National Insurance: GDP

Lord Blunkett Excerpts

Thursday 19th December 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Livermore (Lab)]

Well, no. The OBR has been very clear that the number of people in employment will increase by 1.2 million over the course of this Parliament. As I said before, we had to take some very difficult decisions to clear up the mess that we inherited. I would simply ask the noble Lord and other noble Lords what their alternative is to the course of action that we took? Are they seriously saying that we should not have repaired the public finances? Are they seriously saying that we should not have restored economic stability? Quite frankly, that is the path that the Liz Truss mini-Budget took. We saw what happened then: she crashed the economy and working people are still paying the price today.

[Lord Blunkett (Lab)]

My Lords, can my noble friend the Minister confirm that, in the 12 months leading up to the general election, the previous Government, in reducing national insurance on employees by 4p, actually gave away £20 billion and that there has been no discernible improvement in economic activity as a result? Is not this entirely their fault and not ours?

[Lord Livermore (Lab)]

My noble friend is absolutely right that the actions taken by the previous Government were consistent with the actions of a Government who had a total lack of regard to the stability of the public finances—which is exactly why we ended up with a £22 billion hole in those public finances because, although they willed the ends, they never willed the means.

Economic Productivity

Lord Blunkett Excerpts

Thursday 5th December 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Livermore (Lab)]

I know that the noble Lord cares deeply about this issue. He has spoken in debates on this topic before and has made some very important points about productivity. I have also answered a Question in this House on working from home and its impact on public sector productivity. As I said then, the current evidence is mixed. There are clear advantages to working from home for some and there are also clear disadvantages to working from home. Most studies seem to suggest that there are significant benefits to a hybrid model. But there are no such plans to commission the kind of study he mentioned.

[Lord Blunkett (Lab)]

Does my noble friend accept that there are some really perverse outcomes in the current way we assess productivity in the public sector, such as smaller class sizes worsening productivity in the education system, or employing more police officers so crime drops and the ratio therefore worsens? Is it not really important that we get a bit of common sense into this?

Credit Card Invoices

Lord Blunkett Excerpts

Tuesday 26th March 2024 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Vere of Norbiton (Con)]

My noble friend is quite right. He may have heard some of the explanation I gave in the debate on the Spring Budget on why we had to take the decisions that we did. Noble Lords will all recall that the Government stepped in to provide furlough for nearly 11 million people to save their jobs and protected nearly 500,000 businesses. It was essential that we did that at the time, but it came at a cost to our economy and society, which must be repaid at some stage.

[Lord Blunkett (Lab)]

My Lords, last week I invited the noble Baroness to dinner, if we could find a restaurant with an accessible payment device. That evening, I went to a restaurant that had purchased a cover that made the device accessible. I have been in correspondence with the Minister since and am very grateful for her interest. Could we not simply make all providers offer that service, rather than restaurants having to buy it in?

[Baroness Vere of Norbiton (Con)]

I am interested to know if that is the restaurant that the noble Lord intends to take me to. I have been in correspondence with him since last week. We will work very closely with UK Finance as its finishes off its accessibility forums to understand what more can be done to ensure that payment devices are accessible.

Electronic Payment Devices

Lord Blunkett Excerpts

Tuesday 19th March 2024 Lords Chamber

Asked by

[Lord Blunkett]

To ask His Majesty’s Government what discussions they have had with providers of electronic point-of-sale payment devices to make them accessible for those with a visual impairment, such as via tactile keypad.

[The Parliamentary Secretary, HM Treasury (Baroness Vere of Norbiton) (Con)]

My Lords, the Government are unequivocally supportive of all efforts by the financial services industry, the card machine operators and charities such as the Royal National Institute for the Blind to make card machines fully accessible for those with visual impairments. In November 2023, UK Finance published a list of vendors which produce approved devices, to assist merchants with purchasing a device that is sufficiently accessible.

[Lord Blunkett (Lab)]

My Lords, someone with low or no vision can access a smartphone because there is a Siri or voice-over function, and you can have several goes if you hit the wrong buttons the first time. If you are spending over £100 in hospitality and you are faced with a flat screen and you get it wrong, you lose access to your card. The providers are pretending that there is accessibility when there are markings down the left-hand side of a flatscreen. It is a major challenge for those without sight. It is, in my view, in complete breach of the Equality Act 2010. The providers do not provide the necessary covers that can be available to make at least a stab—I mean literally a stab—at hitting the right buttons, and it is time we acted.

