Anne Main
Main Page: Anne Main (Conservative - St Albans)Department Debates - View all Anne Main's debates with the Cabinet Office
(11 years, 2 months ago)
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The Prime Minister
As I have said on several occasions during this Question Time, if we want to see living standards recover properly—and I do—there is only one sustainable way of making that happen. We need a growing economy, we need to keep on top of inflation, we need to ensure that mortgage rates are kept low, and we then need to cut people’s taxes by raising the personal allowance. That is how we can help households with their disposable income. If we listened to Labour and had more spending, more borrowing and more debt, the first things to go up would be interest rates and mortgage rates. For all the talk of the costs that families face, that increase in mortgage rates would wipe out all the hard work that we have done. [Interruption.] The shadow Chancellor says “You wait.” Well, we are waiting—for one single sensible suggestion from a party whose Front Benchers have got it comprehensively wrong in the last three years.
Mrs Anne Main (St Albans) (Con)
As chair of the all-party parliamentary group on Bangladesh, I am pleased to be leading a delegation as part of the preparation for our report on the Rana Plaza collapse. I thank the Department for International Development for its rapid response, and I am grateful for all the extra funding that was provided for it. Will my right hon. Friend join me in encouraging all businesses in the United Kingdom that trade in garments to ensure that their trade is ethical, and that other people are not being exploited for the benefit of our markets?
The Prime Minister
I congratulate my hon. Friend on the work that she does to further relations between Britain and Bangladesh, and thank her for her reference to DFID, which works extremely hard with that country. She is absolutely right to draw attention to that appalling industrial accident, and to encourage companies to check their supply chains and establish where their produce is coming from. She has made a very important point, and I wish her well with the work that she is doing with Bangladesh.