Budget Resolutions
Debate between Wes Streeting and Mike Gapes(7 years, 8 months ago)
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Wes Streeting
The right hon. Gentleman makes a powerful and important point. Unless we get to grips with that, not only will those people suffer as they fall below the line and can no longer keep their heads above water, but the economy itself will suffer. Even the sluggish growth over which the Government have presided since they took office has been driven by an increase in household debt. What happens to those families, and what happens to the economy, when the money dries up—when there can be no more lending, or when families can no longer service their debt? Of course, it is not just national insurance or, indeed, income tax that the poorest pay. Other forms of taxation have a disproportionate and regrettable impact on them: VAT, council tax, and other unprogressive tax measures are causing them to become the very worst off.
If that were not bad enough in itself, it was explicitly ruled out in the Conservative manifesto, not just once but four times. It is a bit rich for the Chancellor to come to the House and talk about the small print produced by companies, and for his Ministers to tidy up the mess the next day at the Dispatch Box by talking about the small print in the National Insurance Contributions Bill. This is a broken promise, plain and simple. Not only was it in the manifesto; it was a central line of Tory attack. The Tories were wrong to warn at the last election that a Labour Government would somehow cause chaos and instability. Look at the mess they are presiding over now, and look at what they have done to the country in the short time since that election!
Mike Gapes (Ilford South) (Lab/Co-op)
My hon. Friend has referred to the Conservative manifesto. That was the same manifesto that committed the Government to staying in the single market. The lesson, surely, is that Conservative manifestos are worth nothing, not even the paper they are written on.
Wes Streeting
I entirely agree. I am not sure how many experienced, wise leaders of the NHS and local councils could come forward and warn the Government about not just an impending crisis, but a crisis that is affecting hospitals and care services in each of our constituencies today. What more will it take for the Government to show the courage, and find the money, to fund social care? Imagine what a cross-party commission led by the likes of my hon. Friend the Member for Leicester West (Liz Kendall), the right hon. Member for North Norfolk (Norman Lamb) or the hon. Member for Totnes (Dr Wollaston) could do to build a health and social care model for the 21st century.
Was it not a travesty that, as schools in our constituencies faced cuts in their budgets, the Chancellor chose to arrive yesterday with a funding package that would benefit a small number of pupils at a few selective schools? What do Ministers have to say to headteachers and parents in my constituency, or to the pupils who attend the vast majority of schools in my constituency, about the fact that they face on average a funding cut of £188 per pupil per year? I do not need an opinion poll to tell me that there are a few things that people, whether they vote Labour or Conservative, expect the Government to do, and among them are to make sure that we have decent hospitals and well-funded schools. It is a scandal that so much of the educational progress made in my city and across the country, led by the last Labour Government and following on since then, is being put at risk because of swingeing budget cuts to schools. What sort of Government choose to cut education for the next generation while also cutting the tax bill for the very wealthiest?
The flimsiness of the Budget Red Book—for once it did not take long to get through—betrays the fragility of our economy. In the long list of supposed good news the Chancellor arrived with yesterday, a few facts were missing. This was the ninth Budget by a Conservative Chancellor since 2010, and what do we have to show for it? We have the only developed economy that has a growing economy but falling real wages; rising costs of living, but wages still at pre-crash levels; a widening productivity gap holding back growth and depressing wages; a weaker currency fuelling inflation that households and businesses can ill afford; a failure to meet the Tories’ own targets for debt and deficit reduction because they have never understood the need to balance spending cuts with investment for growth; and a failure to meet their own welfare cap because of their failure to tackle unemployment, under-employment, casualisation of the labour market and exploitation by unscrupulous employers, which leaves a welfare system that lacks the confidence of the majority of the public but also fails the people who need it most. That is the very worst of all worlds, and even now, in the wake of a Brexit vote driven in large part by the votes of people who have been left behind, we have a Government willing to preside over rising child poverty, public services at breaking point, and an economy ill equipped for the challenges that lie ahead.
It should not take dragging a former—Conservative—Prime Minister out of retirement to tell this Government that the way they are handling the single biggest issue facing our country, the departure from the EU, and the path they have set us on is putting the economy at risk. What John Major said was very straightforward:
“There is a choice to be made, a price to be paid; we cannot move to a radical enterprise economy without moving away from a welfare state. Such a direction of policy, once understood by the public, would never command support. It would make all previous rows over social policy seem a minor distraction.”
Sir John Major could have been reading from the Labour party script on this issue. There we have it: a former Conservative Prime Minister holding up the truth that we on the Labour Benches know, which is that unless the Government negotiate a smooth and sensible exit from the EU, they will consign this country to being a small tax haven off the north-west coast of Europe, unable to meet the needs of their people and unable to make sure that prosperity is shared.
