Oral Answers to Questions
Debate between Brandon Lewis and Ben Bradshaw(7 years ago)
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Brandon Lewis
I say gently to the right hon. Lady that the definition of net migration, which is decided by the UN, refers to people who have been in the country for 12 months or more, which university students obviously have if they are here for three years and using services here. Ultimately, though, the numbers are decided by the Office for National Statistics, which is an entirely independent organisation, and not by the Government.
Mr Ben Bradshaw (Exeter) (Lab)
The Minister for Immigration (Brandon Lewis)
We are confident that a positive deal can be reached, but we are of course preparing for every outcome. Although we cannot comment on the detailed planning, Departments are working together across a range of complex issues to develop our future approach to the border, including for a possible no-deal scenario. Those options will be subject to the outcome of our negotiations with our partners in the EU.
Mr Bradshaw
The Minister’s former immigration director, David Wood, said last week that, with current resources, the challenge of Brexit “can’t be met”, and that is with a minimum two-year transition, let alone the chaos of a no-deal scenario. Given all the other demands on his budget that we have heard about today, is it not grossly irresponsible for some of his Cabinet colleagues to be running around talking up the prospects of a no deal, instead of being level with the public about any trade-offs that will inevitably result in a Brexit deal?
Brandon Lewis
I am optimistic that we will get a good deal both for the UK and for our partners in Europe, so that we can work together as forward-looking partners, but we are also actively monitoring work flows at the border to ensure that we have sufficient resources in place to meet demand. As my colleagues across the Government and in the Cabinet have said, it is absolutely right that we do plan for all eventualities.
Oral Answers to Questions
Debate between Brandon Lewis and Ben Bradshaw(11 years, 11 months ago)
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Brandon Lewis
It is amazing that the party that left us with a council tax benefits bill that had more than doubled is now complaining that this Government are trying to sort out the economic mess we inherited. It is very simple: we are talking about a voluntary scheme, and if councils want to take it up, they can. They will have the money in March to help them through the first year and they can then take their schemes forward, but many councils will have structured schemes that protect the vulnerable in the first place. It is a shame that too many Labour councils are trying to affect the most vulnerable. This Government are doing what they can to protect them from badly run Labour councils.
Mr Ben Bradshaw (Exeter) (Lab)
6. Whether he plans to implement the proposals by Lord Heseltine for unitary local government.
Local Government Bill [Lords]
Debate between Brandon Lewis and Ben Bradshaw
Mr Ben Bradshaw (Exeter) (Lab)
For a Government who claim to want to give more power to local communities and to devolve decision making downwards, this is a most astonishing Bill to force through Parliament as a priority today. The Secretary of State said on 8 June this year:
“I want to give an indication of my three most important priorities. These are: localism, localism and localism.”
The Conservative manifesto referred to
“Making politics more local… we want to pass power down to people”,
while the coalition agreement spoke of a
“radical devolution of power to local government and community groups”.
Someone called the “decentralisation Minister” told the local government conference on 8 July that he would
“put town halls back in charge of local affairs”.
How hollow those promises sound today, as this Government seek to drive through a Bill that will achieve exactly the opposite, depriving the people of Exeter and Norwich of their localism and their historic unitary status. They have fought for nearly four decades to regain the right to run their own affairs. The Government are not handing power down, but up to the bigger, more remote and much less accountable Devon and Norfolk county councils.
We have already heard that today’s debate involves unfinished business not of the last four years, but of the last 36 years. Before 1974, Exeter and Norwich had both enjoyed their own local government for hundreds of years—long before county councils were even thought about.
We do not need to rehearse the arguments for unitary government, as my right hon. Friend the Member for Don Valley (Caroline Flint) has already expounded them. Suffice it to say that unitary government used to have all-party support for the obvious reason that it is more efficient, more transparent and more accountable. Indeed, the last Conservative Government recognised that and acknowledged the mistakes they had made in 1974, as they created a further 46 new unitary authorities after 1974, including the only other two sizeable urban areas in Devon—Plymouth and Torbay. That reorganisation under the last Conservative Government left Exeter and Norwich as the biggest cities in England without control over their own affairs. That lack of democratic accountability is felt even more acutely in those great provincial cities that are in the middle of large rural counties, where most of the services continue to be delivered and the decisions continue to be taken by rural-dominated county councils.
