Deregulation Bill
Helen Goodman Excerpts(10 years, 7 months ago)
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Helen Goodman (Bishop Auckland) (Lab)
As my hon. Friend the Member for Newcastle upon Tyne Central (Chi Onwurah) said, the Opposition have a lot of sympathy for the hon. Gentleman’s amendment, but we were not clear whether it means that things would be opened up for negotiation—whether or not to pay; how much to pay—or whether no payments and no broadcasting would be possible. That is our uncertainty.
Philip Davies
It would enable a normal commercial arrangement to be reached, but it would not do anything to stop the terms of the Communications Act 2003, under which broadcasters must offer their public service broadcasting channels to cable and satellite platforms. That would still be the case, but the amendment would enable a commercial negotiation to take place, which would be fair to both parties. Otherwise, the situation works for neither party; it is to everybody’s advantage that an agreement is reached. Terrestrial broadcasters want their content on cable, and cable wants that content out there, so there is reason for reaching an agreement.
Oral Answers to Questions
Helen Goodman Excerpts(11 years ago)
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Mr Speaker
I am sure the Minister couples that with admiration for the hon. Member for Rhondda (Chris Bryant).
Helen Goodman (Bishop Auckland) (Lab)
In fact, the creative industries is one of the few areas of the British economy that is currently growing, but despite what the Minister said, Ofsted has criticised the effectiveness of music hubs and one school in six is cutting arts subjects. If DCMS Ministers cannot persuade their colleagues at the Department for Education to take a broader view, our young people will be permanently disadvantaged. Is the problem that the Minister is not sufficiently persuasive or that the Secretary of State for Education is too narrow-minded?
Mr Vaizey
I would never accuse the Secretary of State for Education of being narrow-minded. I take on board the hon. Lady’s praise for my Secretary of State who is leading the growth in the creative industries. We in DCMS are led by a Secretary of State who is leading a Department for growth. That is very good news indeed, and I repeat what I said: there is a huge input from the Secretary of State for Education.
I really would not take too much from an Ofsted report that looks at music hubs four months after they have been created and condemns them. The hon. Lady should speak to her friends in the Musicians Union, who are furious about that report.
Mr Vaizey
Well, the balance in lottery funding between the regions and London was 60:40 under the previous Government, and it has now gone up to 70:30. The Arts Council chairman is well aware of the issue and wants to go further. The Arts Council has set up the strategic touring programme and the creative people and places fund to help to rebalance arts funding in the regions, and our brilliant Chancellor of the Exchequer has introduced proposals to support touring theatre with tax relief.
Oral Answers to Questions
Helen Goodman Excerpts(11 years, 1 month ago)
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The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport (Mr Edward Vaizey)
Slamming is against the Ofcom regulations, and I am appalled to hear about what my hon. Friend’s constituent has gone through. I will certainly do everything I can to assist her, as this is an appalling practice.
Helen Goodman (Bishop Auckland) (Lab)
Will Ministers join me in congratulating the National Theatre on 50 years at the very heart of our cultural and artistic life? It is a great reminder of the sheer quality of the excellence of our national arts institutions, many of which are based in the capital. Outside London, however, the picture is now very different. I pay tribute to those who have produced a report today showing the massive disparity in Government and lottery support for the arts. What the Under-Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, the hon. Member for Maidstone and The Weald (Mrs Grant) said earlier is wholly wrong: whereas Londoners get £70 per head each year the rest of the country gets only £4.60 per head. So what are the Government going to do to rebalance our cultural economy?
Maria Miller
The hon. Lady raises a point that we are trying to address, after her Administration did so little to address it. We are trying to make sure that our great national institutions do work regionally and to throw a spotlight on the excellent work they do. Only a month ago, I was at an exhibition in my constituency that had been put on by the Victoria and Albert museum. We should be applauding the work that our national institutions are doing in the regions.
Oral Answers to Questions
Helen Goodman Excerpts(11 years, 6 months ago)
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Maria Miller
My hon. Friend is absolutely right. We must ensure that when we have access to superfast broadband in local areas, businesses understand its value, and that is why we have always said that this is not only about investing in the roll-out of this infrastructure, but about ensuring that businesses understand how it can help them.
Helen Goodman (Bishop Auckland) (Lab)
Last week, I attended the launch of Digital Teesdale. Will the Secretary of State join me in congratulating Labour Durham county council and the voluntary group Barnard Castle Vision, which are the partners that have delivered it, and will she say why she is signing contracts for delivery in 2016, when her target is for delivery in 2015?
Maria Miller
I thank the hon. Lady for raising such an important project as the one in Durham. It is such projects that can make a real difference, filling in the gaps of the national programme. On the delivery of the programmes, we are pushing hard to get roll-out as quickly as possible, and she will of course know that a considerable number of local authorities have already opened their first boxes. That progress will continue apace. As I said earlier, 70% of the funding allocations have already been signed off.
Home Affairs
Helen Goodman Excerpts(11 years, 7 months ago)
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The Secretary of State for the Home Department (Mrs Theresa May)
The Gracious Speech we heard yesterday put forward a comprehensive legislative programme. Underlying it is a basic principle: this Government want to ensure that people who work hard and want to get on in life are able to do so. We believe that it is part of the Government’s role to help people who want to work hard to succeed. We want to ensure that those who do the right thing do not find themselves penalised for their honesty and their commitment to playing fair. The corollary of that is that those who cheat the system and who do not play by the rules should be prevented from being able to take advantage, at the expense of the decent and hard-working majority.
Nowhere is this more true than in the immigration system. We are going to make the UK a harder place to live for an immigrant who has not played by the rules—who has dishonestly overstayed their visa, for example, or who does not have one at all—or who has committed a serious crime. The immigration Bill referred to in the Gracious Speech will do three things. First, it will diminish the pull factors that make migrants want to come to Britain to take but not to contribute. Secondly, it will make Britain a harder place to live for those who have no right to be here. Thirdly, it will make it easier to remove foreign nationals who have committed serious crimes and who should be deported. It will streamline the appeals system, making it much less slow and cumbersome, and give fewer opportunities for using the Human Rights Act 1998 to avoid deportation.
