Ash Dieback Disease

Debate between George Freeman and Mary Creagh

Monday 12th November 2012 Commons Chamber

[Mary Creagh]

I am going on the empirical evidence, and I shall spend an extensive part of my speech reviewing the scientific facts, seeing how they have changed since they were first published last Wednesday—because they have—and going into great detail on that point.

[George Freeman (Mid Norfolk) (Con)]

Before the hon. Lady develops her theme of the Government’s having been caught short and not reacting properly, does she agree that the Department was alerted to the problem as far back as 2007, two years earlier than has been reported, and that the budget for studying tree disease was cut by more than half in real terms in the years leading up to 2010?

[Mary Creagh]

There has been confusion on both sides of the House about what the former Secretary of State, my right hon. Friend the Member for Leeds Central (Hilary Benn), who is in his place, did or did not do. He asked the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs to do a thorough search of all the ministerial papers he saw on ash dieback, which has shown that he did not see the correspondence between the Horticultural Trades Association and the Forestry Commission about a possible import ban. The only mention of ash dieback was in a briefing note in February 2010, in which the disease was listed as absent from the country. The hon. Member for Mid Norfolk (George Freeman) chairs the all-party group on life sciences, so he should know that the way the disease has been discovered is still evolving.

In 2009, it was thought that the fungus that caused ash dieback was already present in the UK. It was only subsequently that a new virulent species causing ash dieback was discovered. The science changed in 2010, when a new pathogen, Hymenoscyphus pseudoalbidus, was identified as the fungus causing the disease. I advise all hon. Members to read an article by Andy Coghlan in the New Scientist of 31 October that gives the scientific chronology of the disease. I also have a copy of the scientific paper in Forest Pathology in which the change was first discovered, which was printed in 2011.

What did my right hon. Friend the Member for Leeds Central do? He published the “Forestry Commission: Science and innovation strategy for British forestry 2010-2013” on 1 April 2010. It stated:

“Over the next five years we will increase our budget for monitoring and biosecurity research particularly with regard to tree health to 15% of our research spend.”

Even as late as autumn 2011, the Forestry Commission pathology bulletin confirmed that Britain was clear of the pathogen.

Finance Bill

Debate between George Freeman and Mary Creagh

Tuesday 20th July 2010 Commons Chamber

[Mary Creagh]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for that clarification.

I now want to discuss the child trust fund, which is also being cut. When I visited Greenhill school in my constituency to talk about financial education, I asked 10 and 11-year-olds how much money they had saved up in their bank accounts and the answers given by those little 10-year-olds ranged from £50 to £80; that was their life savings. But those children knew that their little brothers and sisters had got £250, and in some cases £500, from the Government through the child trust fund.

[George Freeman (Mid Norfolk) (Con)]

Will the hon. Lady give way?

[Mary Creagh]

I will make my point first. I bet that there is not a single Member sitting on those green Government Benches whose children’s life savings amount to £50. I shall happily give way to any hon. Member for whom that is the case.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mary Creagh]

Interestingly, when the Red Book refers to the effects on child poverty it talks about the next couple of years but does not mention 2013 and 2014. Thanks to the work being done by my right hon. Friend the Member for Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford (Yvette Cooper), the shadow Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, we are finding that this Budget’s impact on women—in particular on poor women, low-paid women and public sector worker women, and therefore on their children—is likely to hit disproportionately hard. I leave the hon. Gentleman with that thought.

What is absent from the Budget and the Finance Bill is any mention of the poor. The changes to the disability living allowance gateway are to save £1 billion by 2014, but we need clarity about which groups of disabled people are going to be affected. The housing benefit move to the 30th percentile of average housing will have an impact on families across the country. Stringent changes are being made to the housing benefit rules to say that anyone who has been on jobseeker’s allowance for more than a year will automatically lose 10% of their housing benefit.

