raised by the hon. Member for Rochdale (Simon Danczuk). On that case, as the Minister responsible, I apologise unreservedly to the family. It falls back on me, and it is about time politicians stood up and apologised when things have gone wrong. In that case, things clearly have gone wrong and the family have every right to be aggrieved, and I hope the hon. Gentleman’s constituent makes a full recovery.

On the call for a cumulative assessment, I am not going to say to the shadow Minister that previous Administrations did not do that—although they did not—but there was a reason why and it is very complex, and the Institute for Fiscal Studies has also said that that could not be done properly and accurately enough. I hope the shadow Minister and others will understand why, although the Treasury carries out independent reviews of different parts of Government policy, it does not do that. I respect the work done in other reports, but they are not cumulative in the way we would like.

[Ian Mearns]

Outside agencies have attempted to do cumulative impact assessments—Scope and Demos, for instance, worked together on an assessment. Surely, given the resources of Government, we can do a better job than those organisations and make a good fist of it.

[Mike Penning]

Actually, I was going to refer to the work by Dr Duffy, and when we leave the Chamber today, I will ask my officials to contact Dr Duffy and his team to see whether we can work closely together. Perhaps we can give them better information so we can be as accurate as possible.

The right hon. Member for Stirling (Mrs McGuire) said my heart is in the right place, and I hope it is. I consider it a great honour to do this job and I desperately want to make things right and proper. If we look at the spending since 2009 going forward and projected into 2015, we see that the budget in this area of Government expenditure will continue to rise. We have a slightly more cumulative figure than the ones I cited earlier, and it is about £50 billion a year, so we spend just under £1 billion a week in this budget. The key for everybody in the House is how we spend it—that we spend it correctly.

I also believe in having a work capability assessment. I do not agree with the motion, but I do agree with the shadow Minister. I think that the assessment was brought in for the right reasons. I am not going to say all the problems were caused by the previous Administration because, frankly, the problems with Atos and the WCA have been there for everybody to see since the general election as well. It is not quite as simple as saying, as some Members have, that we should go out tomorrow morning and sack Atos. It has a contract. As I said at oral questions earlier in the week, I am determined that once we have negotiated the position with Atos—and we are in negotiation with Atos, which is why I was so surprised to read the views of Atos in the press over the weekend—we must make absolutely sure taxpayers’ money is not paid to Atos as compensation for the end of the contract when that comes. That would be fundamentally wrong and I would not agree to it. The negotiations continue.

We have discussed several aspects of benefits today, and I believe that the time being taken for people to be assessed is fundamentally unacceptable. This is an issue not only for the suppliers of PIP and the WCA—we have talked about Capita and Atos—but for my Department as well.

[Yasmin Qureshi]

rose—

[Mike Penning]

I want to make some progress, but I promise that I will give way to the hon. Lady in a moment.

[Kate Green]

Will the Minister give way?

[Mike Penning]

I want to make a little more progress on this point.

The National Audit Office report has been mentioned today. It was a snapshot report based on the situation in the autumn of last year. When I appeared before the Select Committee, I spoke extensively about one aspect of the report, which dealt with terminal illness. It is crucial to understand that I hid nothing away from the Committee, and that I said that the length of time involved in dealing with those cases was unacceptable. It has now come down to about 10 days. That is still too long, although it is less than it was under the previous scheme. We will get it down even further. I am working closely with Macmillan, and we have agreed to pilot a scheme for the 2% of terminal cases in which we will return to a paper-based system until I can get a secure PDF into place. Macmillan is pleased with what we are doing on that. The system is still not perfect, but we have moved an awfully long way, and we learned a lot of the lessons before the report even came out.

[Kate Green]

My point is on the WCA, and I hope that the Minister will address the question that I and my hon. Friend the Member for Edinburgh East (Sheila Gilmore) raised about the suspension of reassessment of ESA claimants for the next two years. Will he tell us why the Department appears to have decided not to inform claimants or Members of Parliament about that?

[Mike Penning]

If we were to inform claimants and Members of Parliament about the minutiae of every single change in policy, we would be here a lot longer. As most Members know, I am not hugely party political, but I must point out that the previous Administration did not offer that level of information either. That is not how Governments work. We are trying to deal with the delays, and to ensure that people get what they are entitled to as quickly as possible and that nobody will be worse off while we are doing that. We are, however, in the middle of a really difficult negotiation with Atos over the WCA.

I want to talk about how we can speed things up. Yesterday, I chaired a meeting of a network involving all the major stakeholders and charities. I hope that I will not upset any of the charities by leaving them out. It was a positive meeting, at which I said to them, “Sit with us and work with us to help us improve on what we have.” I was very much in listening mode, which is why I shall now give way to the hon. Member for Bolton South East (Yasmin Qureshi).

[Yasmin Qureshi]

I am not going to make a party political point; my comment is meant to assist the Minister. On a voluntary basis, I have represented people appealing against assessments now, under the current system, as well as 20-odd years ago under the old system. The problem now lies with the assessment method, which involves only form-filling and box-ticking. That is why we can no longer assess people’s disabilities properly. In the old days, a medical expert gave evidence on a person’s ability. If we were to bring doctors back into the equation, we might find that more decisions were made properly.

[Mike Penning]

I am almost sorry that I gave way to the hon. Lady, because her intervention was so long. My time is being massively eroded, and I hope, Madam Deputy Speaker, that you will give me a few more minutes to address the issues that have been raised.

The consultants and GPs tell us that the clinical evidence taken at the assessment is vital. When they carry out an assessment, they are not there to provide a diagnosis; they are there to assess capacity. They can do that only by using an evidence base. One of the big issues under DLA was that only 6% of applicants ever got a face-to-face assessment. We are at 97% now with PIP. I agree that that is fundamentally too high, as I said to the Select Committee.

I have also attended tribunals to see what is happening during the last part of the DLA claims that are now coming through. I listened to the cases, and I agreed that some of them should never have come before the tribunal in the first place. Under PIP, we have mandatory reconsideration; that was never the case before. I have now asked my officials to go through the approximately 30,000 cases waiting to go to tribunal. We will mandatorily assess all of them, to try to prevent so many from going to tribunal. There is a lot of work to be done, but we must do as much as we can, together with the charities and the representative bodies.

Residential colleges were mentioned earlier. I agree that they do excellent work, but the college principals know that I cannot pay for places that are not taken up. That is what was happening under the previous contract. There were residential places with nobody in residence, and we had day people on day courses. We have worked with the colleges on that, and we will ensure that we have the necessary capacity. Interventions have eroded my time, so I shall now listen to what the hon. Member for Hayes and Harlington (John McDonnell) has to say; I think I know what it will be. Please, let us work together to ensure that the system is better for everyone we represent.

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Mrs Eleanor Laing)]

Order. Before I call Mr McDonnell to wind up the debate, I would like to congratulate the Minister on behalf of the House on his appointment today to the Privy Council.

14:26

[John McDonnell]

I am sorry to spoil the Minister’s day. When the banking crisis took place, the Government —with the support of all parties in the House—found £1.3 trillion to bail the banks out. Since then, virtually every other part of society has been paying for that bail-out, other than the banks themselves. Is it not ironic that we are debating cuts affecting people with disabilities in the week when RBS is putting together a half a billion pounds pool to pay bonuses?

Time and again in the debate, we have heard about the suffering that disabled people are enduring as a result of the cuts, and to be frank, I have heard nothing today about alleviating that suffering. That is why it is important to make a commitment to carry out a cumulative impact assessment. Any good Government would want to assess the impact of their policies, so why are this Government refusing to do so? I think it is because, if an impact assessment were published, people across society would be so angered and disgusted at how people with disabilities were being treated that they would rise up in revolt.

I say to the Minister that when the Question is put at the end of the debate, I will be shouting “Aye”, and I hope that everyone in the House will do the same. If the Government say that it is too complicated for them to carry out the assessment, let us have an independent assessment. Why cannot the Government bring in the Centre for Welfare Reform, Demos and the other think-tanks and fund them to do the cumulative impact assessment that the Government are running from?

All the campaigners have been saying—as we have exposed again today—that the work capability assessment is not working. It is failing people and causing them to suffer; it is failing properly to assess their ailments and conditions; and it is failing to get them back into work. That does not mean that there should be no assessment, however. We are saying that we should scrap this one and work with people with disabilities, their representatives, the BMA and others to create a system that is fair and just. That is all that the people up in the Gallery and the 100,000-plus others who signed the petition are asking for. That is why I urge Members to shout “Aye” today, and to support the reform that is so desperately needed.

Question put and agreed to.

Resolved,

That this House calls on the Government to commission an independent cumulative assessment of the impact of changes in the welfare system on sick and disabled people, their families and carers, drawing upon the expertise of the Work and Pensions Select Committee; requests that this impact assessment examine care home admissions, access to day care centres, access to education for people with learning difficulties, provision of universal mental health treatments, closures of Remploy factories, the Government's contract with Atos Healthcare, IT implementation of universal credit, human rights abuses against disabled people, excess deaths of welfare claimants and the disregard of medical evidence in decision-making by Atos, the Department for Work and Pensions and the Tribunals Service; urges the Secretary of State for Health and the Secretary of State for Education jointly to launch a consultation on improving support into work for sick and disabled people; and further calls on the Government to end with immediate effect the work capability assessment, as voted for by the British Medical Association, to discontinue forced work under the threat of sanctions for people on disability benefits and to bring forward legislative proposals to allow a free vote on repeal of the Welfare Reform Act 2012.

Parliamentary Representation

Thursday 27th February 2014 Commons Chamber

[Relevant documents: Final Report from the Speaker’s Conference (on Parliamentary Representation), Session 2009-10, HC 239-I, and the Government response, Cm 7824. First Special Report from the Speaker’s Conference (on Parliamentary Representation), Session 2009-10, HC 449.]

14:29

[Dame Anne Begg (Aberdeen South) (Lab)]

I beg to move,

That this House welcomes the fact that there are now more women hon. Members and hon. Members from black, Asian and minority ethnic communities in the UK Parliament than at any time in history; notes that, in spite of progress, Parliament is not yet fully representative of the diversity of UK society; recognises that increased diversity of representation is a matter of justice and would enhance debate and decision-making and help to rebuild public faith in Parliament; is concerned that the progress made in 2010 may not be sustained unless concerted efforts are made to support individuals from under-represented communities to stand for election in 2015; and calls on the Government and political parties to fulfil commitments made in response to the Speaker’s Conference (on Parliamentary Representation) in 2010, including commitments in respect of candidate selection and support for candidates.

It is interesting to note just how topical this debate is. A few weeks ago, almost every newspaper in the land carried the picture of the all-male Government Front Bench. I wonder whether it will go down in history, and be as iconic as the Blair’s babes photo, which I was proud to be in. I am not sure whether those on the Government Front Bench were quite so proud to be in their photo.

We have also heard that a number of women MPs are standing down at the next election. That is not unusual for women who are over 65 and who have served in this place for more than 20 years, but it is concerning when younger women who have only been in Parliament for one term decide that they would rather be doing something else.

We have also had your plea, Mr Speaker, for a more civilised Prime Minister’s questions—good luck on that one! Is it all about macho culture, as many say, or is there something intrinsic in the confrontational shape of the Chamber? A great deal has been written in recent months about the rather narrow socio-economic background of most MPs. People ask, “Why so few working-class MPs?” All of that is relevant to this debate. However, the reason I applied for this debate is more prosaic. In the previous Parliament, I was vice- chair of the Speaker's Conference on parliamentary representation, and one of the recommendations was that, every two years, there should be a debate on the issues raised in our report on the Floor of the House. It was hoped that such a debate would raise the importance of having a diverse Parliament, look at the progress made and come up with suggestions on how to improve the situation. The Speaker’s Conference felt that if the issue was not discussed regularly, the need to take action would be forgotten. The last debate was in January 2012, so this debate is to fulfil that recommendation.

[Keith Vaz (Leicester East) (Lab)]

I am most grateful to my hon. Friend for giving way so early in her speech. May I congratulate her on securing this debate and getting the chance to have it on the Floor of the House, and on all the work that she has done, and indeed that Mr Speaker has done, on the issue of parliamentary representation? She has mentioned gender, but does she agree that there is also a case for increasing parliamentary representation in respect of race? In 1987, for example, we had four black and Asian MPs. It is now up to 27 on both sides of the House, but that is still well below the percentage of ethnic minorities in the population as a whole.

[Dame Anne Begg]

I think 4% of the House now comes from a black, Asian and minority ethnic background. The proportion in the general community is 8%. Although a lot of progress has been made, we still have a way to go.

It is just a happy coincidence that the very month that the issue is on the front pages we have the anniversary of the publication of the Speaker’s Conference report. The issue is a live one—as live today as it was five years ago when the conference was first proposed. The arguments for a diverse Parliament being both necessary and desirable have not changed. We should have a Parliament that is representative; it seems obvious. The people sitting in this Chamber should reflect the whole of British society. They should come from all walks of life. This House needs to look more like modern Britain. People should be able to look at this place and see someone who looks or sounds like them and who has, if not the same personal experience, at least an understanding of the life they lead.

To achieve that is difficult. It does not happen by accident. It takes a conscious effort from those with the power to ensure that the candidates the electorate are asked to vote for in the general election come from a range of backgrounds with different life experiences. The political parties are the gatekeepers of this process. They are the ones who choose the candidates, so it is incumbent on them to ensure they have candidates who come from an ethnic minority, are lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender, have a disability—and are not all white men from private schools. I always use the phrase “private schools”, because in Scotland public schools are run by the state and are free to go to. What a difference language can make!

What progress has been made? The House of Commons is more diverse now than at any time in history. It was only at the 1997 election, when I entered the House, that more than 100 women were elected. Up until then, there were more MPs called John than there were women. Interestingly, there were only five women who had been a member of the Cabinet before Margaret Thatcher.

More than 50% of the Labour intake at the last two elections have been women, and across Parliament 4% are black, Asian and minority ethnic against 8% in the general population. There are now more MPs with a disability, and we have even heard from MPs who have been willing to reveal that they have suffered from a mental health problem.

May I also commend the Government for introducing the access to elected office for disabled people fund and for announcing its extension up to 2015 a couple of weeks ago? The Speaker’s Conference recommended setting up such a fund to help disabled people overcome one of the barriers they face in seeking selection—the extra costs that they incur. The money might go to pay for a signer, or postage for someone who cannot hand deliver letters to members, or extra travel costs. It is important and it is a start.

Although the fund can be accessed by disabled people across the UK for selection to Westminster, it does not cover elections to the Scottish Parliament and Scottish local authorities—I am sad that the members of the Scottish National party have disappeared out of the Chamber. Those elections are the responsibility of the Scottish Government who have yet to set up such a fund in Scotland. Despite warm words and a motion and debate in the Scottish Parliament last year, nothing has yet happened. Therefore, while English disabled people can access the fund for local government elections, Scottish disabled people cannot. As political parties in Scotland have already begun their selection process for the next Scottish Parliament elections in 2016, the need for such a fund is urgent. If they leave it too late, potential disabled candidates could miss out. I hope the Scottish Government hear my call and follow the example set by the UK Government in this worthwhile initiative.

