Huw Irranca-Davies
Main Page: Huw Irranca-Davies (Labour - Ogmore)
Mr Davey
My hon. Friend is absolutely right. It is worth reflecting on the Government’s record on jobs. The Opposition do not like to talk about it, but the truth is that, despite the difficult circumstances—despite the Government having no money because we must pay down the deficit, and despite not having the growth that we would like in the world, European or UK economies—we have created jobs. That is a very good record.
Huw Irranca-Davies (Ogmore) (Lab)
Against the glowing backdrop that the Secretary of State paints, why do I now have a food bank in every single village in my constituency when there was only one three years ago? Why has there been a quadrupling of food banks under this Government? His record cannot be that good, given the backdrop of the inexorable rise of food poverty.
Mr Davey
People who run food banks are doing an extremely good job and deserve credit for their work. However, it is completely wrong to suggest that there is a statistical link between the Government’s benefit reforms and the provision of food banks. It is good that people are helping others. I hope the hon. Gentleman supports that.
I wish to make progress and to talk about energy and climate change policy. My Department has three major objectives. The Department wants to ensure that energy is as affordable as possible for consumers and business; that we keep the lights on with energy security; and that we decarbonise the power sector. With the Energy Bill, the green deal and many other policies, we have the most coherent energy and climate change policy of any Government in Europe—and indeed of any Government in this country for many, many years. Our approach also tries to maximise the jobs and growth potential from our energy and climate change policies. We also try to ensure that the impact on the bills of consumers and businesses is as low as possible, and we have policies to try to meet the climate change challenge.
Mr Davey
I am sure my hon. Friend is right. In a previous incarnation, I was Minister with responsibility for competition and was extremely keen to make sure that the UK had the most robust and rigorous competition regime in the world. The changes going through this House have delivered on that. I am not an expert on every single utility sector, so I will be careful about making any particular points about the water industry, or any other industry, but I am sure he is right that competition has an important role to play.
The impact of our climate change and energy policies has been to reduce household bills by 5%. By 2020, bills will be 11% less than they otherwise would have been. We know, of course, that energy prices are going up globally, but we have the policies to try to cushion people. As a result, people will pay lower bills than they otherwise would have done.
Huw Irranca-Davies
I thank the right hon. Gentleman for giving way, and I will not abuse his graciousness any more. Against that backdrop, why is it that independent analysis from the Fuel Poverty Advisory Group shows that an additional 300,000 people went into fuel poverty last year, and the Hills review suggests that 200,000 will be driven further into fuel poverty in the next four years? Against the glowing backdrop he has set out, why is that happening?
Mr Davey
I agree with the hon. Gentleman that fuel poverty is a real problem. [Interruption.] Opposition Members, from a sedentary position, say that the number of those facing fuel poverty is going up. Indeed, with global gas prices going up we have a challenge to keep bearing down on fuel poverty, but we are completely committed to doing that. Later this year we will produce a fuel poverty strategy, the first to be produced for more than a dozen years. One reason why he can quote the Hills review is that the Government commissioned that review to look into the exact nature of fuel poverty to ensure that it is being measured correctly. It shows that the previous Government could not even measure fuel poverty correctly. We will ensure that we measure it correctly, so that our policies can be targeted far more effectively to help the fuel poor. Opposition Members are not the only people in this House who are compassionate about the fuel poor.
It is important that we are concerned about the high cost of energy for all businesses, and energy-intensive industries in particular. That has to come through greater energy efficiency and we have a number of programmes to deliver that. There also has to be compensation and extra help for energy-intensive industries. I am grateful for the work and co-operation of the Treasury and the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills to ensure that we have a package to address the problem, particularly for energy-intensive industries. We have not had one before.
James Morris (Halesowen and Rowley Regis) (Con)
As I have knocked on doors around Halesowen and Rowley Regis over the past five years, a common theme has come up time and again. My constituents, and I suspect those around the country, have been looking for reassurance that the Government are on their side as they go out to work and try to do the right thing and take responsibility for themselves and their families.
