Jobs and the Unemployed

David Anderson Excerpts

Wednesday 7th July 2010 Commons Chamber

[Catherine McKinnell]

I do not have an ideological concern about the debt that is the current deficit, although I share the concern of all Labour Members that the deficit needs to be reduced. Fundamentally, however, it needs to be reduced in a way that does not throw thousands or millions of people on to the scrap heap, in the way that they were left there in the 1980s. I know that this is not taken very seriously by Government Members, but generations of people were left on the scrap heap.

[Mr David Anderson (Blaydon) (Lab)]

Will my hon. Friend give way on that point?

[Catherine McKinnell]

I think I need to make progress.

Finally, some additional cuts have been announced and, although they have perhaps not been talked about today, I believe that they will fundamentally affect future jobs and the ability of people in the north-east to take them up. I refer to the cuts to child tax credits. Although the Liberal-Conservative Government have announced a £150 increase in the per-child element of child tax credits, that is nothing but a fig leaf for the abolition not only of the Sure Start maternity grant, worth £500, but of the baby addition to the child tax credit and the health in pregnancy grant, as well as for the decision to reject Labour’s proposals for a £4 a week supplement—a toddler tax—for each child.

For people on low incomes, tax credits are fundamental to empowering families to support their children and ensure that they get the best start in life, thereby breaking the cycles of deprivation that we see in so many parts of the country, particularly the north-east. As the mother of two small children, I know from experience how vital financial help can be. To be honest, I have been stunned by the callous manner in which that help has simply been abandoned by the Liberal-Conservative Government. Some £3 billion-worth of cuts have been made to support for families. Such decisions will be devastating for parents, preventing them from getting out to work or creating either a work environment or the capacity to work in their households, thereby breaking the cycle of deprivation that can so often take hold in workless households.

Joined to the unfair rise in VAT—a tax that punishes the poor—those cuts will have an impact on unemployment and child poverty in my region, thereby causing further unemployment in the long term. The national economy remains weak, especially in areas of the country such as Newcastle, where large numbers of children, unemployed people and low-income families are already struggling and will struggle more under this Budget. They are the people who must be protected and not punished by the Government’s policies during this difficult time.

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[Zac Goldsmith (Richmond Park) (Con)]

I shall keep my speech brief, Mr Deputy Speaker, as instructed.

One key element of our response to the recession and the pressing need to create jobs has to be a recognition of the value of the green economy. I think that more or less all of us now accept that it would be a mistake to try and recreate the conditions that brought us the crisis in the first place, but we have an opportunity to raise from the wreck of an economy built on housing bubbles, uncontrolled public spending and financial services an alternative that is both stable and sustainable.

Whether or not we are concerned about climate change, it is worth recognising that clean technology is an emerging global market that is expected to be worth trillions of dollars in the coming decades. In fact, that market globally is already worth hundreds of billions of dollars. This is a massive opportunity for job creation, by any standards, and Britain should be at the forefront, but unfortunately we have just a 5% stake in those clean companies.

We should be a leader in innovation: we are not, and in the past decade we have seen virtually no sign of a coherent programme. We have seen no real investment in carbon capture and storage—

[Mr Anderson]

Does the hon. Gentleman recollect the closure in 1986 of this country’s coal mining industry by the Conservative Government? That included closing the most advance clean-coal technology site in the world—at Grimethorpe colliery in Barnsley.

[Zac Goldsmith]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for that intervention. Times change: the case now for clean coal has been renewed on the back of emerging evidence for climate change. If he does not mind, I will not go back 25 years, but I shall continue with a very brief description of what I regard as a huge failure over the past 10 years.

I mentioned carbon capture and storage, but there have been no effective incentives for home owners or organisations in the commercial sector to pursue energy efficiency. There have been virtually no incentives to develop renewable energy: as a result, we have seen virtually no progress over the last 13 years.

The CBI said last year that it is politics and policy, and not the recession, that have prevented green investment in the UK, and it pleaded with the Government to just “get on with it”. When Jonathon Porritt stepped down after nine years as the chair of the Sustainable Development Commission he also accused the Government of gross failure. He added, sarcastically, that the UK had become

“a world leader in green rhetoric.”

We should broaden our economic base to include more green technologies and more engineering and high-value manufacturing. We need to reconfigure our energy systems and find a way to wean ourselves off our dependence on imported hydrocarbons. That dependence is dangerous environmentally, economically and politically. We need to turn Britain into a world leader in green innovation, and we have the chance to do that now. In my view, the existing commitments of the coalition Government will set us absolutely on the right path

Paul King, chief executive of the UK Green Building Council, described the green deal as follows:

“This is a bold and welcome move. The biggest barrier to low carbon refurbishment—the upfront cost—is set to fall. Pay As You Save is a radical scheme, which could”

create

“at least 100,000 new jobs, saving money and conserving energy.”

The green deal is just one initiative, as the Chancellor has announced plans to create a green investment bank to facilitate investment from the private sector in new clean-energy technology companies. In addition to that, we have plans to create a number of large-scale marine energy parks. It is extraordinary that this country has 14,000 miles of coastline, yet we have barely begun to tap this extraordinarily valuable resource. We have plans—indeed, we have a commitment—to roll out smart meters and the feed-in tariff. If the example that Germany has shown us is to be believed, the feed-in tariff will lead to a revolution in decentralised energy and to huge job creation.

