The Economy
Lord Hain Excerpts(9 years, 11 months ago)
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Lord Hain (Lab)
My Lords, I endorse the Minister’s fitting recognition of Lord Peston, who was my professor of economics at Queen Mary College, University of London, and whose brilliance, along with that of the noble Lord, Lord Smith of Clifton, enabled me to get a first-class honours degree—something which produced a barrage of letters in the Daily Telegraph denouncing university standards at the time.
I was struck by last week’s figure for government borrowing in the financial year just ended, 2015-16. What caught my notice was not that the Chancellor had exceeded his borrowing target again—we are used to that now, he is a serial offender. What stood out for me was the £74 billion borrowing figure itself, as £74 billion was exactly the borrowing figure forecast by my noble friend Lord Darling in his final Labour Budget, in March 2010. He planned to bring down Britain’s budget deficit to £74 billion in 2014-15—the limit of his five-year forecasting horizon. It was precisely this level of planned borrowing, £74 billion, that the new Tory Chancellor condemned when he took over at the Treasury. It would take Britain too close to the “brink of bankruptcy”, he fulminated, insisting Labour could never be trusted.
Instead, he replaced it in June 2010 with new, tougher targets, halving Labour’s planned borrowing in 2014-15 from £74 billion to £37 billion and setting himself a tight borrowing target of £20 billion for 2015-16. Both those targets were missed by a mile. All the Chancellor’s scaremongering about Britain becoming another Greece proved to be nonsense. Just like under Labour Chancellor Darling, even during the banking crisis, Britain has had no problem financing our budget deficit: the yield on UK government debt dropped to an all-time low of 1.22% in February. The Chancellor keeps crying wolf but the bond market is behaving more like Britain’s best friend, just as it did under Labour.
Labour argued six years ago, and has continued to do so since, that the Chancellor’s austerity strategy was the wrong way to tackle Britain’s debt and deficit problems. We said that pursuing such deep cuts so quickly risked curtailing growth, thereby making his borrowing targets unattainable, because it is on the growth rate of the economy, not just prudent public finance housekeeping, that budget deficits and the debt burden ultimately depend. Slow growth puts a brake on consumer spending and business investment, which causes tax revenues to tail off, pushing up government borrowing and adding to debt. Sadly, our fears were fulfilled as the Chancellor’s austerity first completely halted Labour’s carefully nurtured growth following the global banking crisis and the ensuing recession, and then caused the recovery we had generated to stall for three years.
Few Finance Ministers have pursued austerity with more vigour than Britain’s Chancellor. In 2013, he boasted that he had squeezed the UK economy more tightly than any of the other advanced economies. At least that claim was valid: Britain’s fiscal squeeze was twice as tight as in the USA or the eurozone. But it cost the country dear. When recovery finally came, it did so at a much slower pace than recoveries from earlier recessions: much more slowly than recovery from the recessions of 1973 to 1976, 1979 to 1983 or 1990 to 1993; more slowly even than recovery from the great depression of 1930 to 1934. It took the UK economy three years longer than America or Germany to get back to pre-crisis levels of GDP. This explains the assessment of the former chief of the Federal Reserve, Ben Bernanke, last October that austerity went too far in Britain after 2010.
Today the Chancellor remains behind schedule on debt and over budget on borrowing. He will continue to miss his targets, because his fiscal strategy for this Parliament is a carbon copy of the failed austerity policy he pursued in the last one. The Institute for Fiscal Studies expects growth between now and 2020 to be held back by the drag of “fiscal consolidation”—the technical term, as your Lordships will know, for cuts—which is greater in the UK than among any of the other OECD developed countries. As the Chancellor’s March Budget made clear, not only is austerity set to drive UK economic policy for the next four years but the fiscal squeeze will be tighter than before, and once again much tighter than anything envisaged by the world’s other advanced economies.
Missed debt and deficit targets are only the obvious indicators of failure. The real cause for concern is that economic growth is slowing down. The economy is running out of steam and losing momentum. Everywhere you look, growth forecasts are being downgraded. The CBI and the Bank of England downgraded theirs in February. In March, the Chancellor’s own financial housekeeper, the Office for Budget Responsibility, judged that growth was slower last year than the year before, and will be even slower this year. Last week, the IMF cut its forecast for UK growth in 2016 to less than 2%. Everyone is on the alert for further signs of a slowdown.
What is driving the Chancellor’s disastrous austerity strategy is his commitment to the neoliberal aim of shrinking the size of the state. His idea for constant budget surpluses except during a recession amounts to a 1920s-style pre-Keynesian recipe for a permanent squeeze on public spending after tax cuts that deliberately put a budget surplus beyond reach. It is the Osborne equivalent to the Tea Party’s “starve the beast” strategy in the US, which aims to cut back the role of the state. It is totally unnecessary if the aim is to cut the debt-to-GDP ratio, as the whole of our history for the last 200 years testifies, but it serves his ideological aim of small government.
There is an alternative which is economically credible and authoritative, a Keynesian policy to replace a failing neoliberal one. Our priority today should be faster, fairer, greener growth. We need growth because only an expanding economy can provide the resources needed to tackle the problems that confront society, such as chronic housing shortage, a decaying social infrastructure, inadequate educational opportunities, especially for the disadvantaged, combined with high student debt, a shortage of vocational skills, a mismatch between health and social care, lack of childcare and an accelerating crisis in elderly provision.
We need faster growth because that holds the key to bringing the public finances back into balance, to generating the work that 900,000 unemployed young people want and millions more unemployed, insecure or underemployed people need, and to raising real incomes. We need fairer growth because unequal societies are unhealthy societies in which everyone loses out as all forms of social ills rise and economic growth rates slow.
We need greener growth because without vigorous action to meet the threat posed by climate change, such as by backing a low-carbon economy and actively promoting renewable energy schemes, such as the entirely privately funded Severn Barrage, environmental disasters can only become more frequent and intense.
Contrary to the stifling grip of neoliberal orthodoxy within the Westminster bubble, faster, fairer, greener growth is eminently feasible. The scope for fiscal action to boost public investment in housing, in the social infrastructure, in training and skills and in green growth is substantial. It would mean the Government borrowing more today, yes, but in order to borrow less tomorrow by giving the economy a fiscal stimulus and raising Britain’s economic growth rate above the pedestrian 2.1% per year expected by the OBR for the next five years.
Would such a stimulus increase government borrowing? In the short term, as I say, yes, but in the medium to longer term, no. Boosting economic recovery may well require more public borrowing in the short term. It is the right thing to do to get the economy growing faster, to maintain the momentum of growth and reduce borrowing over the medium term. Higher public spending and borrowing today can mean lower borrowing tomorrow if it achieves faster growth, with tax revenues rising as total spending in the economy increases, and welfare bills falling as unemployment comes down.
