Taylor Review

Debate between Andrew Griffiths and Nigel Mills

1st reading: House of Commons
Wednesday 7th February 2018 Commons Chamber

[Andrew Griffiths]

I place on record our thanks to the right hon. Gentleman for his continued work in this area. He is right to say that that continues to be the Government’s position. However, we are consulting. The benefit to the employer is flexibility, but we have asked the Low Pay Commission to look again at whether people on zero-hours contracts should get some preferential, extra payment to compensate for the inconvenience.

[Nigel Mills (Amber Valley) (Con)]

Can the Minister confirm the Government’s plan in relation to employers’ national insurance contributions, to ensure that the tax system is not incentivising unscrupulous businesses to pretend that their employees are self-employed?

[Andrew Griffiths]

Clearly that is very high on the agenda. The work we are doing in relation to status will ensure that people who are genuinely self-employed are classified as such. Employers who are trying to game the system by pretending that someone is self-employed when in fact they are working will be addressed. The reality is that if it looks like work and feels like work, it is work, and people should be paid in the same way.

Train-building Industry

Debate between Andrew Griffiths and Nigel Mills

Tuesday 12th July 2011 Westminster Hall

[Nigel Mills]

I think that Germany wins 26% of the time when it bids, and we win about 14%. However, I am not sure that those statistics work when we are talking about major infrastructure projects that are of huge overall significance, rather than about some of the smaller ones. Frankly, across the EU as a whole, we are a hugely advanced economy, with all the high skills and the value added. Therefore, we expect the UK to be able to do things that other economies cannot yet do, and to be winning contracts. The key point is that thousands and thousands of jobs are at stake. We are risking those jobs by playing by the rules, but it seems that the Germans, French and others are not.

Let us consider the Eurotunnel procurement. That contract was awarded not to Alstom of France, but to Siemens of Germany, which must be doing something right. The French went mad and had a judicial review to try to challenge that contract, because they were so surprised that it had not been awarded to one of their domestic companies. We have to send out the message that we want to encourage our UK train-building industry, which is of huge value to us, and we want the Government to support it.

Perhaps we need to consider again how we go about procuring these train-building contracts. For many years, Bombardier has questioned how sensible it is to have a feast of contracts and then a famine. How does that enable it to be a sustainable, viable business? How does having to recruit and skill up to fulfil one contract and then lay people off and start again make a company cost-effective and ensure that we are getting the best price for our trains? How can Bombardier continually develop in the UK and improve its processes if it does not know from year to year whether it will have a viable manufacturing business in the UK?

Let us not set any hares running. We all hope that Bombardier will retain a strong manufacturing presence in the UK and that this will not be a fundamental threat. However, it is a significant contract, especially on the back of its not winning the intercity express programme contract. It would be helpful if the Government set out what other contracts they expect to award in the rest of this Parliament, and how significant their value may be. We know that Crossrail should be one contract. Many have raised the question whether the Government can now bring forward that Crossrail procurement in the hope that Bombardier can win it and try to protect jobs in the Derby area.

Some have suggested that the Crossrail contract is very closely linked to the Thameslink contract. The amount of cross-savings between the two might make it very hard for a company that does not have the Thameslink contract to deliver Crossrail competitively. Will the Minister confirm that that is not the case, and that it is open to the Government to award the Crossrail contract to a different provider?

[Andrew Griffiths (Burton) (Con)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend on securing the debate. Bombardier is a major employer in my constituency, too. He has discussed the success of Bombardier and its ability to win contracts. Is he aware of the statistics that show that of 14 contracts that Bombardier bid for that were not related to the Department for Transport, it won 11, yet of all of the contracts it has bid for with the Department for Transport, it has won not a single one?

[Nigel Mills]

I am grateful for my hon. Friend’s intervention. Had he been here from the start, he would have heard me quote those very same statistics. His point is valid, however, and he reiterates the question whether the Department for Transport is handling those procurements in the most effective manner.

I conclude by asking the Minister some questions about future procurement processes. Do the Government think that there is a need for improvement? Should the Department for Transport be handling them? Will the Department guarantee that the socio-economic benefits will be given some weighting in that process? Can the contracts be structured so that UK manufacturing industry has a chance of a sustainable, viable future? Can we look to structure those contracts in a way that gets trains built, and not look for the biggest bank we can find to underwrite 30 years’ worth of financing?

