Cosmetic Surgery

Debate between Lord Beamish and Ben Gummer

Tuesday 20th October 2015 Commons Chamber

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Health (Ben Gummer)]

I thank the hon. Member for North Durham (Mr Jones)for securing this debate on what is clearly an extremely distressing case for his constituent and an unfortunate one more generally. I want to pick up on the specific issues he raised to do with his constituent’s case before talking about the generality of the regulation of cosmetic surgery.

The hon. Gentleman pointed out the failure of his constituent’s doctor to have insurance and he will be pleased to know that, as of July 2014, new legislation required all surgeons providing cosmetic interventions to provide insurance and proper cover. A failure to do so would render them liable to undergo the fitness to practise tests conducted by the GMC. Those doctors operating outside the UK but in the EU who would have a temporary ability to operate in this country under the directive on mutual recognition of professional qualifications would still, under GMC regulations, be required to provide evidence of insurance cover. That legislation was brought into effect in August, which was clearly too late in the case of his constituent.

[Mr Kevan Jones]

Will the Minister look specifically into the case of Dr Paganelli, as I understand that he is still practising in this country?

[Ben Gummer]

I will certainly look into that case, as it does not sound right. I cannot trespass on the realms of the GMC, but I will inquire into the specific case outlined by the hon. Gentleman.

The hon. Gentleman makes a valid point about the cost to the NHS and this is not the only area in which we have considered and continue to consider cost recovery for the NHS. It can be difficult as sometimes the cost of legal action outweighs the cost of recovery and it is not something that the service is used to doing. I am keen to explore it further, but in the context of the action we are taking, which I shall come on to, I hope that the hon. Gentleman will understand the need to take this bit by bit so that we get the process right. In principle, I certainly agree that if organisations cause a cost to fall on the NHS, as in this case, there is a good argument for seeing whether that cost can be recovered.

That takes me on to another part of the hon. Gentleman’s speech that was particularly striking, about the celebrity endorsements in this case. It is not for me to make policy announcements in an Adjournment debate, nor would I want to in the case of celebrity endorsements, but I agree with the hon. Gentleman that people should think carefully about how they endorse cosmetic surgery. It is a serious intervention and if anyone seeks to glamorise something to which careful thought should be given, people and the organisations using those endorsements should treat them with extreme care.

I would point the organisation that the hon. Gentleman is dealing with and everyone else towards the code of conduct in advertising, the Committee of Advertising Practice and the Broadcast Committee of Advertising Practice, which drew up guidance in October 2013, especially on protecting children and young people. I think it would be appropriate to make sure the organisation of which he speaks is complying with the spirit as well as the letter of that guidance, and if not I will certainly help him to ask whether anything more can be done on that.

The hon. Gentleman raises the issue of counselling. Any reputable organisation should seek to ensure that people undertake procedures only when they need to do so and have been properly counselled on the consequences of their actions so that they can make an informed decision. The Government believe that that should happen in every case for cosmetic surgery. There should be an informed decision, taken with serious thought.

Finally, on the issues to do with The Hospital Group the hon. Gentleman raised, I cannot speak without further advice, but there clearly seem to be questions about trading standards, which he raised. I hope that I and my officials will be able to meet him to look carefully at this case, to make sure if The Hospital Group is misrepresenting its position apropos its surgeons and those it seeks to represent, it is not besmirching an industry which more widely does take its duties and the way it represents itself seriously.

Rail 2020

Debate between Lord Beamish and Ben Gummer

Wednesday 3rd July 2013 Commons Chamber

[Ben Gummer]

The hon. Gentleman is a marvel of this House and is respected deeply by many Members on both sides of the House. However, he must see that the graphs of declining rail use up to 1995, for both freight and passenger, were turned on their heads after privatisation. That is not just a correlative effect, but a causal one.

[Mr Kevan Jones]

I am interested in the hon. Gentleman’s history lesson. He is right that the early railways were pioneered by private enterprise. However, by the time they were nationalised, many of them were in a dire state. That was the case not just in this country, but around the world. Rail passenger numbers went down after the war because there was a rise in car ownership and because of the development of road transport. The reason Germany has good railways is that a British civil servant planned the system after the second world war.

[Ben Gummer]

This is an interesting parlour game and we should pursue it at greater length outside the Chamber. The hon. Gentleman is right that the railways were on their knees after the war. That was partly a result of the war and partly a result of the rise of the car.