It has been tried before and it has worked. President Obama’s 2009 stimulus package after the banking crisis added to the US federal deficit at the time, but US interest rates fell, spending and output rose and dole queues shortened. As a proportion of its expanding GDP, America’s overall deficit has shrunk every year since 2009.
A £30 billion per year increase in annual public investment for two years as part of a 10-year programme to renew Britain’s failing social infrastructure would give a boost to growth at a time when the OBR expects the economy to slow down. By contributing to a higher plateau of ongoing public infrastructure investment, it would also provide a spur to industrial innovation and faster future growth, as well as full employment. Higher current public spending paid for by a mix of higher, fairer taxation, extra charges and greater efficiency would allow us to protect public services from the worst of this Government’s planned spending cuts.
What makes faster growth feasible in the short term is the margin of spare capacity in the UK economy that could be brought back into operation, yielding extra, catch-up growth for several years, just as it did as Britain recovered from the depression between 1933 and 1936, when growth exceeded 4% per year, fuelled by a housebuilding boom—and do we not desperately need such a housebuilding boom now? The belated, slow, faltering economic growth under the Chancellor has delayed deficit reduction. Instead, scrapping austerity could have taken up—and could still take up—the slack in the economy, such as the millions of people who are underemployed and working fewer hours than they would prefer.
A stimulus of £30 billion per year for two years of extra capital investment in infrastructure, housebuilding, education, skills and a low-carbon industry would rapidly expand the economy and cut the budget deficit by boosting tax revenues as people earned and spent more, working hours rose and fewer families needed to look to the state for benefit support. Such a modest and, with historically low interest rates, eminently affordable £30 billion budget boost remains the only way to begin creating a fairer, more sustainable economy at the same time as bringing the public finances into balance.
The scope for doing so is much greater than the Government or the OBR will concede; for example, Oxford Economics noted in 2014 that if its estimate of the amount of slack in the economy, and thus the scope for faster growth, was correct,
“none of the spending cuts planned beyond 2014-15 would be needed to return the deficit to pre-crisis levels”.
By the time of the March 2015 Budget, the Oxford Economics team reckoned that Britain’s output gap was six times bigger than the OBR did, leaving plenty of room for fast, catch-up growth prompted by such a stimulus package.
Much the same argument, along with the case for growth, has convincingly been made by other eminent economists, such as Paul Krugman, Jonathan Portes, Simon Wren-Lewis, Martin Wolf, Bill Martin and Bob Rowthorn. We were reminded a few months ago by the Institute for Fiscal Studies that over the Labour decade up to the start of the financial crisis in 2007-08, the UK experienced an unprecedented period of sustained economic growth. GDP growth averaged 3% a year. That is the least we should be aiming for now.
By the way, to correct another myth, before the global financial crisis crashed all the economies of the world, the previous Labour Government ran a prudent, extremely successful economy, with record growth and employment, low interest rates, low inflation, low national debt and low borrowing—lower, indeed, than we had inherited from the Tories in 1997. Britain’s 2007 budget deficit was £39 billion, or 2.7% of GDP, before the banking crisis. It was dwarfed by the colossal cost of state support to Britain’s failing banks, which was equivalent to some 90% of GDP. Something a bit lower on the budget deficit scale in 2007 would therefore have been irrelevant to the stratospheric impact of the banking crisis or how the Government were able to manage it.
For 30 years after the Second World War, progressive Keynesian full employment policies combined with welfare state policies delivered economic and social stability right across Europe, promoting the necessary investment and faster economic growth, as well as more just, more equal societies and fewer class differences. For nearly four decades now, we have suffered from neoliberalism—that is to say, a small government ideology favouring market forces wherever possible and tolerating state regulation only where absolutely necessary. Economic and social inequality has widened massively. Not just the poor but the middle classes have experienced a relative decline in living standards while the rich have become super-rich. Meanwhile, Britain has a record trade deficit, dreadfully low productivity, manufacturing decline, ballooning private debt, yet another housing asset bubble, growing inequality, job insecurity and sluggish private investment. Some basis indeed for the Government’s claim that their economic plan is working.
Today, the stakes could not be higher: whether Britain can become a compassionate, much more equal society founded on a strong, productive technology sector; or whether we are to be condemned to have an economy plagued by financial short-termism, servicing the interests of only a rich elite. The alternative agenda, however, is emphatically not some wild, irresponsible, unelectable platform of tax and spend, as critics will doubtless complain of my prospectus. Instead, it invites a resurrection of Britain’s post-Second World War mission, based on hard-headed economics and evidence —a modernised Keynesianism, some might say. That, not the Government’s fetish for neoliberalism, should remain both the source of our inspiration and the vision for our age.
Wales Bill
Lord Hain Excerpts(11 years, 9 months ago)
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Nia Griffith
I am not casting aspersions on any individual list candidates. We have two excellent Labour list Assembly Members in west Wales—Rebecca Evans, who champions disability issues, and Joyce Watson, who champions human trafficking issues. They are doing an excellent job, because they are focusing on topics, not sitting like some great cuckoo on one constituency out of eight and making that their sole focus of attention, ignoring what is happening in important aspects of the other seven constituencies that they represent.
We have seen such abuse in Wales before. I am sure my right hon. Friend the Member for Neath (Mr Hain) will remind us again, as he has done many times, of the blatant abuse of the list system. He has quoted frequently from the leaked memorandum from Leanne Wood, the leader of Plaid Cymru, in which she gives explicit instructions to her party’s list Assembly Members to direct their time and resources, paid for by the taxpayer, to Plaid Cymru’s target seats.
Some people say that putting into the 2006 Act the clause that prevents an individual from standing for both the constituency and the list was a partisan move by the Labour Government, but we knew full well that it would also prevent our candidates from standing for both. We had at least four sitting constituency AMs who we knew were likely to be vulnerable to electoral change in the 2007 Assembly election and who could have hedged their bets by standing for both. That might have been very cosy for them, but as a matter of principle we knew how much the electorate hated it. On the doorsteps we heard people ask, “What difference will it make if we go out and vote?” It was extremely difficult to convince people after the Clwyd West scenario, because whoever the constituents voted for, all four parties were elected.
It was extremely important to us to stand by our principle, rather than making some sort of cosy situation for our AMs. In fact, I would go so far as to say that in some circumstances, depending on the specific arithmetic for the region, a candidate who could stand for both the constituency and the list could be pretty much guaranteed to be elected on one or other of them. That could breed a certain complacency, which would not serve the electorate well at all. We take issue with the accusation that this is a partisan point, because it is a point of principle. We strongly oppose clause 2, which seeks to turn the clocks back and allow dual candidacy. Our amendment therefore seeks to remove that clause from the Bill.
Our view is that the Assembly’s electoral arrangements should be decided in Wales, so we have also tabled an amendment proposing that an order should be laid in the Assembly by the Welsh Government before any change on dual candidacy can be implemented. I hope that Members will vote for our amendments.