Many families in my constituency are starting to see things get better. There are now 3,000 more of my constituents in work than there were before the general election. For many, however, things are still a struggle. They want to see evidence that the Government understand that things are tough for them and their families. They want action to make things a little easier, and they want to have confidence that, at the very least, their Government will not make things unnecessarily difficult.
I am pleased that the Energy Bill has been carried over. It will give legislative force to the requirement on energy companies to put customers on the cheapest tariff to meet their needs. When the Prime Minister announced that the Government would ensure that energy consumers were put on the cheapest available tariff, the Opposition’s reaction was that it could not be done, presumably because they knew that when they were in government they had lacked the political will to make it possible. They then changed to arguing that it would not be done—presumably because they knew they would not have done it—and they now seem to argue that it is not worth doing. The truth is that it could be done, it is being done, and it will benefit many of our constituents, particularly the most vulnerable.
As a humble Back Bencher, I hesitate to pick faults in the way Ministers choose to communicate the Government’s achievements, but the message that a series of freezes in fuel duty represents help for drivers tells only half the story. Motorists will, of course, be the most obvious direct beneficiaries of getting fuel costs under control, and drivers in my constituency will, on average, be £170 better off than they would have been had the Government gone ahead with the increase in fuel duty planned by the Labour party. However, I cannot help but think that that message sells the Government short. Transport costs are a significant part of the cost that families pay in shops, particularly for food, and they have a real impact on the cost of living for motorists and non-motorists alike. Poor grain and fruit harvests last autumn have created significant pressures on food prices globally, and the Government’s action to prevent fuel costs from needlessly rising and adding to those pressures will help to stop spiralling food prices that could hit hard-working families hard.
Huw Irranca-Davies
What does the hon. Gentleman make of the National Farmers Union’s repeated call over the past few months for an extension to allow seasonal agricultural workers from beyond EU borders—places such as Moldova and Bulgaria—to come to the UK and pick the crops in the fields because of that issue of affordable food? How does that tie in with the Government’s thinking on immigration?
James Morris
I thank the hon. Gentleman for his intervention but my constituency contains, I think, half a farm, so I am not qualified to speak on the matter he raises. Like the measures contained in the Budget, the action the Government are taking will provide significant help for families in my constituency, and I shall be proud to support them.
I understand that it is this year’s fashion to talk about matters that we wish had been included in the legislative programme, and if I may make one plea to Ministers, it would be to add my voice to those of right hon. and hon. Members—led by my hon. Friend the Member for Harlow (Robert Halfon)—who are calling for measures to stabilise fuel prices to be taken further. With wholesale prices having fallen from their peak, it would be a good time to revisit the idea of a fuel duty stabiliser to protect families and businesses from some of the damaging effects of volatile fuel prices. Should the Government return with such plans, I am sure they would enjoy not only the support of the House but—more importantly—they would make a real difference to our constituents.
The positive action that the Government are taking to address the cost of living stands in stark contrast to the record of the previous Government, although that is hardly surprising. Why would a party that had convinced itself that it had abolished boom and bust worry about rising prices? A Government who believed that the benefits of boom would not be followed by the crisis of bust were happy to assume that they could go on handing out enough in benefits and tax credits, and that a policy of uncontrolled immigration would provide enough cheap labour to keep service costs low. The Leader of the Opposition may have started to talk about energy costs, but he cannot hide from the fact that when he was the Cabinet Minister responsible for such matters, he stood by while the margins of energy suppliers soared.
I am pleased to support the Government’s legislative programme, and in particular actions to keep the cost of living under control. People in Halesowen and Rowley Regis who work hard and want to get on but who have been finding things tough can see that these measures will help to make things a little easier. They can see that this Government are on their side.
Damian Collins (Folkestone and Hythe) (Con)
Several hon. Members have touched on the initiatives that the Government have put in place to try to address the cost of living. I am pleased that my local authority, Shepway district council, has frozen council tax for three years in a row—as Kent county council did this year too. Measures to stop increases in fuel duty have had a direct impact on the lives on millions of people in this country, and I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Harlow (Robert Halfon) on his campaign on that issue. The Government have also taken the first steps any Government have taken to bring in measures to guarantee that consumers receive the lowest energy prices. I welcome all those measures.
