Money Laundering: British Banks

Angela Eagle Excerpts

Tuesday 21st March 2017 Commons Chamber

[Simon Kirby]

My hon. Friend raises an important part of the Criminal Finances Bill, which is going through the other place as we speak. I look forward to its receiving Royal Assent and becoming law, giving new law enforcement powers to stop any of this activity.

[Ms Angela Eagle (Wallasey) (Lab)]

The Economic Secretary has shown real complacency about the huge and building scandal that has been revealed by The Guardian today. Given that our banking sector is very large and that the consequences of its being destabilised by such criminal behaviour are very serious for our economy, does he not realise that his complacent, process-driven answers today are simply not good enough?

[Simon Kirby]

I do not recognise that at all. The FCA and the NCA are well placed to investigate this, if appropriate. We have not only world-leading financial regulation but world-leading financial services. More than 1 million people across the country are employed in financial services in all our constituencies, and the vast majority of them work hard, do a good job and represent customers as well as they can. We have outlined the measures that the Government are undertaking—[Interruption.] I have addressed everything that the hon. Member for Wallasey (Ms Eagle) mentioned. This Government are doing more than at any time in the past 10 years to tackle this issue.

Class 4 National Insurance Contributions

Angela Eagle Excerpts

Wednesday 15th March 2017 Commons Chamber

[Mr Hammond]

I am grateful to my right hon. Friend. We have, absolutely, recognised the view of colleagues on the crucial issue of the manifesto commitment. However, on the substantive issue of the differences in treatment of people who are employed and people who are self-employed, there is a fundamental structural challenge that will have to be addressed, and that includes the question of how we extend appropriate benefits to people who are in self-employment, so that they get the full range of entitlements, as well as contributing in an appropriate way. We are clear that the right thing to do now is to rule out any increases in national insurance contributions during this Parliament, but that does not mean that we should not do the work, carry out this review and present our findings in due course, and we will do so.

[Ms Angela Eagle (Wallasey) (Lab)]

Of 28 measures in this Budget, the Chancellor has had to come in a humiliating fashion to the House today to cast away the one that actually raised money. He has just told us that £14 billion of tax revenue is at risk because of the way national insurance is encouraging people to become, apparently, self-employed, and encouraging other abuses. He has told us he is not going to deal with that in this Parliament, so what is he going to do to safeguard the tax base in the meantime, while he does his review and belatedly puts into effect the manifesto commitment on which he fought the last election?

[Mr Hammond]

I have to say that that was an extraordinary contribution, because the hon. Lady cannot have it both ways or, to put it another way, have her cake and eat it. She wants me to adopt a broad interpretation of manifesto commitments and to adhere to it, and she wants me to protect the revenue base by addressing the difference in contribution treatment between the employed and the self-employed. I say to her, as I have just said to my right hon. Friend the Member for Loughborough (Nicky Morgan), that we will have to address that difference in due course. However, given the interpretation that is clearly out there of the manifesto commitment that was made, our priority now is to show that we will deliver on the spirit as well as the letter of that commitment, and we will not increase national insurance contributions in this Parliament.

Budget Resolutions

Angela Eagle Excerpts

Thursday 9th March 2017 Commons Chamber

[John McDonnell]

I always respect the hon. Gentleman’s interventions because he seeks to find solutions.

[Ms Angela Eagle (Wallasey) (Lab)]

Death tax.

[John McDonnell]

Exactly. It is exactly as my hon. Friend says from a sedentary position. The Labour party tried the bipartisan approach. Hon. Members worked in good faith to seek a long-term resolution to this matter. They looked at a range of options, but halfway through the discussions we were, to be frank, betrayed. Instead of a bipartisan approach, it became a political campaign of the worst order. That was a betrayal of confidence. It will take a lot, to be frank, to regain that confidence to enable us to take a bipartisan approach. We are willing to have discussions with anybody anywhere, but the treatment last time went beyond political knockabout. It was an undermining and a betrayal not just of the Labour party but of frail elderly people and their families who desperately need a solution.

Families are imploding as a result of the lack of social care, because of the burden they are suffering. The Women’s Budget Group conducted an analysis of the Budget last year and this year. It identified two groups of people who have been hit hardest by austerity measures: younger women with children, and older women. Initially, I could not understand why, but the WBG explained that unfortunately in our culture the burden of care still falls on women. Retired women fill the gap when social care is no longer provided. We are always willing to talk to anyone to find a practical solution, but it is against the backdrop of betrayal and bad faith in the past.

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[Ms Angela Eagle]

In the Liverpool city region, we are meant to welcome £30 million a year over the next 30 years, which is £900 million. We have lost more than £1 billion in direct funding cuts to our five local authorities. Half a billion pounds in European funding has been granted for the last two rounds, but there is no guarantee of anything in future. Does my right hon. Friend agree that that is a problem for our regional development and funding in trying to grow our economies from the bottom up?

[John McDonnell]

I know how hard my hon. Friend has fought on these issues, and I congratulate her. She has a grassroots understanding of the consequences of that lack of funding, and of the implications for her region and city. The consequences of the lack of investment are staggering, but it also undermines confidence in the private sector to match fund and invest. That is what we are seeing, even at the first stage, and yet, as my hon. Friend the Member for Cardiff South and Penarth (Stephen Doughty) said, we heard in the Chancellor’s statement not a word of assurance to anybody, whether council leaders, business investors or workers. I found that disgraceful.

It is interesting that, prior to the Budget, the Chancellor and allies floated the idea that he was garnering a £60 billion fighting fund to deal with Brexit. It is not a fighting fund; it is a failure fund. He is having to put aside cash to deal with the consequences of what he knows will be a Tory Brexit failure. That is what the failure fund is for.

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[Ms Angela Eagle]

Obviously it is important to get the deficit down. The Government said that they would eliminate it by 2015, two years ago, and now the Budget document makes it clear that it may not be eliminated by 2025. Is that the Secretary of State’s definition of success—being 10 years late with a five-year plan?

[Sajid Javid]

We have heard no apology from the hon. Lady for the fact that during the 13 years in which Labour was in power, there was an almost threefold increase in the national debt and the country was left with a larger budget deficit than any other major advanced economy.

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[Ms Angela Eagle (Wallasey) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Richmond (Yorks) (Rishi Sunak), whose constituency is in my home county, Yorkshire. The last time I was in his neck of the woods, it was not to go to a pub—as many of my hon. Friends seem to have done—but to fight the by-election that his predecessor fought and won. I remember wandering forlornly through a village in the constituency, door-knocking with my much-missed colleague, Mo Mowlam. We did the entire village and found not a single Labour voter, so I think the hon. Gentleman is probably fairly safely ensconced in Richmond (Yorks), pending an electoral earthquake—although, of course, they do happen.

I was disappointed by the Chancellor’s statement yesterday. His first Budget did not rise nearly seriously enough to the challenges faced by our country in these times of great volatility and change, which we must now confront together. We needed a wider and bolder vision. We needed radical reform to rebuild our prosperity in a post-Brexit world and a sustainable plan to deal with our ageing population and all the pressure that that brings. We needed a recognition that we must recast our tax and benefit systems to deal with the world to come, rather than the world as it was when Beveridge produced his blueprint for a welfare state, 75 years ago.

