Oral Answers to Questions
Barry Sheerman Excerpts(11 years, 2 months ago)
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Mrs Mary Glindon (North Tyneside) (Lab)
6. What steps he has taken to address barriers to small and medium-sized enterprises participating in Government procurement.
Mr Barry Sheerman (Huddersfield) (Lab/Co-op)
12. What steps he is taking to open up central Government Departments to partnerships with small and medium-sized enterprises.
The Parliamentary Secretary, Cabinet Office (Miss Chloe Smith)
It is this Government’s policy to dismantle the barriers facing small and medium-sized companies to ensure that they can compete for contracts on a level playing field and grow. I refer the House to the letter I sent last month to all hon. Members, in which I set out some of the progress we have made and the further steps we will be taking to ensure that Departments continue to increase their spend with small companies.
Miss Smith
I am glad that the hon. Lady has raised that point and she will know that we have asked my hon. Friend the Member for Warwick and Leamington (Chris White) to act as an ambassador on this matter; it is very important. The message that we need to get through to contractors, who are of course the ones making such arrangements, is that they must have regard to the taxpayer and value for money at all times, but that other such issues might also be used to benefit those for whom they are contracting.
Mr Sheerman
Is the Minister not aware that the truth is that the Government are becoming more and more dependent on big companies—private sector companies such as G4S, Serco and Capita? Is she aware that a recent Fujitsu-sponsored poll of small and medium-sized enterprises showed that 26% find it more difficult to get contracts with the Government and that 6% think that it is easier?
Miss Smith
I welcome the hon. Gentleman’s focus on this matter. He will welcome our review on some of the companies he has named, but it is most important to say that the Government are on track to deliver our aspiration of awarding 25% of central Government business to SMEs by 2015. We look for that directly and through the supply chain, and that is what helps us to procure for growth in this country.
Syria and the Use of Chemical Weapons
Barry Sheerman Excerpts(11 years, 2 months ago)
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Mr David Lammy (Tottenham) (Lab)
A few days ago, I found myself rushing to switch off the television because my five and seven-year-old boys were in front of the news when it was showing images of men, women and children who had been gassed and were lying on the floor dead—they were in front of our eyes. It is impossible to have watched events unfold in Syria in the past few years and to have thought anything other than, “If not now, when?”
It is impossible to have watched the footage in the past week and not to have felt the instincts of liberal interventionism pulsating in our consciences. That instinct tells us that we cannot be isolationist, and turn a blind eye to mass murder and wash our hands of the responsibility to act. It is impossible not to think back to the difference that British intervention made for the people of Kosovo, Sierra Leone and Libya and wonder how it can be replicated for the people of Damascus, Homs and Aleppo. However, the tempering of those instincts should be a resounding message seared on the memories of many Members: liberal intervention can fail—and it can fail badly. It can fail if we have no vision of the outcome, no definition of success and no route map to the exit; it can fail if we allow our thirst for justice to trump the patience to secure the greatest possible legitimacy for our action; and it can fail if we forget that our first responsibility is not to make matters worse.
Iraq is not a reason to absolve ourselves from our responsibilities in Syria, but it is a reason to exercise caution, invoke clarity and define a conclusion. This Government seek a blank cheque to use British armed forces in Syria without convincingly and coherently answering the most crucial questions. What constitutes success for a military intervention? If a negotiated settlement is the goal, will military intervention make it more or less likely? Are we comfortable that our intervention is limited to punishing the use of chemical weapons, rather than explicitly to protecting the lives of the Syrian people?
Is it fair for the Prime Minister to imply, as he did today, that this is a humanitarian intervention, when his only ambition is for Britain to be the dispassionate referee of a brutal civil war? If a short and limited military intervention leads not to the cessation of the use of chemical weapons but to an escalation of hostilities or, even worse, retaliation, do we further escalate our involvement or back away entirely? If we escalate, are we comfortable with the slow creep that will place the lives of more war-wary members of our armed services at risk? We need to know the scale of our intervention, the limit of our commitment and the nature of our involvement before we can be asked to affirm it. Parliament cannot be expected to vote on pure sentiment; it needs to vote on specifics.
