Business of the House

Ian Liddell-Grainger Excerpts

Thursday 1st February 2018 Commons Chamber

[Andrea Leadsom]

The hon. Lady raises an issue that is of concern right across the House. Food insecurity is a major challenge, but the Government have ensured that more people get to keep more of their hard-earned cash, raising the personal allowance so that a basic rate taxpayer is £1,000 better off and raising the national living wage to ensure that people are thousands of pounds better off than they were in 2010. It is vital that the Government do everything we can to ensure that people can afford to live well.

[Mr Ian Liddell-Grainger (Bridgwater and West Somerset) (Con)]

I want to bring something that affects my constituency to the attention of the Leader of the House. In Taunton Deane, about which we have just heard, the borough council has borrowed a fortune to do up its headquarters. Not only has it not signed a contract, which I think is illegal and pretty silly, but the headquarters will be valued at only half of what was borrowed. It is not a good council, so may we please have a debate on borough councils in the United Kingdom?

[Mr Speaker]

Order. Did the hon. Gentleman consult his hon. Friend the Member for Taunton Deane (Rebecca Pow) in advance of asking this question? If he did, so be it, but if he did not, it is rather unseemly.

[Mr Liddell-Grainger]

I did, Mr Speaker. I sent an email.

[Mr Speaker]

Yes. I am not sure that that is very collegiate, but I will have to leave Members on the same side of the House to try to sort out such matters. I gently say to the hon. Gentleman, who is quite an experienced Member of the House, that there is a genuine unseemliness about continued references to another Member’s constituency. In the politest possible way, I exhort the hon. Gentleman, who I am sure has a fertile mind and wide range of potential political interests, to focus perhaps on other interests, rather than on those that might affect his constituency—I do not dispute that and do not have authoritative knowledge of the matter—but which most certainly affect that of his hon. Friend.