Oral Answers to Questions

Kate Green Excerpts

Monday 7th November 2011 Commons Chamber

[Damian Green]

Absolutely. The hon. Gentleman knows that my right hon. Friend the Home Secretary is going to make a statement on that matter later, when it can be dealt with in detail, but in his honest moments he will accept that one of the biggest problems—one of the biggest shambles—that this Government inherited was the immigration system that the previous Government left us, and that is what we are getting to grips with now.

[Kate Green]

(Stratford and Urmston) (Lab): Access to good quality expert advice is important to support legitimate applicants and to ensure that those who should not be here can be advised quickly that they have no case, but constituents report to me that such advice is in increasingly short supply. What steps will the Minister take to ensure that good quality advisers remain in place, particularly following the Government’s cuts to legal aid?

[Damian Green]

The Government’s cuts to legal aid specifically do not apply to asylum cases, because we accept that genuine asylum seekers will be in need of proper legal advice, but across the House it is agreed that some of the legal advice available in immigration cases, whether asylum or general immigration cases, is frankly substandard. That is why, when looking at our support for the legal aid system, which was yet another public spending regime that ran out of control under the previous Government, we have specifically protected the most vulnerable.

Gangs and Youth Violence

Kate Green Excerpts

Tuesday 1st November 2011 Commons Chamber

[Kate Green (Stretford and Urmston) (Lab)]

The Home Secretary has rightly emphasised the importance of community leadership in tackling and addressing gang violence. She will of course be aware that there is a risk that the community can become alienated if public agencies get the relationship wrong. How will she ensure that the good will of communities, which is so essential to the success of her proposals, is secured and monitored?

[Mrs May]

That is where setting up the ending gang and youth violence team—people who can give help, support and advice at local level about putting projects in place and what will work in the area, and making sure that the relationships are right—will be so important.

Women (Government Policies)

Kate Green Excerpts

Wednesday 8th June 2011 Commons Chamber

[Yvette Cooper]

We have said that we think there is a serious advantage in some universal benefits. I do not think that the hon. Lady should be paid child tax credit, and she is not, because it is right that some things depend on people’s incomes. However, it is important that some things are universal. That is why we have said that there are serious problems with what the Government are doing on child benefit. She needs to take seriously the point that at every level of income and in every sector of society, women rather than men are the hardest hit.

[Kate Green (Stretford and Urmston) (Lab)]

As someone who has staunchly defended universal child benefit precisely because of the reach that it secures for the poorest families—better than the means-tested benefits that are designed to reach them—I am pleased to tell the hon. Member for West Worcestershire (Harriett Baldwin) that I will certainly campaign for the reinstatement of child benefit for all parents. Does my right hon. Friend agree that one reason why it is so important to have benefits that are predominantly directed at women is that even in the best-off households, the way in which income is divided between a couple often favours the man? It is important to give women some independent income to protect their financial independence within the household.

[Yvette Cooper]

My hon. Friend is right, because who gets the income in the household matters for a lot of women. Child benefit was about giving women an independent income, and it has given women a greater ability to make choices about their own lives.

The Government have dismissed the figures about the impact on women and men. They say that those figures cannot be calculated, but they have calculated no figures of their own. They claim that it cannot be done. That is rubbish, because the House of Commons Library did it, and pretty quickly. They also claim that it is not possible for the Government to come up with such figures, but the Treasury has done it before. When the Minister for Women and Equalities and I were new Back Benchers, I asked Treasury Ministers a written question on exactly the same thing. I asked what was the impact on women compared with men of the 1997, 1998 and 1999 Budgets. Treasury Ministers were able to calculate it then and they can calculate it now. The answer was that men benefited by £2.30 per week and that women benefited by £5.30 per week from the changes brought in by the Labour Government. This is the contrast: the Labour Government’s first Budget helped women twice as much as men; the Tory-led Government’s first Budget hit women twice as hard as men.

The Government say that one cannot look at men and women separately, but that one must look at households. That is the point that my hon. Friend the Member for Stretford and Urmston (Kate Green) made. The Government’s plans for universal credit have the same kind of flaw. They are talking about a single payment being paid to a single household member, with the risk that it will go predominantly to the man. What the Government say is just not true. Of course people choose to share their money in the household and in the family, but that is the point—they choose to share their money. Who gets the money in the first place matters. Beveridge understood that 60 years ago. That is why he introduced the family allowance, which led to child benefit. I do not understand why Government Members and the Government are so blind to this issue. Women on the Government Benches would be horrified if suddenly their salaries were paid to their husbands on the basis that it does not really matter because they are in the same household. That is the logical consequence of the Government’s arguments about households and for not being able to do such analysis.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mrs May]

I am afraid that the hon. Lady’s claim that the Opposition understand dealing with the deficit rings false when we hear what they say the Government should do about the deficit. On the one hand, the Labour party tries to argue that what the Government are doing to address the deficit is wrong, and on the other hand Labour Members remain silent about the fact that a Labour Government would cut £7 of every £8 that this Government are cutting this year. We hear nothing from the Opposition about where those cuts would fall.

