Oral Answers to Questions
Debate between Caroline Flint and Ben Gummer(9 years, 1 month ago)
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Caroline Flint (Don Valley) (Lab)
T8. The Royal College of Nursing reports that it is becoming clear that for the first time since the early 2000s there is a critical shortage of registered nurses in the UK. Both the UK and global nursing labour markets are changing, and our increasing reliance on alternative sources is not sustainable. In 2014, 37,645 students across the UK were turned away from nursing courses. Is it not time the Minister admitted that the situation is not good enough and that the Government need drastically to scale up those places to reduce dependency on overseas nursing staff?
Ben Gummer
The thrust of the right hon. Lady’s question is correct. That is why we have near-record numbers of nurses in training and a record number of nurses in practice, and we will continue to see growth over the next five years.
Jobs and Growth in a Low-carbon Economy
Debate between Caroline Flint and Ben Gummer
Caroline Flint
If the hon. Gentleman’s ambition is not to be as good as Germany, that is one thing, but one thing is for sure: his efforts over the past six months have certainly not put us in a position to get anywhere near Germany’s aspirations. I should be very interested to see the detailed plan of how he expects us to reach 22 GW, given what he has done to the solar industry in just a short space of time.
Caroline Flint
No, I am going to make a little more progress, if I may.
The future is not just in new sources of energy, but in adapting and transforming existing energy generation. We all know that with carbon capture and storage we are on the verge of developing a hugely valuable and exportable technology, but we know also that that opportunity will not last for ever, and the Minister of State, Department of Energy and Climate Change, the hon. Member for Wealden (Charles Hendry) knows that other countries are seeking to develop that technology and that demonstration projects in Canada and Australia are already under way.
I know that the Government have announced a new competition in this sector, but I hope that they take the opportunity to bear down on the projects that we know and understand, because, with a new competition and 20 other projects sitting on a shelf somewhere, we must decide quickly which proposals known to us have the best prospects of success. There is a lot riding on the scheme, as the Minister knows, in this country and in terms of European support, so we all want to begin to develop the technology without further delay.
We know also that new nuclear power stations will need to be built over the next decade. Nuclear is important to us, and Labour understands that. It provides one seventh of the world’s electricity and one third of the European Union’s, and if we do not invest we will only import more French nuclear electricity. With 63 new nuclear power stations under construction worldwide, we have to make sure that we learn in real time the lessons of those overseas projects in order to ensure that the next generation of nuclear power in this country is delivered as efficiently as possible and maximises job opportunities for people in the UK.
Personally, I have found it quite helpful to talk to the people involved in those projects in order to understand what we can learn, and to take some of the risk out of delivering our own capacity more efficiently.
Ben Gummer
The right hon. Lady has spoken much about the previous Government’s record. They had six energy White Papers, of which only the last mentioned nuclear power in any substantive capacity at all, yet she has the front to come to the House and tell Government Members that we should think about nuclear power, when under this Government permission will be granted for new nuclear power stations.
Caroline Flint
I was trying to be helpful in terms of where we are. When we left government, we recognised that we did need to build more nuclear power stations. I am not sure whether all the Conservative party’s coalition partners necessarily accept that. I think that they have an opt-out from any vote on the issue on the Floor of the House.
Energy Prices
Debate between Caroline Flint and Ben Gummer(12 years, 10 months ago)
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Ben Gummer (Ipswich) (Con)
It is always a great pleasure and honour to follow the right hon. Member for Coatbridge, Chryston and Bellshill (Mr Clarke), whose defence of his constituents is always reasonable and valiant. I think he is right to this extent—that appealing to people to switch supplier will not be the entire cure for problems in the energy market. The reason for that is that the energy market is broken, so competition will not work entirely. It can work to a certain extent, but not entirely, if the market cannot deliver what the consumer wants.
To understand how to fix the market, we have to look at the history of the market and why it went wrong. If we look at energy prices, we find that they have moved since the privatisation of the late ’80s. They fell consistently beneath the retail prices index every year from the late ’80s and the early 2000s. They did so over a longer period than at any time since records of energy prices began. Then, from the mid-2000s they levelled out, and from 2005 to 2007 they increased further than RPI until 2010 when the last Government left office.
I am fully aware that this is often not a moment to talk about the previous Government’s record, but they had a fundamental hand to play in the reasons why we are in the position we are in now. It is also incumbent on us to point out that much of the responsibility lies with the man whose name stands at the head of the motion who seeks to lead the British public as Prime Minister after the next election. He is responsible for the complete lack of action taken to do anything about the broken energy market, which has caused the problems from which our constituents, including those of the right hon. Member for Coatbridge, Chryston and Bellshill, suffer today.
In a debate earlier in the Session, the right hon. Member for Don Valley (Caroline Flint)—who is now shouting from a sedentary position—said that reform of the electricity market was
“what my right hon. Friend the Member for Doncaster North (Edward Miliband) has been calling for ever since he was Energy Secretary, including now, as leader of the Labour party.”—[Official Report, 19 October 2011; Vol. 533, c. 931.]
A Secretary of State does not call for a reform of the energy market, or of the electricity market. The right hon. Gentleman’s purpose should have been to do something about the situation, but far from doing something about it—or even calling for something to be done about it—he issued the following warning to the then Opposition Front-Bench team during a 2009 debate on the Energy Bill:
“I have to say that the alarmism... is of no help at all.”—[Official Report, 7 December 2009; Vol. 502, c. 43.]
It was not alarmism, however. We understood that the market was broken, and we understood that fundamental changes were needed. That is why we are introducing the changes that need to be made now that we are in power.
My first problem with the proposals in the motion is that they do not have the agreement of even small energy providers, who say that the right hon. Lady’s pooling mechanism would not work.
Ben Gummer
I can tell the right hon. Lady, in answer to her sedentary question, that even the small providers have put that on record.
Secondly, the right hon. Lady alluded to a series of reforms that she believes would combat fuel poverty. That suggested that the last Government’s attempts had somehow been successful, or would be successful were they to be continued. In that earlier debate, the right hon. Lady also said:
“we had the most ambitious programme to help people in fuel poverty deal with their bills”. —[Official Report, 19 October 2011; Vol. 533, c. 932.]
Let me remind her of that policy. Between 2000 and 2008 the last Government spent £20 billion on abatement of fuel costs, and what happened to fuel poverty during that period? It increased by 333%. That was indeed ambitious. It was ambitious to the extent that for every household the Labour party put into fuel poverty, the taxpayer paid £5,700. The taxpayer paid £5,700 to reduce a household to fuel poverty, yet Labour Members have had the cynicism to come to the House and claim that their policies would work again, and that the brave and principled position of Her Majesty’s Government is somehow misguided. It is a hypocrisy which lays bare a party that has no ideas of its own, and is reduced to attacking its own record.