Budget Resolutions

Emma Hardy Excerpts

Thursday 23rd November 2017 Commons Chamber

[John McDonnell]

I will come back to the hon. Gentleman.

The additional funds put in place amount to £1 returned for every £10 that the Government are cutting from the system. This means that those claiming universal credit will now have to take their first payment as a loan, so they will face 12 months of reduced payments. What has the Chancellor offered to some of the most desperate people in the country—those who are already drowning in debt? More debt. The Chancellor had nothing to say for the people who are newly registered for universal credit and who face destitution this Christmas. Not a single extra penny, however inadequate, will be available for the new year. Some 59,000 families will be left without any support over the Christmas period. Those families include 40,000 of this country’s children. The percentage of children living in relative poverty is the highest since records began in 1961—in the sixth richest country in the world.

Local councils are being starved of the funds they need to protect the most vulnerable children in society. Charities on the frontline are clear and report solidly that cuts to parenting classes, children’s centres, substance misuse prevention, teenage pregnancy support and short breaks for disabled people risk turning the current crisis into a catastrophe for the next generation of children and families. A record 70,000 children have been taken into care this year. One in 64 children in England is at risk of abuse or neglect. There are 1,200 fewer children’s centres than in 2010, eight in 10 schools have no funding to support children with special needs and funding for early intervention to protect children is down by 55%. There was not a single penny extra in the Budget to address this emerging crisis in our children’s services. The Chancellor and the Government are failing some of the most vulnerable children in society, and I urge the Government to look again at this emerging crisis.

It goes on. Schools are facing the first funding cuts per pupil in real terms since the 1990s. Headteachers are being forced to go begging to parents for funds to pay for basic supplies. Five thousand headteachers have written to the Government, asking just for the return of the funds that have been cut. One headteacher in the Prime Minister’s constituency is asking parents for £1 a day to help to pay for stationery.

The National Audit Office says that schools face a £1.7 billion real-terms funding cut by 2020. For younger children, there are 1,000 fewer nursery places and childminders. Eight in 10 schools have been left without the funding to provide adequately for special needs pupils. This means that our most vulnerable children are deprived of the counselling or support they need, and spend break times away from their friends, alone. Their education is being discriminated against.

[Emma Hardy (Kingston upon Hull West and Hessle) (Lab)]

I was told by a headteacher in Hull that there is not enough money for post-16 special educational needs provision, because they cannot cut the number of teaching assistants due to the ratios of staff needed to care for these children. She is looking at of not being able to offer a full-time post-16 school placement for children with SEN. Does my right hon. Friend agree that that is appalling?

[John McDonnell]

It is absolutely shocking when, as a society, we are looking to integrate everybody into the mainstream as best we can. It means that those children will be deprived for the rest of their lives. More than 4,000 children with an approved education, health and social care plan are still not receiving the provision they are entitled to, which confirms what my hon. Friend reports.

The Local Government Association is now warning the Government that the cuts to local government will mean schools being forced to turn away students with special needs. Yesterday’s Budget offered £177 million for additional maths and IT teachers, supposedly to make us fit for the future, at a time when just 10% of our schools offer IT GCSEs—£177 million to compensate for £1.7 billion, or £1 pound given back for every £10 taken away. Capital spending on schools is also scheduled to be cut by £600 million over this Parliament, at a time when class sizes are rising.

On the NHS, experts and health professionals are agreed that it is approaching breaking point. The NHS needs proper funding. The chief executive of NHS England has said our national health service needs £4 billion this year to prevent it from falling over. He has warned of 5 million people being left on the waiting lists if there is not additional funding.

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[Sajid Javid]

My hon. Friend will not be surprised to learn that the Opposition do not know what they would do. They have no idea, other than borrowing billions of pounds more and trying to bankrupt this country once again.

What Labour has never understood is that getting more homes built requires action on many fronts. It is the easiest thing in the world to say, “We’ll build more homes”, but it is meaningless unless we address where we are going to build them, what we are going to build and how, who is going to do the building and who is going to pay for it all.

