amendment of the law

Jim Cunningham Excerpts

Tuesday 25th March 2014 Commons Chamber

[Rachel Reeves]

The compulsory jobs guarantee, which will last for the full five years of the next Parliament, will be based on what we have seen with the jobs growth Wales programme, whereby 80% of the jobs are in the private sector. A couple of weeks ago, the shadow Minister for employment—my right hon. Friend the Member for East Ham (Stephen Timms)—and I visited a software company in Cardiff that had taken on 12 people through jobs growth Wales. It had made a huge difference to those young people, giving them hope and opportunity. The Government carp at our policies to get young people back to work, yet under them long-term youth unemployment has more than doubled. That is the Secretary of State’s record under this Government.

If the Chancellor really wanted this to be a Budget for savers, he would cap fees and charges on pensions and require insurance companies to provide free independent brokerage, as Labour has called for. Why did the Chancellor not do those things? It is because he is strong when it comes to standing up for the rich, but weak when it comes to standing up for the poor.

[Mr Jim Cunningham (Coventry South) (Lab)]

Does my hon. Friend agree that one of the biggest indictments of this Government and the Budget is the way in which they have adjusted taxation such that women will fund the bulk of the £14 billion the Government have to save? Women will have to save £11 billion—that is an indictment of this Government.

[Rachel Reeves]

My hon. Friend makes an important point: women are disproportionately hit by the changes introduced by this Government and are struggling with the rising cost of living more than anybody in this country. Moreover, the increasing costs of child care under this Government are making it harder for working parents, particularly working mums, to go back to work and make the contribution we need to the economy.

Four years ago, this Government said that debt would fall and that living standards would rise, yet the reverse has happened. They have broken their promise to balance the books by 2015 and they are set to borrow £190 billion more than they had planned. National debt is rising this year and it will rise next year and the year after that. There is more borrowing, more debt and more welfare spending under this Government.

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[Mr Jim Cunningham (Coventry South) (Lab)]

The tragedy of the hon. Member for Enfield North (Nick de Bois) is that he actually believes what he said. I think that we need to be a bit more realistic now. For the past four years, we have heard the Conservatives blaming the previous Labour Government for the economic recession—[Interruption.] If Members want to follow North Korean doctrines such as that of the “Dear Leader”, they should just carry on, but let us get a little bit real.

The recession started in America. I am sure that my colleagues remember Lehman Brothers and Fannie Mae. In this country, we had a problem with Northern Rock, which the Labour Government tried to address. All of this talk about us running up a deficit is nonsense. Basically, we had to save the banks. When the Labour Government came to power in 1997, they cleared the national debt. They inherited the policy of 50p of every pound paid in tax going to pay off the national debt; crumbling schools; patients waiting for treatment in hospitals on trolleys; and declining manufacturing, especially in Coventry and the west midlands. Coventry was losing thousands of manufacturing jobs a week, and household names such as Standard Triumph were disappearing. I am sure that my colleagues remember that.

The previous Tory Government attempted to rebalance the economy. They moved from manufacturing for export to the service industries, which led to the crisis of 2008. When we left office, we still had our triple A rating. We had introduced low interest rates to help families and pensioners and quantitative easing to help the economy and we had bailed out the banks to protect savings. Growth was returning. We had persuaded George Bush, an American Republican conservative President, to pump billions into the American economy.

When the present Government were in Opposition, they said that they would maintain our spending levels. They opposed freedom for the Bank of England and said that the economy was over-regulated and that they wanted to cut red tape. That was their solution to a worldwide crisis that started in America and spread across the world. Their plan was to pretend that it was confined to Britain so that they could blame the previous Labour Government and justify breaking their election promises to the British people.

We must remember that 13 million people are still living below the poverty line in the UK and that 350,000 people used a food bank last year. Energy prices are high, housing is inadequate, wages are low and the Government are offering nothing at a time when many people are suffering. The Government have very little to offer.