There have been other changes that have made Parliament more accessible. We now have more reasonable hours, and the programming of business has meant an end to the old late nights spent in the bar. The opening of Parliament’s crèche has also been a step forward. However, there is no room for complacency, and unless the women MPs who are standing down in 2015 are replaced by even more women, then the overall numbers could drop. There is clearly a need for us to look at ourselves to see why so many people think that being an MP is not a job for them.

If people from different backgrounds do not want to be an MP, and cannot be persuaded to put themselves forward, we will not address the supply side issues. If it is too expensive to enter a selection race, people from modest backgrounds are not going to be in that race. If the public continue to hold MPs in such low regard, why would anyone in their right mind want to be an MP? Of course perception is far worse than the reality, which may explain why a higher proportion of the people wanting to be an MP already have a knowledge of the world of Parliament—either because they are related to an MP, they have worked for one or they have been a political special adviser. What puts other people off, does not seem to discourage them. Perhaps they realise that being an MP can be fun. I must say that I have never regretted standing for Parliament, and I do not come from the typical MP’s background. How do we get across the fact that, for most of us, serving as an MP is a privilege and an honour and the best decision of our lives? Having said that, we must be honest about the issues that put people off. Perhaps we should do more work shadowing, such as that organised by Operation Black Vote, and look closely at the work of my right hon. Friend the Member for Salford and Eccles (Hazel Blears) so that potential candidates can see just how good this place can be, despite all the shouting—although that can be fun, too.

If proof were needed that MPs are different from the rest of the population, we need look no further than the recent research by academics Professor Sarah Childs and Dr Rosie Campbell presented at the “Parenting in Parliament” event last month. Their research has identified a statistically significant difference between the number of children that women MPs have and the number of children had by women of their peer group in wider society, with women MPs having fewer children. That would appear to support the proposition that family commitments are a barrier to women’s entry into Parliament. Dr Campbell indicated at the event that further qualitative work would be required to ascertain precisely what factors are involved and how this issue may best be addressed.

One key recommendation of the Speaker’s Conference that remains unresolved was aimed at ensuring that political parties choose a diverse range of candidates in potentially winnable seats: the publication by political parties of diversity data relating to candidate selections has not properly happened. It is worth setting out again the reason why the conference thought that was so important. We found evidence to indicate strongly that inequality persists in candidate selection. The reasons for that are complex, and it is difficult to identify and apply solutions because parties and constituencies select candidates by different methods and, frequently, independently of central control.

The vast majority of MPs are selected on a party ticket. The parties are the agents of change, and the choices the parties make about candidates are central to shaping what the House of Commons looks like. Those choices are important to the parties as well: the message of inclusion is a very powerful one that could help to engage new audiences and develop closer bonds with alienated communities. We recommended the creation of a formal monitoring scheme, requiring political parties to publish anonymised data on the gender, ethnic background and other characteristics of candidates selected. Knowing that the parties already hold that type of information, we gathered it from them ourselves and published it in the six months preceding the last general election—that shows that it can be done. We also secured an amendment to the then Equality Bill—it is now section 106 of the Equality Act 2010—to make such monitoring permanent.

Since the election, however, and the end of the conference, the central publication of data has stopped, despite my writing to the political parties reminding them of the Speaker’s Conference recommendation. Section 106 of the Equality Act has not been commenced, as the Government wished to consult further with the parties and secure their agreement to publish voluntarily. But that has not happened, so may I ask the Minister whether she can implement section 106, so that candidate selection can be tracked? Now is the right time to do it, as candidate selections for 2015 were delayed owing to uncertainty over future parliamentary constituency boundaries, so it was only at the end of last year that selections for Westminster constituencies began in earnest. Data on current candidate selections have now been published online by Labour and the Liberal Democrats, but not, as far as I can discover, by the Conservatives. Some of the information that has been published is not necessarily comparable across the parties, but I hope the Minister can help with all that.

I appreciate that all political parties have different cultures and so may not all adopt the same approaches in tackling under-representation. It might be through all-women shortlists, through the use of primaries, through the use of an A-list or by whatever means, but a conscious effort must be made because this will not happen by accident. There is no silver bullet or magic wand to wave that will change the make-up of the Commons, and it would be an enormous missed opportunity if the Parliament elected in 2015 is less diverse than this one. Changing that make-up will require all political parties to accept they have a role to play in fostering talent and in candidate selection. The Government can play a role, too, in providing leadership and encouraging a cross-party approach, as we have seen with the access to elected office fund. But Parliament has to be more welcoming, too, and perhaps, if I may be so bold, Mr Speaker, that is where you come in as well. Our democracy is precious—it is too precious to be wholly in the hands of a narrow elite. We can make this a Parliament for the 21st century, but we can only do it together.

14:44

[Margot James (Stourbridge) (Con)]

Mr Speaker, I congratulate the hon. Member for Aberdeen South (Dame Anne Begg) on securing this debate and on keeping the pressure up to make sure that the Speaker’s Conference proposals, which were made before many of us entered the House, live and carry on delivering the successful outcomes that they have started to deliver. I agree with much of what has already been said; we are here because we all care about our democracy and know how fundamental it is that all Britons, regardless of their ethnic origin, gender, sexual orientation, where they come from or social background, should not be barred from playing a full part in our parliamentary democracy. So this debate involves the issue of fairness, as well as the effectiveness of our legislative process. As I found in business, things are much more effective where a diverse group of individuals, with a variety of backgrounds and experiences behind them, come together to have an impact on the process. Later in my contribution I will give a few examples of small ways in which that has been achieved by our greater diversity.

A more representative Chamber will also help us to reduce the gap, which we have all seen grow in our lifetimes, between the public and their elected representatives. There are many reasons why we are all here, and the whole process starts at a young age by inspiring in people an interest in politics. Although we have improved the routes into politics, one conventional route is still for young people to come here to work as interns or special advisers or for one of the main parties’ research functions. We have to capture those young people and make sure they are more representative of society at large, as that is a natural pool of entry into politics.

We also need to consider the people who come into Parliament later in their careers, having done something else first. The public always say that they want to see more of that, and I believe everyone in this House agrees with that. There needs to be a career within Parliament that embraces the experience that these people have had in other fields and does not just focus narrowly on the more political experience, and the performance in the Chamber and at the big set-piece events, as the only perceived way of getting on in Government or shadow Government.

There are many barriers to overcome, and I have touched on a few. The hon. Lady gave a strong mention to the economic barrier, which puts a great many people off. It is why we have so few people from lower-paid or manual occupations. Indeed, there are also issues to address in respect of people at the higher end of the pay spectrum, who might feel that they cannot afford to go into Parliament. This is a big issue with numerous aspects.

The impact on family life has to be tackled better than it has been, and some of the regulations imposed by the Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority have moved the situation backwards. That has to be tackled head on; we must not be embarrassed or nervous about dealing with the problem faced by those who represent constituencies many miles away and who want their family with them during the working week. They should not be disincentivised by an anti-family system of allowances. That system has to be changed.

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

Does my hon. Friend agree that the partners, wives and husbands of MPs have changed their view of the role of an MP? An MP, like everybody else in our society, needs to do a range of things both for their family and for their work, and that social change in expectations on child care and other things is a driver in some of the things to which she has referred.

[Margot James]

I thank my hon. Friend for that intervention. He makes a good point about how society and family life are changing, and how Parliament has to keep up with that. I quite agree.

[Dame Angela Watkinson (Hornchurch and Upminster) (Con)]

Following on from that, does my hon. Friend agree that the decision to become an MP is a much greater one for a woman than it is for a man, particularly if she is of child-bearing age, because there are big decisions to make about when to have children? I am absolutely full of admiration for female colleagues in this House who have had babies while they have been working, but there are decisions to be made about who looks after the child, possibly decisions that men do not have to make. That is one of the reasons why women are under-represented in this Chamber.

[Margot James]

I thank my hon. Friend for that intervention; she makes an important point. I know that she does not mean to imply that the aspects of family life and child-rearing that she mentioned apply only to women; increasingly, young fathers are also involved in making such decisions.

It is difficult to combine a parliamentary career with caring responsibilities. While my parents were alive—they lived close to me in London—I would have found it possible to represent a London constituency but impossible to represent a constituency outside of London and many miles away from them.

My hon. Friend makes a very good point. We need to tackle this issue, and the system of allowances and parliamentary hours, about which much progress has been made, needs to reflect the difficult decisions that people make. She is quite right, of course; I believe that there is only one mother in the Cabinet, and perhaps that has something to do with the point she made.

I will talk a little about some of the measures that have been taken and that have worked to various degrees. Clearly, the all-women shortlists that the Labour party introduced in 1997 have had a positive effect on the representation of women in Parliament, and I am sure that they have had much to do with why 33% of Labour MPs are women. Positive discrimination, if I can put it that way, has also benefited Conservative representation, perhaps not so much in this place as in Europe, where we have two or three very good MEPs who were elected at the last European elections because we were brave enough to say that in the primary system of election, whereby we were electing candidates, the highest placed woman went to the top of the list.

[Sir Edward Leigh (Gainsborough) (Con)]

Does my hon. Friend accept that, although we of course want to have as many women as possible in Parliament—not least because they are as gracious as she is—it is still a fundamental Conservative principle that Conservative associations must preserve full independence to select the best people, whatever their sex?

[Margot James]

A system that does not recognise that some groups in society face greater barriers than others does not do Parliament a service, and I do not think that we can just leave things to what, in some parts of our country, are fairly small groups of people. If they are in a Conservative area where there is a large majority and effectively choosing the MP, I do not think that they can expect to have untrammelled choice, when we are acknowledging in this debate that many groups—including women and ethnic minorities, and especially people with disabilities—have particular issues they need to overcome. That needs to be built into a system in order for it to be genuinely meritocratic, and I thank my hon. Friend for his kind remarks.

[Mr Brooks Newmark (Braintree) (Con)]

I could make the quip that for more than 200 years we seemed to have all-male shortlists and nobody seemed to object to that. Does my hon. Friend agree that, when we make international comparisons, we see that where there is higher representation of women in international Parliaments there is some form of positive discrimination?

[Margot James]

I agree with that point and I thank my hon. Friend for his intervention. In most Parliaments where there is a decent level of female representation there is at least positive action.

Our party has succeeded to some degree with the positive action that we have taken. I was on the A-list, as it was known, before the last election, along with many of my hon. Friends. That system enabled a big increase in the number of Conservative women that we now have in the Chamber. As many Members will know, it was a system whereby half of the list of candidates from which an association could select were female. We went through a few other developments on that theme, and later in the cycle of selections there was a system whereby associations had to have gender parity at each stage of the selection process. I commend that process for enabling men to have a proper and fair chance while ensuring that women were supported in overcoming some of the more extensive barriers that they face.

[Andrew Percy (Brigg and Goole) (Con)]

I will just take my hon. Friend back to the point of selection. Is it not also the case that the selection processes of all parties, but especially our party, do not only favour men but men of a particular social and professional background? That has been one of the biggest issues in expanding representation. This debate is about not only gender, but social class, and frankly our associations all too often—not in the case of my constituency, I am pleased to say—represent a particular social class.

[Margot James]

My hon. Friend makes the very good point that, of course, this debate is about more than gender; I could not agree more. In my area, the black country, I do not feel that Conservatives have any sort of class bias in favour of people from higher socio-economic backgrounds, but I can see that in some parts of the country that bias might exist and we must certainly stamp it out.

Gender is an area where it has been easier to improve the selection processes, but we must work equally hard on improving the access to Parliament for other disadvantaged groups. We can do that by fostering a sense of inclusion—a sense that Parliament is an inclusive place—and by our parties respecting that when they select candidates.

The Speaker’s parliamentary placement scheme has delivered a good start in equalising the number of women and men who come into Parliament at a young age to work. Almost 50% of the paid internships supported by the scheme have been for young women, which is a good thing. The hon. Member for Aberdeen South mentioned the access to elected office for disabled people fund. There have been 60 applicants to that fund and 29 people with disabilities, who probably face greater hurdles than anybody else in entering Parliament, now have full funding, which is great progress. I thank you, Mr Speaker, for your support for all that work, which I hope will continue.

I will say a little bit about the sort of changes that we can make when we get here. The number of lesbian and gay people on our Benches now makes quite a big difference. Ministers across all Departments are very busy people. I am glad to say that all the Ministers I know are fully committed to diversity and equality, but the issue is not always at the top of their mind—they have very busy lives and many responsibilities—so it is up to Back Benchers. I applaud many of my fellow gay Back Benchers on keeping the Government to their promises. There has been the legalisation on gay marriage; the removal of historical convictions for consensual sex between men; the pardoning of Alan Turing; and support for anti-homophobic bullying campaigns in school. There are many other examples, too. It is because we have more diversity that we can make that sort of difference, and that is why we need more of it.

I want to talk about what we can learn from business. In business, we have seen some success in the “Women on Boards” programme, which has very much been led by the Government and the Under-Secretary of State for Women and Equalities, my hon. Friend the Member for Maidstone and The Weald (Mrs Grant). Now, 25% of non-executive directors on boards are female; that is up from 16%. I can see business outstripping politics if we are not careful. Of course, I hope that business wins the battle to get more diversity and inclusion. It realises that it will not win corporate battles by relying on the talent pool that used to win in the past, and that areas of great shortage, such as engineering, need to attract more women. Some 75% of an organisation’s customers and employees will not be white men, so its decision makers should not be, either.

There are many ways to lead. Lloyds Banking Group has set a target: it wants women to be 40% of its senior executives in five years’ time. Procter & Gamble has a big programme on developing women leaders globally. Thomson Reuters has a female management academy. Those organisations recognise that women need support and training, and a champion at board level to enable them to fulfil their potential. I see an opportunity there for politics in Westminster. I think that we are all aware that HR at Westminster is perhaps a little antediluvian, compared with HR in industry. We need to learn lessons from these organisations, which do not just set targets, but have committed people dedicated to making those targets a reality. On those programmes, women are identified and put into positions that are known as feeder jobs, in which people can acquire critical skills that they will require at board level. What I am saying is that it is not enough to get greater diversity in Parliament; we then need career progression, which needs to be managed and led from the top. There is a great opportunity there, and I urge that point on Members on both Front Benches.

[Julian Smith]

From my experience of head-hunting in business, I would say that the key element in getting more women into the positions that we are talking about is incentivising men to look at a much broader longlist of candidates. That is vital in achieving what she wants.

[Margot James]

My hon. Friend makes an excellent point. More broadly, many men, both in politics and the corporate world, now see the benefits of having a more inclusive environment. It is crucial that the head-hunting industry plays its part in supplying the longlists that he mentions. There is a lot to learn from business.

