United Kingdom Internal Market Bill
Debate between Alun Cairns and Chris Bryant(4 years, 2 months ago)
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Alun Cairns
I will come on to explain in further detail specific cases as to why the UK Government need the power in these clauses to intervene to support those communities that I want to support; I am sorry that the hon. Gentleman does not seem to want the UK Government to have the capacity to step in.
The current arrangements are confusing and messy, and could easily end up in the courts. Out of respect for devolution, Whitehall has been reluctant to be as assertive in pursuing some policies as the political and economic situations require. Constituents do not understand these arrangements, and businesses are often frustrated by the complexity and the perceived lack of interest in the issues and challenges they face. I said on Second Reading that for someone who is unemployed and living in one of the poorest communities, in a run-down town or village, perhaps with poor qualification levels or few training opportunities, UK Government Ministers’ answer to any call for help is, as it stands, simply to point them to the Welsh Assembly or to a Welsh Government Minister. Someone living in one of those communities in those circumstances does not care where the help comes from. They want the Government to be able to offer hope and opportunity, to play a part in bringing about change and to be relevant to those challenges that those individuals and communities face by helping to fix them.
Chris Bryant
I completely agree that my constituents in the Rhondda, which is one of the poorer communities in Wales, in the UK and in the whole of the European Union, would not care less where the money came from if they were seeking support, be it for a new youth service, more police officers, a new health centre or anything else. But for that to be effective, it has to be co-ordinated with other local services. A Government could not suddenly decide to build something in the Rhondda without planning permission from the local authority and without other permissions from the Assembly. This is why some of us are sceptical that the Government need these powers or that they are really serious about them. The Coal Authority is an agency of the Westminster Government, not of the Welsh Government, yet we are still waiting for our £1.2 million. If he can tell me a reason why the Government cannot give us the £1.2 million now, I would be delighted to hear it.
Alun Cairns
I am happy to respond to the hon. Gentleman. In relation to the Coal Authority, he is aware—this highlights the point that I made about the complexity of the current legislation—that land reclamation is a devolved function. Therefore, the Coal Authority is an agency of the UK Government, but the legislative responsibility falls to the Welsh Government. That highlights the complexity of the situation and may well be—I do not know because I have not looked at it in close enough detail—one of the root causes of why that community faces such a challenge.
The hon. Gentleman also highlighted flooding as a challenge. Flooding is a devolved responsibility. Therefore, when he calls on Environment Ministers to support funding projects in his constituency, he knows full well that the powers allowed by the current legislative framework to directly support such projects do not exist. Therefore, those calls, all too often, will fall on Ministers who do not have the power to act in those circumstances.
Chris Bryant
I think I am agreeing with the right hon. Gentleman in some small measure, which is obviously hurtful for me. He is of course right that flooding in Wales is the responsibility of the Welsh Government. However, there comes a time, if we want to reinforce the Union, when the Westminster Government have to accept that there have been specific events that fall outside the normal Barnett formula—outside the normal envelope. That is why I have repeatedly asked—and the Prime Minister promised this at the Dispatch Box—that we will get the money for the floods that happened excessively in Wales, and particularly in Rhondda, rather than anywhere else in the UK earlier this year.
United Kingdom Internal Market Bill
Debate between Alun Cairns and Chris BryantMonday 14th September 2020
(4 years, 2 months ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate United Kingdom Internal Market Act 2020 View all United Kingdom Internal Market Act 2020 Debates Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts Amendment Paper: Notices of Amendments as at 11 September 2020 - (14 Sep 2020)
Alun Cairns (Vale of Glamorgan) (Con)
In the limited time that, unfortunately, is available to us, I want to focus on the protection of the UK market and on the enhanced powers that this Bill will give to UK Ministers to act in UK nations. Without this Bill, the way in which businesses trade and interact could be at risk. There is a realistic potential that the marketplace could become chaotic. We all recognise—
Alun Cairns
If the hon. Member gives me a moment, I will continue the argument and he can make an intervention later if he wishes.
We all recognise the status of the EU single market, which is something many of us will have championed and questioned in equal measure over the years. Rarely have we commented, however, on the UK market, yet the single UK market is more important and directly relevant to the businesses in each and every constituency across the country. It gives us the right to trade freely and seamlessly in all parts of the UK. It sets minimum standards for products and services—a common rulebook for tradespeople to work from. It allows for the mobility and flexibility of labour, protects against unfair subsidies and enables the recognition of qualifications, confirming free and fair competition and opportunity wherever people are based in the United Kingdom. It is so important to our prosperity and so obvious that until now many people will have taken it for granted, which is why we need to act in this Bill.