One issue that has not been addressed in this debate is the Labour party’s commitment to increase borrowing—it says in the short term—as part of its programme for government. It is very reluctant to be drawn on this, but it should be drawn on it, especially in a debate on the cost of living, because of the consequences it would have. The country direly needs to live within its means and reduce its debts and deficit. If it deviates from that track because of the Labour party’s desire to spend more money—money that it does not have—we have to wonder how the money will be raised. Will it be raised in taxation—by asking people to pay higher taxes—or by higher borrowing, which will be passed on to consumers in higher mortgage rates? We have been down this track before and we have seen the consequences, which is why the Opposition are so reluctant to be drawn on the consequences of their policies and what they will mean for people’s lives.
Huw Irranca-Davies
This morning I was at a breakfast meeting with a contingent from the Civil Engineering Contractors Association, which has published a report that advocates increasing expenditure on infrastructure, not necessarily through the public sector but through imaginative use of private sector investment, including being underwritten by the Government at a time when interest rates are at a record low. Does the hon. Gentleman approve of that?
Damian Collins
I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for his point, because it provides a neat segue into what I want to talk about next. Of course, the Government welcome investment in major infrastructure projects that improve the competitiveness and underlying strength of the economy, and there are numerous schemes where that is taking place. If I look at investment in jobs in my own area through the work of the regional growth funds, I see that £35 million is being spent in east Kent to create new jobs. Businesses such as Wooding in Hythe in my constituency have already received £1 million and they are hiring people on the basis of that investment. Of course we welcome that type of investment, but we are hearing from the Labour party a desire for a short-term, temporary cut in tax to act as a stimulus to the economy, with no real sense of where that money will come from or how it will be costed and paid for. My concern in this debate on the cost of living is that the people who will end up paying for those policies will be the consumers. People will pay through higher taxes, and higher interest rates on their mortgages if they are homeowners.
I will come back to the point made by the hon. Member for Ogmore (Huw Irranca-Davies) on imaginative partnership with the private sector to increase investment, which also touches on the speech made by the hon. Member for Edinburgh East (Sheila Gilmore) on the housing sector. One of the biggest elements of the cost of living is housing. Rent, servicing a mortgage or finding the money in the household budget to try to save and buy one’s first home are all significant costs. I am attracted to schemes where local authorities seek to work with institutional investors to fund the building of new homes that will be run by arm’s length management associations and councils, effectively producing a private partnership with a local authority to build new council houses and to borrow money from an institution over a 40-year to 50-year period. That is a sensible thing to do, and is what any organisation would do. If it is ultimately responsible for paying the rent through housing benefit, why would it not seek to control the end product too? That will give us more opportunities not only to provide people with lower cost homes to rent, but, in time, for even more people to benefit from the right to buy scheme, and for the money to be reinvested into providing new, high-quality homes. That would a good thing: it would reduce some of the costs of renting and be a good thing for the housing market as a whole.
Such a policy would also help to do something to address the scandal of the poor quality of many homes in the private rented sector which are offered to tenants claiming housing benefit but are not fit for habitation. Local authorities should use powers, which they already have, to take action against those landlords. I welcome, in part, the measure in the Queen’s Speech that will create an obligation for private landlords to ask whether people seeking accommodation are qualified to receive it. That will ensure that they are in the country legally and not in breach of the law. That is a good thing, because we will probably find that it is the rogue landlords who are happy to take the money and not ask any questions, and who are making money not out of people who are here illegally, but from some of the poorest people in our society. We should clamp down on that, because it is public money, paid out through housing benefit, that they are profiting from, and we should take firm action against it.