Helen Goodman (Bishop Auckland) (Lab)
Will the Home Secretary explain to the House why she has sent back fewer foreign prisoners than were sent back in the last year of the Labour Government?
Mrs May
If the hon. Lady cares to look at the figures, she will see that there has been a significant increase in the number of appeals by foreign national prisoners, which is delaying their deportation. That is exactly why this Government are bringing forward measures in the immigration Bill to deal with the appeals system, and I hope that those on the Opposition Front Bench will support them.
One of the most fundamental injustices of the present system is one that many Members will be aware of from the complaints of their constituents. It is the extent to which immigrants can call on publicly funded services without having made any contribution to the system that provides them. Our system is one of universal provision, and it will remain so under this Government, but it is also one that requires some contribution to be made in order for that provision to be accessed. That is the basic principle of justice that underpins the system, but it is a principle that has been flouted. When the Bill becomes law, it will be respected.
The Bill will ensure that temporary migrants and others will not be able to have free access to the NHS until they have made at least some contribution to the Exchequer. Furthermore, the Bill will strengthen legislation that penalises businesses that employ illegal immigrants. It is obviously unfair that those who are not entitled to be in Britain should be able to take jobs that ought to be filled by people who are so entitled. The Bill will strengthen our ability to enforce penalties on employers that have used illegal workers. It will also confirm that a migrant must have lawful immigration status of more than six months to qualify for a UK driving licence.
Mrs May
I was about to say that the hon. Gentleman was a little slow in jumping up; I thought he might have done so when I first mentioned communications data. He was a member of that scrutiny Committee, so he will be aware that it said there was a case for legislation in this area. We accepted a number of the Joint Committee’s recommendations on the proposed Communications Data Bill. As I have just explained, because this is an important area for catching criminals and for dealing with terrorists and paedophiles, it is right that the Government are looking to address the issue. The wording of the Queen’s Speech yesterday made it clear that the Government intend to address the issue and, as I say, proposals will be brought forward.
Helen Goodman
The Home Secretary is indeed being most generous this morning. When she is considering what to do about IP addresses, will she also look into having better, tighter systems for age verification? We hear a lot about how a better age-verification system would deal with many of the problems that we are facing on the net.
Mrs May
The hon. Lady’s point does not technically come under the remit of the communications data issue and deals with access to the internet more widely. If I have understood the point she is making, there is an issue to address. Some hon. Members have been taking this point up; my hon. Friend the Member for Devizes (Claire Perry), for example, has been doing a lot of work in this area and examining any possible changes.
Sir Edward Garnier (Harborough) (Con)
Unsurprisingly, I rather disagree with the right hon. Member for Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford (Yvette Cooper). I think that the Queen’s Speech contained some very positive and interesting aspects, not least the proposals that the Secretary of State for Justice spoke about earlier. The Queen’s Speech set out that
“Legislation will be introduced to reform the way in which offenders are rehabilitated in England and Wales.”
For me, that is perhaps the most important part of the Queen’s Speech. I hope that the programme that the Government bring forward, and the Bill or Bills relating to rehabilitation, will produce real benefits for the public.
I will just add—this follows a couple of newspaper reports over the past few days—that the money available for spending on rehabilitation is, I suspect, being unfairly reduced by the ordering of costs out of central funds for the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. When it fails successfully to prosecute offenders, sometimes it has to pay its own costs and sometimes it does not, but invariably the successful defendant’s costs come out of central funds. I hope that the Front-Bench team will look carefully at their resources to ensure that central funds are not used—I presume that “central funds” means Ministry of Justice or Home Office money—to bail out private prosecutors when they fail to bring their prosecutions home.
Let me revert to the wider subject of rehabilitation and place it within the context of the criminal justice system as a whole. It strikes me that the criminal justice system is a process, not an event. Our prisons are part of that process and, for all but the very few prisoners who will live out their lives in custody, they are places of temporary accommodation into which and from which the “community”, “society”, the “outside”—call it what we will—sends and takes them back. For most of those who are sentenced to prison, custody is not the end of the journey but a part of it.
Conversely, for many of us—those of us on the outside—who have no experience of the criminal justice system and who have never been into a prison or met anyone who has been sentenced to a term of custody, prison is society’s final answer. That is wrong: prison is itself a process within the wider process of the criminal justice system. It cannot be isolated in a silo from the other parts of the criminal justice system, such as the police, the courts, the probation service, the drug and alcohol abuse programmes and the education, training and diversionary activities that run alongside them.
The value of prison for society, law-abiding and criminal alike, should be that it takes in offenders and releases them reformed and rehabilitated so that they can return whence they came as different and better people, ready to participate as responsible citizens, looking after their dependants, free from drug use, better qualified, earning a living, paying their way and going straight. That is no doubt the unattainable ideal to be placed beside the hope of the crime-free society, but just because we cannot have total success does not mean that we should not strive to do better than we are doing now. I therefore look forward to seeing the detail of the Government’s proposals in relation to rehabilitation.
Prison, for most of those who end up inside, is evidence of failure: the offender has failed to look after himself, his family and those he cares for; he has failed to get an education, a job and to maintain his physical and mental well-being; and he has failed to understand, or has simply ignored, the needs and rights of others. In failing in so many ways he has caused incalculable damage to those most close to him and to his immediate and more distant victims. But in sending him to prison and doing nothing with him save incarcerating him—statistically most offenders and prison inmates are male—are we not also failing ourselves, our neighbours, our communities and our country? Prisons, properly understood and properly directed, should be prisons with a purpose that serve the public interest.
Helen Goodman
The hon. and learned Gentleman makes a very reasonable point when he says that we should look at the criminal justice system as a whole, and the interactions between the institutions have a big impact on the effectiveness of the system, but does he not understand that it is precisely for that reason that the proposal to privatise the probation service and extend payment by results without having completed the pilots is so risky, because the institutions will be competing against each other, rather than trying to promote a good criminal justice system for society as a whole?
Sir Edward Garnier
I am glad that the Government are taking a risk, but it is not an irresponsible risk. The outcome that we are looking for is rehabilitation. The probation service should not simply be an employment system; it should be a system more widely looked at that takes prisoners and rehabilitates them so that they can re-engage in society. If the Government’s proposals work—this is not a new idea; the Conservative party has been thinking about it for many years—they should be welcomed. Of course there will be doubt from the trade unions and from the Labour party, which are more state-centric organisations than we are, but for goodness’ sake let us give it a try. The current system is not working. If the Government are to be believed, as they should be in this regard, the Opposition should be a little less wary of this exciting new venture, because the benefits of it working are worth striving for.
