Debate on the Address

Debbie Abrahams Excerpts

Tuesday 10th May 2022 Commons Chamber

[Mr Davis]

My right hon. Friend is right. He has been the icebreaker in this argument, which I refer to as the Redwood argument. We have record tax collections this year because of fiscal drag and for a variety of other reasons, including underestimates by the Treasury. That is money that we should give back to the people. We do not need to balance the budgets twice over. We need to get that right.

There are respects in which we need to reinforce or increase what is in the Queen’s Speech. My favourite line in the Queen’s Speech is the same every year:

“Other measures will be laid before you.”

We are Conservatives. We believe in a property-owning democracy. Governments of all powers and all persuasions for 30 or more years—since Margaret Thatcher, in truth —have failed on that issue. Two thirds of my generation bought their own home; today it is a quarter. That is a scandal. I approve of the Prime Minister talking about the right to buy for housing associations—I should do; I first came up with the policy in 2002 when it was my responsibility, and we still have not implemented that policy. However, it will not solve the problem. We are at least a million houses short, in a period in which the population has increased by 7 million. We are about 100,000 houses a year short in what we are constructing, in addition to that million.

We need to find a way of addressing the issue that does not hit what people call the nimby problem, in which people, when objecting to things, talk about protecting their environment. We need to find a way around that, and we need to look very hard at what was done in the 1920s with garden villages and garden towns. We need to use the increased wealth that they create to pay for the community centres, surgeries, schools, roads and wi-fi that are necessary. There would be plenty of added value to make the farmers rich at the same time. Politically, it would not be straightforward, but it would be an easier policy than we might think.

We Conservatives are also believers in social mobility. I think all Members are believers in social mobility. We used to be the best on that in the developed world; now we are among the worst. When inequality is greater, social mobility is more important. Indeed, the only real moral argument for an unequal society is that everybody has an opportunity and a chance to take part. In the last 20 years or so, the top 1% of the population have roughly trebled their income whereas the median has roughly flatlined, so there is a stronger argument for social mobility today than there was before.

The best mechanism for social mobility is the education system, and there are some good proposals in the education Bill in the Queen’s Speech. Adding to the academy system will help at the margins, however, and will not solve the problem; it has not solved it for the last 20 years and it will not solve it now.

The great scandal is that half of children from free school meals families are failed by the education system by the time that they are 11. They cannot meet the requirements in English or mathematics to make progress in education, so their lives are effectively over in terms of social mobility at that point. We need to get a grip of that, which means re-engineering our classrooms and helping our brilliant teachers with more artificial intelligence, more software support and more augmentation. The technology is there now—it exists, it is proven and it is available. I hope that the House will not laugh too much when I say that I went to see it demonstrated at Eton of all places, where it was brilliant at bringing on the weakest children.

[Debbie Abrahams (Oldham East and Saddleworth) (Lab)]

Does the right hon. Gentleman recognise that if a child is hungry, as many of our children are because they are living in poverty, that will not help their educational attainment?

[Mr Davis]

I agree entirely; I have arguments that I will not deploy today on universal credit and so on that relate directly to that point. One of the outcomes of having a technologically augmented teaching and assessment system, however, is that the teacher knows within days if a child has a problem that they did not have before and if their educational performance suddenly falls, perhaps because the parents have separated, there is trouble at home, they are going hungry or whatever. The hon. Lady is right and I agree with her basic premise, but technology would help even with that if we did it. I want to see us do that and deal with the scandal.

The last area that I will speak briefly about is the fundamental one of healthcare. We all support the national health service and no doubt applauded the brilliant staff—doctors and nurses—who did a fantastic job. We tell ourselves over and over again that we have the best healthcare system in the world, but that is simply not true. We have those committed doctors and we now spend more than the OECD average on healthcare, but we are not delivering more than the OECD average. Whether it is on survival rates in all the different categories of cancer care, coronaries, strokes, diabetes or whatever, we are not doing as good a job as we should be for the money, work, skill and commitment that go into it.

My argument is that we should look at the other countries that are doing better than us, such as Germany, France, Estonia, Austria, Sweden, Canada or Australia. They all have different systems that are all free at the point of delivery. I was a beneficiary of the Canadian system, which is an insurance-based system that is free at the point of delivery and supported by the state if people cannot afford it—and it works better than our system. We need to look at those other systems and learn from them. We need to stay with the fundamental principles of the health service but learn and improve what we can.

