(12 years, 8 months ago)
Commons ChamberI think that the sensible approach, in conformity with convention, is to stick to questions to and answers from the Prime Minister in this Chamber.
In the words of one business leader today,
“Margaret Thatcher was a constant thorn in the side of European leaders, but she never vacated the negotiating table; I am anxious by the implications of what the prime minister has done.”
When will the Prime Minister give business in this country the reassurance that it needs about the impact that his walking away will have on jobs and the economy?
I think that business does understand that we must be in the European Union for trade, growth and jobs, and that our membership of the single market is key. However, there is a lot of damaging regulation coming from Brussels and we need to stand up to that. When new treaties are suggested that involve huge fiscal changes and other changes in the European Union, it is right that Britain should seek safeguards. I am not hearing the same message from business that the hon. Gentleman is hearing.
(12 years, 9 months ago)
Commons ChamberT2. Speaking of fewer jobs, the Public Bodies Bill scrapped regional development agencies. My constituent Mark Davenport invested £6,000 setting up a business installing solar panels. At six weeks’ notice, the investment made by thousands of businesses was wiped out by a dramatic cut in the feed-in tariff scheme. Can the Minister explain to Mr Davenport how the abolition of the RDAs and now the cut in feed-in tariffs is helping jobs and growth?
What the hon. Gentleman needs to deal with is the fact that the regional development agencies in their time never managed to achieve what they set out to achieve and acquired vast liabilities—an astonishing achievement for development agencies. The solar tariffs had to be reduced because they were a disgrace and would have cast ill-repute on the whole of the very important programme that we have for supporting renewables and feed-in tariffs in this country.
(13 years ago)
Commons ChamberMerseyside police say they will lose 880 police officers, with neighbourhood officers most at risk. Sir Hugh Orde says that “grass-roots neighbourhood policing” is key to policing in this country because of the effectiveness of building relationships and trust over the long run. Will the Prime Minister listen to Sir Hugh and reverse the cuts before long-term damage is done to the police’s ability to protect the public?
Chief constables up and down the country are now coming out and explaining how they will achieve these relatively modest budget reductions—6% in cash terms over four years—while maintaining the rate of visible policing. Labour committed to £1 billion of policing cuts; it would have had to do exactly the same as we are doing.
(13 years, 1 month ago)
Commons ChamberI am most grateful to my hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Yardley (John Hemming). Let me make two points. First, some terrible things have happened and I welcome the Prime Minister’s statement and his resolve to sort these things out. I am also grateful for his assurance about protecting investigative journalism and the free press. Our free press has unearthed, over time, miscarriages of justice, the misappropriation of public money, and abuse and lawbreaking on a grand scale. I remind hon. Members that a few weeks ago we were in here debating the tragic Winterbourne View case. The BBC Panorama team’s work on that had to involve false documentation, misrepresenting one of their journalists as someone else, and going in to film secretly. How else would we have known about that terrible situation? I am delighted about that.
If the hon. Gentleman does not mind, I will not—the wind-ups start in one minute.
My second point concerns the Culture, Media and Sport Committee session yesterday. There are lessons to learn from the Enron case about wilful blindness and when a company’s leadership could have known, should have known and sometimes chose not to know. I have worked in such environments at times in my career: there was an awful business of senior leadership turning a blind eye and the management thinking they could get away with things. Instead of that, we should have a culture in the media in which organisations’ boards and leaders really look to their journalists to abide by the regulations.
(13 years, 1 month ago)
Commons ChamberThere is no real defence of that sort. There is going to be a police investigation—it is under way—that will ask exactly who was culpable and who knew what, when. After that is over, the second stage of the judicial inquiry will go over all that information again, not requiring the bar of criminal prosecution, and perhaps then we will get the real evidence of who knew what, when. However, we could not have tougher processes to get to the answers that people want.
Will the Prime Minister define for us what he regards as an appropriate conversation between him and News International about BSkyB?
I thought Rebekah Brooks defined it excellently—one that you could also repeat in front of a Select Committee.
