Debate on the Address

David Drew Excerpts

Monday 14th October 2019 Commons Chamber

[Paul Blomfield (Sheffield Central) (Lab)]

It is great to have this opportunity to contribute to this afternoon’s debate, Madam Deputy Speaker, and I assure you that I will not outstay my welcome.

I want to make a few remarks arising from the community consultation that I have just finished with people from across my constituency. I do this every September during the recess, and this year almost 1,000 people were involved in one of 37 events over three weeks. More than 1,000 shared their views by completing a survey that I circulated. They set out their concerns and the issues they wanted me to raise, and today’s debate provides a first opportunity to put some of those on the record.

Inevitably, Brexit dominated, and in the survey that formed part of the consultation, 71% of people said they wanted a further public vote; only 18% were against the idea; 77% said that they would vote to remain; 15% said they would support leaving with a close relationship; and only 8% wanted to leave without any agreement. That was reflected in the meetings, too, and it was reflected even more strongly among young people. The Government need to recognise that if they lead this country to a damaging Brexit on a false prospectus, there is a rising generation who will never forgive them.

For that young generation—and, indeed, more widely across all age groups—there was a real concern to see stronger action to address the climate emergency, on which they felt they had been failed over the past nine years and about which they will see little comfort in today’s Gracious Speech. I was interested to hear the Prime Minister’s comment that we lead the world on addressing carbon emissions, and that comment has been echoed by a number of Members during the debate. I have taken the opportunity—on the odd occasion when I was not paying attention—to google every survey I could find, and none of them indicates that Britain is leading the world on this. Other countries—Sweden, Morocco and many others—are playing a leading role, and there is much more that we can do. We also have a responsibility to do much more, given our historical contribution.

A wide range of different issues were raised across the meetings and events that I organised, but there was a common theme. I heard how difficult it is for carers to access the necessary respite, without which their lives are challenging. There was frustration that the Government have failed to meet their post-2017 promise to bring forward proposals to tackle the crisis in adult social care and, indeed, to meet the needs of young carers. Domiciliary care workers told me about how their capacity to care had been eroded by 15-minute appointments, poor support, poor training and inadequate supervision. During the consultation I was conducting, one local residential home announced its closure due to inadequate funding, and we all know that many more across the country will follow that path. There was a real sense that we need a complete paradigm shift on how we meet the challenges of an ageing population and how we provide the resources to support that change.

[Dr David Drew (Stroud) (Lab/Co-op)]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for bringing up that group of young people and for talking about carers. I made a point at a meeting that the continual contracting out of services causes so many problems for voluntary groups. Does he agree that the Government ought to pay attention to that?

[Paul Blomfield]

I very much agree with my hon. Friend, and I shall return to that point later in my comments.

On health, I was told about the difficulties in securing timely appointments with GPs, sometimes acute difficulties with waiting times in A&E, and difficulties in accessing other services. Young people told me about the pressures that are contributing to the rise in mental health problems, on which the system is failing them badly. Schools told me that they were dipping into teaching budgets to provide support for students in mental health crises. Teaching budgets are there for teaching, but that money has been diverted to cover the crisis in young people’s mental health. We need even more support and substantial investment in child and adolescent mental health services. Young people told me that waiting times of 25 weeks between first diagnosis and a referral to the first opportunity for help are the norm, not the exception, but early intervention is critical to tackling mental health crises.

Parents of children with special educational needs and disabilities told me heartbreaking stories of their struggle to get education, health and care plans that met their children’s needs. Parents also talked about the challenges that schools face in delivering the plans once they are in place because of the lack of resources. We know that our schools have been hit by an 8% real-terms budget cut, but the particular failure to address special educational needs and disability funding is causing an enormous crisis.

Young people were increasingly worried about crime, talking about knife crime in particular. They made the case for the out-of-school activities that used to be common before the cuts, which have had a disproportionate impact on our local authorities and have led to a collapse in youth services. In other meetings, people highlighted how we miss Sure Start and the difference that the centres made in supporting families during the crucial early years. They talked about how school exclusions, driven by the lack of resources to support the most difficult children, are feeding gangs with recruits and sucking young people into knife crime.

