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Debate between Chris Evans and Baroness Primarolo(10 years, 5 months ago)
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Chris Evans (Islwyn) (Lab/Co-op)
It is indeed a pleasure to follow my hon. Friend the Member for Corby (Andy Sawford) who speaks with such great passion about his home area of Northamptonshire.
Madam Deputy Speaker (Dawn Primarolo)
Order. I am sorry to interrupt the hon. Gentleman, who can start again in a moment. Let me explain the practice relating to speakers. Where Members have notified the Chair in advance, they will obviously participate in the debate. If Members wish to contribute once a debate is a good way through, they may approach the Chair, but take a lower priority. The hon. Member for Oxford West and Abingdon (Nicola Blackwood) was unable to be present earlier and has indicated that she would like to speak. I intend to call her at the end. I hope that that is clear to Ministers. I am not being unfair to the hon. Lady; I am following normal practice.
Chris Evans
Thank you for your patience this afternoon, Madam Deputy Speaker. I have had to be in and out of the Chamber, trying to balance my attendance with my duties on the Finance Bill.
The Queen’s Speech contains three new Bills that relate to criminal justice. For a Government who argued while in opposition that the Labour party over-legislated in this area, these Bills join seven others on criminal justice since they came to power in 2010. The previous seven Bills have created in total 619 new criminal offences, many of which carry custodial sentences.
With our prison population stretched to maximum levels, now is the time to question the role that prison and criminal justice play in society. In the past year, the prison population in England and Wales has reached record levels and stands today at 85,228 prisoners—a 90% increase since 1993. In 2012-13, the overall resource expenditure on prisons in England and Wales was just under £3 billion. Each inmate costs the taxpayer an average of £36,808 per prison place a year—money that the general public would no doubt think better spent on health, education, improving the roads and many other projects that hon. Members have mentioned.
With the UK having the second highest incarceration rates in western Europe and the prison estate suffering from overcrowding since 1994, we are facing a crisis that needs to be addressed sooner rather than later. There is no doubt that prison works for some people. For the victim of crime and those who live in fear of it, prison gets criminals off the streets, reducing the risk they pose to the rest of society because they cannot commit an offence when they are locked up. Sadly, we all know that some individuals pose such a threat to other people that there is no option other than keeping them under lock and key for a very long time. However, prison is not the answer in all cases, and I want to concentrate on that in my speech.
According to the executive summary of the latest figures on releases, about 590,000 adult and juvenile offenders were cautioned, convicted or released from custody between July 2011 and June 2012, and 25% of them reoffended within a year. According to the “proven reoffending” tables, the reoffending rate among persons released from a custodial sentence was 45.5% for adults and 67.4% for juveniles. Those statistics should be balanced against the fact that between 1997 and 2010, under a Labour Government, crime fell by 43%, and violent crime fell by 42%.
Although I represent the Labour party, I will say that it seems that when in government we were very good at locking people up, but did not address the inherent problem of reoffending. Now, as more criminal justice Bills appear before Parliament, I see that we are still not tackling that problem. If Governments have a duty to society to protect their citizens from criminals, that means they also have a duty to ensure that those who are released from prison do not drift back into a life of crime.
The National Offender Management Service manages 17 public prisons in England and Wales and the contracts of 14 private sector prisons, and is responsible for a prisoner population of about 86,000. However, it must make cuts of £650 million in its £3.4 billion budget by 2015. Now, with the prison population reaching almost unmanageable levels and the Government intent on making cuts in the resources available to prison staff, it is of the utmost importance that rehabilitation be looked at seriously. That approach needs to begin in the prisons themselves. Just 36% of people leaving prison go into some type of education, training or employment.
People often leave prison ill equipped to deal with day-to-day life. Statistics show that 43% of offenders have numeracy skills below GCSE standard, while 37% have reading skills below the same measure. Moreover, no one can agree on the number of offenders who have learning disabilities such as dyslexia. For many prisoners who are released, unemployment is a familiar scenario: 67% of the prison population were unemployed before being locked up, and many will face the same situation when they are released.
High-cost Credit
Debate between Chris Evans and Baroness Primarolo(11 years, 2 months ago)
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Justin Tomlinson (North Swindon) (Con)
I welcome much of what is being said, but I have a word of caution. An unauthorised overdraft in a mainstream bank is equivalent to 80,000% APR. We may not want to signpost people towards that.
Madam Deputy Speaker (Dawn Primarolo)
Order. Before the hon. Member for Islwyn (Chris Evans) concludes his remarks, I gently remind him that the recommended period for opening a debate is 10 to 15 minutes and he has now had 19 minutes. I appreciate that he has taken interventions.
Chris Evans
I apologise Madam Deputy Speaker. I am coming to an end, but I will just deal with the hon. Gentleman’s point. The significant word is “unauthorised”. I know that the hon. Gentleman has done a lot of good work on financial education, which is the way forward. An unauthorised overdraft is a failure to manage the account properly, so we need to teach people how to do that. I think that he would agree with that.
Credit unions rightly receive support from both sides of the House, but to flourish they need the support and help of Government. If that means regulating the high-cost credit industry while at the same time restricting its advertising budgets, as we have done in other industries, so be it.
Once again, I thank the Backbench Business Committee for granting me time for this debate. I know how important it is to Members from both sides of the House and I look forward to hearing colleagues’ contributions.