Instead, we got a Budget that made no mention of the greatest challenges facing us today. There was no mention whatsoever of climate change. There was no mention of rising poverty and inequality, or of public expenditure cuts stretching to the far horizon. Perhaps most surprisingly of all, there was no serious mention of Brexit. This was an occasion on which the Chancellor ought to have set out a bold reforming vision for the UK. But he did not. He left the grimmest news unspoken; perhaps he hoped that nobody would notice.

On living standards, the Office for Budget Responsibility revealed something that millions of people in this country already know: real pay levels have not yet returned to their pre-2008 peak. The autumn statement revised down the forecast for real earnings by £1,000 by 2020, and the Budget will do nothing to change that. That means that workers are facing 13 wasted years of lost earnings and stagnating pay under this Government. To make matters worse, the Government’s flagship promise of a £9 so-called living wage, which in itself was never going to be enough, has been revised down to £8.75.

The modest growth in our economy, which is at historic lows, has translated into real earnings stagnation for the vast majority of people. The fact that more than half the 13.5 million people in this country who are now living in poverty are in work is not a problem the Chancellor was troubled enough to mention in his speech, but it is an indictment of his Government’s record, and it is one of the most serious social problems facing Britain today.

The Budget papers reveal that consumer debt is once more exceeding its pre-crisis peak; it is this unsecured debt that is driving what modest growth there is in the economy. The Bank of England is right to be worried about it, but it did not trouble our Chancellor enough for him to refer to it at all in his Budget statement. These facts alone show just how much the Prime Minister’s just about managing families are being made to shoulder the burden of a painfully slow recovery from the financial crash, yet there was simply not enough help announced for them yesterday.

On infrastructure and investment, the perfunctory re-announcement of the £23 billion in the rather grandly named national productivity investment fund is to be welcomed, although it has been announced many times before. But, at 2.6% of GDP, it remains far lower than the levels of infrastructure investment achieved by the previous Labour Government, and well below the OECD average. That is going to put us at a continuing long-term disadvantage in a global race in which we are more isolated and at risk than ever before, after the Brexit vote.

On investment generally, the OBR forecasts that Brexit and the uncertainties surrounding it are likely to depress private investment going forward, and uncertainty about trade arrangements will hit exports and inward investment, too, offsetting any beneficial trading effect of the depreciation of sterling. This is not a credible platform from which to launch any serious attempt to prepare our economy for the challenges of a post-Brexit world and enable us to secure our prosperity for the future.

This is a Budget that continues to hit the poorest the hardest. The Red Book demonstrates that the cuts to public services just go on and on into the future. We are told that the target for eliminating the deficit, which was originally meant to be achieved in 2015, might now not be accomplished until 2025—a 10-year delay on the original five-year plan. The Budget documents reveal a massive 20% cut in the funding allocated to local government next year, down from £8.2 billion to £6.5 billion. That puts at risk services for the most vulnerable and threatens to rip our social fabric apart.

There is an 8% per-head cut in education funding, which will threaten to bankrupt some schools—certainly in my constituency—while the extra funds announced for education are ring-fenced for the Prime Minister’s grammar schools vanity project. Once again, some people are being left behind while a chosen few, in certain chosen areas, get all the advantages. Also unmentioned by the Chancellor in his statement yesterday was a 6% real-terms cut in non-pension-related spending on social security, which will hit the most vulnerable the hardest.

The pressures of our changing demography make it clear that there must be urgent and radical reform of our system of social care, and in social justice more broadly. The changes to our labour market, which are happening on a global, national and local level, along with the profound implications of rapid technological change, make it imperative that we reform our tax and benefit system to make it fit for the future. We must be willing to look again at the tax base in order to guarantee real security for everyone in our society.

In both those areas, though, the Government have been caught out by their cynical electioneering attacks on Labour and their even more cynical election promises to the people. After participating in cross-party talks following the Dilnot report on adult social care and agreeing a joint approach to the challenges we face, in 2010 the Tories cynically produced propaganda posters condemning what they called “Labour’s death tax”. Thus, for short-term, cynical electoral gain, they equally cynically ruled out the changes we need to make as a nation so that social care can be put on a sustainable footing for the future.

The Tories did the same with what they called “Labour’s tax on jobs”—proposed changes to national insurance contributions. In 2015, they even produced the Tory “tax lock”, a pledge that it has since emerged was manufactured to fill a hole in the general election grid. It was described by the No. 10 adviser who thought it up as

“the dumbest economic policy that anyone could make”.

[Stephen Doughty]

My hon. Friend mentioned previous claims by the Conservatives. I have the advert that they put out during the last election, which made clear that any rise in national insurance would be

“costing jobs and hitting hardworking taxpayers”.

What has changed?

[Ms Eagle]

Exactly. My hon. Friend will agree that, with their cynical use of short-term advantage and the way they have electioneered on it, their pledges and the way they have campaigned, the Conservatives have actually made it much harder for us to make the reforms that we as a society need to make to our tax and benefit system and our social care system. That is the ultimate in irresponsibility.

Yesterday, the Chancellor tore up the tax lock. He can dance on the head of a pin and claim that the lock did not apply to class 4 national insurance contributions all he likes, but that was not on the side of the bus and no one will believe a Tory election promise ever again. The Chancellor has learned a tough lesson: if he wants to be for the just about managing, he needs all the tools of government available to him. He cannot tax-lock himself out of all his options and end up having to plug the gap in social care by taxing the self-employed. The Government have been hoist by their own cynical petard.

We are willing to work with the Government on both the challenges that I have mentioned—social care and how to arrest the alarming rise in self-employment, which brings precariousness for far too many people. Self-employment is often just apparent self-employment, and it is quite often very low paid and precarious. We need to ensure that the self-employed are properly protected and have proper access to the protections that employees take for granted.

[Seema Malhotra]

As usual, my hon. Friend is holding us spellbound with an excellent speech. The former Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, the right hon. Member for Chingford and Woodford Green (Mr Duncan Smith), in a sense blamed the Tory manifesto for being wrong more than he blamed the policy that the Government introduced yesterday and the way that they did so. Does she agree that those are both problems that the Government clearly need to learn from?

[Ms Eagle]

I agree. We saw a cynical dash from the Conservatives to make short-term promises to get elected, and we saw them campaign even more cynically on those promises in the hope that when they had to be broken nobody would notice. But the Government’s actions are making it much harder for us to have cross-party support on anything, and they have also made it very difficult for anyone to believe any single one of their manifesto pledges again. The Government have increased distrust of politics. That is the legacy of their behaviour on social reform and tax reform, which are vital if we are to prosper in the future.

[Stephen Doughty]

My hon. Friend is being generous in giving way. She talks about mistrust having been created. Does she agree that people out there often say to us that they do not feel that politicians in this place—the Government—actually understand the realities of life? Life for the self-employed, in particular, is often very difficult. They have many costs on top of those we would normally expect. They need increased insurance, find it difficult to get a mortgage and have to pay out for additional things. This Government simply do not understand the reality of life for self-employed people.

