Start-up Loans

George Mudie Excerpts

Wednesday 20th November 2013 Commons Chamber

[Matthew Hancock]

The interest is typically 6% and the average duration is up to five years, but those matters are of course also dependent on the proposition that is made. So far, in the year and a bit that the scheme has been going, the amount paid back has been pretty strong.

[Mr George Mudie (Leeds East) (Lab)]

The Minister berated my hon. Friend the Member for Chesterfield (Toby Perkins) for not looking at the wider picture, but he will be aware that of the outstanding loans from British banks in August, more than 30% were loans to other banks and more than 40% were loans to consumers linked to house buying, while only just over 1% were loans to small businesses. After three years of having scheme after scheme, how can he persuade this House to take Government policies in this area seriously?

[Matthew Hancock]

That is precisely why we need programmes such as this one, which I hope the hon. Gentleman supports. It is important for us all to realise just how difficult it is to recover from the scale of the banking crisis under the previous Government. Many measures are of course needed, and this very important one is helping thousands of people to start their own businesses and realise their dreams.

Oral Answers to Questions

George Mudie Excerpts

Thursday 2nd February 2012 Commons Chamber

[Mr Speaker]

That question is fascinating, but sadly it bears absolutely no relation to the question on the Order Paper, so the hon. Gentleman should keep it for the spring, or some other suitable time.

[Mr George Mudie (Leeds East) (Lab)]

In view of the Secretary of State’s answers, will he assure the House that he has made representations to the Chancellor and United Kingdom Financial Investments Ltd to make sure that in the RBS last year’s practice of giving 323 bankers bonuses in excess of £1 million is not repeated, and that the anticipated payment of £4.5 million to John Hourican, a senior banker in RBS, does not go ahead?

[Vince Cable]

Of course there is a continuing issue with the scale of bonuses in RBS, but they are vastly reduced from their former level. We are conscious of the issues involved. Many of those people are American traders operating in the United States, but we are conscious that every amount that goes out in bonuses is money that could otherwise have gone to small businesses.

Academies Bill [Lords]

George Mudie Excerpts

Thursday 22nd July 2010 Commons Chamber

[Vernon Coaker]

The hon. Gentleman and I have debated other Bills—indeed, we have served on Bill Committees together—and on those occasions he has made one or two good points to which I have said, “That’s quite a good point, and I’ll come back to it on Report,” and then a Government amendment is introduced. That is the usual process in the House, and when it happens everyone tells this joke: “If it was such a good amendment and the Government have come back with their version of exactly the same proposal, why did you not accept it when it was moved by the Opposition?”

The situation with this Bill is totally different from how the Minister has just described it. Not all the amendments on the amendment paper are in my name—some have been tabled by his hon. Friends, and comments have been made by other Members as well—but we are totally unable to amend the Bill. Let me say to any new Members on the Government Benches who might be tempted to strike out in a spirit of independence by organising to make a change to the Bill through proposing an amendment and seeking to press it to a Division that it would not be very long before those who traditionally sit on the far end of the Treasury Bench came to see them to explain that that was probably not the best thing to do. I just say in all honesty to the Minister that I think it is deeply disappointing that we cannot amend the Bill in the way that many of us would want.

[Mr George Mudie (Leeds East) (Lab)]

I understand my hon. Friend’s surprise, but the Government have form on this. We have just completed our debates on the Finance Bill, all of which were taken on the Floor of the House, which never happens, and not one amendment was accepted—although, to respond to what the Minister has just said, there were many proposed amendments to the Finance Bill as well. There are two major Bills, therefore, that did not go upstairs to Committee for detailed scrutiny and to which not one amendment was made, because the Government are determined to steamroller both through the House.

[Vernon Coaker]

My hon. Friend makes an extremely good point. I was going to say that what is happening in respect of the Academies Bill is a one-off, but he has pointed out that this happened in respect of the Finance Bill as well. One would hope, however, that it is not a precedent of how other Bills will be dealt with.

I have tabled amendment 70 in order to try to be helpful. The amendment does not say that no capital moneys can be paid to free schools. In fact, it says capital moneys can be paid to free schools, but before that money is paid there has to be the agreement of “local parents and children”, the “local authority” and

“any other persons deemed appropriate.”

I thought that we were all in favour of the new localism and local decision making, and the point of the amendment is to allow the local people and communities along with the local authority to determine whether the capital moneys proposed to be used to set up a free school—that will be agreed by the Secretary of State—should be spent in that way, when it might have been used for the benefit of other schools in, for example, Liverpool, Halton and Luton.

I am trying to be helpful to the Government, therefore. I am saying to the Government, “You establish the free schools—the ‘additional schools’ as the Bill calls them—but if you’re going to take capital moneys away from other schools in the community to establish the free schools, then let’s see whether the local people and the local authority agree.” Given the furore we have seen over the cuts to Building Schools for the Future, with communities throughout the country seeing their new school buildings taken away from them, I wonder what they would say when asked whether they would wish to see their new school buildings sacrificed on the altar of a school experiment that is unproven and supported by no evidence one way or the other. I know why the Government will not accept this amendment, therefore: because they would be frightened of the answer they would get from local communities, who would turn around and say, “We want capital moneys spent for the benefit of the whole community, not for the benefit of a few.”

