Oral Answers to Questions

Derek Twigg Excerpts

Wednesday 15th September 2010 Commons Chamber

[The Prime Minister]

My hon. Friend is entirely right. If we want to tackle poverty, we must go to the causes of poverty. The chief cause of poverty is people being out of work generation after generation and, as he says, young people growing up in homes where nobody works, where there is no role model to follow. That is why we are pursuing the welfare reform agenda so vigorously, because we want to help people to get out of unemployment and into work. We want it to be worth while for everybody to work or to work more than they do now. That is what our welfare reforms, so scandalously neglected by the previous Government, have set out to achieve.

[Derek Twigg (Halton) (Lab)]

Q2. The proposed £400 million Mersey Gateway project, which will create up to 4,000 new jobs in the area, is under threat because of the spending review, despite the fact that it is strongly supported by business and by all local authorities across Cheshire and Merseyside, including the Chancellor’s local authority. How will cutting projects such as the Mersey Gateway help economic growth in the north-west?

[The Prime Minister]

We are not making any further cuts in capital spending. The hon. Gentleman ought to ask the question of those on his own Front Bench. The Labour party went into the last election with a 50% cut in capital spending in its figures, and did not tell us one single project that would be cut. We have said that that is far enough; we should go no further. We will be protecting capital spending to help to boost the recovery in our country.

G8 and G20 Summits

Derek Twigg Excerpts

Monday 28th June 2010 Commons Chamber

[Mr Speaker]

Order. It is always a pleasure to listen to the hon. Gentleman, but the Prime Minister is not responsible for speeches made by the shadow Chancellor, nor even for the former Prime Minister, so I think that we will leave it there.

[Derek Twigg (Halton) (Lab)]

The Prime Minister said in his statement that the G8 sent a collective signal that “we want the Afghan security forces to ‘assume increasing responsibility for security within five years’”—he did not say “full responsibility”. He said later on that he wanted to give an indication that we will be out of Afghanistan in five years. Does that mean that we will be out of Afghanistan regardless of the situation in that country in five years’ time—full stop?

[The Prime Minister]

The point is that for many years after our troops have left, we will have a strong relationship with Afghanistan that will involve diplomacy and aid, and perhaps even helping to continue to train Afghan forces. However, in answer to the question of whether we should be in Afghanistan by then in the way that we are now, with large-scale military deployment and all the rest of it, no we should not. We should by then have trained up the Afghan army and police force, and seen an improvement in governance, so that we can bring our troops back home.