Mr Barry Sheerman (Huddersfield) (Lab/Co-op)
My right hon. Friend, like me, is sickened by the number of times we have voted for war, sometimes to my great shame. What is the hurry? The civil war has been going on for two years. Is it not time that we got on with negotiation and diplomacy?
Madam Deputy Speaker (Dawn Primarolo)
Order. I know that hon. Members turn away because they think I might not stop them if their intervention is too long. I remind Members that they should address their comments through the Chair so that I can sit them down if they go on too long.
Oral Answers to Questions
Barry Sheerman Excerpts(11 years, 4 months ago)
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Mr Barry Sheerman (Huddersfield) (Lab/Co-op)
I am sure that the Deputy Prime Minister will share my concern about young people not voting. If so, why, as a member of the coalition Government, is he standing by as citizenship training disappears from our schools up and down the country?
The Deputy Prime Minister
I hope that the hon. Gentleman has had time to look at the national curriculum, which was published yesterday by the Secretary of State for Education and the Prime Minister. It places laudable emphasis on ensuring that citizenship is properly taught in schools. We also have a programme of schools outreach, and we will be looking for organisations to deliver a set lesson framework, Rock Enrol, which is being developed and piloted by Bite the Ballot in a number of schools across England and Wales. Those are good initiatives.
The Solicitor-General
Yes, the detailed schedule of cases comes to the Attorney-General each month, and we have discovered that more cases are being dismissed without leave to appeal being granted, which suggests good CPS presentation; up to 57% of cases are now dismissed without leave.
Mr Barry Sheerman (Huddersfield) (Lab/Co-op)
But what is happening on how the CPS and the Serious Fraud Office deal with highly complex financial scandals, where there is a great reliance on the accountancy profession, which has been shown to be very unreliable in the evidence it gives?
The Solicitor-General
The hon. Gentleman makes the point in his own way, but the advantage of the SFO is that it has in-house experts and can also draw on outside expertise to ensure that these cases are very well prepared. Although we have had some problems, as he knows, in many cases the SFO is able to do an exceptional job.
G8
Barry Sheerman Excerpts(11 years, 4 months ago)
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The Prime Minister
My hon. Friend is absolutely right. There is a danger of young people from Britain taking part in this conflict, just as there has been in Afghanistan, Mali and elsewhere. We should do everything we can in the UK to try to crack down on those centres of radicalisation. It is clear to me, as I said during Prime Minister’s questions, that we need to do more to throw extremists out of mosques and confront the radicalisers and hate preachers, and we must do more to throw those who are not British nationals out of the country. This is a huge programme that goes right across Government, and we must do everything we can to deliver it.
Mr Barry Sheerman (Huddersfield) (Lab/Co-op)
The Prime Minister will know that my constituents and people around the world will be positive about much that has come out of the G8 conference, although the hard-headed and cynical press are always ready to say it is pie in the sky. What assurance can he give me and my constituents that jobs and growth are a priority, and how do we know he will follow this through so that it makes a real difference to a world looking for a new deal in employment?
The Prime Minister
I completely understand people’s cynicism about these great international gatherings because they produce long communiqués, lots of talking, and one has to ask afterwards, “Well, what did you actually agree?” On this occasion, we can point to one or two really concrete things—an agreement not to pay ransom for kidnap by terrorists, which is good, and all the agreements in the run-up to the G8 conference which have delivered an extra £1 billion of revenue, just from Crown dependencies and overseas territories, that can help to keep tax rates down. I think the Lough Erne declaration is the clearest statement yet to come out of an international body about what needs to be done on tax, transparency and extractive industries, and frankly it is now a guide for NGOs to hold Governments to account and make progress on that vital agenda.