It is interesting that this necessary monopoly that was challenged profoundly in the second half of the 20th century is now able to compete successfully with motor vehicles and planes, precisely because of the investment from the private sector. As a result of that investment, the subsidy per passenger kilometre has gone down considerably since privatisation, even though the total subsidy has gone up.

[Ben Gummer]

I agree completely with my hon. Friend. I will come on in a second to the link between his constituency and mine.

[Mr Kevan Jones]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

[Ben Gummer]

I will give way in a while, if I may.

The Government are continuing a strategy. There are, rightly, arguments about whether the franchising process was got exactly right, but to my mind, John Major’s privatisation of the railways was one of his most significant acts. It has transformed the way in which—[Interruption.] Opposition Members laugh, but they ignore the fact that we now have some of the safest railways in Europe, second only to Luxembourg, which we did not have before privatisation.

[Ben Gummer]

The hon. Lady shakes her head, but she should listen to the facts. We have the fastest rate of passenger growth in Europe. We have the safest railways in Europe after Luxembourg. That is the result of privatisation, which has made a significant difference.

The ideologues are the Opposition Members, including the shadow Secretary of State for Transport, who espouse the ideology that dare not speak its name. She wants gradually to bring the railways back into public ownership and undo the extraordinary progress that has been made.

[Mr Kevan Jones]

The hon. Gentleman has a very selective view of history. He obviously does not remember—perhaps he was still at school—the period between privatisation and the effective renationalisation of Network Rail, when there were a number of tragic rail accidents in this country because of the inefficient way in which privatisation was carried out and the lack of investment. He must take into account that the effective renationalisation of Network Rail was how the investment was got right.

[Ben Gummer]

I am giving a bit of history because it does inform our discussion of the franchise process, which is the core of the report. I am not going to start trading statistics, but over the period of Railtrack, rail safety improved and we were going up the European safety league table. The reason so much money had to be invested—very successfully with private help—was the years of underinvestment by a series of Governments, Conservative among them. I disagree with the hon. Gentleman’s intervention on that point, not least because the facts on the safety of the rail network under privatisation speak for themselves.

How do we get this franchise system to work so that rail companies can compete with their natural competitors, the motorways and the airlines? I plead with the Government to do as much as they can. I know that the advice they have had recently has been to shorten slightly the long franchises that have been planned, but the longer the franchise rail companies can get, the better their ability to invest in rolling stock, customer service and improving the capacity and punctuality of their services.

Those of my constituents who have had the misfortune of having to commute on the Ipswich to London line for a long time will say that the best improvements they have seen were under the first franchise—as I am sure my right hon. Friend the Minister will agree—which was quite long and had the loosest possible terms. It allowed the then Anglia franchisee to put maximum efforts into improving performance. The last Government did many good things in rail, but one of the bad things was to have far too tight a control over the franchises, stipulating to the dot and comma how the services should be delivered. Unsurprisingly, the bidders for those franchises went in at the lowest possible price, bidding on the specification provided by the Government, and the improvement in service flattened and, in some cases, reversed. We need as loose a franchise framework as possible, and as long as possible so that the private sector can invest as fully as possible in the services without being second-guessed by the doubtless otherwise brilliant officials at the Department for Transport.

We need to see other improvements, and I am glad that the Committee recommended them in its report. We need transparency in subsidy. The system is still not good enough at identifying where subsidy goes. I have tried to understand how much subsidy goes in to the great eastern main line. Network Rail and the Office for Rail Regulation are not good at disaggregating subsidy in sufficient granular detail. I have questioned them about control period 5, but it is almost impossible to get a decent idea of the quantity of subsidy or public investment we are likely to get in our line, which makes it very difficult for us, as public representatives, to fight for our constituents.

Transparency is also important for the way in which the franchise system develops. When privatisation was introduced, there was only one profit-making line in the UK and there are now many that turn a surplus. Effectively—and I know that the Minister disagrees with me slightly on the detail of this—fare income is transferred from one part of the country to another. Roughly £30 of the £74 standard fare ticket from Ipswich to London is paid in premium which is moved, effectively, to those parts of the country that need a subsidy. That is unfair on my constituents, especially those who are paid the same bad wages that some people in subsidised areas are paid. They rightly demand a social subsidy so that they can get their rail service for less than they would otherwise.

