Energy Prices and Profits

Debate between Caroline Flint and Lord Jackson of Peterborough

Wednesday 4th September 2013 Commons Chamber

[Caroline Flint]

My hon. Friend is right, and that lack of confidence and trust in the market and how it operates is at the heart of our motion.

I want to tackle this issue head-on by turning to the question of the retail energy market. It is nearly a year ago now that the Prime Minister promised to force the energy companies, by law, to put all their customers on the cheapest tariff. Let me remind the House of exactly what the Prime Minister said on 17 October last year:

“we will be legislating so that energy companies have to give the lowest tariff to their customers”.—[Official Report, 17 October 2012; Vol. 551, c. 316.]

He reaffirmed his proposal at Prime Minister’s questions earlier today, but the details show that it will not in fact apply to all customers; it will apply only to people on closed or dead tariffs, which is a tiny fraction of consumers as a whole.

Given the crucial difference between what the Prime Minister promised and what the proposals entail, it is reasonable to ask exactly how many people will benefit. Since then, I have asked one urgent question, six oral questions in the House and six written parliamentary questions to get to the bottom of this, but every time the Government have refused to answer.

This is meant to be their core offer to consumers, yet the Government cannot even tell me how many people will be moved to a better deal, when that will happen or how much they will expect to save. So I ask the Secretary of State again today: how many people will the energy companies be forced to move to the cheapest deal? Why is his Department so far refusing to answer my freedom of information request on this issue? Why has so much time and so many resources been wasted trying to shore up a policy announcement made off the cuff?

The sad thing is that there is agreement across the House and, to its credit, within industry that the proliferation of tariffs in the past few years has hindered, rather than helped, consumer choice and competition. Instead of focusing on that, the Department has wasted a year trying to dig the Prime Minister out of a policy hole entirely of his own making, creating unnecessary confusion for the public.

[Mr Stewart Jackson (Peterborough) (Con)]

Before the right hon. Lady gets too far along the road of critiquing the dysfunctional market, perhaps we ought to consider that the Labour Government inherited a dynamic and efficient market, geared to competition for consumers with 14 companies, and handed on to this Government an oligopoly of six companies, which she now criticises.

[Caroline Flint]

It is fascinating how figures can be used. The briefing that Energy UK gave Members on both sides of the House says that 17 companies are operating in the market. The problem is market share; the big six control 98% of the market. I do not call that competition, and we will not get it until we get a fairer sharing out of the market—that will make a real difference.

Localism Bill

Debate between Caroline Flint and Lord Jackson of Peterborough

Monday 17th January 2011 Commons Chamber

[Caroline Flint]

Supply is important on all counts: supply in social housing, supply in rented housing, and, indeed, supply of affordable homes for people to buy. There is, however, absolutely nothing in this Bill about the private rented sector. In fact, in the name of protecting home owners—he referred to this earlier in departmental Question Time—the Secretary of State was all too keen to confer on private landlords with empty properties a general power to neglect for up to two years, rendering local councils powerless in the face of blight or antisocial behaviour. That is a dilution of local authority powers, as we enabled councils to take action after six months, and it was announced just three days before the Under-Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, the hon. Member for Hazel Grove (Andrew Stunell) urged swift action to tackle empty homes, warning that empty properties attract squatters, vandalism and antisocial behaviour. The Minister even went to Oldham on a visit related to the policy, for which he had to apologise. It did not do the Liberal Democrat candidate much good. What we have here, therefore, is a chaotic policy and a hapless presentation, and it would be comic if the results were not so devastating.

The Secretary of State knows that I support sensible reform of social housing, but it must be reform that encourages employment, supports families and helps to create strong communities where people feel safe. Simply abolishing secure tenancies and kicking new tenants out of their homes when they get a promotion or a pay rise would just create fear and uncertainty. It would disrupt family life, and it could provide a disincentive to work. We on this side of the House could never support reforms that put a break on aspiration

[Mr Stewart Jackson (Peterborough) (Con)]

I fear the right hon. Lady is overegging the pudding, given that she must surely acknowledge that in her time as Housing Minister she very courageously brought up the issue of social rent tenure. She was faced with a hailstorm of opprobrium from her own party because of that very brave decision, and her party did nothing about the issue in 13 years in power.

[Caroline Flint]

My worry was about single men and women without dependants who were not in work, who had not received the right training and who, often, were going from foyer projects into social housing with a secure tenancy but no support to get them into work. For me, social housing should be a springboard into work—it should be a springboard for people to change their lives. I find it odd that the much-vaunted proposals of the Minister for Housing and Local Government were all about saying that councils will check someone’s pay packet to see whether they have had a pay rise. People may use a pay rise to improve their home, for example, by buying new curtains or decorating, but they could now face eviction. I do not understand that approach. It is not about creating strong and stable communities; it is about stopping people realising their aspirations and stopping the self-sufficiency of many families in future.

