Oral Answers to Questions

David Morris Excerpts

Wednesday 21st March 2012 Commons Chamber

[Simon Hughes (Bermondsey and Old Southwark) (LD)]

6. How much and what proportion of Government procurement was made from small and medium-sized enterprises in the latest period for which figures are available.

[David Morris (Morecambe and Lunesdale) (Con)]

9. What recent progress he has made on opening up public sector procurement to small and medium-sized enterprises.

[The Minister for the Cabinet Office and Paymaster General (Mr Francis Maude)]

rose—[Interruption.]

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Maude]

I am delighted to tell my right hon. Friend that we make this information much more public and transparent than it has ever been before. The Contracts Finder website contains much more information about tenders, contracts and successful bids than has ever been the case, but we have more distance to go, and we will do so.

[David Morris]

I congratulate my right hon. Friend on the work that he has done to help SMEs to access Government contracts, but will he now consider writing protection for small sub-contractors into every major Government contract?

Trade Union Funding

David Morris Excerpts

Wednesday 29th February 2012 Westminster Hall

[Ian Lavery]

I will not give way. It has been mentioned before that we want more transparency. Since the Tory Government took office, they have introduced a certification officer. We now have more legislation than any other democracy in the western world, and our trade unions are more restricted than anywhere else. My view is quite simple—there is a concerted attack on ordinary men and women. However, we should not be surprised. When any Government Member gets up and says, “My auntie used to work here, and my father was a miner”, we know that something is coming in the following sentence: kick the trade unions.

I disagree with several things that have been said. On 30 November, the day of the public sector strikes, the Prime Minister clearly stated in the House that he would review the facility time for trade unions. That was his reaction—to kick the trade unions for daring to have the audacity to speak up for their membership. However, it had been mentioned beforehand.

[David Morris (Morecambe and Lunesdale) (Con)]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

[Ian Lavery]

I will not give way. It had been mentioned at the Tory party conference by officials and Ministers who were proud to be trade union bashers and trade union kickers. That is why a lot of the new Tory MPs are thinking that this is the way to get a job in the party. They think, “Let’s start kicking the trade unions. That’s what we should be doing.”

I have been a trade union representative since the age of 16 or 17. I have been involved in both the private and public sector. By the way, the private sector represents about 40% of facility time, so it is not only public sector representatives who are paid for by taxpayers for facility time.

About the money that has been suggested is being paid by the taxpayer, in my experience, if I had any time off for facility time, I would have just received the wages that I would have received had I been at work. That is not even a saving. No one was put in my place, so there was no saving. It is misleading to suggest that there can be a huge saving in facility time, because, in the main, people are not replaced when they are doing facility time, and that is important.

I represented people in the mining industry. My facility time was about health and safety. What is more important than health and safety in the workplace? I visited people who had lost their husbands underground. They did not want to see the colliery manager or anyone from the management. They would ring up and say, “Mr Lavery, can you go and speak”—

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Gareth Thomas (Harrow West) (Lab/Co-op)]

I congratulate the hon. Member for Congleton (Fiona Bruce) on securing the debate. She said that trade unions are a valuable part of our civic society and that they do hugely important work on behalf of many of their members, and I very much agree with that comment. She went on to make a series of other points from which she drew conclusions with which I am afraid I cannot agree.

I am slightly surprised that she and some Conservative Members should so obviously want to attack the interests of hard-working people—the home help, the teacher, the nurse, the learning assistant, the dustman, the cleaner. Those and many others who work in the private and, in particular given today’s debate, the public sectors are not paid huge salaries. They are part of the squeezed middle and are seeing their finances hit hard by the Government’s VAT rise, for example, and by high energy bills, which Ministers will not act on. Many of them are extremely worried about whether they will have a job in six months’ or a year’s time.

If the hon. Lady and some of her colleagues have their way, the right of such people to be properly represented will be taken away. Thousands of hard-working families will lose that most basic of rights—the right to be properly represented when they need it most. That point was made by my hon. Friends the Members for Blaydon (Mr Anderson) and for Wansbeck (Ian Lavery).