My first major problem with the Budget is that it is extremely unfair to our young people—a group who have been undervalued and forgotten by this Government. The Government should be ashamed of how they have simply abandoned a whole generation, who will suffer the most during this recession. Some 282,000 people under the age of 25 have been jobless for a year or more. That figure is at its highest since 1993 and has almost tripled since 2008. More than 900,000 young people are still out of work. That is a serious problem and the Government seem completely complacent about it.

The Government are pleased about the employment picture, but they have not considered the experience of young people in this country. What about young people who can find only part-time work? What about young people who have work, but in a different field from that in which they are trained, or for which they are overqualified? The Local Government Association has warned that a third of all young people will be out of work or trapped in underemployment by 2018 if we are not careful.

A young person’s first job is just a statistic to this Government, but someone’s early career can make a huge difference to their life. For someone who went to university, studied hard and hoped for a job in a particular field, it can be highly disheartening to work in a non-graduate job or a completely unrelated field. Nearly half of recent graduates are in non-graduate jobs. That can be a blight on their future in competitive industries.

Similarly, when people are burdened with financial pressures, being able to find only part-time work is a problem. We are talking about hard-working, driven young people who want to get on but instead spend their whole lives in jobs that are well below their capacity. Yet the Government smugly pat themselves on the back for the employment figures.

Our young people are being abandoned. If the Government do not see that as a serious problem and begin to take action, we are looking at a lost generation. That reminds me all too well of life for young people under Thatcher.

The Government’s flagship Youth Contract has been declared a failure by their own advisers and the Work programme is finding work for only one in six of the long-term unemployed. That is simply not good enough. Labour’s compulsory jobs guarantee scheme, which would be funded by a tax on bank bonuses, would ensure a paid job for every young person under 25 who was out of work for more than a year.

It looks to me as though the Government have given up on young people, perhaps because they think that they have not forgotten about tuition fees, or perhaps because they know that Labour will give the vote to 16-year-olds and they will not. Either way, they have simply decided that the youth vote is not worth chasing and they are going after pensioners instead. That is disgraceful. Young people are being forgotten. A Government should be a Government for everybody, not just for the people who might vote for them or the people who they are afraid might vote for the UK Independence party. That is no way to run an economy.

The Budget does shockingly little to address the fact that women are so unfairly hit by the cuts. Women are bearing the brunt of the cuts and the Budget is no exception.

[Mrs Mary Glindon (North Tyneside) (Lab)]

Women form the majority of employees in the public sector, so the cuts to that sector are doubly affecting women. Does that not show that the Government are going about this in an unfair way?

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[Mr Cunningham]

I agree with my hon. Friend. The majority of jobs created that are part time and have limiting career prospects have gone to overqualified women. Since 2010, male unemployment has decreased by 17% whereas female unemployment has risen by 7%. Disgracefully, women still tend to have lower end-of-career salaries than men and so often have lower pensions. Women are under-represented in the Government and that shows in their policies. What in the Budget will address that?

I want also to raise my concerns about local government finance. I have raised the issue on a number of occasions, but I cannot stress enough how much it matters. It needs to be made clear that a crisis is coming in many local authorities. Coventry city council has already lost approximately £45 million in core Government grant in the past three years and has had to implement a significant savings programme to minimise the impact on front-line services. That has, of course, put a huge strain on services. Coventry will face a—

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Dawn Primarolo)]

Order.

Payment Scheme (Mesothelioma)

Jim Cunningham Excerpts

Monday 17th March 2014 Commons Chamber

[Mike Penning]

I would be amazed if we did not discuss the matter again, as we have done over the years. It would be right and proper for us to do so. If we raise compensation payments to 80%, many people will receive more than they would have done through a civil court. The payment is an average, so some people would have received less in the civil courts. By raising the level from 75% to 80%, we have ensured that more people will receive more than they would have done if they had found their employer or their employer’s insurer.