At the moment, we have overcrowded prisons that can do no more than lock up for the period of their sentence the violent, the dishonest, the mentally ill, the addicted substance abusers, the illiterate, the innumerate and the socially inept. It can do no more than warehouse human beings for no other purpose than keeping them off the streets and preventing them from reoffending while inside. That is not a wrong or improper purpose—it is a very good reason to send an offender to prison—but on its own it is an insufficient and unimaginative purpose, and without more it is a huge waste of public money. If we do no more than house and release offenders and fail to carry out the essential work of helping them to find somewhere to live, to find a job, to stay off drugs and to return to their families and look after their dependants, we will fail again and again, and reinforce that failure.
We have a choice. We can continue to reinforce that failure or we can think hard about why we are failing the victims of crime and those we send to prison, as well as the wider taxpaying public, and do something about it. We can continue to put large cohorts of people into an overcrowded prison estate and send the same cohorts of people back out again to commit more, and often worse, crimes, or we can try to change things for the better—better for the taxpayer, better for the victims of crime, better for the public at large, and better even for the criminal.
Prisons need walls to deny criminals their liberty, to keep them off our streets and to stop them committing further crimes while serving their sentences, as well as to prevent them from escaping and to keep them safe from those on the outside who would do them harm. But those walls also need windows through which society can see in and know what is being done inside in its name and through which the offenders can see out and realise that a life of hope and purpose awaits them and is worth striving for. This is the era that cannot keep a secret and where no confidence is respected, and yet there remains a secret world of which the public know little or nothing: the world inside our prisons. It is time to put those windows in those walls.
No doubt the Government’s plans for rehabilitation will not entirely cure the problem of reoffending, but this is a Conservative answer that is positive, forward-thinking and practical, and at least worth thinking about. The status quo is not an option. Some years ago, the then chief inspector of prisons, Anne Owers, wrote:
“There is a link between humanity and effectiveness.”
Public safety, in her view, hinges on having an effective process, “And this isn’t one”. She was right then and she is right now. The prison system in England and Wales is creaking. The Prison Service, in its various guises, is confused, and the public are increasingly concerned. Traditionally, correctional policies have focused less on correcting and more on punishment and temporary prevention. Keeping offenders incarcerated and thus protecting society from their crimes and deterring them from committing them again and others from starting on a life of crime, is the job, or one of the jobs, of the prisons, and it is not an easy one. However, the Government are now attempting to deal with the issue.
Another central purpose of custody, and a more challenging one, must be to reduce, even if we cannot totally prevent, levels of reoffending. All but a tiny minority of prisoners are released at some point, and it is in our interest to prevent them from returning to a life of crime. As the Prison Reform Trust has written,
“Prisons should be places that hold securely, and make every effort to rehabilitate, serious and dangerous offenders. The skills and focus of those who run them should be wholly directed towards that aim, in the interests of public safety.”
If one thing stands out from any sensible examination of the prison system, it is that this second pillar is unstable, leaving not just room for improvement but potential for danger. It is, furthermore, wasting vast sums of public money. The cost of keeping a criminal in jail must now be well over £50,000 a year, and for younger, teenage offenders I would not be surprised if the cost were well over £150,000 a year. That does not take into account the cost of fostering the children of prisoners while their parents are away.
Stereotypically, any focus on rehabilitation is labelled as soft, but an intelligent analysis of the prison system must surely conclude that regardless of the well-being of offenders, their successful rehabilitation benefits the public purse, enhances public safety, and is in the public interest. I recognise that the need to reduce reoffending must be accompanied by the need to foster a public understanding that reform and rehabilitation of offenders is in their interest and a public good—a necessity not entirely obvious at first glance. As a former Lord Chief Justice, Lord Phillips, explained,
“Some newspapers appear to have an agenda which is to persuade the public that judges are soft on crime, that no prison sentence is long enough and that a sentence which does not involve imprisonment is no sentence at all. The only purposes of sentencing which they recognise are punishment and deterrence—rehabilitation does not enter the picture…We need to get across the message that rehabilitation of offenders makes life better not just for them but for the rest of us.”
The Government are now pushing that agenda, and I welcome that. It is clear that there are arguments worth making and that now is not too early to do so.
Andrea Leadsom
I am grateful to the hon. Lady for that comment, because it highlights precisely my point. She is subliminally implying that this generates racism, and that has been the problem with the debate for the past decade. Particularly under her Government, anybody who wanted to talk about the problems of uncontrolled immigration was somehow racist. I have just said that immigration has been of huge benefit to this country—I hope she was listening to that—but at the same time fairness is vital to the interests of this country.
I will now address that fairness aspect, which is where I think the Bill is incredibly important. It should ensure that those who have paid into the system benefit more than those who have not. This is not just a problem that concerns Britain; it also concerns Germany. The Fresh Start project, of which I am a founding member, recently went to Berlin to talk to German politicians and businesses. They feel that immigration has benefited the German economy, but that the fact that people can migrate there for the sole purpose of claiming benefits is simply unfair and generates resentment.
Constituents have said to me at surgeries that it is totally unfair that they, having potentially paid into the Exchequer coffers for years, get so little back if they lose their job. The Fresh Start project has assessed what happens on the continent. Many countries, including Germany and the Nordic countries, have a far more Bismarckian system of benefits payments, which means that if someone who has paid into the system for years loses their job, they can, for a period, generate half of their previous income while they get themselves back on their feet. The system in the UK is very different.
If we are to address the resentment over access to benefits for migrants, and access to benefits for those who have paid in versus those who have not, we need to look seriously at reducing benefits for those who have never contributed either because they have never worked here or because they have recently migrated here. Those who have paid in, as well as school leavers who have not yet got a job but whose parents have paid in, should get a higher level of benefit. That would be fair. In dealing with the impact of immigration on voters’ quality of life, fairness is key.