Mr Peter Hain (Neath) (Lab)
I, too, wish to speak in favour of amendment 13 and against clause 2 remaining in the Bill. The Secretary of State and other Members who have taken part in our proceedings on the Bill might recognise some of my comments from my single transferable vote speech on dual candidature, because I remain firmly opposed to that abuse of democracy. However, I will be brief, because my favourite premiership player, Frank Lampard, is captaining England at 5 o’clock, and I know that even Members from Welsh constituencies, with the possible exception of our Plaid Cymru friends, will want to cheer them on in their final game.
I repeat my basic argument, which I have expressed throughout the Bill’s proceedings, and the rationale for my ban on dual candidature in the 2006 Act: it cannot be right for losers to become winners through the back door, despite having been rejected by the voters. That is an abuse of democracy. People who stand for a single-Member seat and then lose can end up being elected anyway, in defiance of the electorate’s wishes, because at the same time they are in a list category, and that is an abuse of democracy. There is no real argument against losers becoming winners in that way.
There was a widespread abuse practised by 15 of the 20 list AMs prior to the 2006 ban. They used taxpayers’ money to open constituency offices in the very single-Member seats in which they were defeated. They then targeted those seats at the following election by cherry-picking local issues against the constituency AMs who had beaten them. Why are they so afraid of taking their choice to the people, and why are the Government so afraid of democracy? Why are they so afraid of losing constituency elections that they need the lifebelt of standing for the lists as well? That is what the leader of Plaid Cymru, Leanne Wood, for whom I have considerable admiration despite all that, is doing in Rhondda. In a leaked memorandum written in August 2003, she was refreshingly honest about promoting abuse of the dual candidature system by list Members using taxpayers’ money.
Pete Wishart
I am genuinely interested in the right hon. Gentleman’s view on this issue. What advice does he have for Scottish Labour, which has just done a total U-turn on dual candidacy and is now allowing the practice to go on? Will he disparage Scottish Labour as much as he seems to be disparaging Plaid Cymru for carrying out this appalling act?
Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Dawn Primarolo)
Order. Before you answer, Mr Hain, let me make it absolutely clear that we are talking about dual candidacy in Wales, as I think you probably appreciate. This is a tightly drawn debate and that is the subject of the amendment.
Mr Hain
I am grateful for your guidance, Madam Deputy Speaker, which directly answers the hon. Gentleman’s point. I am speaking about Wales. I am not aware of serial abuses of the kind practised in Wales prior to the 2006 ban occurring in Scotland. Indeed, I think that the codes that apply in Scotland may be different. I note that the then Presiding Officer of the Scottish Parliament, Lord Steel, attacked dual candidature in terms very similar to mine.
Leanne Wood’s bible for dual candidature went on:
“We need to be thinking much more creatively as to how we better use staff budgets for furthering the aims of the party.”
She finished with a refreshing burst of honesty that, in an era of political spin, can only be commended:
“Regional AMs are in a unique position. They are paid to work full-time in politics and have considerable budgets at their disposal. They need not be constrained by constituency casework and events, and can be more choosy about their engagements, only attending events which further the party’s cause. This can be achieved by following one simple golden rule: On receipt of every invitation, ask ‘How can my attendance at this event further the aims of Plaid Cymru?’ If the answer is ‘very little’ or ‘not at all’, then a pro forma letter of decline should be in order.”
All the arguments and evidence I have cited in the past few minutes, in Committee and on Second Reading, demonstrate that the 2006 ban was not partisan but instead enhanced the democratic standards of all Welsh Assembly Members.
Indeed, I reminded the House at the time of the ban that six Labour Assembly Members, including three Ministers, would be defeated in the 2007 Assembly elections by a very small swing of 3% against them. They would not have the lifebelt of dual candidature, which I had removed; they would no longer enjoy the safety net of the regional list. Two of them subsequently did lose, as I said could happen. The reform affected Labour candidates and candidates of other parties alike, a point that my hon. Friend the Member for Llanelli (Nia Griffith) made so eloquently.
In conclusion, the Government have now officially blessed this practice—presumably, they will marshal the votes shortly to try to defeat our amendment—and it appears that they are, sadly, doing so with the blessing of the Electoral Commission. I therefore look forward to Labour being welcomed into the fold of running dual candidates again. After all, why should we lose out while everybody else takes advantage? Never mind the voters, let us put our own self-interest as political parties first. I trust that the Government will be proud of bringing politicians in Wales into even greater disrepute than the political class right across the United Kingdom. Tellingly, the Electoral Commission is endorsing that disrepute and the Secretary of State is now smiling in anticipation of that happening. That is the consequence of his reversal of this ban; he is opening the door again to the serial abuses which have been documented and proved beyond doubt. He is going to invite that very abuse of democracy in Wales by removing the ban and installing clause 2, which is the reason for supporting amendment 13.
Mrs Siân C. James (Swansea East) (Lab)
I wish to speak briefly in support of amendment 13 and against the removal of clause 2. I oppose dual candidacy simply because if a candidate is not elected by a constituency under the first-past-the-post system, it cannot be right for them to be elected under the list system. If the electorate have rejected someone once as their first-choice candidate, it is not acceptable for them to have the opportunity to re-enter the game through the back door. In mainstream society people get one chance at a job; if they are not successful at an interview, they have to accept the decision and they do not go back squealing to the prospective employers saying, “Can we change the rules now? Can I possibly be appointed under different criteria or under a different set of interview processes?” Things should be no different for politicians. There should be no swapping or alternatives; it should be the same for everybody.
Let us examine the attitudes towards dual candidacy. We have heard a lot of pooh-poohing of the Bevan Foundation’s inquiry and report, but my constituency took part in that inquiry and I did not see any party members participating; those who participated all came from local community groups and pensioners groups, were not affiliated to any particular party and were not aligned to any political point of view. Some of them were sceptical about devolution and the political process, whereas others were very supportive of it. Those who participated sent a clear message saying, “We are really concerned about the way politicians are behaving on the dual list system and about what is happening.”
The report found that more respondents said that
“dual candidacy was unfair compared with those who felt candidates should be free to stand in both.”
Someone who was interviewed said:
“I think it is unfair…It’s like people can sneak in the back door.”
Another said:
“It seems unfair in a way, surely if they weren’t popular enough they shouldn’t be able to get in.”
There has also been international criticism of the dual candidacy idea. Moves have been made to improve things in New Zealand and in Canada, and Canadian research states:
“Voters are displeased with the case where a candidate is not successful in a single member constituency, but is elected anyway by virtue of being placed on the top of a party’s list.”
In further support of my argument, I give the example of the unfairness—this has already been mentioned by colleagues—in the Clwyd West constituency. It puzzles most people in Wales that it was possible for all four candidates on the first-past-the post list to end up being elected. When I got into politics, a very wise old bird told me, “Siân, don’t get into politics if you’re not prepared to lose, because there’s only one winner.” We have totally turned that on its head with devolution and now anyone can be a winner, as long as they are at the top of their party’s list. I think the public find that difficult to understand and they are puzzled by it.