A big worry across all ages and among all parts of the community was the rise in homelessness, rough sleeping and street begging. At a meeting on housing, we talked about the rising number of people in temporary accommodation without a permanent home of their own, the rise in sofa surfing, and the increasing dependency on friends and relatives for accommodation. People were clear that the only solution is a concerted programme of building affordable social housing. The problem of rough sleeping and street begging is clearly more complex, and we talked about mental health and alcohol and drug dependency problems that need intensive interventions to support people into getting off the streets and rebuilding their lives. There was a huge willingness from people in statutory services and the voluntary sector to resolve such problems, but there was also a real sense that the problems had risen over the past nine years as a consequence of the cuts that had affected statutory services’ ability to support and work with the voluntary sector in a way that has a real impact.

Those are all different issues, but there is a common theme. Nine years of cuts have sapped the capacity of our public services and much of the voluntary sector to meet the needs of those who need them most. Austerity has corroded the quality of too many lives, but it did not have to be like that. Such decisions were not forced by necessity, but by political choice, and those choices need to change. The Gracious Speech offers a few convenient headlines, but there is no real recognition of the scale of the change that we need: the fundamental new direction for our country that my constituents spoke about and which this Government clearly cannot provide.

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[Dr David Drew (Stroud) (Lab/Co-op)]

I am delighted to take part on the first day of our consideration of the Queen’s Speech, which was more about a political programme for the forthcoming general election than about how this country is going to be governed. Sadly, the Brexit morass that will envelop us all will carry on, regardless of what happens on Saturday and whatever happens by the end of this month. I wish, however, to start on a conciliatory note and something I am pleased to add my comments on. I refer to the commendation of our late friend Paul Flynn. Paul helped me enormously. He always said I would become an MP and he proved to be right, and he came over to Stroud to help me on numerous occasions. I owe him so much and he is clearly someone we all miss on this side of the House, and I hope the whole House will feel the same.

The Queen’s Speech is significant not so much for what was in it—as I said, there was a lot of politicisation—but, sadly, for what was not in it. It contained no mention of the Women Against State Pension Inequality Campaign, whose tragedy this whole House has to face up to at some point. It contained no mention of housing, which is the key issue for many of us in terms of how public service has to deliver much better. It did contain a mention of animal welfare, but it was minuscule compared with where we need to be going on animal welfare. A genuine animal welfare Bill is required, yet we are now talking about trophy hunting just as we talked previously about ivory bans, both of which are important in their own right but not what we should be doing, which is looking for a much more comprehensive approach. Many of our constituents vote on the issue of animal welfare and they feel we should be taking things forward much more quickly and radically.

[Matt Western]

My hon. Friend is making some powerful points. I believe he is alluding to the fact that this Queen’s Speech seemed almost tokenistic, in that it was almost like a shopping list of ambitions and touchpoints of things that the Government and Prime Minister felt to be important. How can there have been no mention of something as crucial to what is needed out there as housing, given that we have homelessness and rough sleeping at record levels, with people desperate and dying on the streets?

[Dr Drew]

That is what we should have been prioritising in this Queen’s Speech, along with the abolition of universal credit, which has proved to be a monumental mistake. There was nothing wrong with the concept, but the delivery of UC has caused such hardship, in all our constituencies, and it is beyond reform. We have to get rid of it and start with something different.

The Prime Minister, in defence of the Queen’s Speech, talked a lot about one nation. I know the Conservatives like to talk about themselves as the one nation party. Sadly, the way things could turn out means we could be facing one nation, because the other three parts of the United Kingdom, for various reasons, no longer seem to want to be part of this one nation. I really worry about the level of English nationalism, which is now driving the Conservative party. We have a fundamental problem and I agree with the right hon. Member for Broxtowe (Anna Soubry) that we need radical constitutional reform, and that includes devolution in this country of England, where we have failed to do anything to deal with the centralisation of power. That is a fundamental reason why people voted for Brexit; they did so because they feel disconnected from the way in which decisions are made. That comes into the need for a fundamental rethink, with votes at 16, electoral reform and unitary authorities, to which she alluded. As someone who spent 28 years on a parish and town council, I am pleased to say that that means taking power to the first level of government—it is not the lowest level. That is important, because people can then see what is happening in the communities.