Oral Answers to Questions
Barry Sheerman Excerpts(11 years, 5 months ago)
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The Deputy Prime Minister
The whole issue of opt-in and opt-out for trade union members and of donations from the trade union movement, which is now pretty well single-handedly bankrolling the Labour party, has of course come up in the cross-party talks on party funding, which unfortunately have proved somewhat elusive. One of the measures that we want to bring forward —it does not apply to trade unions alone—relates to the way in which a number of campaign groups, be they trade unions, animal welfare groups, tactical voting groups, rural campaign groups, religious groups or individuals, spend money to determine the outcome of campaigns in particular constituencies. At the last election, those major groups and individuals spent £3 million—a full 10% of what the major parties spent. We want to make sure that this increasingly important type of campaigning is fully transparent and is not allowed to distort the political process. That is what proposals that we will come forward with soon will do.
Mr Barry Sheerman (Huddersfield) (Lab/Co-op)
T7. Mr Speaker, I know that you know about the 10th “Audit of Political Engagement” report, just published by the Hansard Society. Is the Deputy Prime Minister conscious of and worried about the steep decline in political participation, particularly in the last three years, under this coalition Government? This is the first time that the percentage of people who are certain to vote has gone below 50%; it is now 43%. For young people between 18 and 25, it has fallen to just 12%. What will he do about that?
The Deputy Prime Minister
The first thing that I would like to do is try to persuade the hon. Gentleman and his colleagues to join me in reforming our clapped-out political system. If his party had supported democracy for the House of Lords, would clean up party funding, and had given wholehearted support to electoral reform, perhaps he would have a leg to stand on when it came to greater political participation.
Tributes to Baroness Thatcher
Barry Sheerman Excerpts(11 years, 7 months ago)
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Mr Barry Sheerman (Huddersfield) (Lab/Co-op)
You were not in short trousers, Mr Speaker, but I think—because I checked your birth date—just starting your A-levels in 1979, when I got elected to the House of Commons on the same day as Mrs Thatcher became Prime Minister. You can imagine my astonishment when I came No. 1 in the list for the first Prime Minister’s questions, which meant I was going to ask her first question. Unfortunately, my predecessor, Curly Mallalieu, died that week, and I had to withdraw from that first Prime Minister’s questions. It took me a long time to get another question to the Prime Minister. Indeed, the next time I got a highly placed question, Willie Whitelaw was standing in for her. Eventually, on 15 April 1980, I said:
“Will the Prime Minister take time today to reflect on the mounting evidence emerging this week—not only from her Chancellor of the Exchequer—that her economic strategy is destroying Britain’s industrial base? Will she further consider a reversal of those policies which have led to a soaring inflation rate of 20 per cent., rising unemployment and crippling interest rates that will soon turn this country into a banana republic, both economically and diplomatically?”—[Official Report, 15 April 1980; Vol. 982, c. 1007.]
I mention that only because for a number of years I was a Back Bencher, and for a long time a shadow Minister, drilled to hate everything Mrs Thatcher stood for. Over those years, I came to respect Margaret Thatcher because she commanded the Dispatch Box and was a fantastic parliamentarian. However, we cannot pretend that people did not love and loathe her. In fact, the election results show that more people loved her than loathed her.
When I was at the London School of Economics, I studied with Michael Oakeshott and read Hayek, and I was very much influenced by both those gentlemen. Oakeshott took me through a wonderful study of Machiavelli’s “The Prince” and “Discourses”, which tell us that for a leader—a prince or Prime Minister—to survive, they have to be lucky. Mrs Thatcher was not only talented as a leader, but lucky. I was on the Opposition Benches knowing what a shambles the Opposition were. We spent more time fighting each other within the Labour party than we had time to fight the Government. It is not good for democracy to have such a weak Opposition as we had post 1979. Sometimes we stand up and say that Mrs Thatcher rolled over the mining communities, and she did. She caused great hardship. Terrible things happened to people in the mining communities, and the miners’ dispute should have ended much sooner than it did. My heart went out to the wives of miners selling things to raise money and trying to keep families together. I remember it very well. Although my constituency is not a mining constituency, it is very close to mining constituencies. I understand the people who loathed Mrs Thatcher, but I also understand that at that time those people were let down by the Opposition because we could not get our act together to defeat her.
