Business of the House

Angela Eagle Excerpts

Thursday 5th September 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 will be as follows:

Monday 9 September—My right hon. Friend the Prime Minister will propose an humble address and message on the occasion of the birth of His Royal Highness Prince George of Cambridge. I expect my right hon. Friend to update the House following the G20, followed by consideration in Committee of the Transparency of Lobbying, Non-Party Campaigning and Trade Union Administration Bill (day 1).

Tuesday 10 September—Consideration in Committee of the Transparency of Lobbying, Non-Party Campaigning and Trade Union Administration Bill (day 2).

Wednesday 11 September—Conclusion of consideration in Committee of the Transparency of Lobbying, Non-Party Campaigning and Trade Union Administration Bill. The Chairman of Ways and Means has named opposed private business for consideration.

Thursday 12 September—General debate on child protection in the UK, followed by general debate on employment rights.

The subjects for both debates were nominated by the Backbench Business Committee.

Friday 13 September—Private Members’ Bills.

The business for the week commencing 7 October will include:

Monday 7 October—The House will not be sitting.

Tuesday 8 October—Remaining stages of the Transparency of Lobbying, Non-Party Campaigning and Trade Union Administration Bill (day 1).

Colleagues will wish to be reminded that the House will meet at 2.30 pm on this day.

Wednesday 9 October—Conclusion of remaining stages of the Transparency of Lobbying, Non-Party Campaigning and Trade Union Administration Bill.

Thursday 10 October—Business to be nominated by the Backbench Business Committee.

[Ms Eagle]

I thank the Leader of the House for announcing next week’s business.

A report from the Resolution Foundation yesterday showed that one in five workers is paid less than the living wage, a rise of nearly 1.5 million in three years. We now know that the Government’s economic policies have meant that people are £28 a week worse off than they were in 2010, and for all but one month since the election prices have risen faster than wages. It is not a recovery if it leaves everyone but those at the top behind, and the public are not buying it either. Polling shows that 70% of people believe that recent improvements in the economy have not benefited middle and lower income families, and 81% believe that politicians who say that household incomes have grown faster than price rises are “out of touch”. I could not have put it better myself. This is an out-of-touch Government, complacent on living standards, building an economy that works only for their rich millionaire friends. So may we have an update from the Chancellor about this week’s understanding of his favourite phrase, “We are all in this together”?

The lobbying Bill that we have been discussing this week shows us that instead of getting the big money out of politics, the Government would rather put a gag on campaigners while protecting Lynton Crosby. But that is not surprising when with this Government money seems to buy influence. Hedge funds gave the Conservatives £32 million and then got a massive tax cut, and then there was the tax cut for millionaires. In spite of all this, I was still surprised to see Boris Johnson say this week that he would change his name to “Barclays” in return for £100 million in sponsorship. How long will it be before we see the Cabinet touting for sponsorship too?

We have been back only a few days and it is already back to normal for this Government. We have had a rebellion, chaos in the Whips Office and abject incompetence, and we have had our first U-turn this morning with the dropped plans on legal aid price competition. Where there is chaos there is waste. We have already had the pointless top-down reorganisation of the NHS at a cost of £1.5 billion. This week we have discovered that they have squandered £74 million forgetting to add VAT on the troubled aircraft carrier programme. Today, the sheer scale of the failure at the heart of the Secretary of State for Work and Pension’s flagship universal credit programme became clear. The National Audit Office report says that the scheme has been beset by

“weak management, ineffective control and poor governance”.

We have also learned that £34 million has been wasted on IT and they have spent £300 million on a computer that they do not know what to do with. The NAO blames a fortress mentality where only good news is released. Will the Leader of the House arrange a debate on this fortress mentality and the impact it may be having on the ability of the civil service to operate effectively in the culture that this Government have created?

Next week, we have the Committee stage of the comically named Transparency of Lobbying, Non-Party Campaigning and Trade Union Administration Bill, which had its Second Reading on Tuesday. The Opposition are committed to cleaning up lobbying, getting big money out of politics and keeping dodgy donors out of Downing street, but the Bill achieves none of this. The Leader of the House got a very rough ride, including from three Select Committees and his own Back Benchers, for this rushed, incompetently drafted and sinister mess of a Bill. He has already tabled 23 amendments and there will be a lot more, I am sure, before we have finished. This Bill has united the lobbying industry and transparency campaigners, who agree that it will make lobbying less transparent, not more. The Electoral Commission, hundreds of charities, campaigners and many thousands of members of the public are fighting the Government’s sinister gag on free speech in the run-up to a general election.