Brexit has caused huge divisions, but it has also led to this Government wasting the past year. I regret and resent the fact that we will not be having the Agriculture Bill and the Fisheries Bill back—we did not even get as far as the environment Bill. All those are fundamental pieces of legislation that should have been enacted over the past year. We may disagree about what was going into those Bills. We had a critique in Committee, but, sadly for those who served on it—I led on behalf of the Opposition—the Agriculture Bill disappeared last November, never to be seen again. That does nothing other than cause disillusion. Farmers are asking, notwithstanding the uncertainty over Brexit, what policy is going to be in place if we crash out. More particularly, even if we do not crash out, we will need an agricultural policy that is understood and that takes account of the idea of public money for public goods. We need to see that in practice and see how it will work. At the moment, we just have a huge void.

I welcome the fact that the issue of mental health is in the Queen’s Speech, and hopefully a Bill will subsequently come forward, but there is a problem. Like many other Members, I go around my local schools—I have been to 40 schools in the past year—and besides funding and staff stability, the third issue that all schools raise with me is their children’s mental health. It is now at a stage where it is a crisis. We must not underestimate how bad things are. Of course, it is about not only the children but their families. We have a significant problem, even in Gloucestershire, with off-rolling. A lot of it has to do with parents who do not believe that their children can get special needs provision in the normal system, but it is also about the way parents can take their children out of school into so-called home education. There is nothing wrong with home education in theory, but they are not then educating their children, who are being taken out of school more as companions than in the context of a parent-child relationship. That should be addressed by proper investigation and, in due course, the putting in place of a proper legislative context.

My hon. Friend the Member for Swansea West (Geraint Davies), who is sadly not currently in the Chamber, talked about air quality as a key issue. I hope that will be addressed, either through the environment Bill or in its own right. I shall just add to what he had to say the significant issue of incineration, which leads to small particulates that have an enormous impact on the health of children in particular. We have never investigated it, and it should be paramount in the way we try to drive up air quality. Yes, of course traffic is seen as the major cause of the huge issue of our deteriorating health standards, but there are other parts to it. The disposal of waste through appropriate means by getting rid of it in a non-polluting manner is crucial, as is not creating it in the first place.

That brings me to the biggest loss in the Queen’s Speech: the failure to address climate change properly. The target of 2050 is far too late. Earlier this evening, I had the opportunity to go along to a meeting of the Parliamentary and Scientific Committee, at which three experts, including the former chief scientist Sir David King, basically argued that we are not anywhere near meeting the obligations in this country, let alone in the wider world. Warming of 2° will cause climate change catastrophe. We need to understand that, which is why I am proud to stand by my constituents. As many Members know, Extinction Rebellion came from Stroud. Many of my constituents are out there at every moment in time, and I am happy to help them wherever I can. I also pay due regard to Polly Higgins, the creator of the campaign on ecocide who latterly became a Stroud constituent. We need to look at ecocide and the implications—there is an opportunity for Members to come to a briefing this week—of how we can pass a law that means we will not leave a worse situation to our children and particularly our grandchildren. We should feel desperately keen to avoid doing that at any cost. Let us listen to the scientists and the campaigners, and let us do something in this place, rather than talk about it.

In conclusion, I am pleased that the Domestic Abuse Bill has been carried over and will hopefully see the light of day. Let us make sure that the legislation is not watered down and includes action such as banning sham marriages. We must make sure that it is not just linked to immigration and human rights but stands in its own right. The Opposition will debate the Bills as they come forward and seek radically to improve the legislation. We will make sure that there is an alternative. We heard earlier that it was all about the previous Government’s failings in power; I argue that austerity was a political programme. We are now coming to the end of austerity. It was such an unnecessary and punitive way for any Government to try to deal with the poorest and most vulnerable in our society. If we have come out of austerity, now is the time to see the real changes that are desperately needed, so that we have a more humane society that addresses issues such as housing, education and health, as well as trying to deal with the morass of Brexit. More particularly, we need to deal with climate change.

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[Bill Wiggin]

That is a very good reason to have a better test and to win the battle against the disease, and then we will not need to do so many tests because the cattle will be clean.

[Dr Drew]

The hon. Gentleman is being very generous in giving way. There is even better news: there is now—within five years—the prospect of a cattle vaccine. Under the old enzyme linked immunosorbent assay test, we could not separate those that had been vaccinated and those that had not. I gather that that is now happening. Is that not much better than some of the things that are going on?