Over the last six months, we have seen that the agendas of each Administration around the UK are not always in line, and therefore the potential to create chaos in the marketplace exists. Protecting the interests of businesses and consumers in all parts of the country must be our priority, and that is exactly what the Bill does. It does so in a way that also respects and supports devolution by enhancing the devolved Administrations by extending their powers still further.
I am particularly encouraged and grateful that my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy has included clause 46 in part 6. It is particularly welcome: it enhances the powers of UK Ministers to act and to be relevant in UK nations. That is essential for the future of the Union, and to my mind it is the start of the Union fightback. It shows that Whitehall now understands the changing nature of our make-up as a United Kingdom.
Since devolution, UK Ministers have been prevented from acting directly in support of businesses, charities or authorities in UK nations. UK-scale investment projects have always been difficult to achieve since devolution. Every Secretary of State has been frustrated by that, partly because of the devolved settlement and the limitations that it has put in place. After all, for someone who is unemployed and living in one of the poorest communities, which may have substandard education and limited training opportunities, in a run-down town or village, at this point the UK Government’s answer to calls for help would have to be, “You need to contact your Assembly Member or the Welsh Government Minister.”
Chris Bryant
I am sorry, but I have been asking for money to make good the problems that we have had with flooding in the Rhondda all this year; I have not had a single penny out of the Westminster Government for it. I have been calling for the work that needs to be done in the Rhondda to take away the 60,000 tonnes of material that has fallen into the river from tips, which are a responsibility of the UK Government, to be funded by the UK Government; I have not seen a penny. I am not going to listen to all this nonsense of pretending that they are going to send us money—it is a whole load of tosh.
Alun Cairns
The hon. Member has made my point. He recognises that the areas of policy that he is talking about are devolved: the capacity of the UK Government to act in those spaces does not exist, as it stands. He recognises that the devolved settlement already gives Wales, or the Welsh Government, £120 for every £100 spent in England, so the answer that I might suggest is: I am sorry, but the hon. Member will have to contact the Welsh Government Minister to act in his constituency.
When people live in the circumstances that I have described, they do not care where the help comes from; they just want the Government to give hope and opportunity, and to play a part in bringing about change. The Bill allows for exactly that. I have long argued that the future of any nation would come under pressure if a wide wealth gap continued to persist between nations and regions. The Prime Minister’s levelling up agenda recognises that, and this Bill empowers that levelling up agenda in Scotland, in Northern Ireland and in Wales.
Oral Answers to Questions
Debate between Alun Cairns and Chris Bryant(5 years, 2 months ago)
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Alun Cairns
We can take great pride in how the economy has performed since the referendum took place: record levels of employment; low levels of unemployment; and inactivity levels in Wales now that are better than the rest of the UK for the first time in decades. I look forward to the opportunities being a participant in new free trade agreements right around the world will give to the Welsh economy.
Chris Bryant
I’m not sure it’s worth it, to be honest. [Laughter.] If the UK leaves the European Union without a deal, how will Welsh farmers be able to sell their lamb in the European Union?
Alun Cairns
I have already mentioned the positive engagement that we have with the farming and rural affairs community, and the new markets that are open to us. The hon. Gentleman, by voting last night in favour of a motion and by supporting the Bill tonight, will just prolong the uncertainty and will not allow farmers to prepare. We are determined to leave the European Union. We want to leave the European Union with a deal, but we must draw a line and move on to exciting economic opportunities thereafter.
Oral Answers to Questions
Debate between Alun Cairns and Chris Bryant(5 years, 6 months ago)
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Alun Cairns
Similarly, I hope the hon. Gentleman will recognise that there is a better way of delivering regional support. Wales has received £4 billion over 17 years. We will consult shortly, but even ahead of that formal consultation lots of preliminary work is ongoing. For example, the Welsh Government and the UK Government were recently at St Asaph, where the Welsh Government jointly presented. That demonstrates the joint work that is taking place.
Chris Bryant
The Government are talking about awarding the money in Wales on the basis of a competition between different local authorities and areas. Can the Secretary of State quash that rumour? All the money will inevitably end up going to middle-class areas rather than to the areas of greatest need, such as the Rhondda. What is wrong with the fundamental principle of “From each according to his or her ability, to each according to his or her need”?
Alun Cairns
The hon. Gentleman is pre-empting the consultation. We will of course work with local authorities, and there are different views among local authorities throughout Wales on how we deliver the UK shared prosperity fund. The hon. Gentleman’s local authority will have some frustrations as well as some successes in relation to the current European structural funds model, on which we have an opportunity to improve.
Autumn Budget as it Relates to Wales (Morning sitting)
Debate between Alun Cairns and Chris Bryant(6 years, 9 months ago)
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Alun Cairns
The hon. Gentleman will be well aware that when that commitment was made, the intention was to use electric-only trains rather than bimodal trains.
