Public Services

Christian Matheson Excerpts

Wednesday 16th October 2019 Commons Chamber

[Angela Rayner]

I absolutely agree with my hon. Friend, but I also urge the Government to look at what is happening in our schools today. That money is not even going to our schools today. Our teachers and support staff are doing a superb job in all our constituencies, but they do not have that money where it is needed, right now, where the cuts are hurting, right now—as the Secretary of State for Education knows, because his own wife has told him so.

[Christian Matheson (City of Chester) (Lab)]

Pretty much every school in Chester will suffer a budget cut next year, despite what the Conservatives say. Does my hon. Friend have full confidence in the mechanism that the Government are using to put money into schools? We do not seem to be getting any of it in Cheshire.

[Angela Rayner]

My hon. Friend has made an important point. Although increased funding is welcomed by many schools, it will do nothing to reverse the cuts that they face. Moreover, they will not even see the money before a general election, so it could all be toast again. Some would say that that is a cynical move ahead of an election.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mrs Theresa May (Maidenhead) (Con)]

I am pleased to have my first opportunity to welcome my right hon. Friend the Home Secretary to the head of what I believe is the greatest Department of State.

I listened very carefully to the impassioned speech of the shadow Secretary of State, but she omitted one fact. Why was it that, in 2010, the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats coming into government had to take tough decisions because of the state of the public finances left by the last Labour Government?

[Christian Matheson]

Will the right hon. Lady give way?

[Mrs May]

It is a bit early in my speech, but I will happily give way.

[Christian Matheson]

I am grateful to the right hon. Lady for giving way so early in her speech. Can she explain how the last Labour Government were responsible for the subprime mortgage market in the United States causing the longest, deepest recession in the world?

[Mrs May]

The biggest deficit in our peacetime history—that is what the Labour Government left us and that is what we had to address.

--- Later in debate ---

[Christian Matheson (City of Chester) (Lab)]

May I start by welcoming the Government’s proposals to ban trophy hunting imports? Personally, I would like to go further and ban trophy hunting, but we would need some kind of international agreement to do that. I believe there is something profoundly disturbed about people who take pleasure from killing animals. I welcome the Government’s proposals.

I do not welcome the Government’s proposals on requirements for people to show ID when they vote. That is simply voter suppression, and I will oppose it.

The Queen’s Speech started with, and much of the debate this week has been dominated by, the madness of Brexit. I remain convinced that the best deal available is the one that we currently have as a member of the European Union. Any Brexit would have a worse effect on the economy and our ability to pay for the public services that we are debating today.

Jonathan Portes and Anand Menon demonstrated earlier this week that income per capita would be 1.7% lower under the May deal, 2.5% lower under the current impression of the Johnson deal and 3.3% lower in a no-deal, WTO scenario. When they added in the effect on productivity, which amplifies those hits to the economy, they suggested that income per capita would max out at 8% lower in the event of a no-deal Brexit.

We have been hearing this week, as the negotiations continue, that the Government want further regulatory dealignment. That does not just mean a hit to workers’ rights and environmental protections; I have been given credible reports this week that the Government plan to move away from alignment with EU aviation, and automotive and chemicals regulations, meaning that manufacturing in those sectors—all major contributors to the UK economy, particularly in my area—would be obliterated. For example, it would take 10 years for the Civil Aviation Authority to get up to capacity and capability to certify and regulate the UK aerospace and aviation sector to the required international standard, by which time the industry simply would not exist any longer in the UK.

Frankly, I think that Professors Portes and Menon are being a little too cautious in their warnings about the hit to the economy and the effect on the livelihoods of ordinary folk, although of course some billionaires, including several backers of the Conservative party, would see their income increase by hundreds of millions as they short sell the pound for a hard or no-deal Brexit—money that would then, of course, get laundered back into the coffers of the Conservative party.

I raise that issue because those sectors—aerospace, automotive and chemicals—raise about £90 billion a year for the economy. Without those sectors, which seem to be facing divergence in the current discussions, the question is raised how we pay for the public services we are debating. It might be that we have an increase in borrowing from the Government, which would not surprise me because this Government have borrowed more than every Labour Government ever put together. It might be that there is an increase in tax, although not, I suspect, for Amazon, Google or the billionaires with their offshore trust accounts. The third possibility is that the Government are simply trying to hoodwink the public.

The Home Secretary opened the debate, so let us look at criminal justice. My Opposition colleagues have all rubbished the claim of an extra 20,000 police officers—a number that does not get near to replacing those who have left. In Cheshire, we might get 90 new officers, which is about half to two thirds of the number we have lost. It is not just police officers; police community support officers, forensic and scientific officers, and crime scene officers have all been lost, and capacity and capability have therefore been reduced.

The probation service has been trashed by privatising it. Personally, I do not think that criminal justice is an area where profit is a relevant motive. JP numbers have fallen from 32,000 to just 13,000, and courts are running at 50% capacity. Although we have seen recent headlines about sexual assault allegations and hate crime allegations going up, which is a good thing because it means that people feel more confident to report them, convictions are at their lowest level ever.

Money is being saved by closing courts, centralising work and digitalising work, without any evidence to show that it has worked anywhere else in the world. In a further inconsistency in criminal justice policy, the Government want to do away with short-term custodial sentences, despite the fact that they admit that the probation service is a complete mess because of the privatisation that they introduced.

Attempts to con the public with promises of new police officers do not tell a fraction of the story, and they will be exposed. Those attempts to con are hardly a surprise from a Government led by a Prime Minister twice sacked for lying and who would, it would seem, mislead Her Majesty the Queen about the reasons for a dodgy Prorogation.

This is not just about the police and justice services. My hon. Friend the Member for Lincoln (Karen Lee) talked about fire services. In Cheshire, Chester is being forced into a scramble with Ellesmere Port, Macclesfield and Crewe as the location for the redeployment of a fire engine, as we had to make a choice between rural areas, historical and heritage sites or major chemicals sites.

On housing, as mentioned by my hon. Friend the Member for Cambridge (Daniel Zeichner), there are cuts to local authority budgets for drug and addiction services, so there are more people on the streets, more social disorder and more of a sense of people not feeling secure because they are concerned about the sight of the homeless as well as the plight of the homeless. This Government’s strategy has always been to cut local authority budgets and then blame that local authority for the failure to deliver the services. They will not get away with that con. This is a Queen’s Speech full of promises they know they will never have to keep. They are presenting cheques that they know the public will never have to cash. When the time comes, I shall vote against this Queen’s Speech.