There have been some very good and perceptive speeches. I agreed with one or two Government Members and did not agree with two or three of my colleagues. I have reflected on what Mrs Thatcher contributed, and I think it was this. What happened in 1979 was a colossal sea change in British politics, and we needed it. We needed something radical to happen to the untidy post-war shambles of a consensus, and Mrs Thatcher was it. It was not about Conservatism or Toryism. The people who said that it was Gladstonian, laissez-faire liberalism were absolutely right, as we know, because that blue liberalism was well known and understood in West Yorkshire. That is what she stood for, and it surprised everyone. Labour Members did not know how to handle it, and partly because of that she had three general election victories. We were trounced. We were a divided party and a divided Opposition, and we had a very long and tough time getting through it. Mrs Thatcher transformed the Labour party. We had to reform and change and get our act together, or we would have ceased to have the presence and power of a major party in our country. We must remember what Mrs Thatcher did for parliamentary democracy.
We are again overdue for a radical change in how we regard our parliamentary democracy. We need a voice in this Chamber—I do not know which party it will come from—that says that there are some deep inequities in our society. There are serious problems, different from those that Mrs Thatcher faced in 1979 and in the years of her prime ministership, but very deep. My right hon. Friend the Member for Birkenhead (Mr Field) touched on some of them. There is the tragic decline of our great cities, many of them in the north and the midlands. That has happened all over the developed world—in the United States, we should look at what is happening in Detroit and Pittsburgh. There is something deeply wrong with how our societies are developing, and that is to do with a complex change in international capitalism, as Labour Members would call it, and the international structure of economics.
Something fundamental is happening that we have become a bit complacent about in all parts of this House. We will need somebody with the originality of Thatcher to get us to wake up to what is going on. If we are honest—I make this a constant theme in my speeches; I am sorry—most of us will admit that tiny numbers of people in our constituencies are actively involved in politics. We are in a democracy where only 65% voted at the last election and 6 million people did not even register to vote. The state of our parliamentary democracy is deplorable. We will need someone with a vision, perhaps based on a very different political view, who will say, “If we value this democracy we have got to shake it up.”
I have spoken today because I got to admire and quite like Mrs Thatcher, who, as some of my colleagues have said, could be very pleasant indeed. She would give someone a real roasting from the Dispatch Box if they made a comment, but out there in the corridor she would be very kind. That is the truth of the woman. She was phenomenal. She did things that I deplored; she did things I thought were wonderful. There is a balance, and over time we will judge how good it was. We are facing a challenge to our democracy, and we need a Thatcher-like—not the same as Thatcher—radical change that will again wake us up to the fact that our country faces challenges to which, at present, we have no answers.
Oral Answers to Questions
Barry Sheerman Excerpts(11 years, 7 months ago)
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The Deputy Prime Minister
I agree with my hon. Friend. This new employer’s allowance is a very exciting way of encouraging small and medium-sized businesses, which are the backbone of the British economy, to take on more people. When it comes into effect it will mean that a small employer will be able to employ someone on up to about £22,000 without paying any national insurance whatsoever.
Mr Barry Sheerman (Huddersfield) (Lab/Co-op)
Did the Deputy Prime Minister have any hand in the air-sea rescue helicopter service being sold off or given to a Texan company rather than to the British Navy and Air Force? Is he responsible for that? Does he approve of it, as it seems a rather strange decision?