There is also outreach: we have to reach out. I hear from contacts in universities and the workplace that the Labour party is very good at that. We Conservative Members need to follow its example of going after people from a diverse range of backgrounds when they are at university or in leadership roles in business, inviting them in, and suggesting a parliamentary career to them. Hopefully, more will be Conservative than the opposite.

[Dame Angela Watkinson]

rose—

[Margot James]

Does my hon. Friend wish to intervene?

[Mr Speaker]

The hon. Member for Hornchurch and Upminster (Dame Angela Watkinson) need not be unduly shy; she would be breaking the habit of a lifetime.

[Dame Angela Watkinson]

Thank you, Mr Speaker. I want to follow up the point about going to universities and enthusing people at that stage. That needs to start even earlier. I have been shocked to find in schools that pupils do not ever read a newspaper or watch news bulletins on television. I encourage them to do so. They think politics and public life are nothing to do with them. Interest in general matters needs to start much earlier.

[Margot James]

I absolutely agree. All of us have a duty in that regard. We all enjoy going to schools and talking about politics, and ensuring that there are school visits to this place; all that is very important. Politics A-level should be an option in all sixth-form colleges and all schools, because that can inspire people. If young people do not watch the news on television, perhaps they are getting their information from blogs, or in other ways, but they must be encouraged, by us and by others, to engage politically; I absolutely agree with my hon. Friend on that.

We all want a much more inclusive political process. I hope that I have been able to set out a few ideas about how parties, the Government and Parliament itself can help us to achieve that goal so that we do not go backwards, as the hon. Member for Aberdeen South realistically warned that we might, but instead go forward as a Parliament that is far more inclusive than it has been to date.

15:05

[Mr David Blunkett (Sheffield, Brightside and Hillsborough) (Lab)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Aberdeen South (Dame Anne Begg) on securing the debate. She was extremely modest, however, because she has been assiduous and tenacious in following through on these matters since she was vice-Chair of the Speaker’s Conference, albeit that she chaired it under the previous Speaker and then under your tutelage, Mr Speaker, after you were prepared to pick up the cudgel when you came into your position. You carried the conference forward and have given support since then including, of course, through the parliamentary placement scheme that you and my right hon. Friend the Member for Salford and Eccles (Hazel Blears) have pushed forward. I am pleased to have a paid intern in my office under that scheme, who happens to be female, which is beneficial in my speaking in the debate.

My hon. Friend the Member for Aberdeen South must not hide her light under a bushel, because not enough people keep pushing this issue. I often nip myself and think, “Why aren’t I doing more to speak about this, or to put forward publicly ideas of what we might do?” I should, however, declare a non-pecuniary interest: I am helping to establish the Bernard Crick centre at Sheffield university—it is named after my old tutor, Professor Sir Bernard Crick—which is also called the centre for the public understanding of politics.

We had high hopes that the Cabinet Office, linked to the Deputy Prime Minister’s office, would be prepared to do more. We keep hearing that it will, but after the schemes are put up, they seem to disappear like sand between fingers. I understand that money has been diverted to be handed over to local authorities to address the critical issue of electoral registration, given that Parliament was getting into a mess regarding people being discouraged from registering, but we need to spend even modest sums to encourage political engagement from the earliest years.

The hon. Member for Stourbridge (Margot James) is right that it is vital that we encourage young people at school to be interested in politics and citizenship and that they receive proper unbiased tutoring in those subjects. I was very pleased that the Secretary of State for Education—I do not often say that—took a step back and did not remove citizenship from the school curriculum, but there is still a discussion behind the scenes about parity with other curriculum subjects and the timing of any review of programmes of study. I hope that that will be sorted out between the Department and Ofqual as quickly as possible because, as the hon. Lady rightly said, we often pick this up too late. If young people are turned off from the whole idea of public engagement—not just standing for a council seat or this place, but being engaged in campaigns and activities that we would all see as crucial dynamics in a living civil society—we will lose them. By the time people start having children and commitments, it can often be too late.

[Dame Anne Begg]

When I was listing the things that have improved, I failed to acknowledge the improvement to the parliamentary education service and not only its outreach work, but what it does to bring people to this place so that we can break down some of the barriers.

[Mr Blunkett]

I agree entirely, and I am pleased that the education centre has been granted planning consent. I hope that there will be a route to it, Mr Speaker, because I am strongly in favour of the service, and support and participate in its programmes. I am pleased that your efforts and those of the Lord Speaker in reaching out, going out and talking about Parliament and politics in a non-party way is encouraging others to be interested in this subject. There is hunger out there. I say that I hope there is access to the new facilities because on one or two days of the week these days, it is quite difficult to get from Portcullis House to here in one piece. I do not want to discourage anybody from coming here, but we will have to look at that.

[Mr Speaker]

Order. May I just say to the right hon. Gentleman that I have taken careful note of his strictures on that point, and I regard it as being as close to a parliamentary instruction as he is minded to volunteer? I hope that he will not be disappointed when the eventual plans materialise.

[Mr Blunkett]

I am very grateful for that. These days, I grab at anything that indicates that what I have said is taken seriously, so thank you very much, Mr Speaker.

The way in which people see politics and Parliament has been raised. The allowances debacle four years ago is still doing great damage, partly because people believe things that do not happen and they believe and are worried about things that do happen. I hope that my hon. Friend the Member for Aberdeen South agrees when I say that, in relation to the Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority, issues to do with disability matters have improved considerably. There is always a step back in any organisation when there is a change of personnel, because people do not know that others have been “educated” to understand the issues and to be sensitive to them. But when it comes to an understanding of families one would have thought that those who have families—everybody is brought up in some sort of family, even if they are looked after—would have understood the issues around family life. I regret that we have not got there yet.

On the issue of disability, access to elected office is important. I am pleased that 29 people have been fully funded on this. I have been trying to help people who have approached me from both major parties. No one has yet approached me from the Lib Dems, but I would not discriminate against them if they did, so perhaps I could encourage them to do so.

[Nia Griffith (Llanelli) (Lab)]

My right hon. Friend may be interested to know that there is not a single Lib Dem in the Chamber.

[Mr Blunkett]

I thought that the Equalities Minister was a Lib Dem.

[Nia Griffith]

She is absent.

[Mr Blunkett]

That is a shame because she served on the Speaker’s Conference. I was hoping that the enthusiasm that she showed five years ago would have shone through. I do know that ministerial office wears you down, and you sometimes lose the fervour that you came in with. Perhaps we could encourage her on these matters.

Access to elected office is important, but here is a thought.

[Julian Smith]

Will the right hon. Gentleman give way on that point.

[Mr Blunkett]

Can I just do the thought? When you get to my age after 27 years in this place, if you do not deliver the thought when it is in your head, you might lose it.

The thought was how difficult it is for people with disabilities—it is equally true for those with caring responsibilities, who are mainly, although not exclusively, women—both to become a candidate in the European elections and then to campaign effectively across a region. We need to encourage the European Union to be a lot more supportive in that regard.

[Julian Smith]

On the point about the Liberal Democrat Minister who is not here. If I am not mistaken, she is on maternity leave. That is a really positive move, and crucial to the issues that we are debating.

[Mr Blunkett]

I have always been prepared to take advice from around me and behind me, and I totally commend the Minister on her drive and willingness to take on the difficult task of matching her political and personal responsibilities. How could I not? I am reliably informed that there is some sort of job share going on.

We must also not exaggerate the difficulties. We need to be positive in seeking change, but we need to tell people more often that it is possible to do it. I want to say something that is a bit more humble than usual. I am very proud to have been in the Cabinet for eight years, as I am of all sorts of things I have done over the past 44 years, both in local government and in Parliament, but probably the most important thing I have ever done, and the thing I am most proud of, is demonstrating to young people, families, employers and society in general that someone with a definable disability—I rarely talk about this—can work on equal terms in a very tough environment. If I can get that message across, everything else will have been worth while. I say that because I think that we have to be positive in saying, “Whatever your background, whatever the challenges you’ve had in life, whatever economic or physical disadvantages, and whatever your gender or race, you can do it.”

To pick up on the point made by the Chair of the Home Affairs Committee, I have often been concerned that particular ethnic minority groups are underrepresented in Parliament and in many areas of local government. I am particularly concerned in that regard about the Afro-Caribbean community. We need to look at how we can encourage particular groups to feel that they can play a part and that they would be welcome in doing so.

It is about people like us, but it is also about people who are changing like us. I want more people who have experienced challenges in their life to feel that they can come forward and use that experience to bring about positive change for others, but I also want them not to be daunted by the fact that we change. I am not the same person I was when I entered Sheffield city council in 1970, or even when I entered this place in 1987, and the challenges and difficulties I face are not the same. To begin with, I am better off now. I can buy things that I could not previously buy and do things that I could not previously do.

I am also slightly more daunted by things that I used to do, particularly when it comes to travel. For example—I will share this story with the House briefly—I remember going to a football match at Stamford Bridge when I was in my late teens. The match was between Sheffield Wednesday and Chelsea. I persuaded my mother that I would meet an old school friend, who was totally blind, at the ground. She was more terrified about it than I was, but I would be more terrified now than she was then. I came down on the coach and hooked on to the crowd going to Stamford Bridge. I got to the main gate and started shouted my friend’s name: “Tony.” He answered and I found him. How the hell I managed to find someone else who could not see outside the ground, I do not know.

The second part of that story is that we often rely on the support, encouragement and, sometimes, direct help of others, as we all need to be able to do. In those days football grounds did not have audio-described commentary, as they often do now, so we had to commandeer the poor devil who was fortuitously sitting behind us so that he could give us a commentary. Anyway, it was a one-all draw.

I think that this afternoon’s debate will also be a one-all draw, because I want to finish with a dangerous riposte to the hon. Member for Stourbridge, whose speech I enjoyed. She was very kind to my party in commending us on what we do. I must say that I wish we did it in quite the way she described. If we did, I think that I would be prouder, more encouraged and less concerned. We all have a great deal to do, within our political parties and within our society, to change the nature of how we describe our politics, what we are doing and the way in which we are seen and heard. Perhaps this biennial debate will help to encourage other people to think more positively, to be a little more courageous and, above all, to carry this forward post the general election next year.

15:20

[Mr Robert Syms (Poole) (Con)]

It is a great pleasure to follow the right hon. Member for Sheffield, Brightside and Hillsborough (Mr Blunkett), who not only spent eight years in the Cabinet but was one of the most effective performers on the Labour Front Bench. He has a lot of respect in all parts of the House and has been a role model throughout his time in the Chamber.

The fact that the Chamber is changing will lead to more change. Let us face it: someone would need to be a bit odd to want to stand for Parliament. We were always the odd people at school; most people were interested in football and other things. If people see positive role models in the Chamber who they feel might well represent them, they are more likely to stand for Parliament. Therefore, the changes that have started to occur will continue.

Our system has a great advantage and a great disadvantage—it is called first past the post. I love our electoral system; it is very good. It means that we represent a definable geographical area, that we have to deal with people who do not vote for us—people come into our surgery who voted Labour, Liberal, Conservative or whatever—and that we have to get to know our constituencies very well. That is a big advantage in terms of representation, but it does mean that, on the whole, associations joyfully go ahead in selecting one person. If every association selects the one person they want, that does not necessarily mean that the team we get at the end of the day is balanced or representative. The one advantage of proportional representation, as in the European elections, is that it enables a slightly more balanced approach.

Clearly, all the political parties are signed up to change. The driver of that change is ultimately political competition, because each party wants to get the most votes possible and realises that it can do that only if there is much more balanced representation in the House. Although articles in newspapers often say that there is a deficiency of women voting Conservative, the polling evidence is that as many women now vote Conservative as vote Labour. There is a slight propensity among younger women to vote for the left and older, or more mature, women to vote for the right. However, we need only look at the US presidential elections to see that the very heavy preponderance of young women voting Democrat was probably the reason Obama won the election, because although the margin in terms of the electoral college was quite large, in terms of the vote it was quite narrow.

One of the things that makes me feel that the situation will continue to improve is that we have a very competitive political system. All the political parties want to get the maximum number of votes, and they all realise that that necessitates changing the manner in which we carry out our selections. That sometimes means educating our own best friends. We all have in our associations people we have known for years and dearly love, and who are great supporters, but sometimes do not always act in a way that is in the broadest, greatest interests of the party. Political parties have to try to persuade their own members that change is necessary. That is a big challenge for those of us who have been in elected politics for a number of years. The Conservative party has changed in the way it sometimes carries out selections. That is to be commended and is starting to have results.

I agree with my hon. Friend the Member for Stourbridge (Margot James) and, indeed, the right hon. Gentleman that the role of the Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority has not helped. People with caring responsibilities, particularly those with children, are not well catered for in the expenses system. The abolition of the resettlement grant is a retrograde step. If we have fixed five-year Parliaments, a Member coming up to their 60s has a choice whether to go or to stay for five years. If there is a financial incentive to go early, that will mean more selections, and if there are more selections we will have a more diverse House, so it is a simple way of getting change. If we abolish the resettlement grant, there is always the temptation for a Member to hang on for one more term, even when they may have lost interest. I hope that IPSA revisits this, because there ought to be positive incentives to manage people out of this House rather than the other way around. As we all know—we all have our dear friends in this House—there comes a time when everybody has to go, and usually it is sooner rather than later.

The Speaker and many other people in this House—there are many great examples of role models in the Chamber—have changed the nature of politics. We have to amend the expenses system to make it more family-friendly. For many years, the Conservative party was run by women, and many of them dominate our associations and our local councils, but the problem is getting them into this House. It is not necessarily about women, but about women with children—that has always been the biggest barrier. It is vital to deal with caring responsibilities, and sometimes it is very important to educate my own party in that regard. I am glad to see that both the leadership and most of our parliamentary party understand that, which is why we are making progress.

Parliament is richer for having more diverse representation. That gives people a different perspective, and that perspective makes us all better representatives because we are dealing with people whose life’s contribution and life story is somewhat different from our own experience. Meeting other people and picking up people from less traditional backgrounds is important and makes for better Members of Parliament.

I congratulate the hon. Member for Aberdeen South (Dame Anne Begg) on securing this debate. I hope we continue to make progress, and I am sure we will, but my main message today is that political competition will be the driver of that. If all of us do our best to encourage people who want to come into politics from a range of areas, I am sure we will end up with a more diverse and a more vibrant House.

15:25

[Fiona Mactaggart (Slough) (Lab)]

I was proud to serve as a member of the Speaker’s Conference and I want to reflect on some of its broader aspects, because I think it is regarded as being just about how to change the composition of the House of Commons. In fact, it was a big reflection on democracy and politics. I strongly recommend to Members that they read the whole report because there is not enough in politics today that makes the case for political parties and for an active democracy. That is what I think the conference did.

