Fairness at Work and Power in Communities

Christopher Chope Excerpts

Thursday 12th May 2022 Commons Chamber

[Dr Fox]

We should be having far more housing built in our urban areas. One of the great hopes I have for this Bill is that we will see housing built closer to where people can go to work so that there is not so much pressure on the transport infrastructure. It has been our tendency in recent times to build commuter belts where people therefore have to travel into our cities. Getting mixed development in our cities, thereby regenerating them, would take a lot of pressure off the transport system.

[Sir Christopher Chope (Christchurch) (Con)]

Will my right hon. Friend give way?

[Dr Fox]

I do not have time—I apologise to my hon. Friend.

We need reform of land banking. The system that we have at the present time, where big developers buy land, get permission for 200 houses, build 40 and wait for the price to rise before they build the rest, results in planning blight. It results in big land banks for the developers. It means that people who live in our communities do not know what is going to happen. There are a number of solutions. My preferred one would be that if developers have not built out the permissions they have, they should not be allowed to apply for further planning permissions in the same local authority area. We absolutely have to deal with this problem, because it blights communities up and down the UK.

The levelling-up agenda is about extending opportunity to people in all parts of the United Kingdom. In regenerating our great northern cities, we have an opportunity to take pressure off the overcrowded south where housing and transport demand is too high. We need better employment opportunities spread across the country in what I would call a rebalancing of Britain. We have a great chance to have a win-win for all parts of the United Kingdom. However, unless we are able to tame inflation, none of our ambitions will be realised.

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[Sir Christopher Chope (Christchurch) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Sheffield South East (Mr Betts). I agree with him about one thing, which is that the Government need to show a lot more conviction in expressing their opposition to windfall taxes. They are a simplistic solution that always end up hurting hardest the ordinary people who work in this population. I am against windfall taxes, and if I have time I will say a little bit more about that later.

Who would dare to criticise the content of the Gracious Speech delivered in Her Majesty’s platinum jubilee year? I am certainly not going to criticise it, but I would like to begin by drawing attention to some omissions from it. I referred to one of them in an article carried in today’s “ConservativeHome”, headed “Harm from Covid vaccinations. Don’t leave victims behind.” That is a reference to the need for changes to be made to the vaccine damage payment scheme. Currently, the maximum payment under that scheme is £120,000, which has not been increased since 2007. By way of comparison, as my hon. Friend the Minister on the Front Bench will know, industrial injuries disablement benefit has in the same period gone up by 39%. When I discussed this with my hon. Friend the Member for Erewash (Maggie Throup), the Minister for vaccines and public health, she indicated that she took the point and understood that something needed to be done. I hope that in responding, the Minister will be able to say what is going to be done and why the Government believe it is fair that this level of £120,000 should continue to remain unchanged since 2007.

The newly formed vaccine injured bereaved UK organisation, vib.uk, which has been established in the last few days is also calling for much wider changes to the vaccine damage payment scheme. I think they are absolutely correct and in the article to which I have referred I explain why I support its suggestions for fundamental reform of the scheme to make it more flexible and relevant to the plight of those who have suffered as a result of doing the right thing by getting vaccinated.

[Kirsty Blackman]

Unfortunately, I missed the article this morning but I will be sure to read it. Does the hon. Gentleman agree that one of the biggest issues with this scheme is the length of time it takes for decisions to be made? People are waiting a significant length of time even to get an initial contact with the vaccine damage payment scheme. Does he agree that that is one of the key things that needs to be fixed?

[Sir Christopher Chope]

Absolutely, and I have been campaigning for changes since I first raised this issue in the House last September. In the article I refer to the fact that at the meeting I had with the vaccines Minister on 21 April she told me that, at last, an organisation has been appointed to carry out the administrative job of assessing the claims. There are now over 1,300 claims and the first assessments have not even begun, but I am told they will now begin on 16 May. The new organisation that has got the contract is committed to dealing with 1,800 such assessments each year, which is an indication of the extent of this problem. As the hon. Member for Aberdeen North (Kirsty Blackman) rightly says, it is appalling that we have had to wait for so long, and only last autumn the Prime Minister was assuring a correspondent that people who have suffered vaccine damage should not be ignored and left to suffer in silence. So I very much agree with the hon. Lady on that point and again commend the article to her.

