Enterprise and Regulatory Reform Bill
Debate between Alok Sharma and Chuka Umunna
Mr Umunna
With the greatest respect to the hon. Gentleman, our party has made it very clear what we believe. Mr Wadham can speak for himself, but I must first point out that he is not the chair of the organisation. Secondly, the Equality and Human Rights Commission has made it clear that it has changed its position on this matter. Thirdly, we are hardly going to find a senior member of an agency such as the commission seeking to have a public row with its Minister. However, I think we all know exactly what people in the commission think. I was told that the last time we discussed this matter in the House, Opposition Members were being cheered on by employees of the commission who were watching the debate. I am sure that they are watching this debate right now, and that they will have listened with interest to what the hon. Gentleman has just said.
The Minister should also reflect on what the majority of her party’s members think about this issue. They cannot fathom why she and the Business Secretary are making all these changes to people’s rights at work, to the role of the commission and so on. My hon. Friend the Member for Edinburgh South (Ian Murray), the shadow Minister for employment relations, has told me about his trip to the Liberal Democrats’ spring conference last month. He spoke at a fringe meeting on employment rights—I did not know he was going to do that—at which the Minister tried to justify all these changes. My understanding is that people walked out of that room in disgust at the measures that she is trying to push through today. I have, of course, castigated my hon. Friend for forgetting to take Labour party membership forms with him to dish out; he will take a big box of them next time. We support the Lords amendments in this respect.
Let me turn now to deal with caste discrimination, a matter that has attracted considerable interest outside this House. Labour has a proud history of tackling injustice and discrimination. We believe that people should be able to make the most of their potential opportunities—whatever their race, gender, family background or social circumstances. In recent months, organisations such as the Anti-caste Discrimination Alliance have campaigned for stronger action to tackle caste discrimination, and their case has been powerful. Every community group and every faith group to which we have spoken—on either side of the debate in recent days—has been united in the belief that caste discrimination has no place in our country.
We Labour Members thus believe that we must send a strong and clear message today—that caste discrimination is completely unacceptable, and that we support taking more action. That is why we will support the amendment. We need to do more to ensure that the small number of people who face such injustice have access to the redress they deserve and have somewhere to turn to for support.
It is fair to say, however, that some have raised legitimate concerns about the practicalities of how the legislation would work—about its drafting and implementation. We take those practical points seriously and we agree that any new action we take must over time reduce rather than increase the number of people being identified by their caste, eliminating discrimination in the future.
Alok Sharma (Reading West) (Con)
I absolutely agree with the hon. Gentleman and I think all of us are united in believing that any form of discrimination—caste or any other form—is entirely wrong. It is interesting to reflect that the hon. Gentleman is talking about this issue in 2013, yet the Labour party was in power—I know he was not here then—for 13 years. Did this issue not come up at any time over 13 years and, if so, why did the Labour party not bring forward any proposals at the time? It should welcome the fact that this Government are the first to put forward an education programme to deal with the issue.
Mr Umunna
I hear what the hon. Gentleman says, but we sought to deal with the issue through the Equality Act 2010 and then by providing for further action to be taken thereafter. It is not fair for him to say that we took insufficient action during our time in government: we needed to allow time for the communities concerned to adjust and to provide an opportunity for the education which he talks about. Despite the time that has passed—the Act was passed back in 2010—it is clear that more still needs to happen.
We do not believe that the Government are doing enough on this issue, which is part of the reason why we will vote against the Government’s motion to disagree with the Lords amendment. I hope that further discussions can take place here about the implementation of action against caste discrimination before the matter is discussed again in the other place. People on both sides of the debate have said loudly and clearly that they would like far more consultation on the subject. We hope that that can happen. The goal—the place where we all want to be—is to reach agreement on a way forward over the next few days before the provisions arrive back in the House of Lords.
Alok Sharma
I will restrict my comments to the discussion of caste discrimination. As I said in my intervention on the hon. Member for Streatham (Mr Umunna), I think we can all agree that caste discrimination is wrong and abhorrent, as is any form of discrimination. I welcome the fact that the Government are making a real effort, taking the issue seriously and putting in place a programme of education.