The reason issues of representation became so core to this is that in order for democracy to work, people need to trust politics. In order to trust those of us who are professional politicians, they have to think that we get what is happening in their lives. That means that we have to look normal to them. When the Leader of the Opposition, my right hon. Friend the Member for Doncaster North (Edward Miliband), demonstrated the other day that the composition of the Front Bench of the governing party was all-male on that day, one of the reasons why that had so much resonance was the sense that half the country felt that they were not there —that we are extremely odd, peculiar, not like them. Until there is a sense that politics gets it and that it is like us, that gap of trust between the voter and the votee, if I may call us that, will grow. It is extremely significant.

It is only in the past four years, for example, that we have had any Muslim women in this Parliament. On the Labour Benches in the previous Parliament, the hon. Members for Gloucester (Parmjit Dhanda) and for Bradford West (Marsha Singh) were Sikhs. Now on the Government Benches the hon. Member for Wolverhampton South West (Paul Uppal) is a Sikh. I know that my Sikh constituents believe that I can understand their issues—such as whether Britain was involved in the invasion of the Golden Temple or not—but they want to make sure that somebody who has the gut feeling, the cultural baggage which is so important to them is part of the conversation. Having that genuinely does change the conversation.

I will never forget the conversation that I had with the Clerk to the Defence Committee in about 1998. I asked him whether having women on the Defence Committee had made a difference. It was the first time there had been any women on that Committee ever. “Of course,” he said. I asked what difference. He said, “Well, we always used to talk just about how big the bombs were, and now we talk about the families and children of the soldiers and the other people who are out there defending us.” It seems to me quite obvious that if we are asking someone to be extraordinarily brave, the most important thing for them to know is that their family is safe. It is a no-brainer, but it took women on that Committee to have that insight.

It is true that diversity brings different kinds of insight. If we miss out on those insights, politics is poorer. For example, one of the achievements of the Speaker’s Conference was changing the rules in relation to Members of Parliament who have mental health challenges. The interesting thing since those rules changed is that a number of colleagues have been able to come out and say that they have suffered from poor mental health, and that has helped the general public feel, “Oh, maybe they’re more normal.” Confessing to abnormalities has made people feel that we actually have the same struggles and challenges as them.

I did not want ever to speak in Parliament about the fact that I have multiple sclerosis, and I only did so when it was relevant to a debate on stem cell research. That was really important for one of my constituents. He has a much more severe form of the condition than me, but he felt, “If she can do that, I can step up.” There is a sense that if we show people—my right hon. Friend the Member for Sheffield, Brightside and Hillsborough (Mr Blunkett) made this clear—that we are like them and have had different challenges, politics can be more engaging and make more sense to them.

We still have big challenges. I still regularly hear people saying—I speak as the first generation of my family to speak with a southern accent—“Why don’t I hear more politicians speak like me, with an accent?” We really need to address such issues.

Where does this all come from? One of the things that the Speaker’s Conference made clear was the importance of the role of political parties themselves. It said that

“political parties are the mechanism by which people of any background can be actively involved in the tasks of shaping policy and deciding how society should be governed…The extent to which political parties are the subject of both contempt and general public indifference should be a cause of concern to all who are interested in how our country is run.”

That is what I want to address. It seems to me that the biggest risk is to our parties, which are the mechanism through which we can deliver some of the changes needed, yet we do not do it well enough. In introducing the debate, my hon. Friend the Member for Aberdeen South (Dame Anne Begg) reminded the parties of the commitment they made to publishing their selection records.

We as politicians know that it is political party activists who only ever go to talk to people about politics and how to vote. I am very proud that I and my Labour colleagues have spoken to at least 18,000 electors in Slough since December. We are very dynamic in the way we go to talk to voters and we can probably claim the best record in the country. That is one of the reasons why I am still the Member of Parliament for Slough, because my constituents know that they can engage with people on the doorstep who are like them—people who might not feel comfortable doing what Members do in this Chamber every day and who might not be able to make the sacrifices in their lives that many of us have made in ours, but who nevertheless recognise that political parties are an agent for change.

One of the things that really worries me is that the media perceive political parties as a conspiracy against the voters and as somehow trying to defraud them, and I believe that we feed that conspiracy by having a lot of private little arrangements to deal with things. For example, we have no formal maternity or sick leave arrangements. Instead, the Whips secretly make deals across the Chamber to pair Members. Why are those things not proper rights and more transparent? We need them to be. The risk of us looking antediluvian and ancient is not just because of who gets here and the fact that we do not reflect the whole of society as well as we ought to, but because of our ancient habits and ways of doing things and our habit of saying across the Chamber, “You’re all bad guys and we’re all good guys.”

At the moment, I am missing a sitting of the pre-legislative scrutiny Committee on the draft Modern Slavery Bill. Its members are working across parties—in quite an intelligent way, I hope—to herd the Home Office into producing slightly better legislation than would otherwise occur. Listening to them, people would not be able to tell which party they belong to or what line they are taking, because we are united in a common cause. Members from all parties have united with colleagues from across the Chamber on areas on which they have a common cause.

When we do politics, we should copy Mars, which does not say, “Cadbury is poisonous; go for Mars”, but, “Ours are just better”. In our politics, we have a real problem or challenge about permitting a discourse saying that the other guys are all evil, rather than that we share many values with them, but disagree about some of the ways to deliver those values.

[Penny Mordaunt (Portsmouth North) (Con)]

The hon. Lady is making an incredibly important point. When accusations are made about really appalling behaviour—bullying—they are not made about or ascribed to an individual behaving badly in the Chamber or outside it, but to a general group of people. For example, they are made about our male colleagues who, on the whole, are kind, supportive and generous individuals. Do such accusations not perpetuate the impression that this place is an ordeal, particularly for women, whereas it is in fact a wonderful place to work and a fantastic job to have? Will she encourage people who complain about bullying to identify its source and complain to Mr Speaker, rather than to tar all our colleagues with the same brush?

[Fiona Mactaggart]

I am not sure that the victims of bullying do the tarring; I think that our media are unable to differentiate sufficiently between groups of people, and therefore ask whether men have been the source of the bullying. The situation has got a lot better since I first arrived here and went through a door marked “Members only”—I thought that that was for me—only to find a urinal behind it.

Bullying still occurs, but I do not think that it is only by men of women. I feel guilty when journalists ring me about people shouting in Prime Minister’s questions—I am very reluctant to confess this, but I will do so in front of Mr Speaker—because I have a voice that can very easily be heard and I have been known to behave inappropriately at Prime Minister’s questions. It is not a wholly male thing, because I have done it. I have taken a vow to stop, and I will keep trying to do so. I have also taken a vow to give up chocolate and alcohol during Lent, but I digress.

The hon. Lady’s point is that there is a risk in saying that a whole class of people is guilty of inappropriate behaviour. One thing that we fail to do is to say that the class of people wanting to represent others is, on the whole, made up of people who are honest and want to make a better world, even though some of them have a very funny idea of what that world should look like. We have not done enough to advocate democratic politics as a better way than any other of changing the world and building a better society. Out of this debate should come very strong consensus throughout Parliament about such a belief, as well as a belief that to make politics stronger, it must be less peculiar, involve more normal people and be more possible for people with a range of challenges in their lives.

We need to make our behaviour to each other more supportive here, so that it is more possible for people to do things. Although I have not had detailed conversations with the women on the Government Benches who will be leaving Parliament shortly, I think that partly what is happening is that they are people whose lives were quite normal; who have not been through generations of hateful politics and developed skin a mile thick; and who found the change to their lives, their income and their families very challenging. They have thought, “What I am giving up and what I am having to put up with is too much.”

We all need to have a bit more solidarity for one another, so that people who want to do that noble thing of representing constituents and building a better world do not get put off by the exigencies of public life. We could all help to meet that challenge through our own behaviour, whether it is by shouting less at Prime Minister’s questions or by offering just a little support to someone when they are having a hard time. Frankly, that is something that political parties do not do sufficiently for our colleagues.

15:39

[Andrew Percy (Brigg and Goole) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Slough (Fiona Mactaggart). I particularly agreed with the final part of her speech. She was entirely right to say that we do not always help ourselves in this place. For those of us who do not come from particularly political backgrounds—I did serve as a local councillor for a while, but that was very different from this job—the torrent of abuse that we often have to put up with and the invasion into what were previously perfectly normal lives can be difficult to take. It has made me question on more than one occasion whether I want to continue doing this.

This has been an interesting debate. As I intimated in my intervention on my hon. Friend the Member for Stourbridge (Margot James), I want to talk about social class. Much has been said about gender. This place is under-representative in terms of gender, race and sexuality, but it is also under-representative in terms of social class. That is not often spoken about. There is an intense debate about all-women shortlists. I have always come back at people by saying that there is little use in replacing a privately educated, middle-class man with a privately educated, middle-class woman if the person who misses out is, for example, a working-class, northern mechanic. That does not increase diversity in this place in any real sense.

The only tag that I am interested in applying to myself, apart from the Conservative tag for the purposes of the election, is a working-class tag. I am proud to be from a working-class background. I am the son of a school secretary and a foundry worker. My dad lost his job in the recession of the early ’90s and we spent a considerable period on benefits. He later got a job as a market gardener, which he still does at 69 years of age. I could not have asked for more loving or hard-working parents.

I attended a local comprehensive school in Hull. It was so bad that it was closed down twice. I am probably the one and only Member of Parliament who will come from that school.

I come from a completely non-political background. Most of my family voted Labour. I had a great-granddad who was apparently something of a communist agitator in the ’30s. He was the only political person in my family. The rest of them were Liberals, apart from my grandma, who was a Tory.

I am proud of that background. I am also proud to be the first member of my family to go to university. My parents were the first generation in my family to buy their own home. My grandparents all grew up and lived until they died in social housing or private rented housing. We are all the sum total of our experiences. I am proud of that background, not that I like to whine on about it too much.

I have also been a teacher, which makes me very unusual—a working-class, northern Tory from the public sector. My last workplace was a primary school and that was very under-representative as well, but in that case it was men who were under-represented. It is not only this place that needs to do more to be representative.

Without wanting to whine on, let me say a little about the challenges and difficulties of getting here for someone who comes from a normal background and does not have any money behind them. I was lucky in that I ended up on the parliamentary A-list. I always joke that it was because I turned up for the interview in a frock, but it was not. I hope it was because the party saw that I was working-class—I will not say normal; we will leave others to judge that—and from a profession that was not well represented on these Benches. However, that was largely irrelevant to me because I would have been able to stand in my area as a local candidate.

I was lucky that the selection processes for 2010 had changed somewhat, but in all parties our selection processes still favour people who come from a certain professional or educational background. At many difficult comprehensive schools, pupils simply keep their heads down and try to get on with surviving school, rather than putting themselves forward for things that might exist in other places such as debating societies—not at my school—or wanting to be something called a head boy or a prefect. We did not have anything like that. In many difficult inner-city comprehensive schools, pupils simply keep their heads down and get used to not raising them above the parapet, but the selection process for getting to this place is the complete opposite.

Selection used to be a case of having to make set-piece speeches—who does that benefit? As a school teacher, I was okay doing that; I just thought I was speaking to a load of five-year-olds—actually, they are more frightening that the selection executives of local Conservative associations. However, it certainly feeds into the fact that a lawyer or a barrister will be more used to doing that kind of thing and feel more comfortable with it. We must recognise that the processes sometimes have an in-built advantage for certain people.

[Sir Edward Leigh]

My hon. Friend is not making a speech against the selection of old Etonians is he?

[Andrew Percy]

No, not at all. I am making a speech in favour of ensuring that we select the best people, and create processes that allow the best people—from whatever background or social class—to come forward and succeed.

A lot of the time, we end up with non-local professionals who come in and take the seats. They often do a very good job, but that sometimes disadvantages local candidates whose hearts may be a bit more in their local area. As somebody who came to this with no personal or family wealth, I spent three and a half to four years as a candidate fighting for a marginal seat and not knowing whether at the end I would achieve my aim of getting elected to Parliament. That is a big risk that would put off many people, particularly if they have small children.

The financial commitment is huge. I was lucky to have a very supportive association, and to get a lot of support from the Conservative party, for which I am grateful. I had a really good chairman and agent, Councillor Rob Waltham, who was there to provide support where necessary. One of my local councillors, Caroline Fox, lives round the corner from me, and I would not have survived the three and a half years without her constant support, whether in the form of meals or saying, “I’ll give you a hand in the house,” or whatever. I would not have got here without people such as them.

The time commitment and the impact it has on a career is massive. As I said, I was a school teacher, but I started teaching part time in order to try to achieve my aim of winning the constituency from the sitting Member. That has a massive financial impact, and an impact on my career. Had I not won the seat I would have been greatly disadvantaged and gone back to teaching part time in the primary school where I was when I was elected. That is a great job to have, but it would have left me financially much worse off.

[Penny Mordaunt]

My hon. Friend is making an excellent point. One thing that was always a bit unfair before we had fixed-term Parliaments was that prospective parliamentary candidates were disadvantaged because they had to prepare for three possible timings of election campaigns, whereas Members of Parliament had a better idea and were more financially secure. Does he agree that fixed-term Parliaments will be a great help in creating a more level playing field for people wanting to get into Parliament?

[Andrew Percy]

Absolutely, I could not agree more. Those of us who had been selected early had the prospect of the 2007 general election, which did not happen. I remember thinking at the time, “Please, Lord, just let this election happen”, and that was only 12 months into being the candidate. I wanted it to be over.

There was then the constant question of when the election would come. From a career point of view, what could I say to my head teacher? I was very lucky at Berkeley infant school to have had a lot of support from the deputy head teacher, Sarah Shepperson, who was also my job share. She was there to take over, and was happy to take over, from me if I was elected. That uncertainty—will the election be in three months’ time or six months’ time?—is a killer. I completely agree that fixed-term Parliaments at least deal with that side of it. They do not deal with the prospect of spending three-and-a-half years flogging what is ultimately a dead donkey, so we need to bear that in mind.

[Fiona Mactaggart]

I just wanted to follow up on the hon. Gentleman’s point on some of the difficulties that face people if they stand. Recommendation 37 of the Speaker’s Conference states:

“The Government should legislate to enable approved prospective parliamentary candidates who are employees to take unpaid leave, rather than resigning their employment, for the period from the dissolution of Parliament”.

That is just one step towards making it possible for more people to stand.

[Andrew Percy]

Absolutely. That deals with the issue during dissolution, but unfortunately it does not deal with the preceding three-and-a-half years. I think it was estimated on ConservativeHome that the average cost to a candidate was about £40,000. That is not only from having to stomach the cost of large parts of one’s own campaign—feeding the students who come out and help; they are even poorer than the candidate, allegedly—but from the loss of the income that would have come from career advancement.

Despite all that, I am glad to have got here. Lots of other colleagues got here too. I am lucky that my near neighbour, my hon. Friend the Member for Cleethorpes (Martin Vickers), is a fellow local working-class lad, as is my right hon. Friend the Member for Haltemprice and Howden (Mr Davis). My hon. Friend the Member for Chatham and Aylesford (Tracey Crouch) is a former McDonald’s employee. She trained me at McDonald’s in Hull, when I was 16 and she was a student—she was a taskmistress, but we will not go into that. She is the first Tracey to have been elected to Parliament. I cannot claim to be the first Percy, as one of them tried to blow this place up. I am assured that there is no family connection, although the Whips have often wondered whether that is my ultimate aim.