The cuts to the housing budget have already dealt a hammer-blow to the hopes of hundreds of thousands of families who are trying to get their own home, and on the big issue of how we get more new affordable homes the Bill is ominously silent. The Government seem unmoved by the fact that the number of planning permissions for new homes in the last quarter of 2010 was down 18% on the record low of the same period in 2009. They seem unmoved by the fact that the housing waiting list figures rose by 12% between July and September, and the Secretary of State is unmoved by the fact that his proposed reforms to the planning system in this Bill could make things worse.

Labour would support reforms that gave local people and communities a greater say and more control over the future of their local areas, because a fair and open planning system that involves local people does lead to better decision making and greater consensus about development. However, every community cannot thrive if the system is biased against change, and every community has to look to the future to create new homes, new workplaces and new jobs. A planning system that is devoid of any obligations to provide for the future, rather than just to protect the present, is destined to fail. There is a danger that the reforms in this Bill, including the scrapping of regional housing targets, could mean that the homes that this country so badly needs will not be built. Indeed, since this Government came to power local authorities have already ditched plans for 160,000 homes—that represents 1,300 homes every single day. Although the hon. Member for Grantham and Stamford (Nick Boles) tells us that the Prime Minister and the Deputy Prime Minister want “chaos” in the planning system, that is not what local people want. They want a planning system that respects the wishes of local communities but is able to deliver the homes that are so badly needed.

Last week, the voters of Oldham sent a very clear message to the Government about the rise in VAT, the trebling of tuition fees, the cuts to the police and the loss of vital community services. To those people, and those across the country, this Bill has nothing to say. For the council coping with huge front-loaded cuts, and facing rising costs for child protection and growing demand for social care, the Localism Bill has no answers. For the community that will see its potholes unrepaired, its streets unswept and its libraries shut down, the Localism Bill offers no help. For the councillor hoping for new jobs in their area, wishing to hold local agencies to account or wanting new affordable homes, the Localism Bill is worthless. For the resident who is worried about care for a loved one, living in fear of antisocial behaviour or concerned about their children’s youth club closing, the Localism Bill gives no assistance.

Labour knows that localism must mean more than dismantling local services and putting blind faith in volunteers picking up the reins, and that localism must serve more than those with the loudest voices and the deepest pockets. We are on the side of local people when it comes to the issues that they really care about. It is to Labour that they will look when this Bill fails to deliver, because they know that the Tories’ claim to believe in localism is a sham. Let the record show that we urged the House to decline to give this Bill a Second Reading.

Police Grant Report

Debate between Caroline Flint and Lord Jackson of Peterborough

Wednesday 14th July 2010 Commons Chamber

[Caroline Flint]

I am interested in the coalition Government’s attitude to the way in which information is given to the public in order to ensure that there is transparency about the provision of public services. They seem to think that that is not an important part of the compact between the people and those who enforce the law. Regardless of the debating points that are made between the Front Benches, it is clear from the findings of all the surveys in various force areas about public attitudes to the police and crime statistics that crime has fallen. However, as a constituency Member I often find that the public do not know about those figures—or, indeed, about the monthly meetings held by the police, the activities of the safer neighbourhood teams, and who is working with whom. When I give them that information in my surgeries, when I am out on the doorstep or in my newsletters, they are very pleased to receive it. I am not saying that a blank cheque should be handed to those who deal with communications. The issuing of information must be thought through properly. It must be established why the information concerned is important, and sometimes we have to pay for that information to be issued.

I will say this to the hon. Gentleman. We currently have some 43 police forces. All of them have communications departments and press officers, and I believe that that is one of the functions that could be managed better across police force areas. The most important element of local policing for the residents of Don Valley is at borough command level, and the most important public face for people in Doncaster is our borough commander. Most of those people do not know the name of the chief constable; they are interested in what is happening in the Doncaster borough. Discussion about what is the most appropriate organisation and structure at force level, and about the elements beyond local crime that require particular attention, should be part of a debate about efficiency savings, value for money and outcomes that genuinely deal with organised crime better than we are able to at the moment.

[Mr Stewart Jackson]

The right hon. Lady is making a passionate case, but I fear that she is demonstrating one of the worst aspects of the record of new Labour governance, namely an obsession with processes and the policing pledge. Is not the real issue, and the real driver for elected officials, the fact that there is currently a huge gap in accountability? At present accountability operates only between senior police officers and the Home Office, and elected officials and residents are squeezed out. That is why local people across the country support elected officials, and why our manifesto commitment has been such a success. The police family, as it is called, is hostile because vested interests are being challenged by ordinary people and elected officials.