[Emma Hardy]

The right hon. Gentleman makes the point about where we build homes and the need to get the people to build them. Does he recognise that providing money to create maths teachers will not help with the skills shortage that we have in the building industry so that we can create the builders we need to build properties?

[Sajid Javid]

First, I would have thought the hon. Lady would welcome the extra investment in maths. If she had been listening to the Budget, she would have also welcomed the partnership that we are beginning with the TUC and the CBI to invest in the skills of the future, and the additional funding to get more skills into the construction industry.

Our housing White Paper promised action on many fronts, and that is what the Budget delivers, with more than £15 billion of new financial support to help make it happen. Over the next five years we will commit to a total of at least £44 billion of capital funding, loans and guarantees to support our housing market, to boost the supply of skills, resources and land for building, and to create financial incentives to deliver an average of 300,000 net additional homes a year—or to put it another way, almost three times as many as the shadow Housing Minister managed when he was Housing Minister.

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[Mr Barry Sheerman (Huddersfield) (Lab/Co-op)]

It might surprise some people on the Government Benches in particular to hear that I agree with several of the major themes of the speech made by the right hon. Member for Sevenoaks (Sir Michael Fallon). We have worked together on manufacturing and other matters and would agree on the need for greater expenditure on our defence sector. As a Labour and Co-operative Member of Parliament, I was surprised at his conversion to passionate advocacy of employee share ownership—I perhaps did not know about his championship of the idea. There are other matters on which we do not agree.

This is my 43rd Budget so, if I am a little cynical and pessimistic, it is because I have sat through 43 Budgets since I came to the House in 1979. Some have been amazingly bold, ambitious and brave. I remember sitting on the Government Benches during what was not a Labour party-induced economic meltdown but a banker-induced global economic meltdown, when brave men such as Alistair Darling stood at the Dispatch Box and made the right decisions about getting our country through. It is sometimes very important to set the record straight.

All Budgets are usually compared to a magician’s performance. We all know what a magician is like—they take one’s eye off the main business with nice sparkly things and rabbits coming out of hats. My experience is that we can never judge a Budget until the papers hit the doormat on a Sunday morning. That is when we get a relatively mature view of what is happening. Let me give an example. We should watch a Chancellor who switches from percentages to pounds, to billions. Yesterday, I noticed that the Chancellor of the Exchequer suddenly said that there would be £1.6 billion for the national health service, but this morning I had the House of Commons Library check what that was. It is 1.2% of the overall NHS budget. So, £1.6 billion sounds like a lot of money; 1.2% does not.

We must judge the Budget cautiously. It is the most depressing Budget that I have ever heard, and not just because of the growth figures or the dire situation that so many people in our country are still in, but because the shadow of Brexit looms over everything the Chancellor said yesterday. It could not be a Budget of passion, imagination, new ideas and real change, because he was hemmed in not only by those in the Cabinet who would not give him an inch if he made any slight mistake, but by the passionate Brexiteer majority behind him, which will not let anyone question this absolutely disgraceful decision to take ourselves out of the European Union. Not everyone on my Front Bench agrees with me, but I must confess that I will fight to the very end of the Brexit process to make sure that we stop it if we possibly can.

I want to deal with four points. First, let us start with productivity and growth. Sometimes, I hear the word productivity bandied around, and not many people know that the definition of productivity is the measure of the efficiency of a person, machine or factory system in converting stuff into useful outputs. We ain’t very good at it. Under all parties, of all Governments, we have not quite managed to become as productive as we should be.

The right hon. Member for Sevenoaks referred to managerialism in his closing remarks. That is different from competent management, and what this country needs more than anything else, in the private and public sectors—running our hospitals, our universities and our private sector businesses—is first-class management. Our universities and colleges are producing too many people with soft social science degrees and arts degrees and not enough managers who know how to run this country, run our industries and create wealth. There is very little in this Budget about encouraging managers. There are some nice things about science and maths, and I do not decry them, but we need good managers and more of them.

[Emma Hardy]

My hon. Friend mentions that we need skills for managers, but he will find that, ever since the right hon. Member for Surrey Heath (Michael Gove) was Education Secretary, this Government have got rid of the development of those soft skills—teamwork, leadership and oral communication—because of his ideological focus on fact retention.