[Mr Jim Cunningham (Coventry South) (Lab)]

I apologise for being a little late. It would be interesting to know the difference in costs between payments of 80% and 100%.

[Mike Penning]

I will write to the hon. Gentleman with that information. We debated the matter at length at each stage of the Bill, and I reiterate that the key is to stick within the 3% agreement, which is not being passed on to new business. The House agreed when we debated the subject that to pass on costs to new business would be improper.

Oral Answers to Questions

Jim Cunningham Excerpts

Thursday 13th March 2014 Commons Chamber

[Mrs Grant]

My hon. Friend has made an important point, but I believe that the enhanced checks and requirements that have been introduced by the football authorities are making some difference. I am also hopeful that the Football Association regulatory authority will ensure that changes in club ownership are much more fully scrutinised.

[Mr Jim Cunningham (Coventry South) (Lab)]

Is the Minister aware that 12 months ago her predecessor promised us that the Government would present proposals based on the Select Committee’s report? The current situation in Coventry is disgraceful: fans have to make a round trip of about 70 miles to Northampton. When will we see some real action to deal with that?

[Mrs Grant]

I think that we are starting to see some action, but I agree that we need to see more. Last August the Football Association introduced reforms which included smaller boards and a new licensing system to deal with matters relating to ownership, finance and supporters. I think it fair to say that a start has been made, but more needs to be done, and if it is not done, we will legislate.

Job Insecurity

Jim Cunningham Excerpts

Wednesday 5th February 2014 Commons Chamber

[Mr Umunna]

I shall come on to the point about the nature of the work and the jobs created. Of course it is a good thing for the hon. Lady’s constituents that there are more opportunities, but I shall return to that point.

[Mr Jim Cunningham (Coventry South) (Lab)]

Although we always welcome any improvement in employment, the fact remains that the purchasing power of people out of work has dropped about 5%, and that mostly hits women.

[Mr Umunna]

My hon. Friend is right. It is worth recalling that when my right hon. Friend the Leader of the Opposition first talked about the cost of living crisis and the squeezed middle, Members on the Government Benches and their supporters ridiculed the very notion, but the existence of that living standards crisis is now undeniable. Indeed, since my right hon. Friend first talked about the squeezed middle, in 2011, I think, the people who compile the Oxford English Dictionary named it their word of the year, despite the fact that it is two words.

Words are one thing, but they are backed up by the reality of what we see in our communities. Ministers can do whatever jiggery-pokery they want with the figures, as the Chancellor did the other day when he claimed that the top decile of earners was the only decile that had lost out from his measures. In so doing, he miraculously forgot to take into account the huge tax cut he had given the top 1% at the same time as heaping a VAT rise on working families and taking away support from them.

The average employee is earning substantially less than when this Government came to office—over £1,600 less a year. It is important to remember that on Wednesday 13 February last year—almost a year ago—the Prime Minister at Prime Minister’s questions in this House pledged that people would be better off in 2015 than in 2010, and we will hold him to that. The head of the Institute for Fiscal Studies, who is often cited in all parts of the House, thinks differently. He said last month:

“We will be able to say definitively—I’m pretty sure—that, come 2015, average household incomes will be lower than they were pre-recession and lower than they were in 2010.”

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[Mr Umunna]

Of course it is good that more people are in work in the hon. Gentleman’s constituency, but what is the nature of that work? Is it temporary or permanent, and what wages are people earning? That is the question I have posed.

[Mr Jim Cunningham]

I seem to remember the Chancellor announcing, about 12 months ago, a bonus if people gave up their employment rights. I wonder what happened to that. It demonstrates that what this is really all about is the corrosion of people’s employment rights in this country and making life worse for them.

