United Kingdom Internal Market Bill

Debate between Chris Bryant and Sally-Ann Hart

Wednesday 16th September 2020 Commons Chamber

[Sally-Ann Hart]

No.

Faced with a choice of supporting our Union or the European Union, I know whose side I am on; do you?

[Chris Bryant]

There is nothing like a dame, Dame Rosie.

This debate today! I remember sitting in the theatre a few years ago—do you remember the theatre?—and there was a couple in front of me who had had a terrible row. The woman turned to the man and said, just as the curtain was coming up, “The worst of it is that you’re so bloody ‘paytronising’.” and he kissed her on the forehead and said, “It’s ‘patronising’, dear.” If I am honest, I feel we have all patronised each other to death today. Actually, there are lots of areas where there could be some common ground, if we chose to try to find it, which is what I shall try to do in my speech.

Let me start with principles, because they should inform all the legislation that we support. The first principle must surely be—I say this as a proud socialist; I have never run away from the word “socialist”, even when Tony, whom I much admired, was leader of the Labour party—that any country performs best when it is most equal. When it is most equal, a country is happier, more successful economically and a better country to live in.

Secondly, decisions about policies and, for that matter, about funding are best made closest to the people that they most directly affect. I was a Government Minister for around 20 minutes, and my experience was that it is all very well coming up with all these grand ideas, sitting in an office in Westminster, but if they cannot be delivered because they do not fit alongside other policies, is just a waste of time—someone would just be wasting their own energy dreaming up legislation, and although they might buff their fingernails at the end of the day, they would not have actually got their hands dirty and achieved anything.

Thirdly, no single policy area stands alone. I have tried to do a lot of work on acquired brain injury over the past few years; it is an issue that affects every single Government Department—the Ministry of Defence, the Department for Work and Pensions, the Department of Health and Social Care, the Ministry of Justice and so many other policy areas, including the Treasury, of course. My experience is that unless we manage to devise policies that fit with other policies, we are not going to achieve what we could possibly achieve. Perhaps that is just because I believe that we achieve far more by our common endeavour than we do by going it alone.

All that is why I am afraid to say to the people with whom I am often in the same Lobby, but not so much this evening, that I believe in the Union. I believe that Wales is stronger in the Union and—I hate to say this to the people I disagree with in many ways—but I am also still a Unionist when it comes to the European Union. I know that I am not meant to raise that decision anymore, and that that battle is meant to be done, but—[Interruption.] Yes, I did not get the memo, but I will doubtless be sent it later.

I say all these things because I represent one of the poorest constituencies in the UK, one of the poorest constituencies in Wales and one of the poorest constituencies in the whole European Union. I was proud when we kept on getting structural funds in Wales. One of the things that I thought was clever about structural funds was that the funding had to be matched. It always had to sit alongside decisions made locally and money that was raised locally, so there was a degree of devolved decision in there.

I hate to say this, Dame Rosie, but I have a list of things that the Rhonda needs. We need to finish the Rhondda Fach relief road. I would like to improve the railway so that people can get into work much quicker, with bigger trains and proper toilets. I would like to unblock Stag Square in Treorchy and, for that matter, the roundabout outside Asda. I would like to rebuild the powerhouse in Tonypandy, which is falling apart. I would like proper cycle routes up both valleys. I would like a fully funded youth service which, unfortunately, has been cut in pretty much every part of the UK over the past 10 years.

This year has been—there is a four-letter word for it, but I am not allowed to use it—not very good in the Rhondda. We have had terrible flooding. A quarter of all the floods in the whole of the UK were just in my constituency, and my hon. Friend the Member for Pontypridd (Alex Davies-Jones) has experienced similar. One of the culverts will cost £300,000 to be mended, and about £140 million-worth of work needs to be done to ensure that people’s homes are safe. I do not think that that should be met within the normal envelope of the Barnett formula, because I think that is part of us being a Union of four nations. I have repeatedly asked the Prime Minister for that money, and the Prime Minister has actually said at the Dispatch Box that we will get it, but it has not come and, of course, that makes me worried, because if Rhondda Cynon Taff has to do that work and has to find the money from elsewhere, there is a real danger that lots of other budgets will be slashed to the bone, and, if I am honest, things are already pretty threadbare—if I am not mixing my metaphors.

The one issue that I have had rows with the former Welsh Secretary about—he is not here—is that Wales and many mining constituencies across the UK have former coal tips. They are the responsibility of the Coal Authority and, of course, the problems that stem from them today predate devolution, because nearly all of them were closed long before devolution came to pass—certainly all the ones in the Rhondda. I gather that the Coal Authority, which is an agency of the Westminster Government under the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, has produced a new report, or is in the process of doing so, which is likely to suggest that a lot of those tips need a lot of investment to be made safe.

Just like those in Nottingham or Durham or wherever else in the UK, including in Scotland for that matter, I think that the coal tips in the Rhondda are a UK responsibility—a moral responsibility, even if not a legal responsibility—and we need to ensure that they are safe. A tip in Tylorstown collapsed in the floods earlier this year, and 60,000 tonnes of material needs to be moved, which is a phenomenal job of work for a relatively small local authority to undertake. It is doing it because it has to be done, otherwise there is a real danger of further slippage if there is much more serious flooding later this year. However, we still have not had the guarantee from the Westminster Government that the £1.2 million, which would seem a tiny amount to most people, will come our way.

Now, I actually think that clause 46 is both unnecessary and impotent. It is unnecessary because the Government could do every single thing in clause 46 without it. I do not think it is needed at all, but, equally importantly, I think it is impotent. Let us say for the sake of argument that the Government decided, having heard my pleas for a youth service in the Rhondda and to do up the powerhouse in Tonypandy, that they were going to spend money on a brand-new youth service facility in Tonypandy in the powerhouse. “Hurrah!”, I would go. They would not be able to do it without the local authority agreeing to it because they would have to get planning permission and work with the transport facilities. They would have to make sure that people were available to work in it and that it was sustainable, so it would be impossible to implement that simply on the basis of clause 46. I say gently to some of my colleagues that I think they have slightly over-egged the argument that suddenly Westminster will descend and plant things in constituencies, because I do not think it will be able to. I think this is very poorly drafted legislation, as it happens.