Regional Pay
Debate between Chris Williamson and Lord Maude of Horsham(12 years, 5 months ago)
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Mr Maude
I am going to make a little progress, but I will give way in due course.
Those pay remits are currently set at 1% a year. We need those constraints in order to address the appalling legacy of the biggest budget deficit in the developed world, which was left by exactly the people who now complain about its effects. Our approach is not about making further savings, but entirely about creating greater flexibility within those pay remit constraints.
Thirdly, this is not about cutting anybody’s pay. Even if we wanted to, we would not be legally able to do so.
Mr Maude
I will not give way, if the hon. Lady will forgive me, because I need to make some progress and Back-Bench contributions are already likely to be constrained because the debate started rather late.
The then Chancellor also said that pay for the civil service should include a stronger local and regional dimension, while in that year’s Budget he set out
“action to increase regional and local flexibility in public service pay”.
As I have mentioned, the then Chancellor’s advisers included the current Leader of the Opposition and the current shadow Chancellor. It seems pretty opportunistic for Labour, at the 11th hour, to produce this motion, when its own Government took the public sector further down this path than we are at this stage contemplating.
Indeed, Labour did not just talk about localised pay; it actually introduced it. In 2007, the last Government introduced localised pay for civil servants across the courts service. They did so in response to the Treasury’s pay guidance, issued in 2007, at a time when, as far as I can make out, the current Leader of the Opposition was the Minister in the Cabinet Office responsible for civil service matters and the shadow Chancellor was the Economic Secretary to the Treasury. Yet that pay guidance, which went out across the civil service, asked Departments that operated across different locations to differentiate between pay levels across regional labour markets. Following that guidance, which was issued under the aegis of the current Leader of the Opposition and the current shadow Chancellor, the previous Government introduced localised pay in the courts service across the country. That was, if I may say so, a sensible and unusually well-judged move, and it has been successful.
Mr Maude
I am going to make progress now.
That policy was introduced at a time when those who are now on the Opposition Front Bench were intimately involved, so it is worth the House asking itself what happened. Did devilish civil servants somehow slide this wicked measure through, as the attention of the current shadow Chancellor and Leader of the Opposition was elsewhere, no doubt overly occupied in trashing the then Prime Minister?
Why is the shadow Chief Secretary to the Treasury taking up valuable parliamentary time attacking in opposition a policy that her own leaders actively promoted in government? It is not as if the Labour party immediately abandoned the idea in opposition that local and regional variations in the cost of living are important. In January, The Guardian reported that the right hon. Member for Birmingham, Hodge Hill (Mr Byrne)—another previous holder of my post—told a private meeting of Labour MPs that housing benefit
“varies locally and so should a benefit cap”.
In fact, he was reported to have said:
“It makes much more sense to have localised caps…in different parts of the country”.
That revealed that the Labour party still recognises in private the very principle that it is today seeking to oppose. It is humbug, Madam Deputy Speaker. Yet again, the Opposition oppose policies that they introduced in government and that they still support in private.
We know what is behind this. It is the Labour party’s union paymasters who are calling the tune. We know that the Labour party ask their union backers which amendments to vote for and which to oppose. We know that under the current Labour party leader more than 80% of Labour’s donations come directly from trade unions—even more than under the last Prime Minister. No wonder Charlie Whelan boasted that it was Unite that won the current Labour party leadership. Yet again, it is Unison and Unite that are calling the tunes. But even the unions are confused on this matter. As my hon. Friend the Member for Cannock Chase (Mr Burley) said, Unison itself has made the case for local variations.
There is a serious case to be made for local market-facing pay. While private sector pay is typically set according to local markets, public sector pay is usually set on a one-size-fits-all basis at national level. As a result, public sector workers are often paid more than private sector workers in similar jobs in the same area. According to the Institute for Fiscal Studies, the overall gap between public and private sector pay averages 8.3%. However, the gap can be as low as virtually minimal in some places and as high as nearly 20% in others.
Academic research also shows that public sector pay is only 40% as responsive to local labour markets as private sector pay. That has potentially damaging consequences for the public sector and the economy. A one-size-fits-all system for public sector pay could limit the number of public sector jobs that could be supported in lower-cost areas. It militates directly against the relocation of public sector jobs to more deprived parts of the country. Private employers looking for staff to set up or grow their businesses might need to compete with much higher public sector wages. The evidence has yet to be examined, but the public sector could be crowding out the private sector in that way, and holding back the private sector-led recovery that the economy needs. Arguably, this makes private sector job creation less attractive. Importantly, it also makes it less attractive to move public sector jobs out of London and the south-east because, without any differential in pay rates to reflect the differential in living costs, it is much less easy to justify the relocation costs and loss of continuity that relocating inevitably involves.
So this approach is about investigating whether this could be another way of supporting local economies, by helping to provide more public sector jobs for the same level of spending and by helping the local private sector to become more competitive and to expand. This could help poorer areas to grow—[Interruption.] Exactly that point was recognised explicitly by the previous Prime Minister. He made exactly that argument. The hon. Member for Leeds West might want to argue with him, but we think that this is one of the few things on which he was right.
More broadly, this Government are determined to support regional private sector growth. Since the last election and the formation of the coalition Government, 843,000 private sector jobs have been created, and promoting regional growth—[Interruption.]
Party Funding
Debate between Chris Williamson and Lord Maude of Horsham(12 years, 8 months ago)
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Chris Williamson (Derby North) (Lab)
Does not this whole sorry episode reveal something very rotten right at the core of the Conservative party? Does the Minister agree with me that it stretches credulity to breaking point to argue that Peter Cruddas, a senior—the most senior—fundraiser for the Conservative party, did not understand the law relating to donations to political parties?
Industrial Action
Debate between Chris Williamson and Lord Maude of Horsham(12 years, 11 months ago)
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Chris Williamson (Derby North) (Lab)
Why do the Government so despise public sector workers such as nurses, doctors, teachers and street care cleaners as to impose a swingeing tax increase when the contributions to pension funds exceed their liabilities? The local government pension fund has an annual surplus of £4 billion to £5 billion. How is that fair and how can he justify it?