(6 years, 6 months ago)
Commons ChamberMay I say to my hon. Friend the Member for Romford (Andrew Rosindell) that there will indeed be scope not only to copy across the existing favourable trade arrangements but to increase the favourability in terms of access to the UK market for many of the poorest countries in the world post Brexit.
Our commitment to global health is designed to ensure that focus is placed on the most vulnerable, and our support for sustainable health systems ensures that the work that is going on to improve maternity and pregnancy services in so many parts of the world is supported and bolstered by the work that we do both in country and multilaterally.
(7 years, 3 months ago)
Commons ChamberI am very happy to agree with my hon. Friend about the importance of food production in this country. I am also happy to commend the work of hard-working farmers up and down the country, and all those who work in our food production industry. As he will know, we now have an historic opportunity as we leave the EU to deliver a farming policy that will work for the whole industry.
I certainly welcome that announcement by Facebook, and I am pleased to say that my right hon. Friend the Home Secretary has been working with these companies to ensure that they do more and act more clearly in taking down material of an extremist nature. I am very pleased to welcome the announcement that Facebook has made and I hope other companies will follow.
(7 years, 9 months ago)
Commons ChamberI agree that it is an extremely important development. It is a world first to provide this amount of information in that form. It is true that it holds a mirror up to the whole of society, and not just central or indeed local government and public bodies, but all other bodies, including charities, will need to respond positively to some of the disturbing findings exposed in the race disparity audit.
We are working hard with the National Cyber Security Centre to improve competency not only within the civil service and across Government, but among our young people. Our CyberFirst programme, which I visited in Portsmouth this summer, shows that there is a massive range of really enthusiastic young people who are determined to learn the skills that they will need to help us.
(11 years ago)
Commons Chamber“Finally” is the operative word for something that has bedevilled debate in Westminster for more than 100 years. As the hon. Gentleman knows, in January 2012 we set up the McKay commission to consider how the House of Commons should deal with legislation that affects only part of the United Kingdom. The commission’s report—an excellent one—was published in March, and the Government are now considering it in detail. I must point out to the hon. Gentleman that if this question were so straightforward to sort out, I suspect someone would have done it a long time ago.
T13. Under the Deputy Prime Minister’s flagship school meals programme, he pledged that every infant child would receive a hot, healthy school meal. How many children will be eating cold sandwiches in September because, once again, he cannot keep his word?
Even by the hon. Lady’s standards, it is a bit sour to try to undermine a policy that has not yet been implemented. It will be implemented in September and is a really progressive policy. All the evidence shows—as did the pilots conducted under the previous Government in Durham and parts of east London—that this will not only save families on low income a lot of money, but help to raise the educational performance of children from lower-income backgrounds and provide a powerful way of creating cohesion among young children as they share a meal together. We are working intensively with thousands of schools across the country at the moment, so I cannot give the hon. Lady a precise answer, but the overwhelming majority of those schools are already ready to provide this service. We are working with them over the summer to make sure that if there are any exceptions in the provision of those healthy school meals at lunch time in September, there will be only a very small number of them.
If I may say, the evidence is overwhelming that we are moving to greater consistency in sentencing. The Sentencing Council and the progressive rolling out of sentencing guidelines is an immensely helpful tool to judges in ensuring consistency in sentencing. In addition, if the judge has not explained any inconsistency with the guidance, that usually provides a good basis for my making a reference in those cases which are referable. I think we are moving in the right direction, and that progress is totally supported by the judiciary. I therefore hope that, as we move to new areas in which guidance is provided, the need for me to make references will go down.
4. What steps he plans to take to ensure that child abuse offences are prosecuted successfully.
The Crown Prosecution Service prosecutes child abuse cases robustly. In 2013-14, the number of such prosecutions rose by 440 to 7,998, with a conviction rate of 76.2%. Steps to prosecute the cases include piloting pre-recorded cross-examination of children, prioritising cases involving children aged 10 and under, and applying a new approach to child sexual abuse cases generally.