[Caroline Flint]

One of the most dramatic changes in the nature of police accountability has been brought about by neighbourhood policing teams. In various parts of my constituency, local people can attend monthly meetings to engage in discussion and hold the police to account. Information from those meetings—along with other information about where antisocial behaviour is happening, which is collected and captured on computers—is tasking the police in a far more intelligent and accountable way than we have ever seen before. However, that did not just happen; it had to be driven by Government, and it was driven by a Labour Government.

--- Later in debate ---

[Caroline Flint]

We already have elected councillors as part of the police authorities, and I think that model could be improved. At the local level through the safer neighbourhood teams, we already have monthly accountable meetings which the public can attend and talk about their local policing priorities. This is not about being against accountability; it is about what is right and what is fit for purpose—and, to be honest, what is good value for money, which is part of the debate we are having this afternoon.

[Mr Stewart Jackson]

rose—

[Caroline Flint]

I want to make some progress, as I have taken lots of interventions and I am very conscious that other Members want to contribute to the debate.

The reality is that as a result of improved communications, new technologies and international mobility, serious and organised crime is becoming more sophisticated and increasingly global in reach, making the police’s job more difficult. As I have said, we are dealing with 21st-century criminal entrepreneurs. They are involved in all sorts of rackets from counterfeit goods to human trafficking, prostitution and, of course, drugs, and what we need is a 21st-century police response.

The reality, however, is that many smaller forces—there are 19 in England and Wales with fewer than 2,000 officers—already struggle to meet the challenges of modern crime, and across the board, as Sir Paul Stephenson made clear in his speech on Monday evening, police resources for tackling serious and organised crime are “unco-ordinated” and “inadequate”. I am afraid to say that that is partly due to the police structures we have and a parochialism that does not address some of these serious crime issues. Many Members—probably on both sides of the House—will defend their force structure, even though it might not help or deliver the capacity to deal with some of the crimes I am talking about. That is why I believe there is a very strong case for borough level local policing, but I am certainly not convinced that at the force level some of the sizes of organisation we have are either manageable, good value for money or even delivering what we need.

The police believe that there are 68 criminal organisations with assets in excess of £10 million. These are organisations whose operations are complex and do not respect national borders, let alone police force borders. While inter-force collaboration is certainly improving—there are many good examples of it up and down the country—as the Bichard report clearly highlighted, the way our police service is structured means that all too often individual forces act separately and fail to share information with other forces. In an age in which criminals can escape quickly across police force boundaries, it is not sustainable for police forces to have to notify other forces in advance, or have protocols in place, before they can track and apprehend criminals. It slows everything down; it is not a good use of resources.

In the case of the London and Glasgow bombers in June 2007, when terrorists placed two car bombs outside a nightclub in London’s west end before driving to Scotland to ram their jeep into the entrance at Glasgow airport, detectives from London following the getaway car were concerned that if they had to make arrests en route they would have to ensure that local forces were notified and put on stand-by. Later there was also confusion about which force should lead on the case—whether it should be the Metropolitan police which had started the investigation, or the Strathclyde police in Glasgow where the case finished up.

It is also difficult for smaller police forces to invest in the assets that are needed to run complex, and often international, investigations effectively. There is a case for investigations into serious and organised crime being led by larger, more centralised crime-fighting units, and merging some functions or responsibilities, or even forces, could offer economies of scale and reduce bureaucracy and costs and lead to better outputs. Alternatively, as Sir Paul Stephenson suggested, we could have a nationally co-ordinated, federated structure for tackling organised crime, whether led by the police service or as part of an extended Serious Organised Crime Agency remit.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Jackson]

Thank you. Except that on this occasion, of course, I am on the opposite side of the Chamber. I remember the debate on 3 February with the right hon. Member for Delyn (Mr Hanson), who delivered his lines in a typically amenable way.

It is appropriate at this point to welcome my right hon. Friend the Member for Arundel and South Downs (Nick Herbert) to his position. He is a seasoned reformer, and if anyone can get to grips with delivering more for less, it is he. I also wish his predecessor as the shadow Minister, my hon. Friend the Member for Bury St Edmunds (Mr Ruffley), all the best of luck in returning to good health; I am sure I speak for the rest of the House in that respect.

The key word in this debate is “legacy”: the legacy of the fiscal disaster we inherited from the previous Labour Government on 6 May. The shadow Minister made a good fist of synthetic outrage and faux anger at this “swingeing cut” by the coalition Government—the precursor to a plague of locusts and all things doom-laden in the state. However, it is actually a funding cut in-year of 1.46%.

