Budget Resolutions
Jeremy Corbyn Excerpts(7 years, 7 months ago)
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Jeremy Corbyn (Islington North) (Lab)
The test of a Budget is how it affects the reality of people’s lives all around this country. I would submit that the reality—[Interruption.]
Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Lindsay Hoyle)
Order. Look, if somebody wants to go for an early cup of tea, please do so—I am told there are mince pies waiting—but what I will have is the Leader of the Opposition listened to, and quietly, from the Government side, in the same way I expected from the other side of the House.
Jeremy Corbyn
Thank you, Mr Deputy Speaker.
The reality test of this Budget has to be how it affects ordinary people’s lives. I believe, as the days go ahead and this Budget unravels, the reality will be that a lot of people will be no better off, and the misery that many are in will be continuing.
Pay is now lower than it was in 2010, and wages are now falling again. Economic growth in the first three quarters of this year is the lowest since 2009 and the slowest of the major economies in the G7. It is a record of failure, with a forecast of more to come.
Economic growth has been revised down. Productivity growth has been revised down; business investment, revised down; people’s wages and living standards, revised down. What sort of strong economy is that? What sort of “fit for the future” is that?
You may recall, Mr Deputy Speaker, that the deficit was due to be eradicated by 2015. Then that moved to 2016; then to 2017; then to 2020. And now we are looking at 2025. The Government are missing their major targets, but the failed and damaging policy of austerity remains.
The number of people sleeping rough has doubled since 2010. This year, 120,000 children will spend Christmas in temporary accommodation. Three new pilot schemes to look at rough sleeping across the whole country simply does not cut it. We want action now to help those poor people who are forced to sleep on our streets and beg for—[Interruption.]
Mr Deputy Speaker
Order. I think the Whips should know better. Mr Spencer, I am sure you could relax—please, we do not need any more from you. If not, leave the Chamber.
Jeremy Corbyn
The point I was making is that three new pilot schemes for rough sleepers simply does not cut it. It is a disaster for those people sleeping on our streets and forced to beg for the money for a night shelter. They are looking for action now from Government to give them a roof over their heads.
In some parts of the country, life expectancy is actually beginning to fall. The last Labour Government lifted 1 million children out of poverty—it was an amazing achievement. Under this Government, an extra 1 million children will be plunged into poverty by the end of this Parliament. Some 1.9 million pensioners, or one in six of all pensioners, are living in poverty—the worst rate anywhere in western Europe. So, it is falling pay, slow growth and rising poverty. This is what the Chancellor has the cheek to call a strong economy.
The Chancellor’s predecessor said they would put the burden on
“those with the broadest shoulders”—[Official Report, 20 October 2010; Vol. 516, c. 951]—
so how has that turned out? The poorest 10th of households will lose 10% of their income by 2022, while the richest will lose just 1%—so much for “tackling burning injustices”. This is a Government tossing fuel on the fire.
Personal debt levels are rising: 8.3 million people are over-indebted. If the Chancellor wants to help people out of debt, he should back Labour’s policy for a real living wage of £10 an hour by 2020. Working-class young people are now leaving university with £57,000-worth of debt because this Government—his Government—trebled tuition fees. The new Government policy is to win over young people by keeping fees at £9,250 per year—more debt for people who want to learn.
But that is just one of the multitudes of injustices presided over by this Government. Another is universal credit, which we called on Ministers to pause and fix. That is the view of this House. It is the verdict of those on the frontline.
Mr Deputy Speaker
Mr Pincher, you shouted out “Keep going,” and the right hon. Gentleman will—but you will be going out of the Chamber.
Jeremy Corbyn
I would rather people stayed to listen, actually, Mr Deputy Speaker, to the reality—[Interruption.]
Mr Deputy Speaker
Order. Silence—that’s the difference. It will be in silence.
Jeremy Corbyn
Thank you, Mr Deputy Speaker.
Maybe Government Members would like to listen to Martin’s experience. A full-time worker on the minimum wage, he said:
“I get paid four weekly meaning that my pay date is different each month”.
Because, under the universal credit system, he was paid twice in a month and deemed to have earned too much, his universal credit was cut off. He says:
“This led me into rent arrears and I had to use a food bank for the first time in my life”.
That is the humiliation that he and so many others have gone through because of the problems of universal credit. Would it not have been better to pause the whole thing and look at the problems it has caused?
The Chancellor’s solution to a failing system causing more debt is to offer a loan, and a six-week wait, with 20% waiting even longer, simply becomes a five-week wait. This system has been run down by £3 billion of cuts to work allowances, the two-child limit and the perverse and appalling rape clause, and it has caused evictions because housing benefit is not paid direct to the landlord. So I say to the Chancellor again: put this system on hold so it can be fixed and keep 1 million of our children out of poverty.
For years, we have had the rhetoric of a long-term economic plan that never meets its targets when what all too many people are experiencing is long-term economic pain—and hardest hit are disabled people, single parents and women—so it is disappointing that the Chancellor did not back the campaign by my hon. Friend the Member for Brent Central (Dawn Butler) to end period poverty. He could have done that. Well done her on the campaign; shame on him for not supporting it.
The Conservatives’ manifesto in the last election disappeared off their website after three days, and now some Ministers have put forward some half-decent proposals conspicuously borrowed from the Labour manifesto. Let me tell the Chancellor: as socialists, we are happy to share ideas. The Communities Secretary called for £50 million of borrowing to invest in house building; presumably, the Prime Minister slapped him down for wanting to bankrupt Britain. The Health Secretary has said that the pay cap is over, but where is the money to fund the pay rise?
The Chancellor has not been clear today—not for NHS workers, our police, firefighters, teachers, teaching assistants, bin collectors, tax collectors, or armed forces personnel—so will he listen to Claire? She says:
“My Mum works for the NHS. She goes above and beyond for her patients. Why does the government think it’s ok to under pay, over stress and underappreciate all that work?”
The NHS chief executive says:
“The budget for the NHS next year is well short of what is currently needed”.
From what the Chancellor has said today, it is still going to be well short of what is needed. He said in 2015 that the Government would fund another 5,000 GPs, but in the last year we have had 1,200 fewer GPs—and we have lost community nurses and mental health nurses. The Chancellor promised £10 billion in 2015 and delivered £4.5 billion. So if he does not mind, we will wait for the small print on today’s announcement—but even what he said certainly falls well short of the £6 billion Labour would have delivered from our June manifesto.
Over 1 million of our elderly are not receiving the care they need. Over £6 billion will have been cut from social care budgets by next March. [Interruption.] I hope the hon. Member for Burton (Andrew Griffiths) begins to understand what is like to wait for social care stuck in a hospital bed, with other people having to give up their work to care for them. The uncaring, uncouth attitude of certain Government Members has to be called out—[Interruption.]
Jeremy Corbyn
That is why social care budgets are so important for so many very desperate people in our country.
Our schools will be 5% worse off by 2019 despite the Conservative manifesto promising that no school would be worse off. Five thousand head teachers from 25 counties wrote to the Chancellor saying that:
“we are simply asking for the money that is being taken out of the system to be returned”.
A senior science technician, Robert, wrote to me saying:
“My pay”
has been
“reduced by over 30%. I’ve seen massive cuts at my school. Good teachers and support staff leave.”
That is what does for the morale both of teachers and students in school. According to this Government, 5,000 head teachers are wrong, Robert is wrong, the IFS is wrong—everybody is wrong except the Chancellor.
If the Chancellor bothered to listen to what local government is saying, he would know that it has been warning that services for vulnerable children are under more demand than ever, with more children being taken into care and more in desperate need of help and support. Yet councils are labouring with a £2 billion shortfall in the cost of dealing with vulnerable children. Local councils will have lost 80% of their direct funding by 2020. The reality of this across the country is women’s refuges closing, youth centres closing, libraries closing, museums closing, and public facilities understaffed, under-resourced and under-financed—it could be so different—but compassion can cost very little. Just £10 million is needed to establish the child funeral fund campaigned for so brilliantly by my hon. Friend the Member for Swansea East (Carolyn Harris). Why could not the Chancellor at least have agreed to fund that?
Under this Government, there are 20,000 fewer police officers, and another 6,000 community support officers and 11,000 fire service staff have been cut as well. You cannot keep communities safe on the cheap. Tammy explains:
“Our police presence has been taken away”
from her village
“meaning increasing crime. As a single parent I no longer feel safe in my own village, particularly”
at night.
Five and a half million workers earn less than the living wage—1 million more than five years ago. The Chancellor, last Sunday, could not even see 1.4 million people unemployed in this country. There is a crisis of low pay and insecure work affecting one in four women and one in six men, with a record 7.4 million people in working households living in poverty. If we want workers earning better pay and less dependent on in-work benefits, we need strong trade unions—the most effective way of boosting workers’ pay. Instead, this Government weakened trade unions and introduced employment tribunal fees, now scrapped thanks to the victory in the courts by Unison—a trade union representing its members.
