Private Sector Pensions

Bernard Jenkin Excerpts

Monday 22nd January 2018 Commons Chamber

[Ms McVey]

As Members on both sides of the House know, the regulator is an independent, arm’s length body. It was set up in 2004 after much discussion about how it should work and how it could best support pensioners when they needed its help. What it never did was to interfere with the running of a business; that was what was decided. We said that we needed to make sure that we could go further if we had to. That is why we have set about introducing a Green Paper—as I said, we have had 800 consultation responses—looking at where it is best to intervene, to make sure that we get the balance right. We do not want to tip the edge and unnecessarily cause harm to a business.

Profit warnings mean that a company will not get the profit that it expected—no more than that. We have to make sure that the Government do not precipitate anything that could be seen as negative from business. That is why we are looking at all these 800 responses, looking carefully and considering how to protect companies’ employees, protect pensions and move forward in the most conducive and careful manner. The new White Paper will be coming forward later this year.

[Mr Bernard Jenkin (Harwich and North Essex) (Con)]

May I draw my right hon. Friend’s attention to the way the British public are reacting to this issue? They are seriously repelled by the notion that executive directors and even ex-directors should carry on drawing large payments at the same time as there is a mounting pension deficit. If this was what capitalism was really like, people would not want it. What are the Government going to do to draw the attention of businesses and executive directors to their governance responsibilities in these situations in the future, although this is nothing like as bad as the Maxwell scandal?

[Ms McVey]

I completely agree with my hon. Friend. This is about strengthening the corporate governance of organisations. This is about giving power to the boardroom. This is about giving shareholders responsibility. This is about having responsible businesses doing the right thing. Where we can ensure that that happens, and where we can look into investigating what is going wrong—should things be going wrong—it is right that we do. As I said at the beginning, most businesses—the vast majority of businesses, and there are over 6,000 defined benefit schemes—are doing the right thing, but where they are not, it is right that there is fury from the public to make sure that they do the right thing. That is why the Insolvency Service carries out investigations in this regard and gets money back where it can.

Housing and Social Security

Bernard Jenkin Excerpts

Thursday 22nd June 2017 Commons Chamber

[John Healey]

I welcome you to the Chair, Mr Deputy Speaker; I think this is the first time that you have been in the Chair in the Chamber. May I also welcome almost all of my Labour colleagues back to the House after the election, and all 87 new Members from all parties? As elected Members of the House, ours is a special job with special responsibilities. Last but not least, may I welcome the Secretary of State and his old team back to the Front Bench? There is a new Housing Minister, but, sadly, he comes with no new ideas or plans to deal with the housing crisis in this country.

These are extraordinary times. There is a Government Bench without a Government, a Prime Minister who cannot even seal a deal with the DWP—I mean the DUP. [Interruption.] She might have better luck with the DWP; she cannot seal a deal with the Democratic Unionist party. There is also a Queen’s Speech with no guarantee of getting the number of votes needed to approve it. This is the first minority Government in this country for 38 years, but this Prime Minister is no Jim Callaghan. She called the election expecting a bigger majority and saying she wanted a stronger mandate. She now has no mandate, no majority and no authority.

Normally, the Queen’s Speech sets out what the Government will do; this Queen’s Speech sets out what they won’t do, can’t do and daren’t do. They will not make the economic changes to invest for the future and protect our public services. They cannot put forward a full programme for government, because the Prime Minister cannot yet do a deal with the DUP. They dare not even implement their own manifesto, and have taken it down from their website.

[Mr Bernard Jenkin (Harwich and North Essex) (Con)]

A Queen’s Speech with, I think, 21 Bills in it, and draft Bills, is not a thin Queen’s Speech. May I just point out that the mandate from a 42.5% vote share in this high-turnout election is rather better than, say, Tony Blair’s mandate in 2005, when he got only 35% of the vote?

[John Healey]

To come up with that number of Bills, the hon. Gentleman has to incorporate anything that can be loosely described as a draft Bill or flagged as potentially coming to the House in the next two years. The Prime Minister promised she would not call an election, but then did so because she wanted a bigger majority, a stronger mandate and greater authority. I am sure the Secretary of State will accept that the Prime Minister has none of those things at a time when our country is facing—I know he will appreciate this being such a strong Brexiteer—some of the biggest challenges we have faced for decades at home and abroad. At a time when we need a heavyweight Government, we have an interim leader and a set of lightweight Government Ministers.

--- Later in debate ---

[John Healey]

But my goodness, didn’t people—including us—have to argue hard for those basic regulations? Why did the hon. Gentleman and his colleagues, when the Bill that became the Housing and Planning Act 2016 was going through the House, reject intervention and regulation to ensure that all private landlords at least made their homes fit for human habitation before letting them? This is a Government whose mindset can see regulation only as red tape, and who do not see what the Prime Minister described as the important role played by good regulation in the public interest.

