Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Baroness Ritchie of Downpatrick and Justine Greening

Wednesday 17th December 2014 Commons Chamber

[Ms Margaret Ritchie (South Down) (SDLP)]

1. What recent progress her Department has made on tackling Ebola in west Africa.

[The Secretary of State for International Development (Justine Greening)]

The United Kingdom is leading the international response to the Ebola crisis in Sierra Leone, from where I have just returned. We have already committed £230 million and delivered over 880 treatment and isolation beds. We have opened three laboratories, and we have doubled the number of burial teams.

[Ms Ritchie]

I thank the Secretary of State for her answer. The World Health Organisation believes that since February 2014 there have been nearly 18,000 recorded Ebola cases and 6,000 deaths. According to Dr Frieden, the director of the US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention, speed of response is the key to ending epidemics affecting Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone. In the light of her visit, will the Secretary of State indicate what further actions can be taken, notwithstanding what has already been done?

[Justine Greening]

Yes, of course. We will continue to deliver the promises we have made such as getting hospitals open and delivering extra beds. A key announcement I made during my visit over the past few days was to provide more protection for the many children affected by the crisis. Many of them are orphaned or themselves suffering from Ebola and needing to recover. There will be lots more support for them. I can assure the hon. Lady that as we are able to scale up the operation, we will reach more and more patients.

Comprehensive Spending Review

Debate between Baroness Ritchie of Downpatrick and Justine Greening

Thursday 28th October 2010 Commons Chamber

[The Economic Secretary to the Treasury (Justine Greening)]

This is a very important issue, and I want to take this opportunity to reassure the hon. Lady that that is precisely what we are doing.

[Ms Ritchie]

I thank the hon. Lady for her response.

The most important thing to us in Northern Ireland is the annually managed expenditure, through which our benefits are paid. What makes this iniquitous is the fact that the money does not come out of the Northern Ireland block, but directly out of the pockets and purses of benefit recipients. In Northern Ireland, that represents up to £0.5 billion being taken from some of the poorest households. The Prime Minister claims that that is fair, but what is fair about snatching the mobility allowance that is payable to people in residential care? What about the changes to child benefit? What about the changes to housing benefit? Are they fair? On the face of it, those large-scale welfare cuts have little to do with the laudable desire to help people move from benefit dependency to the dignity and self-sufficiency of gainful employment. They represent an old-fashioned onslaught on the poor.

I am a former Minister for Social Development in Northern Ireland with responsibility for benefits. Along with my successor, I have engaged in continuing discussions with the Department for Work and Pensions about welfare reform issues and the respects in which welfare reform proposals are inappropriate for Northern Ireland. I believe that we have reached a point at which we may need to redesign the social security system in Northern Ireland to make it much fairer for all, and to give ourselves greater freedom and flexibility to do things differently. I believe that that can be done without the need for an increase in the net subsidy to Northern Ireland.

We are doing a lot of thinking about how we can secure more local control of Northern Ireland’s economic levers, and we expect a robust but fruitful dialogue with the Chancellor when the promised economic paper on Northern Ireland is circulated by the Government within the next few weeks. The Chancellor indicated in last week’s CSR statement that both he and the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland intended to engage with all Northern Ireland Members of Parliament. As one of those Members of Parliament, and as a Northern Ireland party leader, I look forward to that discussion. There is no doubt that we need to rebalance our economy, but one thing that we must not do is throw the baby out with the bathwater and remove people from the public sector, because that will throw asunder our whole jobs and investment scenario.