I have some questions linked to the amendment for the Minister. How many free schools does he expect there will be? How much money does he expect to spend on each free school? What do the changes in the review of capital expenditure actually mean? Are there going to be any regulations or are we going to allow children to go on the 13th floor, let us say? I note that the head of Tesco property offices is one of the advisers to the capital review group, and we will see what happens there. Can the Minister confirm that he expects the first free schools to open in 2011? Does he expect to spend all of the £50 million? Does he expect that to be enough money to develop the 38 schools in September 2011?

While we are talking about Building Schools for the Future, may I also ask the Minister to confirm how many academies have been affected by the BSF cuts? Looking at the list, it appears that while many local authority-maintained schools have had their BSF money stopped, lots of the academies are listed as under review. Will the Minister take this opportunity to explain to us exactly what is happening in that regard?

How much does the Minister expect the free schools to cost not only over the next six months or year, but over the next five years? How much money will the Department for Education be trying to get from the Treasury in the next spending review? What evidence does he have that the moneys to be invested in free schools is a policy worth pursuing and that it is worth taking money from the vast majority of schools to fund what I regard as an educational experiment?

We look forward to hearing the Minister’s response, and the comments of other Members who may also want to contribute to this important debate. At the heart of the debate on all the amendments, including amendment 70, is the fact that there are those of us who wish to try to ensure that opportunity and excellence for all is made a reality in every single community. There is a difference between the Government and the Opposition on this. Sometimes we are characterised as wanting to pull down those who can excel. Far from it: we want all children to achieve, including those who have talents and ability. We want all children to have school buildings of which they can be proud. The amendment before us seeks to ensure that, where the Government want to divert capital moneys from one set of priorities to another, that is done on the basis of local support—the support of local parents and the local authority—and not done at the whim of the Secretary of State.

Industry (Government Support)

George Mudie Excerpts

Wednesday 16th June 2010 Commons Chamber

[Vince Cable]

I am heartily relieved that my hon. Friend did not ask me an awkward question about the retail ombudsman, but he is right about Cornwall: it has special problems. As it happens, it has not been well served by the RDA. The South West of England Regional Development Agency covered areas such as Bristol and more prosperous parts of the country, which received an undue share of its attention. In the new structure, which I shall describe shortly, his county, and its county council and businesses, will be in a much better position to advance their cause.

[Mr George Mudie (Leeds East) (Lab)]

Will the right hon. Gentleman give way?

[Vince Cable]

I have taken a lot of interventions. I am always generous, but may I come back to the hon. Gentleman?

I want to pursue the issue of cuts. I have dealt with the issue of immediate cuts; however, the question is where they were going to lead. I know that we have gone quite far in the modernisation of the House, but we have not got as far as PowerPoint projections, so I am a bit limited in what I can show. However, the right hon. Member for Wolverhampton South East will be familiar with the work that the IFS did before the election showing where cuts were going to appear in different Departments, had the Labour party been returned to power. I have here one of its charts, which shows what would have happened to the Department that I now lead. It shows a projection of cuts in the order of £4.4 billion, or 20%. That is what the right hon. Gentleman and his colleagues were planning.

--- Later in debate ---

[Vince Cable]

Indeed they were, although I do not think that the right hon. Gentleman can quite make up his mind whether to apologise or deny.

The IFS is an independent body—it has nothing to do with the Government—and I am talking about what it anticipated. It would be useful to contrast the scale of the cuts that the right hon. Gentleman and Lord Mandelson and his friends were planning to make in their area of government with what we have already done. In the first week of office we had to find cuts, and we found £830 million—we got £200 million back in recycled money and we have made a cut of £630 million. That is a large sum of money, but it is about an eighth of what we know a Labour Government would have taken out of my Department’s spending. [Interruption.] We can quibble about the number, but very large cuts were being planned by the Labour Government, had they been returned to office. Let us be clear about that.

It would be useful to know what Labour was planning to do. The right hon. Gentleman objects to cuts in RDAs and cuts in industrial support, and he objects to the fact that student numbers are not rising by as much as he wanted, but where are the cuts going to come from? All from the science budget? All from FE colleges? I do not know. Perhaps he is too embarrassed to stand up and tell his colleagues on the Benches behind him what he was planning to do, but I would like to know, because we are in the middle of a very difficult spending exercise. I would like his advice, so perhaps I can set up a private meeting with him and Lord Mandelson, so that they can tell me what they were going to do. I would find that instructive.

[Mr Mudie]

Many of us have admired the right hon. Gentleman’s pragmatism and judgment over the years, yet we remember what he said during the election campaign about the danger of clearing the structural deficit within the lifetime of this Parliament, which is a policy of his coalition partners. The Office for Budget Responsibility has now indicated that the structural deficit is much worse, yet the Chancellor is sticking to the same timetable. If the Secretary of State worried about that approach during the election, will he share with the House his worries about the deeper and worse situation that we now face, and the effect that it will have in pushing us back into another recession and increasing unemployment steeply?

[Vince Cable]

Of course there are dangers, and I spelled out earlier the twin dangers that we have to balance very carefully. Lest the hon. Gentleman imagine that I have suddenly developed an enthusiasm for strict public sector discipline, I suggest that he read the pamphlet that I wrote the best part of a year ago, in which I made the case for dealing with the structural deficit rapidly and in a radical way. That is entirely compatible with the strategy that we are now adopting.