Why did not the Chancellor take the opportunity to make two changes to control debt: first, to cap credit card debt, so that nobody pays back more than they borrowed; and secondly, to stop credit card companies increasing people’s credit limit without their say-so? Debt is being racked up because the Government are weak on those who exploit people, such as rail companies hiking fares above inflation year on year, and water companies and energy suppliers. During the general election, the Conservatives promised an energy cap that would benefit
“around 17 million families on standard variable tariffs”,
but every bill tells millions of families that the Government have broken that promise.
With £10 billion in housing benefit going into the pockets of private landlords every year, housing is a key factor in driving up the welfare bill. There were not too many words from the Chancellor about excessive rents in the private rented sector. With this Government delivering the worst rate of house building since the 1920s and a quarter of a million fewer council homes, any commitment would be welcome, but we have been here before. The Government promised 200,000 starter homes three years ago; not a single one has been built in those three years. We need a large-scale, publicly funded house building programme, not this Government’s accounting tricks and empty promises. Yes, we back the abolition in stamp duty for first-time buyers—because it was another Labour policy in our manifesto in June, not a Tory one.
This Government’s continual preference for spin over substance means that across this country the words “northern powerhouse” and “midlands engine” are now met with derision. Yorkshire and Humber gets only a 10th of the transport investment per head given to London. Government figures show that every region in the north of England has seen a fall in spending on services since 2012. The midlands, east and west, receives less than 8% of total transport infrastructure investment, compared with the 50% that goes to London. In the east and west midlands, one in four workers is paid less than the living wage—so much for the midlands engine. Re-announced funding for the trans-Pennine rail route will not cut it, and today’s other announcements will not redress the balance.
Combined with counterproductive austerity, this lack of investment has consequences in sluggish growth and shrinking pay packets. Public investment has virtually halved. Under this Government, Britain has the lowest rate of public investment in the G7, but it is now investing in driverless cars, after months of road testing back-seat driving in the Government.
By moving from RPI to CPI indexation on business rates, the Chancellor has adopted another Labour policy, but why do the Government not go further and adopt Labour’s entire business rates pledge, including exempting plant and machinery, and an annual revaluation of business rates?
Nowhere has the Government’s chaos been more evident than over Brexit. Following round after round of fruitless Brexit negotiations, the Brexit Secretary has been shunted out for the Prime Minister, who has got no further. Every major business organisation has written to the Government, telling them to pull their finger out and get on with it. Businesses are delaying crucial investment decisions, and if this Government do not get their act together, those businesses will soon be taking relocation decisions.
Crashing out with no deal and turning Britain into a tax haven would damage people’s jobs and living standards, serving only a wealthy few. It is not as though this Government are not doing their best to protect tax havens and their clients in the meantime. The Paradise papers have again exposed how a super-rich elite is allowed to get away with dodging taxes. This Government have opposed measure after measure in this House—their Tory colleagues have done the same in the European Parliament—to clamp down on the tax havens that facilitate this outrageous leaching from our public purse. Non-paid tax and clever reinvestment to get away with tax hit hospitals, schools and housing, and they hit the poorest and most needy in our society. There is nothing moral about dodging tax; there is everything immoral about evading it.
Too often, it feels as though there is one rule for the super-rich and another for the rest of us. The horrors of Grenfell Tower were a reflection of a system that puts profits before people and that fails to listen to working-class communities. In 2013, the Government received advice in a coroner’s report that sprinklers should be fitted in all high-rise buildings. Today, once again, the Government failed to fund the £1 billion investment needed. The Chancellor says that councils should contact them, but Nottingham and Westminster have done so, and they have been refused; nothing was offered to them. We have the privilege of being Members of Parliament, in a building that is about to be retrofitted with sprinklers to protect us. The message is pretty clear: this Government care more about what happens here than about what happens to people living in high-rise homes, in effect saying that they matter less.
Our country is marked by growing inequality and injustice. We were promised, with lots of hype, a revolutionary Budget, but the reality is that nothing has changed. People were looking for help from this Budget, and they have been let down by a Government who, like the economy that they have presided over, are weak and unstable, and in need of urgent change. They call this a Budget fit for the future; the reality is that they are a Government no longer fit for office.
Greece
Jeremy Corbyn Excerpts(10 years ago)
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Mr Osborne
We should understand that of course the German Government, and therefore the German people, are one of the largest creditors and therefore take a close interest in developments in Greece. Under the terms of an application for a new programme from the European stability mechanism, that requires a vote in the Bundestag, so there are clearly some key German political issues here. Where I agree with my hon. Friend is on the observation he makes about the stability and growth pact. One can argue that many of the problems that the eurozone has encountered in recent years were because of the lax interpretation of the rules, not least by France and Germany, over a decade ago. To be fair to the German Government and others, they have tried to strengthen those rules in recent years.
Jeremy Corbyn (Islington North) (Lab)
Does not the Chancellor think that something quite remarkable happened yesterday in Greece? Half its young people are out of work, public services are collapsing and there is desperate poverty around the country, yet the Greek people rejected the European Union’s proposals for further austerity and further cuts, seeking instead to renegotiate with the EU? When even the International Monetary Fund says that the debt is unpayable and has to be restructured over a longer period, does he not think that that should concentrate the minds of the EU and the German Government to do something urgently so that the banks in Greece can reopen, people can get back to work and the Government—the elected Government—can continue a programme of developing and expanding the economy, which is the only real way forward? Further austerity will create only deeper misery and shorter lives for a very desperate people.
Mr Osborne
It may surprise the hon. Gentleman to find that I agree with him on a number of points. First, I agree that we should respect the result of the referendum and the democratic decision of the Greek people. I agree that we need to see the Greek economy grow, although I would say that that requires structural reforms, as my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Rushcliffe (Mr Clarke), the former Chancellor, said. I hope we agree, too, that there are many members of the eurozone and that this cannot be just a unilateral decision by the Greek Government and the Greek people, because other peoples and other Governments are involved, including creditor nations. The final thing we agree on is that I think the hon. Gentleman would be an excellent leader of the Labour party.
Trident Alternatives Review
Jeremy Corbyn Excerpts(11 years, 11 months ago)
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Danny Alexander
I entirely agree. I applaud President Obama’s leadership of the disarmament debate. I think that the review gives the United Kingdom an opportunity to contribute further both to disarmament and to the global movement towards the de-alerting of our nuclear weapons.
Danny Alexander
No, I will not. I will give way later, but I want to make some progress first.
The review presents a much greater opportunity for change and the consideration of alternative postures, and that in turn presents the possibility of maintaining our nuclear deterrent capability with fewer submarines. This is where the real opportunity resides for making long-term savings, for recalibrating our policy to the requirements of our ages, and—as we just heard from my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for North East Fife (Sir Menzies Campbell)—for contributing to nuclear disarmament.
Analysis of the national security strategy confirms the position adopted by successive Governments that
“no state currently has both the intent and the capability to threaten the independence or integrity of the UK. But we cannot dismiss the possibility that a major direct nuclear threat to the UK might re-emerge.”
With no hostile backdrop and a surprise attack against the UK highly unlikely, the United Kingdom could adopt a number of viable and credible alternative postures while maintaining a nuclear deterrence capability that meets the needs of national security.
The review demonstrates that our current nuclear posture of continuous-at-sea deterrence is not the only one available. Let me briefly describe four of the alternative postures that were considered in the review, from highest to lowest readiness. Each of them represents a different rung on the nuclear ladder, with CASD at the top.
A posture of focused deterrence would maintain a continuous nuclear deterrent for a specific period in response to a specific threat. At all other times, the system could adopt a reduced readiness level. We considered three options for reduced readiness. A so-called sustained-deterrence posture would mean regular patrols that maintained deterrence capability, but the number of platforms could be reduced. A responsive posture would allow gaps of irregular frequency and length between deployment, so that a potential adversary could not predict when and for how long a gap in deployment might occur. A posture of preserved deterrence would hold forces at low readiness. Under preserved deterrence, no platforms would be regularly deployed, but the UK would maintain the ability to deploy if the context changed.
The review clearly demonstrates that the concept of a ladder of nuclear capability and readiness is viable and credible, and that there are a number of options for taking steps down the rungs without getting off altogether.
Danny Alexander
As my right hon. Friend will know, the first question is a matter of political judgment for the Government of the day. As for the second, it would depend on which of the alternative postures was adopted. They would all be designed to allow us to surge back to the so-called focused deterrence, which would sustain a continuous posture in response to our needs.
The reality is that in the current circumstances, and for the foreseeable future, the ultimate guarantee does not need to sit on a hair trigger. We can afford to go much further in de-alerting our nuclear deterrent. The option of non-continuous deterrence does not threaten current security, and by changing postures we can reduce cost at the same time. For example, ending CASD and procuring one fewer successor submarine would make a saving of about £4 billion over the life of the system.
Jeremy Corbyn
May I put a simple question to the right hon. Gentleman? In what circumstances would he envisage the use of nuclear weapons, and the problems that would follow as a result of their use?
