Business of the House

Angela Eagle Excerpts

Thursday 9th May 2013 Commons Chamber

[Ms Angela Eagle (Wallasey) (Lab)]

Will the Leader of the House give us the business for next week?

[The Leader of the House of Commons (Mr Andrew Lansley)]

The business for next week is as follows:

Monday 13 May—Continuation of the debate on the Queen’s Speech on health and social care.

Tuesday 14 May—Continuation of the debate on the Queen’s Speech on the cost of living.

Wednesday 15 May—Conclusion of the debate on the Queen’s Speech on economic growth.

Thursday 16 May—General debate on mental health. The subject for this debate has been nominated by the Backbench Business Committee.

The provisional business for the week commencing 20 May will include:

Monday 20 May—Remaining stages of the Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Bill (Day 1).

Tuesday 21 May—Conclusion of remaining stages of the Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Bill (Day 2), followed by motion to approve a European document relating to Syria.

I should also like to inform the House that the business in Westminster Hall for 16 May will be:

Thursday 16 May—Debate on the seventh report of the Education Select Committee on careers guidance for young people, followed by debate on the seventh report of the Science and Technology Committee on educating tomorrow’s engineers.

[Ms Eagle]

I thank the Leader of the House for his statement. The next time the Government cannot find their Education Minister and have to bring business questions forward, I wonder whether they might like to give us a little more notice—I am still catching my breath. I also thank him for advance sight of the written ministerial statement he tabled today confirming the Bills announced yesterday. I am sure that you, Mr Speaker, will be as concerned as I am that while he provided Members with one page of information, the Downing street spin machine provided the press with 93 pages of detail on the same Bills. Will he confirm that he will arrange for a copy of that briefing to be placed in the House of Commons Library immediately and that in future he will ensure that Members of this House are accorded the same courtesies as are accorded to the press?

I welcome to the House the new Labour Member, my hon. Friend the Member for South Shields (Emma Lewell-Buck), the first woman to represent Shields in Parliament. She will be a fighter for her constituents. I also welcome back into the Conservative fold the hon. Member for Mid Bedfordshire (Nadine Dorries). I wonder whether the Leader of the House is taking bets on how long it will take the Chief Whip to wish she was back in the jungle.

I suspect that last week’s local elections had a more profound impact on the Queen’s Speech than the Leader of the House can let on. They were a disaster across the English shires for the Conservatives, as Labour won in many southern marginals and hordes of true blue voters flocked to the UK Independence party. I followed with interest the Conservative implosion in the Leader of the House’s own backyard of Cambridgeshire, where the Conservatives lost control of the council for the first time in more than 15 years. The Conservative leader of the council even managed to lose his seat—and to a Liberal Democrat. I hope that the Leader of the House has congratulated his deputy, the right hon. Member for Carshalton and Wallington (Tom Brake), on that success for the Liberal Democrats on his home turf. It is hard to imagine, but the Leader of the House did better in the elections than the Prime Minister, who managed to lose Witney to Labour and see the Conservative candidate beaten into third place by UKIP.

The signs are that the panic is setting in. Lord Lawson is calling for an exit from Europe—[Hon. Members: “Hear, hear.”] He has some support on the Government Back Benches, I hear. Lord Tebbit is reported as saying that UKIP’s policies are now closer to the traditional Conservative agenda, and the hon. Member for North East Somerset (Jacob Rees-Mogg) is calling for a big, open and comprehensive coalition with Farage. This is a failing Conservative party that cannot even hold on to the Tory shires and whose Members are starting to behave like headless chickens. They are so bad at listening to their own members that this week one of them resorted to taking out a full page advertisement in The Times to tell them how out of touch they are. The irony is that he probably paid for it with his millionaire’s tax cut.

Many of us were shocked by the omission from the Gracious Speech of the promised legislation to ensure plain packaging for cigarettes. The public health Minister, the hon. Member for Broxtowe (Anna Soubry), publicly supported the proposal, and when the Leader of the House was Secretary of State for Health he said:

“The evidence is clear that packaging helps to recruit smokers, so it makes sense to consider having less attractive packaging. It's wrong that children are being attracted to smoke by glitzy designs on packets.”

Does he stand by that view? Why have the measures on minimum alcohol pricing been dropped, too? After this week’s revelations that the Prime Minister’s election guru, Lynton Crosby, has business links to big tobacco and the drinks industry, can the Leader of the House assure us that no inside lobbying has taken place at No. 10? Or is that why the Government’s proposal to introduce a statutory register of lobbyists has also mysteriously disappeared?

