Business of the House

Angela Eagle Excerpts

Thursday 27th March 2014 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 31 March—Second Reading of the Wales Bill.

Tuesday 1 April—Second Reading of the Finance Bill.

Wednesday 2 April—Opposition day [unallotted half day]. There will be a debate on an Opposition motion. Subject to be announced, followed by motion to approve a statutory instrument relating to terrorism.

Thursday 3 April—Statement on the publication of the fourth report from the Work and Pensions Committee on support for housing costs in the reformed welfare system, followed by a debate to be nominated by the Backbench Business Committee, followed by a general debate on civil service reform. The Select Committee statement and subjects for debate were determined by the Backbench Business Committee.

Friday 4 April—The House will not be sitting.

The provisional business for the week commencing 7 April will include:

Monday 7 April—General debate on justice and home affairs.

Tuesday 8 April—Consideration in Committee of the Finance Bill.

Wednesday 9 April—Continuation of consideration in Committee of the Finance Bill.

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

Friday 11 April—The House will not be sitting.

I should also like to inform the House that the business in Westminster Hall for 3 April will be:

Thursday 3 April—Debate on incapacity benefit migration.

[Ms Eagle]

I thank the Leader of the House for announcing next week’s business. I also take this opportunity to mark the funeral of Tony Benn, which will begin at St Margaret’s church shortly. As we heard in the fulsome tributes last week, Tony Benn was one of the great parliamentarians of our age, and we will miss him.

Will the Leader of the House join me in congratulating the competition authority for listening to the Leader of the Opposition and announcing an inquiry into the big six energy firms? After SSE showed yesterday that it backs the Leader of the Opposition’s plan by freezing its prices, perhaps the Leader of the House will tell us why his party still do not. Will he give us an assurance that, while the investigation is ongoing, consumers will be protected from any more unfair price rises?

We have the Second Reading of the Wales Bill on Monday, which gives further powers to the Welsh Assembly. Given that it wants these new powers as soon as possible, will the Leader of the House confirm when he expects the Bill to reach Committee stage?

My hon. Friend the Member for Wansbeck (Ian Lavery) has today published his Bill to abolish the bedroom tax, after the House supported its introduction by 226 votes to one. As there is no time left for private Member’s Bills to have a realistic chance of getting a hearing, will the Leader of the House arrange for us to debate this Bill in Government time? After all, the House has expressed a strong view and it is not as if the Government are overly busy with their own legislation.

It seems that this Government are becoming more and more Orwellian. Last week we had beer and gambling for the proles, and this week the Justice Secretary has been forced to defend his ban on prisoners being sent books. The author Philip Pullman has called the change “disgusting” and “vindictive” and one unnamed senior Tory Minister briefed the press that the Justice Secretary

“wins the prize for the Government’s least enlightened Minister”.

Will the Leader of the House tell us whether he agrees with the Justice Secretary and his ban on books in prisons?

This week, we have been debating the Chancellor’s missed opportunity Budget. Across the country, people are £1,600 a year worse off, long-term youth unemployment has doubled and according to the Office for Budget Responsibility, energy prices are rising at twice the rate of inflation. The Chancellor called it a Budget for savers, but the OBR revealed that the savings ratio will have halved by 2018. The Chancellor said that it was a Budget for makers, but productivity remains weak and the trade gap has widened. The Chancellor said that it was a Budget for doers, but real wages have fallen by 2.2%. This was a Budget of spin. The Red Book revealed the depth of the Chancellor’s failure and buried in the small print was yet another stealth tax cut for Britain’s biggest banks. Next Tuesday, we will discuss the Finance Bill. On every crucial measure—living standards, growth and debt—the Chancellor has failed.

The Government are fast acquiring a reputation for staggering incompetence. They said they had an economic five-year plan, but it is already running four years late. They said that universal credit would save money, but it is now costing an unbelievable £160,000 per person, and their trebling of tuition fees is drowning students in debt yet bringing in no extra money. What a Government for the Liberal Democrats to prop up. Faust sold his soul to the devil for unlimited knowledge and worldly pleasures; the Lib Dems have sold their souls for a mess of pottage

[Mr David Heath (Somerton and Frome) (LD)]

No, we haven’t.

[Ms Eagle]

You have—sold your soul for a mess of pottage. [Laughter.]

In the hotly fought race to be the UK’s next EU Commissioner, I am sure that the Leader of the House will be delighted to hear that his odds have dramatically shortened and he is now the clear front-runner. As we get closer to a reshuffle that might ship him off to Europe, I wonder whether the Leader of the House would like to agree with his local Conservative councillor, Mark Howell, who has said that South Cambridgeshire would “love” to have Boris Johnson as its next MP? I for one would miss our exchanges if he did decide to go.

There are still 406 days until the general election, but recently Lord Tebbit said that

“the coalition has…gone past its sell-by date”

and that it is

“beginning to smell a bit“.

Gwyneth Paltrow and Chris Martin have just announced their separation, so I would like to suggest that the Leader of the House gets them in as advisers. Their strategy of “conscious uncoupling” sounds exactly like what this Government are trying to do.

