Oral Answers to Questions

Baroness Anderson of Stoke-on-Trent Excerpts

Wednesday 3rd February 2016 Commons Chamber

[The Prime Minister]

I have great respect for my hon. Friend, but we do not agree on this one. We said in our manifesto that anyone coming to Britain from the EU searching for work should not get unemployment benefit, and we have fulfilled that promise. We said that if within six months they do not have a job, they should go home—we have fulfilled that promise. We said that people should not be able to come here and send British child benefit back to their families, and we have secured that they will only get child benefit at a local rate. And we said no more “something for nothing”; the idea that someone could come here and claim immediately from our in-work benefits system without paying in was not right. I said we would secure a four-year gap and we have. People said that would be impossible, but that is what we have put in place. It is a negotiation, but these are good proposals that I think will have the backing of the British people, because they mean no more something for nothing, and that is a vital value for Britain.

[Ruth Smeeth (Stoke-on-Trent North) (Lab)]

Q8. More than 2,500 people are directly employed by the ceramics industry in Stoke-on-Trent North and Kidsgrove. These and tens of thousands of other British manufacturing jobs are at risk if China is granted market economy status. The Prime Minister is very happy to sell off the family silver, but can he guarantee that he will not sell off the family crockery?

[The Prime Minister]

We want to support industry in the potteries, and that is why we are helping manufacturing with research and development tax credits and with apprenticeship schemes; we are helping with a whole range of measures, not least the energy-intensive industry measures, which are very important for the constituency the hon. Lady represents. That is what we want to see. The issue with market economy status is a separate one, as I have said before. Even if China gets that status, it cannot dump steel products or other things into European markets, and it can be fined. What we should be doing is making sure that we are driving open markets for us to sell to China. The Chinese are the ones with a massive growth in the middle class taking place—hundreds of millions of people are joining that—and there are many great products made in Stoke that should be sold in China.