I am grateful for that answer. The Director of Public Prosecutions recently announced a series of measures regarding cases of rape because of the decline in referrals from the police to the CPS. Will such measures be considered in cases of child sex abuse, given that there has been a decline in referrals of such cases from the police to the CPS since 2010-11?
The emerging evidence is that the referrals are beginning to increase, which is good news. However, there are new guidelines, issued last October, for child sex abuse cases, which provide that there should be specialist prosecutors; a focus on the allegation, not the victim: early third-party material; and a challenging of myths and stereotypes.
(11 years, 1 month ago)
Commons ChamberA great deal of nonsense is talked about raising the minimum wage. When we consider the cost to the people who are employed and the cost to the Exchequer, it is clear that we cannot continue to subsidise employers who could pay their employees a living wage.
My hon. Friend is right to express concern about carers, many of whom are women. Would not many of them benefit the most from Labour’s commitment to provide extra child care assistance so that their children can be looked after, as opposed to the Government’s promise of jam tomorrow in autumn 2015?
My hon. Friend is absolutely right. Most carers are women, and most of them are now older women because of that very problem that people cannot afford to pay for care.
An investigation of 80 care providers established that nearly half of them were not complying with minimum wage regulations. A fifth of the adult social care work force are on zero-hours contracts. Many are not paid for travel time, and, unsurprisingly, there is a 30% turnover of care workers who work in people’s homes. This is not just bad for them; it is also bad for the people they care for. Imagine a situation in which someone does not know who will come into their home four times a day to get them up, to feed them and to put them to bed, and who does not know who will be washing their most private parts. Imagine the strain of their having to tell different people every day how to care for them, the strain on carers when their cared-for person is unable to speak up for themselves, or the worry for people of not knowing when carers will turn up and the panic when they think they might have been forgotten.
Then there are the mistakes that occur. Members will know that I speak from experience. My mum was given both her morning and evening tablets at the same time the other day because the carer accidentally gave her her evening tablets and then thought it would be a good idea to give her her morning ones as well. Another carer just gave her her evening ones instead of her morning ones, and, even worse, a new carer took my mother for her shower, wrapped her in a towel and left her to walk alone from the bathroom to the bedroom with the towel wrapped around her, Of course, my mother fell and has a head injury, and an arm injury that is still troubling her now several weeks later. I speak from experience and I know that this is exactly what is happening to hundreds of thousands of people every day when they cannot rely on the care service. Imagine the distress, too, of a cared-for person, day in, day out, having a parade of different carers.
Low pay, insecure work and zero-hours contracts are not just bad for the employee; they are bad for all of us. I fear that yet again my words are falling on the deaf ears of those who simply want to tell us that everything in the world is fine. Well, it may be fine in their world, but it is not fine in the world of the majority of my constituents in Bolton West.
Simply telling my constituents that things are getting better does not solve the problem. This Gracious Speech does not solve the problem that a third of private rented homes are non-decent homes. It will not build the affordable homes or the social homes for people and their children. It will not provide secure tenancies or affordable child care or raise the national minimum wage. It will not guarantee a job for the long-term unemployed. It will not freeze energy prices. It will not stop workers being undercut by the unscrupulous use of migrant workers. It will not make it easier for people to see their GP. It will not stop the privatisation of the health service, and it will not tackle the issues of dog welfare and dog control that put my constituents at risk; and, worst of all, it is not going to make work pay.
I hope that in 12 months’ time I will be welcoming all the things that I said this Gracious Speech will not do, and that I will be sitting on the Government Benches welcoming the next Queen’s Speech. Truly Britain deserves better than this.
(11 years, 2 months ago)
Commons ChamberI welcome the hon. Gentleman’s interest in this matter, as he knows. We have learned the lessons from Northern Ireland and that is one reason we have provided the funding we have to enable groups of people to go into schools and encourage people to register. One of the differences from which we have learned a lesson concerns the importance of online registration, which was not available in Northern Ireland. Our approach to registering young people is to encourage them to register online, and that will be carried out across the country.