No one should doubt that the train-building industry is of great importance to the Derby area and the UK economy as a whole. We have a proud heritage of train building. We can and should have an exciting future of train building. I urge the Government to do their bit to ensure that that is what we get.

Police Reform and Social Responsibility Bill

Debate between Andrew Griffiths and Nigel Mills

Monday 13th December 2010 Commons Chamber

[Nigel Mills (Amber Valley) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to speak in this important debate on a Bill that will fulfil many Conservative manifesto commitments, namely electing police commissioners and tackling the antisocial behaviour that is caused by excessive drinking in some of our towns. It is a pleasure to follow the Chair of the Home Affairs Committee for the second time in a week. I found myself losing concentration thinking how wonderful it would be to be able to summon Batman to tackle the crime in our towns, but I sense that that solution is not possible.

I will start with the less high-profile measures in the Bill and leave police commissioners for the end of my small amount of time. Even areas such as mine, which lack a large city and its attendant problems, face the problems of alcohol-induced antisocial behaviour in the early mornings; people finding back routes home from the pub that take them past people’s houses, where they disturb people with their noise; and people’s frustration when they are not allowed to object to a licence because a vicinity test does not quite work. The reforms on those matters are greatly to be welcomed.

We must be careful that in the well-meaning attempt to tackle these problems, we do not create a different problem or use the proverbial sledgehammer to crack the nut. An example is the late-night levy, which is an important measure and a great tool for councils. My understanding of the Bill is that if a council such as mine introduces the late-night levy, it has to do so for the whole borough. My seat contains three towns, so all three towns would be included and not just the one where there might be a problem. We could therefore end up imposing a provision that is not required on establishments that are completely responsible and in areas where there is no issue to be tackled. Perhaps that point can be addressed in Committee so that the words achieve what we want them to.

[Andrew Griffiths]

rose—

[Nigel Mills]

I am sorry, time is too limited.

Police commissioners, as the hon. Member for Blackpool North and Cleveleys (Paul Maynard) said, are not something that one reads about and at once thinks, “Oh, marvellous.” People do not come to our surgeries and say that they want a police commissioner by May 2012. However, when one works through the ideas and looks at the problems that we are trying to tackle, it is clear that constituents feel divorced from the police. Perhaps unfairly, they think that the police are not accountable to them and are not doing what people want. In comparison, people are usually quite happy with the safer neighbourhood team with which they associate. There is a general view that the police are happily sitting behind desks or racing around in cars, rather than doing policing. That is a real problem that we need to tackle, because we all believe in policing by consent.

No one is arguing that we do not need some kind of authority or body to hold the police to account. We would not want to leave it to the chief constable to do whatever he felt like. We all accept that there have to be policing priorities. We cannot have police everywhere doing everything on every issue all the time. It is right that when difficult choices have to be made, there is some democratic accountability.

No Member has argued tonight that police authorities are a great success. I imagine that most of my constituents would struggle to name a single member of their police authority, and I do not recall an election leaflet saying, “This guy’s been on the police authority for the past four years. Hasn’t it been terrible? You should vote him out because of his record on that”. It just does not happen.

Nobody appreciates or values what police authorities do, and despite the costly newspaper that appears through my door every so often, nobody really understands what on earth they are for. There is a vacuum, and I cannot imagine that the way to fill it is through each district electing its own commissioner and all of them coming together to try to agree on something. I cannot see that working. The right answer has to be to elect an individual whom the public will recognise. People will understand that that is the person who is there to be accountable and to whom they can complain. That is the person to blame, who can set the strategy that the police force will follow. People will know that if it does not work, they can vote that person out four years later. That has to be the right way forward.

I do have some concerns about the electoral system for police commissioners included in the Bill. It is a bit strange that we will have a referendum next year to decide how we elect our MPs, yet we have jumped almost to the other side of that debate in the Bill. I might have preferred us to use the same electoral system for commissioners as for MPs. That would be far more understandable for the public.

I understand the argument that the method proposed will ensure that we do not end up with an extremist person having a commissioner’s power by mistake on a flukily low vote, but frankly, I would trust the people of Derbyshire not to end up in that situation. Those of us who represent a seat where there are British National party councillors can be a little nervous about that, but we can trust the people to elect a responsible person as commissioner. They will see that it is a very important job, and it will be valued, so I do not think people will do unfortunate things with their vote.

I wholeheartedly welcome the Bill. It meets a whole load of the promises that we made at the election, and it will be a great step forward in bringing the police back closer to the people. We should all welcome that wholeheartedly.