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[Emma Hardy (Kingston upon Hull West and Hessle) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Faversham and Mid Kent (Helen Whately). I hope the right hon. Member for Sevenoaks (Sir Michael Fallon) uses his new-found freedom on the Back Benches to join me and many other Members in calling for the Red Arrows order to be brought forward to secure jobs at BAE.

The short-sightedness of the Government’s continued addiction to austerity is astounding, and the Government clearly have little understanding of cause and effect, but I hope with this speech that I can convince the Chancellor to make a proactive decision that will save NHS England money. On 18 October, I led a Westminster hall debate on transvaginal mesh. Transvaginal mesh has been used to treat stress incontinence on the NHS for 20 years and it is the most commonly used mesh implant. More than 120,000 UK women have had this in the past 10 years. Prolapse mesh has been used on the NHS since 2002, and is placed either vaginally or through the stomach. The draft National Institute for Health and Care Excellence report, expected for publication in December 2017, announces that vaginally placed prolapse mesh must only be used in a research context. We know this is surgeons’ code for “do not use”. Mesh was ruthlessly marketed as a quick inexpensive fix. However, a recent report shows evidence that about 10% of women have suffered complications after surgery.

This week, representatives of the all-party parliamentary group on surgical mesh implants met campaigners from Sling the Mesh. During the meeting, Kath Sansom illustrated the cost of mesh failure to the NHS. Mesh-injured women face the long-term costs of pain medication and removals, but no one has yet realised the extent of the increased health costs because of our fragmented NHS. Mesh-injured women are an unplanned extra cost to an NHS budget that is already overstretched: for example, Hull and East Yorkshire Hospitals NHS Trust in my constituency has a deficit of £11.5 million.

Many mesh-injured women suffer chronic pain and urinary infections; many have leg pain, ranging from moderate to severe. Some are in wheelchairs, or are using sticks to help them to walk. Risks are serious, they are forever, and they are devastating. Many of these women claim benefits. Some work reduced hours and claim working family tax credit, while others receive personal independence payments or other disability benefits.

During the APPG meeting, Kath mentioned four women in connection with the costs to the NHS. I have just enough time to mention two. Joanne is an NHS administrator. She costs the NHS £180 a month, and in 11 years she has cost it £55,000. Jemima went from being super-fit to using sticks to walk, and is in daily agonising pain. Mesh has sliced her insides so badly that she knows that, at some point, her bowel will have to be removed. She is delaying that by using a special kit to pump herself out every day. It costs £900 a year, plus prescription medication costs of £135 a month.

In her response to my Westminster Hall debate, the Under-Secretary of State for Health, the hon. Member for Thurrock (Jackie Doyle-Price), dismissed my call for a public inquiry and a retrospective audit. She said:

“I think it is more important that we get the treatment that is needed, but I encourage everybody to report their cases through the yellow card scheme.”—[Official Report, 18 October 2017; Vol. 629, c. 317WH.]

Most women are not aware of the yellow card scheme, and have no idea how to use it.

We need a retrospective audit on mesh so that the NHS can gather the necessary evidence of the scale of the injuries suffered by those who have had mesh fitted. The refusal to fund and commission such an audit is incredibly short-sighted. More women are having this operation every day, and the level of risk is unknown. We could be adding astronomical costs to our NHS daily as a result of future mesh failure. However, the costs of mesh failure are not just to the NHS; they are to all our public services.

How can Hull City Council provide the support that is needed both by mesh-injured women and other disabled adults when it has lost 32% of its funding since 2010? Those cuts are having an impact on its ability to deliver local services, including adult social care. East Riding of Yorkshire Council faces an increase in adult social care costs of more than £21 million, without the increased budget to pay for it. Some mesh-injured women need supported housing because of their disabilities. Many of them are suffering from both depression and anxiety, which adds more pressure and demand on our already overstretched mental health services. Our councils cannot continue to foot the bill for the Government’s failure to take the action that is needed. The councils need budgets that will enable them to provide those services for everyone.

One way in which the Government could save money for our NHS and our councils would be to fund a retrospective audit for all mesh-injured women. That would save the costs of treating and caring for them in the future.