Virtually all the staff who would be affected most by the hon. Lady’s proposals do not earn huge salaries, yet they still demonstrate considerable commitment and hard work in delivering some of our most basic and important public services. The Prime Minister once spoke of compassionate conservatism. I ask the hon. Lady and her colleagues, how is it compassionate to take away from often low-paid, hard-working employees the opportunity to be properly and professionally represented when they need it most?

[David Morris]

The hon. Gentleman referred to hard-working families. Does he not think that it is appalling that hard-working families’ taxes are funding people who should be working, but rather than doing their actual jobs, the taxpayer is paying them to be union officials pro rata?

[Mr Thomas]

With all due respect to the hon. Gentleman, I think that he has got completely the wrong end of the stick, as I will explain.

If an employee is facing sexual harassment, worried about safety in the workplace, about to lose their job or have their pay cut, and does not know where to turn when they have problems at work, trade union representatives—independent of their employers—offer a crucial place to turn. They are trained and experienced in handling such issues and in liaising with employers to resolve disputes and workplace problems before they escalate. They help to reduce the cost to the immediate employer and the social and human cost for the individuals concerned. They reduce costs to the employer and ultimately help to reduce the cost to the taxpayer, a point made by my hon. Friend the Member for Aberdeen North (Mr Doran).

Even if one accepts the figures in the TaxPayers Alliance report, which seems to have provided the context for the debate, union representatives amount to only 0.05% of the public sector work force, and, it must be said, they carry out a significant proportion of union duties in their own time. They have attracted a vast amount of Conservative MPs’ time. It is reasonable to wonder whether spending so much time on that issue is the best use of the House’s time. The national health service is in crisis, we have record levels of joblessness, the economy is in free fall, welfare to work schemes are falling apart, many charities and community groups are in a desperate search for funding and there are huge cuts to our armed forces. When all those issues deserve the attention of the House, it is a little surprising that Conservative Members want to focus on 0.05% of the work force.

As my hon. Friend the Member for Paisley and Renfrewshire North (Jim Sheridan) pointed out, interestingly, union representatives continue to enjoy the support of many business people, so much so that the former director general of the CBI, Sir Richard Lambert, described them as having

“a lot to give their fellow employees and the organisations that employ them.”

If such a senior figure from the business world was moved to endorse the role of union representatives, maybe Conservative Members should pause and consider whether the performance of organisations in the public sector benefits from union representatives paid for by the public sector, as my right hon. Friend the Member for Wentworth and Dearne (John Healey) and my hon. Friend the Member for East Kilbride, Strathaven and Lesmahagow (Mr McCann) said.

Research by the University of Hertfordshire examining the benefits of funding trade union facility time in the public sector suggests that the work of union representatives saves between £260 million and £701 million per annum. For every £1 spent on union facility time in the public sector therefore, between £2 and £5 is returned in accrued benefits. Many City institutions would be proud of that rate of return. I gently ask why the hon. Member for Congleton and her hon. Friends think that Britain can afford to waste such sums of money, because that is what would happen if her proposals were accepted.

The organisation that appears to have created the context for the debate, and indeed for other such debates, is the TaxPayers Alliance. Its report does not seem to be terribly well researched. It is certainly not up there with research from the Institute for Fiscal Studies or Barnardo’s and it certainly contains misunderstandings about how the Union Learning Fund works. When I was preparing for the debate, I was interested that the slightly calmer voice of the Minister for Further Education, Skills and Lifelong Learning praised the work of Unionlearn. The report refers to unions that do not exist and to organisations that are not unions, including School Leaders Scotland, the Retired Officers’ Association and, I am told, a credit union.