Helen Goodman
The hon. Lady exaggerates her point about what she calls benefit tourism, but to say that she has got it out of perspective is not to say that there are not significant economic incentives for people to come to this country. Surely, immigration has more likely been fed by the fact that if someone comes here and works hard for, say, three years and saves up £3,000, they have enough to put down a deposit on a house in an eastern European country, but not here. The disparity in exchange rates means that the incentives are totally different.
Andrea Leadsom
I completely agree that the vast bulk of people who come to this country come here to work, but equally the hon. Lady must agree that more than 40,000 EU immigrants are claiming child benefit here for children who do not live in this country. If she wants to write that cheque herself, she can then claim that it is a trivial sum, but to my constituents, who are writing those cheques—they are the taxpayers—it is utterly unacceptable and unfair.
Finally, I would like to deal with an excellent Bill introduced in the last Queen’s Speech. The purpose of the Financial Services (Banking Reform) Bill is to address the institutional failure of the banking system. Recent scandals such as LIBOR rigging and swaps mis-selling have left voters utterly disgusted and contemptuous, not just of the culture of banking, but of the seeming immorality of those at the top. I know that the Government have made great efforts, as has my hon. Friend the Member for Chichester (Mr Tyrie) through the Banking Commission, to weed out the culprits and to put in place reforms that will minimise the chance of a repeat of this nightmare.
In my opinion, however, another reform is long overdue. We need to spark a revolution in bank competition to facilitate the widest range and type of new financial services entrants and to force the big oligopoly banks to reprioritise excellence in customer service. That revolution is bank account number portability, which would make it possible for us all to switch banks instantly, taking our bank account numbers with us, and would remove the need to fill out endless new forms and re-establish new standing orders and regular payment instructions.
Bank account portability would have four key advantages. First, it would lead to a revolution in competition and bring in new entrants. At the moment, 80% of small and medium-sized enterprises and personal current accounts are banked with the big four oligopoly banks, so new competition—new entrants—is essential. Secondly, it would spark a revolution in customer service and product innovation in the payments sector. Thirdly, it would impose a significant reduction in fraud resulting from systems failures due to the out-of-date legacy systems in the oligopoly banks. I ran an investment banks team during the ’90s when there was a massive merger of banks, broker dealers and funds managers. Each of the oligopoly banks has up to 20 legacy systems. It is unbelievable. The recent failures of RBS-NatWest systems to make even simple payments highlighted that these systems are held together with string and sellotape.
Fourthly, a means of resolution is terribly important in banking. If we have another financial crisis and bank failure, rather than people lining the streets to take out their money, we need a means of instantly transferring bank accounts from a failed bank to a survivor bank. Cyprus is a case in point. The British Government decided to underwrite customer deposits in London branches of Cyprus banks, but we had no means to move customer bank accounts elsewhere. Bank account number portability would solve the very significant issue of resolution.
I am delighted that the Financial Secretary to the Treasury is consulting on introducing a new payments regulator in a Government amendment to the Financial Services (Banking Reform) Bill. An independent regulator would deal with the big problems that the Payments Council and VocaLink—the two bodies governing and providing the infrastructure for payments—are governed by the oligopoly banks themselves. It is the most astonishing closed shop. However, I urge the Government to go further and require the new regulator to evaluate bank account number portability properly. Seven-day switching is just more string and sellotape on an already broken system.
This is a positive and optimistic Queen’s Speech, focusing on a small number of high priority Bills for this Government. I believe they will make strong improvements to the quality of life for our voters, which is what it is all about. However, I hope that Back Benchers such as myself will be able to contribute our ideas to making the legislative programme even stronger.
Helen Goodman (Bishop Auckland) (Lab)
It is a great pleasure to take part in this debate on the Queen’s Speech this afternoon.
I am interested in some small proposals in the Queen’s Speech: the proposal to protect intellectual property; the proposal to produce a draft consumer rights Bill, which, as we have been briefed, will cover digital purchases as well as ordinary purchases; the proposal to invest in infrastructure, particularly broadband, following the Government’s significant failure to deliver broadband in rural areas; and the Home Secretary’s proposals to match internet protocol addresses.
My main concern, however, is with what is not in the Queen’s Speech, namely a proper and complete Bill from the Department for Culture, Media and Sport on communications and the media. The Communications Act 2003 has now been overtaken by significant changes—both technological and in the market—and it is time that the Government stopped taking a piecemeal and bite-sized approach to the internet, which has led to a rather chaotic situation, and took a much more strategic overview.
The new technology obviously has the potential to disperse power and to support economic growth. However, those things will happen only if we have a policy to maximise access and challenge some of those in this arena who have significant concentrations of power—not only in the market but in the democratic processes and the information that is available to people. We need a strategy that can reproduce online the rights and responsibilities that we have in the real world. We also need a much stronger cross-departmental approach than the Government seem capable of delivering at the moment.
The new means of communication are proving to be very significant to jobs and business development. Last year, the communications sector was worth £50 billion, which was 4% of GDP, and it employed more than half a million people. I am told that every year between 60,000 and 130,000 new jobs are created in this sector. We know that businesses that are online are growing much faster than other businesses, so we must ensure that the legal underpinning is there. I hope that the proposals on consumer rights mentioned in the Queen’s Speech will support that process, but it is rather disappointing that the Bill will only be in draft form.
We must make changes in three broad areas: first, we must deliver broadband to all parts of the country and give people access to it; secondly, we must improve digital inclusion, training and skills; and, thirdly, we must strengthen people’s rights with a digital consumers charter. Everyone should have access to broadband. Everyone is entitled to a telephone and the Post Office has a universal service obligation, and broadband is now so significant that it should be put on the same footing.
The Queen’s Speech said that the Government would
“continue to invest in infrastructure”,
but the fact is that the previous Labour Government had a target of ensuring that everybody had 2 megabits per second by 2012. The Government abandoned that target and probably will not achieve it until 2016. At the moment, 2.6 million households, mainly in rural areas, have no possibility of accessing broadband.