I hope that the hon. Member for Streatham would agree that, before introducing legislation, we should ensure that there is an evidence base for doing so. As I am sure he will be aware, the NIESR report was incredibly comprehensive. As I understand it, NIESR approached CasteWatch UK and Voice of Dalit International and looked back at cases that were up to 10 years old, yet it came up with a relatively low volume of caste-related incidents. I have no wish to trivialise any of those incidents, and clearly they were incredibly hurtful to the individuals involved, but I will just make the point that, ultimately, if we are to introduce legislation, we need to ensure that there is a broad evidence base for doing so. I understand that 32 people were interviewed for the NIESR report and 23 were used as case studies. Those 23 people reported 36 separate caste-related incidents.
Mr Umunna
I am listening carefully to the hon. Gentleman, but I want to ask him two questions. Does he accept that caste discrimination is going on and, if he does, does he agree that the fact that it might be quite restricted should not preclude us taking action to protect the small number who are subject to it?
Enterprise and Regulatory Reform Bill
Debate between Alok Sharma and Chuka Umunna
Mr Umunna
What I cited was the World Bank’s assessment of the state in which we left the environment for businesses to carry out their work. If the hon. Gentleman reads the guidance that has been issued by his Government, he will see that we have been praised for doing things such as introducing the primary authority scheme, which was supposed to, and did, reduce the regulatory burden on businesses.
Perhaps the Secretary of State’s most damning criticism of his and his Government’s actions is that they are “frankly, rather piecemeal”. At first sight, that is precisely what the Bill is. It is a hotch-potch of measures that provides no discernible overall vision or confident message. There is no evidence of a connected approach across Government to drive growth.
Business was straight off the blocks with its criticisms of the Queen’s Speech, the centrepiece of which was this legislation. The director general of the British Chambers of Commerce said what many people have been saying for many months:
“There is a big black hole when it comes to aiding business to create enterprise, generate wealth and grow.”
He is right. Our amendment makes it clear that the Bill, viewed as a whole, does not change that assessment.
I will quickly go through the parts of the Bill and set out our position on each.
Mr Umunna
I will make a bit of progress, because I want to ensure that there is time for others to get in.
Part 1 will set up the green investment bank. I have stated on many occasions, as has the Leader of the Opposition, that it is crucial to long-term economic growth to have an active Government working in partnership with the private sector. In our view, the Government should work with business to identify the sectors from which future demand will come and to ensure that companies are set up to meet that demand. There is and will continue to be a growing demand for green technologies, so we need an active industrial strategy to support the low-carbon economy, as I and my right hon. Friend the Member for Don Valley (Caroline Flint) have argued.
A critical component of that is the green investment bank. That is why we set up the green investment bank commission in 2009 with a view to establishing such a bank, and why we committed ourselves to establishing such a bank in our 2010 manifesto. We will therefore not oppose the bank—our amendment makes it clear that we support it in principle. Also, I do not want to add further long-term policy uncertainty in this area, after the huge uncertainty that the Government have heaped on the low-carbon sector since coming to office. I note that the deputy leader of the Liberal Democrats, who has left his place, conveniently ignored the decision on feed-in tariffs, which is perhaps the most glaring example of the uncertainty that has been created.
As the Secretary of State said, Lord Smith of Kelvin and Sir Adrian Montague were appointed as the chair and deputy chair of UK Green Investment Bank plc during the Whitsun recess. We welcome their appointment. Having heard what the Secretary of State has said, I suggest that until this entity is given the power to borrow and to lend, allowing it to leverage its initial equity to make more capital available, it will not be a body that most people would recognise as a bank. It is a fund, whereas it is an operational bank that the country needs. The Secretary of State made has made it clear that it will not be allowed to borrow—he repeated this today—unless public sector net debt is falling as a percentage of GDP in 2015. The earliest it is likely to be able to borrow is therefore 2016. That is a delay of four years from now. Ed Matthew, the director of Transform UK, the business alliance campaigning for the bank to be set up, put it well:
“Allowing the bank to borrow is the key to generating growth and rebooting the UK economy. Delaying this power until the economy has recovered is like a doctor waiting for a seriously ill patient to recover before giving him life-saving medicine”.