Barry Sheerman
Main Page: Barry Sheerman (Labour (Co-op) - Huddersfield)Department Debates - View all Barry Sheerman's debates with the Leader of the House
(5 years, 3 months ago)
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Andrea Leadsom
I am grateful to my right hon. Friend for the quality of his prose this morning. I am also very glad that he was able to join my fantastic Parliamentary Private Secretary, my hon. Friend the Member for Banbury (Victoria Prentis), to launch the great British spring clean recently. That will take place mainly between 22 and 24 March this year, and I encourage everyone to get out there with their hi-vis jackets and litter pickers and their local teams and to contribute.
My right hon. Friend is right to raise this issue; it is of huge concern, and always in the top three items that people in the country raise. Litter is a huge concern to all of us, and certainly it is a function of the improper use of packaging. I am very sympathetic, therefore, and my right hon. Friend might well want to seek at least a Backbench debate for all hon. Members to share their concerns.
Mr Barry Sheerman (Huddersfield) (Lab/Co-op)
May we have an early debate on the state of our town centres and the closure of Marks & Spencer stores? Marks & Spencer used to be a company with high ethical values; indeed, it used to buy a lot of its materials in Huddersfield for suiting and ladies’ fashions, but now its management is under a former Conservative vice-chairman and Member of Parliament, Archie Norman, who we know well from his asset stripping of Asda. We know from the involvement of his team in HBOS and other companies what they do; there is no ethical value there. May we have a debate on these asset strippers destroying our town centres?
Andrea Leadsom
The hon. Gentleman makes some very serious accusations, and I cannot share his enthusiasm for pointing at individuals and blaming them. Nevertheless, he makes an important point about the need to have thriving town centres; he is absolutely right to do that, and he will be aware that the Government are doing a lot to try to reduce and reform business rates to give our retail spaces a better chance so that we can all enjoy thriving town centres.
On the hon. Gentleman’s specific point about asset stripping and the policy of big business, I encourage him to raise that directly during questions to the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy on 12 February.