The Government's Plan for Brexit
Debate between Angela Smith and Helen Goodman(8 years ago)
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Angela Smith
I shall come on to the option that we should follow in the negotiations. As many Members have illustrated, we all have views on where we should be going. The National Farmers Union has modelled three scenarios for the outcome of the negotiations: a free trade agreement with the European Union; World Trade Organisation rules; and trade liberalisation.
The potential cost to farming of non-tariff barriers to access the EU and worldwide trade range from 5% as a result of regulatory divergence to 8%. If direct farm payments are reduced or taken away completely from farmers in those scenarios, there will be a hugely negative impact on farm incomes, ranging from a reduction of £24,000 per annum under the best deal—the free trade deal—to an impact of over £30,000 per annum on individual farm income under the trade liberalisation scenario. The EU spends £3.2 billion a year on support to farmers, which is just under 25% of what we pay the EU to be a member of the Union. A key question for the Commons is whether we continue direct farm payments to farmers at the existing 100% level. Do we reduce it, and do we look at the impact on farm trade and individual farmers? We need answers to those questions before we can sign off any Government position on what we do in Brussels in summer 2017.
The farming industry employs more than 80,000 seasonal workers a year. The NFU has called for a seasonal agricultural workers permit scheme. The Government refuse to commit to such a scheme, but without that input there is little hope for the horticultural sector. Furthermore, the food and drink manufacturing sector has a skills gap. By 2024, it will stand at 130,000. On top of that, one in 12 employers in the sector report an intention on the part of their employees to go back home.
The road haulage industry, which is a critical service for the food and farming sector, has a skills shortage of 45,000. Sixty thousand drivers in the UK are foreign, mostly from the EU. The veterinary sector is another vital service for the food and farming sector, and reports that over 50% of vets registered every year in the UK come from abroad, mostly the EU.
Helen Goodman
My hon. Friend is making an excellent speech about the importance of the farming sector. She will know that we have had representations from the National Trust and the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, which have millions of members, all of whom are concerned about biodiversity, which is what farmers support in this country. Farmers cannot provide the environmental goods if their income makes farming uneconomic.
Funding for Local Authorities
Debate between Angela Smith and Helen Goodman(11 years, 2 months ago)
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Angela Smith (Penistone and Stocksbridge) (Lab)
I will preface my comments by referring to the speech made by the hon. Member for Tiverton and Honiton (Neil Parish). For reasons I will outline, I do not believe that the real debate should be about rural versus urban areas. I believe that it should be about the fact that local government is being asked to bear the austerity cuts being applied by the coalition Government. That is the real issue.
I wish to put on the record my congratulations to Councillor Steven Houghton, leader of Barnsley council, on recently being raised to Knight Bachelor for services to local government, a well-deserved honour. Steve Houghton has got to be one of the best leaders we have in local government. He has done a great deal to develop local government in this country, including designing the future jobs fund, which has now been abandoned.
Like many other right hon. and hon. Members, I was a local councillor before entering Parliament. I was a member of my local council for nine years and was very proud to be a councillor and a cabinet member for education. I now represent the constituency of Penistone and Stocksbridge, which straddles two metropolitan local authorities, Barnsley council and Sheffield city council. It is an incredibly diverse constituency. A large part of it is rural. Indeed, it contains much of the north-eastern aspect of the peak district national park—it does not get any more rural than a national park—within its boundaries. But other parts of the constituency would best be described as semi-rural, suburban and urban.
In other words, the constituency spreads from the fringes of urban Barnsley and urban Sheffield right out into the valleys of the peak district. In the rural western part of the constituency, one finds all the usual issues: the needs of local farmers and other typical problems, such as lack of access to high-speed internet or a decent bus service, and there are all the other issues relating to affordable housing, employment and access to work.
However, other parts of my constituency, such as the old pit villages of High Green and Dodworth face challenges common to former coalfield areas, as the disappearance of what was essentially a key economic activity rooted in villages has left a huge vacuum in employment and, in High Green, severe social problems. Then there are the urban areas in Sheffield, which carry with them all the seemingly intractable problems we have seen emerge since the deindustrialisation of the 1980s.
