(2 days, 8 hours ago)
Westminster HallWestminster Hall is an alternative Chamber for MPs to hold debates, named after the adjoining Westminster Hall.
Each debate is chaired by an MP from the Panel of Chairs, rather than the Speaker or Deputy Speaker. A Government Minister will give the final speech, and no votes may be called on the debate topic.
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I remind hon. Members that it is up to the Member who is speaking whether they take an intervention. If any Member wants to speak in the debate, they must have got the agreement in advance of the Member in charge and the Minister. They cannot just get up and speak. They must have done that in advance, according to the rules that apply in this debate.
I beg to move,
That this House has considered the impact of the switch to digital landlines on rural communities.
It is good to see you in the chair, Mr Betts. You are correct that a 30-minute debate is normally a two-person debate. This subject has attracted more attention than is normally the case. I come at this from this from the perspective of my beautiful rural constituency, with places such as the Candovers and the Tisteds, Binsted and Buriton, Froxfield and Privett, Hawkley and East Meon, but the debate is deliberately is not entitled “East Hampshire”; it is entitled “Rural Communities”, because the impacts and the issues are much broader. Colleagues from all parts, possibly all four nations of the United Kingdom, with us today may therefore wish to intervene, and I have trimmed my remarks to make sure that colleagues can intervene—within reason, obviously—should they wish to.
Analogue telephony will soon be no more. PSTN, the public switched telephone network, uses technology that is outdated, with copper wire infrastructure nearing the end of its life and spare parts becoming harder to source. Britain, like other places, will thus be digitising its phone network. What follows will in many ways be better—more resilient, more scalable and more flexible. The roll-out of VoIP, Voice over Internet Protocol—we sometimes hear different names such as Digital Voice—is an industry-led initiative, but some of the issues that we will be talking about today go beyond that. They are issues for our society and therefore for the regulator, and ultimately, they are issues for the Government.
(8 years ago)
Commons ChamberThe purpose of the limit on support through universal credit or tax credits to the first two children, in the case of new claims and new births, is to reduce our welfare spending and to target it in a particular way—[Interruption.] In some 85% of families that include children, there are one or two children. When it came to determining where necessary reductions must be made, this was the correct way of doing that.
The hon. Lady talks about rising inequality. I simply mention to her that inequality is down, and that household incomes are at a record level.
The Department has sought to maintain the services that it offers claimants while minimising the impact on claimants as far as possible. These proposals may mean slightly longer and slightly shorter journeys for some individual claimants, and that has been taken into account in the setting of the criteria.
I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Sheffield, Heeley (Louise Haigh) on the campaign that she has run with the Public and Commercial Services Union and local residents to keep open the Eastern Avenue jobcentre, which serves both our constituencies. Will the Minister confirm that the only reason for closing Eastern Avenue is to save money, and that if it closes, extra capacity will be needed at Cavendish Court and Woodhouse jobcentres? In the light of that need for extra capacity, will he produce figures showing whether there will actually be any net saving as a result of the closure of Eastern Avenue?