I want to say something on the role of the public, on expenses and on what Parliament is like. I do not care about people’s background: I treat people as they treat me and I think it is great that we have Members from a whole range of backgrounds. I get sick of being told that I am in a posh party. That really does rankle with me, because there are plenty of Conservative Members who are not posh and there are plenty of Labour Members who are.

This institution is a bit odd. It is not like real life. That is partly because of the nature of the environment in which we operate. It sometimes feels very much like a private members club. I remember going into the Tea Room for the first time and being told, “You can’t sit on this side, because that’s where Labour Members sit.” When I go to Starbucks or Mae’s Tearoom in Goole, I sit wherever there is a spare table, so that seemed like a strange thing. With the wooden panels, the way people speak, the cliques and all the rest of it, it is a bit like a private members club. I know that you, Mr Speaker, and others here have done a lot to try to challenge that, but there is still more to do. The processes are a bit stuffy. If one asks a question, even to Officers of the House, one can be spoken to as if it is a terrible question or as if one is an imbecile—which I may be.

What do we do? We could get people interested from a young age. I was a bit odd in the sense that I was interested in politics at William Gee school in Hull—not many pupils were. I had that interest and drive regardless of wealth, but we have to get people from different backgrounds in here through paid internships. We also need to avoid tokenism. I was disgusted with the debate on which party has the most women MPs who are retiring. I understand that a greater percentage of women MPs on the Labour Benches have said that they are not standing at the next election than have those on the Conservative Benches—I believe it is 13% compared with 11%. That whole debate was thoroughly filthy. We should also establish non-ministerial routes for career progression, so that there is an alternative for those who do not want to move forward.

Finally, the public have a role, too. Unfortunately, driven perhaps by the expenses scandal—justifiably in some cases, not in others—there is something of a hate campaign against politicians. The judgment is constantly made that we got into Parliament only to feather our own nests, milk the expenses system, or, in some way, sell favours to our wealthy friends. Well, that is not the case for the vast majority of us, if any of us. Every institution, including this place, has its bad apples over the generations, but the constant torrents of abuse and the questioning of our motives is a real disincentive for people who might otherwise come here and want to stay here.

MPs are, ultimately, normal human beings, but when we try to come across as normal, we are told “You are only doing that because you want to be seen as normal.” We cannot win. When I went into the kebab shop in Goole at 2 am one night, one of the patrons there, although thoroughly lovely to me, told me that it was a scandal that I was in the kebab shop at two in the morning. The disconnection between what people think politicians are and what we really are must change, and the public have a role to play in that.

I am just someone who happens to do a job. This is the job that I do now, but before I did this job I was a teacher, and before I did that I did other jobs, including working at McDonald’s. I am still a human being. I still have a family and friends as everyone does—as we all do here. We are all human beings. Until the agenda of hate against politicians ceases, we will not get more normal people into this place, because the only people prepared to put themselves forward will be people who are a little bit odd.

15:46

[Valerie Vaz (Walsall South) (Lab)]

I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Aberdeen South (Dame Anne Begg) for initiating the debate. I suppose that it is a measure of how far we have come that both the Front Bench spokespersons are from diverse backgrounds, which is very pleasing.

Before I entered the House of Commons in 2010, I used to watch the evidence sessions of the Speaker’s Conference, and I suppose that, in a way, that gave me the motivation to have one last fling, as they say. I had been trying to get into this place for a number of years, but had been unsuccessful. Then there were a great many retirements, which benefited me because plenty of seats became available. It was probably the Speaker’s Conference that finally pushed me into making another attempt, and I think that it also sent a message to the political parties that certain things had to change.

The first point that I want to make is about the qualities that we have. I do not think that there are such things as male and female qualities. Some women—including me, it could be said—enjoy the cut and thrust of debate, or challenging people, and some men do not. I think we should acknowledge that we have a mixture of patterns of behaviour. We know that many men nowadays take out the rubbish and change nappies. There is even a new word for them. I do not know whether you know it, Mr Speaker, but they are described as “metrosexuals”. They like facials, and wear moisturiser. [Hon. Members: “Hear, hear.”] So we are changing.

I am sure many Members will know that it took both men and women in the House to push forward the change in the hours, which has made a huge difference in giving us a decent, family-friendly workplace. The leaders of the three main parties, all of them men, supported that proposal.

My second point is about diversity. As many Members have pointed out, diversity is important because it is important for us to look like the country overall—to represent the full range of people, both able-bodied and non-able-bodied, including people with different conditions. Let me give an example of the way in which Members with long-term conditions have changed the way in which Parliament works. People with epilepsy used not to be allowed to climb to the top of the Clock Tower to see Big Ben. It took two of my co-members of the all-party parliamentary group on epilepsy, the hon. Members for South Thanet (Laura Sandys) and for Blackpool North and Cleveleys (Paul Maynard), to do such a thing. They climbed the Tower, as a result of which the rule was changed. Anyone can climb the Tower now, including people with epilepsy, but if those two Members had not done so, the change would never have happened. I apologise for not telling them that I was going to mention them in the debate, but I will write to them later.

As many Members will know, people in a number of professions—including some in Parliament—used to say things like “This is not a woman’s job”, and women were kept out of those professions. There were quotas: for instance, only a certain number of women could become doctors. It is only when women and people from different backgrounds are given opportunities that others can see just how capable we all are.

How do we address that need? You, Mr Speaker, are doing a huge amount to change our way of doing business in Parliament. For instance, when you call Members to speak in debates, you alternate between the two sides of the House, and check whether the women have spoken. We owe you a debt of gratitude for the way in which you are changing Parliament. I was very honoured to be part of your delegation to Burma, Mr Speaker. When we were there people were asking, “How do you change Parliament?” I think you will recall that I gave them the example of how you have changed the way we take part in debates. You look around and see who has not spoken before—Members on the Back Benches, for example—and do not necessarily give first place to Members on the Front Benches or those who have had a lot of speaking time. You are going some way towards addressing the way Parliament works, therefore, and it is much appreciated, certainly from the 2010 intake.

How do we address these matters? We must have a level playing field. That involves ensuring, as many Members have said, access to opportunities and to support, which you are also doing, Mr Speaker. Judges used to be picked by a tap on the shoulder, and that was the same in lots of different professions—I think in previous times many Members of Parliament were picked in that way.

Turning to positive action, the hon. Member for Stourbridge (Margot James) talked about business. She is right that it is moving ahead of us in certain aspects. Many businesses now have crèches, and when women have to go on a career break they do not come back to a lower stage than they were at; their position is protected. So we do have something to learn from businesses.

Let us focus on the question of positive action. It is always the case that people have to fulfil the criteria for the post. They are not the lesser candidate because there is positive action; they are of equal stature and they have fulfilled the requirements for the post. We have to look at where there is underrepresentation, and in some instances men will be given positive action. We start from the premise that everyone can do the job. The hon. Member for Brigg and Goole (Andrew Percy) made a very amusing speech, but he will see when we serve on the Health Committee together that a stream of people from a certain section of society—we can call them white males if we like—give evidence even though the health service has a very diverse work force.

Equal opportunities does not mean some will be excluded. The greatest gift of a diverse Parliament or work force is that everyone will feel included.

[Several hon. Members]

rose—

[Mr Speaker]

Order. I am grateful to the hon. Lady for her kind remarks, and may I just say that there are, I think, seven further Members who wish to contribute to the debate and the winding-up speeches will need to start no later than 4.40 pm and we should allow a small amount of time for a winding-up speech by the hon. Member for Aberdeen South (Dame Anne Begg), so we will need speeches of approximately five minutes each, if colleagues can discipline themselves?

16:02

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

I will certainly do my best to stick to that, Mr Speaker.

I want to contribute to this debate from the point of view of someone who is perhaps by all accounts regarded as being a member of the class that is too represented in this House: someone who is white, male—

[Andrew Percy]

From Lancashire.

[Mr Nuttall]

Originally from Yorkshire, if you don’t mind, but I will come to that in a minute.

I come to this debate from the perspective of being white and male and, because I was a solicitor by profession before I entered the House, I would be widely regarded as being middle-class. That points to the archetypal criticism that is thrown at Members particularly on the Conservative Benches: it is said that our Benches are stuffed full with white middle-class males.

That is not the whole story, however, because we need to look more widely than that. We must look at a person’s background. I came from an ordinary working-class background in the north of England—in south Yorkshire, where my father was a steelworker in the rolling mills in Sheffield. On that score, by all accounts I am underrepresented in this House. So statistics can be made to prove anything really. The statistics show that there were 48 solicitors among the Conservative, Labour and Liberal Democrat Members elected to the House in 2010—some 7.7% of all Members—so we are certainly over-represented. We should not try to ensure that every group in society is equally represented; that cannot be done.

I was a solicitor, but I regarded myself as a small business man. As a partner, I was running a small business. I had responsibility for finance, marketing, personnel, administration, complying with regulations and so on. By that score, I should be regarded as having been a small business man. Incidentally, when I was running the practice, more than 90% of the 40 or so staff that we employed were women. I remember one occasion when we had all gone out for an evening meal. I was the only gentlemen among 20 or 30 women. At the end of the evening, a guy came over to me and said, “Crikey, I don’t know what you do, but I wish I had your job!” He was amazed to see me with all those ladies on the table.

[Bob Stewart (Beckenham) (Con)]

On what table?

[Mr Nuttall]

The table in the dining room.

When people recruit for businesses like mine and when political parties choose candidates for selection to this House, they should choose the best person for the job, regardless of physical characteristics—male or female, white or black, Christian or Muslim, Hindu or Jew, gay or straight; it should not matter. We should simply choose the best person for the job. We should not try to engineer a situation in which the membership of this House matches exactly, or even approximately, the make-up of British society.

I should like to refer briefly to the Bradford West by-election, which was triggered by the death of the sitting Labour MP. The 2011 census showed that 54% of the population in that constituency were Asian or British Asian, with just 37% white. The Labour candidate was Mr Imran Hussain, a Muslim, who was the deputy leader of Bradford council. He was no outsider; he was not parachuted in from London. Any observer would have thought he was the ideal candidate, yet, as we all know he lost not by just a few votes but by more than 10,000 votes, and he was beaten by a man who is white—the present hon. Member for Bradford West (George Galloway). The residents of that constituency decided that the hon. Gentleman was the best man to represent them, despite the demographics of the constituency. The diversity of this House is about more than just race or religion; it is also about the background and life experiences of Members.

Let us trust the people to send the right people to this House to represent them. We should not take artificial measures to tinker with the make-up of the House, because that will inevitably mean that someone who would otherwise have been the best person for the job ends up being discriminated against.

16:08

[Nia Griffith (Llanelli) (Lab)]

It is a great pleasure to speak in the debate, and I pay tribute to you, Mr Speaker, for the work that you have done in this respect.

The underrepresentation of specific sectors of society has been well documented. We understand clearly that we need diversity in order to be representative, to bring in new priorities and to speak for a whole range of people. It is no coincidence that, when a critical mass of more than 100 women Labour MPs were elected to Parliament at the 1997 election, there was a real difference in the types of topics that were talked about here. My hon. Friend the Member for Slough (Fiona Mactaggart) has already mentioned the Defence Committee. The agenda in the House focused much more on a range of subjects including maternity and paternity leave, carers, flexible working and equality legislation. We debated a raft of issues that would probably not have come to prominence had there not been such a critical mass of women in the House.

That did not just happen, however. We are 57th in the world in terms of women’s representation. We are behind not only many of the progressive countries but some of the countries with a very traditional view of women’s roles. They are catching up with us fast.

Let me remind people of where we are with regard to women MPs. From 2005 to 2010, some 98 out of 356 Labour MPs were women, 27%; 17 out of 192 Conservative MPs were women, 9%; and 10 out of 62 Liberal Democrats were women, 14%. In 2010, Labour went up to 32% and the Conservatives to 16%; and the Liberal Democrats went down to 12%. It may be significant that there have been no Liberal Democrats in the Chamber for this debate, apart from the brief appearance by the hon. Member for Solihull (Lorely Burt).

It is not good enough to allow things just to happen, which is probably the Liberal Democrats’ way of doing things. They think everyone is a nice person, and therefore things will change. However, we are not starting from a level playing field. We need to look at why the representation is as it is now, and what more we can do to encourage people to come through. It is easy to describe the situation, but much more difficult to do something about it.

We must put in place positive steps. We cannot allow chance to make things happen. We need to look at why people are not coming through. What is stopping them? Why are we beginning to stagnate in some respects? Why are we not moving forward in the way in which we would all like to do?

We do not have enough role models. We are beginning to have a few role models who are women and a few role models from different ethnic minority groups. A few people have come from diverse backgrounds, and a few represent those with certain disabilities. None the less, if we ask the person in the street what comes into their mind when they hear the word “MP”, they say a middle-aged white male. We are beginning to see more diversity among reporters and news presenters on television, but there are still some fields that are significantly under-represented.

There is a huge tendency for everyone to pick people who are like themselves. That has been well documented in lots of human resources work about equal opportunities interviewing. The tendency is to choose a person who speaks like us, looks like us and who does things in the way that we do.

One of the key requirements for this job is an immense amount of self confidence, which can be a major obstacle. If we look at the work done in schools, we tend to find that in primary school, children are relatively confident whatever their background. As they get into secondary school, we find significant differences between the way boys and girls perceive themselves. Children who consider themselves to be not so bright academically think that they are second rate compared with those more successful pupils. We often hear children saying, “Oh, they never pick anyone from this class.” They may also say that about the street in which they live. We must deal with that sort of attitude, because confidence is such a key part of political representation. We have to believe that we can do something and that we can make that difference, so confidence is one of the things that we need to look at again and again.

If we take schools, we find that not enough is being done about citizenship lessons. In Wales, we now have the Welsh baccalaureate, which makes pupils look at the way that society and politics work, but that is not widespread, and not rolled out in the same way across England.

School councils can be effective in primary schools. Quite often, young pupils come forward with good ideas, and they have opportunities to implement them. In secondary schools, there is less of a direct connection between what pupils come up with and what can be implemented, partly because of the size of the schools and partly because of the cynicism of teenagers. It is more difficult at that stage for young people to have the opportunities to participate in a democratic way.

If we look around Portcullis House, we see far more young men than young women. Again, what are we doing about the people who ask to come here and to take advantage of the opportunities that this place offers? I think more young men than young women approach this place, and more people from privileged backgrounds than less privileged backgrounds. We must take steps to improve that situation.

It is not for me to comment on the selection procedures in other parties, so I will talk about what happens in my party. The key is to make sure that it is not easier for people who have had a lot of opportunity to know what the procedure is like to do better than those who have not. I very much welcome the fact that on Saturday I will be at a special conference where we will be examining the opportunity to limit expenditure on selection procedures. However, this is not just about expenditure; it is also about time, because, as has been mentioned by the hon. Member for Brigg and Goole (Andrew Percy), there are implications in respect of having to give things up and do a lot of work early on. I put my name forward and very much worked full-time in my job, and it was a lot more difficult for me than it might have been for someone who had time available to them.