Individual Voter Registration

David Morris Excerpts

Monday 16th January 2012 Commons Chamber

[David Morris (Morecambe and Lunesdale) (Con)]

This debate, which is on voting in this country, is one that is naturally at the heart of our democratic process. In the past, electoral fraud was a small, minor problem, and few people worried about it, but in my view that has changed. The prevailing view is now that electoral fraud is much more widespread than it once was. The numbers being investigated and convicted show that we are certainly going downhill at a rate of knots when it comes to accountability.

In the past, the electoral register was accurate, and fraud was not a major problem. Anyone committing fraud would have needed the bravery to appear at least twice, and perhaps even three times, at the polling booth before they were caught. From what we can tell, that did not happen very often. Today, as a result of postal votes on demand, people can vote without ever having to see anyone. That has led to an unknown number of people listing fictitious residents at their properties and voting by post on their behalf.

[Siobhain McDonagh]

Will the hon. Gentleman explain his source for his last assertion—that large numbers of people are registering multiple times—because his Government’s review suggested that there was a negligible amount of such behaviour?

[David Morris]

I am speaking from personal experience. I have stood in three seaside resorts and have come across situations—including in the 2010 election—in which voters have died six months prior to their votes being cast.

Listing fictitious residents has led to an unknown number of people—

[Siobhain McDonagh]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way? Presumably he has contacted the police about that.

[Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Nigel Evans)]

Order.

[David Morris]

This has led to an unknown number of people listing fictitious residents at their properties and voting by post on their behalf. The vital failsafe in our system—namely, going to the ballot box in person—has been removed. This means we need a new failsafe, and I think that that is agreed on both sides of the House. There are various ways we can do this and I know the last Government saw ID cards as the answer. I do not.

I support fully the proposal to have individual voter registration. It is simple, cheap to administer—unlike ID cards—and fits in with the existing system, because it works on the same principle. Individual voter registration requires very few changes to our system, and we know from Northern Ireland that it works. But in today’s debate, some hon. Members have got two different issues muddled up. One is the issue of fraud that IER seeks to address, and the other is how we encourage more people to go to the ballot box. Making fraud easier will undoubtedly boost turnout, but it will not encourage more real people to vote. People do not bother to put themselves on the electoral register because they do not feel engaged, and do not want to vote. Similarly, there are millions of people on the register who do not want to vote. We need to make those people feel that their votes count.

It is not surprising that people cannot be bothered when 70% of our laws are edicts from an unelected Government in Brussels. People feel as if they cannot make a difference whichever way they vote, and that is the issue that we need to address. I really believe that repatriation of powers from Brussels, devolving more decisions to local councils and electing more police commissioners will help to engage people in the democratic process, but this has nothing to do with individual voter registration.

Individual voter registration is about reducing fraud and building confidence in the system. Today, once again, we see that electoral fraud and confidence in the system seem to be an entirely secondary considerations. They must be our central considerations, not least because people will have less confidence in the system if they feel they will be outvoted by electoral fraudsters. How many people will bother trudging to the ballot box when they rightly or wrongly believe that their views will be overridden by the fraudsters?

Maintaining the status quo will continue to undermine our system, so we do need to encourage more people to the ballot box, but the way to do this is with greater democracy. We need to stop electoral fraud, and the way to do this is to make people register individually.

EU Council

David Morris Excerpts

Monday 12th December 2011 Commons Chamber

[The Prime Minister]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for that point. What I also noticed from that poll, which says that more than 50% support what we have done and—as she says—14% are against, is that the leader of the Labour party does have a constituency of opinion among the people who have not made up their minds.

[David Morris (Morecambe and Lunesdale) (Con)]

May I congratulate the Prime Minister on the strength he has shown in leading this country? The tabloid press says that £40 billion would have gone over to Europe, or £642 for every man, woman and child in this country. I thank the Prime Minister for stopping that happening, and will he point out to the Leader of the Opposition—who now says that he would not have signed the treaty—that instead of being cast adrift on the waves of the Atlantic, we are now the financial lifeboat of Europe?

