Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Geraint Davies and Graham Stuart

Tuesday 25th October 2022 Commons Chamber

[Graham Stuart]

We are on track. [Interruption.] We are on track and we are focused on delivering that. The margins are tighter than we would like, but we are on track, we have delivered to date and we will deliver in future.

[Geraint Davies (Swansea West) (Lab/Co-op)]

Will the Secretary of State meet me and Swansea University to talk about using off-peak renewables to convert plastics into hydrogen and blending that in the gas grid, as his predecessor did, as part of the growth agenda? I appreciate that his predecessor did not do very well following that meeting.

Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Geraint Davies and Graham Stuart

Thursday 15th April 2021 Commons Chamber

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for International Trade (Graham Stuart)]

My hon. Friend is quite right to highlight the importance of supporting SMEs precisely to get into that international business space. That is why we are developing a new export strategy. We have the developing Export Academy, with a range of toolkits and information to support small businesses. We have the internationalisation fund: £38 million of grants to help businesses to overcome any barriers to international trade. Last but not least, we have UK Export Finance, our award-winning credit agency, which has increasing numbers of staff not only across this United Kingdom, but across the world to make sure that SMEs, wherever they go, can be financed and supported to realise those opportunities, which are many.

[Geraint Davies (Swansea West) (Lab/Co-op) [V]]

Sixty per cent. of Wales’s exports have been to the EU and steel is of great importance. Given that the Government’s own Office for Budget Responsibility forecasts showed that the Brexit deal would lead to a 4% reduction in our GDP, and given that they are removing the safeguards on steel in June, does the Secretary of State accept that the overall amount and value of exports from Wales in the next five years will be less than it was in the previous five years due to the Government’s policies?

Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Geraint Davies and Graham Stuart

Thursday 6th June 2019 Commons Chamber

[Graham Stuart]

We have a supplier relationship management programme, where we have built relationships at ministerial and senior official level with the largest investors into the UK. It is notable that in 2017-18, the 2,072 FDI projects that landed in the UK created 75,968 new jobs. Investors are not put off by Brexit, but they are deterred by the threat of nationalisation by the Labour party. It is the fear that job creators most often express to me, which goes to show that Labour does not even need to be in power to damage British jobs and living standards. The threat of Labour is enough.

[Geraint Davies (Swansea West) (Lab/Co-op)]

My father, David Thomas Morgan Davies, was head of economic development at the Welsh Office and got Ford to move to Bridgend in the ’70s, yet this week we find that it is announcing its closure at a time when Donald Trump is saying that we are going to have a great trade deal. Does the Minister agree that the people working in Ford who voted in good faith to leave the EU did not vote to leave their jobs and deserve a say on the final deal, so that they can think again and stay in the EU instead of losing their jobs and being decimated by the Americans?

[Graham Stuart]

The hon. Gentleman again wants to frustrate the will of his constituents. The automotive industry is in massive global flux, and trying to link every decision to Brexit leads people astray, just as he and so many of his colleagues do as they come up with these false arguments for a second referendum. The people want the thing they decided to be done and they do not want to hear weasel words from the Labour party, trying to say the opposite.

Health and Social Care Bill

Debate between Geraint Davies and Graham Stuart

Monday 31st January 2011 Commons Chamber

[Geraint Davies]

The taxpayer invests in GPs to provide medical and clinical excellence so that they can diagnose people’s health problems. The taxpayer does not invest in them to become small business people who go around trying to maximise profit and work out rates of return on different sorts of health care. That is the problem with introducing privatisation and marketisation: the thought in the back of the business person’s head is how to make money, not simply what is the best diagnosis. The customers whom GPs are facing—patients—are to a large extent ignorant. It is not like buying electricity from npower: patients do not know what is wrong with them. They are in the hands of their GP and they do not know whether what they have been prescribed—perhaps a cheaper drug that makes a higher profit but is not as effective—is right: they just have to guess.

[Mr Graham Stuart]

Rationing is inevitable in any system, but who should best do it? Should remote managers do it away from patients’ needs, or should GPs do it in a way that involves managing and being aware of a budget but trying their best, within that budget, to deliver the best health outcomes for all their patients? Who is better—PCT managers or GPs?

[Geraint Davies]

A GP must always ask what the best treatment for the patient is rather than what the best treatment for their business’s profitability is. That is why this is fundamentally wrong.