Danny Alexander
The whole purpose of nuclear deterrents is to deter their use.
The judgment must be made about where on the ladder we believe that it is credible to stand, provided that the ability to scale up or down as threats change and the momentum of proliferation on the one hand and disarmament on the other shift. As a recognised nuclear weapon state under the non-proliferation treaty, we have an obligation to move towards a world in which nuclear weapons are no longer part of state security and defence postures. It is true that Britain has made significant steps since the cold war in disarmament terms. Some would argue that Britain has done its bit for disarmament and we have reached the minimum level possible. That argument has been deployed at every point at which we have scaled down over the past 20 years, but each time it has proven not to be true. The next step down the ladder is to reduce the salience of nuclear weapons in our defence policy itself, which means accepting that a cold-war-style continuous deterrent has become unnecessary.
Jeremy Corbyn (Islington North) (Lab)
I am pleased we are having this debate and that the hon. Member for New Forest East (Dr Lewis) has spoken, because he sincerely believes in nuclear weapons as much as I sincerely disbelieve in them. Interestingly, he quoted Tizard as one of the main scientists involved in the Manhattan project and the development of nuclear weapons, but we should also recall that many of the others involved, including Joseph Rotblat and Einstein himself, were later appalled at what they had discovered, at how it had been used and at the consequences for humanity of possessing nuclear weapons at all.
I hope that the hon. Member for Brighton, Pavilion (Caroline Lucas), I and one or two others might manage to bring to the Floor of the House a sense that there are alternatives to Trident. The review that the Liberal Democrats have asked for and that was no doubt produced at enormous expense is not a discussion of the alternatives. It is a discussion of weaponry and, in part, of perceptions of security and risk, but it is not a discussion of the alternative to Trident and nuclear weapons, which is not to have them at all and instead to aspire to a nuclear-free world. Interestingly, when those who support nuclear weapons are challenged, they all say they want to live in a nuclear-free world—
Jeremy Corbyn
Not all of them. I beg the hon. Gentleman’s pardon. I exempt him from my last remark. He wants to live in a nuclear world, but many who agree with him about the decision on Trident want to live in a nuclear-free world, yet they go on to say that they cannot do anything about it, because now is not the time to do it, and then they head off rapidly down the road of weaponry and cold war attitudes towards deterrence and defence.
One or two fundamental questions need to be asked. A nuclear weapon is not a targeted weapon. Let us imagine we set off a nuclear weapon against, say, France. Let us suppose a Conservative Government got very angry with President Hollande. They are frequently angry with the French on most matters. They have never quite forgiven them for the 100 years war or the French revolution—[Interruption.] See, they are cheering up now. They are licking their lips at the prospect of war with France. Indeed, this whole building is festooned with memorabilia about the French revolution and the defeat of Napoleon. If they wanted to teach the French a lesson by sending a nuclear weapon against them, it would not take out a military establishment or an airport; it would take out millions of people in the civilian population, just as it would if used against Moscow, Pyongyang, Tehran or anywhere else. A nuclear weapon is a weapon of indiscriminate mass destruction against a civilian population. Small nuclear weapons were used in 1945 over Hiroshima and Nagasaki. They were tiny in comparison with one warhead on one part of a Trident submarine now, and the cancers from those weapons have existed and lasted for 60 years. The use of a nuclear weapon sets off a nuclear winter and an environmental disaster for those affected.
To those who want us to spend, in reality, £100 billion on Trident, I say that by 2020—if the main-gate decision is taken in 2016—a large proportion of the defence budget will be taken up in building new submarines and the warheads to accommodate them. Will defence chiefs at that time accept cuts in every other area of defence expenditure to accommodate the construction of those new submarines and new missile systems? I seriously doubt it. Those in the House who talk so glibly about nuclear weapons know full well that there is a serious debate in the Royal United Services Institute and the defence establishment about targeting defence expenditure on nuclear weapons when so many other demands are apparently being put forward by different service chiefs.
To my colleagues in the Labour party, who have been through this debate on nuclear weapons many times, I say that if we win an election in 2015—obviously, I hope we do—the demands on that incoming Government about apprenticeships, student fees, benefits, hospitals, schools, council housing, railways, roads, and a whole range of things, will be massive. Will we say to our supporters, “Sorry, the priority is weapons of mass destruction. The priority is nuclear weapons”? I like to think we would not.
Yes, we face threats in this world, including from terrorists, but holding nuclear weapons did not do the USA much good on 9/11, or us much good on 7/7, and it has not done anybody else much good. We must look to the causes and the humanitarian effects of war. A 1996 International Court of Justice ruling stated that
“the threat or use of nuclear weapons would be generally contrary to the rules of international law applicable in armed conflict, and in particular the principles and rules of humanitarian law.”
Let us look for alternatives such as nuclear weapon-free zones, supporting a non-proliferation treaty, or a conference of middle eastern states to bring about a nuclear weapon-free middle east. The review is not an alternative document but one that leads us down the road of nuclear proliferation and danger. The real alternative, produced by the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, sets out an agenda for peace and investment in people, jobs and a good future for this country, not investing in weapons of mass destruction.
I hope I have managed at least to bring an alternative view to this debate.
Bank of England (Appointment of Governor) Bill
Jeremy Corbyn Excerpts(13 years ago)
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Stephen Hammond
Indeed. We could have a long discourse about the fact that Montagu Norman was the initiator of sound monetary policy, but in view of the strictures set out by the hon. Member for Hayes and Harlington, I shall not go down that course today.
It might be worth referring to two more modern Governors. Lord Kingsdown, who was Robin Leigh-Pemberton at the time he was Governor, was in some ways a classic figure. He had been a lawyer for many years and had no banking experience. He was appointed chairman of Nat West bank and was then invited to become Governor of the Bank of England. I am sure we could envisage the Treasury Committee saying, “But you are a lawyer, and we want a banker or someone with financial services experience”. The current Governor’s predecessor, Baron George, went from Cambridge to the Bank of England and never left it. Again, can we not hear the Treasury Committee saying, “But you are an insider in the Bank of England. You have no experience anywhere else. How on earth”—
Stephen Hammond
Let me finish the point. The Treasury Committee might have said, “How on earth can you as an insider bring insight into the rest of the system?”
Mike Freer
I am grateful for your advice, Madam Deputy Speaker.
My worry is that the other place, in whatever form, will seek to flex its muscles and say, “If the Commons has a role in appointment and dismissal, why not us?” There could be a deadlock not only between the Executive and the House of Commons but between the House of Commons and the other place.
The Treasury Committee’s role is vital. I have no doubt that its role in expressing a voice in the appointment of a Governor of the Bank of England is crucial. Let me deal, however, with the issue of deadlock. In reality, if there were a deadlock, we are told that it could come down to an opinion being expressed on the Floor of the House. Given the potential for such an impasse to create instability in the markets, I remain unconvinced that this Bill provides proper safeguards to prevent this from occurring. In reality, a vote on the Floor of the House is likely to be whipped, and the Chancellor of the day would get his candidate. The Chancellor would have his way, but only after a delay and a bruising stand-off between the Committee and the Chancellor. How would the markets react if there were such a delay?
Jeremy Corbyn
Does the hon. Gentleman not accept that whoever was appointed would have greater legitimacy because they would have the authority of having been appointed by Members of Parliament and there would be a route of accountability to the appointment?
Mike Freer
That is one argument, but the contrary argument is that if the chosen candidate fails to carry the support of a substantial number of Members—there could be a majority of just one—there would be a credibility gap and the candidate would be damaged. What if the Chancellor were forced to withdraw a candidate or if the candidate chose to withdraw and we ended up with a second candidate or a third, eventually getting to the least worst candidate? That is not good governance; it is certainly not good for the credibility of the institution and cannot be good for the policy of the Bank of England.
People say, “Well, if there is a delay, it does not matter too much; it is more important to get the right person for the job.” Members will recall that when the former chairman—if that is the correct term—of the International Monetary Fund, Mr Strauss-Kahn, was forced to resign, the gap between his departure and the appointment of Mrs Lagarde caused a huge sense of drift in the international markets. That should cause the House to think twice about creating a scenario that could cause the same sense of drift here.
I have another objection to the Bill. We have already agreed to a fixed eight-year term for the Governor’s appointment. That is a difficulty in itself, because the eight-year period will not be coterminous with the fixed parliamentary terms, but if we continue to delay an appointment, a huge problem may be caused. Governors could be appointed mid-Parliament, which could lead to a politicisation of the appointment.
Joseph Johnson (Orpington) (Con)
I congratulate the hon. Member for Hayes and Harlington (John McDonnell) on his extraordinary luck in topping the private Members’ ballot not once but twice, and on choosing this important subject from among the many that must have competed for his attention.