[Mr Lansley]

I am grateful to the shadow Leader of the House for her questions. Today is an opportunity for many Members to say farewell to Tony Benn at St Margaret’s and I was very glad that we were able to do so formally in the House last week. Indeed, many Members were able to do so individually in the Chapel during the course of yesterday evening.

The hon. Lady asked about the big six. The Secretary of State will make a statement to the House immediately after questions, but it is clear that the Government are taking action. In its announcement about the price freeze, SSE said that the Government’s decision to cut the taxes that add to energy bills was the

“principal factor in SSE being able to make this price commitment”.

There is a world of difference between an effort on the part of the Opposition to try to buck the market, as they always want to do, and an effort on the part of this Government to get a competitive market that delivers the greatest possible benefits to consumers. In that context, I was staggered that by voting against the Budget the Opposition voted against measures that would cut energy costs for energy-intensive industries, including in some of the areas that Labour Members represent where jobs depend on the competitiveness of manufacturing. Those same measures will help in the long term to reduce energy bills for consumers in this country.

The Wales Bill will have its Second Reading next week, and I will announce when its Committee stage will be. As it is a constitutional Bill, however, I hope that we will find time, before too long, for it to be considered on the Floor of the House. We are anxious to bring forward the Wales Bill—that is why we have introduced it in this Session—and the debate next week will allow us to hear from the shadow Secretary of State for Wales whether he is in fact, as he appeared to be in the Welsh Grand Committee, against the devolution of powers relating to tax to Wales. This is an astonishing position: the Government are in favour of further devolution to Wales, and the Opposition are against it. They will have to explain themselves.

I agree with the Lord Chancellor in relation to prisons. There is not a ban on books. There is, on the part of the prison authorities and the Ministry of Justice, a determination to act to make sure that security in prisons is maintained. There are libraries in prisons and there is access to books. We have to make sure that the security is appropriate.

I would say that the hon. Lady was attacking the Budget, but her approach was a bit limp to be described as an attack. The Budget is clearly a success. The fact that Labour Members voted against the Budget will, I am afraid, return to haunt them. What happened in the last couple of days has been very curious. When challenged yesterday on whether Labour Members had in fact voted for higher taxes on business, the shadow Chancellor was busy denying it, having the day before voted for exactly that to happen. Then yesterday, they voted for—at least most of them did—the cap on welfare, while at the same time in private the shadow Chief Secretary was busy trying to tell everybody,

“It will be much better if we can say all the changes that the Government has introduced we can reverse”.

So Labour Members are voting against the Budget and denying it, and voting for the cap on welfare and denying that. I do not know where they are coming from or going to; what I do know is that they will have to explain themselves. In particular, they cannot vote against a cap on housing benefit, against the overall cap on the benefits a household can claim and against plans to limit the annual increases in benefits, and at the same time vote overall for the cap.

I hope that we will raise a glass to those who are entering into marriage this weekend—for the first time, those who are entering into same-sex marriages, as well as the no doubt thousands of others who are entering into marriage. I was pleased to note that in 2011, there was an increase in the number of people getting married in this country. I hope that the measures that we have taken on same-sex marriage will help to promote, as my support was intended to do, the lifelong commitment that marriage represents.

On the justice and home affairs debate on Monday week, which I announced in provisional business, I hope the House will welcome the fact that we committed to returning to the House for a further vote. We will do so later this year, before formally applying to rejoin the measures we are seeking to rejoin, following the House’s support for the opt-out. We are grateful to the European Scrutiny Committee, the Home Affairs Committee and the Justice Committee for their reports on the matter. The planned debate on 7 April will provide Parliament with an opportunity to debate those issues and the Select Committees’ reports, in order to seek the views of the House, as we have always made clear that we will, prior to any specific measures being rejoined later in the year.

Finally, in the course of the debate yesterday evening between the Deputy Prime Minister and the leader of the UK Independence party, I was slightly staggered by what Nigel Farage said about Ukraine and Russia. Actually, in the House of Lords yesterday, in response to the statement that was repeated from this House, Lord Pearson of Rannoch also made a remark to the effect that the cause of the crisis was the EU’s relationship with Ukraine, and not Russia’s. I think it is outrageous that UKIP should be behaving as apologists for President Putin. I hope that they will withdraw the comments.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Lansley]

I think we all recognise that primary legislation is critical. Although there is an enormous amount of legislation, the question of who makes our primary laws is an issue on which we should focus. I am grateful to my hon. Friend for his solicitous remarks. I cannot comment on such issues, because they are matters for the Prime Minister, not for me, happily—it is up to him.

[Ms Angela Eagle]

Oh, come on! Should we place a bet?

[Mr Lansley]

No, because I do not particularly approve of gambling. I listened to the debate yesterday and thought that, on the facts, the Deputy Prime Minister had the better of the argument. All the way through, however, I thought to myself that a debate about Europe is all very well, but what the British people want is an in/out referendum. The leader of the UK Independence party cannot deliver it and the Labour party and our Liberal Democrat friends will not deliver it—only the Conservative party will deliver a referendum.