Business of the House

Angela Eagle Excerpts

Thursday 3rd July 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 next week will be as follows:

Monday 7 July—Estimates day [1st allotted day]. There will be a debate on universal credit implementation, followed by a debate on the implementation of the common agricultural policy in England. Further details will be given in the Official Report.

[The details are as follows: There will be a debate on universal credit implementation: monitoring DWP’s performance in 2012-13, Fifth Report from the Work and Pensions Committee, HC 1209, Session 2013-14, and the Government response published as Second Special Report, HC 426, Session 2014-15.

The lead Department is Work and Pensions.

There will be a debate on the implementation of the common agricultural policy in England 2014-20, Seventh Report from the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee, HC 745, Session 2013-14, and the Government response published as Seventh Special Report, HC 1008, 2013-14.

The lead Department is Environment, Food and Rural Affairs.]

At 10 pm, the House will be asked to agree all outstanding estimates.

Tuesday 8 July—Second Reading of the Modern Slavery Bill, followed by proceedings on the Supply and Appropriation (Main Estimates) Bill.

Wednesday 9 July—Opposition day [4th allotted day]. There will be a debate on the subject of education, followed by a debate on housing supply. Both debates will arise on an Opposition motion.

Thursday 10 July—There will be a general debate on the UK’s justice and home affairs opt-outs.

Friday 11 July—The House will not be sitting.

The provisional business for the week commencing 14 July will include the following:

Monday 14 July—Consideration of a Bill, followed by a motion to approve the first report from the Committee on Standards on the respect policy.

Tuesday 15 July—A motion on the retirement of the Clerk of the House, followed by Second Reading of the Small Business, Enterprise and Employment Bill.

Wednesday 16 July—Opposition day [5th allotted day]. There will be debates on Opposition motions, including one on the subject of health.

Thursday 17 July—Business to be nominated by the Backbench Business Committee.

Friday 18 July—The House will not be sitting.

I should also like to inform the House that the business in Westminster Hall will be as follows:

Thursday 10 July—A debate on the second report of the Work and Pensions Committee on the role of Jobcentre Plus in the reformed welfare system.

--- Later in debate ---

[Ms Eagle]

I thank the Leader of the House for announcing next week’s business. On Monday, we will have the first allotted day for the debate on the estimates. That is an arcane and opaque process that does little to scrutinise the actual spending of the Government. Does the Leader of the House agree that we need to reform the estimates process to ensure real scrutiny? Will he support my call for the Chancellor of the Exchequer to answer questions in the Chamber on the estimates, separately from the Budget, and for each Cabinet Minister to have a yearly Budget question and answer on spending in their Department?

On Tuesday, we will debate the Modern Slavery Bill, which the Opposition support but which in some areas does not go far enough. Will the Leader of the House tell us whether his Government will accept our amendments to provide statutory legal guardians for child victims of trafficking, and greater transparency in supply chains to ensure that companies do much more to prevent slave labour?

Yesterday, private Members’ Bills were formally introduced. Labour Members brought forward a series of Bills to tackle the scourge of zero-hours contracts, to strengthen the minimum wage and to protect the NHS. However, all Conservative Members could do was cheer yet another Bill on the UK’s membership of the European Union. [Hon. Members: “Hear, hear.”] They are at it again. While we bring forward practical solutions to the crisis in living standards, all they can do is bang on about Europe.

It has been a year and a half since what was billed as the Prime Minister’s last speech on Europe, but what have we seen since? A Prime Minister too afraid to stand up to the Eurosceptics in his own party has been suffering rebellion after rebellion. The more they bully him, the more he appeases them by picking fights in Europe. The trouble is that he keeps losing. Only this Prime Minister could come to the Chamber and claim that losing 26-2 is actually a triumph. If that is what success looks like, I would not like to see what happens when he fails.

We have a PR Prime Minister who cannot deliver the goods. He promised to protect the NHS and keep waiting lists down, but four years later cancer waits have increased by nearly half. Two thirds of people cannot see their GP within two days and the A and E waiting time target has now been missed every week for almost a year. Instead of getting his facts wrong and smearing the Welsh health service, the Prime Minister should listen to the chair of the British Medical Association, who said that the NHS is

“palpably fraying at the edges”.

Will the Leader of the House finally admit that people cannot trust the Tories with the NHS? Will he arrange for a debate in Government time, so that the Secretary of State for Health can come clean about the scale of his failure?

The Government are living in a parallel universe. The Chancellor claimed that we are “all in this together” but Government figures show that in the last two years 1 million more people fell into absolute poverty. Lord Finkelstein, the Tory peer and one of the Chancellor’s closest confidantes, let the cat out of the bag recently when he said that future Tory cuts will

“undoubtedly fall on poor people”.