The Bill, which requires the Treasury Committee to consent to the appointment or dismissal of the Governor of the Bank of England, goes to the heart of a very important constitutional question about the precise nature of the responsibility of, respectively, the Executive and the legislature in relation to public appointments. As we suffer the after-effects of a profound financial crisis, none of us needs to be reminded that this is a matter of interest not just to constitutional experts. The quality of regulation and supervision can have dramatic effects on rates of economic growth and on the wealth of nations.
Furthermore, as the hon. Member for Hayes and Harlington said, at a time of great change in the regulatory framework, which deliberately places the Bank of England at the very heart of our financial system, it is entirely right to double-check that we do, indeed, have in place appropriate scrutiny mechanisms for the Governor. The Financial Services Bill, which is now in the other place, gives the Bank considerable new powers in macro-prudential and micro-prudential regulation, and in the assessment and management of financial crises. Its governance should, indeed, be appropriate to these new powers, as the Treasury Committee has argued in its review of the Bank’s accountability to Parliament.
While I agree with the hon. Gentleman that the Bank must be accountable for its actions, I am reluctant to go as far as him, in calling for the radical step of providing the Treasury Committee with co-decision rights, in the form of a veto over appointment and dismissal. I will try not to linger over arguments that have already been very well made by many colleagues on the Government Benches, but let me reiterate that there has been an increase in accountability since the Bank acquired operational control over the setting of interest rates in 1997. While Bagehot’s dictum,
“We must not let daylight in upon magic”,
applied initially to the monarchy, it could have been said to have applied just as well to the Bank of England prior to 1997, but that is clearly not the case today.
Since 1997, the Treasury Committee has held regular pre-commencement hearings with the Governor, deputy governor and Monetary Policy Committee members, providing Parliament with a valuable opportunity to challenge key appointees before they begin work. Since 2009, these appointments have also been subject to open public competition. That was precisely what happened in 2009, when Paul Tucker became deputy governor, and this Government, like the previous Government, have agreed that that eminently sensible practice will continue.
The process of increasing accountability has carried on under this Government. Provisions in the Financial Services Bill for a non-renewable eight-year term, rather than the current system of a renewable five-year term, combined with internal reform of the Banks’ board arrangements, will further reinforce the Governor’s independence from the Government and the quality of oversight undertaken by the court of the Bank of England. The accountability deficit, which definitely existed, has therefore narrowed considerably over the past 15 years, and it will close still further if the Bill is enacted. Providing for a parliamentary veto over the appointment and dismissal of the Governor is not an ideal solution for closing what might remain of any accountability shortfall. I do not want to repeat what has already been said, in particular by my hon. Friends the Members for Wimbledon (Stephen Hammond) and for Great Yarmouth (Brandon Lewis) in their excellent speeches, but I worry that giving the Treasury Committee strong powers—in effect, powers of co-decision—in the appointment of the Governor might negatively impact on the Committee’s ability to scrutinise the Bank and hold the Governor to account for his performance. Put simply, Committee members will be unwilling to criticise the work of the Governor if they were complicit in his appointment in the first place. Having invested their own reputational capital in the appointment of the Governor, they will inevitably to some extent pull their punches in questioning him later. That is just human nature, and that is why we have a separation of powers in the Committee system.
Jeremy Corbyn
The hon. Gentleman is obviously experienced in these matters, but what about the parallel case of local government-appointed chief executives? Also, the fact that there is a joint appointment of the Metropolitan Police Commissioner by the London assembly, the Mayor and the Home Secretary does not fetter their ability to ask tough and robust questions, as they are required to do—and as we are required to do. I do not see why somebody who was involved in deciding who to appoint to a post will later not properly question what that appointee does. We are here because people have sent us here to ask tough questions.
Joseph Johnson
I thank the hon. Gentleman for his excellent intervention, but I would make an important distinction between being consulted and having the right of decision. That is a fundamental distinction and, on balance, arrangements that tilt towards giving the Select Committee system powers of decision over public appointments are going too far. The role of Select Committees might be better restricted to consultation than decision.
Kwasi Kwarteng
Thank you, Mr Deputy Speaker. I am suitably bullied and shall proceed as I intended.
The Bill raises important constitutional issues. We have a Parliament, we have the honour of sitting in the House of Commons, and we all know the struggles the House had in order to assert its primary function and its principal character as the legislature and main law-making organ of government. I am afraid that the Bill represents a further encroachment of the powers of the House of Commons. I am a Conservative. I happen to think that there should be a balance and distinction between the Executive and the legislature. As someone who has read a little of the history of this place, I also recognise that the position of the House of Commons in the constitution should be guarded, but this new development—this assertion that the Treasury Committee should have a power of veto or even a power of appointment over the Governor of the Bank of England— represents an unprecedented extension of the powers of this House.
Jeremy Corbyn
The hon. Gentleman makes an interesting point, but will he not care to look at the matter slightly differently? Yes, the Bill extends greater powers to the House of Commons, but in reality these are currently powers of patronage over which the House has no control. The Bill represents a very small encroachment on those powers of patronage, which are the Achilles heel and bedevilment of the British parliamentary system.
Kwasi Kwarteng
The hon. Gentleman makes a very good point, and he talks about patronage, which is a feature of our system, but if we are to talk about patronage, we should do what other Members in the debate have suggested and talk generally about the powers of the Select Committee system. It seems rather bizarre that in the Bill we should debate the appointment of a single public official, because we should debate—if that is what we want to do—the powers of Select Committees over other appointments.
Jeremy Corbyn
I agree that we should debate and, indeed, extend the powers of Select Committees, because I do not see any reason why, if a Select Committee is so minded, it should not be allowed to introduce legislation as well as to supervise appropriate appointments within its purview. That after all is one reason why we are elected to Parliament—in order to have some democratic influence over what in our society are largely undemocratic institutions.
Kwasi Kwarteng
I appreciate the hon. Gentleman’s remarks, but Mr Deputy Speaker, with your forbearance, I suggest that this debate is about the appointment of the Governor of the Bank of England. We can have more extensive and general debates about the appointment of other officials, but I think that our current system works well. I would not want to see, for example, the Archbishop of Canterbury hauled up in front of a religious affairs Committee for “ratification”.
Jeremy Corbyn
We can leave that very difficult problem of the Archbishop of Canterbury to one side by simply disestablishing the Church of England.
Kwasi Kwarteng
The right of veto proposed in the Bill, which apes the structures in the United States of America, is totally inappropriate and would take the constitution down a road that we have not travelled down before. My hon. Friend the Member for West Suffolk talked at length—but to the point, I must say—about the structures in the United States. It is important that we understand what goes on in the United States in order to understand what might happen here if the Bill becomes law.
We well understand the recent financial history of the world. I was working in the City in 2000—[Interruption.] I am not ashamed that I had a job outside this House. I do not think that it is something I should apologise for. I worked on a dealing room floor in 2000 at the time of the election in the United States. The financial uncertainty that prevailed in the markets as a consequence of the indecisive nature of that election, with the fight between Bush and Gore being taken up to the Supreme Court, was debilitating. I have first-hand experience of that.
I would not want to see a situation in this country in which a candidate to be the Governor of the Bank of England was scrutinised by the Treasury Committee and an impasse reached, resulting in days or even weeks without an appointment being secured. I know from first-hand experience that that is the worst message that could be sent to the financial markets in what are perilous and uncertain times. It would be irresponsible of us to delay or complicate the process in that way.
Jeremy Corbyn
Does the hon. Gentleman not feel that in his opposition to the Bill, he is in danger of treading down the rather dodgy road of saying that he supports some kind of technocratic Government, with democratically elected politicians becoming observers, rather than the participants and the controllers? Surely the whole point of the US constitution was that democratically elected politicians were trying to assert their power over the structures of society. I realise that there is much corruption in the US financial system, but surely the principles of the US constitution are not entirely wrong.
Kwasi Kwarteng
I agree with the hon. Gentleman. All I am suggesting is that the balance of powers is about right. We know that the House of Commons had a long struggle against King Charles I and the Executive. However, I think that the current constitutional balance is about right.
I do not think, as I suggested earlier, that the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Chief of the Defence Staff or the chairman of the BBC should be scrutinised by Select Committees, but that is a debate for another time. I cannot support this Bill because it would add an element of uncertainty to the financial markets, which is the last thing that we need at this time. I thank Members of the House for indulging me in my brief remarks.
Budget Resolutions and Economic Situation
Jeremy Corbyn Excerpts(13 years, 3 months ago)
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Jeremy Corbyn (Islington North) (Lab)
This was presented as some kind of intelligent Budget that was taking the country forward and improving economic growth and opportunities. The whole narrative, however, unravelled within half an hour, when it became obvious that the Budget involved an attack on pensioners with the reduction in their tax-free allowances. We saw that the cut in the highest rate of taxation to 45% meant 14,000 people getting another £40,000 a year, while a great friend of the Government, Bob Diamond of Barclays bank, will alone receive £300,000 a year out of this Budget.