[Baroness Vere of Norbiton (Con)]

I recognise the issues raised by the noble Lord, and the financial services industry also recognises these challenges. As I have already said, UK Finance publishes a list of vendors, recognising that it is not just financial services companies that use these machines; it may be the merchants themselves. This builds on work by UK Finance and the RNIB in publishing accessibility guidance, which only happened in 2022. Today, the third in a series of three forums is happening involving UK financial services groups and charities, and each of the three forums is focusing on specific interventions—whether it be technology or training to help improve the accessibility of all sorts of banking services.

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[Baroness Vere of Norbiton (Con)]

My Lords, I am not entirely sure that I am here to speak for all regulators. However, the consumer duty was introduced, whereby the FCA must ensure that the financial services sector is delivering good outcomes to prevent harm. That was introduced only in July 2023 and will take a little while to bed in. We will monitor the outcomes of that consumer duty to ensure that it is having the impact on disabled and other vulnerable customers that we need to see.

[Lord Blunkett (Lab)]

My Lords, I would like to invite the Minister out to dinner, and I promise to pay if there is a flat screen that I can access.

Bank Accounts

Lord Blunkett Excerpts

Wednesday 19th July 2023 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Penn (Con)]

My Lords, the Government have taken an interest in this issue, which is why we issued a call for evidence earlier this year that covered freedom of speech and bank account closure. That is the right avenue through which the Government should seek to address this issue, rather than through their shareholding in a particular bank.

[Lord Blunkett (Lab)]

My Lords, I am fully in favour of the Government protecting the rights of the “Coutts one”, as they should be protecting the rights of the 1 million who cannot get a bank account. But is it not perverse, on the day that the Prime Minister has rightly apologised for the egregious treatment of LGBT people in the Armed Forces, for the Home Secretary to widen this debate into a full-frontal attack on equality, diversity and inclusion? Is that not totally unacceptable as well?

[Baroness Penn (Con)]

My Lords, I think the point we can all agree on is that the right to lawful freedom of speech is fundamental. Where that has been seen to be brought into question through the provision of services, we have cause to worry.

Banks: Closures and Shared Banking Hubs

Lord Blunkett Excerpts

Thursday 27th April 2023 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Penn (Con)]

I absolutely commend building societies and all businesses that have a commitment to local communities and are thinking about how they can make their services as accessible as possible. There are many different routes to ensuring accessibility. We should focus on the outcome for the customer and embrace the different routes that this can be delivered by.

[Lord Blunkett (Lab)]

My Lords, the bigger the profit, the less customer service there is. This has happened over the last decade. There are still some banks pretending that they are disabled by Covid and that is why you cannot get through on the phone, and the local branch is closed so you cannot actually talk to anyone. Will the Minister ask the banks to start putting the customer first and ensure that there are facilities available, not just at the odd hub but in local communities, which, in the past, could rely on serious, person-to-person customer service?

[Baroness Penn (Con)]

My Lords, a process has been put in place to allow communities to make the case through LINK for where they need access to further services, and there is a commitment that if something is deemed necessary, it will be implemented. The noble Lord is right that it is essential that the interests of consumers are properly considered in all areas of financial services. There is the new consumer duty, which is due to be implemented later this year and will take forward some of his suggestions.

Cross-Government Cost Cutting

Lord Blunkett Excerpts

Tuesday 6th December 2022 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Penn (Con)]

My noble friend is right: we must ensure that when we undertake these exercises, we really are delivering efficiency and value for money gains, rather than short-term fixes for departments’ budgets that, in the long term, may create other problems. I can reassure him that no figure is attached to the current exercise; it is about working with departments to see where they can find efficiency savings to help them manage the pressures they are under.

[Lord Blunkett (Lab)]

My Lords, does the noble Baroness not agree that what she has just said underlines the total failure of the short-term and damaging fixing over the last 12 and a half years?

[Baroness Penn (Con)]

No, I would not agree with the noble Lord at all. Efficiency savings are something that Governments of all colours have striven to deliver, including in previous comprehensive spending reviews under the Labour Government. It is absolutely right that, when we look at departmental spending, we build in an assumption of improved efficiency and value for money, but also that, at this time of increased inflationary pressures, we put even more work into looking at where we can achieve efficiencies and release savings to be reinvested into those budgets.