[Mr Umunna]

I will come on to that, but before that I will go through some of the things the Government have done to people’s rights in the workplace. They have increased the service requirement for claiming unfair dismissal from one to two years, depriving people of the right to seek justice when they have been wronged in the workplace. They have reduced compensatory rewards for unfair dismissal, which, as I have said in this House before, will impact in particular on those in middle-income occupations—the squeezed middle. They have also reduced the consultation period for collective redundancy and have sought to water down TUPE protections for people. I could go on.

We know that much of that was inspired by the 2011 report by the Conservative party donor and employment law adviser to the Prime Minister, Adrian Beecroft. By his own admission, in public evidence sessions in this House, Mr Beecroft said that his findings were based on conversations and not on a statistically valid sample of people—classic “off the back of a packet” stuff.

Never mind Beecroft, the best example of the Secretary of State failing to resist measures that increase insecurity in the workplace—my hon. Friend the Member for Coventry South (Mr Cunningham) has just referred to this—is the shares for rights scheme announced by the Chancellor at the Conservative party conference in 2012. The scheme provides for new employer shareholder status, whereby in return for between £2,000 and £50,000-worth of shares in their employer, the employee gives up fundamental rights at work: the right not to be unfairly dismissed, rights to statutory redundancy pay, rights to request flexible working and so on.

For all sorts of reasons, this is a bad idea, so much so that there was cross-party opposition to it, with the former Conservative employment Minister, Lord Forsyth, describing it as having

“all the trappings of something that was thought up by someone in the bath”.—[Official Report, House of Lords, 20 March 2013; Vol. 744, c. 614.]

What did the Business Secretary do about it? He not only waved through the scheme; he sponsored its passage through the House. Since then, take-up seems to be low —about 19 inquiries have been made to the Department—but what happened next? Up popped the Deputy Prime Minister at the beginning of the year—let us remember that the Business Secretary waved through the scheme and took it through Parliament—calling for the scheme’s abolition.

Let me get this right: the Deputy Prime Minister’s two Liberal Democrat colleagues—the Business Secretary and the hon. Member for East Dunbartonshire (Jo Swinson)—guided the policy through the House just 10 months ago; the Deputy Prime Minister marched his Members through the Division Lobby, along with Conservative Members, to introduce it; and now the Deputy Prime Minister wants to take credit for saying he wants to scrap this disastrous scheme, which he set up in the first place.

I know the Liberal Democrats have a reputation for this sort of thing, but even by their standards this really does take trying to have your cake and eat it to a whole new level.

Oral Answers to Questions

Jim Cunningham Excerpts

Thursday 30th January 2014 Commons Chamber

[Maria Miller]

I am not aware that the FCO would make that sort of advice available to people, although it is obviously important that we advise people on security issues, as we do in relation to many nations. The hon. Lady is right to say that we can use culture and cultural links to advance many human rights issues. When I visited Moscow and St Petersburg in December to discuss the year of culture, I used that opportunity to meet a wide selection of human rights organisations, including those that support people on issues of domestic violence.

[Mr Jim Cunningham (Coventry South) (Lab)]

6. What plans she has to bring forward legislative proposals in respect of football governance and finance.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport (Mrs Helen Grant)]

I will continue to work with football authorities to press for improvements in the game. They have made some significant changes, but my expectation is that they can, and will, make further progress. We will move to legislate if football fails in that task.

[Mr Cunningham]

I am sure the Minister knows about the dispute between Coventry city council and Coventry football club, since I and my colleagues have made representations to her Department in the past. The Culture, Media and Sport Committee report on football governance from July 2011 found the Football Association in need of urgent reform and called on the Government to introduce legislation if drastic changes were not made. In April 2013, the then sports Minister stated that he agreed with the Committee and that his officials had started working up a draft Bill. Where is the Bill? Let us have some action.

[Mr Speaker]

I think some of these matters could be usefully pursued through Adjournment debates, and will probably have to be.