--- Later in debate ---

[Debbie Abrahams (Oldham East and Saddleworth) (Lab)]

I want to look at the context of this Queen’s Speech. We have escalating poverty; there is absolutely no doubt about that. We know that 14 million people are living in poverty, over 8 million of whom are in work. We also know that 4.5 million children living in poverty and, again, more than half of them are in working families. There is an increase in pensioner poverty, and an increase in the number of disabled people living in poverty. The net effect of the autumn Budget and the spring statement is that there will be 1.3 million more people living in absolute poverty, including 500,000 children. When we talk about social mobility and educational attainment, as many Conservative colleagues have been doing, we need to recognise that that is the context.

I chair the all-party parliamentary group on health in all policies, and we had a session on health inequalities with Professor Sir Michael Marmot a week or so ago. He described how the UK and the United States are outliers among advanced economies in terms of our life expectancy and our healthy life expectancy because the length of time that we are expected to live in good health is actually falling, and we should be really ashamed of that. We also heard from another academic, Professor Clare Bambra, who has been looking at the regional impacts of this. She has developed estimates showing that £13.2 billion a year is being lost because of this differential in health. The lower healthy life expectancy that we are seeing is the product of structural inequalities, which have got worse under this Government.

People say, “Well, what can we do about that? We’re doing the best we can.” That is absolute rubbish. We have the highest tax burden in 70 years. That is a Government choice. We have escalating energy costs and food costs. Again, the Government refuse to accept that they need to do more on this. The Opposition parties and the chief executives of various companies—Tesco was the latest one, this morning—have been saying that there should be a windfall tax, which would not be inflationary. But again, the Government have refused to act. There is no emergency Budget, no help with energy bills, and no scrapping of the national insurance contributions that are adding to the burden that people are feeling. There is nothing on social security support for people in work or out of work, or for pensioners. There is just 3%, when we know that inflation is currently at 7% and predicted to go to 10% by the end of the year. On top of that, the Government have now decided that they are going to move people who are on legacy benefits across, through the managed migration process. That has to happen in the next three months, and the impact, according to the Government’s own documents, is that nearly 1 million more people will be worse off. A million more! These are Government choices, unfortunately.

There was nothing in the Queen’s Speech on retrofitting our homes so that we can not only help people with the cost of their energy use but reduce the demand for energy, and nothing on how we are going to transition to support for businesses that produce and stimulate sustainable green jobs. There was nothing on tackling the inequality that is depriving our citizens not just of opportunities but of the ability to live long healthy lives. If the health of our children is a litmus test of how our society is doing, we must conclude that we are doing very badly, given that we have the highest level of infant mortality in western Europe.

There was nothing on the Government’s pledge to double research funding to find cures for the diseases that lead to dementia, which is the most common cause of death in this country; it is what people over 60 dread the most. There was nothing on how to correct the injustice experienced by disabled claimants who have lost their lives and by their families and friends, and nothing about an inquiry that will investigate how this happened. What we do have is more of the same from the Government, including stripping British citizens of their human rights and protections under the law. We will have to see whether such privations are restricted to the many, not the few. Some people clearly believe that the Government make laws for others that they do not need to abide by themselves.

To illustrate the Government’s thinking and how they are oh-so-skilfully packaging their Bills in emotive and divisive language, we helpfully have the Brexit freedoms Bill. The Government say it is designed to get rid of red tape, such as those annoying employment rights that try to hold abusive employers to account, or those troublesome health and safety regulations designed to stop us dying at or from our work.

Even more fundamentally, where is the legislation that will build back trust and confidence in our politics and our politicians and that reinforces that politics is about public service and serving our communities and our country, not ourselves or our mates? Legislation must address the inequality not only in income and wealth, but in power too, including in political power. Where is the legislation that would put the ministerial code on a statutory footing, as it is in the devolved nations, underpinned by the Nolan principles of selflessness, integrity, objectivity, accountability, openness, honesty and leadership? Where is the legislation that would make lying to this House and to the people of this country a sackable offence? Where is the legislation that would make it an offence to lie about a candidate in speech, in print or online during an election in order to influence the outcome? The Representation of the People Act is clearly inadequate in today’s digital age.

We do not need to see the results of the many surveys that show our citizens do not trust us; we just need to look at the turnout at last week’s elections, especially in our part of the world, Mr Deputy Speaker. We must change the culture of our politics. Being an honourable Member, whether in this Chamber or a local authority, should mean something. Our constituents must know that we will act with integrity and decency and that we will be on their side. However, with people allowed to stand in last week’s elections who based their campaigns on misogyny, racism, division and hate, and with others dishing out leaflets containing Trump-esque QAnon conspiracy theories to rabble-rouse, I am afraid that we are a long way from where we need to be.