In a couple of weeks’ time, the benefit cuts will kick in—the housing benefit cap will have a big effect in my constituency—and the cuts in tax credits will kick in at the same time. Hidden away on page 87 of the Red Book is the revelation of a further £10.6 billion cut in welfare to be taken at some point over the next four years—yet it is utterly unspecific about where it is coming from, and utterly specific about what is going to be hit—on top of the £40 billion taken out of welfare budgets in the 2010 Budget, and all the cuts that have gone on since.
My hon. Friend the Member for Sedgefield (Phil Wilson) eloquently criticised and attacked the Government’s proposals on regional pay—and I absolutely agree with him. This will lead to a free-for-all in public sector pay and will undermine the whole concept of national pay bargaining—something that has brought stability to the public sector over a long period.
The Secretary of State for Transport spoke about transport infrastructure in her opening speech. The hon. Member for Harrow East (Bob Blackman) would have us believe that everything is absolutely perfect in London. Under Mayor Johnson, however, fares have risen and continue to rise. As he is presiding over very high fares, he is storing up problems for the future. He is also trailing the idea of the fantasy island airport in the Thames. The Government seem to be embarrassed by that, so have delayed any rational discussion of airport policy in order not to embarrass Johnson ahead of the May mayoral election.
I suspect that at some point the Secretary of State will come to the House and announce that she needs a third runway at Heathrow after all. The airport’s policy requires that, and its massive recent advertising campaign will bring it about. I look forward to the somersaulting that will take place, and to the massive opposition that there will be to the proposal.
Johnson has spoken much about transport, but one of his first actions as Mayor was to cancel many of the step-free access programmes to stations in London, including three in my constituency: Finsbury Park, Highbury and Islington, and Archway. That has been copied in many other parts of London. To raise the fares on the buses and the underground, to reduce the opportunity for young people to travel, and to end former Mayor Livingstone’s good and progressive programme of improving step-free access to all our stations and of making all our transport system fully accessible is a very strange set of priorities. It was strange, too, that Mayor Johnson churlishly turned down the previous Labour Government’s offer to part-fund the electrification of the Barking to Gospel Oak section of the London overground, which would have assisted in creating a bypass route for freight in London and would have improved the service generally.
My constituency is in inner London, and the local situation is as follows. Unemployment is rising, and currently stands at 8% for adults and about 25% for youth. Today’s Islington Tribune picks up on a report cited in The Guardian that showed that the rate of unemployment among black young people has doubled since 2008 and is rising faster than for the rest of the community. The housing benefit cap is forcing many people in my constituency out of private rented accommodation—and there are still no controls whatever on the rents of those living in private rented accommodation.
I want a Budget that helps the poorest in this country, that creates jobs, that encourages local authorities to build council housing, and that shows that there is a sense of the reality experienced by those living in inner urban areas. If we do not provide jobs for young people, we will reap the whirlwind.
Pay and Consultants (Public Sector)
Jeremy Corbyn Excerpts(13 years, 4 months ago)
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Mr Slaughter
I suspect that it goes back even beyond then and that the tradition of public service and people doing jobs not primarily for the remuneration changed in the 1980s, when a lot of moral values went out of the window in the era of Gordon Gekko and Margaret Thatcher. We could talk about that all night if we wanted to, but I would rather talk about the current situation—and the issue is very contemporary. At 8 pm this evening on Radio 4, “File on 4” will cover tax avoidance through personal service companies. I think—I am never quite sure, with the BBC—that it will cover some of the same examples that I will give today. The brief for that programme begins:
“How strong is the government’s commitment to ending schemes set up to minimise tax? A number of schemes have proved popular in the private sector, including Employee Benefit Trusts. These have been used by football clubs for tax planning purposes, but are now in the sights of HMRC as it attempts to recoup what it sees as unpaid tax. But how widespread are these trust schemes and why are they so popular with companies that have large government contracts?
As the Treasury reviews tax avoidance by senior government employees, it has emerged that employees in other parts of the public sector are using payment schemes that keep them off the payroll. There is growing concern that paying public servants through personal service companies may be inappropriate.”
I have received briefings in advance of the debate from the TaxPayers Alliance and the Public and Commercial Services Union. The concern that these issues cause across the political spectrum is such that I could read a paragraph from each briefing, seamlessly, without affecting the flow of my argument. That is not something that can be said about every topic.
The Treasury review, to which the “File on 4” blurb refers, is the one announced in the main Chamber on 2 February by the Chief Secretary to the Treasury, in response to an urgent question from my right hon. Friend the Member for Newcastle upon Tyne East (Mr Brown). That, in turn, was a response to the exposé of the funding of the head of the Student Loans Company. The investigation at the time was, I think, by “Newsnight”, but I am now referring to a report in The Daily Telegraph. The investigation showed that the
“chief executive of the Student Loans Company, was paid through a private firm he had established rather than being paid direct—a tax avoidance mechanism which could reduce his income tax liability by £40,000 a year.
The disclosure threatens to undermine Coalition pledges to crack down on tax avoidance in the private sector and opens ministers up to accusations of double standards.”
Heaven forbid!
“Documents show the deal was signed off by David Willetts, the Universities minister, who said in a letter that it had been ‘agreed by the Chief Secretary to the Treasury’ Danny Alexander.
Mr Alexander insisted he did not know that the arrangement allowed him to avoid tax, and has ordered an urgent investigation across Whitehall to see if the practice is widespread.”
I am sure that many hon. Members remember that urgent question and that many took part in the debate. I could not be there, but I have of course looked at the Hansard and will outline what the review was said to entail. After, rightly, quoting the Treasury’s “Managing Public Money” guidance, which states that
“public sector organisations should avoid using tax advisers or tax avoidance schemes as any apparent savings can only be made at the expense of other taxpayers or other parts of the public sector”
and making the bold assertion that
“There is no place for tax avoidance in Government”,
the Chief Secretary said in relation to his review:
“I have asked the Treasury urgently to review the appropriateness of allowing public sector appointees to be paid through that mechanism”—
the one used by the chief executive of the Student Loans Company. After being interrupted, the Chief Secretary continued:
“I have also asked the Treasury officer of accounts to write to all accounting officers across Whitehall to remind them that all appointments should, in line with existing guidance, consider the wider cost of lost revenue to the Exchequer when considering value for money.”—[Official Report, 2 February 2012; Vol. 539, c. 1001.]
Jeremy Corbyn (Islington North) (Lab)
Will my hon. Friend not go further and say that anyone working directly for the public sector in any capacity should be employed by, and accountable to, the public sector? There should be utter transparency about their employment, and we should not have these ludicrous schemes that are probably to do with tax avoidance and lack of accountability.
Mr Slaughter
As always, my hon. Friend has summed up my 40-minute speech in about 40 words. I agree with him, but I will not sit down.
Communities and Local Government
Jeremy Corbyn Excerpts(13 years, 6 months ago)
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Stephen Gilbert (St Austell and Newquay) (LD)
May I start by thanking the many Members from all parts of the House who have paid tribute to the way in which the Backbench Business Committee handles these debates? As Forrest Gump put it, these pre-recess Adjournment debates are a bit like a box of chocolates:
“You never know what you’re gonna get.”
I just hope that my contribution does not stick in people’s throats.
All the Members and staff in this House will be looking forward to spending Christmas with their family and friends. We are looking forward to a traditional Christmas dinner and, if we are lucky, to a warm log fire. However, not all our country-folk are as fortunate. I would like to spend some time remembering the hundreds of people around the country who will not spend Christmas with their friends and family, and who will not enjoy gift giving and festive celebrations, but who will instead spend it on the streets, desperately hoping for passers-by to give them a few pennies or pounds.
Homelessness can have dire consequences. Just last month, I was saddened to hear about the death of two of my constituents who had been sleeping rough on the streets of Newquay. If we are to tackle the crisis of homelessness in our communities, we first need to understand better the causes. A recent report by the charity St Mungo’s highlighted the role that relationship breakdown, domestic violence and mental health problems can play in leading people to sleep rough on our streets. Indeed, relationship breakdown is the largest single trigger of rough sleeping cited by outreach workers. It is the reason for just under a half of all male rough sleepers. Almost a third of female rough sleepers have left home to escape domestic violence. The St Mungo’s study also found that just under half of rough sleepers have one or more mental health problems. Indeed, people who have slept rough are more than 15 times more likely to have a diagnosis of schizophrenia than the general population.
At this time of year, it is important that we recognise the work of charities such as St Mungo’s in helping people in desperate need. I hope that in his response the Minister will join me in paying tribute to the great work that such charities do in caring for rough sleepers and giving people a second chance. In particular, I would like to recognise the work of Cosgarne hall in St Austell in my constituency in helping local people.
Jeremy Corbyn (Islington North) (Lab)
The hon. Gentleman is making an excellent speech on the problems of homelessness. I join him in paying tribute to the work of St Mungo’s and many other charities. Does he acknowledge that one problem for such charities is that when they house people in hostels or relatively short-stay accommodation, they have enormous difficulties in finding move-on accommodation? It ends up with a blockage in the system because local authorities cannot cope with the numbers that charities refer to them. The Government must address that issue.