Unemployment
Debate between Chris Evans and Baroness Primarolo(12 years, 11 months ago)
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Chris Evans (Islwyn) (Lab/Co-op)
Government Members are obsessed with immigration, when there is youth unemployment and young people are leaving school without the skills to fill the jobs that are going to come up. In future we will have to bring more people to this country to fill those jobs for which we do not have the skills.
Madam Deputy Speaker (Dawn Primarolo)
Order. Lots of Members are doing this: when they make an intervention or speak they have to face the Chair, not turn their back to it. So, if everybody could remember that, it would be very handy.
The Economy
Debate between Chris Evans and Baroness Primarolo(12 years, 11 months ago)
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Chris Evans (Islwyn) (Lab/Co-op)
We have heard the name of John Maynard Keynes again in this debate. My favourite Keynes quotation is the one in which he says that there comes a time when every Government have to indulge in “ruthless truth-telling”, and it is time that this House stopped acting like Nero when Rome was burning.
We stand on the edge of the abyss, and we have a eurozone crisis that is not being solved. Nothing seems to be happening. Greece is on the point of defaulting, it could exit the euro and it could be quickly followed by Spain, Portugal and, even, Italy. Yes, we might say, “We’re not in the euro: we’re little Britain; they can’t touch us,” but the key thing is that their bonds are held by British banks, and British banks will have to bail them out once again.
We have to ask ourselves, “Are we going to stand back and allow ourselves to sleepwalk into another financial crisis, or are we going to heed the warnings and do something about it?” Last week, when we had the autumn statement, the headlines were that the OBR had downgraded its forecasts, but what worried me more than anything, and what was not said anywhere or by anybody in the House, was that the OBR could not quantify what a crisis in the eurozone would do to the British economy. The best economists in the Bank of England could not even quantify or say what disaster might befall us if there were a euro crisis, and to me that is very concerning.
There comes a time with every Government when they have to put ideology aside. When Labour nationalised the banks, it did not do so because of ideology; nationalisation was 30 years ago and belonged to the past. It did so because nationalisation was a necessity and a practicality, so now, as we face the crisis in the eurozone, we have to put ideology aside, see what the practicalities are and put them into practice. It calls for the type of bravery that is rarely seen in this House, but, if we had to nationalise the Bank of England and bail out the high street banks again, we would be saying to our constituents, “If you have the dream and the hope of setting up a business, it ain’t gonna happen, because the banks are going to be even more cautious about lending to you,” and, “If you have a mortgage, you’re not going to be able to move it on to a lower interest rate, because the banks are not going to take that risk again.”
The problem is that, with every crisis, every politician will stand up and say, “Oh, it’s never gonna happen again. It won’t happen on my watch.” Even the Chancellor has said, “It won’t happen again. No, not while I’m Chancellor—no it can’t,” but the truth is that it can, because we have not learned the lessons of the previous financial crisis.
In my speech, I wanted to analyse the legislation that affects banking, so I looked, researched and went to the Library, but I could not find any. There was none at all, so we are facing another crisis with the same banking practices and with a Government unwilling to do anything.
One thing on which I agree with Keynes is that, “During a recession you do not raise taxes.” But what have the Government gone and done? They have put VAT up. It is all very well saying, “We’re going to create jobs,” but, if someone needs to drive to work and they are paying £1.33 for petrol and £1.41 for diesel, they might find it difficult to do so. If they are shopping and find that the price of their shopping basket has increased by 5% in the past year, they might not be able to afford food. Those are the decisions that people face.
I wish I had more time, but I will say this: the Government have an opportunity to do something. We need to look at skills and education, and to have a grown-up, adult conversation, asking, “Why are our young people leaving school not equipped to go into work?” I talk to people in my constituency with apprenticeship schemes, and they say that the kids are not prepared, so let us have an adult conversation and ask, “Why are they not prepared? What is wrong with the education system?”
The final point that we need to look at is tax reform. It is all very well the Government giving people a 1p cut in corporation tax, but when I speak to the small business man I find the thing that concerns him more is red tape. He asks me, “When I have a micro-business, why do I have to employ an accountant? Why can’t I have a simplistic tax form to fill in?” I wish I had more time to develop those arguments, Madam Deputy Speaker, but I will sit down now.
Postal Services Bill
Debate between Chris Evans and Baroness Primarolo(13 years, 10 months ago)
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Richard Graham
Will the hon. Gentleman clarify where he thinks the risk to our sub-postmasters is coming from? I have a print-out of a Communication Workers Union briefing that arrived this morning. It is claiming to have a list of 900 post offices that are for sale and 160 that are subject to long-term temporary closure. One of those listed in both categories is the post office in Quedgeley, in my constituency. However, it is not for sale and it is not subject to long-term temporary closure, because a new sub-postmaster will be opening it in the next six weeks—
Madam Deputy Speaker (Dawn Primarolo)
Order. We are discussing a new clause on inter-company agreements, so the hon. Gentleman’s intervention needs to be relevant to that point, although I am sure that his sub-postmaster will be pleased to hear that they have been cited in the Chamber.
Chris Evans
I know Quedgeley post office, because I was the Labour party candidate in Cheltenham in 2005. I know Gloucester quite well and I know that Quedgeley is a lovely part of the world. If the hon. Gentleman is looking for support to keep its post office open, he should give me a call.
Postal Services Bill
Debate between Chris Evans and Baroness Primarolo
Chris Evans
My hon. Friend knows that TNT has a terrible track record on employee relations. If it takes over Royal Mail, will productivity be affected in terms of worker happiness?