A further problem with the Government’s approach is that they have prioritised speed over access. It is significant that the Government’s super-connected cities programme, into which they have poured £150 million, has been challenged by some of the operators on state aid grounds as it is not clear whether the subsidy is needed to develop faster speeds in inner-city areas. At the same time, the Government are allowing a situation to continue in which 10.6 million people have never sent an e-mail and 16 million people have inadequate digital skills. My secretary says that it is quite clear that I am one of those people, but I do not think the problems I face because of my lack of digital skills are nearly as serious as those faced by many of our constituents. When the Government try to make it compulsory to access universal credit online, they will come up against a serious problem as many of the people involved will be precisely those who do not have the access or the skills.
The Government should be developing a strategy to get as many people online as possible. That means doing something much more energetic in the rural areas as well as helping people to improve their digital skills through training and education. We need to pause for a moment and consider that point. The Government are trying to do something in schools—although I do not think it is adequate—but if an adult does not have a job or if their job does not involve work in an office, it is difficult for them to learn those skills.
Furthermore, it is extremely expensive to be online. Ministers must face up to this point. It costs about £5 a week to have a connection and the kit costs a further £100. Meanwhile, the welfare reforms mean that I have constituents who are now expected to live on £20 a week; it is not sensible to say to the same group of people that they should prioritise spending £5 a week on an internet connection.
Another group of people who suffer from digital exclusion and this growing divide in our country are those who are disabled or who have learning disabilities, as we do not oblige the manufacturers of kit to make the kit accessible for them.
A Labour Government would switch half the money— £75 million—from the super-connected cities programme to a digital inclusion programme. On the basis of the experience in the previous Parliament, when we found that it cost about £30 million to get 1 million people online, that could help some 2 million people get online. It would be much better to use the money productively. It would have a much bigger impact than some of the infrastructure that the Government have been prioritising. There is no point in putting money to one side because of a legal challenge and not using it at all. It would be far better to help some of those people to get online.
The communications sector, as I said earlier, is highly concentrated and monopolistic. In each technology there are a small number of players, some of which are very large and some of which are vertically integrated. Many of the operators are international and foreign-owned. For example, last year Facebook floated for £100 billion. That is larger than nine European economies. Vodafone has a market capitalisation greater than that of BP. There are only four mobile phone companies, of which three are foreign-owned, and BT and Virgin own all the infrastructure for broadband, down to the last mile.
In addition to being extremely wealthy, some of these firms are very aggressive and through litigation have been challenging rulings by Ofcom. For example, the internet service providers challenged the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills on the legality of the Digital Economy Act 2010. I am glad to say that the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills succeeded and the internet service providers failed in that challenge.
Against this background, it is a worry that the Government have failed to give Ofcom the resources that it needs and that they are not introducing new legislation to strengthen its powers. If it does not have the necessary powers, it is much more likely to succumb to such expensive litigation. It is a bit contradictory. The Government have cut the Ofcom budget, but they have not strengthened its powers, which means that Ofcom’s legal bill is running up and up, so that is not a sensible way of carrying on. We need to strengthen Ofcom’s powers in order that the work of the regulator can no longer be deliberately frustrated. That could be addressed through cost capping or reforming the standard of appeal under the existing communications legislation.
A fully connected country has the opportunity to share information and disperse power, but currently the small number of players means that consumers’ interests are not always at the forefront of their minds. We need regulation, not to tell companies what to do in every last detail but to promote competition. I should like to highlight the elements which a consumers charter approach should cover. First, we need to deal with privacy and online theft. According to a survey by O2 and Populus, people’s No. 1 worry about the web is how their personal data are used and how large companies share the data that people hand over. We must take effective action to protect people’s privacy and engage much more energetically with the proposals coming from the European Union on personal data.
The Home Secretary’s proposals on internet protocol addresses are welcome but I am not sure they go far enough. As I said to her earlier today, she should take the opportunity to strengthen age verification because it is important to help parents protect their children online. The Government have been saying for three years that they want to do something about that and the Prime Minister says that he wants to run the most family-friendly Government, but not one real step forward has been taken. We need a statutory backstop now. It is what the Labour Government promised in the previous Parliament—a statutory backstop so that if the ISPs have not introduced measures to enable parents to protect their children, they will be required to do so.
Furthermore, we need better price transparency. Many of the firms are bundling up people’s television contract with their mobile phone, internet connection and so on, making it difficult for the ordinary consumer to see what each is costing. We must do something about that and to help people switch from one provider to another. We must also see some action on security for people making payments over the internet. It is not clear from what the Government have said whether they propose to do that or not. That would increase security for consumers and would also be welcomed by businesses because they cannot expand e-commerce without more security on the internet.
Finally, people in this country are most exercised by nuisance calls. We know that in order to address the proliferation of nuisance calls, legal action is needed. It is extremely disappointing that after three years, two Secretaries of State, the promise of a Green Paper and the promise of a White Paper, none of that has happened. We need to see a Bill now.
Nia Griffith (Llanelli) (Lab)
I want to speak on a number of important issues. The Queen’s Speech seems to lack vision. There is no idea of a coherent society or how we make it a better and fairer society. There seems to be a lot of tinkering at the edges without really tackling the main causes of the main issues of the day. As my hon. Friend the Member for Warrington North (Helen Jones) pointed out, we lack an economic vision—a vision to rebuild our society and use the talents of our people to improve the lot of all of us.
We often talk about community cohesion, but when we try to define what makes that it leads to all sorts of discussion. Key to community cohesion is a sense of respect for each other and self-respect, and key to that is thriving communities that offer job opportunities for our young people and for all our citizens. That would bring the welfare bill down. Many people are desperately looking for a job and would like to work more hours, but nothing in the Government’s proposed programme will help to create jobs.
The Welsh Government are playing their part in creating jobs and providing support to businesses. They have already created 4,000 jobs in the Jobs Growth Wales programme, and are on target to create another 4,000 this year and the year after. The focus is on helping the private sector to grow, so young people are helped into work and businesses are helped to grow. Jane Hutt, the Finance Minister in the Welsh Government, has recently announced a package of £75 million of additional capital investment to support the Welsh infrastructure investment plan. In addition, £400 million is to be spent on housing to help to realise a target of 7,500 affordable homes by 2016.