We have plans to lay out a national recharging network. It will trigger a shift, which we absolutely need, from the traditional, conventional car to electric vehicles and hybrid plug-ins. I realise that time is short, and I could cite endless examples of Government initiatives that will foster the shift we are going to see. At every stage of the shift, we will see huge opportunities for job creation and wealth creation, and we need to tap into those.

In green policies, as in most policies, the most powerful role the state can play is not to dictate or direct, but to empower. Instead of introducing a mind-numbing array of quangos, conflicting initiatives and schemes, all aimed at micro-managing our way towards a low-carbon future, we need to establish a clear framework, set the signals and let the market deliver. In truth, that is our only option. We cannot rely on public money because, as we all know, there is none. Instead, we have to find ways of ensuring that existing money flows in a new direction and if we are successful, we will prosper on the back of an economic recovery that might last. We will have done the right thing and we will be rewarded for having done so.

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[Nadhim Zahawi]

My hon. Friend is right. One example is the way in which the gap between the south-east and the rest of the country has grown. Labour Members just do not seem to understand what it takes to create an enterprise economy.

[Mr Anderson]

Further to the point made by the hon. Member for Peterborough (Mr Jackson), a lot of people were made wealthy in the 1980s, and 200,000 coal miners got £20,000 to go on the dole queue—paid out of the public purse.

[Nadhim Zahawi]

And your point is? At the end of the day, you only have to look at the facts. The facts are that you have left us with a legacy of £500 million a day—

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[Mr David Anderson (Blaydon) (Lab)]

It is an old but true saying that if we do not learn the mistakes of history, we end up repeating them. For some Members of the House, this discussion is not just theoretical, because we have lived it—our families and our areas have lived it. My grandfather was sacked in 1926 for having the temerity to go on strike. He was blacklisted for eight years and died in poverty. My father was forced to go down the mines in 1935 as a 14-year-old at a time when, he has told me, miners were treated like slaves. People did not march from Jarrow to London just for the fun of it: they did it because the private sector had let them down.

In the 1930s, a miner was killed in the mines every six hours because of the success of the private sector. That was not because there was too much red tape, but because people did not invest in the mines. That is why, at the end of world war two, the people of this country, despite having a GDP-to-debt ratio of 262%—not 62%—did the right thing and threw that Government out. They then built a million houses, created the national health service and nationalised the major utilities and the railways. They did all that right and what was the result? In 1959, the Prime Minister said that this country had never had it so good—that was because of the things that Labour Governments had done in the 1940s and 1950s.

Unfortunately, in the next period there was general consensus in the country on one-nation Toryism. Of course, that was done away with in 1979 when Mrs Thatcher came along. She had a view of one-nation Tories from the Wash southwards and we ended up with people on the dole, mines closed, shipyards closed and steelworks closed. That was said to be a price worth paying only because the people represented by the Conservatives were not paying it. The price was paid by the people of my constituency and those of Scotland, Wales and other industrial areas while the yuppies in London were swanning around in their Porsches, drinking champagne and smoking big cigars. Conservative Members can smile because they were not there, but some of us were, and we were suffering. People struggled and saw communities going down the drain. People were burgled by their neighbours’ children and saw drugs in villages where there had been nothing but hard work for two centuries. We saw houses falling down that people had kept going for a hundred years. This is not a joke; it is serious stuff.

Hon. Members talk about unemployment—in the constituency where I lived before I became an MP, the highest unemployment rate in the past 13 years has been 7.8%, which is far too high, but in 1986, in the week that the mine I worked in was closed and 721 miners were put on the dole, the unemployment rate was 18.6%. The Conservatives should not come here lecturing us about unemployment when it is just some sort of theoretical debate they have had in the students union.

At the end of the 1980s, the public services were attacked, compulsory competitive tendering was introduced and people were put on wages of £1 an hour. We had a situation where people who had given their lives to organisations such as the health service were told, “We don’t want you any more—go and work for Joe Bloggs’ cleaning company.” People were underestimated and undervalued. The next thing was that the private sector came back in. We gave the utilities back to the private sector and we ended up with a utilities sector that was not fit for purpose. The reality is that we will probably end up with power cuts or running out of gas. Alternatively, we will end up, as the hon. Member for Richmond Park (Zac Goldsmith) suggested when he spoke so eloquently about green issues, being dependent on people like the Russians or the Ukrainians for gas and oil supplies. Why? It is because of lack of investment by private companies.

When Labour came back into power in 1997, we took action and used public money to put right some of those wrongs. We introduced the national minimum wage, we brought in rights for people at work and we introduced good-quality health and safety legislation that saves lives. We introduced regulations that stopped business people from exploiting people at work, and we should never move away from that or apologise for it. We also introduced the regional development agencies, which have not been successful in some regions—it is pointless to pretend otherwise—but the areas where they have been successful are probably those where they are needed more than anywhere else, such as in my region, where the RDA has been very successful. Taking RDAs away will cause a repeat of the past and will be the wrong way to go.

Some people say that we have no choice and that we are all in it together, but we do have a choice. We do not have to follow past accidents: we could introduce a financial transaction tax on the banks, we could take real action to attack tax avoidance and tax evasion, and we do not have to cut corporation tax. I know that it is highly unlikely that the Conservatives will want to do that, because they still want to be the party of business at the helm of the work force, but the Opposition will not stand for it. It is a shame that the hon. Members on the narrow Government side of the House—the Liberal Democrats—are supporting the other Government Members in doing that. They should be ashamed of what they are doing.