Budget Resolutions

Debate between Danny Kruger and Jackie Doyle-Price

Thursday 7th March 2024 Commons Chamber

[Dame Jackie Doyle-Price]

On social care, the hon. Gentleman has a fair point, but I do not think that what he says is true as regards HGV drivers, builders, labourers or anyone else in the construction industry. It is true that we have relied on cheap migrant labour to deliver social care, but that is largely because we have not valued social care as a profession. While we have had that abundance of cheap labour in the sector, we have also been able to kick the can down the road about how we fund social care and our later stage of life, so the impact has been not just on earnings but on allowing policymakers to be lazy about grappling with these difficult issues.

[Danny Kruger (Devizes) (Con)]

My hon. Friend is making an important speech, with the authentic voice of common-sense Conservatism, which we need to hear much more of. The point she makes about the depressive effect on wages of the high immigration so far this century is incredibly important and relevant to the debate we are having about the workforce. Does she agree that at least our party has a plan to reduce legal migration substantially in the years ahead, which is more than we hear from any Opposition party?

[Dame Jackie Doyle-Price]

I do agree that we have a plan, but I say to my hon. Friend that it has to be more than words—it has to be delivered on. I am sure he would agree on that. He will have heard, as many of us have, about how many industries have lobbied us to ensure that such and such a profession is added to the skilled workforce list. Those employers do not want to pay those higher wages and we, as politicians, need to be robust about that and say, “You know what, we genuinely want to deliver a high-wage, high-skilled economy. If you want to employ HGV drivers, you are going to have to pay them the money they deserve.”. That is how we will reward aspiration and hard work by the people of this country, and, overall, we will have better growth. It is not going to be painless getting there, because some employers will have to start paying higher wages and that will filter through to higher prices. But that is how we correct our economy and become the great world leader that we should be. We should be the powerhouse of the G7; given the skills and abilities within our country, we should be leading the world. We have allowed ourselves to become impoverished by quick fixes, to be brutally frank.

I come to my final issue. I have said for a long time that the biggest challenge facing this country is the lack of affordable housing and the failure to build enough new homes. I welcome the continued emphasis by the Government on this issue, but we are still failing to deliver. Yesterday, the Chancellor mentioned new investment to facilitate new housing in Barking and Canary Wharf. If we are to learn from what can go wrong, I encourage him to travel a few miles east to my constituency, to Purfleet. It sits on the River Thames and it has a railway station that can take people to Fenchurch Street in the City of London in 45 minutes. We have been talking about building 3,500 homes in Purfleet since 2008. If they were constructed on the River Thames, 45 minutes from central London, these homes would have sold themselves. Purfleet Centre Regeneration Limited, a public-private partnership, was developed to deliver these homes. It had £70 million-worth of public land gifted to it. It was granted £5 million in 2015 to kickstart the works, and it subsequently received £70 million in housing infrastructure funding. The first house was promised to be constructed by 2018. We are now in 2024, and we do not have a single new home after all that public money.

I want the Government to register that while it is great to see capital funding being made available, with all these wonderful brochures with nice plans for new homes, nothing is being delivered. I wonder whether there is something wrong with how we approach these things. From where I am sitting, I can see consultants who have managed to earn a pretty penny over the past eight years out of Purfleet, but we have achieved nothing except the disappointment of the public. The public have supported and got behind these proposals, but have found their hopes and ambitions dashed. They deserve better. They have been seriously misled by a number of people. It is not for me to apologise to the people of Purfleet—I have done my best to call out the fact that the emperor had no clothes for a very long time—but the public gets very disillusioned when promises given by politicians come to nothing. If we really are to deliver more new homes, then we need to look at why we have not realised the ambitions from such projects in the past.

International Women’s Day

Debate between Danny Kruger and Jackie Doyle-Price

Thursday 10th March 2022 Commons Chamber

[Jackie Doyle-Price (Thurrock) (Con)]

It is a great pleasure to join in this debate. Like other Members, my thoughts this afternoon are with the women of Ukraine. I particularly thank my right hon. Friend the Member for Romsey and Southampton North (Caroline Nokes) for her speech, which frankly had me filling up, so I am glad I have had some time to deal with my emotions.

Thinking of war situations where women are leaving or seeing their sons, husbands and fathers being involved in fighting, 30 years ago last week the independent state of Bosnia was founded, having itself been subjected to significant wars. I am reminded of my regular visits to Srebrenica and the memorial at Potočari, which is lovingly maintained by bereaved women who lost their sons, fathers, brothers and uncles. We all know the story of what happened with the genocides in Bosnia. Many of those women do not have a body, or even a body part, but they are dealing with their grief by maintaining the memorials to other victims as well as their own. At this time, there will inevitably be bereaved women who have left their husbands and sons behind and do not know what their ultimate fate is going to be. For me as a Member of Parliament in this fantastic first-world country of Great Britain, I feel hopelessly inadequate watching these events unfold. We must do everything we can to support all those victims, and particularly to give safe havens to those refugees who are fleeing.

I would like to reflect on some of the other contributions made today, particularly that of the right hon. Member for Kingston upon Hull North (Dame Diana Johnson). I say to the Government that as the right hon. Lady has shown, we are making lots of noise about women’s health and breaking lots of taboos in that space, but fundamentally, the biggest source of our oppression is our biology—our reproductive biology. The ability of women to control their fertility and manage their reproductive rights in a safe way depends on adequate contraception services, and also on a safe abortion law. I will repeat what I have said many times in this place: the abortion law is more than 50 years old. It was written before we had medical abortion, when abortion was a surgical procedure and was much more dangerous for that reason. If we are really going to look at women’s reproductive rights from the perspective of safety, may I helpfully suggest that we need a review that does not rely on individual Members of Parliament tackling this as a matter of conscience? This is about how we deliver a safe environment for women to be able to manage their reproductive rights and their fertility. Until we properly bring that law up to date and into the 21st century, any semblance of a positive women’s health strategy is for the birds. I leave that as a challenge for the Government.

I also congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Harwich and North Essex (Sir Bernard Jenkin) on bravely stepping into the debate about sex and gender, and the conflict of rights that arises from conflating the two—a conflict of rights that has not been adequately tackled by either of the Front-Bench teams in this place. Frankly, that is a disgrace; it is not fair to transgender people or to women, and it is high time that we did so. I am glad that my hon. Friend has done it, and the fact that he is a man doing it on International Women’s Day is a matter not for criticism, but for celebration. I am also pleased to see my hon. Friends the Members for Devizes (Danny Kruger) and for Boston and Skegness (Matt Warman) present, because on the last two occasions I attended this debate, there were no men. This is a way forward, because we need men to value and celebrate women too; this should not be a women-only party.

[Danny Kruger]

The Father of the House is also present.

[Jackie Doyle-Price]

My apologies—how could I forget my hon. Friend the Member for Worthing West (Sir Peter Bottomley)?