T1. If he will make a statement on his departmental responsibilities.
As Deputy Prime Minister, I support the Prime Minister on a full range of Government policy and initiatives. Within Government, I take special responsibility for the Government’s programme of political and constitutional reform.
Real wages are down, 1.4 million people are stuck on zero-hours contracts and thousands more families have been forced to turn to food banks. Is that the right hon. Gentleman’s party making a difference in government?
The hon. Lady might have forgotten that when we came to power her party had left an absolute economic catastrophe behind. The great Labour recession in 2008 cost every household in this country more than £3,000. Her party predicted that more than 1 million more people would be unemployed when in fact 1.7 million new jobs have been created, of which we are very proud.
(11 years, 3 months ago)
Commons ChamberThe hon. Gentleman wants some examples: I said no to proposals from his party that anyone could basically be fired at will with no reason at all; I said no to his party’s proposals for a snoopers charter; and I have said no to profit making in state schools and to prioritising tax cuts for millionaires when our priority should be tax cuts for many people on middle and low incomes. If he wants me to go on about how the Liberal Democrats are anchoring the Government in the centre ground to ensure that we build a stronger economy and a fairer society, be my guest.
T11. A recent answer to a parliamentary question reveals that by 2015 construction will have started on only 10% of schools in the Deputy Prime Minister’s priority school building programme. Is he happy with that record?
There has been a long record of ineffective use of the public funds provided to schools for their redevelopment. The Building Schools for the Future programme, for instance, was widely recognised to be inefficient in the deployment of funds. We are providing billions and billions of pounds of capital so that schools can be rebuilt across the country, and of course all of us, on behalf of our constituents, want that rebuilding programme to take place as soon as possible.
(11 years, 5 months ago)
Commons ChamberT2. Sunderland has a great record on technology start-ups, but these small companies still find it difficult to compete and bid for Government work. What more can the Minister do across Government to support this growing industry in the north-east?
We can do more, and we are already doing much more than was previously the case. The amount of Government business going to small businesses, both directly and indirectly, has risen to nearly 20%. I am afraid that the last Government were not even measuring how much went to smaller businesses. There is much more that we can do. We have streamlined the procurement processes, which previously seemed almost deliberately to exclude small businesses from being able to bid. [Interruption.]
(11 years, 10 months ago)
Commons ChamberMy hon. Friend could add to the good weather the fact that Andy Murray won Wimbledon and England retained the Ashes—much good news was to be had over the summer. It is important that we recognise what brought about the good news to which he refers. Parties had to make a key judgment on whether, in this Parliament, to get to grips with the deficit and take the tough decisions we needed to turn our country around. The Government parties made those tough decisions; the Labour party ducked every single one of them.
Q8. The Government are right to extend free nursery provision to disadvantaged two-year-olds, but figures show that four in 10 councils will not have sufficient places. Can the Prime Minister guarantee that all those children promised a place will have one?
We have put in place the funding to provide that for the disadvantaged two-year-olds and I am confident that they will receive the services they deserve.
(12 years, 3 months ago)
Commons ChamberMy hon. Friend makes an important point, which is that we have consistently lifted the personal tax allowance—the amount of money that people earn before they start paying tax—starting at around £6,000 and now rising all the time, so that over 2 million people have already been taken out of tax altogether. If he is sitting comfortably for the next half an hour, he may hear some further news.
Q9. Does the Prime Minister agree with his hon. Friend the Member for Hexham (Guy Opperman) that his Government’s focus should be on looking after people who are struggling to pay their mortgages, rather than protecting those in £2 million houses?
We should be helping people who are paying their mortgages, and that is why it is so vital that we stick to our plans. We have low interest rates in this country because we have a plan to get the deficit down. That is absolutely key. The other point I would make to the hon. Lady is that if we look at the funding for lending scheme from the Bank of England, it has now successfully reduced mortgage rates and also made sure that people who do not have access to a large deposit are able to look at buying a house. We are making progress, but there is a lot more to do.