Food Banks

Jim Cunningham Excerpts

Wednesday 18th December 2013 Commons Chamber

[Mr Jamie Reed (Copeland) (Lab)]

I regret to say that the laughter from some of those on the Government Benches during this debate says more than words ever could. I want to praise the work of those in my constituency who are doing so much to help those in need. The commitment of the volunteers in the food banks throughout Copeland and across west Cumbria in towns such as Whitehaven, Millom and Workington has been remarkable, and I should like to say thank you to them on behalf of my constituents. I also want to thank those who donate the vast amounts of food, without which the food banks simply could not operate.

The final verdict on any Government is based on how they treat the poorest in society during the hardest of times. The rise in the need for food banks is a horrifying indictment of this Government’s record, and it demands urgent action. The complacency of those on the Government Front Bench and of Ministers in the other place is as distasteful and unedifying as anything I have ever witnessed in Parliament. In July, Lord Freud seemed to suggest that the increase in the number of people using food banks was simply a result of the increased prevalence of the food banks. He claimed that he did not know which came first: supply or demand. He also claimed that there was an infinite demand for what he called “free goods”. In order to access the services of a food bank, a person or family needs to be referred by health services, local authorities or other groups that look after their welfare. I am not going to try to second-guess what was going on in the Minister’s mind, but he seemed to be implying that there was somehow an ambition to reach hardship, and a desire and aim for people to reach poverty in order to get a free basket of shopping to get them to the end of the week.

In order better to inform Members on the Government Benches how food banks actually operate, I shall give them a quick rundown. People who are forced to turn to food banks can receive help only a limited number of times. They go to the local food bank not to do their full weekly shop but because they need the bare essentials in order to get by. Many of those people will already have made extremely difficult decisions, such as whether to sit in a cold room rather than go hungry. There is no more harrowing example of that than the fact that one in five mothers in the UK regularly—not just once or twice a week—skip meals to feed their children.

[Mr Jim Cunningham (Coventry South) (Lab)]

Can we deal once and for all with one particular issue? It is partly right to say that food banks have been around for about 10 years, but the truth of the matter is that the Churches set them up to help refugees who were waiting for their asylum status to be confirmed.

[Mr Reed]

My hon. Friend makes a telling point.

The circumstances in which people have to seek assistance to feed themselves and their families are not usually simple. They often involve a combination of issues, which manifest themselves in a great deal of pain and pressure for those involved. For example, I have constituents who are cancer patients who are forced to use food banks as a result of various combinations of Government policies. I wish I could say that those were isolated cases, but they are not. I wish I could say the situation was improving, but it is not. There are no signs of things getting better.

Housing Benefit

Jim Cunningham Excerpts

Tuesday 12th November 2013 Commons Chamber

[Ms Karen Buck (Westminster North) (Lab)]

In powerful speeches from the Front and Back Benches, we have heard arguments against the bedroom tax, all of which were predicted and laid out by the Government in their impact statement. The impact statement made it clear that if this policy worked, in so far as it allowed people to downsize and their properties to be occupied by other social tenants, it would not save money, and that savings would come about only if the policy did not work. Contrary to the statements from some Government Members, those two objectives are mutually incompatible.

The impact statement showed that an estimated one in three of those affected would go into arrears. The Government knew that arrears were the likely consequence of this policy, and that is what we have seen. What we have not heard is another truth, which is that two thirds of those people affected by the bedroom tax are also affected by the Government’s cuts in council tax benefit. Out of their very low incomes of £75 or £105 a week they are having to make a contribution of £14, or in some cases £20-plus, for their bedroom tax and their council tax.

[Mr Jim Cunningham (Coventry South) (Lab)]

Is not one of the big problems the lack of accommodation? It is ridiculous to try to move people from large to small accommodation when we do not have it. Will that not contribute to the housing bubble?