Mr Hain
Is the Secretary of State aware of the evidence that Professor Roger Scully has brought forward? A number of Asian countries have a similar ban, including Taiwan and South Korea, in similar circumstances. Does the Secretary of State think that he should withdraw the statement that he has just made?
Mr Jones
I clearly referred to a particular type of system, which is the majoritarian type. That is where the votes in the constituencies count towards the list elections. In Asia and Ukraine, there is something similar, but not under that type of system. I am pleased that the right hon. Gentleman refers to Professor Scully. In his evidence to the Welsh Affairs Committee during pre-legislative scrutiny of the draft Bill, he clearly said:
“If parties that are defeated at constituency level can still win representation through the list, then it is difficult to see why that should not also apply to individuals.”
In other words, what is the difference for this purpose between a party and an individual? That is Professor Scully’s view. To pray him in aid goes against the advice that he gave during pre-legislative scrutiny of the draft Bill.
Mr Hain
Notwithstanding that advice, Professor Scully was simply correcting the Secretary of State on his basic proposition. The point is this, and no one has disputed it: neither the Secretary of State nor the Minister have challenged one bit of evidence that we have brought forward, and which I have repeatedly cited, about the serial abuses in Wales under the dual candidacy system, which the Secretary of State is about to reintroduce. He offers no protection or guarantee that that serial abuse will not happen; it went on prior to the ban in 2006. In fact, his Bill is a charter for reopening that abuse.
Wales Bill
Lord Hain Excerpts(11 years, 11 months ago)
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Owen Smith
I am tempted to say that very few of my constituents—or, I suspect, those from any constituency in Wales—ever want to talk to me about the constitution, which seems to exercise Plaid Cymru all the time. Most people in Wales do not want to talk about the constitution: they want to talk about the cost of living crisis and the other problems that we have in Britain.
In conclusion, the evidence of the recent past in Wales suggests that the previous system was being abused. We have made a clear, principled non-partisan argument that the current system should be retained as it is. In so doing, we are striking a chord with the views of the Welsh Affairs Committee, which did not come to a final conclusion but did say, as a point of principle:
“we consider it unadvisable for electoral systems to be changed frequently. Successive changes to electoral systems risk being perceived as partisan by the public.”
This is clearly a partisan change. The public will see it for what it is and I am sure they would support us when, later this evening, we vote against clause 2 standing part of the Bill.
Mr Peter Hain (Neath) (Lab)
I welcome your Celtic insight into this debate affecting a Celtic neighbour, Dr McCrea. I apologise to you, and to those on both Front Benches, if I have to be out of the Chamber for the winding-up speeches.
I wish to speak on clause 2 stand part, a clause that reverses the ban on dual candidature, which this House legislated for in 2006. On Second Reading I provided detailed evidence about the widespread abuses of the dual candidacy system in Wales that led to it being banned under the Government of Wales Act 2006, which I introduced. None of that evidence was disputed or rebutted by the Government or any of the parties. I readily confess to being one of the Wales Ministers who, prior to devolution, took the original 1998 Government of Wales Bill through Parliament that permitted dual candidature, but I never for one moment imagined the abuses that it would produce and the antipathy it would create. Voters never understood that it was widespread practice, from when the Assembly was established in 1999 up until 2007 when it was banned, for candidates rejected by a particular constituency to secure back-door election as Assembly Members through the regional list. They were then even able to claim to represent the very constituency that had rejected them.
After reading the Government’s proposals for repealing the ban on dual candidacy, I have searched in vain for substantial arguments beyond cries of political partisanship. The truth is that the ban has affected all candidates of all parties by preventing each one from having a two-way bet with voters. The ban simply puts the voters in charge by ensuring that, if a candidate is defeated in the constituency vote, that candidate does not get elected in defiance of the popular will. At a time when the political class—all of us—are held in lower repute than at any time in the history of British democracy, the very idea that the Government are proceeding to ensure election losers become winners is absolutely extraordinary. It holds the electorate in utter contempt.
Let us examine the case advanced by Ministers. First, the Government have used evidence borrowed heavily from the Scottish elections, which are similar to ours in Wales, and manipulated evidence from the Arbuthnott report to support their case. Ministers claimed in the Green Paper that the Arbuthnott report on the situation in Scotland found no justification for the argument that public dissatisfaction with dual candidacy had a negative impact on voter turnout. They also used evidence from the Electoral Commission’s 2006 “Poll Position” report, which focused on voting in the National Assembly elections. Clearly, however, the Government chose only to reflect the contents of those reports selectively.
In fact, the Arbuthnott report quoted the Scottish social attitudes survey 2003, which found a high degree of opposition to party control of candidates on their regional election lists. Moreover, opposition to party control of the lists was particularly acute—this is the important point—because of public confusion with the system, exacerbated when regional Members of the Scottish Parliament appeared to get in through the back door having been defeated as constituency candidates. In the 2003 Scottish election Arbuthnott report, the public was indeed concerned that 88% of regional MSPs elected had fought and lost in constituencies. The closed list system was seen to have undermined the election result in these scenarios, as it raised questions of legitimacy for regional MSPs in voters’ minds. The Electoral Commission’s 2006 “Poll Position” report on voting in Wales clearly demonstrated that more than half the Welsh population—56.7%, to be exact—opposed the closed list system, which is still in place, and that more than 60% of the electorate preferred to be represented by just one Assembly Member.
Mr Hain
I would like to make a bit more progress, because although the hon. Gentleman was generous in taking interventions, his contribution lasted 40 minutes. I would prefer to be a bit briefer, and I normally am very generous.
The fact that, nevertheless, Scotland has retained dual candidature, in defiance of Lord Steel’s advice, is no reason for Wales to do the same. The Government simply will not acknowledge the fundamental democratic abuse of dual candidacy, which is that losers become winners, and that voters are second-guessed and contradicted by the system, their choices denied. The second significant measure the Scottish Parliament adopted after Arbuthnott tried to increase the accountability of regional MSPs to the electorate by changing the voting system and introducing an open list for regional candidates—not something this Bill provides—to give some measure of control for Scottish voters. That was done because the Scottish social attitudes survey 2003 found a high degree of opposition to the party control inherent in the list system. Voters in Wales enjoy no such privilege and the Government are not proposing to give it to us.
On the issue of dual candidacy, two different paths were followed: in Scotland it was through greater clarification of the roles of Members and by turning to open lists; and in Wales we felt that the ban was the right solution to dual candidacy abuse. Nearly a decade on from the Government of Wales Act 2006 I feel that we made the right choice, but much more must be done to give regional Assembly Members more accountability to the electorate. On candidacy, this Bill does nothing to further the evolution of Welsh democracy—indeed it puts it into reverse.
