Business of the House

Angela Eagle Excerpts

Thursday 12th June 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 will be as follows.

Monday 16 June—I expect my right hon. Friend the Foreign Secretary to update the House following the global summit to end sexual violence in conflict. That will be followed by the conclusion of the remaining stages of the Consumer Rights Bill, followed by a motion to approve a statutory instrument relating to special educational needs.

Tuesday 17 June—Conclusion of the remaining stages of the Criminal Justice and Courts Bill.

Wednesday 18 June—Opposition Day [1st allotted day]. There will be debates on Opposition motions, including a debate on energy prices.

Thursday 19 June—Motion to approve a statutory instrument relating to terrorism, followed by a general debate on the UK’s relationship with Africa, followed by a general debate on defence spending. The subjects for both debates were determined by the Backbench Business Committee in the last Session.

Friday 20 June—The House will not be sitting.

The provisional business for the week commencing 23 June will include the following:

Monday 23 June—Conclusion of the remaining stages of the Deregulation Bill.

Tuesday 24 June—Remaining stages of the Wales Bill.

Wednesday 25 June—Opposition Day [2nd allotted day]. There will be a debate on an Opposition motion, subject to be announced.

Thursday 26 June—General debate on the programme of commemoration for the first world war.

Friday 27 June—The House will not be sitting.

[Ms Eagle]

I thank the Leader of the House for announcing next week’s business, and may I also take this opportunity to congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for North East Derbyshire (Natascha Engel) on her unopposed re-election as Chair of the Backbench Business Committee? She is doing such a good job that no one even thought she should be replaced. We could not say the same about many Government Ministers.

I would also like to wish the England football team good luck in their first World cup game on Saturday. We are all convinced that they are going to have a great tournament and we will all be watching their every move, as usual, from behind the sofa.

I note from the Leader of the House’s comments that the Foreign Secretary is due to give us a statement on his conference on sexual violence, which is very welcome, on Monday, but we all watched in horror as militant extremists overran swathes of north-western and central Iraq yesterday, and they are now reported to be within 50 miles of Baghdad. Over half a million people have had to flee, and the country has been forced to declare a state of emergency. Will the Leader of the House arrange for the Foreign Secretary to keep the House fully informed as this deeply worrying situation develops?

In future business there is an eerie silence on the recall Bill, and the Deputy Prime Minister managed, in true Lib Dem fashion, to disagree with his own draft Bill only last week. Can the Leader of the House tell us when the Government’s latest version of the recall Bill will actually be published?

A report from the National Audit Office has revealed that the Government’s armed forces restructuring is in chaos. The plans are already six years behind schedule, and instead of making savings of nearly £11 billion, it looks like these changes are going to cost the public purse more. The Chair of the Public Accounts Committee has rightly described the additional cost as scandalous. The changes risk exposing a dangerous capability gap in the nation’s defences, so will the Leader of the House arrange for a statement from the Defence Secretary so he can explain these failings in his Department?

As the passport agency descended into chaos, the Government first tried denial, then played the blame game, and now have been forced into a series of emergency measures. The head of the agency denied that there was a backlog only on Monday; the Home Secretary was boasting that it was meeting its service targets on Tuesday; by Wednesday the Prime Minister was forced to admit that it has been trying to clear the backlog for weeks; and overnight we found out that Ministers were not even aware that vital security checks have been scaled back to speed up the process. Even if the Home Secretary was unaware, the Leader of the House acknowledged the problem last week and promised a written ministerial statement. Seven days later, we have not had one, and my colleague the right hon. Member for Delyn (Mr Hanson) has had no substantive reply to his named day questions on this subject. Will the Leader of the House explain why we have had to drag the Home Secretary kicking and screaming to the Chamber today to account for this fiasco? Is the non-appearance of the promised statement a further sign of the Home Secretary’s incompetence, or has she fallen out with the Leader of the House too?

After yet another weekly session where the Prime Minister focused on the rhetoric and ignored the reality, I have decided that we need a regular “mind the gap” watch to highlight the Government’s failure to live up to their PR hype. This week alone we have had the news that the housing benefits bill is set to soar by yet another £1 billion despite the Government promising to make work pay and provide enough affordable homes, food bank use is up by 54% last year alone despite the Government saying they would face up to the cost of living crisis, and, despite matching our promise to end child poverty by 2020, this week a report from their own Child Poverty Commission said that was not remotely “realistic”.