Chris Bryant (Rhondda) (Lab)
The former Secretary of State for Transport also categorically stated in the House of Commons that the valleys lines would be electrified by the end of 2018. There is absolutely no prospect of that happening, is there? Why do Conservative politicians keep making promises that they know they have no prospect of fulfilling?
Alun Cairns
The hon. Gentleman is well aware that that responsibility has been passed over to the Welsh Government, with additional money being made available by the UK Government for that scheme. I suggest that he puts that question to his colleagues in Cardiff Bay, because the former Transport Secretary would have been repeating the claims and the comments that had been made by politicians in Cardiff Bay.
Oral Answers to Questions
Debate between Alun Cairns and Chris Bryant(10 years, 1 month ago)
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Alun Cairns
Where possible, we would encourage employers to pay the living wage, but the Government’s responsibility is to ensure that the national minimum wage is adhered to. It is set independently, and it is a balanced discussion between employers, Government and employees.
Chris Bryant (Rhondda) (Lab)
If Conservative Members are so keen on improving poor wages, why did they do everything in their power to prevent the national minimum wage from coming into law? Why do Conservative Ministers regularly accuse the poor of being workshy when actually, in my constituency, many of the most hard-working are those who are hit by a double whammy—low wages and few hours? That means that when they travel to work in Wales they are working a damn sight harder than the Minister ever did.
Alun Cairns
We have not only increased the national minimum wage by the largest cash increase since 2008 but taken the lowest earners out of income tax, which means that a full-time employee on the national minimum wage is paying two thirds less income tax. I hope that that is something that the hon. Gentleman would welcome.
Future of the BBC
Debate between Alun Cairns and Chris Bryant
Chris Bryant
The hon. Gentleman walks straight into my trap. Public service broadcasting is not about making programmes that nobody wants to watch or listen to, which is in effect his argument. I do not believe that Radio 3 prevented Classic FM from coming into existence. If anything, Radio 3 enabled Classic FM to come into existence. There was competition at the start, but Classic FM found a different way of presenting classical music. It relied on an audience that was already out there—an audience created largely by Radio 3—and on players, singers and concert halls that, effectively, were subsidised by the BBC. There is a double benefit from the BBC. The licence fee paid by my constituents in the Rhondda pays for the hon. Gentleman to watch all the highbrow, intellectual stuff he watches, and to listen to the wonderfully intelligent and academic stuff he appears on and contributes to. My constituents are interested in watching “EastEnders” and, on Saturday evening, “Strictly Come Dancing”. They are also interested in watching sports programmes such as Wimbledon, which get very large audiences.
Chris Bryant
The hon. Gentleman would not give way to me, so he can wait a moment.
I do not want to rely on the market failure argument that has been advanced by a couple of hon. Members.
Chris Bryant
Before I give way to the hon. Gentleman, who is a member of the Culture, Media and Sport Committee, I ought to give way to the hon. Member for Vale of Glamorgan.
Alun Cairns
Does the hon. Gentleman recognise that, when the BBC competes actively for sport, it drives up the prices for other broadcasters? He has mentioned Wimbledon, but no other broadcaster is allowed to broadcast it.
Chris Bryant
That is not true. Other broadcasters are allowed to broadcast it—[Interruption.] If the hon. Gentleman quietens down, he will be able to hear the answer and learn something. The truth of the matter is that, under the television without frontiers directive, to which all countries agreed, the European Commission allowed individual countries to list certain events—they must be agreed by the Commission so they are not too anti-competitive. Wimbledon is on the list of events that must be available on free-to-air television, but others can compete for it, just as they have competed for other sports that must to be available on free-to-air television.
Chris Bryant
It is an utter delight to see you in the Chair, Madam Deputy Speaker. In whatever small way I contributed to your election, or at least did not prevent you from being elected by supporting you, I am delighted that you are there.
My hon. Friend is absolutely right. In many cases, the only training programmes in the industry are run by the BBC. For example, its contribution to the high arts, by funding orchestras and choirs, is one of the things that manages to keep many of our concert halls and classical concerts going. Broadcasting is one of the things we can rightly say, without any sense of British arrogance that often applies to many other things, we do better than any other country in the world. I am conscious that that is not just about the BBC. I once worked for the BBC in Brussels. I got into a taxi and the driver asked me who I worked for. I told him I worked for the BBC and he said, “I love the BBC. I love ‘Midsomer Murders’, ‘Inspector Morse’ and ‘Brideshead Revisited’.” I did not point out to him that they had been made by ITV. We get a double benefit from the BBC, because it creates a competition for quality. It is not anti-competitive—quite the reverse. It is profoundly competitive, because it creates a competition for quality.