If a lot of our fare income is being moved to other parts of the country, it makes it difficult for us to get the investment we need. We should have more transparency about how the premiums are moved so that we can achieve some sort of parity for investment.

I turn now to a discussion of the east of England, and I know that the Minister has a constituency interest there and, therefore, a profound knowledge of the area. Only two regions of England outside London are net contributors to the UK Exchequer: the south-east and the east. Since the 19th century, the eastern region has suffered some of the worst levels of investment. Historically, there has been a poor level of investment in the main line from London to Norwich, with hand-me-down carriages and levels of service that other parts of the country have long forgotten about. The region has contributed to the UK economy in the past five or 10 years, but investment is needed for that contribution to continue. The region is not demanding new motorways or A roads, but investment is required for people to able to get from London, Ipswich and Norwich to the midlands. That would lead to growth that would make a significant contribution to the UK economy.

We are profoundly grateful for the investment that has occurred in the past few years. It was promised for many years, but not delivered. We will soon have a direct line between Felixstowe and Nuneaton, the constituency of my hon. Friend the Member for Nuneaton (Mr Jones). Thereafter, I hope we will have a direct line from Nuneaton to Coventry. I hope—the Minister will speak on this later—that there will be a new bypass loop north of the Minister’s constituency of Chelmsford, which would release capacity and improve performance between London and Norwich. All of these plans, in addition to Ely North junction, have been long promised and long talked about. They are at last being delivered, and for that we are very grateful. However, we need new trains on the new track; not now, not immediately or in the next few years, but within the new franchise that will be set in 2016. We need the new trains that have been provided to the rest of the country and have been denied to us. Whenever the rest of the country is finished with a new train, it is passed on to East Anglia. That is no longer good enough.

Sentencing

Debate between Lord Beamish and Ben Gummer

Monday 23rd May 2011 Commons Chamber

[Ben Gummer (Ipswich) (Con)]

I think that the Opposition Front-Bench team do their Back Benchers a great disservice; we have heard some interesting and thoughtful contributions, especially from the right hon. Member for Knowsley (Mr Howarth). Once again, however, we have seen the Opposition Front-Bench team jumping on the bandwagon of the week. Three weeks ago it was Sure Start and the Opposition showed their commitment to that in the Opposition day debate with only four or five Members present, yet there were dozens on the Government Benches. Last week, we had the Opposition day debate on the health service, at which the car crash unfolded because Labour Members were unable to attack the proposals effectively. Now, today, we see an attack on Government proposals that were published in the autumn of last year, which had been supported in large part by the Leader of the Opposition and his Front-Bench team. Yet they have just discovered now that they find some truck with some elements of it. This shameless and shameful opportunism would be extraordinary in any other group of people, were it not for the fact that this Opposition have shown themselves to be experts in turning opportunism into a low art.

At the end of last year, the Opposition spokesman said:

“I am not going to say Ken Clarke is being soft on crime… because he is asking the right questions about rehabilitation rates”.

What of the speech of the Leader of the Opposition to the Labour party conference just minutes after he had been made the new leader? He said that

“when Ken Clarke says we need to look at short sentences in prison because of high re-offending rates, I’m not going to say he’s soft on crime… This new generation must find a new way of conducting politics.”

What a new way of conducting politics—to agree to radical and brave proposals by my right hon. and learned Friend the Justice Secretary and come here and attack them the minute the bandwagon is passing. The Opposition are so misguided because for the first time in a generation a Government have been brave enough to make difficult proposals that will help victims in the long run.

[Mr Kevan Jones (North Durham) (Lab)]

I am interested to hear the hon. Gentleman’s forthright views on opportunism. He was not a Member before the last election, but his party, including his leader, were very good at opportunism at that time. Has he tested any of these ideas on the electorate of Ipswich?

[Ben Gummer]

I thank the hon. Gentleman. Although there are many things on which I agree with my hon. Friend the Member for Shipley (Philip Davies), who spoke previously, I differ on this issue. At the last election, I was very plain with people when they spoke about prison reform. The hon. Gentleman might know that I have had a long-running interest in the subject. I told people in Ipswich what I am about to explain to him now—that our current penal system does victims a disservice.