Over the past 15 years, the Scottish Parliament and Welsh Assembly have both evolved in different ways to better suit the needs of their individual electorates. As the Government’s proposal stands, we will return to some of the absurd anomalies we saw in 1999 and 2003. As has been mentioned, in Clwyd West in 2003 every one of the three losing party candidates nevertheless won. Let us also consider the following cases from the 1999 elections, when 17 out of the 20 regional Assembly Members elected lost constituency elections. Thus, more than three quarters of the regional AMs did not have a democratic mandate to represent people—voters had not voted for them—and 15 of these 20 had offices in the constituencies they failed to be elected in.
In the Conwy constituency the Lib Dem AM Christine Humphreys came fourth in the popular vote—she had less than 10% of the vote in Conwy—yet still became an AM for the North Wales region. In Wrexham the Plaid Cymru AM Janet Ryder came last in the constituency, with 2,659 votes—the constituency AM had 9,239 votes—and yet still became an AM through the back door. In Ynys Môn the Tory AM Peter Rogers won 6,031 votes, which put him third on the constituency list—the Plaid Cymru AM who won a majority had more than 16,000 votes—yet he still became an AM for the North Wales region. It is not a partisan argument but simply a truth to state that those results are fundamentally undemocratic.
In the 1999 election more than 215,000 Welsh men and women voted in the North Wales region. Were we to look at every individual who ran as a constituency candidate in that election and collate their votes, we would find that Christine Humphreys, Janet Ryder and Peter Rogers polled less than 6% of the total regional vote and yet still became AMs for that very same region. After two Assembly elections where this was a regular occurrence, and with almost half the population saying in 2006 that they did not understand how their electoral system worked, we sought to remedy confusion over how AMs could still get in through the back door. The ban on dual candidature was the right choice then and remains so now. We introduced the ban in 2006 to stop these anomalies and the confusion they produced in voters’ minds, but now the Government are proposing to start this all over again.
In 2006, Victoria Winckler, director of the Bevan Foundation, conducted a survey, which found broad support for the ban on dual candidacy. Her report also highlighted the need for greater education and understanding among the general public. This report qualified the findings of previous research into dual candidacy. It said that none of it had been sufficient to make a substantial case on whether or not the public were for or against it in elections, but that it did discover considerable public disquiet on the issue with broad support in favour of the ban.
Jonathan Edwards
If dual candidacy is so objectionable to the right hon. Gentleman’s party, will he explain why, when it was in power in Westminster in 2010, it did not ban it in Scotland or for the Assembly in London?
Mr Hain
I have already dealt with that matter, but I will, if I may, correct the hon. Gentleman. It is not objectionable to my party; it is objectionable to voters. That is the point about this, and we are representing the voters’ will.
Perhaps the great irony of the Government’s proposals is that when they released their Green Paper in 2011, they found what was described as a
“small majority of people opposed to the Government’s proposal to lift the ban”,
and yet they still carried on. The Government, who themselves have a small majority, now seek to overturn a small majority. A former Liberal Democrat leader and a Conservative Secretary of State backed my 2006 ban, as did the chairman of the Richard commission. The commission reported in 2004, recommending extra powers for the Assembly, which my 2006 Act delivered. Lord Richard told the Welsh Affairs Committee:
“There is something wrong in a situation in which five people can stand in Clwyd, none of them can be elected, and then they all get into the Assembly. On the face of it that does not make sense. I think a lot of people in Wales find that it does not.”
The eminent Welsh academic, Dr Denis Balsom, said in his evidence to the Richard commission:
“Candidates use the list as an insurance against failing to win a constituency contest. This dual candidacy can also confuse the electorate, who may wish to consciously reject a particular candidate only to find them elected via the list. It should remain a basic democratic right not to elect a particular candidate or to be able to vote a Member out.”
Ian Lucas (Wrexham) (Lab)
Does my right hon. Friend agree that the real objection to dual candidacy is that those individuals who are rejected are then let in by the parties through the back door, and not by the electorate?
Mr Hain
My hon. Friend expresses my argument well—indeed better in some respects. One motivation for reversing the 2006 ban expressed by Plaid Cymru was the loss of its unquestionably talented Assembly Member, Helen Mary Jones. On 9 January 2006, when I was Secretary of State for Wales and dual candidature was still permitted, Helen Mary Jones put out a press release in which she described herself as the “Llanelli-based Assembly Member”. In it, she complained about money spent on a hospital in Carmarthen instead of one in Llanelli. However, she should really have been supporting both hospitals. As a list Assembly Member for Mid and West Wales, she represented both towns. If she had really been discharging her list Member duties properly, she would not have discriminated between those two towns or their hospitals. Yet of all the parts of the list area which she represented, she targeted the one place where she had been narrowly defeated in 2003, invariably describing herself as the “Llanelli-based Assembly Member”. The 2006 Act stopped her describing herself as that, although in the meantime she had campaigned hard as the list Member and had won the seat back in 2007, only to lose it again in 2011. As the ban had kicked in by then, she no longer remained the list Member. That has made it much harder for her to win the seat back for the next elections in 2016.
Now I come to the pièce de résistance. If this Bill gets enacted unamended, the Plaid Cymru party leader, Leanne Wood, will be able to implement—indeed quite possibly is already implementing—the comprehensive strategy she laid out in a remarkably candid memorandum in August 2003 when she was a list Assembly Member. My hon. Friend the Member for Pontypridd (Owen Smith) has quoted from that document, so I will not do so—[Interruption.] I can if Members are disappointed.
Mr Harper
I have been listening carefully to the right hon. Gentleman’s argument and I do not understand this concept of the “back door”. I might be wrong— I am sure that Opposition Members will tell me if I am—but surely if party candidates are listed on the ballot paper and electors cast a vote in a regional ballot, which is a separate vote, they know the consequences of that vote. If someone on that list is elected based on the second vote that somebody casts, the voter will have known that that could happen. I do not know how the right hon. Gentleman can describe that as someone being elected by the back door.
Mr Hain
I realise that the hon. Gentleman is not a member for a Welsh seat, but the truth is that people in Wales feel that people are being elected by the back door when they turn down a particular individual as their constituency Member only to find that they are elected anyway. This description of such an election as “by the back door” seems to me to be valid.
Mr Hain
I want to make a little progress, if my right hon. Friend does not mind. I have a series of points to make in conclusion.
A Mrs Jones or Mr Davies living in Porth or Treherbert in the Rhondda constituency should be forewarned by Leanne Wood’s memorandum, which amounted to a charter for abusing their money as taxpayers. I would advise them not to bother to approach for help and to check first whether they fit into her game plan. That plan is not about helping either of them, but about helping her and her political party. She is extremely—some might say recklessly—honest about her real intentions.