That is the situation that the Labour Government inherited. We quite rightly recognised the role of cities such as Norwich and Exeter as economic growth points, and the desirability of unitary government as less wasteful and more accountable. In 2006, we invited bids from anyone interested to come forward with suggestions for unitary government. Like a number of other towns and cities across England, Exeter responded enthusiastically.
Exeter’s bid enjoyed all-party support. We have already heard one quote from the leader of the Conservative group, Councillor Yolonda Henson. She wrote to my local newspaper, the Express & Echo on 10 March this year:
“In one of the greatest political statements ever spoken, Abraham Lincoln praised the virtues of a government of the people, by the people and for the people. That is precisely what the restoration of unitary local government is promising for the people of Exeter.”
I could not have put it better than the Conservative group leader on Exeter city council. I would like to pay tribute to Councillor Henson and her fellow Conservative councillors for withstanding the constant bullying and pressure from their party at the national level and from Conservative councillors at County hall. It was not only all the political parties on Exeter city council that supported our unitary bid, as every single significant stakeholder in the city supported it: Exeter university, Exeter chamber of commerce and the voluntary sector. Every single opinion poll carried out in Exeter showed that the overwhelming majority of people in the city wanted their own self-rule.
At this point, I note the comments of Lord Burnett during consideration of this Bill in the other place. He claimed that the recent general election result in Exeter was evidence of opposition to unitary status. I have to inform Lord Burnett that in Exeter Labour secured the second-lowest swing against it anywhere in the south-west. The poor Conservative candidate, caught between her local party and central office, sat so firmly on the fence on the issue that I wondered how she did not split in half. She did much worse than the Conservatives had expected, given the tens of thousands of pounds of Ashcroft money they poured into Exeter. The poor Liberal Democrat candidate, who defied his own local party and came out against unitary status, was the only Liberal Democrat in the whole of the south-west whose vote went down. As with so much of what else Lord Burnett has said on this matter, he is grossly ill informed and the facts are quite the opposite of what he claimed.
Exeter’s original bid had all-party, all-stakeholder and public support. We should not forget that it would have been perfectly possible at that time for counter bids to be made by Devon county council or Norfolk county council, but that did not happen. The then Labour Government regarded Exeter’s bid as one of the strongest, but, as we have already heard, it narrowly failed to come through on one of the criteria—the affordability criterion, as it would have taken a long time to pay back the costs.
Brandon Lewis
The right hon. Gentleman refers to the failure of alternative bids—for example, from Norfolk. There was advice from the Department about what should have been considered. Surely the right hon. Gentleman would accept that this happened in Norfolk because Norfolk county council wanted the status quo and did not want to be messed about by the Government in the first place.
Mr Bradshaw
That might well be the case, but my point is that it would have been perfectly open to either Norfolk or Devon to make counter-unitary bids, but there was no support. I accept that there was no support in Devon or Norfolk for those initiatives and I shall come on to explain why. That is exactly why the Labour Secretary of State came to the conclusions he did.
Exeter’s bid was considered one of the strongest, but it narrowly failed on one of the criteria because there were no corresponding unitary bids from the rest of Devon. There were weaker bids at that time: there was a bid from Bedford and a bid from Chester that went through because there were corresponding unitary solutions covering the rest of those counties. That being the case, I think the Government were absolutely right to ask the boundary committee to look at possible unitary solutions covering the whole of Devon—and the same for Norfolk and Suffolk.
I have to say that describing the boundary committee process as unsatisfactory would be the understatement of the century. It took two years and it had a flawed consultation, which had to be started again. It was plagued by a series of self-serving judicial reviews from some of the district authorities that were worried about being abolished. There was a strong—and, I believe, justified—suspicion in both Exeter and Norwich that the boundary committee and Department for Communities and Local Government officials were not balanced in their approach, favouring the more powerful counties against the cities.