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Gemma Doyle Excerpts

Thursday 9th May 2013 Commons Chamber

[Gemma Doyle (West Dunbartonshire) (Lab/Co-op)]

I am grateful for the opportunity to contribute to today’s debate. Yesterday’s Gracious Speech was, I think, the third since I was elected to represent West Dunbartonshire in 2010. As with the previous two, however, I am afraid that yesterday’s was simply another wasted opportunity by a Government who should be getting to grips with the real challenges facing the UK. As other Members have mentioned, yesterday’s speech was more important for what it did not include than for what it contained.

Across the UK, people are really struggling. They may be unable to get a job because of the flatlining economy or struggling to make ends meet because of the cost-of-living crisis. I can assure Members and Ministers that the people of West Dunbartonshire are absolutely no different; in fact, they are at the sharp end of this Government’s crisis. The Prime Minister promised there would be a change for the better when he went into Downing street in 2010, but the truth is that things are getting much worse, not better. In West Dunbartonshire unemployment is up, youth unemployment is up and long-term youth unemployment is now 10 times the level it was in May 2010—more than 1,000 young people are looking for a job. It is an absolute scandal.

It does not look as though things will be changing any time soon. Currently in my constituency, more than 12 people are chasing every job—and, almost unbelievably, the number has been as high as 40 people out of work for every advertised job in the last three years. In fact, I frequently hear of jobs—part-time jobs that do not require any skills or qualifications—for which more than 100 people have applied. That, if nothing else, should be setting off alarm bells for this Government.

Yet the Government repeatedly say they want to reward those in work; indeed, the Home Secretary said so in her opening remarks today. However, those in work who are having their tax credits and housing benefit cut will struggle to see how what the Government are saying to us here in this Chamber matches up with what they are doing to people around the country. There are simply not enough jobs for people to go into. The vast majority of people who are sitting at home are not doing so because they do not want to work: they are being failed by a Government who are unwilling or unable to get growth in the economy and to create the jobs they desperately need.

This Government have cut public sector jobs in my constituency. By now they have, I think, given up repeating the mantra that the private sector will sweep in and make up for all the jobs they have cut. If any Minister wants to come to my constituency and talk about how the private sector can be helped to grow, they will be very welcome, but so far that growth is not happening, and we face an unemployment crisis.

The national insurance holiday, which we first heard about in the Budget, is welcome. Indeed, it is very similar to the scheme we were calling for, but it is three years too late. The Government should have introduced it much earlier. Instead, we have we have had three years of flatlining growth.

The Gracious Speech contains no real plans to get the economy back on track, and nor are there any plans to help people struggling with the rising cost of living. All we have had is more of the same from an out-of-touch Government: no answers and nothing to say to the people of this country.

Scotland is being hammered by two Governments that are one and the same, both putting misguided ideology ahead of necessary action and legislation, and both bereft of ideas when Scotland needs solutions. When Labour delivered devolution to Scotland, we did so in order to create aspiration and achievement in the good times, and to protect the people of Scotland from the worst excesses of a Tory Government in the bad times. We could now have a Scottish Government using their ingenuity to bring forward creative proposals, but we do not have that. They could, and should, be straining every sinew and using every mechanism at their disposal to help the Scottish people, but instead they are standing on the sidelines, and today the Scottish National party is not even interested in turning up to debate these issues—I think there was a brief intervention from one SNP Member at the very beginning of this debate.

The Scottish Government are standing on the sidelines and rubber-stamping Tory measures such as the bedroom tax. They have passed no legislation to protect people from this policy. They have done nothing to help councils and housing associations in Scotland deal with the fallout from the bedroom tax. In fact, just last week I was told in confidence of a Scottish Government official who had a civil servant who let it slip that they had been told that everything they do must be about winning the referendum. That is absolutely scandalous, because power is a privilege and it must be exercised with caution and in the best interests of the people. At the moment, in Scotland, it is being used in a desperate attempt to win a campaign that is not about the interests of the Scottish people; it is about the interests of the First Minister.