Does the Leader of the House agree with him, and will he tell me whether Lord Finkelstein was present last night at the Tory summer ball, where, I am told, a bottle of champagne was auctioned for £45,000? [Interruption.] Was that cheap champagne? We now know that last year’s event was attended by six billionaires, 73 financiers, the owner of a strip club and the judo partner of Vladimir Putin. While the Chancellor’s hedge fund mates and dodgy donors are getting tax cuts, millions of Britons are living in poverty, and now the Chancellor’s ally says they can only expect it to get worse. So can the Leader of the House arrange for a debate in Government time on the meaning of “all in this together”?

The Conservatives recently tried to rebrand themselves as the workers party. They produced that beer and bingo advert aimed at people they think of as proles, but this week they have had to abandon a photo-shoot for working-class MPs because they could find only 14 of them. That is far fewer than went to Eton. It is becoming harder for them even to pretend they are in touch with real life: the right hon. Member for Croydon South (Sir Richard Ottaway) thinks that Londoners who cannot afford the soaring rents should get on their bikes to Manchester; the family business of the hon. Member for Newbury (Richard Benyon) is buying up swathes of social housing, trebling rents and threatening mass evictions; and a Tory councillor in Coventry thinks that people who use food banks are selfish.

The Tories say they have changed on Europe, they say they have changed on the NHS and they say they have modernised the Conservative party, but we all know the truth: no matter what spin they put on it, it is the same old Tories.

[Mr Lansley]

I am grateful to the shadow Leader of the House for responding to the business statement, and to her and her colleagues for giving me the opportunity to announce the business for next Wednesday. She asked about reforming the estimates. As she knows, I am not proposing any reform of the estimates process as such, but Select Committees have considerable latitude and potential to undertake inquiries on departmental expenditure plans and, through the Liaison Committee, to bring forward, on estimates days, opportunities for the House to debate those. I recall that when I was Health Secretary the Health Committee undertook an annual substantive inquiry on all aspects of the health budget. That is not true of all Select Committees, but it is an important pointer to the direction in which we may go. She will be aware that the Public Administration Committee is in discussion with the National Audit Office and often emphasises the importance of NAO support, not only to the PAC but to other Select Committees, in the scrutiny of departmental expenditure.

The hon. Lady asked about the Modern Slavery Bill. Its Second Reading is coming up next week, so, if I may, I will leave things until that debate. We agree on the principles, and I hope the legislation will be of substantial importance. We need to get it right, but, working together, not least with the benefit of the pre-legislative scrutiny, which has been important in that context, I am sure we will have an opportunity to respond to the issues she mentions.

The hon. Lady referred, as did the Leader of the Opposition, to the NHS. I remind her that the Prime Minister was in no sense smearing the NHS in Wales. On the contrary, he was setting out some simple facts. The decisions that the Labour party has made on the NHS in Wales should be understood by people in England as well as by people in Wales. The Labour party has cut the budget for the NHS by 8% in Wales, whereas this year this coalition Government are increasing the budget for the NHS by £3.5 billion. Over this Parliament the NHS budget will increase by £12.7 billion—that is a real-terms increase. That is what is enabling the NHS to deal with rising demand and the very large number of additional patients: 1.3 million more accident and emergency attendances; more than 1 million more in-patient admissions; 6.5 million more out-patient appointments; and 3.5 million more diagnostic tests. Those are substantial increases in demand, and the NHS, with a small real-terms increase, is coping extremely well with that—better than in Wales, where the budget has been cut. For that reason, the latest report—the 2014 report—from the Commonwealth Fund in America put the UK at the top of its comparison of leading health systems across the world. We can be proud of that. All the data on which it is derived, contrary to what the shadow Health Secretary was saying, relate to the experience of the people in this country, in the health service, under this coalition Government.

The hon. Lady asked about private Members’ Bills. I am looking forward to debating those Bills, not least the EU Referendum Bill of my hon. Friend the Member for Bromley and Chislehurst (Robert Neill) on 17 October. I do not understand why she thinks that that matter is not important to the people of this country. If the European parliamentary elections did nothing else they demonstrated that it is important to the people here. Let me say something that is quite unusual for me. The hon. Lady should listen to Len McCluskey and Unite, because they are telling her party that it should be supporting a referendum on our relationship with Europe.

The Prime Minister’s speech, the Bloomberg speech, was important as it made it clear to the people of this country that they had a right to expect us to enter into a renegotiation of our terms that would lead to reform and give them a choice. As the Prime Minister has said, at the end of the day it is the people of this country who will have a choice. He has fought and won in Europe before. He won in getting us out of the banking bail-out in which the Labour party would have left us. He got the budget cut. When we had a Labour Government, they gave away part of the rebate. Our Prime Minister protected the rebate and cut the budget, and that is important. He will win those battles again.

Finally, I did have the pleasure of going to the summer party last night. I did not see my noble Friend Danny Finkelstein—[Interruption.] I did not buy the champagne, which was bought not for drinking purposes but because it was signed by Margaret Thatcher. [Hon. Members: “Yes!”] The highlight of the evening was not the auction but a speech by my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister, who illustrated the positive achievements of this coalition Government and the increasing likelihood of a Conservative victory at the next general election.