Oral Answers to Questions
Debate between Damian Hinds and Jacob Rees-Mogg(1 year, 5 months ago)
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The Minister of State, Ministry of Justice (Damian Hinds)
The work that our probation service does is incredibly important and, like the work of prison officers, it often goes unseen. There have been recruitment challenges throughout society, as the hon. Lady will know, but we have been focusing particularly on recruiting into probation. I am pleased to report that, over the past couple of years, we have exceeded our target, which was already stretching to 4,000. In regions such as London, where recruitment has been particularly difficult, we have had encouraging signs, including, for example, 144 new trainee probation officers starting in London in 2022-23. Their ongoing training and professional development will be incredibly important over the next few years.
Sir Jacob Rees-Mogg (North East Somerset) (Con)
I wonder what conversations the Lord Chancellor can have with the Chief Coroner about the poor performance of the Somerset coroner’s office, where the waiting time went up from 23 weeks to 31 weeks in 2022 against a decrease in the rest of the country. That involves worse things for individual constituents. Mrs Deborah Cox has been waiting nearly four years for the coroner to get on with the job of providing an answer. That is deeply distressing for families, and I wonder what can be done.
Business of the House
Debate between Damian Hinds and Jacob Rees-Mogg(4 years, 4 months ago)
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Mr Rees-Mogg
The hon. Gentleman is quite incapable of keeping quiet, even for a moment. His agitation and his degree of excitement may be slightly theatrical on this occasion.
On the ISC, as always, that will be set up in due course. It would be wrong to be “Russian” these things—[Laughter]—as I am sure the right hon. Member for Walsall South (Valerie Vaz) appreciates. [Interruption.] No, it was not, actually; it was quite deliberate.
On the Cumberlege review, I actually gave evidence to that review in relation to Primodos. This is an opportunity for me to pay the greatest tribute to the hon. Member for Bolton South East (Yasmin Qureshi), who has campaigned absolutely tirelessly. I first met the hon. Lady when we were both elected in 2010 and had offices opposite each other, and she took up this issue when nobody else was really interested. She has transformed people’s thinking about it, and I look forward with great interest to what Baroness Cumberlege has to say about Primodos. It is a very important issue.
Going back to some of the other questions, the right hon. Member for Walsall South is a kind and generous person, and her sympathy for Cabinet Ministers having to queue is much appreciated by my right hon. Friends, who have to take on these onerous things which are otherwise unknown across the country. Our constituents never have to queue for anything because life is so smooth and easy, but she appreciates that right hon. Ladies and Gentlemen having to queue is so burdensome and tough, and makes us realise that we are really earning our living as we stand in a queue. Remarkably, it takes almost exactly the same time to pass through the Division Lobbies as it does when we are using the Lobbies without social distancing. The speed with which we got through them earlier this week was pretty much the normal speed and therefore things are working: Government business is getting through and scrutiny is taking place. I am not as kindly or as soft-hearted as the right hon. Lady, and I think a Cabinet Minister queuing for a few minutes is no bad thing, and probably spiritually enlightening and uplifting.
The right hon. Lady referred to renters who have lost income. Emergency provisions were made: £1 billion has been made available to help people who are renting. The Government are very conscious of the need to protect people who are in the private rented sector.
The right hon. Lady also mentioned the Prime Minister not making a speech in the House, but making it outside the House. However, the Prime Minister came to the House just a week before and made a statement. We are having a statement on Wednesday next week from the Chancellor of the Exchequer. The Government have been assiduous in maintaining the ministerial code’s requirement to make major announcements to the House first, and this is part of the natural process of government.
Damian Hinds (East Hampshire) (Con)
I know the whole House will want to join the Leader of the House and the shadow Leader of the House in their thoughts and prayers for our hon. Friend the Member for Hexham (Guy Opperman).
A lot has changed since plans were first put forward for Parliament’s restoration and renewal, and it is appropriate for the newly formed sponsor body now to review those plans. May we have a debate on the plans before the recess as a means for all hon. and right hon Members to take part fully in that process?