In the memorandum, Leanne Wood urged Plaid Cymru Assembly list Members such as herself only to do casework not where it is needed—not where it might help Mrs Jones or Mr Davies—but where it might benefit Plaid Cymru in its target seats, now including the Rhondda. She advised her colleagues to attend civic and other events in the constituency only if they thought there were votes in it. I would say, “Those are your votes, Mrs Jones and Mr Davies. I would check it out first if I were you.” She urged Plaid Cymru Assembly list Members to concentrate tens of thousands of pounds on their local Assembly office budgets in their party’s target seats, such as Rhondda. Leanne Wood’s memorandum of August 2003 was entitled, “What should be the role of a Regional AM?” It made a perfect case for the ban on dual candidature in Wales, as my hon. Friend the Member for Pontypridd made clear by quoting in detail from it.
The Government are shamelessly proceeding to enshrine again in statute, in clause 2, the very practice that this Parliament banned eight years ago to prevent such abuses, of which there had been very many over the years.
Jessica Morden (Newport East) (Lab)
My right hon. Friend is making a brilliant and convincing argument against dual candidacy, as always, but does he agree that, as the Electoral Reform Society has said, at the very least changing the system back and forth risks undermining the stability of the electoral system? Should we not just stick with the system that we have?
Mr Hain
I completely agree. The change was made after evidence had been assembled for Parliament, and Parliament was convinced by that evidence.
There is a simple question that both supporters of the Bill and critics of this Parliament’s 2006 ban cannot answer. It is this: if candidates cannot persuade voters to vote for them, why should they nevertheless be forced on voters through the back door? The people of Wales are entitled to an answer, even if this Government cannot give it to them by ramming through this highly contentious, undemocratic and thoroughly objectionable clause in a Bill that otherwise, in its broad features, enjoys a fair degree of cross-party consensus.
The fundamental point is that the Government of Wales Act 2006, by introducing the ban, put the voters back in charge. If voters did not want to elect somebody, they did not have to do so. If they reject a candidate, that candidate should not end up representing them. We should keep the voters in charge by rejecting clause 2.
Albert Owen (Ynys Môn) (Lab)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Chope. I will not go over many of the issues that my right hon. Friend the Member for Neath (Mr Hain) raised, but he is absolutely right and I shall vote against clause 2 stand part because I believe that the restriction is right. The hon. Member for Forest of Dean (Mr Harper) has been trying to intervene repeatedly to say that people have a choice—they could vote for an individual on the constituency basis but then have some other choice on the list. That is not quite the case. The names are listed in order and the voter might like candidate No. 3 on the list, but they do not have the choice to vote for that person—they vote for a political party, and it is the political party that selects the people at the top of the list. Usually that is either to boost its vote in an area or to get a person in by the back door who has already failed. That is the simple fact of the process before the current restriction came in; it is a back-door one.
amendment of the law
Lord Hain Excerpts(12 years ago)
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Mr Peter Hain (Neath) (Lab)
I agree with the hon. Member for Cardiff North (Jonathan Evans) over Tata, but the one thing that cannot be said about the economy under this Chancellor is that it has recovered quickly from the shock of the global financial crisis. Total output still has not reached pre-crisis 2008 levels, quite unlike in the USA and Germany, both of which passed their 2008 peak back in 2011. What took them three years to achieve is taking the British economy under this Chancellor six years, and the reason is the savage cuts since 2010, a far tighter squeeze than in the USA or the eurozone. Under Labour, recovery was already well under way in the first half of 2010 when the Chancellor came into office. It was his policies that choked it off and the British people have been paying a heavy price ever since.
Today we have an unsustainable, out-of-balance recovery. The Chancellor acknowledged that neither investment nor exports are high enough. We already knew that higher consumer spending has come out of reduced savings, not out of higher incomes, because real incomes have been stagnating for years. It is a short-term recovery that cannot last. The ex-chair of the Financial Services Authority and ex-director general of the CBI, Adair Turner, said so in January at Davos when he warned:
“We have spent the last few years talking about the need to rebalance the economy away from a focus on property and financial services and towards investment and exports. We are now back to growth without any rebalancing at all…If you chuck enough monetary stimulus at an economy something happens. It is as if we have had a cracking great hangover, had a stiff drink and off we go again.”
A second factor making the situation unsustainable is that UK productivity has been flat for years. This pushes up unit costs and keeps our export prices higher. Our export predicament is dire. On top of that, we are witnessing a housing bubble again, with property prices rocketing in London in particular. In short, nothing fundamental has changed to avoid a rerun of a financial crisis brought on by a debt-financed consumer boom and a Government-backed housing bubble that sooner or later will burst, because bubbles always do burst.
Yes, the economy is recovering faster than forecast last year, but growth is forecast to be slower next year than this. The Chancellor expects the economy to run out of steam almost as soon as it starts to grow again, yet there is plenty of scope for much faster growth, and faster growth would mean less need for spending cuts and a quicker reduction in the Budget deficit.
The austerity programme, which this Budget continues to drive forward is based upon what I call the big deceit of British politics: that Labour “overspending” left the country with the mountainous levels of debt and borrowing which the Tory-Lib Dem Government inherited after the 2010 election. [Interruption.] The idea that the global credit crunch was caused by Labour’s public investment in Britain is risible. [Interruption.] The proposition that by building new hospitals and new schools, and by recruiting tens of thousands of extra nurses, doctors, teachers and police officers in Britain, Labour caused the sub-prime mortgage defaults in the US that ricocheted throughout the world’s financial institutions is preposterous. [Interruption.]
Robert Flello
It is amazing to hear the laughter from the Government Benches. Does my right hon. Friend recall, as I do, Conservatives standing up time and again saying there was far too much regulation of the banks and that they needed to reduce it?
Mr Hain
Absolutely.
It was not Labour’s public spending that triggered Britain’s or the world’s economic crisis; it was the global inter-dependency of reckless banking that the Conservatives wanted to be less regulated that in 2008 triggered an economic meltdown in Britain and right across the globe. [Interruption.] Labour responded by boosting public spending and borrowing to offset the catastrophic collapse in private sector spending, and the £90 billion spent on bank bail-outs plunged the public sector into record annual deficits, but these were deficits that stopped a shocking slide into a fatal slump and laid the basis for recovery from the biggest shock to hit the world economy in peacetime since the 1930s great depression. [Hon. Members: “Give way.”] If I have time at the end, I will.
Contrary to right-wing free market mantras and Tory-Lib Dem history rewrites, it was the banking crisis that caused debt to rocket, the deficit to rise and borrowing to rise as well. The low yields on UK Government bonds before, during and after the credit crunch under Labour bore eloquent testimony to the fact that the international markets had full confidence in its policies, and that they were not clamouring for the right-wing dogma subsequently visited upon Britain. Indeed, so desperate was the right hon. Member for Witney (Mr Cameron) to identify with Labour’s success on spending, investment, jobs and growth that he pledged to match Labour’s spending plans for three further years in September 2007 up to 2010. [Interruption.] Members on the Government Benches shake their heads, but that is what he did. If we had spent too much—if all the charges made by the Conservatives were true—why on earth would the current Prime Minister have backed our spending plans for three years ahead? It would help the quality of this debate and the quality of assessment of the Chancellor’s Budget if the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats had the decency to acknowledge that essential fact, including this Prime Minister’s support for our spending programmes, instead of ploughing on regardless, with no end to austerity in sight.