[The Prime Minister]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for his question. The point about the budget is important because, as a net contributor, every extra percentage point of budget increase does result in a big transfer from Britain to Brussels, so it is important that we have managed to achieve a freeze.

Oral Answers to Questions

David Morris Excerpts

Tuesday 15th November 2011 Commons Chamber

[The Deputy Prime Minister]

The Parliamentary Secretary, Cabinet Office, my hon. Friend the Member for Forest of Dean (Mr Harper), will give more details about the commission in a statement before Christmas.

[David Morris (Morecambe and Lunesdale) (Con)]

T3. Will my right hon. Friend elaborate on the comments made by my hon. Friend the Member for Harwich and North Essex (Mr Jenkin) about industrial tribunals? If there is to be any reform, will he give us a timetable, and may I respectfully ask whether I may help out, given my experience in this regard?

[The Deputy Prime Minister]

I know that my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills is keen to proceed with the reforms that I mentioned earlier: the change in the timetable from one year to two, and the idea of protected conversations. I am sure that he would be delighted to benefit from my hon. Friend’s expertise.

Libya

David Morris Excerpts

Monday 5th September 2011 Commons Chamber

[The Prime Minister]

My hon. Friend is entirely right. We need to encourage Israel to work with all its moderate friends and allies for a safe and secure future, and obviously that is more difficult when relations between Israel and Turkey are more challenged.

[David Morris (Morecambe and Lunesdale) (Con)]

It is refreshing to see a Prime Minister leading from the front, as my hon. Friend the Member for Reading West (Alok Sharma) said, but I am very concerned about the Yvonne Fletcher investigation. Will the Prime Minister assure me that all avenues will be followed to bring the perpetrator of this crime to book?

[The Prime Minister]

I can certainly give my hon. Friend that assurance. That is why I raised the case personally with Prime Minister Jibril at the Paris conference. I would just say that I think it is important that we allow this new Government to get their feet under the table in Tripoli before pressing the case a huge amount further. This is a police investigation too, and I would urge the Metropolitan police to do what they can to push the investigation forward and work with the new Libyan authorities.

Public Disorder

David Morris Excerpts

Thursday 11th August 2011 Commons Chamber

[The Prime Minister]

In Wales, as in England, there are opportunities to get officers out from desk jobs, HR jobs and IT jobs. Opposition Members shake their heads. That is what is so hopeless about them—a sense that there is no reform that can be made to try to get better value for money. That is why, frankly, the country is not listening to them.

[David Morris (Morecambe and Lunesdale) (Con)]

Will the Prime Minister share with me his gratitude to Lancashire police for sending 76 police officers to help out in London, and will he convey to the Opposition that, at my insistence 12 months ago, Lancashire police found a way of keeping their PCSOs, preventing two of my constituents from fuelling violence and rioting in my constituency and in Lancaster?

[The Prime Minister]

I certainly pay tribute to the Lancashire force and to other forces who acted quickly under the PNICC system to make forces available in London, Manchester or the west midlands where they were most needed.

Phone Hacking

David Morris Excerpts

Wednesday 13th July 2011 Commons Chamber

[The Prime Minister]

I hope the inquiry will look at what happened with the Information Commissioner’s report, because that was one of the wake-up calls when, frankly, the politicians did not wake up. In terms of taking into account the views of the other parties in the House, I am going to discuss that with my right hon. Friend the Culture Secretary and see what is the best way forward.

[David Morris (Morecambe and Lunesdale) (Con)]

May I ask the Prime Minister, given the group feeling in the House, whether we could put the full vetting authorities of the Government to the assistance of the Leader of the Opposition so that he can find out more about his director of communications?

[The Prime Minister]

We all have to answer questions about the people we employ and the activities they might have undertaken. I am sure that the Leader of the Opposition will be doing just that.