The Government’s Whitehall farce continues to run and run. The Conservatives are blaming their multiple failures on the civil service, their special advisers, the last Labour Government, and now they are even trying to blame Oxfam. The Prime Minister wanted to reshuffle his deck, but has now realised that he has got a pack of jokers. The Liberal Democrat headquarters managed to tweet:

“we didn’t go into govt because it was the right thing to do, we went into govt because it was the right thing to do”.

[Hon. Members: “Where are they?”] There is not a single Liberal Democrat Member here; they are all at a lesson on how to tweet properly. Only the Liberal Democrats could change their minds halfway through a tweet. After their disastrous election results, the Deputy Prime Minister has finally had some good news this week. They have finally topped a ballot—but it was only the ballot for private Members’ Bills. Meanwhile, the Chief Secretary to the Treasury has declared that the Liberal Democrats could be the biggest party in 2025, and William Hill has pulled its sponsorship from the Liberal Democrats’ closest rivals, the Monster Raving Loony party. This clearly demonstrates that there is only one joke party left in British politics.

[Mr Lansley]

I am grateful to the shadow Leader of the House for her response to the business statement. I echo her congratulations to the hon. Member for North East Derbyshire (Natascha Engel), whose re-election is a testament to her chairmanship of the Backbench Business Committee and to the work of the Committee as a whole. It has brought forward some important debates and given Back Benchers a greatly enhanced voice. Surveys in recent years have shown that the public now believe that the House debates issues of relevance to them on a more regular and timely basis.

I also echo the shadow Leader of the House’s good wishes to the England team. It will be a late night on Saturday, but at least it will be followed by Sunday morning. I am looking forward to the England team scoring many goals and kissing the badge, as they say. I am told that the Leader of the Opposition is being invited to do that with the trade unions in Nottingham at the moment. It seems a strange idea, but it tells us something about where the trade unions think the interests of the Labour party lie, in contrast to the coalition, which knows that it serves in the national interest.

The hon. Lady asked about a statement on Monday. I have announced that the Foreign Secretary will be in the House on that day to make a statement, and we will of course take opportunities to update the House on the very concerning situation in Iraq. The threat presented by the so-called Islamic State for Iraq and the Levant is alarming for the whole international community. The Iraqi authorities in the federal Government and in the Kurdistan Regional Government need to co-ordinate and work together to put forward a political response and a security response to the situation. We are aware of large numbers of Iraqis being displaced from Mosul and the surrounding areas. The Department for International Development is monitoring that situation closely, and rapidly assessing the humanitarian need that will arise from it. I will ask my colleagues in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and in DFID to ensure that the House can be updated whenever possible.

The hon. Lady mentioned the recall Bill. We announced the Bill in the Queen’s Speech and will introduce it in due course. We are making good progress with it. We have already introduced five Bills in this Session—three in the other place and two here—and we will introduce further Bills in due course.

The hon. Lady also asked about defence spending. I have announced a debate on defence spending, which will take place next Thursday following the recommendations of the Backbench Business Committee. It will give my colleagues an opportunity to remind Members—including Opposition Members—that we inherited a defence budget with a £38 billion black hole. We have taken action to balance the books; Army 2020 is an integral part of that. An excellent job has been done—not least by the Defence Secretary and the Chief of the General Staff—to redesign the Army so that it can meet future demands while remaining affordable. We are committed to investing £1.8 billion in the reserves, and we are now seeing the benefit of that: the trained strength of the reserve forces is rising for the first time in 18 years.

The hon. Lady asked about the situation in the Passport Office. I made it clear in response to questions last week that my colleagues would update the House on that matter this week, and they have done so in response to questions and to an Adjournment debate secured by the hon. Member for Coventry North West (Mr Robinson). The Home Secretary has also given the House a full, authoritative response on the issue and outlined a number of measures that will make a substantial difference in the weeks ahead.

The hon. Lady asked about issues that she suggested were not being covered in the Government’s reply, and she included food prices. I heard one of my DEFRA colleagues reminding the House that food prices in the year to March rose by only 0.5%, and in the past two months food prices appear to have been falling, so it is important to bear in mind the fact that on some issues relating to the cost of living people are in a better place than they might otherwise have been. That is particularly the case when they are in work, and as we saw just yesterday more than 2 million new private sector jobs have been created since the general election. If there is a gap, it is between the Labour party and reality on what is happening in our economy. Our long-term economic plan is delivering on reducing the deficit and on growth, which is 3% up on a year ago. We have 2 million more private sector jobs and 400,000 more businesses. We are delivering our long-term economic plan in the national interest while the Leader of the Opposition is off to serve the union interest.