We need to make sure that we get all those things in place, but we also need to bring forward a range of candidates—we need to be looking for people. That is not because we do not want a level playing field—we do want one, but the playing field is not level to start with. That is why we have to make the extra effort, particularly for those from less privileged backgrounds. We also need a better geographical selection, because there can be a tendency for people from London and the south-east to go to represent a seat elsewhere, and we have a geographical imbalance in where people come from.

On the IPSA issue, it is important that we never have a system whereby people who do not have wealth behind them cannot be MPs; we must make sure that it is possible for people to be MPs. I worry that it may be very difficult to attract people who are the main earner in the family and between the ages of 35 and 50 if we do not get the MPs’ expenses system right. It must be possible for someone to be that person, otherwise we will have only very young people or people who are older and able to take a drop in salary. It is important that we get all those things right, but it is not a matter of trying to create special privileges; it is a matter of trying to put right inequalities and bring forward more people from all sectors of our society.

[Several hon. Members]

rose—

[Mr Speaker]

Order. The wind-ups from the Front Benchers are due to start at 4.40 pm, and half a dozen colleagues still wish to speak. I know that colleagues can do the arithmetic for themselves, and I hope they will try to help me to help them.

16:17

[Mr Brooks Newmark (Braintree) (Con)]

I am delighted to follow the hon. Member for Llanelli (Nia Griffith) and I welcome today’s motion, for the fact remains that, notwithstanding recent progress, both women and ethnic minorities are woefully under-represented in our Parliament today. So what are the facts? As we have heard, we have 27 ethnic minority MPs, which is just 4% of the total number of MPs, whereas about 18%—not the 8% mentioned earlier—of the population are represented in the 2011 census as coming from a non-white background. We have 147 women MPs in Parliament, which represents 23% of all MPs, whereas just over 50% of the population are women. Clearly, we can do better and we must do better.

As co-chairman and co-founder of Women2Win, I intend to limit my remarks to what my organisation has been doing to address the concerns legitimately raised in the motion. Parliament and political representation is made stronger by diversity, and we should all be working to make this change happen. Without buy-in from men, attempts to encourage more women into Parliament will not be as successful as they could be, so we all need to engage with the issue of diversity of representation. I strongly believe that, which is why I co-founded Women2Win in 2005, in order to work with other parliamentarians to address the imbalance. Back then, there were only 17 female Conservative MPs—a paltry 9% of our MPs. Women2Win was launched in November 2005 by myself and Baroness Jenkin to support and enable more Conservative women to gain election to Parliament. Women2Win helps a substantial number of women candidates to gain selection and election, through headhunting, mentoring, training and supporting in a variety of ways. Over the course of 2013, we have had more than 30 MPs volunteering their time and expertise to run training sessions and to mentor candidates, and I am pleased to say that more than half of those volunteers have been men.

I will take a moment to give special thanks to my hon. Friend the Member for Hexham (Guy Opperman), the vice-chairman of Women2Win, who, as our head of training, has dedicated countless hours to ensuring that we are doing everything we can to increase the number of women applying for seats and doing so successfully. Over the course of 2013, we have provided more than 150 hours of training to women candidates, and the feedback and success have been extremely positive.

We have made progress since 2005. Indeed, given the leadership provided by the Prime Minister on this issue, with the support of organisations such as Women2Win and the Conservative Women’s Organisation, we saw the number of women go up from 17 to 49 in 2010. We also saw the number of ethnic minority MPs in our party rise from two to 11.

I agree with my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister, who recently pointed out:

“On the important issue of getting more women into public life…this is…important for our country, because we will not represent or govern our country properly unless we have more women at every level in our public life and in our politics.”

He ended his statement with the words,

“we need to do much more.”—[Official Report, 5 February 2014; Vol. 575, c. 264.]

Amen to that.

I believe that, with more women in politics and public life in general, we not only get better decision making but better policy outcomes for the country as a whole. More women in politics will mean more role models, leading to a virtuous circle whereby, hopefully, political associations will increasingly select and the public in general will increasingly elect women to become their representatives in Parliament.

In my party, we will continue to work hard to strive for more equitable representation in Parliament as we head towards the 2015 general election and beyond. Indeed, my slogan for the 2020 general election campaign would be, “50:50 by 2020.”

Let me end my speech by thanking my co-chairman and co-founder of Women2Win, Baroness Anne Jenkin; the director of Women2Win, Ellen Miller; our vice-chairman, my hon. Friend the Member for Hexham; and our chief operating officer, Resham Kotecha, and her predecessor, Dolly Theis. I am delighted to support the motion.

16:19

[Simon Danczuk (Rochdale) (Lab)]

I, too, thank my hon. Friend the Member for Aberdeen South (Dame Anne Begg) for leading this important debate. I apologise for being absent for the opening remarks; I was called to an urgent meeting with the Opposition Chief Whip, the details of which I will not bore Members with.

I have found the debate interesting and helpful. At times, it has felt as if it has been quite therapeutic for some hon. Members. Nevertheless, I have enjoyed it and I want to add my two-penn’orth, as we would say in Lancashire, and to concentrate on some of the issues mentioned by the hon. Member for Brigg and Goole (Andrew Percy) about working and social backgrounds. I agree that we need to make more progress as regards gender, race and disability, but although we are doing so a little slowly, we are making some progress nevertheless.

As for social background, in 1979 nearly 100 MPs had backgrounds in manual work, which was about 15% of all MPs at that time. If we fast-forward to today, 22 MPs have a background in manual work, which is just 4% of all MPs. To put that in context, 20% of the country’s work force are skilled or unskilled workers. To get a House of Commons that reflects the working lives of people in this country, we would have to sack 105 hon. Members and replace them with manual workers. I have no doubt that you, Mr Speaker, could identify some of the people up for dismissal and replacement.

This is an important point. I do not want to enter into some sort of Monty Python sketch with the hon. Member for Brigg and Goole about background, work experience and life experience, but like him I come from what would be described as a humble background. It is important that there are more people in this place who represent the wider communities out there.

My worry is that we are getting too many politicians from white-collar professional backgrounds, and too many politicians effectively come from what is known as the Westminster bubble. Many of those hon. Members are very good at their job, I hasten to add, but we need more of a mix. The journalist Peter Oborne has talked about the idea that there is a closed shop, or guild, for politicians, and I worry that that is very much to the fore at the moment. All political parties need to do more to dilute that.

The final area that I want to talk about is business experience. The Labour party has been very good at diversifying the make-up of those on the Opposition Benches, but it has been particularly poor when it comes to getting Members with a business background. Figures from the Library show that just 20 Labour MPs out of 257 have a business background. We could do more to encourage people with business experience, particularly experience of micro-business and small and medium-sized enterprises, to stand for our party.

There are no easy solutions, and I will not go into lots of detail, because of the time, but we need to put more effort into encouraging people to come forward for selection, and to change the culture in our political parties. Earlier this week, I wrote a piece for the Manchester Evening News about having a turnout threshold for elections of, for argument’s sake, 20%, so that if not enough people voted in an election, there would be no political representative. That is quite controversial, but it would concentrate political parties’ minds on who they selected and whether that person related to the community that they were trying to represent. It would certainly make candidates work harder. Also, if MPs in safer seats perhaps relaxed too much, there would be an emphasis on them to get out and do more. There is also an argument for looking at primaries.

To conclude, there is a long way to go before we can really say that we have a Parliament that reflects the people of this country. There are steps that we can take to address the problems before us; only by taking those steps will we get a Parliament that looks like the country that it represents—male and female, black and white, rich and poor. Hon. Members might even call that a one nation approach to representation.

[Several hon. Members]

rose—

[Mr Speaker]

Order. With a maximum of 13 minutes left, there are still four Back-Bench colleagues wishing to contribute; I simply put that on the record.

16:27

[Bob Stewart (Beckenham) (Con)]

I will be as quick as I can, Mr Speaker. Fifty-one per cent. of our population are women, so if we are to be fair, 51% of Members of Parliament should be women. There should be more chance of the Prime Minister being a woman than a man under those circumstances. Looking at the numbers, the Labour party does better than the other parties by a factor of at least two, but no political party reflects our population, so how can we balance the equation better? The best way is for society to change, so that people do not even question the idea that women should naturally be in Parliament.

Things are changing through societal evolution, rather than revolution. As hon. Members can tell, I am entering young old age, and I accept that some, particularly on the Conservative Benches, will look at me as a dinosaur. I somewhat reflect my generation. I freely admit that I have not done enough to equal the effort made by my wife when it comes to my family; it is something like 90% effort from her, and 10% from me. Maintaining our home has really been up to her, and I am not a very good father, at least in terms of care, but my children—I have several—are very different from their old man. Those with children of their own do not even question the need to share duties, the idea that women should be equal, or the idea that Parliament should be made up equally of men and women. That is wonderful.

Everyone wants more women in Parliament, but fellow Members will agree that we also want the very best people in our society to represent our society, male or female.

16:30

[Martin Vickers (Cleethorpes) (Con)]

I shall curtail my remarks. I was going to talk about the need for more working-class representation, on which I fully support the comments made by my hon. Friend the Member for Brigg and Goole (Andrew Percy).

On the selection process, the hon. Member for Rochdale (Simon Danczuk) mentioned primary elections, which help to broaden the base of those who make selections. I acknowledge that it would be unrealistic to have a widespread primary process in which all constituents could be involved, but using semi-open primaries similar to that through which I was selected would broaden that base. The process probably trebled the number of people who attended my final selection round, many of whom were not members of the local party.

A recent survey by Professor Philip Cowley, in which he asked members of the public two questions, demonstrates the importance of broadening the base. In effect, the public said that they wanted a Member of Parliament who was more like them, and the proportion of people saying that increased as one went down the socio-economic scale. The Speaker’s Conference mentioned social class as one of the supply-side barriers that might stop individuals coming forward for selection, as well as the public’s perception of a typical MP.

Those from a similar background to mine rarely consider a political career, although I am pleased that they are more likely to do so nowadays. My parents were proud to call themselves working-class Tories, and as I have progressed through the ranks, I have appreciated that there is a wider spread of such people than I thought on our Benches and among the Conservative party at large. I attended a bilateral state school, which meant that it had grammar and secondary modern streams, with children having the ability to move between them. Such schools would be a useful addition to the education mix that we have today. At the time I left my secondary school, people had little chance of a university career, as only 6% or 7% of people moved on to universities from state schools. I eventually graduated at the age of 54.

Time and chance also play a great role in our lives. My hon. Friend the Member for Gainsborough (Sir Edward Leigh) is in the Chamber, and he encouraged me to put my name forward as a candidate for my home town of Cleethorpes. I remember the day distinctly because he made his suggestion as we were driving home from a meeting of Cleethorpes Conservative ladies’ luncheon club. That august body is still in existence and does a grand job for our party.

All parties have become more representative, but we need to do a great deal more and modest financial support from our parties would not go amiss. However, I sense, Mr Speaker, that you want to move on to the next speech, so I shall call it a day there.

[Mr Speaker]

That is extremely public spirited of the hon. Gentleman.

16:33

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

I congratulate everyone who has been involved in moving things on so well since the Speaker’s Conference report was published.

The Conservative party has done a great deal in the past few years to increase the number of women on our Back Benches and, most importantly, the number of high-quality women on our Back Benches—[Hon. Members: “What about the Front Bench?”] On all our Benches. What was so infuriating about the photo of a couple of weeks ago is that we already have 20% female representation on our Front Bench. We now have a golden pipeline of high-quality female Members who are ready to move on to the Front Bench, which means that the Prime Minister will be able to hit his 30% representation target soon.

There are people in our party whom we need to thank. There are people who have unfortunately passed away, such as John Maples and Shireen Ritchie, and those such as Gareth Fox and Davina Merison, and many others, including David Jones who runs our assessment centres. We have put in place a phenomenal competency-based programme, and that has produced so many excellent female—[Interruption.] I am sorry; I am just going to keep going. The criticisms of the Prime Minister on this issue are absolutely unwarranted.

We have heard from my hon. Friend the Member for Braintree (Mr Newmark) about the work that we are doing as a party, but we need to back the work that the House of Commons and Mr Speaker are doing to promote this place outside. Mr Speaker seems to get a lot of criticism for doing foreign trips and promoting this place. He seems to get a lot of criticism for educational initiatives, which my constituents cry out for. They want more of these initiatives. Why on earth he is getting this hassle for promoting this wonderful cradle of democracy I do not know. I just encourage him to keep pushing forward.

The Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority has done a great deal for parliamentary staff. We have 100% maternity pay. Ira Madden has done great work in the occupational health area, but there is a lot more to do. I am pleased that my hon. Friend the Member for Brentford and Isleworth (Mary Macleod) has her commission set up, and I hope that that will look at some fundamental questions, such as why my friend Bridget Harris is having to fight in the media about groping allegations. Why, when I speak to other colleagues, do they say that this is not unknown today? Why are 140 crimes taking place on this estate, with about three or four in the last 21 months against women? Why are sexually charged words and phrases used in the media in relation to female Ministers and Members, whereas that lexicon and that dialogue are not used for male Members? How do we make this place more family-friendly? Mr Speaker had a lot of hassle about the crèche, but for a new dad like me that is vital to me doing my job and keeping my deal with my wife.

How do we ensure that everyone in the House becomes obsessed about the pipeline issues that we have spoken about? We must all worry about and obsess about that. Most importantly, how do we ensure that as many men as possible realise that the current position is unsustainable? We have to nail this in the next couple of years by finding more women, more diverse candidates, to come here and be part of our democratic process.

16:37

[Sir Edward Leigh (Gainsborough) (Con)]

This has been a good debate and we all, even reactionaries like me, are desperate to have more women in Parliament. I am. I think women MPs are much more interesting in so many ways. Do we want legions of more young, grey, ambitious men in suits? No, we want more women. We are all united. But let me say a word of caution. We must move with society. We cannot impose structures and while we should worry about the lack of Conservative women MPs, we should have confidence in our own beliefs and in the way that society matures to ensure that we have more women MPs. Therefore, I am strongly opposed to all-women shortlists.

Ultimately, as my hon. Friend the Member for Brigg and Goole (Andrew Percy) said, there is no point in a constituency denying a strong local working-class man being the Member of Parliament by insisting that in that particular constituency, where perhaps he has worked for years, there must be an all-women shortlist. No, the way forward is to recognise, as my hon. Friend said, that society is changing. It is a mystery why Conservative associations, which have always been dominated by women, have selected so few women. There was some feeling perhaps in the past of “Where I cannot go, why should I send somebody else?” There was perhaps a feeling of jealousy. All that is changing, so we do not need to impose our centralising tendencies on our local associations; we need to have confidence that they will themselves want to select more women and the best candidates. One of the ways forward is through the open primary system. That is highly democratic. It takes power back to the local people. It takes it away from the Whips Office—dare I say?—because people will be more reliant on what people are saying locally, so the open primary is the way.