Another significant omission from the Gracious Speech is any reference to the promised changes from RPI to CPI as the measure for calculating the maximum annual increase in charges for pitch fees for park home residents. This issue is dear to my heart; I have been chairman of the all-party group on park homes for many years, and the Government have outstanding, overdue business not just on that aspect but on dealing with the issue of rogue operators in that field.

When I was first elected in Christchurch—25 years ago, Madam Deputy Speaker—I would never have been able to contemplate that we would have a Conservative Government presiding over the highest levels of taxation in a generation and with inflation raging at 10%. I note from the Gracious Speech that the

“Government will drive economic growth to improve living standards”—[Official Report, 10 May 2022; Vol. 714, c. 4.]

and I hope I am right in concluding from that that the Government are not going to introduce any further tax increases. Yet there is talk, even from some of my Conservative colleagues, about new tax increases: so-called windfall taxes. Describing a tax as a windfall tax does not make it any less of a tax and I am concerned that the Government still seem to be flirting with the idea of ever higher taxes despite all the evidence showing that windfall taxes would be a further disaster.

[Mr Sheerman]

I have been in the House rather longer than the hon. Gentleman and I remember when the first windfall tax was introduced; it was by the Conservative Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. She made very good use of a windfall tax on the banks, which had made a very big profit. I thought it was a very good innovation; what is wrong with Thatcherism these days?

[Sir Christopher Chope]

As with so many things about Thatcherism, the Labour party tried to copy it and, when Gordon Brown introduced a windfall tax, it was such a disaster that ever since Governments have decided that windfall taxes are a very bad idea. I was not in the House at the time, but the justification for the windfall tax to which the hon. Gentleman refers was that the Government had pushed up interest rates in response to rising inflation, so the banks had received a windfall benefit. Those arguments are nothing like those prevailing at the moment, where we need to encourage our oil and gas industry to invest, rather than disinvest, in our economy. Instead of windfall taxes, the Government should be talking about paying back to taxpayers some of the windfall receipts of tax revenue. VAT receipts are now expected to be £47 billion in the coming year, £9 billion more than predicted. So the case for removing VAT on energy bills completely and scrapping green levies on energy bills is overwhelming. It could be financed from the windfall receipts.

I am concerned that throughout this debate there has been insufficient reference—indeed, hardly any reference—to the issue of productivity, which is fundamental if we are to get the economic growth we need. However, I congratulate the Government on, it seems, being on the threshold of completing Brexit, resolving the issue of the Northern Ireland protocol and ensuring all those restrictive practices we continued to sign up to after we left the European Union can be removed. If this Government are able to finally deliver the full Brexit, they will have my full support.

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[Mr Barry Sheerman (Huddersfield) (Lab/Co-op)]

I was reminded by my staff that I have been present at 42 Queen’s Speeches—this is the 42nd. May I say how concerned I am that the Government seem to be downgrading Parliament all the time? I cannot remember one of these debates without a Secretary of State on the Government Front Bench defending the Queen’s Speech and the elements within it. As a long-serving Member, their consistent and persistent downgrading of Parliament worries me very much indeed.

The Queen’s Speech is deeply disappointing. So many things have been missed out. I disagree with almost everything said by the hon. Member for South Dorset (Richard Drax), except—Madam Deputy Speaker, I am sure you would like some bipartisan remarks—on the strength of our Army. I have stood up in this Chamber for a long time to say that it was dangerous to have fewer than 100,000 personnel in our armed forces. We are now planning to go down to 72,000 at a time when the world is a very worrying place and we have to take that very, very seriously indeed. It is what is missing from the Queen’s Speech that worries me so much.