Investing in Britain’s Future

Lord Blunkett Excerpts

Thursday 27th June 2013 Commons Chamber

[Danny Alexander]

I know that the hon. Lady has taken a great interest in this subject. Maintenance spending constitutes a major part of the DEFRA resource budget that was announced yesterday. DEFRA has made considerable efficiencies in flood resource spending, and will continue to have a significant budget. I have been assured by the Association of British Insurers that the proposed levy will not add to people’s bills overall.

[Mr David Blunkett (Sheffield, Brightside and Hillsborough) (Lab)]

I am afraid that the Chief Secretary’s statement was an insult to the intelligence of the British people. We have established, have we not, that in 2015 we as a nation will be spending £10 billion less on infrastructure than we spent in 2010. How can the Chief Secretary allow infrastructure and structural investment funds from Europe to be protected in Scotland and Wales while they are being cut by two thirds in England, at a time when English local government is being asked to cut its day-to-day spending on essential services by a third, allegedly to allow funds to be invested in infrastructure?

[Danny Alexander]

The Prime Minister secured an extremely good deal on structural funding for the United Kingdom at the recent European summit. There will be a fair allocation of the small reductions in funds between the four constituent nations of the UK, and I think that is the right and proper approach.

Business and the Economy

Lord Blunkett Excerpts

Monday 14th May 2012 Commons Chamber

[The Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills (Vince Cable)]

The measures set out in the Queen’s Speech reassert the coalition Government’s fundamental commitment to rescuing the UK economy and promoting growth. There is no easy route out of the debris of a financial collapse. I start with that point, since one of the most important pieces of legislation in the Queen’s Speech is structural reform of banking, which I have worked on closely with the Chancellor.

More broadly in relation to pursuing growth, it is clear that the economic model that produced growth in the past decade and a half was fatally flawed. It rested on the illusion that growth could be created by a bloated banking sector, a bubble in property values, ballooning household debt and an unsustainable budget deficit. In practice, what we saw was that business investment stagnated, and British manufacturing industry was left to decline as a consequence of an overvalued exchange rate that resulted from the imbalances in the economy.

The ongoing crisis in the eurozone makes the task even harder. The turmoil in Europe serves to illustrate the wisdom of creating a firewall of confidence in the UK against otherwise panicky financial markets. The low interest rates that our policies have created provide an economic platform for support of private and public investment in infrastructure and housing.

We are very conscious that the absence of growth is a major challenge and it accounts for much of the frustration of the public, who are understandably impatient to see a recovery from the financial crisis and its aftermath, which wiped out 10% of our economy, dragging down the living standards of many families.

[Mr David Blunkett (Sheffield, Brightside and Hillsborough) (Lab)]

Can the right hon. Gentleman explain to the House why the Labour Government were responsible for the global meltdown, but the present Government are not responsible for the drop in growth and the double-dip recession?

[Vince Cable]

Clearly, the previous Government were not responsible for the global meltdown, but they were responsible for building up the largest and most volatile banking sector in the western world, and it was from that that the collapse followed.

To achieve a recovery, we need to build on some of the positive trends that are beginning to emerge. Despite the deep-seated problems of the economy and the slow growth, we have seen 634,000 private sector jobs created in the past two years, which is almost twice as many as have been lost in the public sector. Private sector job growth explains why our unemployment level, although distressingly high and a tragedy for many individuals, is no higher than that in the United States.

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[Mr David Blunkett (Sheffield, Brightside and Hillsborough) (Lab)]

I have a registered interest in higher education, Mr Deputy Speaker.

That was an interesting contribution from the right hon. Member for Wokingham (Mr Redwood). I did not agree with all of it, particularly about dictating to the Greeks what they might or might not eventually do on the euro. However, one thing is clear: we should wish the new President of France, as he will be from tomorrow, every success in trying to countervail the hegemony that the Germans are forcing on the eurozone. Fiscal austerity not merely as a mantra but built into future policies would be disastrous.

Let me make two or three key points. The many comments about rebalancing the economy are interesting. I remember the last major effort to rebalance the economy, which was made in the 1980s by Lady Thatcher. It virtually wiped out manufacturing industry in my city. The sad thing about the past two years is that the first rebalancing announcement made under the auspices of the present Secretary of State, who commands a great deal of respect in this House, including from me, pushed him into refusing Sheffield Forgemasters the advantageous loan it needed to expand dramatically on world markets. Some growth fund money has been offered, but we are not entirely clear how many jobs it will deliver and where.

