National Insurance Contributions (Secondary Class 1 Contributions) Bill

Debate between Dave Doogan and Roger Gale

Consideration of Lords message
Tuesday 25th March 2025 Commons Chamber

[Sir Roger Gale]

Thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker. I naively assumed that, having already been called twice today, I had to take my place in the pecking order.

I want to come back briefly to hospices. This is a very serious issue, and I do not think that the Minister or the Government understand the deleterious effect of the change on care for some of the sickest people in the land, both in adult hospices and children’s hospices. I have listened very carefully—twice now—to the Minister’s response about giving this and giving that, but they are giving with one hand and taking away more with the other. The net result will be a reduction in staff. This is a straightforward tax on jobs.

Without dedicated, caring staff, who do jobs that frankly most of us would not begin to know how to do, the health service will not function. There are children living in and being serviced by Demelza House, Shooting Star and all the other children’s hospices. The Pilgrims Hospices in Thanet and Canterbury will not be able to afford to recruit and or pay the staff that they need.

Hospice care is an integral part of the health service. The point was made by my right hon. Friend the Member for Gainsborough (Sir Edward Leigh) and others that hospice care is part of the health service and should be treated as part of the NHS. [Interruption.] My right hon. Friend asks from a sedentary position, “Where are all the Labour Members?” The answer is that they will be in the Lobby, voting against these measures, but they are not here listening to the debate. It saddens me to have to say it, but in this instance, their absence speaks volumes. Quite simply, they do not care.

[Dave Doogan (Angus and Perthshire Glens) (SNP)]

The Lords amendments seek to address a clear, present and insurmountable financial challenge for significant elements of health and social care delivery in all our communities. The Government say, in the most spurious and disingenuous way, as though they did not understand their role in the health service, that social care providers, GPs, dentists and pharmacies are contractors. How they are dealt with by His Majesty’s Revenue and Customs is irrelevant. It is the role that they fulfil in our society and in the delivery of health and social care services that is at stake. These are not contractors that can go and develop new markets somewhere else. Their market is exclusively within the NHS and health and social care up and down these islands. Many properly commercial businesses will not manage to pivot their way out of this attack from Labour—and GP practices, pharmacies, care providers, nurseries and hospices certainly will not.

I want to mention hospices. When Macmillan Cancer Support speaks, no matter what colour our rosette, we should listen. It has highlighted clearly what the measures mean for end-of-life care. There have been 15 years of chaos in the United Kingdom, most of it economic; there has been the lost decade of Brexit, and its catastrophic effect on the UK’s economy and the material welfare of people up and down these islands. I ask: who can we blame? Who is culpable? Who has their fingerprints all over it? Not terminally ill children in hospices, who will, as a result of the Bill, suffer as a result of the debilitating effect on the care with which they are provided. The Minister and his Government could do a simple thing: give hospices a derogation from the grasping hand of the Bill, and protect children in the worst imaginable circumstances.

From the outset, the Government’s fiscal misadventure has been met with opprobrium from all manner of sections of the economy and society, but they have held firm. I pay tribute to the Minister; he fronts up here every time with a smile, and does his best to defend what he has to. That is his job, and I do not judge him for that, but the bottom line is that the Government have yielded, not to children in hospitals, or to people trying to deliver social care and free up hospital beds by preventing delayed discharge, but to the bankers by restoring their bonuses, and to the non-doms who want all the benefits of living in this country but do not want to pay for it. That speaks volumes about what a Labour Government in this day and age are all about.

Ukraine

Debate between Dave Doogan and Roger Gale

Tuesday 20th December 2022 Commons Chamber

[Mr Deputy Speaker (Sir Roger Gale)]

I call the SNP spokesman.

[Dave Doogan (Angus) (SNP)]

More than 17,000 civilians are estimated to have been killed in Ukraine, with increasing hybridisation displacing the failed kinetic offensive by Russia—failed but no less destructive for its want of just purpose. The figure seems destined to grow amid the missile attacks on civilian infrastructure in Ukraine’s harsh winter. The Odesa Oblast energy department advises that fully restoring electricity supplies could take as long as three months, confirming that Russia is deliberately bombing hospitals and other medical facilities to sow and cultivate terror in over 700 such attacks since February.

Russian attacks on energy infrastructure on Sunday 11 December left 1.5 million people without power in Odesa in the middle of winter. Ukraine’s armed forces advised that Russia launched 15 Iranian-made drones in the region of Odesa and neighbouring Mykolaiv, 10 of which, thankfully, were shot down. Determined to engage the world in his conflict, Putin has weaponised not only energy, as we now see all across Europe in these winter temperatures, but the blocking and now consistent frustrating of the meagre ship traffic into and out of Ukraine, limiting food to the global south, impacting grain prices globally and challenging the storage of the 2022 harvest.

This is hybrid hostile action against a global civilian community, designed to show the strength of the Russian nation but so woefully misguided and miscalculated that it reveals principally the unity of Europe, the steadfast shield of NATO and the indefatigability of the Ukrainian people fighting and suffering with just cause on their side and the world at their backs.

Perhaps not surprisingly, the UK Government like to reflect on the help, support, training and other interventions given to Ukraine to date—I note the 900 generators detailed in the Secretary of State’s statement and the unity that he rightly refers to across the House. He can continue to rely on Scottish National party support in this one distinct area. Can he assure the House that he will be ever vigilant for cracks of fatigue in the international community as we continue to support Ukraine, and have a strategy to deal with those cracks should they ever—I hope they do not—appear?