But we all know that the main economic levers are held by the UK Government, where the savage cuts in tax credits and the increase in the regressive tax VAT mean that millions of less well-off families are struggling to make ends meet, particularly as prices are rising very quickly, while those earning more than £150,000 are given a tax break. This is not only unfair, it is economic nonsense, because the least well-off spend their money quickly and it goes back into the local economy, whereas the better-off may wish to stash it away or spend it abroad. We have only to look at our town centres to see the dire effects of squeezing middle and low-income families. Research also shows that greater equality between the better-off and the less well-off members of society makes for greater community cohesion. We need a tax on bankers’ bonuses to provide money to invest in jobs, such as house building.
On immigration, what we really want is a crackdown on all forms of exploitation, whether of migrant workers or our own workers. There are still far too many examples of gangmasters bringing in groups of people, housing them in substandard conditions, making all sorts of deductions from their salaries and, with regard to their hours and working conditions, exploiting them ruthlessly. Far from tackling the problem, the Government seem to be doing the opposite. They have done away with the Agricultural Wages Board, which was one body that set down minimum standards for accommodation, and have put the Gangmasters (Licensing) Act 2004 under threat, whereas we would like to see it extended to cover those in the construction and care industries, for example.
Many Members will have visited the excellent exhibition on human trafficking opened by the Prime Minister. One of the calls was for some form of slavery Act. Perhaps that is a slightly dramatic term, but it would have been nice to see something in the Queen’s Speech that tackled that type of exploitation and began digging down into the real problems that exist not only in one or two parts of Great Britain, but right across the country, as the exhibition’s wall map showed. Simply not enough is being done to tackle human trafficking.
Another issue, mentioned by my hon. Friend the Member for Slough (Fiona Mactaggart), is the overseas domestic workers visa. That is another thing the Government have done that has made it more difficult to trace people and rescue them from domestic slavery. That is what we really need to tackle when we talk about immigration. Trafficking and exploitation have continued, all of which is bad for not only those workers, but local people, who are obviously being undercut. I think that everybody would accept that what we really want is decent jobs with decent remuneration for local workers and migrant workers alike.
Helen Goodman
My hon. Friend is making an interesting case. I represent a constituency in the north-east, where we have high unemployment and low wages. Will she tell us what the situation is like with regard to unemployment and wages in her constituency?
Nia Griffith
We have two great scourges: first, unemployment, and secondly, underemployment and a low-wage economy. That means that people are dependent on tax credits. We would like the minimum wage to be increased at least in line with inflation and to move towards a living wage that gives people enough to live on without having to have their salaries topped up by tax credits. That is obviously an aspiration that many of us share. Certainly, some of our local councils are trying to work towards that.
Violence against Women and Girls
Helen Goodman Excerpts(11 years, 10 months ago)
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Caroline Lucas (Brighton, Pavilion) (Green)
It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Kingston upon Hull North (Diana Johnson) and I pay tribute to the leadership shown on this subject by the hon. Members for Slough (Fiona Mactaggart) and for Walthamstow (Stella Creasy). We have heard compelling speeches from Members on both sides of the House and I was particularly struck by those from the hon. Members for Totnes (Dr Wollaston) and for Mid Norfolk (George Freeman). Notwithstanding that, I share the disappointment that has been expressed about the lack of vigour from those who sit on the Government Front Bench, in particular. When I asked the Minister of State, Home Department, the hon. Member for Taunton Deane (Mr Browne), this morning about the importance of statutory education in PSHE and violence against women and girls, I was told that it is voluntary and that schools can offer it if they want to. Everything we have heard in the debate this afternoon suggests that that is not enough.
Helen Goodman (Bishop Auckland) (Lab)
Does the hon. Lady agree that it is a problem that PSHE is not part of the curriculum in academies and free schools? As we have all agreed during the debate, the problem goes across society.
Caroline Lucas
I agree. I also agree with those who said we need a whole-school approach. Yes, PSHE is vital but such education should also be mainstreamed across all other parts of the education system.
The figures, tragically, are all too familiar. In Britain, 60,000 women are raped every year and two women a week are killed by a partner or ex-partner. That culture of violence is doing enormous damage to our young people. As the hon. Member for Devizes (Claire Perry) said, NSPCC research found that so-called sexting is linked to coercive behaviour, bullying and violence and has a disproportionate impact on girls. A YouGov poll for the End Violence Against Women Coalition found that more than 70% of 16 to 18-year-old boys and girls said that they heard sexual name calling towards girls routinely and, even more disturbingly, one in three girls said that they experienced groping or other unwanted sexual touching at school.
In a report published last year entitled “I thought I was the only one,” the office of the Children’s Commissioner found that in the space of just 12 months more than 16,000 children, mostly girls, were identified as being at risk of sexual exploitation. The report highlights that we need to ask why so many males, both young and old, think it is acceptable to treat both girls and boys as objects to be used and abused. That brings me to my key point: violence does not happen in a vacuum. We must recognise the impact of the wider culture, so I want to focus on just one aspect of that—the objectification of women in the media, whether it is in the newspapers, music videos, adverts and video games.
Women have been served up as sex objects in some of our daily newspapers for many years. They show images that would be prohibited on television or subject to the watershed, yet they are sold entirely without age restriction in shops, often at a child’s eye level. As the mother of two sons, there are shops I would prefer not to go into because of the eye-level material that they will see and have seen and because of the effect on them.
Every week we read in the papers cases of women who are killed by their partner or former partner. Every one of these cases should cause an outcry, but rarely warrants a paragraph because it is tragically becoming so routine. The problem was highlighted last year by women’s groups who gave evidence to the Leveson inquiry and later published a report called “Just the Women”. This examined how domestic homicide cases are reported as “tragic” one-off incidents, rather than as part of a well-understood pattern of behaviour. Rape cases in some papers are routinely placed next to pictures of half-naked women. Cases of forced marriage or so-called honour-based violence, a horrible misnomer, are explained in terms of culture or religion—anything but violence against women and girls. Lord Leveson himself suggested that a front-page report in The Sun headed “Bodyguards for battered Towie sisters” about violence against two women from “The Only Way is Essex”, which was accompanied by a picture of one of the women in an erotic pose in lingerie, may well infringe clause 12—the discrimination clause—of the editors code of practice.