I do not think that IPSA has helped at all. For instance, would a successful woman doctor working in the north of England want to give up a successful practice to come and live under our present expenses system, to be stuck in a rented one-bedroom flat, and not just for the occasional business trip, but for half her working life? It is difficult. The problem is not so much that we have created structures that discourage women, but that women themselves do not want to come forward. I think that IPSA could help with that.

Lastly, we must not think that we will encourage more women by making Parliament more anaemic, for instance by sitting from nine to five. The fundamental job of Parliament—it might be boring and take a long time—is to hold the Government to account and to scrutinise the Government. That means that we must sit here for long hours, because that is our job.

Under the present system, some of our greatest Prime Ministers have come from modest backgrounds, as have many leaders of the Conservative party, including Margaret Thatcher, Ted Heath, Michael Howard and John Major. They were all committed parliamentarians. Many of our best parliamentarians, such as Ann Widdecombe and Margaret Thatcher, were women, and we should have confidence that we can go on throwing into the mix some wonderful women parliamentarians.

16:39

[Sadiq Khan (Tooting) (Lab)]

I will keep my comments brief, Mr Speaker, as you have asked us to. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Aberdeen South (Dame Anne Begg) on securing the debate and on the motion. I also congratulate all 14 Members who spoke and all those who intervened. I think that this is the first debate in which I agreed with almost every word said by all Members on both sides of the Chamber. However, I think that it would be complacent to get involved in mutual backslapping, saying how fantastic things are as a consequence of the Speaker’s Conference. Progress has been made, but there is still a huge amount to do.

The most senior woman member of the Government, the Home Secretary, when asked about this, said:

“The first responsibility for ensuring diversity of representation rests with political parties, and with political parties taking action to ensure we have a greater diversity of candidates”.—[Official Report, 17 June 2010; Vol. 511, c. 1017.]

All three party leaders have signed up to the principles of making Parliament more diverse: justice, effectiveness and legitimacy. It is really important that responsibility should start and end with political parties.

It is important that we take a look at how the three political parties are doing when it comes to representation. Of the 55 Liberal Democrat Members of Parliament, only seven are women—a Liberal Democrat Whip was just in the Chamber for a short period, but she has now gone—and none of them are black or Asian minority ethnic. For the European Parliament elections on 22 May, only a third of the party’s candidates are women. I think that is a problem.

The Labour party has made some progress, but a lot more is needed—I am not, by any stretch of the imagination, suggesting that we are perfect. I remember being inspired when I saw my right hon. Friend the Member for Leicester East (Keith Vaz) elected in 1987, along with my hon. Friend the Member for Hackney North and Stoke Newington (Ms Abbott), Bernie Grant and Paul Boateng. Fourteen members, or 44%, of the shadow Cabinet are women, as are 55 of our 138 shadow Ministers, or 40%. Two members of the shadow Cabinet are BAME, as are five of our shadow Ministers, and 54% of our candidates in target seats are women, and 40% of them in London are BAME.

Had there been more people like me sitting around the Cabinet table when there was a discussion about whether to have a van with the words “Go home” on it driving around the most diverse parts of London, I genuinely believe that someone would have said, “Hold on a second. I remember the National Front in the 1970s and 1980s. They used the same phrase.” Others would have said, “I have neighbours and friends who remember the National Front in the 1970s and 1980s, and that is not a sensible thing to do.”

Had there been more disabled people sitting around the Cabinet table when cutting and cancelling impact assessments was being discussed, I think that someone would have said, “Hold on a second. If we stop having impact assessments, we will not be aware whether a consequence of a policy might be poorer and disabled people being left out.” Had there been more women around the Cabinet table when it came to talking about anonymity for victims of rape, they would have said, “Hold on a second. There are very good reasons why victims of rape are kept anonymous.”

The Prime Minister said, as you will remember, Mr Speaker, that he wants a third of his Front Benchers to be women by the end of this Parliament, so how are the Conservatives doing? In the 2010 general election, Labour secured its second-worst result in history. Notwithstanding that, the percentage of our women MPs went up from 28% to 31%, and the number of black and minority ethnic MPs more than doubled from 2.2% to 6.2%. The Tories did very well in the 2010 election—although perhaps not as well as they should have done—and increased their number of MPs by 97 in numerical terms. The percentage of women MPs did not go up by as much as male MPs. They still have half the number of women MPs that Labour have—48 out of their 306 MPs, or 15%—and still only 11 of their MPs are BAME. Although progress was made and credit should be given, it was not enough progress.

Let us look at how the Government have conducted themselves under this Prime Minister. Of the various Departments, four are run by women—the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, the Home Office, the Northern Ireland Office, and the Department for International Development. Those Departments have a combined budget of £33.79 billion—9.2% of the total budgets that the Government spend. Of the Ministry of Justice, the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, the Cabinet Office, the Scotland Office, the Wales Office, the Office of the Attorney-General, the Office of the Leader of the House of Commons, and the Office of the Leader of the House of Lords, none has a woman in at all. Those Departments’ combined spending is £55.6 billion—almost double that of the four Departments that women run. There is still a huge problem in relation to whether this Government understand the importance of having women in positions of power and influence.

What about other appointments made by the Prime Minister? Of 114 Privy Counsellors appointed since 2010, 17 are women, with zero being BAME. Fourteen per cent. of the seats on influential Cabinet Committees are held by women, but how many of them are BAME? Zero. Of the 85 policy tsars appointed since 2010, 13 are women. How many are BAME? Zero. Of the 19 Select Committees chaired by a Conservative MP, how many are chaired by a woman? One. Who is she? The hon. Member for Thirsk and Malton (Miss McIntosh), and we know how that movie ended. How many—[Interruption.] I hear some chuntering from the Government Benches. I am happy for the hon. Member for Brentford and Isleworth (Mary Macleod) to intervene if she wants to. No? Fine. Out of those 19 Conservative Chairs of Select Committees, I said that one is a woman. How many are BAME? Zero.

Lots of progress has been made and we can talk in platitudes about the importance of making further progress. All the Conservative Members who spoke made excellent speeches; I particularly enjoyed those by the hon. Members for Brigg and Goole (Andrew Percy) and for Braintree (Mr Newmark), who I commend for his plug for Women2Win. However, although the Prime Minister signed the commitments to the three principles at the Speaker’s Conference and progress has been made in relation to the number of additional seats won by women, the evidence thus far on this Conservative-led coalition is that progress has not been made, not only for women in politics but for women voters. Research by the Library shows that those who have been affected disproportionately by this Government’s policies are women, the disabled and those who are BAME.

I am afraid that in the next general election it will once again be left to the Labour party to make further progress in this important area. However, we want competition. We want the Conservative party and the Liberal Democrat party to be doing far more, because the more they do, the more our game is raised, and the more our game is raised, the better it is for British society.

16:48

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport (Mrs Helen Grant)]

I congratulate the hon. Member for Aberdeen South (Dame Anne Begg) on securing this important debate. She has been a tireless and passionate advocate of the Speaker’s Conference, and she is quite a role model in her own right. I pay tribute to all hon. Members who have made excellent contributions in thoughtful speeches and interventions.

Our democratic institutions make the best decisions when they have a mix of people with different skills, backgrounds and experiences from different parts of the country. As things stand, Parliament, especially as seen on television, presents as a predominantly white, middle-aged, male institution, which is not good for anyone’s faith in democracy—a point that was made in very strong terms at the Speaker’s Conference.

The House is an institution designed by men and for men hundreds and hundreds of years ago, it seems, and it often shows. The hours are long and often we do not leave until well after 10 pm, and for those with families, as we have heard, finding a balance can be difficult. There have been recent improvements through the introduction of an in-house nursery and more family-friendly sitting hours. I thank the right hon. Member for Lewisham, Deptford (Dame Joan Ruddock), who worked hard and effectively to bring about that very important change. I also thank you, Mr Speaker, for your ongoing commitment to and determination on the issue of representation and the work you have done on so many fronts. Long may it continue.

Progress is welcome, but it has been very slow indeed and we cannot be complacent. We need women and diversity to be part of the system in order to change it. I am very proud to be a woman and from an ethnic minority background in this Government, who are committed to help instigate change.

The Government are committed to supporting parties that want to increase their talent pool and ensure that they better represent the electorate. In that respect, we have implemented the provisions of the Equality Act 2010, which enable political parties to use positive action in candidate selection, should they wish to do so. We have also extended the ability for parties to use women-only shortlists to 2030, and to reserve seats on electoral shortlists for those with particular under-represented characteristics. We have also secured commitments from the three main parties to provide greater transparency of candidate selection through the collection and publication of diversity data. I am very pleased that the main parties are acting on their agreement to publish the data ahead of the 2015 general election as an alternative to implementing section 106 of the Equality Act.

There has been real progress in getting more women into politics, and this is the most gender diverse Parliament ever. Currently 22.6% of MPs are women, up from 19.5% in 2010. Following the 2010 general election, there are now six Asian women MPs, whereas previously there were none. Five women attend Cabinet, with some 24 women in Government overall in the House of Commons and the House of Lords. In the September 2012 reshuffle, 12 of the new intake from the 2010 general election were promoted, six of whom were men and six of whom were women.

Despite this progress, we know that we still have a long way to go to achieve gender quality. That is why I am delighted that my hon. Friend the Member for Brentford and Isleworth (Mary Macleod), who chairs the all-party group on women in Parliament, has launched a very important inquiry into how to attract women into Parliament and public life and, just as importantly, how to retain them. I hope that everybody who cares about this issue will support the inquiry as much as they can.

In 2010, the number of ethnic minority MPs nearly doubled—it went up from 14 to 27—with 10 being women. That is Westminster’s biggest ever percentage increase and I want to ensure that that upward trend continues.

We also need to do as much as we can to attract people from different socio-economic backgrounds to enter politics—a point that was made very well indeed by my hon. Friend the Member for Brigg and Goole (Andrew Percy). It is worth noting that Mr Speaker’s parliamentary placement scheme, which is run through the Social Mobility Foundation, is specifically aimed at people from disadvantaged backgrounds. I am delighted that the Government have been able to support it. I also pay tribute to the right hon. Member for Salford and Eccles (Hazel Blears), who initiated the scheme with Mr Speaker. I am also pleased that it is being used as a model for a similar scheme in the Scottish Parliament.

In July 2012, we launched the access to elected office for disabled people strategy, which gives support to disabled people who want to get elected. As part of the strategy, the Government have delivered the access to elected office fund, which enables disabled candidates to meet the additional costs they face and thus compete with others on a level playing field. The fund has now been extended to cover the 2015 general election and local authority elections, as well as parish and town council elections, with an increased application limit of £40,000. That has been widely welcomed by disability charities up and down the country.

This has been a very well-managed, well-mannered and mature debate. It is a bit of a shame that the shadow Minister let the side down at the final hurdle in seeking to score fairly cheap, if I say it myself, political points on issues about which we all care. These are not Conservative, Labour or Liberal issues; they are issues for Parliament. We must not use them as party political footballs, but work together to get the situation right and continue to make improvements.

[Fiona Mactaggart]

rose—

[Sadiq Khan]

rose—

[Mrs Grant]

I have little time left, so I will finish my remarks.

Today’s debate has reflected a wide range of opinions on how Parliament, Government and the parties can work to increase diversity of representation in Parliament and public life, while respecting parties’ cultures and philosophies. A strong democracy is inclusive. It is clear that such diversity is not something that is just nice to have, but is an absolute essential.

Many steps have been taken since 1918, when women first got the vote. Even then, the prospect of women standing at this Dispatch Box, let alone becoming Prime Minister, was absolutely inconceivable. We now have more women in the House than ever before. The Speaker’s Conference has thrown down a challenge to us all, whatever hat we wear—as a parliamentarian, a party activist or a Minister—and this Government are of course absolutely committed to playing their part fully. The Government support the motion.

16:56

[Dame Anne Begg]

With the leave of the House, I thank all hon. Members who have contributed to this debate, which has shown this Parliament at its best, with an ability to agree and to disagree, to be lively, funny and amusing, and most of all—surprisingly—to agree across the Chamber that the House needs to be more diverse.

We have shown that we already have diversity in the House. We have had a speaker from the LGBT community and several from BAME communities; a couple of us happen to be disabled; a few of us are women; and, indeed, some people have been willing to self-declare as working-class. Of course, we also heard from that very put-upon minority, the white middle-class man. All of life was here.

I was very struck by the phrase used by my hon. Friend the Member for Slough (Fiona Mactaggart), who said that we all have a belief in politics. The fundamental basis of this place is that we believe in it. We believe that we can change things and make the world a better place from this Chamber. We all believe that this is the place to be in order to make life better for our constituents. If this place is undermined, that will affect our ability to do that job and our very worthwhile work. We do not do it for individual glory, despite what many people outside Parliament think, but because we think it is right. That is why we are here, why we should come from different communities and why we must represent different views from across our country. Under your tutelage, Mr Speaker, I hope that that is what this House of Commons will become in the near future.

Question put and agreed to.

Resolved,

That this House welcomes the fact that there are now more women hon. Members and hon. Members from black, Asian and minority ethnic communities in the UK Parliament than at any time in history; notes that, in spite of progress, Parliament is not yet fully representative of the diversity of UK society; recognises that increased diversity of representation is a matter of justice and would enhance debate and decision-making and help to rebuild public faith in Parliament; is concerned that the progress made in 2010 may not be sustained unless concerted efforts are made to support individuals from under-represented communities to stand for election in 2015; and calls on the Government and political parties to fulfil commitments made in response to the Speaker’s Conference (on Parliamentary Representation) in 2010, including commitments in respect of candidate selection and support for candidates.

[Julian Smith]

On a point of order. Is it in order that in the closing stages of a cross-party debate about a parliamentary report, the shadow Minister—

[Sadiq Khan]

Shadow Secretary of State.

[Julian Smith]

I apologise. The shadow Secretary of State sought to over-politicise the debate and was quite aggressive in debating issues that are important for the House.

[Mr Speaker]

I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for his attempted point of order. I do not say this in any disobliging sense, but his attempted point of order has much in common with the vast majority of attempted points of order—namely, that it was an attempted point of order, but the attempt was unsuccessful. Nothing disorderly has taken place, but the hon. Gentleman with his usual eloquence and alacrity has registered his point, and it is on the record.

I call Tessa Munt to present a petition. Not here.

Post Office Museum and Post Office Railway

Thursday 27th February 2014 Commons Chamber

Motion made, and Question proposed, That this House do now adjourn.—(Claire Perry.)

17:00

[Emily Thornberry (Islington South and Finsbury) (Lab)]

I requested this debate to help secure the heritage of the British postal museum and archive. It was closed in the mid-1990s and, if the plans go well, a new museum will, at long last, open its doors and the public will once more have access to not just stamps, but the history of communication and the social history that will be on display.