It seems that the Bill’s only success has been to create a huge coalition against it, so wide that it includes the TaxPayers Alliance, the Royal British Legion, HOPE not hate and 38 Degrees. Yesterday the Prime Minister accused the trade unions of mounting a concerted lobbying campaign against the Bill, but he omitted to mention that Con. Home is against it, too.

The Leader of the House does not seem to have learnt many lessons from his last disastrous attempt at a Bill, the Health and Social Care Act 2012, but I would like to ask him to learn just one: he needs to pause, listen, reflect and improve. Why not start by listening to the important report from the Political and Constitutional Reform Committee, published today? He should scrap the timetable he has just announced for Committee stage and arrange some much-needed pre-legislative scrutiny. Even better, why does he not just go back to the drawing board?

[Mr Lansley]

I am grateful to the shadow Leader of the House for her further questions. On the transparency Bill, she is just trying to rerun the debate we had on Tuesday. All the points she has made were presented in that debate and she lost. The Bill secured a Second Reading and, in particular, the support of the House against the Opposition’s reasoned amendment, which specifically sought a delay.

As I made clear on Second Reading, we will look at some of the concerns that have been raised, but I re-emphasise this point: many of the representations that are being made are based on a complete misunderstanding and a misrepresentation, which is that some change is taking place in the definition of what constitutes expenditure for electoral purposes, as distinct from campaigning on policies and issues. Charities will continue to be able to campaign as vigorously as they wish in putting forward their policies, and if any organisations were to step over the line and try to secure the election of a party or a candidate, that should be treated as election expenditure. That was the case in the past and will be the case in future. If there is any way we can make that even clearer, we will set out to do so.

I am surprised that the hon. Lady did not take the opportunity to respond on behalf of the Leader of the Opposition to the letter I sent him before the recess making it clear that the Bill was available for the Labour party to put forward proposals to give trade union members a deliberate choice on their participation in political funds, which he said they should have. Only yesterday we saw Paul Kenny of the GMB clearly trying to push him off his proposals. If he wants to entrench them, he should come forward next week—he still has time to do so—and table amendments to the Bill so that that can be legislated for and he can show his determination. If he does not do so, we will know that he is not serious about doing it at all.

The hon. Lady asked about the urgent question earlier today, trying to rerun points that I think my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State dealt with very well. Let me say one thing, and I say it from personal experience: he is doing absolutely the right thing to ensure that we deliver the programme on universal credit. It is vital that we do so in order to make work pay and to get the incentives in the welfare system right, which the Labour party failed to do. Stepping into a programme to make changes in order to deliver it on time and on budget is the right thing to do, unlike what Labour did with the NHS IT programme, which was to go into denial about all the problems. When my colleagues and I came into office after the general election we found a broken programme that we had to scrap, but in the process we saved over £2 billion, which enabled my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Health last week to announce a major programme for supporting hospitals and the NHS to improve their technology themselves. That is what we should be doing; we should have workable programmes, not top-down, broken ones. [Interruption.] Talking about the National Audit Office, it has said that delivering the NHS reorganisation programme on time is a major achievement and that it is delivering the planned savings: £5.5 billion from the reform programme itself over the course of this Parliament and £1.5 billion every year thereafter.

The hon. Lady asked one thing about business, regarding an update from the Chancellor of the Exchequer. I am happy to remind her that he will be at the Dispatch Box on Tuesday to answer questions. I am looking forward to him being able further to remind the House, as the Prime Minister did yesterday, of the events of the summer in relation to the economy, which the hon. Lady did not mention and her leader did not mention at Prime Minister’s Questions. The reason they did not is that the Chancellor will be able to refer to figures showing that employment is up, exports are up, confidence is up, manufacturing is up, services are up, construction is up, housing starts are up, and growth is up. The hon. Lady knows that, as a consequence, the Labour party is going down.