Yesterday’s Queen’s Speech showed that the Government may have legislated for fixed five-year Parliaments but that they have run out of ideas after just three. Instead of new ideas to get our economy growing again, all we get is a thin, cobbled-together legislative programme that is completely lacking in ambition. Our last Session saw parliamentary time unfilled, badly drafted, badly managed Bills, and a U-turn, on average, once every seven sitting days. Yesterday’s Queen’s Speech will give no one confidence that in the coming year we will not see more of the same.

This was the Government’s third Queen’s Speech, and all we have had is three years of failure, with low growth, falling living standards, and rising borrowing. The Government had nothing to say on tackling the crisis in youth unemployment. They had nothing to back small businesses, nothing to boost housing, nothing on rail fares and nothing on growth. This is a tired Government, out of ideas and out of touch. Even Sir Alex Ferguson could not turn this lot into a winning team.

[Mr Lansley]

I am grateful to the shadow Leader of the House for her response. I am glad that she has sufficient puff, even though the shadow Queen’s Speech she published during the recess seemed to have less steam in it than a decent kettle.

I join the hon. Lady in welcoming the hon. Member for South Shields (Emma Lewell-Buck). Although this is a matter for the Chief Whip, I also welcome back my hon. Friend the Member for Mid Bedfordshire (Nadine Dorries). In this case, however, it is probably more appropriate to say, “Welcome back to the jungle.”

The shadow Leader of the House should not trespass on to trying to interpret last Thursday’s local election results, especially those in South Cambridgeshire. I know about mid-terms; I ran the Conservative party’s European and parliamentary election campaign in 1999, two years before the 2001 general election, when we trounced everybody in sight. Labour Members might like to remember that simple fact. They might also like to remember the simple fact that their party, with their leader, secured less impressive local election results last Thursday than Michael Foot or Neil Kinnock did in mid-term. On the day before the local elections there were six Conservative county councillors in South Cambridgeshire; after the elections there were nine, partly because a sitting UKIP councillor in one division lost his seat to a Conservative. I would like the hon. Lady to get her facts right before she ventures into my constituency.

The hon. Lady asked about standardised packaging. I initiated the consultation on standardised packaging, and I did so, as I said at the time, with an open mind. As my right hon. Friends have made clear, no decision has been made in response to the consultation on that. I think that the hon. Lady will recall that the nature of the Queen’s Speech is to put forward proposals for legislation where the Government have decided what their policy is, not to venture into legislation where no policy decision has taken place. It is completely false to imagine that there was ever a question of including reference to standardised packaging in the Queen’s Speech; there never was, and it would not have been appropriate to do so.

As I said, I have looked at the hon. Lady’s alternative Queen’s Speech. In contrast with ours, there seem to be just six Bills, one of which is a finance Bill. It refers to a consumer’s Bill. There is a draft consumer rights Bill in our proposals. She has a proposal for a jobs Bill. I do not know quite what that means, because I have never yet found out how Labour Members can propose policies that would destroy jobs while guaranteeing people jobs. Where are these jobs supposed to come from? Jobs come from wealth-creating businesses, and that is what this coalition Government have been able to achieve in the past year, with some 500,000 additional jobs. Since the election, 1.2 million extra jobs have been created in the private sector. That is what makes the real difference.

The hon. Lady’s shadow Queen’s Speech refers to a banking Bill. A banking reform Bill is being carried over from the previous Session. She talks about a housing Bill, but as far as I can see her proposals would not get any houses built; we will do that through the Help to Buy scheme and other schemes.

The Labour party’s shadow Queen’s Speech also refers to an immigration Bill. Such a Bill is the centrepiece of our legislative programme, but the Labour party’s version would not impact on net migration numbers at all. It might be reasonable to make sure that migrant workers are not abused, but that is not the issue; the issue is to ensure that we encourage those people who can contribute to this economy, while also ensuring that we are not subject to abuse by those who enter and do not make such a contribution. That is what our immigration Bill will do.

On informing the House on the content of Bills, I remind the hon. Lady that today’s fresh new Order Paper notes that, in addition to the carry-over Bills from the previous Session, the Pensions Bill, the Anti-Social Behaviour, Crime and Policing Bill, the Gambling (Licensing and Advertising) Bill and the Northern Ireland (Miscellaneous Provisions) Bill will be presented in this House today, while the Care Bill, the Offender Rehabilitation Bill, the Mesothelioma Bill, the Local Audit and Accountability Bill and the Intellectual Property Bill will be presented in another place. The House therefore has a full programme, commencing today.