Stephen Gilbert
I agree entirely with the hon. Gentleman. We need to make the journey from presentation at the local authority through to hostel accommodation and supported accommodation much more seamless. I endorse entirely his recommendation.
St Petroc’s is another homelessness charity in Cornwall. It helps to provide food and shelter to the more than 100 rough sleepers across Cornwall. That will be particularly important in the cold days and months ahead. I have visited the St Mungo’s shelter in Brent, as I am sure has the hon. Member for Islington North (Jeremy Corbyn), and seen the work it does with homeless people. I was also lucky enough to visit the Outpost housing project in Newcastle recently, which works with young lesbian, gay and bisexual people who get kicked out of home after coming out. Like many hon. Members, I have also been to Centrepoint here in London.
From all those visits, one thing is clear: we are all just a few steps from being homeless, whether through losing our job or losing our partner. There is no typical homeless person and homelessness can and does affect people from all walks of life. That is why I am calling on the Government to consider the introduction of a right to shelter—a fundamental statement of principle that the Government will do more to help those who find themselves homeless, often through no fault of their own. It is simply not right that many people can go to their local authority for help and be turned away to sleep on the streets in the sixth largest economy in the world. As well as a right to shelter, there needs to be more recognition by drug, mental health and other service providers that they have a role to play in preventing homelessness. We need a more flexible, personal service that reflects the complexity of an individual’s life so that we can achieve the vital ambition of ending rough sleeping.
Over the past year, 102,000 people approached their local council and declared themselves homeless, an increase of 15% on the previous year. Tackling homelessness must remain a Government priority, so I welcome the fact that the spending review protected the £400 million of homelessness grant to local authorities and the voluntary sector, and the fact that the Government have prioritised help for single homeless people, providing £10 million to the charity Crisis to help in its good work. I also understand that a cross-departmental ministerial working group has been set up to address some of the complex causes of homelessness. However, much more can be done, and I reiterate my call for a basic right to shelter and sufficient funding to ensure that no individual is left with no option but to sleep rough.
I hope that my contribution today, though limited, will serve as a wake-up call to the Government to do more in the years that remain to them, so that in future we can all enjoy our Christmas holidays knowing that nobody will be spending them out in the cold.
Jeremy Corbyn (Islington North) (Lab)
I wish you a merry Christmas and a good new year, Madam Deputy Speaker.
I absolutely concur with what the hon. Member for St Austell and Newquay (Stephen Gilbert) has just said about homelessness. He put the case very well. Despite various changes in homelessness legislation over the years, I find that in London a depressingly large number of people are denied access to housing because they are single, because they are concealed homeless or because they do not have an identifiable physical condition or mental illness. They end up sleeping rough, sleeping in cars or in some cases just endlessly sofa-surfing among friends’ homes.
It is quite surprising that if we go down to “Occupy London Stock Exchange” outside St Paul’s, we find quite a lot of people living there who work, and for whom it is a place to live and survive. That is the reality of homelessness in this country. It is probably slightly worse in London than the rest of the country, although I acknowledge everything that the hon. Gentleman said about Cornwall and the south-west also having a considerable problem.
I wish to draw attention to a number of matters in this short contribution. I am proud to represent an inner-London constituency, and housing is the biggest issue that my constituents face by a long chalk. The borough as a whole has 13,000 families on the register of those who need somewhere much bigger to live, and we have a very large number of young people and children growing up in grossly overcrowded accommodation. In such accommodation it is impossible for all the children to maintain good health, do their homework and achieve anything at school. It is hardly surprising that there is so much family breakdown and underachievement in school.
I have people in my advice bureau in tears because they have three teenage siblings, sometimes of widely differing ages, sharing a bedroom and they are unable to study or do any homework, with all the obvious consequences. That leads to underachievement in school and to consequences for the rest of our society, as those young people feel excluded from the education system and end up in the criminal justice system because of what they get into.
We have to recognise that the overall rate of private renting in Britain is growing at the expense of owner-occupation. That gap is growing much faster in London, to the extent that in my constituency, privately rented accommodation now accounts for well over 30% of all households, owner-occupation is below 30% and the rest is made up of council and housing association accommodation and a very small number of co-operatives. Almost a third of my constituents live in private rented accommodation.
For young people who are in work—perhaps a young couple earning reasonable salaries—it is impossible to raise the deposit for a mortgage even if they can afford one. Their only chance of buying is if their parents are well-off enough and prepared to remortgage their own property to provide them with a deposit. The average age of first-time purchasers in London is now in the late 30s, if not the 40s. The choice between private rented, council rented and purchased accommodation that the Government talk about so blithely simply does not exist.
Even in my borough, which is doing its very best on housing matters, it is impossible to buy somewhere under a part-rent, part-purchase shared ownership scheme. A key worker needs to be on more than double the average London income to get anywhere near buying somewhere under shared ownership. That is a major problem.
The situation has very serious consequences for London. Where are the skilled workers of tomorrow whom we need in the public service? Where are the service workers of tomorrow? Where will such people come from unless we seriously address the need to examine all sectors of housing difficulties?
Stephen Gilbert
The hon. Gentleman makes an eloquent case, and I agree with much of it. Does he agree that one concern is that a pernicious generational divide might be emerging, broadly between the baby boomers—the housing “haves”—and generation X, for which, as he rightly says, home ownership is an aspiration that many will never be able to meet?
Jeremy Corbyn
Absolutely. Those who own and occupy their own homes in my constituency tend increasingly to be much older people. If they pass on or decide to sell their property, it is nearly always sold to a speculative owner who then rents it out privately. The rental income from those properties is absolutely enormous. There is therefore a very strong case for seriously increasing the powers, facilities, opportunities and abilities of local government, and for intervening in the question of housing markets as a whole.
I turn very briefly, because the debate is short, to the case of my own borough council. It is doing its best to address the borough’s housing issues, and it is building about 100 new council homes a year, largely on local authority housing land, disused garages, car parks and difficult places on estates. In some cases it has made agreements with preferred partners through housing associations, which are building on former industrial land, although there is not much of that, or on other sites. The council’s condition for joint participation with a housing association is that it maintains the existing tenure system—a tenancy for life—and rent structure. That means that the rents are not market-related but economically related, and are those that the local authority charges. That is having a good effect, and the council is doing its best, but unless we can address issues on a wider basis, with much greater Government investment in council housing for rent, the needs of my borough will not be met any more than those of any other borough.
I have two points to make in the last 42 seconds that I have. The first is about housing benefit. Will the Government raise the cap on housing benefit, so that the new rent levels that are imposed on people do not force them out of their homes? I have lost count of the number of people who have come to my advice bureau about to lose their home because of the housing benefit cuts and rent increases.
Finally, the Labour mayoral candidate Ken Livingstone has proposed the concept of a London living rent. We have had a London living wage, and it is time to have a London living rent to be fair to people who are forced to live in privately rented accommodation by making it affordable, long-term and permanent.
Duncan Hames
The imposition of development plans that are not owned by the local community was exactly what we had in the regional spatial strategies—the grand regional plans left to us by the previous Government —and I applaud this Government for abandoning them. The RSS in the south-west of England never actually took legal force, and I am glad that it will never do so. It is important that people feel that decisions are made locally and democratically.
In Wiltshire, the council has not yet adopted its core strategy—its local plan—and we of course await the final version of the national planning policy framework in the spring. In the interim, our system is not robust enough to balance the competing interests in the planning process, and development too often seems inevitably set to proceed.
Jeremy Corbyn
For the hon. Gentleman’s information, I was born in Chippenham, thus I have an interest in it. I applaud what he is trying to do. Out-of-town developments not only disfigure beautiful landscapes in a beautiful area; they also create vastly increased traffic and environmental consequences for everyone else, as well as a complete hollowing out and destruction of the town centre, which becomes the home for charity shops and banks—and very little else.
Duncan Hames
I completely agree with the hon. Gentleman, and I am delighted to learn of his interest in Chippenham. In fact, it was that very concern about the hollowing out of the town centre that prompted the resignation last week of the chair of the Chippenham Vision group, who had sought, in a voluntary capacity, to work with different parts of the community to build a vision for the future of our town centre. However, that was fundamentally undermined by the decision to grant a dramatic increase in the retail floor space of an edge-of-town superstore, which will no doubt be expanding into non-food items, threatening the businesses in our town centre, to which I shall return later.
Given the Government’s new presumption in favour of sustainable development, and given the record of other councils in agreeing permissions on unallocated “white land”, which does not benefit from the protections in the draft framework, I see a need for robust mechanisms to ensure the rigorous application of that presumption according to clear tests. I was encouraged by a recent response that I received from the Under-Secretary of State, Baroness Hanham, who, without pre-empting the consultation responses, acknowledged that the meaning of “sustainable development”, as well as its application, was an area where the Government needed to look again more closely in the consultation. I would suggest that a crucial part of any mechanism for deciding whether an application qualifies for that presumption should be input from the local community. The question should not end up being decided in the courts through case law, or by planning inspectors. If that happens, the Government will not achieve their objective of greater localism.