[Ms Eagle]

That may be the generous interpretation, but there are other interpretations that involve the cynicism I have talked about. This is the issue: if the Government really wanted to make a reasonable reform to the tax system and national insurance contributions to take away the current tax incentive for people to self-incorporate or real employers to force people into becoming apparently self-employed, they would not have made such a reform. They would have said, “We’re going to introduce these new benefits for the self-employed and take away the tax advantages and disadvantages of being self-employed, and finally we will bring forward a much more stable tax base and tax system.” That could be supported, but it looks like the Government have changed national insurance contributions to fill a fiscal hole in social policy. That is a grubby way to behave, and it is in breach of the Conservatives’ election manifesto. That is not the way in which the Chancellor should have made this change. He may learn, but in this Budget all we got was green Hammond rotten eggs.

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[Ms Angela Eagle]

Just to reassure the hon. Gentleman, I suspect that I would have been even more offended if he had agreed more with me than with his hon. Friend.

[Mr Raab]

It is good to at least start on a point of consensus.

When I hear the leader of the Labour party or the shadow Chancellor talking about the economy, I sometimes feel that there is a parallel universe. I listened carefully to the right hon. Member for Hayes and Harlington (John McDonnell) on “The Andrew Marr Show”. He explained that the economy was not growing fast enough. In fact, the British economy was the second fastest growing in the G7 last year, as it is this year, despite all the doom and gloom around Brexit. He needs to look at the economic facts.

The right hon. Gentleman went on to say that real wages are falling, which hon. Members have returned to on several occasions. I will talk about cost of living pressures, but the official figures are crystal clear. Real wages have been rising since September 2014 and, according to official data, are set to continue rising. [Interruption.] If the hon. Member for Heywood and Middleton (Liz McInnes) wants to intervene, I would welcome that, but otherwise she should go and check the facts. The raw truth is that employment is at a record level, real wages have been rising since 2014, income inequality—I know that she, like me, cares about that—is at its lowest in 30 years, the FTSE is at a record level, and there has been a fresh wave of investment since the referendum, including, most recently, the commitment by James Dyson.

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[Barbara Keeley (Worsley and Eccles South) (Lab)]

We have heard a wide range of speeches this afternoon, including from the hon. Members for Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath (Roger Mullin), for Richmond (Yorks) (Rishi Sunak), for Esher and Walton (Mr Raab), for Harrow East (Bob Blackman) and for Peterborough (Mr Jackson), and from the right hon. Member for North Norfolk (Norman Lamb), who is no longer here. We also heard excellent speeches from my hon. Friends the Members for Wallasey (Ms Eagle), for Croydon North (Mr Reed), for Bristol East (Kerry McCarthy), for Ilford North (Wes Streeting), for West Bromwich West (Mr Bailey), for Feltham and Heston (Seema Malhotra) and for Cardiff South and Penarth (Stephen Doughty) and from my right hon. Friend the Member for Leicester East (Keith Vaz).

I shall mainly talk about social care, but I want to mention the absence of any Budget help for the 1950s-born women struggling without their state pensions owing to the 1995 and 2011 Pensions Acts. Their demonstration and lobbying here yesterday were wonderful. I am also sad that the Chancellor could not find £10 million for the children’s funeral fund, which was campaigned for so ably by my hon. Friend the Member for Swansea East (Carolyn Harris). Despite cuts from central Government, my local authority has recently announced that it will waive fees for child burials, but all the weight of that should not be put on councils.

I had hoped that this Budget would finally announce a Government funding commitment to start to put the social care sector on a stable footing. The Chancellor said that everyone should be able to

“enjoy security and dignity in old age.”—[Official Report, 8 March 2017; Vol. 622, c. 820.]

However, despite his rhetoric, it is clear that his Budget did not match up to that aim. As we have heard, the King’s Fund has put the current funding gap for social care at around £2 billion. Yesterday, the Chancellor announced additional funding of £2 billion over three years, of which only £1 billion will be available this year. That is half of what is needed to deal with the immediate crisis. The Care and Support Alliance commented that that the funding will

“keep the wolf from the door”

but no more. There has been much discussion about the future and what will happen to that extra funding, but we must bear it in mind that post-Budget figures for adult social care show a 2.1% cut between 2016-17 and 2019-20, showing that funding is still being cut in this Parliament.

Along with council leaders, social care providers and health leaders, the Opposition have been warning this Government for many months about the perilous state of the social care sector. Indeed, the King’s Fund recently said that adult social care is

“rapidly becoming little more than a threadbare safety net for the poorest and most needy older and disabled people.”

Last week, the care company Mitie offloaded its two homecare businesses for £2, which is a clear demonstration of the fragility of the current care market. That company, which had provided care and support to 10,000 people and employed 6,000 staff, was reduced to being worth only £2. It has taken until now for the Government to heed the many warnings, and they were wrong to wait so long to act, just as they were wrong to cut local government budgets by around 40% since 2010, which has led to cuts of £5.5 billion from adult social care budgets by the end of this financial year.

[Ms Angela Eagle]

Does my hon. Friend also recognise that the cuts to benefits, particularly to housing benefit, will have a huge effect on extra care? Large numbers of people are very happy, well looked after and protected in those arrangements, but they cannot pay for them if housing benefit goes. Moving those people into nursing care will cost far more a week. That is another ticking time bomb.

[Barbara Keeley]

My hon. Friend is right about extra care housing.

The Chancellor was wrong not to make any extra funding available for social care in the autumn statement. Instead, Ministers chose to continue putting the burden of funding social care on councils and council tax payers. The local government finance settlement compounded the mess by recycling money from the new homes bonus to create the adult social care grant. That rather inept settlement made a third of councils worse off, including my own Salford City Council, which loses an extra £2 million from budgets this year.

One council that did not lose out from the settlement was Surrey County Council, which will gain £9 million extra from the adult social care grant. Perhaps that should not surprise us, given that the settlement was made when Surrey was in the middle of a long, drawn out and clearly highly successful lobby of Ministers to get more funding for just that council’s social care.

Last night, Surrey County Council released many documents and texts revealing the extraordinary level of access that that one council enjoyed with Ministers and their advisers. My local authority recently asked for a meeting with the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government to discuss our difficult financial situation and the loss of funding for social care. We were given a 30-minute meeting with one of the Under-Secretaries of State. However, the leader of Surrey County Council was given meetings with the Secretary of State on 12 October, 19 October and 9 January. There were a number of further meetings with the Secretary of State to discuss Surrey County Council’s funding situation involving the Chancellor, the Secretary of State for Health and other Surrey MPs. There was also a substantial stream of letters, emails and texts, some of which may make surprising reading. Some frustration was expressed about the Communities Secretary, with one Surrey MP saying:

“Sajid led me to understand before Christmas that he would be trying very hard…to help Surrey out with the worst of its (Government-dictated) financial dilemma.”

And he said that if the Secretary of State was

“imprudent enough not to have £40m hidden under the Department sofa for just this sort of emergency/problem”

and if all the Secretary of State’s local government money really is allocated, he

“still has the option of adjusting all other Council settlements down very slightly in order to accommodate the £31m needed for Surrey—and I think he should be encouraged to do this.”

In January that Surrey MP wrote that he was

“losing hope re getting help from Government this time, we still need to kick up such a fuss that Ministers and Civil Servants really do remember at the very least ‘they will need to treat us better next time.’”