No one is suggesting that the media are solely to blame for these attitudes, but their objectification of women and the treatment by some newspapers, for example, of rape cases go some considerable way towards explaining why prejudicial attitudes to women are so deeply entrenched and are so normalised. The chief Crown prosecutor for London, Alison Saunders, has expressed concern about the impact that the treatment of women in the media has on rape cases and jurors’ decision making. She believes that jurors are coming to court with preconceptions about women that affect the way they consider evidence and she says:
“If a girl goes out and gets drunk and falls over . . . they are almost demonised in the media, and if they then become a victim, you can see how juries would bring their preconceptions to bear.”
Fortunately, much needed work is being done with detectives and prosecutors, for example, to dispel myths and stereotypes about women who have been raped or subjected to sexual and others forms of violence, but Alison Saunders asks whether there is
“something more we should be doing”
so that people doing jury service are not being challenged for the first time, and the subject is not one that they are thinking about for the first time.
The answer to that question is, of course, yes. That is why our schools should be taking a lead. Work to prevent violence against women and girls must be an integral part of education policy, delivered in every school as part of the statutory curriculum. It is astonishing that in 2010 40% of 16 to 18-year-olds said either that they did not receive lessons or information on sexual consent, or that they did not know whether they did. Although PSHE education must now teach about consent, it needs to go further and cover all forms of violence against women, including teenage relationship abuse, forced marriage, FGM and sexual exploitation. It should also be linked to work on gender equality and challenging gender stereotypes; otherwise young women and men will never be exposed to education designed to reduce gender violence and to counter the damaging impact of cultural factors, such as the media.
The 1 billion women rising today want a world that empowers young people, rather than represses their sexuality, so work in our schools must allow young people to be more in control of their sexual identity, rather than being dictated to by the media or advertising. Crucially, it must address harmful notions of masculinity and present boys with positive alternatives. The Director of Public Prosecutions and the Deputy Children’s Commissioner have both spoken out about the impact of pornography on young men’s sexually aggressive behaviour, and there is evidence of the negative impact of porn on young men’s attitudes to women.
In my constituency, the domestic abuse charity Rise is an excellent example of existing good practice. It delivers a PSHE preventive education programme on healthy relationships to schools across the city. Our schools also subscribe to the whole-school approach recommended by the End Violence Against Women coalition, where heads take a lead, teachers are trained on the issues, and all students receive comprehensive sex and relationship education which deals with consent, equality and respect. If we are serious about preventing gender violence, those messages need to be reflected not just in our schools but across society as a whole.
Helen Goodman (Bishop Auckland) (Lab)
I am pleased to have the opportunity to speak in this important debate. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Slough (Fiona Mactaggart) on initiating it and on the work that she has done in this field.
The Government estimate that last year 85,000 women were raped or sexually assaulted. That is a shocking statistic. Clearly, this violence takes place in a cultural context. I want to build on the remarks of the hon. Members for Totnes (Dr Wollaston), for Devizes (Claire Perry) and for Brighton, Pavilion (Caroline Lucas) and my hon. Friend the Member for Liverpool, Wavertree (Luciana Berger) to suggest some concrete things that we might do to shift this culture which is portraying women in such a highly sexualised way.
During my adult life, women have made lots of progress in many respects. We have made progress at work, in education and public services, and in pensions and child care, but we seem to have gone backwards in the public portrayal of women and the impact that that is having on our self-esteem and on the way that men treat us. The all-party group on body image has looked into women’s attitudes to their bodies. That can appear to be at the soft and fluffy end of the scale, but it often drives into women’s sense of themselves and levels of self-esteem. People who have negative self-images can become extremely depressed and subject to mental health problems and eating disorders—so much so that 80% of women are unhappy with their bodies, 40% of children are concerned about their bodies, and 1.6 million people have eating disorders. People’s anxieties are strengthened by their being faced with a constant bombardment of images of perfection.
I thought it would be interesting to talk to two groups of young people about these issues. I went to a school in London to talk to a group of girls in year 10 and to a school in my constituency in County Durham to talk to a mixed group of boys and girls, also in year 10. They agreed that these were significant problems. The girls, in particular, drew a connection between the images portrayed in the media and the way they are harassed on the streets by complete strangers. They have now begun to airbrush their own photographs on Facebook—[Interruption.] My hon. Friend the Member for Slough is groaning; I was appalled as well. There are some practical things that we can do about this. It is impossible to ban airbrushed photographs in advertisements, but we could label them as such.
The young people told me that they find such discussions valuable. As I said, they saw a clear link between sexualised imagery in the media and how they were treated in real life. The portrayal of such images should be covered in the PSHE curriculum. The Girl Guides have produced a fantastic pack about these issues. Another important aspect is that this is reducing trust between the genders. That is not a good thing, because obviously we want people to have happy, fulfilling long-term relationships, and they will not do that if they feel anxious and insecure.
The thing that most worried them was music videos that glamorise violence. They were particularly scathing of Eminem and of Rihanna’s video, “Love the way you lie”, which is about a woman who is apparently in love with an aggressive man. The girls were particularly alarmed by that.
We need to take some positive action, so I suggest that the Government consult urgently on introducing age-rating for music videos, which was one of the Bailey review’s proposals; that Ofcom look again at its rules for radio stations to keep sexually explicit and inappropriate lyrics to particular times of the day; and that we reduce the amount of on-street advertising containing sexualised imagery in locations where children are likely to see it.
A further problem that has been brought to my attention by ATVOD—the Authority for Television on Demand—is that R18 material is available on on-demand online sites that are not out of the reach of children. A survey of mine on The Huffington Post website is gathering people’s views on these issues, so Members should visit it if they would like to take part.
I know that the Minister will not be able to commit to my suggestions this afternoon, but we need seriously to take some concrete steps and move the policy on.
Oral Answers to Questions
Helen Goodman Excerpts(11 years, 10 months ago)
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Mr Vaizey
It is absolutely essential that we strike a balance between protecting our rural environment and removing some of the obstacles that have slowed the roll-out of broadband, so that it can be laid more quickly, more cheaply and more efficiently. It is important to strike a balance and I note what the hon. Gentleman has said.
Helen Goodman (Bishop Auckland) (Lab)
The House knows by now that it was Labour’s policy to roll out broadband across the nation by 2012. The Government put the target back to 2015 and BT now says that it will not be achieved until 2017. What will be the impact of the Prime Minister’s decision to agree the 90% cut in the European broadband budget last week?