Instead, I suggest that we should look to the examples offered by communities in Wiltshire that are working with the Government’s framework for neighbourhood plans in the Localism Act 2011. Woolley, in Bradford-on-Avon, and Malmesbury, in north Wiltshire, are two communities that are seizing this opportunity. In their impressive document, “Plan for Woolley 2026”, residents have come together in an entirely voluntary capacity as Friends of Woolley to draw up a framework for Woolley’s physical, community and economic development for the next 25 years. Meanwhile in Malmesbury, Councillor Simon Killane is spearheading the neighbourhood planning pilot scheme. That includes a neighbourhood forum, which will bring residents and community organisations to meet potential developers to discuss their plans and what they might mean for the local community and the infrastructure it needs. Those plans will be assessed against the neighbourhood plan, based on residents’ own aspirations and ratified by a local referendum.
I was pleased to read Baroness Hanham’s assurance that such neighbourhood plans will have to be “given a fair hearing” against other local authority plans or, indeed, the national planning policy framework. The 2011 Act gives neighbourhood plans statutory force. As she points out, such plans will have to be
“in general conformity with strategic policies in the local plan”.
However, the word “general” is very important. It reminds me of the old planning policy statement 12, whose definition stated that
“the test is of general conformity and not conformity.”
That means that it should be possible for a neighbourhood plan to conflict with land allocations in existing core strategies or local plans, as long as the general aims of development can be achieved, perhaps by bringing different land into use. The Government need to be clear about what “sustainable development” is taken to mean in that context. In my view, sustainability encompasses the impact of development on carbon emissions, travel-to-work journeys, the conservation of wildlife and the preservation of our countryside.
I would not oppose housing development, but I believe that local plans need to propose development that accommodates the needs of the local population and the understood demographic changes that are envisaged, and not be about accommodating outflow or overflow from other towns. To do so would be to allow a council’s settlements to become dormitories, which is something that we are vigorously fighting against in Wiltshire. Members should be aware that the Select Committee on Communities and Local Government is due to publish its report on the draft national planning policy framework tomorrow. I look forward to reading its recommendations and contributing to further debates on this subject, so that we might harness the power of genuinely local decision making in our planning system.
Public Service Pensions
Jeremy Corbyn Excerpts(13 years, 6 months ago)
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Danny Alexander
The Minister for the Cabinet Office and Paymaster General tells me that there were 14 meetings in which discussions took place between the civil service employers and unions, and that the general secretary of the PCS did not turn up to any of them. That is a deeply disappointing position to be in. I hope very much that the PCS will rethink its position, because it will not have the support of its members—as that ballot showed—and it will certainly not have the support of the general public if it chooses to inflict further industrial action after an agreement has been reached.
Jeremy Corbyn (Islington North) (Lab)
Will the Chief Secretary to the Treasury stop trying to demonise the PCS, and recognise that it is representing its members, which it has a democratic right to do, and that its general secretary has attended a great many meetings? According to the PCS’s calculations, the average civil servant will pay £63 a month more to work for longer to get less. He has twice told the House that billions are being saved, but that can be done only at the expense of hard-working public sector workers. Is he really proud of this?
Danny Alexander
I am very proud indeed that we have managed to achieve something that Members on both sides of the House thought would be very difficult, if not impossible, to do—namely, to reach agreement between the Government and many of the trade unions on the long-term reform that is necessary to ensure that public sector workers continue to get the best possible pension schemes long into the future. The previous arrangements were unsustainable, but this one is sustainable, which is why I am confident in offering the House a 25-year guarantee that no party in the House will need to revisit these arrangements over that period.
Prevention of Nuclear Proliferation
Jeremy Corbyn Excerpts(13 years, 7 months ago)
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Mr Hoban
We are acting under powers that were put on the statute book by the previous Government. My hon. Friend will be aware that there is a licensing regime in place, and some licences have already been issued on a general basis—there are applications that I shall perhaps turn to a little later when dealing with specific examples. Permission has been given on a general basis to enable transactions to be completed, for example, so there is a regime in place. However, if my hon. Friend has particular concerns, I would encourage him to engage with Treasury officials to take them forward. I know that my hon. Friend, as chairman of the British-Iranian all-party group, has a clear interest in this subject. If there are particular concerns of which businesses are aware, I encourage them to talk to us about them.
Jeremy Corbyn (Islington North) (Lab)
The Minister has been speaking for about 10 minutes, during which he has come from expressing concerns about Iran’s nuclear activities to discussing financial regulations. He would, however, recognise that Iran remains a signatory to the nuclear non-proliferation treaty. Does the Minister not think that a serious diplomatic initiative by all members subscribed to the nuclear non-proliferation treaty would be a more fruitful way of dealing with the issue, rather than descending to what some of us fear will be a much more serious situation, including possible military conflict with Iran?
Mr Hoban
The purpose of the order is not to enable debate of the broader issues of engagement with Iran, but to put in place financial restrictions against Iran. As I said earlier, there is a twin-track approach of both engagement and sanctions, where appropriate. That is what we are doing. I think we would all want Iran to come back and engage in this process; we need to find a mechanism for that to happen.
Let me return to explaining why we have imposed the restrictions in the order. Iranian banks play a crucial role in providing financial services to individuals and entities within Iran’s nuclear and ballistic missile programmes. Many Iranian banks have already been sanctioned by the UN and the EU for their role in Iran’s proliferation-sensitive activities. However, experience under existing financial sanctions against Iran demonstrates that targeting individual Iranian banks is no longer sufficient. Once one bank is targeted, a new one can step into its place.
Taking this action will also protect the UK financial sector from the risk of being used unwittingly to facilitate activities that support Iran’s nuclear and ballistic missile programmes. As I said to the hon. Member for Islington North (Jeremy Corbyn), the action is in line with the Government’s dual-track strategy of pressure and engagement with Iran. The aim of the pressure track is to encourage Iran to begin serious and meaningful negotiations.
Let me explain the specifics of the order. It was made under schedule 7 to the Counter-Terrorism Act 2008, which provides the Treasury with the power to give a range of restrictions to UK credit and financial institutions in response to certain risks to the UK national interest. The power enables the Treasury to respond to proliferation risks, money laundering and terrorist-financing risks, or where the Financial Action Task Force calls for counter-measures. The restrictions in the order sit alongside sanctions already imposed on Iran by the UN and the EU, but go further, as they prohibit additional activities.
The restrictions came into force at 3 pm on 21 November 2011; shortly after that, the Treasury published a series of documents on its public website to alert the financial sector to the restrictions and to provide detailed guidance on their implementation. Those documents were also e-mailed to more than 13,000 subscribers to our e-mail alert system. In previous debates on these measures, one concern raised by the Opposition was about how we ensure that people are made aware of the restrictions.
Jeremy Corbyn (Islington North) (Lab)
In this brief debate, we should think very carefully about the long-term implications of the path on which we are apparently setting out today. I recognise much of what was said by the hon. Members for Northampton South (Mr Binley) and for Wyre and Preston North (Mr Wallace) about human rights abuses in Iran. I draw attention to early-day motion 2526 concerning trade unionists in Iran, and there are human rights abuses against people of the Baha’i faith, Kurdish people and others. I am extremely well aware of the abuse of human rights that takes place in Iran and of the determination of many people, including working-class people, trade unionists and intellectuals, to do something about their society and to take part in that political debate. We should recognise that a lively, if robust and sometimes very dangerous, political debate is going on in Iran.
We should also think carefully about the rhetoric we use when we talk about Iran. Iran is an inheritor of the Persian tradition, a place of enormous civilisation and culture, and a place of enormous unity when faced with an external threat, as my Friend the Member for Newport West (Paul Flynn) pointed out. We should not denigrate the whole history of the Persian people and the contribution that they have made to history while ignoring our own scandalous role in their history, from the attempts at exploiting oil, which eventually led to the formation of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, which became BP, through to the coup in 1952 inspired by the British and the CIA. We do not have clean hands in the history of Iran, and we should have some humility when dealing with the situation there.
Jonathan Edwards (Carmarthen East and Dinefwr) (PC)
To add to that point, does the hon. Gentleman agree that the last thing we should try to do now is demonise Iran?
Jeremy Corbyn
Absolutely. I sat in the Chamber in the run-up to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, when the House indulged in an orgy of demonisation of a particular country. That created a sufficient head of steam in public opinion that was deemed by the Governments of the day to endorse an invasion of those countries. I remind the House that 10 years later we are still in Afghanistan, we have spent £9 billion or £10 billion on wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and there is no end in sight.
The reason the Minister gave for proposing the Financial Restrictions (Iran) Order 2011 to the House was that this is a banking order—a finance order—but he relied heavily on the IAEA reports and the issue of Iran’s nuclear capacity and nuclear capability. I stand here as somebody who is passionately opposed to nuclear power and nuclear weapons in equal measure. I believe nuclear power to be intrinsically environmentally unsustainable and dangerous, and I think nuclear weapons are absolutely immoral. However, I recognise that in law there is a distinction in that any country is allowed to develop nuclear power; it is not allowed to develop nuclear weapons.
