Oral Answers to Questions

Bill Esterson Excerpts

Wednesday 2nd November 2011 Commons Chamber

[Bill Esterson (Sefton Central) (Lab)]

T2. 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?

[The Minister of State, Cabinet Office (Mr Oliver Letwin)]

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.

Public Disorder

Bill Esterson Excerpts

Thursday 11th August 2011 Commons Chamber

[Bill Esterson (Sefton Central) (Lab)]

Merseyside 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?

[The Prime Minister]

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.

Public Confidence in the Media and Police

Bill Esterson Excerpts

Wednesday 20th July 2011 Commons Chamber

[The Prime Minister]

There 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.

[Bill Esterson (Sefton Central) (Lab)]

Will the Prime Minister define for us what he regards as an appropriate conversation between him and News International about BSkyB?

[The Prime Minister]

I thought Rebekah Brooks defined it excellently—one that you could also repeat in front of a Select Committee.

Public Confidence in the Media and Police

Bill Esterson Excerpts

Wednesday 20th July 2011 Commons Chamber

[Margot James (Stourbridge) (Con)]

I 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.

[Bill Esterson (Sefton Central) (Lab)]

Will the hon. Lady give way?

[Margot James]

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.

Phone Hacking

Bill Esterson Excerpts

Wednesday 13th July 2011 Commons Chamber

[The Prime Minister]

My 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.

[Bill Esterson (Sefton Central) (Lab)]

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?

European Council

Bill Esterson Excerpts

Monday 27th June 2011 Commons Chamber

[The Prime Minister]

My 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.

[Bill Esterson (Sefton Central) (Lab)]

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 Prime Minister]

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.

Oral Answers to Questions

Bill Esterson Excerpts

Wednesday 15th June 2011 Commons Chamber

[Mr Hurd]

I 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.

[Bill Esterson (Sefton Central) (Lab)]

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?

[Mr Hurd]

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.

Oral Answers to Questions

Bill Esterson Excerpts

Tuesday 24th May 2011 Commons Chamber

[The Deputy Prime Minister]

We 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.

[Bill Esterson (Sefton Central) (Lab)]

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?

[The Deputy Prime Minister]

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.

Oral Answers to Questions

Bill Esterson Excerpts

Wednesday 27th April 2011 Commons Chamber

[The Prime Minister]

I 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.

[Bill Esterson (Sefton Central) (Lab)]

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?

[The Prime Minister]

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.

United Nations Security Council Resolution 1973

Bill Esterson Excerpts

Monday 21st March 2011 Commons Chamber

[Edward Miliband]

I think that my hon. Friend probably speaks for Members across the House, and Ministers will have heard what she and my hon. Friend the Member for Blackley and Broughton (Graham Stringer) said. It is important that the House is not just kept up to date but has the chance to debate these issues. I see the Prime Minister and the Foreign Secretary nodding.

[Bill Esterson (Sefton Central) (Lab)]

The point about regular scrutiny of what happens is incredibly important, not just to hon. Members but for the wider public. Talking to constituents over the weekend, I discovered that they had great concerns about our involvement, and about the length and level of that involvement. A great deal is needed from the Government to reassure the public about that involvement, not just now but over the coming weeks and months.

[Edward Miliband]

My hon. Friend probably speaks for many hon. Members from all parts of the House who went back to talk to their constituents. There is obvious concern, for a range of reasons, about our engaging in another military action, and it is a completely understandable concern.

That takes me on to the third part of my speech, which is about not just defining the mission but ensuring that there is clarity as it moves forward. There are a number of questions and challenges that the Government must seek to answer in the days ahead. In particular, there are four areas that require clarity: clarity about the forces and command structure involved; clarity about the mandate; clarity about our role in it and the limits; and most difficult of all, clarity about the endgame.

On broad participation in the mission and the forces involved, I want to impress again on the Prime Minister, as I did on Friday—and he himself noted this—the central importance of Arab participation, not just in the maintenance of the no-fly zone but in all the diplomatic work that is essential to keep the coalition together. I welcome what he said about a regular coalition meeting, because that is important. The Arab League’s decision to support a no-fly zone was central to turning the tide of opinion, which is why there was concern in various quarters about the apparent comments of Amr Moussa, the secretary-general of the Arab League, yesterday. He has since sought to correct the interpretation of those comments. I urge the Prime Minister—I am sure that this is being done, but it is important—to develop the fullest and most comprehensive diplomatic strategy to maintain the support of those countries and, indeed, the broadest possible coalition. That means not just keeping the countries in the region informed of our mission but ensuring that they are consulted on it.

We must be clear about the mandate of the UN resolution. We all want to see Colonel Gaddafi gone, and the Prime Minister repeated that today. None of us, however, should be under any illusions or in any doubt about the terms of what was agreed. The resolution is about our responsibility to protect the Libyan people—no more, no less.