[Ms Buck]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. I was about to make that point. The impact assessment also told us—as has been mentioned already this afternoon—that the distribution of properties across the country does not match the two objectives of downsizing and dealing with overcrowding. In the north-west, in Yorkshire, 43% of social tenants are affected by the bedroom tax, and I think the figure is worse in Wales. That is more than double the rate for London, yet it is London that has the most serious problem of overcrowding: one in six properties is overcrowded. So the policy is predicated not just on people moving from one property to another in their neighbourhood or community, which might have some sense to it, but on people moving from one part of the country to another, from one end of the country to another. Frankly, that is not how people live. People are not sticks of wood. People are not crates of dry goods that can be put in a container and taken from London to Liverpool or Wales, because that is how the distribution of property suits their needs.

Capping Welfare Spending

Jim Cunningham Excerpts

Wednesday 10th July 2013 Westminster Hall

[Charlie Elphicke]

My hon. Friend makes an interesting point, which is certainly a topic for debate, so I hope that the Minister will address it when he responds. The Government have sent a positive social signal that work is a force for social good. Capping the amount of benefit that any one family can receive is right and has been met with great approval in my constituency. My constituents raised the issue time and again.

[Mr Jim Cunningham (Coventry South) (Lab)]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for securing the debate and for giving way. At the beginning of his speech, he mentioned that the current Government had inherited debt from the previous Government. I remind him that after 18 years of the Conservative party being in power, that previous Labour Government found in ’97 that, for every pound levied in tax, 50p went to pay off debt. They eliminated a lot of inherited debt, but that is not my main point. When I was a Member under previous Conservative Governments, people were trapped in housing estates. The hon. Gentleman wants to call it the system that we inherited or whatever, but whatever system we bring in, there are going to be people trapped in certain estates—they used to be called Thatcher’s children.

[Charlie Elphicke]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for that interesting intervention, but I cannot agree with him. When the current Government came to office, the interest bill was the same as the entire education budget—I think that I am right in saying that. It was a very substantial amount. That is not a great showcase for fine administration of the public finances. It is well understood that the country’s debt was entirely out of control. I take his important point about social mobility and helping people to get out of the traps of poverty. Universal credit will make work pay, incentivise work and encourage people to do well, and that lies at the heart of much what the Government are doing. I approve of that approach. We need to build in incentives, by on the one hand limiting the amount of benefit and on the other hand encouraging work and making it pay.

Disabled People

Jim Cunningham Excerpts

Wednesday 10th July 2013 Commons Chamber

[Mr Byrne]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. Of course the employment rate among people with a mental health condition is the lowest of all; it is a disgrace and it needs to change. At the moment, however, we do not have a system that actually assesses people’s needs at the same time as we assess what benefits they should be entitled to. There is a complete disconnection at the heart of the system. The point we want to make to the Secretary of State gently this afternoon is that he presides over one of the great Departments of state; about 100,000 civil servants work for him. If this country can organise an Olympic games, help put rockets into space and organise complex armed conflict abroad, he ought to be able to work out a cumulative impact assessment of the changes affecting disabled people.

The Minister of State, Department for Work and Pensions, the hon. Member for Fareham, who has been forced to answer this debate, has, curiously enough, told the House the following:

“The Government regularly produces analysis of the cumulative impact of all coalition changes…The publication of cumulative impacts is a coalition initiative”.—[Official Report, 5 July 2013; Vol. 565, c. 862W.]

Labour Members welcome that. So can we please have a cumulative impact assessment of the changes hitting disabled people?

[Mr Jim Cunningham (Coventry South) (Lab)]

Does my right hon. Friend agree that, historically, the Government party has always been against the welfare state? Successive Conservative Governments have tried to weaken the welfare state by making statements that are not really helpful to those who need it.

[Mr Byrne]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right about that, and, worst of all, what he describes comes with a nasty and divisive politics to boot.