The regional growth fund is a muddle. It lacks a clear direction about which sectors and which areas of our economy we should be putting most of our resources into, and about how credit easing might be focused meaningfully to ensure that people get the loans at a price that is affordable not just for very small businesses, but medium-sized enterprises such as Ideal Care Homes, a company in Yorkshire that has sought loans for a very good business creating jobs in the caring sector. Growth in such jobs is critical to those in our society who seek basic qualifications to work in an area of massive expansion as our population ages.

In education, the contradictions abound. Why is the Secretary of State for Education downgrading design and technology and information and communications technology at precisely the moment we need to expand in education in those areas massively to equip our young people to take jobs in the knowledge economy? That brings me to higher education. The university of Sheffield, working with Boeing and others, has developed the advanced manufacturing research centre and advanced manufacturing park on the edge of Sheffield and Rotherham, making a positive contribution to real growth for real jobs in real areas. Its efforts to recruit people from across the world to come to the university, however, have been undermined by the actions of the Home Office. On the one hand, the Department for Education is undermining young people in preparing for their future, and on the other hand, the Home Office is undermining the ability of universities and higher education to deliver. Unfortunately, the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills has also failed to persuade the Government to give priority to the higher education Bill, which seems to have been kicked into the very long grass.

There is a total lack of focus on future skills. Now that the regional development agencies have gone, there is nobody—the local enterprise partnerships are not in a position to do this—to pull together all those who are committed to shaping a skills agenda for the future using light-touch planning for jobs that really exist, rather than pretending that simply expanding apprenticeships anywhere, at any price and in any sector, is the sole answer. I am totally committed to apprenticeships— my city was built on them—but large numbers of apprenticeships are being mopped up by the retail sector, taking Government resources to train people that that sector was already training, or had failed to train, using its own resources.

We need to prepare for the youth contract by using some of the money devoted to it to prepare young people who have been out of work for a long time to take the jobs that are on offer. Their soft skills and their social skills, as well as their ability to get up in the morning, turn up for work and be a regular, reliable employee, are undermined by the length of time they have spent unemployed. One in five young people under 25 is unemployed; that is a national scandal of the first order and that is what we should be addressing.

If we do not have room for such measures, I have a suggestion. Drop the ridiculous farce, the rotten piece of fish, that is the draft House of Lords Reform Bill and give us a chance to do something proper for the future of this country, on which all our children and grandchildren can rely.

Finance (No. 3) Bill

Lord Blunkett Excerpts

Monday 4th July 2011 Commons Chamber

[Chris Leslie (Nottingham East) (Lab/Co-op)]

I beg to move, That the clause be read a Second time.

We do not often find the issue of high-cost credit lending in the headlines, but it is critical for many people up and down the country. Many of our constituents would expect to see it addressed in the Finance Bill, because there is growing concern that a large number of some of the poorest people in society are becoming prone to high-charging payday lending, doorstep lending, new variants of hire purchase and illegal loan-sharking, especially as the mainstream banks restrict credit availability.

I gather that since 2007 we have seen a fourfold rise in payday lending. The high-cost credit sector is now estimated to be in the order of £8.5 billion in value. The situation is familiar to many hon. Members across the House and particularly so to my hon. Friends, who represent some of the poorest and most challenged constituencies in the country. In my constituency, Nottingham East, the citizens advice bureaux and other advice organisations, such as Advice Nottingham and the St Ann’s advice centre, have recently published an anthology of modern poverty as they encounter so many stark stories of personal indebtedness daily. There are too many instances of companies—legal ones—preying on the vulnerability and desperation of stressed consumers who need to bridge their spending with short-term but, unfortunately, ultra-high-interest credit. A quarter of consumers who use high-cost credit cannot access any other form of borrowing. Apparently, 7 million people in the UK are denied credit and bank accounts that many of us would take for granted.

[Mr David Blunkett (Sheffield, Brightside and Hillsborough) (Lab)]

May I lend my support to my hon. Friend’s endeavours on this critical issue? Is it not a fact that the pressure on debt advice in our constituencies has increased dramatically because of the economic circumstances and the tightening of the criteria for social fund and care grants, and that this situation will get worse as people get caught up in a spiral of borrowing to pay existing debt?

[Chris Leslie]

My right hon. Friend, who has an excellent track record in raising many of these issues, is completely correct. The vice in which many of our poorest constituents find themselves being squeezed is very much apparent. The changes to the social fund that he mentions are part of the context in which we would want to review the circumstances in which high-cost lending takes place. That is the objective of our new clause 11: we want to examine the possibility of regulatory and/or tax measures to address this problem.