The main point made by the right hon. Member for Don Valley (Caroline Flint), was that there is nothing mutually exclusive about driving forward shared services and back-office functions across different police forces on an administrative basis, while at the same time dealing with serious organised crime through such collaborations. The problem with the previous Labour Government was that their approach was all about compulsion and a lack of proper accountability and consultation. Fundamentally, Labour did not trust people to make the right decisions, which is why it still does not trust them now and is so hostile to police commissioners.

As I pointed out in an intervention on the right hon. Lady, there is no point in focusing moral outrage on a process-driven issue such as the policing pledge, which people in the Dog and Duck in Peterborough are not talking about at length. What people actually care about is real accountability and whether they have some say in local policing priorities. At the moment, they do not. At the moment, the accountability link is simply between the basic command unit and the chief constable, and upwards to the Home Office. Whether the right hon. Lady likes it or not, what actually drives local policing is what local police forces have been told to do by the Home Office.

I should have prefaced my comments by pointing out that I am biased, in that I made my maiden speech, in June 2005, on the issue of elected police commissioners, the headline in the Peterborough Evening Telegraph being, “We need city sheriff says city MP”. However, it was not as simple as that. It is a question of accountability, but also of understanding that the police authorities model is probably not fit for purpose and does not command the support and respect of the many people who pay taxes and are also afflicted by crime. These are not just people in middle-class neighbourhoods and gated communities who can afford to push crime away; they include people such as those in my constituency who are perhaps not on good incomes and do not live in the most salubrious of neighbourhoods. Such people are afflicted by drug dealing, antisocial behaviour, burglary and other serious crimes. There is absolutely nothing wrong in giving those people a real say by allowing them to influence not day-to-day operational issues, but the strategic overview of the priorities taken by the local police service—in my case, Cambridgeshire constabulary.

That was the problem of 2006, and the shadow Minister will know that it contributed, among other things, to the early departure of his erstwhile colleague the former Member for Norwich South, Charles Clarke, whose successor is in the Chamber today. The problem was one of not listening and forcing things on people, in the typical top-down regional model imposed by the Labour Government, which we have seen in fire control, and in the ill-fated campaign and referendum on the question of a regional assembly in the north-east.

There are a number of key strategic issues that this Government are tackling head on. They are focusing, for example, on the efficiency and efficacy of what is actually done on the ground. Only 14% of police time is spent on the beat; 22% is spent on paperwork. One of the issues we need to look at—hopefully, it will be examined during the Government’s review in the next few months—is the inspection regime that police services are subject to. Not only the police service but local authorities and others are subject to too much onerous, unnecessary and unnecessarily frequent inspection. Constabulary and police authority officers spend inordinate amounts of time preparing for, going through and reviewing inspection, when in fact they should be concentrating their efforts on tackling crime and putting criminals behind bars.

I must take issue with my hon. Friend the Member for Shipley (Philip Davies) and agree with my right hon. Friend the Member for Arundel and South Downs, in that this is not a question of getting a key, opening the jail and letting everyone out. However, we do have a massive problem with recidivism and we must deal with it in an innovative way. I should declare an interest, in that Kalyx, which runs the 840-bed category B private prison in Peterborough, has been awarded a contract. It is a very interesting social experiment, and I believe that it will deliver the goods. Kalyx will receive 40% of the indicative cost of incarcerating a prisoner for one full year if it keeps that prisoner from recidivism and reoffending.

I am no tree-hugging lily-livered liberal on this issue—[Interruption.] Well, I guess I am compared with my hon. Friend the Member for Shipley, whose many contributions on penal policy I fondly remember, not least his comments on prisoners having access to ping-pong tables and Sky television, for instance. I believe it was Albert Einstein who said, “If you keep doing something over and over again and it doesn’t work, try something else.” He probably put it much more eloquently. Our approach has not worked; it costs a fortune to incarcerate people.

When I had lunch with the senior judges at Peterborough Crown court some months ago, they made the point, as my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Rushcliffe (Mr Clarke) has, that there is no point incarcerating people for very short sentences—for instance, serial burglars—if we cannot teach them to read, write or add up, if we cannot give them meaningful work to earn money and if we cannot give them a position where they feel socially useful. Punishment is important, but rehabilitation is too. If we can give them a way forward to be decent members of civil society—Kalyx will do that with the scheme at Peterborough prison—that is good for society, because it will, in the end, save money for my constituents, and those of all hon. Members, in the form of taxpayer funding.

[Caroline Flint]

I agree with some of the points that the hon. Gentleman is making—illiteracy among prisoners is a big problem—but what I do not understand, and what I ask him to clarify, given that we have tried everything else with many of these burglars, is why they cannot learn to read and write during six months in prison.