Huw Irranca-Davies (Ogmore) (Lab)
It is a delight to speak in this Queen’s Speech debate, focusing on the cost of living. It is also a delight to follow the hon. Member for Weaver Vale (Graham Evans), who referred back to sunny Jim Callaghan, who was a Cardiff MP. I would like to pick up on the hon. Gentleman’s theme of pensions. He says that what happened under sunny Jim and subsequently made him end up on the Conservative side of the House. One of the reasons for my ending up on the Labour Benches was the fact that before I came here in 1997, the state pension was £64 and there were searing, scandalous levels of pensioner poverty. I say to the hon. Gentleman, with all due respect, that it was clear that something had gone horrendously wrong when people were literally dying of hypothermia in their homes. We do not see that nowadays, and it is something to which we cannot return.
As my right hon. Friend the Leader of the Opposition has said, the pension reforms that will introduce a more contributory basis are very welcome. It is good that it will be possible to lift everyone out of means-testing so that people can have what should be theirs as of right, including carers, and mothers can stay at home and contribute to family life. However, when Labour came to office we responded to a very real crisis in the country.
Earlier today, a Member asked my right hon. Friend the Member for Sheffield, Brightside and Hillsborough (Mr Blunkett) what Nye Bevan would say about something. Everyone goes back to Nye Bevan quotations: what would Nye Bevan be saying if he were speaking here today? There is a tremendous panoply of such quotations, but I recall that when his party was in opposition he said, facing the then Prime Minister across the Dispatch Box,
“The Prime Minister has an absolute genius for putting flamboyant labels on empty luggage.”—[Official Report, 3 November 1959; Vol. 612, c. 870.]
That is what this Queen’s Speech is. It is indeed a flamboyant label—it is the Queen’s Speech—but the Queen is travelling very light indeed in the new parliamentary Session.
Alison McGovern
While we are wondering what the great Nye Bevan might have said, may I ask my hon. Friend whether he thinks that, if Nye Bevan were around today, he might have said “Vote Labour”?
Huw Irranca-Davies
Nothing but, and never anything else!
I should have liked to see, in the rather light luggage that we are carrying, a consumers Bill to tackle rising energy costs, train fares and so forth. I should have liked to see a housing Bill that would take action against the real scandal in housing: rogue landlords and extortionate fees and charges in the private rented sector. At present, when people come to my constituency office and complain about that, I have to say that we can do little about it.
The Bill that I should really have liked to see, however, is a jobs Bill that would have given the long-term unemployed a duty to go to work, but would also have guaranteed that jobs would be there for them. That would have been a good way to tackle an unemployment rate of 2.56 million—or whatever the figure is now—and the massive youth unemployment that we see in my local communities.
Let me make a point that I suspect Nye Bevan would have made if he were here today. Let me give the House a reality check. For many people in my constituency—not all of them, because some are weathering the storm very well—the main problem is under-employment. They cannot secure the hours of work that they want so that they can put food on the table. Wage reductions are forced on them, or they have to accept them because of the economic climate.
I had thought that the scandal of zero-hour contracts had disappeared a decade ago, but they are back. People are being told “We will pay you when you are on the till; but then you must go home and sit in a corner, and we will pay you when a customer comes through the door again.” It is an utter scandal. We did not crack down sufficiently on the abuse of the national minimum wage ourselves when we were in government, but my goodness, we need to crack down on it now. Yes, we are seeing jobs being created, but my goodness, we are seeing jobs being lost.
A Government Member of the House of Lords, who claims that he was misreported, recently said, in effect—in the context of that long litany of problems, such as the driving down of pay and conditions—that this was a good time for someone to take the opportunity presented by those problems and set up a business, because it could now be done on the cheap. Let me say this to Government Members as well as those on the Opposition Benches: yes, let us encourage start-up enterprises—we rely on small and medium-sized enterprises in this country—but let us not do it on the backs of others. Let us ensure that people are properly rewarded. Let us consider those who, if they had the right jobs and the right pay in their hands, would be spending money like there was no tomorrow, because they would actually have to.
Andrew Gwynne
Is it not an absolute scandal that since the Work programme was introduced long-term youth unemployment in this country has risen by 355%? That is disgraceful, is it not?
Huw Irranca-Davies
It is an absolute scandal, and if we had a Labour Government now, that would be on the front page of the papers every single day—and it should be, because that is the real scandal. We all want to see people in jobs, so let us get them those jobs and put them into those jobs. We can attach conditionality to welfare to ensure that they take those jobs if they have been unemployed, but give them the jobs, for goodness’ sake.