I think that refers to the new funding formula. All this about a council that the Chancellor himself told in a letter in December:

“Surrey’s core spending power in 2016/17 decreased by 1% compared to an average reduction of 2% for shire counties as a whole”.

And the Chancellor said that over the lifetime of this Parliament

“Surrey’s spending power is forecast to increase by 1.5% compared to a flat cash settlement for local government as a whole”.

It seems that Ministers were not ready to listen to most council leaders, care providers, local authorities and their own regulator about the fragile state of social care funding, but it is clear from all the correspondence—I recommend that hon. Members read that correspondence, as it is very interesting—that relying on council tax and business rates to fund social care will never give us the fair and stable funding system that we need.

As I said earlier, there will still be cuts of 2.1% to social care up to 2019-20, so what we have in this Budget is a sticking plaster or a stopgap announcement that will not give older and vulnerable people the “security and dignity” in old age that the Chancellor claims. And it will not enable us to deal with the continuing demographic challenges that we face. The number of people aged 75 and over is projected to nearly double by 2039. That ought to be something to celebrate, but instead the Government have created fear and uncertainty for older people by failing to address the health and care challenges raised by those demographic changes. The Chancellor said that the Government intend to produce a Green Paper in the autumn on long-term funding options, and there has been some discussion of that in this debate, but given that we have already had the Barker review and the Dilnot commission, there are fears that the Government could be kicking this issue, once again, into the long grass.

I hope that the Government are not doing that, because cuts to social care budgets hit not only people who need care, but the 6.5 million unpaid family carers. Carers UK tells us that an estimated 1.6 million people currently provide 50 hours or more of care per week, which is an increase of a third since 2001. Some 2 million people have given up work at some point to care for loved ones, and 3 million carers have had to reduce their working hours. That is not good for their finances, with many falling into poverty as time goes on.

As people live longer with disabilities and long-term health conditions, more of us will find ourselves having to take on a caring role. Sadly, this Budget offered nothing to carers, just as it offered nothing to women born in the 1950s and nothing to families who were bereaved after losing children. There was nothing in it for carers, no extra support and no sign that this Government value the important work that they do. I say to the Minister that £120 million would deliver a three-hour respite break each week for 40,000 carers who are providing full-time care; instead, as we know, the Government have chosen to prioritise cuts to inheritance tax and corporation tax, and to ignore the increased burden on unpaid family carers.

The Government have also failed to recognise that the social care crisis is not just about older people. The Chancellor talked about the impact that the £2 billion over three years will have on delayed discharges, but, as councils have reminded us this week, other groups of people need social care, including those with learning disabilities. About a third of councils’ annual social care spending—some £5 billion—goes on supporting adults with learning disabilities. Surrey MPs must now understand that fact, after all the correspondence from their council leader, who spent a lot of time trying to make clear to them what an issue that was for councils.

We had an excellent debate in Westminster Hall earlier in the week on social care in Liverpool, when we heard that Liverpool had lost almost 60% of its grant since 2010 and that that will reach cuts of 68% by 2020. Cuts to social care there have meant that funding for care packages had to be cut, so whereas 14,000 people were receiving one now only 9,000 are—5,000 people are no longer getting a care package. Surrey, which has had so much attention, did not have cuts at that level; its cuts were only 28%. Indeed, social care spending in Surrey has increased from £273 million to £367 million.

I want to make an observation about the new allocations for the £2 billion that the Government have announced. I observe—that is all I can do, because the figures have only just arrived—that the allocations are £1 billion for year one, two thirds of a billion for year two, and one third of a billion for year three. In that, Surrey’s allocation goes up in year two; it is one of only six councils on the whole list that gets a bigger allocation out of a smaller amount of money. I do not know, and it is impossible to see here in the Chamber, what the formula is, but that position is very worrying.

Disturbingly, this important matter of funding social care has been tarnished by the offering of sweetheart deals and the making of gentlemen’s agreements. It seems, from reading the correspondence, that all of that was done to escape the political heat for some right hon. and hon. Members facing the reality of what cuts to council funding have done to social care in their local authority area. That is what this is all about: threats of what will happen to constituencies and areas if the cuts go on.

Social care should not ever be consigned to becoming a threadbare safety net. We also should not have a Communities Secretary who can hold more than seven meetings with Surrey County Council or Surrey MPs to discuss their funding, yet who will not meet a cross-party delegation from Salford City Council and has no time in his diary to meet the leader of Hull City Council. I hope the Communities Secretary will start to listen to councils other than Surrey County Council, whose leader emphasised in letters that we have seen that it has the largest Conservative group in the country. He should also listen to leaders from Hull, Croydon, Salford, Manchester, Liverpool, Durham and Newcastle. He needs to understand from them what is needed throughout the country to save social care from crisis.

Oral Answers to Questions

Angela Eagle Excerpts

Tuesday 28th February 2017 Commons Chamber

[Mr Gauke]

As the Chancellor announced at the autumn statement, the Government are significantly increasing investment in research and development, rising to an extra £2 billion a year by 2020-21. We have also made the R and D tax credit regime much more generous. We want to ensure that the UK remains an attractive place for business to invest in innovative research.

[Ms Angela Eagle (Wallasey) (Lab)]

Given the shameful neglect of social care spending in the autumn statement and straws in the wind about how that is going to be put right in the Budget, will the Chancellor take account of the fact that authorities such as ours in Wirral are having to deal with £45 million-worth of pressure due to the number of our older people who are needing help, and that a 3% increase in council tax will deliver us only £22 million?

[Mr Philip Hammond]

I generally find it best not to comment on straws in the wind, but I recognise the pressure that many authorities are under from underlying demographic trends. As we have said before, we are alert to that concern and will seek to address it in a sensible and measured way.

Concentrix: Tax Credit Claimants

Angela Eagle Excerpts

Tuesday 18th October 2016 Westminster Hall

[Fiona Mactaggart]

The hon. Gentleman is absolutely right. I will try to make some progress, so that he can see what I want to say about that kind of issue. Decisions were certainly made on the basis of inadequate evidence, in a way that I believe was actually illegal under the Tax Credits Act 2002, and should not have been permitted.

[Ms Angela Eagle (Wallasey) (Lab)]

Will my right hon. Friend give way?

[Fiona Mactaggart]

I am trying to make progress, but I will give way once more.

[Ms Eagle]

My right hon. Friend is being extraordinarily generous. I have had many cases in which precisely that has happened. Single mothers in Wallasey have been accused of living with a previous tenant in a house that they happened to rent at a particular time—allegations so absurd that they had not even thought of them. Their benefits have often been stopped for weeks and weeks, and they have had no access at all to funding, which has forced many of them to go to food banks. What kind of Government allows that to happen?

[Fiona Mactaggart]

My hon. Friend is right that we need to focus on the responsibility of the Government, because that is what we Members of Parliament can most influence. The first lesson for the Government is that payment-by-results contracts should be avoided. Concentrix staff were under pressure to perform—we are told that they were expected to open 40 to 50 new investigations a day—so they regularly proceeded on totally flimsy evidence.