Helen Goodman (Bishop Auckland) (Lab)
My constituency is similarly dispersed. Does my hon. Friend agree that the cost of services in rural areas is far higher, and was not she, like me, appalled to hear Tory Councillor Nick Worth of Lincolnshire county council defending the closure of more than half the libraries in Lincolnshire?
Angela Smith
I completely agree. The closure of libraries really worries me. We face similar levels of closure in Sheffield. We are not applauding or welcoming those closures; we are having to deal with the terrible impact that we know they will have in our area. But we know that the reasons for those closures lie with the lack of funding from central Government.
I have sketched my constituency not because I want to wax lyrical about the area I represent, but because I want to establish a key point that is all too often overlooked when we consider what I call provincial England, meaning England outside London. For too long the debate has been unhelpful, sitting on a platform that polarises the arguments. For too long the argument has been about rural areas versus urban areas, as though the two are literally miles apart. Nothing could be further from the truth, as my constituency exemplifies. As I have already said, I represent deeply rural areas located firmly within a metropolitan borough. I represent rural areas that in the past have supported engineering and coal, railways and ceramics as well as the vital agriculture industry.
My plea to the Chamber today is this: let us start having a more rational and pragmatic debate about the role of local government, let us stop dividing our country up into areas of interest, and let us start representing properly the interests of all the people of England. Let us not have a debate in which we say, “My rural area isn’t getting enough from the Government, so let’s cut the funding for the metropolitan boroughs.” Let us properly recognise that most parts of England, including the metropolitan boroughs, are more complicated than appears to be the case when we just look at a title such as “Sheffield city council.”
Transparency of Lobbying, Non-Party Campaigning and Trade Union Administration Bill
Debate between Angela Smith and Helen Goodman(11 years, 3 months ago)
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Angela Smith
I thank my hon. Friend. What he said provides further evidence to show how this Bill was not properly thought through before it was brought before us. It shows, too, the amount of work that should have been done and the issues that should have been sorted out before it was brought here.
Helen Goodman
I am sure my hon. Friend is aware—I hope so—of the paper produced by the House of Commons Library, which shows that under the Bill’s proposals, the limits on third party spending in Wales are coming down to £24,000 and to £10,000 in Northern Ireland. That would mean that in Wales and Northern Ireland, it would be impossible to employ anybody in a voluntary sector organisation to run any kind of campaign for one year in four.
Angela Smith
I agree with my hon. Friend on that point.
As I was saying, our amendment is designed to return us to the status quo on thresholds and to help protect smaller charities and groups from being caught by legislation, making it virtually impossible for them to participate in the democratic process. That must be right, and the Electoral Commission has suggested, as I pointed out earlier, that the threshold should be raised. Let me quote from the evidence given by Jenny Watson to the Political and Constitutional Reform Committee:
“We said again in our written evidence that one practical thing that could be done to make a difference to the Bill would be to raise the thresholds at which people have to register, and we have a particular concern about that as it relates to Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, because those thresholds are low.”
Let me ask the Government why the voice of the regulator is being so badly ignored in respect of this legislative process. Why is the Electoral Commission being ignored? We will listen with interest to the Minister’s response on that point.
As far as the limits for controlled expenditure are concerned, our position is clear: the limits need to be defined in the context of meaningful reform of the funding of political parties and of their ability to throw big money at election campaigns. In other words, the Government need to withdraw the Bill and to rethink. They need to enter into meaningful negotiations with the other political parties and to commit to proper consultation and scrutiny of proposals as they emerge, in relation to both political parties and the third sector.
In concluding my remarks, I ask the Minister to think again about not just specific points in this clause, but something more fundamental. The Minister is a Liberal Democrat; I ask him to take back to his Conservative partners the message that the Government’s whole approach to this issue needs to be looked at again. “Think again” is our message to the Government, who should commit to discussions designed to produce meaningful reform within which we can place sensible changes to the rules on third party funding—changes that we can consult on with confidence, knowing that we have done the right thing overall in changing our politics for the better.
The Economy
Debate between Angela Smith and Helen Goodman(13 years ago)
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