Mr Rees-Mogg
I am very grateful to my right hon. Friend for taking responsibility by joining the board. He is right that this House ought to have an opportunity to have its say on the future of the Palace of Westminster, which it is right to protect and safeguard for future generations. When the last Parliament considered this matter, it did so on the basis of assumptions that are now five years old, and it is absolutely proper that the sponsor body and delivery authority are conducting a strategic review to reconsider their approach. I would urge Members to consider submitting evidence to the review, and to be mindful that the price tags widely reported are also now five years old. There are rumours that the potential costs now far exceed the £4 billion estimate made in 2015. We must be clear that when Parliament takes its final decision on how to proceed, there can be no blank cheque for this work. The Parliamentary Buildings (Restoration and Renewal) Act 2019 specifically requires the sponsor body to have regard to value for money.
High Cost Credit Bill
Debate between Damian Hinds and Jacob Rees-Mogg
Damian Hinds
My hon. Friend is entirely correct. It is not necessarily even about face-to-face time; even not having to provide a physical signature makes a difference. We cannot logically explain why that is so—it just is. Each hurdle makes people reflect further on what they are doing, and as things become quicker online, that creates an added danger.
Some of the advertising and marketing styles of payday loan companies in particular, such as using cutesy cartoon characters, are to my mind not really appropriate to people possibly getting themselves into financial trouble.
Jacob Rees-Mogg
I am very much enjoying my hon. Friend’s speech. It puzzles me that payday lenders seem to be exempt from the normal rules of “know your client” and money laundering. They prevent any investment house from receiving money, and it seems strange that companies can lend money without being obliged to follow them.
Damian Hinds
As ever, my hon. Friend makes a perceptive point.
I do not think that health warnings on advertising will solve every problem, but I do believe that there is a role for them. If we have health warnings on all sorts of other things now, it is reasonable that we have them on debt advertising.
We must also consider the representation of costs. APR is not a particularly helpful measure in many ways—once it goes past the first 1,000%, people start to think, “What difference does that make?” There is a natural argument for saying that there should be a cash cost comparison instead. However, there is no perfect solution. The formula that Which? proposes of pounds per 30 days seems to deal with the immediate issue, which is the growth of payday loans. It does not necessarily help with the comparability of all products, however, and with any cash comparison—the amount-to-pay-back figure—there is still the issue of how to deal with behavioural charges, which are an additional way of making money out of the customer. Companies can in theory charge a relatively low headline payback rate in the knowledge that they will make more money from missed payments and various other behavioural penalties. We may in the end decide that a cash comparison is useful, but we will still need the representative APR figure, and we will also need to have a proper analysis and debate about which behavioural and other charges should be reflected within that.
On agencies and intermediaries, I support the Bill’s provisions on credit brokers, underwriters and guarantors, and the Amigo model, but there is something else we need to be aware of: as the online market develops even further, there is a tendency in every sector—I saw this in my old sector of hotels and travel—for intermediaries to come in, particularly on paid search, and intermediate, and there is a natural inflationary pressure in that process, which in the end only ever gets passed on to the consumers. Whereas the internet is supposed to make things cheaper for consumers, and comparisons easier and markets freer, it actually tends to concentrate power with other people and add other costs, a lot of which end up going to search engine providers.
Affordability and cost limits is another important issue. Two types of limit can be applied. One is a limit on the cost of the loan—on how much companies can charge to anybody. The other is a limit on affordability, or how much credit can be extended to an individual given their circumstances. Both of them are very complex, which is implicitly acknowledged by the fact that the hon. Member for Sheffield Central says in his Bill that the FCA would have to decide exactly how these things work.
There are big arguments against having a cost cap, because of all the unintended consequences that I have mentioned, but if there is to be a cost cap, it ought to reflect the actual cost structure of extending a loan. In principle there are three elements of cost in extending a loan. The first is the initiation cost, including customer acquisition and credit checks. The second is the actual cost of capital. The third is the risk element, which will vary by customer-type.
If we recognise that and want to reflect it in a limit on the amount of interest that can be charged, we should end up having two elements to the cost cap. One of them is to cover the initiation of the loan, and the second is to cover the cost of capital and risk factor. The figure here would be something like a cap of 15% of the capital as a one-off, plus 30% as an annual interest rate. Sub-prime and high-cost credit providers that offer a range of loans seem to follow that sort of formula.