[Mr Jenkin]

May I put it to the right hon. Gentleman that the last thing people want to see now is parties turning this into a party political argument? It would be equally easy for us to point out that the present Government inherited the 2006 regulations from his Government. If there has been a failure of regulation, I think that it is shared. I think that what the public want to see is the House taking full and shared collective responsibility for what has happened and putting it right, rather than Members trying to accuse each other in order to score political points.

[John Healey]

This is precisely about politics. This is precisely what the House should do, and, in fact, it is precisely about what the Prime Minister said this morning. Indeed, my third point follows on from the point that she made when she talked about the fundamental issues that underpin the detail of what we have also been discussing.

Sections of our people feel marginalised and ignored, and that is what happened to the tenants at Grenfell Tower. It is no good the hon. Gentleman huffing and puffing; the Prime Minister said that this morning. She recognised it. However, this is a Government whose housing regulator has now dropped any real requirement for the voice and views of tenants and residents on governing boards to be heard, and who, in 2010, abolished the National Tenant Voice, which we had set up. Its establishment resulted from a report called “Citizens of equal worth”. Many Grenfell Tower residents, and other social housing tenants, will feel that that rings hollow in this day and age.

Let me now deal with the specific failures on housing. Two thirds of people now believe that the country is experiencing a housing crisis. Everyone knows someone who is affected—people who are unable to obtain a home that they need or aspire to. Many of the housing decisions made by Ministers since 2010—decisions that the Secretary of State boasts about—have made the problems worse. Because Ministers have done too little for first-time buyers on ordinary incomes, home ownership has fallen to a 30-year low. They have given private landlords a freer hand and rejected legislation requiring properties to be fit for human habitation, so 11 million private renters have fewer consumer rights than they have when they buy a fridge-freezer. They have stripped away protections for people who need help with housing, so the number of people sleeping rough on our streets has more than doubled. They have cut investment and outsourced responsibility for building new homes to big developers, so, on average, fewer new homes have been built since 2010 than under any peacetime Government since the 1920s. That is the track record of the Secretary of State and his colleagues.

After seven years of failure, it is clear that the Conservatives have no plan to fix the country’s housing crisis. Some of what the Secretary of State has said this afternoon, and has said before, about house building and tenants’ fees is welcome, but there is nothing in the manifesto or in the Queen’s Speech to tackle the wider causes of the housing crisis.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Bernard Jenkin (Harwich and North Essex) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to see you in the Chair, as Deputy Speaker Sir David—albeit fleetingly, perhaps. I am pleased to follow the hon. Member for Motherwell and Wishaw (Marion Fellows). I did not agree with all her points, but I thought that the collaborative tone of her response to the Grenfell Tower tragedy set the tone that the public want and expect to see in the House.

I commend the Gracious Speech. I am not going to labour the point on Brexit, except to make two brief points. First, the ex-remainers who continue to increase the demands that we should make on our European partners for concessions as we leave the European Union are actually making it harder to get any deal at all, because the more we demand and the more concessions we want, the more we will be accused of cherry-picking. The EU has made it very clear that—to paraphrase Michel Barnier—we cannot enjoy the benefits of membership and not be in the EU. Perhaps the ex-remainers have a plan to make so many demands that will not be granted to us in the hope that the country will decide, “Well, maybe we shouldn’t leave the EU after all.” I put it to them that if there is any idea that we are going to try to reverse the decision taken by the British people in the referendum, that would be an incendiary decision for the House to take.

Secondly, we keep hearing about a cliff edge. What is this cliff edge? It seems to me to be a continuation of the fear campaign that is now so discredited. There is obviously not going to be a comprehensive trade agreement within two years—to that extent, we are not going to have a deal—but are we seriously suggesting that the EU is so insane that it will not make the same kind of arrangements on aviation, data protection, intellectual property, customs facilitation or product recognition on standards that it makes with 100 or 150 other countries with which it does not have a trade deal? I prefer to regard the EU as a bit more constructive than that; indeed, the EU has said that it wants to be constructive and does not want to punish us. If we leave without a comprehensive trade deal, we will have an agreement about lots of detailed things that will enable goods to flow across the Northern Ireland border, just as goods flow across the border between Canada and the United States without the lorries stopping, as my right hon. Friend the Member for North Shropshire (Mr Paterson) said.

I commend the Gracious Speech because I am delighted to see that it contains a draft patient safety Bill, which is the result of a 2015 recommendation on clinical incident investigation by the Public Administration Committee, which I chaired at the time. I had hoped to see a draft Bill on reform of the Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman, which the Committee described as “stuck in time” in our report entitled, “Time for a People's Ombudsman Service”. If we are going to introduce a public advocate for public disasters, is it going to be a statutory body? Would it not be a good idea to combine ombudsman reform with a new public advocate statutory function?