Of course, it is not just John Major who has concerns: the former Chancellor, the right hon. Member for Tatton (Mr Osborne), told the House that this Government have chosen not to make the economy the priority. When so much of this country’s economic success relies on trade abroad, when we have the largest single market in the world on our doorstep, and when being a member of the customs union gives us access to more trade agreements than are enjoyed by any leading economy in the world, for a Government to decide not to make the economy the priority is reckless and irresponsible.
Mike Gapes
My hon. Friend is making a very powerful speech. He mentioned the former Chancellor’s remarks, and the Government’s position is clearly that immigration is the priority. The Government’s target of a reduction to 100,000 seems a bit strange, however, given that the forecasts in the Red Book are based on the assumption that 185,000 migrants will come into this country in 2021; that is the Office for Budget Responsibility statistic on which the forecasts are based. How can the Government reconcile the 100,000 and the 185,000 figures, and surely the economy will be in a worse position based on those facts?
Wes Streeting
I agree with my hon. Friend. I have lost count of the number of times I have heard calls for a real debate on immigration, but a real debate requires an argument. There are undoubtedly real sensitivities and concerns about immigration in communities across the country, not least when people feel that their own wages have been depressed because employers are able to bring in cheaper labour from abroad to undercut the pay, terms and conditions of local workers. For me, that is an issue of social injustice that Governments need to tackle. However, we have an ageing population and a shrinking working-age population, and we can barely afford the pensions bill. We need a greater working-age population to come to this country, do their work and pay their taxes. Any politician who says that immigration is a price that this country cannot afford must also come to the House and tell us how they plan to pay for the public services on which every citizen in this country relies.
We must grasp the reality of the immigration debate. If we continue to fail to address the genuine and well-founded concerns about immigration while pandering to the myths about it, we will set this country on a course that will make us poorer, and that would be the worst possible response to the EU referendum. If people went to the ballot box and voted to leave the European Union because they felt left behind by globalisation in a world that was changing around them, imagine the betrayal they would feel if, having been sold the promise of a brighter future, they found that jobs were drying up, the economy had been left behind and the public services on which they relied were being decimated. That is the real risk of a botched Brexit.
In the context of a rapidly changing global economy in which jobs are changing, huge digitalisation is taking place and a new industrial revolution is sweeping the country at a pace and scale that we have never seen before, the purpose of the Labour party has never been more relevant or more urgently needed. More than 100 years ago, the party was founded to champion the interests of labour over the interests of capital. In a future of deregulation and a loss of jobs because they no longer exist in huge sectors of the economy, it is the job of the Labour party to protect the interests of labour.
When we look at what this Budget does to the self-employed, the strivers and the people across the private sector who make up the backbone of the economy and at what it does to public services, and when we look at how the Government are botching Brexit, we can see that it is long past time for the Labour party to take this lot apart. People across the country are counting on us to be an effective Opposition and an alternative Government. That is the job that we must face up to, and we need to start doing it sooner rather than later.
Sri Lanka: Human Rights
Debate between Wes Streeting and Mike Gapes(8 years, 4 months ago)
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Wes Streeting
The hon. Gentleman is a long-standing champion in this House of highlighting the persecution of Christians and demanding, quite rightly, that the issue gets greater Government focus and attention. Although a smaller religious minority in Sri Lanka, the Christian population is there none the less and also faces human rights abuses that must be recognised, tackled and dealt with effectively.
The Sri Lankan civil war ended in May 2009 and lasted some 26 years. It was primarily between the LTTE—the Tamil Tigers—and the Sri Lankan Government army. It is estimated that up to 100,000 people were killed during the course of the bloody conflict. In 2009, the then Foreign Secretary, David Miliband, described the brutality in the north of the country as a “war without witness”. Since the conclusion of the civil war, so much of that witness testimony has come forward. In my constituency surgery, I have been horrified by the descriptions of what people have suffered, and I have met constituents who bear not only the mental scars, but the physical scars of that conflict. Serious allegations of human rights abuses have been made by both sides of the conflict, including allegations of murder, sexual violence, torture, disappearances, the use of civilians as human shields and the use of child soldiers. Mines were used in the conflict, although many have been removed since the war ended. Many of the people at the top of Sri Lankan society—Ministers, military leaders, and figures in the judiciary and in wider civil society—are suspected of being complicit in many of the atrocities that took place.