[Kate Green]

The issue for the Opposition is exactly where the cuts fall. As my right hon. Friend the Member for Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford (Yvette Cooper) said, not only is the bulk of the Government’s deficit reduction programme hitting women, but women’s unemployment is increasing disproportionately compared with men’s unemployment.

[Mrs May]

In the last three months, the increase in employment for women was greater than the increase in employment for men. Opposition Members, including the hon. Lady and the right hon. Member for Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford (Yvette Cooper), have said today that what the Government are doing is wrong. We hear that in debate after debate. Opposition Members stand up and tell us that the cuts in virtually every area of public sector expenditure are wrong. If they were in government, they would be making cuts. In that case, the question for them is where they would make those cuts.

Socio-economic Equality Duty

Kate Green Excerpts

Thursday 18th November 2010 Commons Chamber

[Lynne Featherstone]

I appreciate my hon. Friend’s direct approach. I probably would not put it in quite such pejorative terms. If the Government are interested in delivering fairness and equality, that has to be done through measures that actually deliver them, rather than just talking about them.

[Kate Green (Stretford and Urmston) (Lab)]

Perhaps I can help the hon. Member for Wellingborough (Mr Bone). In the poorest wards in my constituency, my local authority—Tory-controlled Trafford—has repeatedly under-invested in public services, from addressing health inequalities to sweeping snow from the streets. In the absence of the socio-economic duty, how can my poor constituents be sure that they will not continue to lose out?

[Lynne Featherstone]

All councils up and down the country that are worth their salt will already be considering the socio-economic duty in terms of all the money they spend. That is the point. [Interruption.] I am sorry, but Opposition Members can jump up and down as much as they like—a duty to consider is not action at all.

Public Expenditure Reductions (Women)

Kate Green Excerpts

Monday 6th September 2010 Commons Chamber

[Lynne Featherstone]

I think that the Institute for Fiscal Studies was inaccurate in what it said. The Government have made it clear that the burden of deficit will have to be shared. At the Budget, the Government took unprecedented steps in publishing details. The Treasury welcomes the innovative approach of the IFS in its revised analysis of the Budget and is open to exploring new ways of assessing the potential impact of Budget measures. However, the IFS states that in order to include previously unmodelled reforms the report makes some strong assumptions that add uncertainty to the analysis.

[Kate Green (Stretford and Urmston) (Lab)]

Can the Minister tell us which assumptions the IFS has made that are considered unreliable or not valid?

[Lynne Featherstone]

I will come to that point later if I can.

I wanted to address the point that the hon. Member for Hackney North and Stoke Newington made about the public sector. Although there are a majority of women in the public sector, the Government have made efforts to support the most vulnerable public sector workers—those earning less than £21,000 a year, who will be exempt from the freeze. That will affect about 1.7 million public sector workers whose salary falls below the threshold—mostly women—who will see a flat pay rise of £250 in both years of the freeze. The Government are aware of the statutory obligations when assessing options for spending reductions.

I shall move on to a more general response to the hon. Lady. Fairness is a key theme, along with freedom and responsibility, and underpins our new Government programme. We see it as even more important during difficult times than in good times, not just because we believe it is the fundamental right of every individual to have the opportunity to fulfil their potential, but because we realise that fairness is the key ingredient to getting the country back on its feet. We cannot afford to continue wasting the talents and skills of women, of ethnic minorities and of disabled people—of all those who have been held back for no reason other than their background. Without fairness we will never achieve economic recovery, let alone full economic growth.

Yes, we have to take some tough decisions to tackle the unprecedented deficit we inherited, but as my hon. Friend the Member for Wirral West (Esther McVey) said, we should not forget that the cuts are Labour’s legacy. Labour doubled the national debt and left us with the biggest deficit in the G20. We have to clean up that situation to get the economy moving. Unless we address the deficit first and foremost, more women will be out of work and more women will suffer the consequences of the recession.