It is not a difficult equation to understand, although I know the Opposition do not understand problems in this way. It was the same with the hospital debate. Instead of looking at how to improve cancer survival rates, they look at the structures of GP fundholding. In this instance, they look not at how to improve the experience of victims or how to bring down crime, but at how many people we are sentencing and for how long. They are looking at processes and inputs rather than results. If we turn that on its head and look at the victim rather than the criminal, as we have been asked to do, we might find a different way out.

We want to do something for victims, of whom there are too many. We wish to cut crime. We know that the majority of crime is committed by people who have already offended once or many times previously. What do we do about it? Do we try to increase reoffending rates or do we try to reduce them? It is the experience of Members of all parties that the prison, probation and the community service system are failing on every single account to encourage rehabilitation and to cut the number of victims.

Finance (No. 3) Bill

Debate between Lord Beamish and Ben Gummer

Tuesday 3rd May 2011 Commons Chamber

[Mr Jones]

My hon. Friend makes a good point. Those examples can be seen up and down the country.

Given the amounts of money that some of the directors of Barclays are being paid, they could lend money to those small businesses themselves. The two highest-paid managers, Jerry del Missier and Rich Ricci—great name!— were handed more than £40 million each after share deals awarded over the previous five years. Bob Diamond, the chief executive, took the helm in January this year and, in that period of remorse, has received £27 million, including £6.5 million in bonuses for 2010 and £2.525 million awarded in shares, which could be paid out in the future. The share deal for the past five years paid out £40 million, and the one for 2007 paid out £5 million.

We know about those amounts because of the Government’s great deal under Project Merlin to force banks to expose what their directors are being paid. If that was supposed to act as a threat to them, they seem to be ignoring us and doing it all anyway. They seem to have very tough hides, because rather than being remorseful for the mess that they got us into, they are still taking the money.

[Ben Gummer (Ipswich) (Con)]

The hon. Gentleman is speaking of remorse. He was one of the more eminent members of the previous Government; is he remorseful about the pay-off given to Sir Fred Goodwin, who broke the Royal Bank of Scotland and who was given a knighthood by the previous Government and was a member of the council of “wise men” who advised the previous Chancellor of the Exchequer and Prime Minister?

[Mr Jones]

I had only a small walk-on part in the previous Government. However, when asked whether we can justify some of the bonuses that were paid, I would say no, we cannot. I agree with the hon. Gentleman about that.

When our constituents vote this Thursday, they should be aware of the lack of Conservative and Liberal Democrat Members present for this debate today. I note, however, that the hon. Member for Bristol West (Stephen Williams), who speaks for the Liberal Democrats on finance, has referred to the Barclays bankers’ pay deal as “obscene”. As part of the coalition, the Liberal Democrats need to speak out loudly to ensure that something is done about the bonuses.

The levy is supposed to curb behaviour, but I agree with the hon. Member for Ipswich (Ben Gummer) that the greatest scandal is the bankers’ bonuses being paid by banks controlled mainly by the Government. For example, the Royal Bank of Scotland is 87% owned by ourselves as taxpayers, yet more than 100 of its bankers were paid a bonus of more than £1 million last year, totalling more than £1 billion. We are talking about the bank levy raising more than £2 billion a year, but the banks are paying out £1 billion in bonuses. That raises the question of whether the levy is high enough. If it is not going to change the behaviour of the banks it clearly is not high enough, and we should look in greater detail at the idea of raising the levy.

We have heard a lot of rhetoric on the regulation of the banks, but we have seen very little action. The bankers’ bonus tax raised £3.5 billion for the taxpayer, but the levy that we are now discussing will raise only just over £2 billion a year. The new levy will add about £800 million to that. The banks have got off pretty lightly. In addition, as my hon. Friend the Member for Nottingham East said earlier, they will gain about £100 million from the reduction in corporation tax from 28% to 24%.

The danger that was threatened by the banking sector to Labour when we were in power, and is still threatened today, is that if we do not allow these large bonuses to be paid, or if we charge the banks too high a levy, they will move offshore or elsewhere. The example of Sweden has been mentioned as the only example of that, however. I have looked into whether the lack of such bankers’ bonuses elsewhere affects where people live. An interesting survey has been carried out by eFinancialCareers, which looked at 2,511 bankers, 654 of whom were in the UK. It showed that bonuses rose by about 5% in this country, whereas in the United States they decreased by the same amount.