Contrary to the grand sweeping statements by hon. Member for Vale of Glamorgan about how the BBC never investigates itself, I have heard every director-general, and most directors of programmes, quizzed on BBC radio and television programmes with an aggression equal to that shown to any politician. I do not recall, not even throughout the phone hacking scandal at the News of the World, Rupert Murdoch ever being interviewed by Sky. That is not to say that I do not think Sky is a good broadcaster; I think it is a great news broadcaster—it adopts a different attitude and that is great. I would just point out that, if anything, the BBC racks itself with guilt almost too much on occasion. It did not do a good job with regard to Savile or Lord McAlpine. It did not cover itself with glory in its approach to the National Audit Office, as the hon. Member for Maldon said, and to which I have referred to many times before.
Chris Bryant
I will not give way to the hon. Gentleman again, because I have already made a long speech and I am sure that Members do not want me to go on for ever. I have at least united the House on that point.
There are other critiques I would make of the BBC. The Chair of the Select Committee said that the chairman of the BBC Trust and the director-general are appearing before his Committee tomorrow. I hope they are not appearing together. [Interruption.] He is saying that they are. I think that is entirely wrong as they have completely different jobs to do. They should never, ever appear on a panel together. They should not do joint press conferences or appear before a Select Committee together—perhaps they could appear one after another. This is where the BBC has gone disastrously wrong in the past few years. The chairman of the BBC Trust seems to think that his job is always to defend the director-general and vice versa. I disagree with that. The two bodies should be far more independent, as was argued in a report brought out in 1948.
Ministerial Code (Culture Secretary)
Debate between Alun Cairns and Chris Bryant(12 years, 5 months ago)
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Alun Cairns
I could not have described it better myself, and I am grateful to my hon. Friend.
Alun Cairns
I will in a moment.
I remind the House that it took 23 minutes for the shadow Secretary of State to come to the judgment that the Secretary of State should resign and, then, that he should be referred to Sir Alex Allan. That judgment—
Alun Cairns
I will in a moment.
That judgment came directly from testimony by James Murdoch and Frédéric Michel, the quality of whose evidence on other occasions the right hon. and learned Lady had herself questioned. So it took her 23 minutes to make that judgment—on someone whom she had doubted in the first place.
Chris Bryant
Well, it took the Prime Minister 15 minutes to decide that the Secretary of State was innocent. Let me turn to the hon. Member for Vale of Glamorgan (Alun Cairns), however, because he read out the Whips’ question earlier about Sir Alex Allan, but he is a member of the very Committee that stated:
“We felt, however, that he”—
Sir Alex Allan—
“was unsuited to this role because he did not convince us that he would be able to demonstrate the independence the post requires.”
Now, I know that the hon. Gentleman hardly ever turns up to the Committee, but that was his Committee’s conclusion.
Alun Cairns
We have already heard from the hon. Gentleman and from his hon. Friend the Member for Wrexham selective misquotations of the Public Administration Committee’s report, but, whatever Opposition Members say, time and again we can point to Sir Alex Allan’s letter, in which he states that
“I do not believe that I could usefully add to the facts in this case”.
Sir Alex is fully aware of what has been said at the Leveson inquiry, what has been said here in the Chamber and what has been said at the Culture, Media and Sport Committee, so Opposition Members are calling for—
Finance (No. 4) Bill
Debate between Alun Cairns and Chris Bryant(12 years, 7 months ago)
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Chris Bryant
I will deal with the economic case, but this is where I fundamentally disagree with the hon. Lady ideologically. I do not think we can put economics and politics into separate boxes; the one drives the other. If we want a happier country, where people prosper because they feel that the whole of society is engaged in the same endeavour, we have to make sure that it feels as if everyone has equally got their—I am going to get my metaphors all mixed up—shoulder to the grindstone. I say to Government Members that in my constituency it does not feel that that is the case at the moment. It feels as if the poor are having a very rough time, and there is very little prospect of changing that. I believe that my hon. Friend the Member for Pontypridd said that 2,700 unemployed people in his constituency were going for 200 jobs. The statistics are even worse just up the road in my constituency. It is not a question of someone getting on their bike and going somewhere else to find a job, which is why the politics matter. I am talking not about party politics, but about the sense of whether we are genuinely all in this together.
Alun Cairns
The hon. Gentleman has made a powerful point in comparing the incomes of people in his constituency with those of some in the City of London. But in order to raise the wealth and prosperity of people in his constituency and in every other constituency across the UK, particularly those in the north, Wales and Scotland, do we not need to attract investors and to attract the best brains in the world? That 50% rate is extremely important in respect of providing investment to his constituency, my constituency and others of hon. Members across this House.