Review of Parliamentary Standards Act 2009

David Morris Excerpts

Thursday 12th May 2011 Commons Chamber

[Pete Wishart (Perth and North Perthshire) (SNP)]

I want to paint a picture of two different parliamentary expenses schemes. One is bureaucratic, difficult to understand and administer, expensive to run and universally loathed by those whom it seeks to serve. The other is relatively inexpensive, easy to understand and universally accepted by those whom it seeks to serve. It might surprise some to know that both those schemes currently exist in the UK. The first is our good friend IPSA, and the second is the scheme that operates in Scotland without fuss, issues or any difficulty whatever.

A year on from IPSA’s creation, we are here again discussing its many and manifest failures, while the system in Scotland works without any issues or difficulty. No one cares to hear about it, and even the press are bored with it. They lost interest in the tea and biscuits stories years ago and they have gone on to other things, but it was not always like that in Scotland. In the early days of the Scottish Parliament there were a number of alarming stories, but nothing on the scale of what happened in this House. Initially, the Scottish Parliament more or less copied in full the parliamentary scheme from this place, but then there were difficulties, so it patiently, constructively and conscientiously fashioned a new system, which has worked. That system has the support of MSPs and the public, who know it is fair and transparent, and the press no longer have any particular interest in it.

One way of illustrating the difference between the two systems is by looking at them through the eyes of the staff who have the misery of dealing with them on our behalf. I share an office with a Member of the Scottish Parliament. We share staff and our office manager looks after our office issues for us jointly, so she is responsible for paying all the bills and making sure that all the offices work effectively. When she does the expenses work for the MSP, it is over in minutes: the direct debit for office supplies—done; a few receipts for the travel required—finished. But then we almost hear her groan of anguish when it is time to turn to the MP’s expenses. With a heavy heart, she draws down the IPSA website again and the hours of misery start. Is it the four hours to be spent on the travel reconciliations for last month, or the trying to sit through the quadruplicate reconciliation that IPSA requires for travel that causes the misery? Is it the endless phone calls to IPSA Towers, trying to understand and decipher the new, panicky rewrite of some of the rules? Or is it the stress of possibly getting a claim wrong—of something going into the wrong column or category and the claim being returned or, worse, refused and opened up for the ritual press humiliation that comes when those expenses are published every two months?

[David Morris (Morecambe and Lunesdale) (Con)]

Does the hon. Gentleman agree that having an IPSA-type body is a good thing for MPs, but that it is so over-bureaucratic that it stifles what we are here to do? Speaking from personal experience, I think that if it were not for Philip from IPSA having come around and helped out many of the Members who are present today, we would all be in a world of pain.

[Pete Wishart]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for making that point, which gives me the opportunity to say that there is nothing wrong with the staff who work for IPSA, most of whom are courteous and very helpful. They do all they can to try to resolve some of the difficulties and issues that confront us and our staff day in, day out. The hon. Gentleman is right to say that the problem is the mind-numbing bureaucracy of the thing. I do not want my staff sitting there on the phone to IPSA Towers. I do not want them wading through the quadruplicate reconciliations that are required. I want them to work to help my constituents; that is what they are there to do. Why are they wasting their precious time, which should be spent on my constituents, on that mind-numbing useless bureaucracy? It is time that we addressed that question properly.

The Scottish system and IPSA have one thing in common—one that we all want to see: transparency. That is what it should be about; transparency is the key to the way forward. The system used by the Scottish Parliament is even better, because receipts are put on each MSP’s website and are available at the click of a mouse, so we achieve transparency without the massive difficulties caused by the bureaucracy of filling in all those forms.

IPSA has had a chance to try to resolve those issues. Unfortunately, I missed the debate secured by the hon. Member for Windsor (Adam Afriyie) before Christmas. I do not think that I have yet congratulated him on securing this debate, and on his diligence in pursuing the issue. After the first debate, IPSA was charged with the task of getting some of those difficulties in order. There have been some improvements, which we are all prepared to welcome, but the culture and the institution are still very much in place. There has not been a cultural shift in the way in which IPSA deals with MPs’ expenses, so we are right to try to pursue the issue along the lines that the hon. Gentleman was prepared to suggest. Let us see if we can look at the 2009 Act again to try to get something different.

