Oral Answers to Questions

Danny Kinahan Excerpts

Tuesday 1st December 2015 Commons Chamber

[Mr Osborne]

Over the course of this decade we will have built more social homes than in the entire period when the Labour party was in office. Affordable housing should also be housing that people can afford to buy, as well as rent, and we are doubling the housing budget and undertaking the biggest house building programme since the 1970s. It is a shame that the hon. Gentleman was not with me in Wolverhampton yesterday seeing the new jobs being created at the Jaguar Land Rover engine plant as we make sure that we build homes for the people working at that plant.

[Danny Kinahan (South Antrim) (UUP)]

9. What steps he is taking to assist women born between 1953 and 1955 affected by recent changes in pension age qualification.

[The Chief Secretary to the Treasury (Greg Hands)]

As we remove gender inequality, women born between 1953 and 1955 will receive their state pension at the same age as men, or earlier. The Government have written to all those affected by increases to the state pension age and have acted to ease the timetable, at the cost of £1 billion, ensuring that 81% of all women affected see a rise of a year or less under the Pensions Act 2011. As the Chancellor announced last week, the basic state pension will rise next year by £3.35 to £119.30 a week—the largest real-terms increase for 15 years.

[Danny Kinahan]

It is very good to see the pension going up. However, research by the Pensions Policy Institute and Age UK shows that a third of women in work are ineligible for automatic enrolment into a workplace pension, leaving them at risk of not having a decent income later in life. What research has the Minister or the Department for Work and Pensions carried out in order to understand what difficulties they will have in future?

[Greg Hands]

This continues a process that has been going on since the mid-’90s to equalise the state pension age and the process begun in 2011 to increase the state pension to make sure that it can be more affordable overall in terms of its ability to meet our commitments under the triple lock and the big increase I mentioned earlier. I did not hear all of the hon. Gentleman’s question precisely, but I think he mentioned Age UK. The charity director of Age UK said that this big concession is

“a significant financial commitment from the Government at a difficult time. This will give a much needed 6 month respite to all the women who would have had to work an extra two years.”

Air Passenger Duty: Regional Airports

Danny Kinahan Excerpts

Tuesday 20th October 2015 Westminster Hall

[Danny Kinahan (South Antrim) (UUP)]

I thank the hon. Member for Solihull (Julian Knight) for securing the debate. Belfast international airport is in my constituency. It employs some 4,000 people—a huge number, given the Northern Irish economy—and helps some 200 businesses nearby. It is phenomenally important, just as Belfast city airport is, which is only 20 minutes away, and Londonderry, an hour away. As we have heard, Northern Ireland needs its connections, especially by air, because everything else is slow. While other hon. Members have the benefit of rail and roads in their constituencies, if we take them it is either through Scotland and down, or through Dublin and across. It is long-distance, so the only way to do things economically and quickly is to fly. Air travel is therefore vital to us.

Figures that I was given a year ago show that 47% of passengers going to Dublin airport are from Northern Ireland. I was recently told that the figure is now 52%, so we are draining our population, who are disappearing to travel because of three things: air passenger duty, good roads in Ireland that mean people can get to the airport quickly, and the fact that they are going to a hub that takes them to the rest of the world. The other alternatives include Manchester and Birmingham. Air passenger duty, therefore, is one of the three things that we are really asking the Government to tackle and remove. The point was well made by others about the impact on the less well-off who want to travel. We are adding more than £100 to the travel costs of a family of four. That is sometimes more than the ticket itself, if they have booked early enough. We need to review this.

I am nervous hearing hon. Members talk about different levels of air passenger duty in different parts of the United Kingdom, just as I am nervous about all the matters that break up the Union. Although we want the freedom to travel, we have to be very careful, or all we will end up doing is stealing our own labour forces from one another.

[Jonathan Edwards]

On that point, does the hon. Gentleman therefore oppose the move to devolve corporation tax to Northern Ireland?

[Danny Kinahan]

No. I like the fact of corporation tax. I have just said that we have to be careful, so I am being careful on that matter. We need to find the right balances that work between us. That is why I want to see an all-party group on the Union, so that we can talk through these ideas.

Tourism in Northern Ireland is run by Tourism Ireland, which runs it all from an all-Ireland basis, focusing only on tourism in Northern Ireland. So if Ireland decides as part of its rail policy to put in a direct line from Dublin to its airport, making it easier to get there, that is not part of the tourism policy that we have a say in, and it further damages our economic chances. I am told that, as a result of the block grant in Northern Ireland, if we lost air passenger duty and had to pay for it there would be a staggering cost of £55 million. I would love to know the details behind that. Yet I am also told that Belfast international airport thinks that if we got rid of air passenger duty, it could bring in 5,000 jobs and some £5 million. That should open up the whole economy to working better, which is what we want to see.