If the Secretary of State needs any help with this job of producing cumulative impact assessments, plenty is on hand, as luck would have it. Let me read out the list of people who have half done the job for him: Demos, in its “Destination Unknown” pamphlet; Inclusion Scotland; the Campaign For a Fair Society; the Children’s Commissioner; Contact A Family; and The Hardest Hit. All those organisations have been able to produce cumulative impact assessments, and I am sure that if the Secretary of State asked them nicely, they would lend him a hand.

We believe that there must be vital reform in social security in the future, but that there must be a different way of organising reform. Someone in our country registers with the DWP as disabled every three minutes. The morality of this debate is very simple: disability is an issue that could affect any of us and is therefore something that affects us all. We should be learning from reform such as that pioneered by the Australian Labor party through comprehensive disability insurance, where one personal plan sets out a plan of action for benefits, back-to-work support, social care and help from the national health service and where one partnership comes together to deliver it.

I do not know how often the Secretary of State speaks to his opposite number in the Department of Health, but his right hon. Friend is taking through the other place a Care Bill that creates a definition of well-being that includes the idea that someone should be able to go to work and to get training and an education. The DWP is then missing from the rest of the Bill. The local authority and the NHS are obliged to talk to each other, but where is the DWP? Why is it not coming together with local councils and the NHS to deliver change? We should create a “tell us once” approach to collecting information and, crucially, we should transform back-to-work support by giving people the right to take that support in the form of a personal budget. I know the Secretary of State is still evaluating the “right to control” pilots in Barnsley and elsewhere and we look forward to his bringing forward the conclusions from that work.

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[Mr Hoban]

We already co-operate in those areas. We work closely with local authorities and the Department of Health. We do not need a duty of care to enable us to take that approach; we can do that very well at the moment.

We all know that the cost of care is a huge concern for the elderly and for disabled people, and that is why the spending round provides £335 million to local authorities in 2015-16 to prepare for the delivery of the capped costs system from April 2016 and a universal offer of deferred payment agreements from April 2015. That investment begins a programme of reforms to social care funding in England which will mean that no one faces unlimited care costs or is forced to sell their home in their lifetime to pay for residential care.

We want disabled children to have the best possible start in life. The pupil premium is increasing in real terms. That will disproportionately benefit disabled children and young people, and the Government will continue to reform services for those with special educational needs.

It is hard for people to feel included in society if they are excluded from getting around. Railway funding makes provision for the industry to invest up to £100 million from 2014 to 2019 in measures to provide easier access for older and disabled passengers and those with small children. That list of the priorities announced in the spending review demonstrates that any cumulative impact assessment is about not just one area of Government policy, because there is a whole range of ways in which we are taking measures to help disabled people to improve their lives.

[Mr Jim Cunningham]

Coming back to the £3 billion extra that the Minister mentioned, how will that be distributed, bearing in mind that Coventry city council has to make £28 million in cuts over the next four years? How will he distribute the money to deliver care?

[Mr Hoban]

The hon. Gentleman knows very well that funding formulas are in place to ensure that the money is allocated. There is an obligation on local authorities not only to make a contribution towards tackling the deficit that we inherited from the previous Government, but to look innovatively at how they deliver services and ensure that we get value for money.

Remploy

Jim Cunningham Excerpts

Thursday 4th July 2013 Commons Chamber

[Mr Jim Cunningham (Coventry South) (Lab)]

As far as I am concerned, Remploy was one strand of social services to help people with disabilities and give them dignity. More specifically, however, what is the Minister going to do to help Remploy in Coventry to develop a social enterprise there? It is facing problems with the acquisition of the land. Will she meet me, along with one or two of my colleagues, to discuss that?

[Esther McVey]

I will indeed meet the hon. Gentleman to discuss that. I should add that that is one of the automotive businesses, and it has attracted considerable interest because it is a viable business. KPMG is currently working on that with Remploy, and I will table a written statement shortly about what will happen there. The hon. Gentleman is right, however, that this is about dignity and supporting disabled people, and that is what we are doing.