There is an alternative for people throughout the whole of the UK: Labour’s plans in our alternative Queen’s Speech offer the real change that this country needs. I urge Ministers to look at it, because it gets to grips with the issues they need to deal with. It includes a jobs Bill, to introduce a compulsory jobs guarantee; a consumers Bill, to tackle rip-off energy bills and train fares; and a finance Bill to kick-start the economy, to get it moving again. Those are the changes and the things that people out there want to see.

Our plans also include an alternative immigration Bill with real economic powers to put an end to workers having their wages illegally undercut by employers exploiting migrant labour; it would double the fines for breaching the minimum wage and give local councils the powers to take enforcement action. Those are the things we want to see happen. However, the plans that we heard from the Government yesterday and from the Home Secretary earlier today fail to deal with the big problems to do with the exploitation of foreign workers to undercut local workers. The Queen’s Speech was also very much a missed opportunity to tackle the problem of illegal immigration. We want to see a much fairer system of controls and limits on students, cutting the number of bogus students but ensuring that we have a much more effective system for the migration we need. Legitimate students should not be targeted by the Government to bring immigration down; they are an easy target but not the right one.

There are things that the Home Secretary could be doing, but she is not. The new Schengen information system, which will share information on migrants travelling within the EU, will guarantee the authenticity of documents and help to identify illegal immigrants. So far, for some reason, the Home Secretary has failed to sign up to that—she is refusing to do it. Unlike some Government Members, I am not scared of immigration, because our country has benefited greatly from it, just as other countries have benefited from emigration from this country. My hon. Friend the Member for Slough (Fiona Mactaggart), in her contribution, set out well the beneficial impact that immigration has had on her town. Indeed, I suspect that few Members of the House are not partly the product of a story that involves immigration at some point in the tale.

There are issues that need to be addressed, and unless the Government get to grips with the problems, immigration will continue to be an easy scapegoat and the byword for all the problems faced by the Government. Immigration should not be the scapegoat, but that is what they are using it for at the moment. I therefore urge the Government to deal with firms that are not paying the national minimum wage, with recruitment agencies that are only advertising and using overseas labour, and with the slum landlords profiting from substandard and overcrowded housing. There is nothing in the Government plans to deal with those three pressing key issues. I hope that the Government are anticipating our amendments to their Bill, which the Leader of the Opposition has stated that we will table, and that they might work with us and support those amendments.

The Home Secretary did announce plans to break up the UK Border Agency. I agree that reform of the UKBA is absolutely needed; all of us who deal with casework involving the UKBA would recognise that. Serious issues need to be fixed and tackled; we have seen lower levels of enforcement and huge delays for people coming through the airports last summer. Those problems need to be tackled, and we do not want to see a repeat of that.

The Government are still failing to acknowledge that things have got worse and not better on their watch, including on deportations of foreign criminals, where the number has decreased. Surely the first step to solving problems is to accept responsibility. It is not good enough to keep blaming other people, whether they are officials in the UKBA or elsewhere, or indeed the system, as the Home Secretary did earlier—she blamed the appeals system. She presides over that system, so she needs to get to grips with it.

It is worth recapping some of the facts and the failures: the backlog in finding failed asylum seekers has gone up; the number of illegal immigrants who have been deported has gone down; the number of foreign prisoners who have been removed has gone down; the number of businesses fined for employing illegal workers has gone down; fingerprint checks on illegal migrants at Calais have been stopped; basic security checks on 100,000 missing asylum and immigration cases have been dropped; and the e-Borders technology has been delayed. I do not know how anyone could describe that as anything but a catalogue of failure.

The Government must get this issue right. The plans that they announced yesterday have been found wanting. I hope that they have listened to some of our proposals, and that when the immigration Bill comes forward we will be able to get it right. Unfortunately, at the moment we are simply getting more of the same from an out-of-touch Government: no ideas, no answers, and nothing to suggest. People across the UK deserve an awful lot better.