I spoke to Concentrix about the source of the evidence it received, because I could not really believe that a company would proceed on the basis of such information —“Somebody else once rented this flat”, “The electoral register has this person on it”, “Someone has had their post sent to this address,” and so on. The director of Concentrix told me:

“HMRC provide Concentrix with the claimant cases that they believe qualify for review.”

So the source of the evidence is HMRC. He continued:

“These cases are selected by HMRC based on its own internal system which flags where there may be the potential for fraud or error. There were 1,497,000 cases provided from the Authority based on their initial assessment of risk or error and fraud.

Concentrix subsequently runs a further series of checks to substantiate the potential risk of fraud and error and to refine the list of cases that are then checked. In the latest campaign, Concentrix deselected 80% of the cases originally provided to us by HMRC. This means we contacted 324,000 and the remaining 1,173,000 were not worked by Concentrix.”

According to him, HMRC even pressed Concentrix to investigate cases in which it could not name the alleged co-resident.

We have been blaming Concentrix for using flimsy evidence when I think that the source of that flimsy evidence is actually HMRC. My first question to the Minister is: where is the so-called evidence sourced from? Is it the Post Office, credit agencies or out-of-date electoral registers? Is it true that the Treasury pressed Concentrix to pursue cases with so little data that the alleged co-resident’s name was not even known? When tax credit claimants were written to about the investigation of their case, the alleged co-resident was not named in that letter. Many of my constituents have said, “How can I prove a negative?”. Of course, if they had got through on the telephone, they would have been told the alleged co-resident’s name, but getting through on the telephone was not straightforward, as we all know.

I remind the Minister that section 16 of the Tax Credits Act 2002 gives the power to amend or terminate an award where there are reasonable grounds for believing that an award is wrong or that there is no entitlement. It also gives the power to request information or evidence where there are grounds for believing that the award might be wrong. That law is clear. It was confirmed in an Upper Tribunal judgment by Judge Wikeley that the burden of proof for stopping a tax credit award lies with HMRC, but that was reversed in these cases: the authorities proceeded to close claims without reasonable grounds that they could evidence. They demanded excessive evidence from applicants who sought to disprove allegations that they had claimed the wrong amount for childcare or were living with an unnamed partner.

--- Later in debate ---

[Ms Angela Eagle (Wallasey) (Lab)]

Julie Molyneux, a constituent of mine, was accused of working for only 15 hours, when she had worked 16.5. She phoned HMRC and was told to phone Concentrix. She phoned Concentrix and was told to phone HMRC. She went round and round in circles. Her tax credits were stopped for eight weeks and she was forced to live on £63 a week, with two children to look after, one of whom is disabled. It was acknowledged that a mistake was made, but it has still not been put right.

Hayley Jones was accused of living with a previous tenant. She tried to get through to the system for a week without any luck. She finally got through, but was put on hold for an hour and a half. When she told them she had sent in all the relevant documents, they denied receiving them. She was left without money for eight weeks. She had no money at all and four children to support.

Paula Bee was informed—this was new to her—that she was living with an ex-partner, when he was living somewhere else. She had to try to track him down so she could supply a copy of his rent agreement. What did not get paid as a result of that? People have been unable to get through to the telephone helpline. When constituents do get through, they are placed on hold for more than an hour, in the worst case. Operators are rude to them when they are trying to resolve problems. Single women are told that they are living with other people, and it always turns out to be previous tenants. Concentrix says it has not received forms. It says people should ring HMRC, and HMRC says they should ring Concentrix. Nobody responds to letters for a very long time.

This situation has to stop. It has to be put right. My constituents who have been affected must have it put right now.

--- Later in debate ---

[The Economic Secretary to the Treasury (Simon Kirby)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship today, Mr Nuttall, in my first debate in Westminster Hall. I give the Financial Secretary’s apologies: she is on a Bill Committee and cannot be in two places at once. I have listened carefully to what has been a very interesting debate and will do my best to answer all the questions.

I congratulate the right hon. Member for Slough (Fiona Mactaggart) on securing the debate and take this opportunity to thank all right hon. and hon. Members for their efforts, not just in the debate but during the past few weeks, supporting constituents and bringing to our attention the difficulties that constituents are experiencing with their claims for tax credits. I reassure hon. Members that we are making every effort possible to resolve those difficulties as soon as possible and to make sure that the support provided through tax credits reaches those who really need it. There is no doubt that last month we were falling short in the level of customer service that we were providing to claimants, and I am very sorry about that.

In our efforts to tackle error and fraud in tax credits, we had engaged Concentrix to investigate claims and it did help us to drive down error and fraud to almost the lowest level since tax credits began. However, faced with a high volume of calls, Concentrix struggled to provide the kind of service that people had a right to expect—indeed, the kind of service stipulated in its contract. That led to a stressful time for a lot of people, including some of the most vulnerable, as they struggled to reach Concentrix to resolve any queries about their entitlement to tax credits. Let me be clear that that was not good enough, which is why we stepped in to get things back on track.

[Ms Angela Eagle]

Where did the information, particularly on cohabitation, come from? So many of our constituents have been accused of cohabiting with the previous tenant of their usually rented property. Were the data HMRC-matched or did Concentrix do it all on its own?

[Simon Kirby]

I am going to reach that point later. Very briefly, HMRC provided third-party data to Concentrix, which then chose who to pursue from those data.

Budget Resolutions and Economic Situation

Angela Eagle Excerpts

Tuesday 22nd March 2016 Commons Chamber

[Ms Angela Eagle (Wallasey) (Lab)]

Today we have heard contributions from 30 Opposition Members and only 14 Government Members—the Government ran out of contributors quite a while ago.

The Chancellor has had to be dragged back to the Chamber today to explain what on earth has happened to his Budget which, after all, is still only six days old and already contains three U-turns. He put in a bravura performance, but there was not a windmill that he did not tilt at or a straw man that he did not set up. Even then, he had the gall to claim that he supports the vulnerable. At the end of all that sound and fury, however, his Budget was still a mess, and the idea of one nation Conservatism is still a national joke.

What we actually got was a botched Budget that has disastrously unravelled in just a few short days. It was a Budget created by a Chancellor far more concerned with advancing his own interests than advancing the national interest. We all knew that this was a Budget that had to be seen through the lens of the Chancellor’s own long-cherished ambition to become leader of the Tory party and Prime Minister, and that the chief interest the Chancellor was promoting was his own. In an effort to curry favour with his own side, he announced increases in tax thresholds and cuts to capital gains tax, and he decided that cuts to disability benefits would pay for them.

The Chancellor has presented a catastrophic Budget—omnishambles does not do it justice. The Prime Minister had ordered him to produce a “safety first” budget; instead, he has succeeded in producing a Budget that has torn the Cabinet apart. Despite his performance today, we see a Chancellor at bay, on the run from attacks in his own party. He has completely lost control of his own Budget. He is now so weakened that he is accepting amendments on the tampon tax and solar panels because he knows he would lose the votes, and he dare not let that happen. He has had to reappear in the Chamber today to explain where it all went wrong.

It took less than 24 hours for the Chancellor’s triumph of Wednesday to turn into chaos at the weekend. We have seen a Government in complete and utter disarray and a Chancellor who has only succeeded in shredding his own reputation. Today, we see the utter collapse of his authority. His popularity has halved since the election, and two thirds of people who voted Conservative last May do not think that he is up to the job of being Prime Minister.