A Welsh Government study published in February estimates that the benefits changes—and two thirds of the people affected are in work—will suck nearly £600 million out of the Welsh economy in 2014-15. The impact will be felt not only on wages and standards of living, but on public health, on levels of debt—thousands of people must now be flooding through MPs’ constituency offices every week—and on overcrowding and housing; there will also be an increased demand for emergency bail-outs and emergency services. It really is a tragedy.
Although we were not on track—we were slightly slipping—Labour in government lifted 1 million children out of poverty. Unsurprisingly, the Child Poverty Action Group has already forecast that 1 million children will be put back into poverty because of the benefits changes. Not only are Labour Members giving this message, but the Institute for Fiscal Studies, the Rowntree Trust and others are repeating it. Everyone is saying that we are going backwards at a rate of knots.
In debates in this Chamber, Members of Parliament have a duty to stand up not only for people in their constituencies who are managing, but for those who are suffering. I will finish with a quote, because what we should be doing today is discussing the cost of living and what is missing from this very light Queen’s Speech; Nye Bevan said:
“This is my truth, tell me yours.”
This is my truth, and it is the truth for my constituents. In all of this debate, all the good things being applauded by the Government Members are not being seen by my constituents, who are struggling. They are struggling in food banks and struggling to pay the bills—it is not everyone, but it is a large and growing proportion. Can we not work together to deal with that, as well as with all the good things that the Government Members have been applauding?
Mr Pickles
I wish I had time, but I cannot give way.
Welfare reform is vital to tackle Labour’s budget deficit. Under the last Administration, more taxpayers’ money was being spent on benefits than on defence, education and health combined.
Mr Pickles
I am sorry, but I do not have time. I always give way, but not when I do not have time.
Labour is not short of ideas on new taxes. Labour councillors such as Barnsley’s leader Steve Houghton or the Local Government Association’s Labour leader Councillor David Sparks have lobbied the Government to abolish the single person’s discount on council tax. This would increase tax bills on 8 million people—from elderly widows to young professionals. A Bridget Jones tax is not what I call one-nation government; it is the politics of division.
Mr Pickles
No.
The Local Audit and Accountability Bill, as part of this Queen’s Speech, will further help deliver value for money. The abolition of the Audit Commission regime will save taxpayers up to £1.2 billion over the next 10 years. The Bill will help defend an independent free press from corrosive town hall pravdas that harm local democracy and waste taxpayers’ money.
Mr Pickles
No.
These measures will save taxpayers’ money, cut waste and help keep council tax down.
Mr Pickles
The Deregulation Bill will promote the right to buy by further extending eligibility and undoing John Prescott’s cuts. This complements our £20 billion affordable housing programme, our £10 billion programme for rented sector guarantees and our new help-to-buy scheme to help people up the housing ladder. By contrast, Labour’s alternative Queen’s Speech called for more red tape and would add costs to housing. The party that gave us home information packs now wants a £300 million a year tenants’ tax in the form of compulsory registration of all landlords. Those costs will be passed on to tenants in the form of higher rents.
This is the party whose Labour councils for years turned a blind eye to exploitation by rogue landlords building “beds in sheds”. It is a party that intentionally let immigration rip. Those buildings have been propped up overnight, with Labour councils such as Ealing and Newham doing nothing until it was too late to solve the problem. This Government have given councils clear guidance on the use of their already extensive legal powers to clamp down on rogue landlords, and have provided extra funding to target the problem areas.
What do we think of the alternate Queen’s Speech?
Mr Pickles
Perhaps the hon. Member for Ogmore (Huw Irranca-Davies) would like to think about this. We do not need an alternative speech; we need to look only at Labour in government in Wales. Let us look at Labour’s record on housing there. Labour has failed to boost house-building starts by a mere 1% as compared to 19% in England.
Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Lindsay Hoyle)
Order. As the Secretary of State has pointed out, he does not have time to give way. Voices can be saved for tomorrow.