The Deputy Prime Minister
I do if the service is better and if the Department for Transport, which has run this tender, is clearly persuaded that this is the best way to ensure the safety and security of the British people in the future and to do so at the best value for taxpayers’ money. Those are precisely the criteria on which everyone—any reasonable person—would judge this decision.
Oral Answers to Questions
Barry Sheerman Excerpts(11 years, 7 months ago)
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Mr Hurd
I will take no lectures from the Labour party on wasting money on ICT, because the processes we inherited in that regard were absolutely scandalous. I repeat what I said: we see a big opportunity in digital by default. It is a chance to transform the way people engage with the Government. We can see significant savings, which I do not think have been overstated at all. As I said, we have an active commitment to assisted digital, the details of which will come shortly, and to continued activity to support digital inclusion.
Mr Barry Sheerman (Huddersfield) (Lab/Co-op)
3. What steps he is taking to utilise innovative design to increase the effectiveness and quality of public service delivery.
The Minister for the Cabinet Office and Paymaster General (Mr Francis Maude)
The Government are implementing an ambitious programme of public sector reform. From welfare to education, we are changing the way services are delivered to the public. We are opening up policy making, ensuring that policy is made with implementation in mind. To improve the quality of public services, we are backing new delivery models, such as public service mutuals, and redesigning services to be digital by default.
Mr Sheerman
Is the Minister aware that too many people still think that good design means a beautiful table or chair or a new piece of architecture, such as the Shard? There is a whole body of expert design capacity in this country that could help design services, particularly public services. Will he, his Department and the Government wake up to the fact that good design, as shown in a new publication from the Design Commission, could help recovery in this country?
Mr Maude
I agree with everything that the hon. Gentleman says except his assumption that we are not already doing this. I know he is a member of the Design Commission, which produced that excellent publication; it is in fact very complimentary about a number of initiatives that the Government have taken, including the creation of the Government Digital Service, which is committed to ensuring that as we reform the delivery of public services, they are designed around the needs of the user rather than, as has far too often been the case, designed to suit the convenience of the Government.
Oral Answers to Questions
Barry Sheerman Excerpts(11 years, 9 months ago)
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The Deputy Prime Minister
The lesson of the highly successful summit last week is that it is important to set out a tough but realisable negotiating position, as we did across the coalition—I spent months making the case for the tough approach that we took with politicians around the European Union—and then to reach out to create alliances with other countries, including the Dutch, the Swedes, the Danes and, crucially, the Germans, and then to win the argument. If we want to reform Europe, we have to get stuck in and win the argument, not simply withdraw to the margins and hope that it will be won by default.
Mr Barry Sheerman (Huddersfield) (Lab/Co-op)
Is the Deputy Prime Minister aware that one of his ministerial colleagues in the House of Lords has told the other place that her Ministry is no longer collecting regional data and that that will be a pattern across the country? Is that not a terrible blow in terms of how we treat our regions? Is it not time for a rethink about the regions of our country, which are steadily losing their power and influence? When people come to London, they see that all the power and influence has shifted down here.
The Deputy Prime Minister
Bluntly, ever since the referendum in the north-east failed, the experiment of moving towards a new form of regional governance has been ill-fated. The concept of regional governance did not connect with people’s loyalties locally or at county level. Through the city deals process, we are trying to create economic units that mean something to people and make economic sense. In the wake of the move away from regional governance, I hope that a much more meaningful form of decentralisation will take root.
Oral Answers to Questions
Barry Sheerman Excerpts(11 years, 9 months ago)
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Mr Hurd
Yes, I do. Young people and employers are telling us that. They recognise that the NCS helps young people develop the character skills, leadership, communication, teamwork and self-confidence that will help them succeed in the workplace. That is why we are so proud to support it.
Mr Barry Sheerman (Huddersfield) (Lab/Co-op)
Does the Minister agree that the NCS ought to go hand in hand with paying attention to first-class citizenship in our schools? Is he aware that citizenship in schools has been run down to almost nothing?