I wish to talk about the response to the Grenfell Tower fire and to raise some issues relating to how a public inquiry could be established. Just this year, in February, the Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee produced a report called “Lessons still to be learned from the Chilcot Inquiry”. We drew on previous reports produced under the chairmanship of Dr Tony Wright. Public confidence in public inquiries is not to be taken for granted. As well as Chilcot, we looked at other inquiries that lost public confidence, including the child sex abuse inquiry, and at the length of time that it took for the Saville inquiry in Northern Ireland to report. We recommended that a public inquiry should not be established unless the House has voted for it, on an amendable motion dealing with the remit, the timetable and the chairmanship, and that before such a motion is debated a special Select Committee should be established to consider those matters and report back to the House.

Everyone wants to set up this inquiry as quickly as possible in response to public anger, which is very understandable, but so many public inquiries are set up in haste before their terms of reference are properly considered. The Leveson inquiry, for example, has been regretted because not enough thought was put into it. I do not belong to the tradition of democracy that believes that the elected Government are necessarily the fount of all wisdom, however much I admire the Prime Minister herself.

[Dr Julian Lewis (New Forest East) (Con)]

Is it my hon. Friend’s position that were a Select Committee to look into a terrible tragedy such as this, there might be a better chance of getting a non-partisan analysis that would lead to more information coming forward on the Floor of the House?

[Mr Jenkin]

I am glad that my right hon. Friend has made that intervention, because I want to be absolutely clear. I fully support what the Prime Minister is doing in setting up a public inquiry; what I am suggesting is that a special Select Committee should be established to supervise the setting up of the inquiry, to monitor it and, essentially, to set some timelines. These inquiries take so long because lawyers can always think of new questions and new points to make. We need to put a sense of urgency into these inquiries so that they report on time and do not drag on and on.

I submit that the terms of reference should not be about finding blame. If there are to be prosecutions, there will be prosecutions, but we will not make life better by creating an atmosphere of blame, however understandable it is. I remember that after the Paddington rail crash there was so much blame, but in the end the report did not blame people. The Cullen inquiry was a good inquiry that resulted in far-reaching institutional changes in how safety is managed on the railways. I suspect that we need the same kind of far-reaching reforms on fire safety. We heard from the hon. Member for Westminster North (Ms Buck) about the different regulatory arrangements that are scattered across the landscape of housing management.

All those arrangements need to be brought together and considered as a whole, and possibly there should be one new body supervising the safety management of residential property. There should probably be an independent investigatory body to determine the causes of accidents, rather like the air accidents investigation branch of the Department for Transport or the rail accident investigation branch. The healthcare safety investigation branch of the Department of Health is to be established in statute to do the same kind of thing in health. We want to know who is accountable and what lessons need to be learnt. The whole landscape is very confusing at the moment, and that is what this inquiry really has to resolve.

Housing Benefit

Bernard Jenkin Excerpts

Tuesday 12th November 2013 Commons Chamber

[Madam Deputy Speaker]

I have just said that it is not a matter for the Chair. It may be a matter for debate at some other time, but it is not a matter for the Chair and that was therefore not further to the point of order.

[Mr Bernard Jenkin (Harwich and North Essex) (Con)]

On a point of order, Madam Deputy Speaker. Given that it was described by the judge in the case as a ruling of constitutional significance which cannot be underestimated, has a Minister offered any indication that they will come to make a statement about this very grave matter?

[Madam Deputy Speaker]

I have ruled that this is not a matter for the Chair. The hon. Gentleman knows that it is not a matter for the Chair. The point will undoubtedly be brought to this Chamber at another time.

Universal Credit

Bernard Jenkin Excerpts

Thursday 5th September 2013 Commons Chamber

[Mr Duncan Smith]

I will not give that estimate now, because I intend to make a clear statement in the autumn about how and when we will roll this out. All I can tell the hon. Lady is that there will be significant volumes, and that I intend to close down jobseeker’s allowance and tax credit well before the election.

[Mr Bernard Jenkin (Harwich and North Essex) (Con)]

Is my right hon. Friend aware that the Public Administration Committee will produce an important report tomorrow about civil service reform? It comes as no surprise that the Comptroller and Auditor General has said that his programme lacked “an appropriate management approach”, adding:

“Instead, the programme suffered from weak management, ineffective control and poor governance.”

These are problems that afflict all Departments, and have done so for many years under the last Government as well as this one. Will my right hon. Friend support the civil service reform so determinedly championed by my right hon. Friend the Member for Horsham (Mr Maude), to ensure that we secure the change in Whitehall that we need?

[Mr Duncan Smith]

First, let me say that I am a complete supporter of my right hon. Friend the Minister for the Cabinet Office and Paymaster General on the civil service reform plan, and I have been from day one. The truth is that if the Opposition were in thinking mode they would have agreed with that as well. The reality is that today’s NAO report shows there were problems in the running of this programme. I intervened when I discovered that and changed it, but I never expected to have to do that. When I arrived, I expected the professionalism to be able to do this properly. So my view is that I have intervened in the right way. All the other programmes of IT change are working and are well run—and they are well run by the Department. This one was not. We have made the changes necessary.