Mr Vaizey
We would not expect that to have any impact on our own proposals. We are well ahead of the game in rolling out superfast broadband. Most of Europe—in fact, all of Europe—sees us as a leader in that respect. I am delighted that we did not introduce Labour’s telephone tax on hard-working people. Instead, we are delivering superfast broadband to the vast majority of people in this country.
Alcohol Strategy
Helen Goodman Excerpts(12 years, 8 months ago)
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Mrs May
I thank my hon. Friend. I commend the landlady of The Bell Inn in Shepton Mallet for taking that responsible approach to the issue of alcohol. We certainly look forward to receiving responses to the consultation from people such as her constituent and others. There are responsible landlords out there who are running pubs in difficult circumstances. We know; we have all seen many pubs in communities closing. We want to ensure that those who drink responsibly and those who deal responsibly with their clients, as many landlords and landladies do, are able to carry on doing so, and that we hit that end of the market that is being fuelled by this very cheap alcohol, often sold by supermarkets.
Helen Goodman (Bishop Auckland) (Lab)
I went to talk to young people in the youth club in Spennymoor about exactly this issue. I believe that price does influence young people’s behaviour. What I do not understand is why the Government are having a consultation on this issue but did not have a consultation on the granny tax.
International Women’s Day
Helen Goodman Excerpts(12 years, 9 months ago)
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Helen Goodman (Bishop Auckland) (Lab)
What a pleasure it is to see you, Madam Deputy Speaker, in the Chair during this international women’s day debate.
The hon. Member for Stourbridge (Margot James) made some excellent points about the issues in the countries of the south, and my hon. Friend the Member for Slough (Fiona Mactaggart) made some excellent points about the way in which the coalition Government are trying to turn the clock back to the 1950s in this country. I do not need to repeat what she said, but the policy is backfiring spectacularly, because it is inspiring a whole new generation of feminists to fight for their rights, and I shall tell the House about three of them.
The first is Lucy O’Sullivan, who has researched women’s representation in government and concluded that women Ministers make a real difference to the effectiveness with which women’s interests are represented in practice. She has also tracked the number of women Ministers whom we have had. During the 1980s and 1990s we were bumping along at 5%; then in 1997 we jumped up almost to 20%; and by April 2010 we had seen a steady increase to the point where 30% of Ministers were women. However, after the May 2010 election that figure crashed by 50%, and now it is at a 14-year low, as a result of this coalition Government.
The second example of the new feminism is the campaign to increase the number of women in the media. I am sure many hon. Members will have seen the research demonstrating that only 22% of newspaper articles are written by women. Broadcast magazine has a good campaign, called “Expert Women”, to get more women into the media, and the one trade union with a woman general secretary, Michelle Stanistreet of the National Union of Journalists, is holding a meeting next week to organise the fightback to improve women’s representation in the media.
Colleagues on both sides of the House will know of my concern about the issues of body image—I was pleased to join the all-party body image group that the hon. Member for East Dunbartonshire (Jo Swinson) established—and about the urgent need to close down “ano” websites, which encourage young women to starve themselves, so they may be surprised at my third example of the new generation of feminism. It is Cosmopolitan magazine—a collective made up entirely of female journalists. Alongside its “We use the F word—do you?” campaign, it has now set up a petition for equal pay, and I advise all hon. Members to go to its website and sign it. It states that
“it’s scandalous that the pay gap still exists. Laws on equal pay have existed for more than 40 years yet women working full-time…are still paid on average 14.9% less… At the current rate of change a baby will not achieve equal pay until she is 97 years old. Enough is enough.”
So will the Government take up its challenge to make equal pay auditing compulsory next year?
Lynne Featherstone
This measure will be effective. It was welcomed by women and women’s groups across the board at No. 10 Downing street this morning. There will be two offences. One will carry a sentence of up to six months, and the other a maximum sentence of five years. This is good news—and it is a great shame that the Opposition do not have the grace to welcome it.
We are also working on gangs and girls, teenage abuse and forced marriage. We are putting women at the heart of the economy, too, through the Work programme, the new universal credit and the new national careers service, in order to give women the help and support they need.
The hon. Member for Feltham and Heston (Seema Malhotra) is no longer in her place, but I take issue with her statement that there has been an increase in women’s unemployment. There are 50,000 more women in work now than a year ago.
In November, my right hon. Friend the Home Secretary announced that the Government will provide resources for 5,000 volunteer mentors.
Lynne Featherstone
No, I will not.
Those mentors will help new business start-ups, and there will be help for women in rural areas, too, where we have provided a £2 million fund over the next three years to support women setting up and expanding their businesses. We are establishing a women’s business council as well.
We are going further. We are extending the right to request flexible working to all, establishing a new system of shared parental leave, and promoting equal pay and good practice in the workplace. With the help of Lord Davies, we are increasing the number of women on company boards.
Because disadvantage and the stereotyping of women do not start and end in the workplace, we are also tackling how women are portrayed in the media. The Government’s body confidence campaign—for which I know there is support on both sides of the House—is gaining momentum and is now receiving global recognition following an event I hosted on the issue at last week’s UN commission on the status of women. We are also tackling the commercialisation and sexualisation of children, working with a wide range of stakeholders to bring the use of sexualised images in line with what parents find acceptable. I am sure Members on both sides of the House are as sick as I am of women being portrayed either as sexual or servile.
The coalition Government recognise that investing in girls and women in the poorest countries is transformational both for economic growth and in meeting all the millennium development goals.
Metropolitan Police Service
Helen Goodman Excerpts(13 years, 5 months ago)
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Mrs May
I say what I said earlier about the difference between the Government and the Metropolitan police. The Metropolitan police were in the process of investigating —or had been investigating—the News of the World for alleged wrongdoing. It is right, therefore, that we should look at drawing a line between the investigators and the investigated.
Helen Goodman (Bishop Auckland) (Lab)
There seems to have been an exchange of staff between the Metropolitan police and News International. Last week, I asked the Minister of State, Cabinet Office whether former police officers were subject to the rules of the Advisory Committee on Business Appointments. He has written to me saying that he does not know. Can the Home Secretary say what the current rules are and whether Mr Hayman followed them?