If that is done to people, there are three possible outcomes. The first is that the people involved find jobs—and good luck to them. I am sure that that is the stated aim of the Government’s policy. The second possible outcome is that those people cannot find jobs because a further 1.3 million people are on the dole as the public sector and private sector job losses kick in, so they are forced to borrow the money. However, we are talking about people with a low income or no income, so they will, in effect, be forced into the arms of loan sharks and will fall into debt. The third possible outcome is that these people will spend £10 a week less feeding their children, so their children will be pushed back into poverty. The arguments being made about child poverty will not wash with Labour Members, because both the second and the third possible outcomes will tip those families back into poverty.

[George Freeman]

The hon. Lady mentioned the child trust fund, and I think that all hon. Members would agree that establishing a culture of saving is a commendable thing. In principle, does she think it is better for children to learn to work and to save, or to learn that the way to acquire money is to be given it by the Government?

[Mary Creagh]

The beauty of the child trust fund is that both those things happened; this involved people who would never have thought of opening a trust fund. I count myself among them, because I had no idea what a trust fund was until I was “given it by the Government” when my son was born, but now that I understand what it is and I understand the secrets of how people save for their children in a tax-efficient way, it has enabled me to think carefully about how I plan for my children’s future. It enables families to do both those things.

Most families are using the child trust funds to put a little bit extra by. The parents who scrimp and save to put into the child trust fund will not let their children waste the money. The straw man that has been held up is that they will blow it all on their 18th birthday party, on buying fast cars and all the other things that 18-year-olds do—[Interruption.] That is certainly what has been stated by some Government Members as a reason for cutting the child trust fund; they have said, “You can’t give it to 18-year-olds because they won’t know what to do with it.” When their parents have paid into the fund they will make absolutely sure that that money, which for them is a life-changing sum, will be used wisely by their children.

Jobs and the Unemployed

Debate between George Freeman and Mary Creagh

Wednesday 7th July 2010 Commons Chamber

[Mary Creagh]

My hon. Friend makes a good point, and many skilled IT workers and other professionals will lose valuable public sector contracts as the so-called bureaucratic back-office functions are scaled back.

One of the ways in which the Minister proposes to help the unemployed is by laying off 2,000 jobcentre staff in the next few months. It takes a particular sort of genius to do that in a recession, and I bow to the greater knowledge of the Conservative Members. How will they help people back into work with fewer people on the front line?

[George Freeman (Mid Norfolk) (Con)]

rose—

[Mary Creagh]

I will give way to the hon. Gentleman; perhaps he can tell me.

[George Freeman]

I thank the hon. Lady for giving way to the greater prowess on this side of the House. I appreciated her comments earlier about the importance of the private sector. The fundamental truth in this debate is that the private sector does something that the public sector does not—it pays for the public sector. It pays for itself and its profits pay for the public sector. The hon. Lady nods, which is nice to see. As she worked in the private sector helping small businesses, does she agree that the biggest fear of people in the private sector is not cuts to the public sector, but the threat of a rising debt crisis with interest payments alone—now she shakes her head—forecast to rise to £67 billion a year? The effect that that would have on the sovereign debt crisis and the threat of rising interest rates could plunge this country into a serious economic crisis.

[Mary Creagh]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for his point. We are in danger of rehearsing the arguments that we had at great length on the Finance Bill last night. I chose not to speak in that debate, because otherwise it might have dragged on even later than it did. However, I do not think that someone running a corner shop in south Wales is worried about the interest payments on Government debt. Interest rates on Government debt are historically low, and the repayment period here for such debts is, at 14 years, longer than in the US and Greece.

Government Members need to be very careful about the shroud-waving that they have done in connection with the Greek fiscal deficit. The UK is in no way comparable to Greece, which is an island economy based on tourism—[Interruption.] If the hon. Member for Beverley and Holderness (Mr Stuart) listens, he might learn something. Greece has 178 different public sector pensions, and none of them is funded. In addition, matrilinear succession means that the wife inherits when a man dies, and that the daughter inherits when the widow dies. Trying to compare Greece to the UK is absolute madness.

[George Freeman]

Will the hon. Lady confirm first of all that I did not mention Greece? She has mentioned pensions, but the second thing that concerns the private sector is unfunded public sector pension liabilities, which also saddle the private sector economy. She seems to talk as though the public sector can somehow carry on spending money, but it is the private sector that has to pay for it.