When I first thought about the possibility of having a stamp museum just outside my constituency, I did not think that it would necessarily set the world alight. However, as has been explained to me, it is about communication and, particularly, how we communicated throughout the 20th century. The way in which we communicate with one another is, in the end, what makes us different from the animals.

I am sure that the House will be pleased to hear that I will discuss Royal Mail without delivering a tirade about the outrageous proposal to develop the Mount Pleasant site above ground. The Minister will know that Mount Pleasant is one of the largest development sites in London, yet, of the 650 homes that are proposed for the site, only 12% will be affordable housing. That is frankly scandalous, particularly given that the viability report shows that it could support more than 50% of proper affordable housing and still make a profit. However, I will not talk about that today.

I want to make it clear that there is a difference between the development overground and the development underground. The development underground is the railway and to the side of that is the new postal museum. There is a distinct difference. It is important to underline that difference because the new postal museum and archive and the underground railway will apply to the council for planning permission on 10 March and, on the same day, the council will not be asked to discuss the plans for Mount Pleasant above ground because the developers have decided to bypass local opposition and go straight to the Mayor of London, Boris Johnson. They hope that they will get a better hearing from him than they would get locally, where we are all against the development. We are not against the British postal museum and archive.

As the Minister will know, the museum and archive has strong historical links to the Royal Mail Group. It is an independent charity in its own right and is the caretaker of a remarkable history, some of which I will share with the House. Currently, the archive is based at Freeling House. Freeling was the secretary to the Post Office, which was the equivalent of a chief executive. Because of his expertise in international mail routes, particularly across the continent of Europe, he was an extremely effective spy during the Napoleonic wars. He was therefore not only the chief executive of the Post Office, but a spy from the 1780s until the 1820s. He collected all the accounts, mail coach maps and employee records and put them into an archive. He was therefore the founding father of the archive.

There are other, more immediately attractive items. There is a remarkable sheet of stamps that depict the ageing Edward VII. The stamp was known as the Tyrian plum and was used only once. On the night that the old King died, one of the stamps was sent to the new King. The used stamp that was sent to the new King is in the royal collection and the sheet of unused stamps is in the archive. That was the only time that the stamp was used to post a letter. George V, who was an avid philatelist, collected it.

Another remarkable sheet of stamps was designed in the 1970s. At that time, it took a long time to design a stamp, print it and make it available, so they had to be prepared in advance. Scotland was in the World cup finals in 1978, so stamps were produced so that they would be ready if Scotland won the cup. Those stamps are in the archive and will be available for the public to see, so long as the museum is established. The stamps depict the winning team holding aloft the World cup and celebrating victory, which, tragically, was never realised.

Another stamp documents Churchill’s plan during the second world war, when there was concern that France would fall. Churchill’s plan was to unite the Kingdoms of Britain and France so that they would stand together and France would not be able to capitulate to the Germans. A stamp was designed to celebrate the uniting of the two countries. The plan did not work, but it is evidence of attempts that were made during the second world war. Such things one learns from stamps.

The museum is not only about stamps that depict history; the postal archive holds hundreds of paintings, letters, telegrams and photographs documenting Britain’s social history. There are two telegrams from the owners of the Titanic, one from the evening of 14 April 1912 declaring that rumours of the Titanic’s distress were unfounded, and another from the following morning announcing the death of more than 1,500 people and saying that women and children had been saved. The museum owns 100,000 photographs taken by Stephen Tallents, the person who first coined the term “public relations” and was the first public relations manager of the Post Office. In the 1930s, he revolutionised how companies were to communicate with the public.

The style of many of the posters put up to promote the Post Office in the 1930s was copied by London Underground, and if we compare some of London Underground’s more famous posters with those produced by the Post Office immediately before, we can see where it got the idea. At long last, when the museum is finally opened in my constituency, those posters will be available to be seen. They include photographs of postmen in the 1930s delivering across the country, including to fields where women and children were working, and to washerwomen in Poplar. All sorts of different things were delivered. There are photographs of a postman delivering live fish, and another of a postman holding two dead game birds in both hands—it seems that pheasants could be delivered as long as they were not leaking at the time.

The oldest document in the collection dates from 1636 and is a letter from Charles I to the mayor of Hull. The mayor is told in fairly clear terms that the mail service is now a monopoly and that he is no longer allowed to use his own personal service. He is told that the monopoly is now under ownership of the king and that he must cease using the local mail. It is a remarkable and unique version of history.

The BPMA plans to spend £10 million on a new archive and museum, and £12 million on the little known rail mail—another gem. The rail mail runs under my constituency and many others across the heart of London. It was devised in 1911 and completed in 1927 and is an underground railway that served the main sorting offices from Whitechapel to Paddington. The idea was to link the major railway stations across London so that mail coming into Liverpool Street could be delivered straight from Paddington and out the other side. Therefore, if someone in east England wanted to write to west England, the post would go down to the underground railway line. We talk about producing new railways and the ideas behind them, but that was the first Crossrail devised many years ago. It was built at a time when the belief was that we would—of course—continue to invest in the Post Office because the amount of post would increase and people would always want to communicate with one another.

When the railway line was built across central London, knowing that people were likely to want to expand the line in future, spurs were built so that if it was necessary to have a new line going out to Oxford street, there was a spur already there. It could simply be blocked off at one end and the railway line not closed completely, and the line could be expanded. Things are so different now; now we build to a contract and only to that contract, and hope that we will build it in time and to budget. The project was built with vision, confidence, and with a positive attitude for the future of Royal Mail. So unlike our current times, unfortunately.

The original Royal Mail allowed mass communication across the UK and ran for 76 years. The public have never been allowed to see the railway, but hopefully when the railway museum is opened people will, at long last, be able to go down to see it. There is huge excitement not just in train circles, but for many people who are interested in the industrial heritage of Britain in the 20th century, and they will be able to ride on that railway underneath the streets of London.

[Helen Goodman (Bishop Auckland) (Lab)]

My hon. Friend is making a marvellous speech. Is she aware that one third of the world heritage sites in this country are industrial world heritage sites? Would she consider putting this forward as another one?

[Emily Thornberry]

My hon. Friend is always full of very good ideas. I shall make a note and attempt to propose it.

The historic tunnel has not been seen by the public. It was also used during the wars to house some of our most priceless treasures. There are photographs of Turner paintings in the underground railway during the first world war, where they were held safe from bombs. It was also a home for Air Raid Precautions during world war two.

In total, the BPMA will have raised £8.91 million, and secured a further £8.15 million from donations and loans from Royal Mail and Post Office Ltd. The bulk of the remaining funding will come from an application to the Heritage Lottery Fund, which is currently in progress. The £4.6 million of HLF funding is a second round application. I have written in support of it to Dame Jenny Abramsky, the chair of the HLF. I would like to use this opportunity to ask the Minister and other Members to write to Dame Abramsky and offer their support to the bid. If successful, the grant from the HLF will make a significant contribution to the total project. At £4.6 million, it will make up 20% of the total figure. I am sure that the House will agree that it is vital the BPMA is successful in its application.

It is, however, with some regret that, of the £21.8 million already raised by the BPMA, the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills has donated only £70,000. That figure derives from the residue of the sales of shares in Royal Mail. I hope the Minister will agree with me that such an important historic and social archive as the BPMA deserves a little more than £70,000. It deserves more of the £2 billion sale of Royal Mail than the £70,000 it is being given.

One of the quirks of Royal Mail history is that it has always had two Postmasters General. I hope the Minister will be able to visit and see the history of the two Postmasters General from, I think, the late 17th century to the 19th century. The deal was always, to ensure that when franchises were given out there was an even split of political profit, that one Postmaster General was always a Whig and one was always a Tory. Such things go around: even then there was a coalition of Tories and Liberals who were selling off Royal Mail services.

Given that the Government have acted within the tradition of Royal Mail, I am sure that they will be as keen as I am to ensure that this history is properly documented and accessible. The archives have been closed to the public since the mid-1990s, when the old site at St Pauls was sold off to Merrill Lynch at a time when Royal Mail was in public ownership. Does the Minister not agree that perhaps some of the profit, made when the Royal Mail museum was first sold off to Merrill Lynch in the 1990s, could be ploughed into the new museum? Is it not right that the money from the sell-off, which has been held in trust ever since, is returned to the museum?

The BPMA has managed to raise £21 million towards this project, but it is still £500,000 short. Does the Minister agree that the Government could do more to ensure that the postal archive is once again accessible and that the never-before-seen rail mail is also open to the British public? It is asking for £500,000. I hope that the Minister will this evening be able to grant its request. It is vital that the museum is open to the public.

How far can one walk through London without seeing part of Royal Mail history, such as a pillar box? The museum is like a pillar box. Think of all the history pillar boxes have seen in central London. This museum is standing there showing us the social history that has evolved around it. If any of those 100-year-old pillar boxes could talk, they would be telling us the sorts of things we would be able to pick up at this museum. I hope the Minister will agree that it is vital that the museum opens and I hope that he will be able to show some support for it today.

17:14

[The Minister of State, Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (Michael Fallon)]

I congratulate the hon. Member for Islington South and Finsbury (Emily Thornberry) on securing this debate on the future of the postal museum and the Post Office railway. I commend her for such an entertaining and informative speech, which I think we all enjoyed.

The Government recognise that the British postal museum and archive is the leading resource for all aspects of British postal history in the United Kingdom. These records are designated as being of outstanding national importance. The BPMA was established by Royal Mail in 2004 as an independent charity to manage and preserve the Royal Mail archive and to be the custodian of the museum’s collection. As well as housing the world’s greatest collection of British postage stamps, the museum and archive hold written records of the GPO and the Post Office, staff records, telegrams—as we have heard—posters, photographs, uniforms, pillar boxes, an amazing collection of postal vehicles including a five-wheeled “pentacycle”, and a fascinating variety of other artefacts, including the signature stamp of Anthony Trollope, who worked for the Post Office for over 30 years, and sheets of the Penny Black, the postage stamp that is at the heart of the history of the universal service.

The BPMA effectively safeguards visual, written and physical records from 400 years of postal history. It acknowledged some time ago that in order to secure a sustainable future for that heritage, it would need to relocate and redevelop the museum and archive. The current premises at Freeling House have space and access limitations; they are also prone to intermittent flooding, so the staff have had to deal with additional curatorial issues. As the hon. Lady told us, there was previously a Post Office museum, but it closed in 1998. Since then, a large part of the collections has been held at a storage facility in Essex, or held by other museums around the country. It is clear that the BPMA needs a permanent and damp-free home, for its museum collections in particular but also to lay the foundations for a more sustainable future.

The plans that the BPMA has set in play to address the situation are beginning to pay off. These are exciting times. An existing building near the Mount Pleasant complex is to be the new home for the archive, and the surrounding land will be used to build a new exhibition space. The selected building, Calthorpe House, has been provided by Royal Mail, and planning permission has been granted for the development of a museum building on adjacent land. The BPMA is also proceeding with plans to bring back into service part of the historic mail rail underground system—which we have heard about—as an additional visitors’ attraction. That will enhance the visitors’ experience, and I am sure that it will attract many people to the hon. Lady’s constituency.

The cost of all the redevelopment—again, as we have heard—is just over £22 million, which is a significant sum. The BPMA has secured much of that funding from a number of sources. Royal Mail and Post Office Ltd remain firmly committed to the work of the BPMA and to the redevelopment project. Donald Brydon, the chairman of Royal Mail, has been a great advocate for the BPMA, and has been consistently in touch with me about it. Royal Mail has made available a 999-year lease on Calthorpe House—the new museum and archive premises—at a nominal rent, and further donations of £350,000 have been made in respect of preparation work for the new museum.

Both Royal Mail and Post Office Ltd continue to make payments to the BPMA as part of the ongoing arrangements. For example, in 2012 a £640,000 charitable donation was made for the running and maintenance of the museum. Fees of £400,000 were also paid for archive services provided by the BPMA in order to ensure that Royal Mail and Post Office Ltd would meet their obligations under the Public Records Act 1958, and, in doing so, would themselves ensure that records of social and historic importance were preserved and made publicly available after 20 years.

Royal Mail and Post Office Ltd have also contributed to the new project by providing soft loans and grants of just over £7.5 million, to be paid at various stages of the redevelopment. To secure the loans, the BPMA prepared a commercial business case which will enable it to be more self-funding in future—by, for example, charging for mail rail, and allowing its facilities to be hired for corporate events. The BPMA has also secured access to heritage lottery funding of over £4.25 million, and was awarded £250,000 as initial funding, with access to a further £4 million-plus. My Department arranged a contribution of £70,000 to the BPMA last year. That came about as a result of the terms of the retail share offer element of the initial public offering which we saw through successfully in October. Under the terms of the offer, any sums less than the offer price of one ordinary share were not to be refunded to the applicant, but the Secretary of State could give these amounts to charitable purposes.

[Emily Thornberry]

Was all the residue and the money that was to be given to charities given to this museum, or did some of it go elsewhere?

[Michael Fallon]

My understanding is that it was all given to this particular charitable purpose, but I will check whether I am right.

We considered what charitable donation would be most appropriate and we thought a donation to the BPMA was the most merited of the various possibilities canvassed. The BPMA is also raising significant funds from charities and foundations by selling surplus duplicate stamp collections and related material and using corporate donors to help to raise the funds needed. All proceeds from such duplicate stamp sales are ring-fenced for use by the BPMA. The BPMA also has effective plans in place—along the lines of its existing fundraising activities—to attract the outstanding funds needed for the project.

I hope that today’s debate has served to highlight the highly important work for which the BPMA is responsible as custodian of our postal heritage. That is deserving of wider recognition, and I think deserving of the highest praise given the history of the museum and some of the hiccups along the way. Through the hard work and determination of the BPMA’s administrators over the last few years, this truly worthy project is now within touching distance of coming to fruition, and to get this far is a magnificent achievement in its own right.

I would like to take this opportunity to thank all who have already made contributions to the redevelopment project. Through their generosity a very important part of Britain’s history will be preserved for the benefit and enrichment of everyone—most importantly, of course, future generations. I would encourage all charitable trusts and foundations, corporate sponsors and individuals to give serious consideration to supporting the BPMA in whatever way they can.

I hope that any necessary additional funding can soon be secured to ensure that work can start on schedule for the planned opening in 2016. In the interim I hope that anybody listening to this debate, including those of us who have engaged in it, will be encouraged by the BPMA’s plans and will seriously consider paying a visit to the museum, as I intend to do, to find out more about a key period of our modern history—the communications revolution that started here in the United Kingdom in the mid-19th century and spread with remarkable speed around the globe.

The Government will continue to monitor the progress of the project with keen interest, and Parliament will, of course, be kept informed of the progress through Royal Mail’s annual reports on its heritage activities that are laid in Parliament, as the Government required under the Postal Services Act 2011.

Question put and agreed to.

17:23

House adjourned.