The Chancellor’s Budget was rightly savaged as deeply unfair by his then Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, the right hon. Member for Chingford and Woodford Green (Mr Duncan Smith). Back Benchers’ outrage grew as they realised that the huge cuts to disability support were being used to fund a tax giveaway for the well-off. We then had Panic Friday, as the Prime Minister realised that his party was in revolt and ordered a hasty retreat on the Chancellor’s biggest revenue raiser in the Red Book. Then came a dramatic Cabinet resignation by the Work and Pensions Secretary, who had reached the end of his tether. On Manic Monday, the cowardly Chancellor went missing, sending out his hapless junior to cover for him.

The former Work and Pensions Secretary made clear his opposition in his devastating resignation letter, in which he said that cuts to disability benefits were

“not defensible in the way they were placed within a Budget that benefits higher earning taxpayers.”

That was this Chancellor’s choice. The former Work and Pensions Secretary called the disability cuts that the Chancellor presented last week “morally indefensible”. The former Work and Pensions Secretary has questioned the entire moral basis of the last six years of Conservative government, and weak assertions from Conservative Members that they are really, really compassionate are revealed for what they really, really are: hollow nonsense. The former Work and Pensions Secretary was also clear that he thought that the Chancellor’s welfare cap was unsustainable, and he questioned the motives of his erstwhile Cabinet colleagues, slamming the Chancellor’s indefensible Budget. He said

“they’re losing sight of the direction of the travel that they should be in”

and

“it is in danger of drifting in a direction that divides society rather than unites it. And that I think is unfair.”

It is still unclear in what form this Budget statement will survive, but it now contains an abandoned £4.4 billion of disability benefit cuts and an unspecified £3.5 billion cut in public expenditure. This is a Budget that continues to disintegrate before our very eyes. The Chancellor has given us a Budget that is an economic failure, a moral failure and a political failure. The OBR forecast accompanying the Budget formed a sharply deteriorating backdrop, caused mainly by his own failures at home. Productivity has been revised down and down. Growth has been revised down and down. Earnings have been revised down and are still lower in real terms than they were when the Chancellor took office. It is the same for business investment, which was downgraded by two thirds this year alone. That is not the forecast that most concerns the Chancellor, however. I do not know if you are a betting man, Mr Speaker, but over the weekend the odds on the Chancellor moving next door to No. 10 have slipped from a healthy 2:1 to a distant 4:1. He is on the slide—and fast.

This is a Chancellor who has an astonishing record of missing his own targets. He promised to protect our triple A credit rating—he has failed. He said he would eliminate the deficit by 2015—he has failed. In his 2012 Budget, he set out a target to double UK exports to £1 trillion by 2020—he has failed, admitting he will miss it by £357 billion. In his last Budget, the Chancellor established three targets he wished to be judged by in this Parliament. First, he promised to keep social security spending below an arbitrary cap he imposed on himself. He has, by his own admission, failed, and he will fail every year of this Parliament, and that was even before he was forced to row back on the cuts to PIP.

Secondly, the Chancellor promised to reduce debt as a percentage of GDP in every year. He will fail, by the end of the month, to meet his target, and he only met it last year by flogging off public assets, such as bits of Royal Mail. Thirdly, he has promised to have an overall surplus by 2020, and that rule is now dangling by the thinnest of threads. The Red Book shows that he only hangs on to meeting his economically pointless surplus rule by a series of tricks the Joker would have been proud of, and a promise to cut borrowing by an unprecedented £32 billion in a pre-election year. These are fiscal gymnastics that would embarrass the dodgiest accountant. It does not take a genius to see that this amounts to an economic plan that has lost all credibility in the country, just as he is losing credibility in his own party.

This Budget is also a moral failure. It is a Budget with unfairness at its very heart, from a Chancellor who is making the wrong decisions for our country. Since 2010, over 1 million people have been forced to go to food banks, and over 1 million benefit claimants have been sanctioned, often for utterly trivial reasons. Dying people have been found fit to work—one woman in a coma was found fit to work—and people have committed suicide. Homelessness has soared, and the bedroom tax has caused untold misery. The Chancellor has talked about workers and shirkers, stigmatising all benefit claimants, including those with disabilities, and that has led to a discernible increase in hate crimes against them. I hope the Chancellor is proud of that record, but it is clear that this is not and can never be called compassionate Conservatism.

This is a Budget that planned to eliminate the deficit on the backs of the poor and some of the most vulnerable in our society. None of this is morally justifiable. Never again will this Government be able to claim, “We’re all in this together”. Never again will they be able to don the mantle of compassionate Conservativism with any shred of credibility. This is a political failure of a Budget, as well as a moral failure and an economic failure. This is a Chancellor who has mishandled tax credit cuts, who has pushed and lost on Sunday trading and who has now mishandled disability benefit cuts, too. He is a Chancellor who has lost control of his Budget and lost control of his leadership hopes. This is an omnishambles Chancellor who has produced an immoral Budget, which is disintegrating before our eyes. That is why we will vote against it tonight.

Enterprise Bill [Lords]

Angela Eagle Excerpts

Wednesday 9th March 2016 Commons Chamber

[Mr Speaker]

Order. First, may I appeal for as orderly an atmosphere as possible? The Chair seeks to facilitate as many contributors as possible. Secondly, Members are of course free to say what they like, but I would gently point out that no amendment or new clause on the subject of pilots is to be taken today. There is material before the House, but that subject is not among it.

[Ms Angela Eagle (Wallasey) (Lab)]

On a point of order, Mr Speaker. Will you confirm again that the manuscript amendment that the Government attempted to sneak on to the amendment paper at the last minute today, which would have covered the compromise on which the hon. Member for Berwick-upon-Tweed (Mrs Trevelyan) seems to have done a deal, is in fact not on the amendment paper and not before the House?

[Mr Speaker]

It was not selected. For the benefit of people attending to our proceedings, I shall be explicit. It is for the Speaker to select or not to select, and I did not select that late-submitted manuscript proposal. I need add nothing.

--- Later in debate ---

[Ms Angela Eagle]

On a point of order, Mr Speaker. The House has spoken on the very contentious issue of Sunday trading, which would have affected millions of workers. Can we now hear from the Government that they will respect the will of this House and abandon their tawdry attempts to reintroduce this proposal? And I mean the Chancellor.

[Mr Speaker]

The hon. Lady has made her point, but it is not a matter for the Chair.

The Speaker then put forthwith the Questions necessary for the disposal of the business to be concluded at that time (Standing Order No. 83E).

Schedule 5

Sunday opening hours: rights of shop workers

Amendments made: 13, page 91, line 25, at end insert—

“7A In section 48 (complaints to employment tribunals), after subsection (1) insert—

“(1YA) A shop worker may present a complaint to an employment tribunal that he or she has been subjected to a detriment in contravention of section 45ZA.””

This amendment is consequential on new section 45ZA of the Employment Rights Act 1996 (inserted by paragraph 7 of Schedule 5 to the Bill) and ensures that a shop worker can present a complaint to an employment tribunal in connection with a detriment suffered in contravention of that section.