Mr Redwood
Why did the new and very expensive and complicated regulators the Labour Government introduced fail to control the banks when people like me were telling them they did not have enough cash for capital?
Mr Hain
I agree with the right hon. Gentleman to this extent: we did not regulate the banks well enough or carefully enough, but his party—not necessarily he, but his leadership—was saying that there should be less regulation of the banks at that time, yet now they have the temerity to attack our spending plans when we brought borrowing down. [Interruption.]
Madam Deputy Speaker (Mrs Eleanor Laing)
Order. All other speakers have been heard in silence. The right hon. Gentleman has livened up the debate, but he also ought to be heard.
Mr Hain
It is interesting how those on the Government Benches do not like to hear the truth, Madam Deputy Speaker. The level of debt under the Labour Government before the banking crisis was lower than we inherited from the Conservatives in 1997. We brought borrowing down and we brought the deficit down compared with what we inherited, and yes we invested in repairing the desperate state of our public services—people dying on trolleys in hospitals, schools crumbling, the railways decaying. We repaired all of that and then the banking crisis came along and blew it out of the water. There was a failure by every Government right across the world to recognise the seeds of that banking crisis, but it was not caused by Labour overspending, and not caused by Labour high borrowing or high debt, because none of those things was going on prior to the banking crisis. If we had not dealt with the banking crisis in the way that we did, the whole of the economic and banking system in Britain would have collapsed. We need decency and honesty from Government Members and acknowledgement of that central fact.
Spending Review
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Mr Osborne
My hon. Friend is right, and in the end this is about choices. I say to all the Labour Members getting ready to ask questions that, given that the Labour leader says that he will take these resource plans as a starting point, if they complain about any cut, they have to suggest what else they would cut. We have made choices as a Government. We have committed to protecting the NHS, committed to schools, committed to the pupil premium—we have done these things because we want a fairer society, and we also believe that investing in infrastructure and growth enhances our country’s economic performance. Those are our choices: if people have an alternative plan, we have not heard of it.
Mr Peter Hain (Neath) (Lab)
Why does the Chancellor think he is so right, and Keynes wrong?
Mr Osborne
We have drawn on the best economic evidence that the recovery from a banking crisis of the severity that we went through is long and protracted, but we have to de-lever as an economy and try to fix our banking system. That is what I set out at the Mansion House. We also have to have a credible fiscal policy in order to allow monetary policy to be loose. I think that is the best economic approach.
amendment of the law
Lord Hain Excerpts(13 years ago)
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Mr Peter Hain (Neath) (Lab)
Contrary to the Chancellor’s mantra, Britain’s return to recession was not made in Europe. It was made in Britain by the severe fiscal squeeze that the Chancellor launched nearly three years ago. Problems in the eurozone spell trouble for the UK economy—of course they do—but the Chancellor never mentions the fact that Britain has benefited from the recovery of the USA economy, which accounts for 20% of our trade, and is currently growing four times faster than the eurozone is slowing, because the USA took the route of economic stimulus and stuck to it. Britain set out on the same path under Labour after the banking crisis, and the economy began to pick up. However, the coalition veered off as soon as the Tories and Lib Dems took office, turning the road to recovery under Labour into the road to ruin.
Cutting too far and too fast means that the Chancellor has missed all his key targets. In the year that is ending, his target deficit—the cyclically adjusted current deficit as a share of gross domestic product—is twice what he originally said it would be. Next year, the Office for Budget Responsibility expects it to be four times what he planned. He has also missed his public sector debt target: instead of falling to 67% of GDP in 2015-16, under the Budget it will fall to 85% two years later, in 2017-18. That is a surreal definition of success: debt falling upwards. Salvador Dali would be proud.
Zero growth has forced the Chancellor to accept higher borrowing targets—more than £200 billion higher over five years than he planned in 2010. Most of the cuts that have been announced have yet to hit home. Cuts and austerity will continue Britain’s economic inertia, with more disastrous, scorched earth economics to come. Growth, not cuts, should be the priority. Sadly, there is plenty of spare capacity in the UK economy, which could easily grow quite quickly for a few years by taking up the slack, with borrowing, the deficit and debt falling. Jonathan Portes, former chief economist at the Cabinet Office, said:
“A few years of 3% growth—and given the amount of spare capacity in the UK economy, there is no reason that should be infeasible…—and much of the problem will simply vanish”.
Growth is the magic bullet for overcoming our deficit and debt problems.
Mr Hain
Cuts have fuelled the recession because they have driven demand out of the economy. Getting the economy growing again, as I said, is the key to cutting the deficit, then stabilising and bringing down the debt burden. Once the economy is growing again, it will be much easier to deliver any remaining tax rises or spending cuts that may still be necessary because, as Jonathan Portes says, jobs will be plentiful, real incomes will rise and companies will invest again.
The Tory charge is that Labour would increase borrowing. The answer is, yes, in the short term, we would, but to reduce borrowing in the long term. Borrowing more today can mean borrowing less tomorrow by getting the economy growing again. President Obama’s 2009 stimulus package added to the US federal deficit in the short term, but as US interest rates fell, spending and output rose, and dole queues shortened. As a proportion of America’s expanding GDP, its overall deficit has shrunk every year since 2009, contrary to what has happened to our deficit. A budget boost that triggered real recovery in Britain could follow the same pattern, speeding up the growth of UK national income, cutting the deficit as a proportion of GDP and causing the debt burden to fall.
That is what the Budget should have been about, but old habits die hard as the coalition partners continue to peddle their big deceit. First, they said that the entire global banking crisis was caused by Labour recruiting far too many nurses, doctors, teachers and police officers, and that the trigger for the world financial collapse—sub-prime mortgage defaults in the USA—was all Labour’s fault. The second big deceit is their claim that today’s public sector deficit was caused by excessive Labour spending. To quote utterances of almost every Conservative MP as if on a dreary looped tape, too much Labour borrowing led to too much national debt, so the cuts are all Labour’s fault. They never admit the truth. They never say why, if spending was “out of control” and wildly excessive, the Chancellor in September 2007 committed a Tory Government to matching Labour’s public spending plans for the next three years, up to 2010.
The Chancellor knew only too well that Labour’s spending was affordable, otherwise he would not have signed up to that. The Tories never acknowledge that, until the global banking crisis, British Government debt was low, below that of France, Germany, the USA and Japan, and lower than when we took over from the Tories in 1997. Ten years of steady economic growth under Labour allowed us to pay down debt by the equivalent of £90 billion today, saving taxpayers some £3 billion a year in interest payments. We did fix the roof while the sun was shining.