Mike Gapes (Ilford South) (Lab/Co-op)
As my hon. Friend knows, there are more Tamil constituents in the south of our borough than in the north. But we also have Sri Lankans living in London, and in other parts of Britain, who have come from the other communities. It is important that in this process we try also to get reconciliation in the diaspora. Does he agree that one way to bring that about would be if the Sri Lankan Government could guarantee that people from the UK, or elsewhere in the world, from the diaspora who wish to go back to visit their place of birth or their family will be protected? There is enormous fear, for understandable reasons, among many people living in this country that things will happen to them or to their relatives if they do return.
Wes Streeting
I certainly agree with my hon. Friend and neighbour about that. One thing I find encouraging about the Tamil and Sinhalese population in my constituency is that a number of events are held throughout the year where they come together. That is the spirit of reconciliation we need to promote, not just in the diaspora, but in Sri Lanka. We are pushing for a process of truth, justice and reconciliation. Indeed, in the 2009 speech I mentioned earlier, David Miliband told this House:
“How the conflict is ended will have a direct bearing on the prospects for long-term peace in the country. The Government there must win the peace as well as the war.”—[Official Report, 30 April 2009; Vol. 491, c. 1050.]
Members in the Chamber this afternoon will be aware that the closing weeks and days of the Sri Lankan civil war were among some of the most brutal and bloody, and certainly the Government of Rajapaksa gave very little encouragement that we could find that process of truth, justice and reconciliation. The election of President Sirisena last year offered some hope that there would be an opportunity for Sri Lanka to move forward, as he pledged both reform and reconciliation. I acknowledge that progress has been made under that Government, but what I will set out this afternoon is the fact that the demands of the UN Human Rights Council resolution passed in October 2015 are not yet being fully implemented. The progress being made by the Sri Lankan Government is too slow. Many of the public statements made by senior Government figures are directly contrary to the demands of that resolution, particularly in respect of international involvement in the prosecution of historical alleged war crimes.
That resolution set out judicial and non-judicial measures needed to advance accountability, reconciliation, human rights and the rule of law. It was very encouraging that the Sri Lankan Government co-sponsored that resolution and that it passed unanimously. Although the resolution did not go as far as many of us would have wanted, the compromise was worth while, in binding the Sri Lankan Government to that resolution. That is why we must make sure that it is delivered to the letter.
Although it should be acknowledged that some initial progress has been made, with the release of civilian land and the establishment of an office of missing persons, the update produced by the Human Rights Commissioner last month shows that there is still much more progress to be made if the resolution is to be met and justice is to be obtained. Much more needs to be done to speed up efforts to investigate missing persons and to provide confidence to their families that the search is serious. The UN working group on enforced or involuntary disappearances ranks Sri Lanka as the country with the second highest number of disappearances in the history of its tenure,
The Sri Lankan Government must also do more to improve transparency and communication in relation to their consultations, having promised to engage in broad terms in national consultations and created a consultation taskforce on reconciliation mechanisms in February 2016. Progress in this area has again been slow. The taskforce has not yet begun regional consultations, which, given the nature of the geography and the demography of Sri Lanka, are absolutely essential, and the UN special rapporteur on transitional justice has criticised the process. Indeed, there are many people in the diaspora, including those in my constituency and, I suspect, in other constituencies, who want their voices to be heard and who also deserve to have their say in the consultation process.
It is also worth noting that those consultations that have taken place, for example on the creation of the Office for Missing Persons, have been short and their findings not shared with the public. Instead, in this particular case, they were shared only with a small number of civil society groups, which were given just two weeks to respond. Given the gravity of the issues being discussed, that is wholly unsatisfactory.
The delay in the implementation of the UN Human Rights Council resolution has to be addressed if confidence in the process is to be maintained. This afternoon, there are three key areas to which I wish the Minister to respond. First, there is the issue of international involvement in the prosecution of war crimes. Despite agreeing to
“the importance of participation in a Sri Lankan judicial mechanism, including the special counsel’s office, of Commonwealth and other foreign judges, defence lawyers and authorised prosecutors and investigators”,
public statements have been made by the President and the Prime Minister of Sri Lanka stating that the judicial process will be domestic with no foreign or international involvement, which is wholly unacceptable. It is completely contrary to the resolution that was passed and the resolution that the Governor of Sri Lanka set up.
NHS in London
Debate between Wes Streeting and Mike Gapes(8 years, 8 months ago)
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Wes Streeting
I am grateful to the Chair of the Public Accounts Committee for giving us that insight, which gives me even greater cause for concern about our local situation in Redbridge. The overall gap in funding for the NHS should be a concern to the whole country.
