Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Andrew Selous and Tim Loughton

Tuesday 17th March 2015 Commons Chamber

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Justice (Andrew Selous)]

We will invest in a new generation of body scanners that will help us to detect substances being smuggled into prison. In addition, the Criminal Justice and Courts Act 2015 introduces powers to test specific non-controlled drugs as part of mandatory drug testing. We are providing new guidance to governors. Through the Serious Crime Act 2015, it is now illegal to throw anything over the wall, including spice or any other drug.

[Tim Loughton (East Worthing and Shoreham) (Con)]

T4. A couple of months ago, I asked the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government if he would speak to the Justice Secretary about the prospect of speeding up the eviction process for illegal Traveller encampments by appointing specialist magistrates who are able to sit at short notice and out of hours. Has he had that conversation and is he sympathetic to progressing this matter?

Finance (No. 2) Bill

Debate between Andrew Selous and Tim Loughton

Wednesday 9th April 2014 Commons Chamber

[Tim Loughton]

That is the view of one constituent who has not yet listened to the whole debate. Introducing a married couple’s transferable tax allowance in no way disadvantages that constituent. [Interruption.] In what way is she financially disadvantaged? It is a typical Labour response to say that if someone is in favour of something, they must be anti something else. I am in favour of doing a lot more for constituents who find themselves in that position through no fault of their own and who need help, support and recognition. However, there are also many married couples who need support in bringing up their children, often in difficult circumstances. Just because we want to help them, it does not mean that we are disadvantaging somebody else.

[Andrew Selous]

Of course, everyone in every part of this House is against abuse in any type of relationship. If we want to reduce abuse, does my hon. Friend agree that we should recognise that women and children are significantly more vulnerable to violence and neglect in cohabiting families than in married families? What we are doing today is part of addressing that issue.

[Tim Loughton]

My hon. Friend has done a great amount of work on this issue and there is a much bigger picture.

This policy is popular among the public. It is popular with a majority of Labour voters. It is even popular with an awful lot of Liberal Democrat voters, despite that party’s policy being against it. Last May, the Liberal Democrat Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills attacked the “prejudice” directed at stay-at-home mothers. I am sure that he would have included stay-at-home fathers to be inclusive. It is deeply insulting to the many millions of married couples who have decided to make a lifelong commitment to each other that is recognised in law in front of their family and friends to suggest that we are discriminating in some way against other people.

Some 90% of young people aspire to get married. Some 75% of cohabiting couples under the age of 35 also aspire to get married. There are many forms of family in the 21st century and many people do a fantastic job of keeping their families together and bringing up children, often in difficult circumstances. However, as many of my hon. Friends have said, almost uniquely among the large OECD economies, the UK does not recognise the commitment and stability of marriage in the tax system until one partner dies. Worse still, one-earner married couples on an average wage with two children face a tax burden that is 45% greater than the OECD average, and that gap continues to widen.

To introduce such a recognition of marriage, particularly in the modest form suggested in the Bill, is not to disparage parents who find themselves single through no fault of their own, nor to undermine couples with two hard-working parents, all of whom rightly get help and support from the state in other forms and for whom we might need to do more. Uniquely, married couples, civil partners and same-sex marriage partners are discriminated against in our tax system.

Gypsy and Traveller Policy

Debate between Andrew Selous and Tim Loughton

Tuesday 4th February 2014 Westminster Hall

[Andrew Selous]

I completely agree with the hon. Gentleman. We are all equal under, and have a duty to obey, the law.

The current twin-track, separated planning system—one for Gypsies and Travellers and one for settled residents—greatly threatens and undermines community cohesion and causes significant fear, distrust and upset to both Travellers and settled residents. If someone can demonstrate, or simply declare, that they are a Gypsy or Traveller, they acquire highly lucrative planning rights not available to the rest of the population. Such rights are granted to some individuals who are very wealthy, or become so as a result; they are not all vulnerable individuals. That opens up the system to massive abuse from some people seeking to gain such lucrative planning rights.

Many able-bodied Travellers do not in fact travel for a living. Often, settled residents travel more, on business, than some so-called Travellers.

[Tim Loughton (East Worthing and Shoreham) (Con)]

Is there not another point, which is certainly true in the case of Sussex police? If someone claims to be a Traveller, the police simply accept that as fact. No effort is undertaken to ascertain whether they really are of that ethnic identity.

[Andrew Selous]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. The reality is that anyone can self-declare as a Traveller. I very much welcomed the written ministerial statement made by the Minister on 17 January in which he committed to looking at that issue.

I cannot believe that it is right that some schools, such as that in the village of Braybrooke in the constituency of my hon. Friend the Member for Kettering (Mr Hollobone), should be entirely occupied by Traveller children. I do not believe that that is in their own best interests, not least given Traveller children’s high rates of absence. For Irish-heritage Travellers, the 2008 national pupil database showed primary school absence rates of more than 24% and secondary school absence rates of more than 27%. I believe that if the children of Travellers were integrated across a greater number of schools, they would be more likely to conform to the higher attendance rates of the majority.

The current separate planning system for Gypsies and Travellers often takes no account of the proper provision of facilities in rural locations, specifically those for sewerage and sanitation. Harm is often caused to the local environment by hedgerows being illegally pulled out, pollution of the local water courses and farmland, and sometimes encroachment on others’ land.

Finance Bill

Debate between Andrew Selous and Tim Loughton

Tuesday 2nd July 2013 Commons Chamber

[Tim Loughton]

So the mystery is why on earth it is not happening and the Prime Minister has not been able to say, “We back this amendment.” However, I trust what he has said. Those I do not trust are those who oppose the amendment, because those who oppose it as some sort of 1950s throwback are the ones who are being judgmental about how certain people choose to live their relationships. That view has been endorsed on many Labour party members’ blogs. Disgracefully, they seek, in effect, to pit working mums or dads against stay at home mums or dads, who are of course no less, and often more, hard-working.

My support for a transferable married couples tax allowance has never been based on some moral stance on types of relationship. My concern, as might be expected, is based on what is best for children. That is why I have suggested that it is limited in the first instance to families with children under the age of five. Two statistics say why. For a 15-year-old living at home with both birth parents, there is a 97% chance that those parents are married. For a five-year-old with parents at home, there is a one in 10 chance of those parents splitting up if they are married, but a one in three chance if they are not married. The cost of family breakdown is £46 billion and rising. That is what we need to attack.

Marriage accounts for 54% of births but only 20% of break-ups among families with children under five. We must recognise that in the tax system and we do not. That is what this modest amendment seeks to put in statute as a starting point to appreciate that.

[Andrew Selous]

My hon. Friend is making an excellent speech. Does he agree that we encourage many things in the tax system—for example, employees cycling to work? It is therefore no great surprise that we want to support marriage, given the number of families that split up each year.

[Tim Loughton]

And marriage was invented before bicycles, so why do we not support that, recognise it and value it, as we all do?

There are those who have come up with arguments against the figures, saying it is all about causation and effect. The millennium cohort research revealed that the poorest 20% of married couples are more stable than all but the richest 20% of cohabiting couples, so it is insulting to say that marriage is the preserve of the middle classes or better educated or better-off people.

This amendment alone will not solve all the problems that I have laid out. I am not naive enough to suggest that £150 or whatever the end result may be when this amendment becomes law in some form, as we hope, represents the difference between staying married or getting divorced, or getting married or cohabiting, but it does send a clear and strong message that we value families who take the decision to bring up their children within marriage. When I stood on our manifesto in 2010, and for many years before, my Front-Bench colleagues agreed with that. My amendment makes that a reality, beyond all doubt.