Iran remains a signatory to the nuclear non-proliferation treaty. Last year’s NPT review conference came to the conclusion that the best way of bringing about a nuclear-free world—a big step—would be the creation of a nuclear-free middle east. That would, of course, mean a mechanism for negotiation involving Israel and Iran. Israel, I remind the House, has 200 nuclear warheads and the rhetoric of the Israeli leaders is strongly critical of Iran. We need to bring about a mechanism, impossible within the NPT while Israel remains outside it, and possible only within the terms of a nuclear weapons convention. I hope the Government will put considerable efforts into promoting a nuclear weapons convention, and retaining a diplomatic link and debate, negotiation and discussion within Iran.
There are those who say that the war has not started yet and there is nothing to worry about. I remind them of a number of facts. One is that the US fleet in the Gulf is enhanced and enormous. There is a US base in Bahrain. Iran shot down and captured a drone missile that had apparently strayed over the border or been deliberately sent over it, depending which narrative we care to follow. A serious and significant number of assassinations and explosions have occurred in Iran over the past few weeks, with greater and greater intensity. I do not know who is causing those explosions. It could be foreign forces; it could be internal opposition; it could be all kinds of people, but there are clearly enormous tensions. Isolating Iran in the current circumstances is more dangerous than anything else I can think of.
Martin Horwood (Cheltenham) (LD)
The hon. Gentleman is making some interesting points, but I am not clear whether he opposes a tougher sanctions regime. Surely a tougher regime is the peaceful means by which we will persuade Iran not to develop nuclear weapons, and therefore avoid the higher risk of another state intervening in a more aggressive and violent way.
Jeremy Corbyn
What I want is engagement and recognition, first, of the human rights abuses in Iran, which are clearly immoral and wrong; a great deal of attention has been drawn to those. Secondly, serious engagement is needed that does not lead us to a descent into war with all the incalculable consequences of that, not to mention very high oil prices for the rest of the world. Today’s debate is, to me, one staging post in the process. Whether the sanctions will have any effect I have no idea. I suspect they will have very limited effect, particularly as my right hon. Friend the Member for Blackburn (Mr Straw) pointed out that they are being imposed by Britain with the United States, virtually in isolation from the rest of the world.
I hope we have learned lessons about the folly and stupidity of getting involved in wars that allegedly are for our own protection, but in reality are often seen to be part of western expansionism and the assertion of US power within the whole region. We are here to make a decision on one fairly small aspect. I hope we can be a little more careful and sensible about this and recognise that there are very many people in Iran who will be united, as my Friend the Member for Newport West pointed out, in opposition to any foreign intervention and any invasion of Iran. Perhaps it is those people whom we should be thinking about now, rather than preparing for yet another war.
Robert Halfon (Harlow) (Con)
I welcome this debate because, contrary to what has just been said, I believe that Iran is in essence the new Soviet Union of the middle east. It supports terrorism. We know well its strong backing of Hezbollah in Lebanon. It supplies Hezbollah with the missiles and the finance that it needs to destabilise the region and to fire attack missiles on Israel. Iran also supports Hamas, and we know what Hamas has done in Gaza, overthrowing the more moderate Palestinian Authority, running a totalitarian mini-state known as Hamastan in Gaza, stopping moves towards peace and regularly firing missiles on Israel.
Iran has also undermined democratic states. Not long ago it fired missiles on to the Kurdish regional Government. It is supporting the Syrian Government of President Assad and his crackdown on the recent anti-Government protests. It has provided the Syrian authorities with equipment, advice and technical know-how to help curtail and monitor internal communications. It has provided material assistance in the form of riot and crowd dispersal material, as well as military training for Syrian troops. Hamas, Hezbollah and Syria are in essence proxies for Iran. We well know that Iran has sent suicide bombers into Iraq and attacked our troops.
All this would be bad enough were it not for Iran’s nuclear programme. As has been said, the development of the nuclear bomb in Iran is incredibly concerning. The IAEA report has been highlighted and clearly shows that Iran has been covertly developing the technology needed to weaponise nuclear material. If we think the current Iranian regime is extreme, its so-called more moderate predecessor said that it would be okay to use a nuclear bomb in the middle east against Israel, because if a few million are killed in the process, it does not matter for the wider good.
Jeremy Corbyn
The hon. Gentleman mentioned nuclear weapons. Does he not have concerns that Israel has 200 nuclear warheads and is not a signatory to the nuclear non-proliferation treaty? Does he not think a nuclear weapons convention including Israel would be a helpful step forward in the region?
Robert Halfon
I am happy for any nuclear convention to reduce nuclear weapons in the middle east, but the crucial point that the hon. Gentleman misses is that Israel is a democracy and Iran is a dictatorship.
Andrew Percy (Brigg and Goole) (Con)
I rise to support the motion and the words of the Minister. Some of the shadow Minister’s comments about wanting to see an international extension were perfectly reasonable, but I do not think that that alone should have prevented us from acting on our own, and acting with the United States and Canada was entirely correct.
A great deal has been said that I do not wish to repeat, although I endorse what my hon. Friend the Member for Harlow (Robert Halfon) said about comparisons between Israel’s having nuclear weapons and the acquisition of those weapons by the despotic regime in Iran. We are talking about two completely different Governments and to try to mix them up is unhelpful, to be polite about it.
I do not think that anybody who has spoken today has in the slightest attempted to denigrate or insult the history of Iran or the Iranian people. The issue that we all have is with the Iranian regime; the debate has been consensual in that we have all expressed our outrage at what that does to its own people. I do not think that those who urge us to go further are in any way seeking to denigrate the Iranian people or their history.
Jeremy Corbyn
I appreciate that the hon. Gentleman is not trying to denigrate anybody, but unfortunately the history of interventions is that, however supportive people are or odious the regime is, we end up with an awful lot of wholly innocent civilians being killed, as happened in Afghanistan and Iraq. None of us wants to see that in Iran.
Andrew Percy
I do not think that anybody wants to see conflict in Iran; more importantly, none of us wants Iran to acquire a nuclear weapon at all. We are on the same page on that one.
Andrew Percy
That is a different debate for a different day, but I would rather that nuclear weapons were in the hands of the United States or this country than in the Iranian regime’s, as it is currently constituted.
The hon. Member for Hayes and Harlington (John McDonnell) commented on the International Atomic Energy Agency report—[Interruption.] I apologise for my croaky throat, Madam Deputy Speaker; it is difficult to get my words out. The hon. Gentleman’s conclusions were slightly different from those drawn by others. I want to remind him of a couple of things in that report. Crucially, the report found evidence that Iran has procured
“nuclear related and dual use equipment and materials by military related individuals and entities”;
has developed
“undeclared pathways for the production of nuclear material”;
has acquired
“nuclear weapons development information and documentation from a clandestine nuclear supply network”;
and has worked
“on the development of an indigenous design of a nuclear weapon including the testing of components”.
Further evidence is provided by the reports that we have seen about the high explosive test sites, the neutron initiator and the uranium enrichment, which all prove that Iran is closer than ever to a nuclear weapons programme.
There has also been the non-co-operation with the IAEA, of course—we know that inspectors are consistently barred from entering Iran. In some cases they have been expelled; in 2007, 38 inspectors were expelled. We can read a great deal into the response of the Iranian regime to the IAEA findings; it simply dismisses them as having been written by people acting on behalf of the United States or its western allies.
I do not think that the report’s conclusions were quite as the hon. Member for Hayes and Harlington suggested. We should be extremely concerned. It is absolutely right that we act as we have been acting and show leadership on the issue. Yes, we would like other European countries to come on board, but acting as we have, along with the United States and Canada, is right for this country and what we are all trying to achieve—Iran never getting hold of a nuclear weapon. I associate myself with many of the comments made in this debate and I endorse the position of the Government.
Eurozone Crisis
Jeremy Corbyn Excerpts(13 years, 8 months ago)
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Mr Hoban
That takes us back to the answer I gave to the hon. Member for Rhondda (Chris Bryant)—that when it comes to discussions about future institutional changes in the EU, we need to ensure that Britain’s interests are safeguarded. Matters such as competition, financial services and the single market should be dealt with by all 27 member states, and we will be relentless in our pursuit of the national interest in that context.
Jeremy Corbyn (Islington North) (Lab)
Does the Minister agree that condemnation of the Greek people’s right to have a referendum is entirely incorrect and that they do have that right to hold a referendum; that the people of Greece have suffered greatly through cuts, wage reductions, cuts to pensions and everything else—and they are due to suffer even more—and that it is entirely wrong for the eurozone leaders to try to impose a Government of so-called national unity on the people of Greece to drive through an austerity package without giving the people a choice to decide themselves on their own future?