In my borough in particular, I am concerned by a report produced for NHS England by McKinsey & Company in, I believe, July 2014. The report has just been released by NHS England following a freedom of information request, and it identifies a Barking, Havering and Redbridge system gap of £128 million for commissioners and £260 million for providers. I am concerned by several things. One is that one way in which McKinsey identified that the BHR system will be able to address that gap is through acute reconfiguration of King George hospital, where the accident and emergency department is threatened with closure. I am deeply disappointed that, at a recent meeting of the Ilford North Conservatives attended by the hon. Member for Richmond Park (Zac Goldsmith) for his London mayoral campaign, the Conservatives once again stood up and said, “People should not worry about the accident and emergency department, because we always say it’s going to close and it never does.” The only reason why the accident and emergency department at King George hospital is still there is not because of a positive decision to keep it but because the NHS trust and the local health economy are in such a mess that it would not be clinically safe to close it at this time; the accident and emergency department is still very much at risk.
Mike Gapes (Ilford South) (Lab/Co-op)
The national health service bureaucracy has been trying to close the A&E at King George hospital since 2006. We are coming up to the 10th anniversary of the misnamed “Fit for the Future” document. My hon. Friend’s predecessor, Lee Scott, and I fought a vigorous campaign to stop the closure at the time, and the closure decision was deemed to be clinically unsound. Now, the Trust Development Authority is in charge, and the A&E cannot be closed because the trust is not out of special measures. My hon. Friend has mentioned the trust’s chief executive, Matthew Hopkins, who was hoping to get out of special measures by the end of the year, but that has not happened. We are still in a period of great uncertainty.
Wes Streeting
I agree with my hon. Friend and I welcome him back to Parliament this week after his break. [Interruption.] I know that he has gone to extraordinary lengths to test the resilience of the NHS in London and that he will talk about that shortly. We look forward to it.
In all seriousness, the A&E department is still at risk and many of my constituents worry that it is the financial drivers that are pressing ahead with the closure, rather than the clinical drivers. As my hon. Friend has said, given the length of time since the original case for closure was prepared and since the decision to close was made, it is not unreasonable to ask the Minister to commit to reopening that closure decision and to look at the issue with a fresh pair of eyes, testing whether the evidence base is still there, testing the assumptions that were made when the original closure proposal was put forward and giving people the assurance that it is clinical factors and the healthcare of our residents, rather than financial factors, that are driving this process.
The final thing I will draw upon from the McKinsey report is about meeting the financial pressure within the BHR system. McKinsey observes that to fully close the gap will require further stretch productivity achievement beyond the levels agreed locally, as well as additional private finance initiative support and the closure of the gap to the CCG allocation. The £140 million-odd deficit in 2013-14 was only reached after a £16 million PFI subsidy, and the deficit as a percentage of income is far larger even than it was for Barts at that time.
It is not unreasonable, as part of the wider changes in Redbridge and the work being led by the accountable care organisation, to expect the Government to provide further support in relation to our PFI debt. Many challenges face the local health economy in Redbridge and that debt is like an albatross around our necks. If the Government were to invest now in alleviating that pressure, we may get better outcomes in the long term. I hope that that is an issue the Minister will address when she responds to the debate.
Mike Gapes
The interesting thing is that NHS nurses were not originally on that shortage list. There had to be a lobbying campaign to get them put in because of the stupidity of the people in the Home Office who drew up the list. The fact is that the £35,000 figure will present a problem. Obviously, it will not present a problem in recruiting doctors from abroad, but it is a significant problem in recruiting nurses and other people at lower wage levels. We need to raise that issue, because it will be damaging in the long term.
Of course we need to train more nurses, but to do so the Government need a consistent policy. It takes several years to train a nurse. It is not something that can be switched on and switched off. The other issue is retention. Large numbers of nurses leave our NHS and go and work in other countries. Just as we take nurses from other countries, so British nurses go abroad. There is no reason why that should not be the case; it is a global health economy and the reality is that if we do not pay the lower paid staff in the NHS what they need, we will not recruit sufficient numbers of people to do those jobs.
Wes Streeting
In the context of the recruitment and retention challenges for NHS staff, does my hon. Friend share my concern and that of a number of Members from all parts of the House on the plans to charge nurses, midwives and students of allied health subjects full tuition fees and to remove the NHS bursary? Those things will be deeply damaging to recruitment of the very staff that we need to bring into the NHS.
Mike Gapes
Absolutely, I do agree. That is why I signed my hon. Friend’s early-day motion today. I am about to put it in so that my name is added, now that I am back.
In conclusion, it is a great pleasure and a bit of a coincidence that this debate was here today, but I could not miss the opportunity to say thank you to those people who saved my life.