We do not need to look too far afield, although I would be fascinated to learn about other international examples. We need look only 500 miles up the road to find a system that functions perfectly well, supported by those whom it serves and by the public, and without any issue or interest from the press whatsoever. We do not need to reinvent the wheel; we just need to strap a Caledonian one on to the House and get on with it. That is what we should do now, as we have an opportunity to try to resolve this. When the issue of expenses came before the House a couple of years ago, we strongly suggested that people should take a look at the Scottish system. That proposal was rejected in favour of IPSA, and the House probably realises that it made a dramatic and drastic mistake in going down that route—but there is still time to try to achieve a change. Let us not do something radically different. Let us just do something that works, and something works just up the road.

United Nations Security Council Resolution 1973

David Morris Excerpts

Monday 21st March 2011 Commons Chamber

[David Morris (Morecambe and Lunesdale) (Con)]

Like my hon. Friend the Member for North Warwickshire (Dan Byles), I will vote very reluctantly. Every time a military conflict takes place, death is involved along with ramifications for future generations, and everything hinges on what we say in this Chamber. We all know that this Chamber is the nerve centre of the country.

Although we are debating the motion, I really believe that the Prime Minister and the Foreign Secretary were right to take the actions that they have taken. We cannot stand by and watch people who are not that far away from us, geographically—on the shores of Europe—suffer as they are suffering. We are dealing with a man who, time and again, has violated human rights. Time and again he has killed his own people. He has killed people on our soil. People have been killed through his orders, indirectly, and by his regime, certainly.

Members on both sides of the argument have said that we should have had more time in which to discuss the motion, but cries for help have no time. Those cries for help are coming from 2,000 miles away, which is not very far, and we have to help people. We have to be part of this.

[Michael Connarty (Linlithgow and East Falkirk) (Lab)]

I wonder whether the hon. Gentleman is listening to the cries for help from the people of Bahrain who have been murdered by Saudi Arabian troops, the people in the south of Syria who have been murdered by troops, or the people in Yemen who have been murdered by another dictator there. Why select these cries for help to listen to?

[David Morris]

Because it is the right thing to do; that is why.

[Michael Connarty]

Why select them?

[David Morris]

It is the right thing to do at this time and in this case.

Let me tell the House a story of which I have personal knowledge. A good friend of mine who was a radio officer on a ship jumped off it into the ocean when he saw a British destroyer come past. The military on the ship from which he jumped threw grenades at him, one of which hit him but bounced off and, thankfully, did not explode. He swam for his life, and our boys pulled him out of the sea. He came to this country, and was thankful for that. He has been here for nearly 30 years. Just think of that. Let me tell the House something else. When the students were bombing Manchester in the 1980s, that man lied to everyone that he was Italian, because he was in fear of his life. That is the kind of regime that we are discussing today, and the kind of regime that we want to sort out once and for all.

What else happened in the 1980s? Yvonne Fletcher was shot on our own soil in front of the television cameras. Some people have very short memories, but I do not have a short memory, and what worries me is that if we had not acted as we have so far, massacres would now be occurring in Libya.

This is not about the moral high ground. We pulled a mission yesterday—or over the weekend, or whenever it was—because civilians were involved. We do not attack human shields. We should think about what we are doing here. Yes, we are putting our troops into a theatre, but we are also saving people’s lives, and we are sorting out a dictator who should have been sorted out years ago. This man was responsible for Lockerbie. Do Members remember that? I do. He was never brought to book. Dare I say it, but some Members wanted to appease that regime—and here we are today, having to take up the mantle to sort it out again.

I was outraged when Yvonne Fletcher was shot. What can we do about all this? We can do the right thing. When Members go through the Lobbies tonight, they should think about what has happened in the history of Libya and how it has affected this country and the middle east, and they should do the right thing.