(13 years, 1 month ago)
Commons ChamberMy hon. Friend makes a good point. I do not want those people in the press who work hard, who are good investigative reporters, who do not break the law, who find good stories and who hold the powerful to account to watch today’s proceedings and think that we are going to strangle the free press in this country. That is not what we should be doing. It is very important that we all say that and that the inquiry bears that at the heart of what it is doing and it is in the terms of reference.
The Prime Minister said that destroying evidence would be a criminal offence, but my understanding is that that is the case only once the terms of reference for the inquiry have been set. Why did he not set up the inquiry last week, when Labour Members asked him to, and will he ensure that the terms of reference are set as soon as possible so that no further evidence is destroyed?
(13 years, 1 month ago)
Commons ChamberMy hon. Friend makes a very important point. Of course, if we are asking banks to rebuild their balance sheets and their reserves, there is a tension with that compared with asking them to lend. One of the solutions, as he says, is to make sure that there are new entrants into the banking sector, and that is something we are keen to secure.
The Prime Minister said that the IMF would not have made the loan to Greece if it did not think it could be repaid. The Governor of the Bank of England seems to disagree about the likelihood of that loan being repaid. I think that what the people of this country want to know is how much British taxpayers will be liable for if Greece defaults.
The point I made is that Britain’s share of the IMF is a little over 4%. It is a broad requirement of the IMF to consider whether the money can be paid back before it makes the loan. That is not something that it has decided to do on this occasion; it is something that it has to do.
(13 years, 2 months ago)
Commons ChamberI thank the hon. Gentleman for his constructive engagement with the national citizen service concept. I obviously reject his thesis and would point him to the investment in apprenticeships and everything else that we are doing. I urge him not to underestimate the potential of this programme to transform young people’s sense of what they can achieve.
May I ask the Minister again about the barriers to young people from deprived areas getting involved in this scheme, especially in the pilot projects, for which, in half of the cases, young people are being charged up to £99? Does he agree that such charges will be a severe disincentive to young people from those areas, and will he take action?
We have made it clear—I have done so personally—to every provider that money should not be a barrier to participation in the pilots. We are experimenting with a range of models to gauge people’s willingness to pay for the value that the models add, but we have made it very clear to providers that money should not be a barrier to participation.
(13 years, 3 months ago)
Commons ChamberWe are planning to legislate to introduce individual electoral registration, which of course is intended principally to deal with cases of electoral fraud. At the same time, we hope to pilot in the coming months new schemes to compare the electoral register with other publicly available databases, so that electoral registration officers can go out to communities in which they are active and ensure that if people are missing on one database, they can be included in the other.
T14. The Deputy Prime Minister told my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Camberwell and Peckham (Ms Harman) that there would be no privatisation of the NHS. I will give him another chance. Will he oppose part 3 of the Health and Social Care Bill, or are his comments just meaningless words?
There is a world of difference between allowing patients greater choice and ensuring that there is diversity in how the best health care is provided to patients, and any sell-off of the NHS to bargain-basement bidders, which we have ruled out. There will be no privatisation of that kind whatever under this Government’s plans.
(13 years, 3 months ago)
Commons ChamberI must say to my hon. Friend that she is a lot better at getting them to shut up than I am. I think that she is a future Speaker in the making.
I can absolutely guarantee to my hon. Friend that we will not make the mistake that the last Government made in respect of medical training. They created an utter shambles.
Q6. Eddie Kay from Maghull received excellent treatment when he was in hospital recently, and I am glad to say that he is recovering well. However, while he was in hospital his operation was cancelled four times, and he was also told of bed closures and nursing redundancies on his ward. Does not Mr Kay’s experience show that the Prime Minister was wrong to claim that he would not cut the NHS?
Of course things go wrong in our national health service, which is one of the reasons why I think that we need to reform and modernise it. The fact is, however, that at the last election only one party said that it would increase the NHS in real terms, and that is exactly what we are doing. If the hon. Gentleman is worried about NHS cuts, he should have words with his colleagues in Wales who are proposing to cut the national health service—not in cash terms, but in real terms—and he should help us to put a stop to that.