Amendment 14, page 91, line 46, at end insert—

“8A In section 108 (qualifying period of employment), in subsection (3) after paragraph (d) insert—

“(da) subsection (2) of section 101ZA applies (read with subsection (3) of that section) or subsection (4) of that section applies,””.—(Brandon Lewis.)

This amendment is consequential on new section 101ZA of the Employment Rights Act 1996 (inserted by paragraph 8 of Schedule 5 to the Bill) and ensures that the two year qualifying period of employment for unfair dismissal cases will not apply in relation to cases involving a refusal to work additional hours on Sunday or the giving of an objection notice to working such hours.

--- Later in debate ---

[Sajid Javid]

I shall give way in a moment.

This shows that we were absolutely right when we warned during the election that if a weak Labour Government ever got into office, they would be propped up by an unprincipled SNP. That is why we must never let either of those parties get closer to power.

[Ms Angela Eagle]

I think the right hon. Gentleman should learn a bit of grace in defeat, because that is what the House likes. Will he confirm that these proposals did not fall under the EVEL or the WEVEL parts of our procedures, and will he also confirm that, having listened to the will of the House, this Government have no intention of bringing these Sunday trading proposals back before us?

[Sajid Javid]

Of course we always listen to the will of this House, but that does not take away from the fact that the majority of English and Welsh MPs wanted to see this change—this flexibility on Sunday trading that would have been a right for local authorities in England and Wales to enjoy in the same way as it is enjoyed in Scotland. It was denied because of the SNP.

--- Later in debate ---

[Ms Angela Eagle]

The Bill should have been so much more ambitious to live up to its encouraging short title, but despite the sterling efforts of Opposition Members in this House, and those of our Labour colleagues in the House of Lords, it remains a mouse of a Bill which should have been a lion. As I observed on Second Reading, this piece of legislation does not even match the ambition of the Government’s own rhetoric, let alone meet the huge economic challenges now facing this country. Its timidity is a great disappointment to those of us on the Opposition Benches.

Nevertheless, I would like to pay warm tribute to my right hon. and hon. Friends who served with such distinction in Committee. I would also like once more to pay tribute to the work of our Labour colleagues in the Lords who were able to secure some amendments to this very modest Bill, which undoubtedly improved it. May I also take this opportunity to acknowledge the contribution of all Members who served on the Bill Committee, whichever party they come from, as well as that of the all-important Whips, who ensure that the Committee stage works appropriately?

I welcome the Business Secretary to his place for the first time since it became clear that he has joined the campaign for Britain to stay in the European Union. I do not know whether he has been bullied by the Chancellor. However, he seemed anxious to burnish his Eurosceptic credentials even as he abandoned his Brexit friends in pronouncing recently that he would remain a “Brussels basher” despite his Brexit betrayal. His enthusiasm for the cause will be a great asset to all of us who believe passionately that we need to remain engaged and optimistic about our place in the world, and who are clear that we should not be disengaging from the largest free trade area in the world, where we do 50% of our business.

The Bill was just beginning its Report stage in the Lords when the Chancellor unveiled his comprehensive spending review on 25 November last year. We all remember the smirking optimism he displayed at that Dispatch Box as he unveiled the £27 billion windfall that the Office for Budget Responsibility had discovered to assist him in making his sums add up. But much has changed since then, and the Bill addresses little of that. Just six weeks later, the Chancellor turned up in Cardiff warning ominously that the economy was suddenly facing a “cocktail of threats” in the new year that he had not noticed in November. Then he turned up in Shanghai warning about gathering “storm clouds” and announcing that the British economy was £18 billion smaller than he had expected it to be because of slowing growth and falling tax receipts. He is now in full retreat, adding a £7 billion volte face on his widely trailed radical pensions reform to his retreat on huge tax credit cuts late last year.

This is not a great reforming Chancellor. What we actually see in No. 11 Downing Street is a man who is much more focused on his own leadership ambitions than he is on next week’s Budget or on the best interests of our country. We see a man who is much more interested in duffing up the Mayor of London and the Brexit rebels in his own party than he is in solving the huge challenges facing our economy. If this Bill is meant to be part of the solution to those challenges, I am afraid he has got his diagnosis completely wrong. Where is the “march of the makers” that the Chancellor was waxing so lyrical about six years ago? It has completely failed to materialise, and there is no sign of the rebalancing he promised us. In fact, manufacturing is faltering, the service sector is stuttering and the trade balance continues to worsen; it is now standing at over 5% of gross domestic product.

Of course we on Labour Benches will support the creation of the small business commissioner as it appears in the Bill. However, we worry about its tiny budget and the fact that its very limited remit will not be transformative. We argued successfully in the Lords to give the post some independence, but everyone in the House knows how modest this proposal is. We would much rather have been legislating for comprehensive reform by introducing a small business administration, instead of expending legislative effort on this minor tinkering.

Of course we support moves to establish a quality benchmark for apprenticeships and statutory protection for the term itself, which should help to protect it from being discredited or abused. But with one in three vacancies in the economy reported to be the result of skills shortages, the provisions of the Bill barely scratch the surface of what is needed, and the “skills emergency” that is holding back our country goes on. Time will tell whether the Government’s target of reaching 3 million apprentices will be achieved at the cost of falling quality. I certainly hope that it will not be, but we intend to hold the Government to account on this as their plans develop. We will also continue to keep a close eye on the plans to introduce an apprenticeship levy, which is causing increasing worry in businesses up and down the country. The Government must ensure that our young people can build sustainable and fulfilling careers and that all apprenticeships offer genuine learning opportunities and pathways for progression.

We are extremely disappointed that the Government have used the Bill to flog off the Green Investment Bank before it had been given a proper chance to develop. We are especially concerned that the bank’s core purpose to promote the vital green transformation of the economy will be lost or diluted by this unnecessary privatisation. Our concern is that, by rushing to sell, the Government will not get a decent price for the asset that has been created.

On exit payments, we remain concerned that the Bill goes far beyond capping the most excessive pay-outs and will hit some low-paid, long-serving workers in a completely arbitrary fashion. The provisions breach agreements that the Government made with some sectors of their own workforce only recently.

The way that this Government have chosen to deal with the important issue of Sunday trading has been cynical and disreputable. During the Bill’s passage through the House of Lords, it contained no mention whatsoever of Sunday trading, let alone the Government’s intention to deregulate it by starting a free-for-all in every local authority. There were rumours but no signs of any measures. It was therefore tawdry of the Secretary of State to make an announcement during his speech on Second Reading confirming that the Government did in fact intend to change Sunday trading laws. The House was then put in the ludicrous position of having to debate measures on Second Reading that had not even been published and were not seen until the Committee stage.

The Government have descended further still today. We saw a grubby and desperate last-ditch attempt to avoid a vote on amendment 1, when they tried and failed to put down a late manuscript amendment. When it was rejected, the Minister was reduced to pleading with his own side to support a pilot scheme that was not even on the amendment paper. That is no way for any serious Government to behave when passing laws that will affect millions of retail workers and change the nature of our country. I am happy that they have not been rewarded and hope that the measures will now be abandoned. The current Sunday trading laws work well and strike a sensible balance between the needs of those who want to shop and those who work in retail.

