Oral Answers to Questions
Debate between Lord Young of Cookham and Mark Harper(9 years, 4 months ago)
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Sir George Young (North West Hampshire) (Con)
T4. Does my right hon. Friend agree that as unemployment continues to fall, we have a golden opportunity to offer work to those with a learning or physical disability? Will he confirm that programmes such as Work Choice and Access to Work and the work of his Department’s disability employment advisers will continue to have top priority, so that we can make yet further progress?
The Minister for Disabled People (Mr Mark Harper)
I completely agree with my right hon. Friend. In fact, the latest labour market statistics show that disabled people are sharing in the jobs that are being created, with more than 258,000 more disabled people in work over the last year, including 75,000 in the south-east, which will cover his constituency, and there are particularly sharp rises in the number of those with learning disabilities getting jobs, which he specifically asked about.
Fixed-term Parliaments Bill
Debate between Lord Young of Cookham and Mark Harper(13 years, 7 months ago)
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Mr Harper
And I know my right hon. Friend always means what he says.
The Bill’s key principle is that my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister is giving up the power to seek the Dissolution of the House. Previous Prime Ministers have exercised that power for their own party advantage. That principle of having fixed-term Parliaments was welcomed by the Chairman of the Select Committee and by the right hon. Member for Blackburn, who speaks for the Opposition; indeed it was in his party’s manifesto.
At this point, I should just add to the comments of the Deputy Prime Minister last week and the hon. Member for Garston and Halewood today. I will miss the contributions from the Front Bench of the right hon. Member for Blackburn. He and I have sparred in this Chamber a number of times, and I have always listened carefully to the guidance he has given me on how to deal with the House. I hope Members feel I have learned something from him. I leave it up to others to decide whether what I have learned is, as the right hon. Member for Knowsley (Mr Howarth) said, low cunning or whether I have some way to go in that regard. I should say that I thought the right hon. Gentleman dealt very well with the point raised by my hon. Friend the Member for Louth and Horncastle (Sir Peter Tapsell) about what happened in 1950 and how that could perfectly well have been dealt with by our Bill. The expert way in which the right hon. Gentleman did that showed that he is secretly quite supportive of the Bill.