Between 1997 and 2007, annual Labour borrowing averaged only one third of annual borrowing by the Thatcher and John Major Governments. This is the fourth dreadful Budget by a dreadful Government. It is the same old story from the same old Tories: Budget day blues for Britain. The Chancellor is playing a peculiar game of leapfrog with himself. Every Budget brings worse news. Every autumn statement confirms that things are worse than expected. The Government are failing on growth, failing to improve living standards, and failing on their debt, borrowing and deficit targets. They have got to make way for Labour.
Richard Graham (Gloucester) (Con)
Brushing aside the unhappy attempt by the right hon. Member for Neath (Mr Hain) to rewrite recent history, I shall move on swiftly to discuss the Budget.
Let us begin with the introduction of £10,000 tax-free income.
Richard Graham
The right hon. Gentleman has had his chance.
I absolutely relate to my hon. Friend the Member for Reading West (Alok Sharma) and his aspiration that everyone on the minimum wage should in due course pay no income tax. That was a magnificent announcement of Conservative and coalition policy to help those who work hardest on the lowest incomes, and we should all applaud it.
Secondly, the Leader of the Opposition made a great deal recently of apologising for Labour’s axing of the 10p rate, and he now wants to bring it back, but while he is busy executing a second U-turn on 10p tax, my constituents, especially the many thousands who will benefit from the changes in the Budget, prefer the simple Conservative and coalition approach of zero tax for the lowest paid.
The whole House should unite in applauding the Government for announcing an employment allowance of £2,000, which can be used by small businesses for apprentices or new employees who are older, and can help to continue to bring down youth unemployment, which in my constituency of Gloucester, as a result of all the new apprenticeships that started last year, fell by 18% in 2012. Ten days ago, during national apprenticeships week, I visited three new apprentices in Gloucester, in real estate, golf clubs and ski centres, and if ever there was an example of how apprenticeships have spread through previously unknown sectors those three new apprentices proved it. That is why the Government should go on supporting apprenticeships and bringing the young into employment.
Today, housing is at the core of the debate, and I believe that it is the key to growth stimulus, as it was after the recession of the 1930s and the recession of the second world war. The Centre for Cities rightly said in its recent note that
“there is one area where effective interventions have the potential to generate jobs and growth in the short term: housing.”
It went on to say that
“100,000 new houses…could boost Gross Domestic Product by 1% and support up to 150,000 jobs.”
The Centre for Cities, which recently moved Gloucester up the ratings for cities from 49th to 21st, is clearly a research institute to be followed closely, and I agree with its conclusions on the ratings and with its analysis on the importance of housing.
The right hon. Member for Leeds Central (Hilary Benn) said that he believed that the response to the Budget on housing was largely critical. He was right in one respect, as the National Housing Federation said:
“The Government should be focusing on unlocking investment to build more new homes”.
However, we cannot new build new homes unless there is a market for them, which is why the Government’s policy, through help to buy, of providing £3.5 billion for new homes, will make a significant difference to make sure that people can afford to buy those new homes. The National House Building Council said that it is
“great news that housing has been the centre piece of this Budget. This is a positive step for homebuilders and homeowners alike.”
Both Barratt and Persimmon welcomed the development, and Barratt said:
“We are now gearing up to meet the increase in inquiries that we expect to see.”
Food Banks (Wales)
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Kevin Brennan
The hon. Gentleman calls into question whether the Lib Dems are the successor party. That is another debate for another day. Perhaps Lib Dem members of this Government should recall the words of David Lloyd George as we debate food banks and poverty. In presenting his “people’s Budget” 104 years ago, in 1909, he said:
“This…is a war Budget. It is for raising money to wage implacable warfare against poverty...I cannot help hoping and believing that before this generation has passed away, we shall have advanced a great step towards that good time, when poverty, and the wretchedness and human degradation which always follows in its camp, will be as remote to the people of this country as the wolves which once infested its forests.”—[Official Report, 29 April 1909; Vol. 4, c. 548.]
I am afraid that under this Government, the wolves of poverty are back, along with the sharks who prey on the financial misfortunes of the poor with their high-rate loans.
Mr Peter Hain (Neath) (Lab)
Will my hon. Friend comment on a particular feature of the Neath food bank? Some 1,400 people in the Neath area are dependent on the food bank. Around half of those are in work. It is not solely people on benefits who are dependent on food banks; people in work are, too. The Wales Office website has still not taken down the Secretary of State’s commitment that people in work will always be better off than they would be on benefits. Those people are dependent on food banks in my constituency.
Kevin Brennan
Indeed. In a recent debate led by my hon. Friend the Member for Liverpool, Wavertree (Luciana Berger), my hon. Friend the Member for Cardiff South and Penarth (Stephen Doughty) mentioned that he had collected food for FareShare in Penarth. Many of the people being helped by the food bank were not the people one might expect, but people in work who were struggling to get by. The hon. Member for Monmouth (David T. C. Davies) has been keen to intervene; I note that a new food bank has opened up in Chepstow. I am sure that he will pay it a visit shortly, if he has not already done so.
In Wales, the rapid expansion of food banks is a subject that resonates and rankles. It is symptomatic of an approach by the Government that represents a shift away from the British belief in the importance of social security, founded by the three great Welsh pioneers and symbolised by the old-age pension, national insurance and the national health service, and its replacement with the alien American concept of welfare stigmatism—the demonisation of the poor and the replacement of the state’s responsibility with the vagaries of the charitable handout. The good society has been gazumped by the ill-named “big society”, in which well-meaning individuals try to patch the gaping holes created by austerity economics.
LIBOR (FSA Investigation)
Lord Hain Excerpts(13 years, 9 months ago)
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Mr Osborne
Yes, I do. My understanding, although I have not spoken to him directly, is that the director of the Serious Fraud Office feels that he is well resourced to undertake the investigations he is undertaking.
Mr Peter Hain (Neath) (Lab)
Does the Chancellor accept that public confidence in his Government, the Crown Prosecution Service and the police will be totally destroyed if no prosecution results for the bankers who rigged the LIBOR rate? Whatever the specifics of banking legislation, an offence has been committed—conspiracy to defraud—and that is what the police should be investigating in a criminal investigation.
Mr Osborne
The Serious Fraud Office is absolutely independent of Government, but it will be in no doubt that this House and the Government want to ensure that the law is properly enforced and that if there are legal avenues that it can explore, it should use them. We must accept that the Financial Services Authority, which is also a prosecuting authority in respect of financial crime, does not feel that it was given enough powers to undertake a criminal prosecution, as Lord Turner has said very clearly. That is why I want to give the regulators the powers they need. Instead of spending two or three years getting to that point—a long public inquiry would take a year or two, after which the Government would go away, consult, publish a White Paper and introduce legislation, and it would be 2015 or 2016 before we did anything—I propose that we use the Financial Services Bill that is already before the House and next year’s banking Bill to put things right.