This Bill is a missed opportunity. It is a modest Bill that fails to tackle the real challenges facing the economy. It could have aimed to be transformative. It did not. It could have aimed to tackle the skills emergency and the productivity puzzle. It did not. It could have set out an ambitious industrial strategy to help us to rebalance the economy and to tackle the gaping trade deficit. It did not. It could have prepared us for the challenges of big data and digital transformation, which offer great opportunities as well as threats, but it missed that chance. It is a modest Bill with much to be modest about.

Oral Answers to Questions

Angela Eagle Excerpts

Wednesday 9th December 2015 Commons Chamber

[Hon. Members]

Hurray!

[Ms Angela Eagle (Wallasey) (Lab)]

Thank you, Mr Speaker. It is nice to be given such a warm welcome.

Our hearts go out to all those who are suffering the consequences of the severe flooding in the north-west this week. Given that thousands of families are affected, the priority must be for the Government to give immediate help to all of them. Yet one year on from the 2013-14 floods, it emerged that only 15% of those affected had received payments from the Government’s repair and renew scheme. Does the Chancellor agree that that cannot possibly be allowed to happen again? These people need urgent help now, so will he today give the House a guarantee that people will receive the help they need, and quickly?

[Mr Osborne]

First, let me welcome the hon. Lady to her place and the warm support she has on the other side. I join her in expressing the sympathy of the whole House to those who have been affected by these terrible floods. A record rainfall has hit Cumbria and Lancashire. The update is that we have just one severe flood warning still in place, power has been restored to 168,000 homes and the west coast main line is open, but we have to be there for the long term for these families.

We continue to support the immediate rescue efforts, and the military have deployed. On recovery and the question the hon. Lady asks, I can today announce a £50 million fund for families and businesses affected in the area. That will be administered by the local authorities to avoid some of the administrative problems to which she alluded in her question. When it comes to rebuilding the infrastructure of Cumbria, Lancashire and other areas affected, we are assessing now the damage to the flood defences and to the roads. Funds will be made available. One of the benefits of having a strong and resilient economy is that we can help people in need.

[Ms Eagle]

I thank the Chancellor for that answer but, from listening to him, you would not think that he has cut flood defence spending by £115 million this year. After visiting the floods in the Somerset levels in 2014, the Prime Minister told this House that

“money is no object in this relief effort”——[Official Report, 12 February 2014; Vol. 575, c. 840.]

and that whatever money was needed would be spent. I welcome the announcement that the Chancellor has just made, but will he confirm that the same will apply this time?

[Mr Osborne]

Absolutely. The money will be made available to those affected and to the communities who have seen their infrastructure damaged. Up to £5,000 will be made available to individual families to repair their homes and protect them against future flooding, and we will provide money to businesses that have seen their businesses ruined. There have been heartbreaking stories—we have all seen them on television—about businesses that have been affected. That money is available.

Because we have a strong and resilient economy, we are increasing the money we spend on our flood defences. It is just not the case that that has been reduced. The last Labour Government spent £1.5 billion on flood defences, and we will be spending £2 billion on flood defences and increasing maintenance spending. It is something we can do and we can help these communities precisely because we took the difficult decisions to fix our economy and public finances.

[Ms Eagle]

I thank the Chancellor for that, and we will hold him to account on the promises he has made today. However, I note that the Government’s own figures show that their planned capital investment in flood defence will only protect one in eight of those households at risk.

I see that the Prime Minister cannot be with us to answer questions today because he is visiting Poland and Romania on the latest leg of his seemingly endless European “renegotiation tour.” He has been jetting all over the place. No wonder we had to buy him his own aeroplane. So can the Chancellor tell us: how is it all going?

[Mr Osborne]

The good news is we have a party leader who is respected abroad. The Prime Minister is in central and eastern Europe because we are fighting for a better deal for Britain, something that never would have happened if there had been a Labour Government.

[Ms Eagle]

I have to tell the Chancellor that many of his own Back Benchers are pretty unimpressed with how it is going so far. The hon. Member for North East Somerset (Mr Rees-Mogg) has described the Prime Minister’s renegotiation efforts as “pretty thin gruel”, the hon. Member for Harwich and North Essex (Mr Jenkin) has called them “lame” and “trivial”, and yesterday the hon. Member for Richmond Park (Zac Goldsmith) told the Press Gallery they were “not all that impressive”. The Chancellor is well known for cultivating his Back Benchers, and there is absolutely nothing wrong with that, so may I ask him the question his own side want answering: given that the Prime Minister has pre-resigned, does he really aspire to be Britain’s first post-EU Prime Minister?

[Mr Osborne]

I am not sure I would be quoting the views of Back Benchers if I was speaking for the Labour party at the moment. Most opposition parties are trying to get momentum; they are trying to get rid of it. We are fighting for a good deal for Britain in Europe, we are fighting to make the European economy more competitive for everyone and we are fighting to make sure that Britain, as a country that is not in the euro, gets a fair deal from the eurozone. That is what we are fighting for, but in the end this is something that we will put to the people of Britain in a referendum. The only reason that referendum is happening at all is that the Conservative party won the general election.

[Ms Eagle]

Instead of obsessing about issues in the Labour party, the Chancellor should be condemning the appalling activities in Conservative Future and attacking the Tory bullying scandal. I notice he did not answer the question about his own prime ministerial activities; I am not sure, but he might be worried about somebody a few places down from him on the Treasury Bench. [Interruption.] She knows who she is. If the Chancellor will not listen to the doubts of his own Back Benchers, perhaps he will listen to someone who has written in. I have got here a letter. It is from Donald of Brussels. He writes:

“Uncertainty about the future of the UK in the European Union is a destabilising factor.”

He’s right, isn’t he?

[Mr Osborne]

Since the Conservative party announced its policy on a referendum, we in this country have received the lion’s share of investment into Europe. That is because we have built a strong economy, we stand up for Britain’s interests abroad and we have made this a competitive place to grow and build a business. While we are quoting missives, let me tell the House that someone called Tony has been writing today. He happens to be the most successful Labour leader in history, and he describes the current Labour party as a complete tragedy. May I suggest that the hon. Lady asks some serious questions, about the health service, the economy, social care? She can ask any of these questions. She has got one more question; let’s hear it.

[Ms Eagle]

I prefer this quote from Tony:

“Just mouth the words ‘five more Tory years’ and you feel your senses and reason repulsed by what they have done to our country.”

We all know that the Chancellor is so preoccupied with his own leadership ambitions that he forgot about the day job, and that is why he ended up trying to slash working families tax credits in the Budget. Is it not about time that he focused on the national interest rather than his own interest? Three million UK jobs are linked to trade with the EU. Half our exports go there. That is what they are putting at risk by flirting with Brexit, and that is why we on this side of the House know that Britain is better off in.

[Mr Osborne]

I thought that the Labour party voted for the referendum when it came before the House of Commons. We are fighting for a better deal for Britain in Europe. The truth is that this week we have shown that we have an economic plan that is delivering for Britain. Whether it is well-funded flood defences, putting money into our national health service, backing teachers in our schools or introducing a national living wage, we are delivering security for the working people of Britain. Their economic and national security would be put at risk if the Labour party ever got back into office.