I want to mention one rather dour side of this: our way out of the troubles in Northern Ireland in the past was a thriving economy, with people travelling the world and seeing how other things work. We want everyone to travel. We want them to come home and to bring back ideas. Air passenger duty is severely damaging us, and we therefore want to see it removed. Even if it is removed in stages, can we at least start to look at that? We want to see Northern Ireland open for business, just as we want to see the United Kingdom open for business.

Budget Resolutions and Economic Situation

Danny Kinahan Excerpts

Tuesday 14th July 2015 Commons Chamber

[Danny Kinahan (South Antrim) (UUP)]

I thoroughly enjoyed listening to the passion and wit of the new Members who spoke today. Such speeches are a fantastic way to learn about other constituencies and we should all listen. I particularly enjoyed the comments of the hon. Member for Paisley and Renfrewshire South (Mhairi Black) about the weathercock and signposts, although perhaps not for the right reasons. She and I are not necessarily on the same page.

I thought that when I left Stormont I had moved away from trying to get nationalism and Unionism working together and to agree. In my first few weeks here, listening to Members speak, I began to wonder whether left and right would ever learn from each other. I was impressed when, in the Budget, the living wage was introduced and to see signs that, actually, people do listen to each other. Today, listening to people’s detailed speeches, I have found it wonderful to see that there is a lot of input and a lot of detail. I think we can all learn from it.

From the point of view of the Ulster Unionist party and many others, the biggest concern is that the Budget measures will be brought in without proper safeguards and that provision will be taken away before the new system is in place. Given the farce of the welfare reforms in Northern Ireland, my fear is that we will not be able to look after people because the old system has been taken away. This morning, at a meeting of the all-party group on social science and policy, I was appalled to hear about a woman on this side of the water who had had no benefits for four and a half months, and who had turned to prostitution. That is a complete disgrace. We must have back-up all the way through the system, so that no one is ever let down and has no money.

I share colleagues’ concerns about tax credits being reduced and the effects on SMEs and, in Northern Ireland, on families with more than two children. Those changes could work very much against us. I welcome the lowering of corporation tax—we have the powers in Northern Ireland to do that and I wish we would get on with it, but we do not necessarily have the will and understanding that are needed. However, we need a lot of other things as well. When I was at Stormont, I was briefed by manufacturers who said that the basic costs they struggle with are high energy costs, high labour costs and high rates. We need to look at business rates, as action there could lift the whole British economy. I am pleased that there was no rise in fuel duty, and there are many other measures in the Budget that I like, but what really concerns me is not having back-up and safeguards.

From the Union point of view, I am concerned that as we focus on devolving government and giving more powers to cities, countries and everyone else, we will all be forced into just fighting our corner. We have to remember that we all need to work together all the time while we fight our corner.

In Northern Ireland, unemployment is running at 6.1%. That is way better than in my younger days, when it was about 18% in some places, but there are two aspects of those figures that I want to mention. First, a large number of the people in that 6.1% do not have the skills that the world of modern technology requires; they may never have them. We need to find some way of bringing large numbers of suitable jobs to the Province, because without employment, the planned welfare changes will never work. We need apprenticeships and assistance. I know the matter is devolved, but we must not adopt the attitude of “devolve and forget”. We all need to work together. Years ago, I worked at Short Brothers in Belfast. I remember visiting Harland and Wolff to see a model of that company building seven aircraft carriers. I know we should not hark back to the past too much, but we need to find jobs—the sort of jobs that the people can do.

I hope that the Government will keep the basis of the Stormont House agreement in place, whether it fails or succeeds, because it contained many measures agreed to help the Province. We are very grateful for them, but we must find a way to move forward. I hope the Minister will promise that those measures will stay. I hope also that the Barnett formula will remain in place and will certainly not go down.

The second matter that I want to raise in relation to the 6.1% unemployment rate is mental health. Last week we rightly heard praise for all those who helped after the bombings in London and learned how to look after those who had lost limbs, lost family or witnessed something awful that still affects them today. Think of the number of people affected by 45 years of the troubles in Northern Ireland. I hope the Minister will put funding in place to enable us to continue learning how to help people cope with the mental issues and difficulties in their lives.

I hope some funding, which is not in the Budget, will be put aside for the victims of the guns and Semtex supplied by Libya. The Americans, the Germans and the French all received compensation, yet nothing has happened for the British. Enough resources should be put in place to make sure that the grit and determination are recognised.

I mentioned “devolve and forget” when it comes to the Northern Ireland governing process. I do not think Members in this place know what is going on. We have Departments in Northern Ireland that do not even work with each other. When I was working on education in the past few years, the Education Minister would not share the funds and the spending reviews; he kept them all to himself. That is the sort of problem we have in Northern Ireland. I thank the House for all the help that it has given us. I hope it will keep the pressure on and get Northern Ireland working. The Budget is one way of doing that.