One of the greatest challenges we have is health and social care. We have been promised, have we not, a Bill and firm Government action to do something about social care. I do not know about Doncaster in your constituency, Madam Deputy Speaker, but in Huddersfield one big problem in the health sector is that people are taken into accident and emergency and into hospital but cannot be released because there is no suitable supported housing for them in our communities. There has been nothing about social care and, on housing, nothing about building appropriate housing for supported living. That is a very big miss in this Queen’s Speech.

The other big miss is a moral miss. The fact of the matter is that all of us in politics know that our country has been in terrible trouble. Our constituents have had a tough time. They have had covid, years of austerity and now the higher cost of energy to heat their homes and the higher cost of food to fill the tummies of their children and other members of their families. That traumatic background is the truth of it. I was expecting a Queen’s Speech that said, “This is a national crisis. Let us get together and sort it.” What is missing in this debate is honesty. We are promised lower taxation. All of us know in our hearts that somebody has to pay to put the country right and to do all the things we want in health and social care, and to rebuild the welfare state that was found wanting as we faced covid. This country has one of the lowest rates of unemployment benefit. People who never thought they would lose their jobs or be made unemployed were shocked when they realised how weak the support was for their family.

[Sir Christopher Chope]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

[Mr Sheerman]

In a second.

I meet a lot of people who are earning pretty good money, professional people with good salaries, and they tell me, “We should be paying more tax.” They say, “We want a decent society, so we want to pay more tax.” Can I just put that on the record? Let us be honest with people. If we want a decent welfare state, decent services and decent local government, we must be willing to pay for them.

[Sir Christopher Chope]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

[Mr Sheerman]

Two minutes.

We have demoralised so many people on the frontline. I do not use that in a military sense; I mean our health workers, nurses, doctors, care workers and local authority workers who do everything to make our local society and local community viable and decent to live in. They have all felt undervalued. They have all felt that nobody really values the service they provide, whether emptying bins or running schools. When local government had decent resources they did believe that, and we believed that that was the right thing to do.

We were expecting great things from the Queen’s Speech, but we do not have them. We have an environmental crisis. We have had COP26. We have aspirations to say that the other great challenge, apart from health, is our environment. We have a country where in many of the communities we represent we are poisoning children, poisoning pregnant women and poisoning our constituents with the filthy air they breathe. Nothing in the Queen’s Speech will meet that challenge—there was very little to touch it. There was little reference to a cleaner transport system. That is not enough when, as we were reminded only yesterday, we face global warning and climate change and we will get the increase in temperature that will eventually destroy life on this planet. Nothing in the Queen’s Speech will address that. It is as though it does not exist and there is no threat.

As well as health and social care, there is education. I am very proud that I went to the London School of Economics, both as an undergraduate and a postgraduate, and our motto was “to understand the causes of things”. When I look at the causes of inequality in our country, I immediately see education and levels of child poverty. I worked with Tony Blair and his 1997 Government and, as we remember, the main thrust of the campaign was “education, education, education”. We know from the system we have had that if we want to tackle underprivilege, poor attainment at school and poor attainment of skills, we have to invest in early education—in pre-school and early years—and in supporting families in literacy, numeracy and using the English language. The fact is that there is nothing in the Queen’s speech about levelling up. Where is the determination to bring back children’s centres? Where is a policy like the one we used to have to try to give every child a proper chance in their lives? It is not there. It is an appalling missed opportunity.

Turning to some positive things, we have seen cross-party unity in how we have faced covid together and we have had cross-party co-operation on the support for Ukraine—thank goodness—so surely there are things that we could have done in this Queen’s Speech. We could have agreed that we need 500 sustainable towns and cities in this country, based on the United Nations sustainable development goals. That would have lifted us up and given people the chance to roll up their sleeves and change their environment, not just on a global level, but in their communities locally. That is what is missing. We have wonderful vision, passion and commitment in some areas, but this Queen’s Speech has failed to deliver on the environment, education and aspiration, and I am very sad that that is the case.