Christmas Adjournment

Jeremy Lefroy Excerpts

Tuesday 20th December 2016 Commons Chamber

[Jeremy Lefroy (Stafford) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to follow the right hon. Member for Leicester East (Keith Vaz), even though I am an Arsenal supporter, like you, Mr Speaker. I congratulate Leicester City on their fine achievement earlier this year.

At the beginning of last week, I was in Berlin with the Parliament choir and it was a great honour to sing in the Bundestag building. It is with great sadness that we heard of the terrible event last night. I am sure that all members of the Parliament choir and others who were in Berlin at the time—my hon. Friend the Member for Thirsk and Malton (Kevin Hollinrake) was there with the Communities and Local Government Committee—will wish to pass on our condolences to the people of Germany.

Stafford has this year seen some great developments economically. General Electric, which took over the business of Alstom in Stafford and elsewhere, has almost completed the construction of its first new factory, which contains its automation business. After the referendum, it decided to go ahead with the construction of its second new factory in Stafford, on the Redhill business park, and that will deal with its high-voltage direct current business. Stafford is a world leader in that regard and I welcome that development.

I also welcome a Chinese institution’s investment in the site of the former campus of Staffordshire University, which it vacated in order to go to Stoke-on-Trent earlier this year. A new university will be established in Stafford, alongside an international school. I welcome the continuance of higher education in Stafford provided by Keele University through its medical school and, indeed, by Staffordshire University, which maintains another campus in the town.

It was announced this year that the Ministry of Defence would further expand its site in Stafford to welcome more servicemen and women in the coming years, and I very much welcome that. Stafford has a great tradition of hosting the armed forces, both the RAF and the Army, and the arrival last year of two new regiments—1 Signals and 16 Signals—to join 22 Signals has made a great and positive difference to our town.

Our IT sector in Stafford is expanding, as are many small and medium-sized businesses. As it is Christmas time, I want to pay particular tribute to those who run small and medium-sized businesses. Year in, year out, those people work 60, 70 or 80 hours a week running businesses, employing people and paying their taxes. They are not much sung about, and they often have to deal with a lot of hassle, but they get on with the job of providing jobs and, to a large extent, they keep this country going. More than 50% of jobs in this country are created and sustained by the small and medium-sized businesses in all our constituencies.

I want to say a little about the sustainability and transformation programme for Stoke-on-Trent and Staffordshire, which I have raised in the House on a couple of occasions. I approach this in a positive spirit. We need a transformation of our care, and there are many good ideas in the programme. I wish that the leadership of the programme had engaged more with Members of Parliament; we have had one or two meetings, but sadly the suggestions that I put forward were not taken up. I believe that the leadership needs to listen much more to Members of Parliament as they take this further forward.

I have already mentioned the suggestion that one of the accident and emergency departments in Stoke and Staffordshire should close. I believe that that is absolutely wrong and will not benefit my constituents or those of the other Members of Parliament in Stoke-on-Trent and Staffordshire. I will take the matter up, as I did with the Secretary of State this morning, at every opportunity. However, I believe that some positive work is being done, and I urge those involved to engage with local Members of Parliament.

The issue that really concerns me, as it does a lot of Members, is social care. Staffordshire has been warned this week that social care homes in the private sector across the county are being closed because it is simply unaffordable for them to continue. That is partly a consequence of matters that have gone on for quite a long time, but it is partly a consequence of the introduction of the living wage. We have to bear in mind that most of those who work in the care sector are on approximately the minimum wage. They have, rightly, received a pay rise through the living wage, but there has not been a corresponding increase in the amount paid to care homes for the provision of services.

In Staffordshire, the better care fund has not worked as it should have done this year. Fifteen million pounds was supposed to go into improving care, but it has been retained in the health service. That happened for understandable reasons, but it has caused a great shortfall for the county council. I hope that that will be remedied, to some extent, for the coming year.

We now face a crisis in the funding of social care—indeed, in the funding of health and social care—and we need a long-term solution. Many Members from all parts of the House have raised this on numerous occasions, and I have certainly done so over the last two or three years. The time has come for action. We cannot have more sticking-plaster remedies. The announcements made by the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government last week were very welcome, and I support them, but they are sticking plasters in the context of the sums of money required.

I want briefly to mention transport in my area. I have asked the Secretary of State for Transport to meet me to discuss the road system in Staffordshire, particularly in Stafford. I have done so for a couple of reasons. Although I welcome the improvements that will shortly be made to the M6 between junctions 13 and 15, those improvements, which will take at least two years, will inevitably have a knock-on impact on other roads in the area. We need to ensure that those improvements are made in the most efficient and effective way, with the least disruption.

A much more serious matter is the potential for disruption that may be caused by the construction of HS2 phase 2a if the HS2 Bill passes through the Houses of Parliament in the coming 12 to 15 months. The line cuts across all the major north-south transport routes in Staffordshire, which are the national north-south routes in the west of the country, and unless we think about this and alternatives are planned well in advance—how it will be planned, when road closures will happen, when work is to be done—there will be chaos for not just a couple of years, but many years. I urge the Government to think about that in advance. They may say, “Well, it hasn’t passed Parliament yet, and we can’t do anything about it until then”, but that is absolutely not the approach to take. We must think about this now, because the consequences—for not just Staffordshire and Stoke, but the entire west midlands and north-west economy—could be quite serious.

I would like to see progress on other issues that I have raised in the House during the past year. The first is the issue of hoists in hotel rooms for disabled people. It was a surprise to me when my constituent Daniel Baldawi pointed out that it is not a requirement even for major hotels and chains to have hoists in one or two rooms so that disabled people can enjoy the benefits of staying in them. I have written to many chains: some have come back to me with very positive replies, but others have not done so. I would like it to be standard in every hotel constructed in this country—indeed, hotels already in existence if they are above a certain size—to have hoists available in some rooms.

Following the tragic loss of two lives in Stafford two years ago, I have raised the issue of fireworks and the inspection of facilities containing fireworks. It is quite extraordinary that responsibility for inspecting facilities that can contain almost as much explosive, or gunpowder, as Guy Fawkes had when he wanted to blow up this place are regulated by local authorities. Local authorities may be very good at other things, but they simply do not have such expertise. I want any major facility— with upwards of a few tens or hundreds of kilos of explosives—to be regulated by the Health and Safety Executive or possibly the fire and rescue authorities, which have the experience to make judgments on such matters.

A couple of weeks ago in Westminster Hall, we had an excellent debate, which I was privileged to lead, on the ivory trade. The request was made to the Government that the United Kingdom should end the trade in ivory. I spent many years of my life in Tanzania, which has suffered a huge depletion in the number of its elephants, so this is a very personal matter for me. I know that the Government are looking at it and will hold a consultation early in the new year, but I hope that they will broaden the scope of the consultation so that all trade in ivory ceases, with the few sensible exceptions that were raised in the debate.

The final issue that I have raised in the House during the past year is that of employment and support allowance for those in the work-related activity group. A lot of colleagues on both sides of the House have concerns about this. The Government promised to come up with measures that would to some extent compensate for the loss of the additional money for those joining that group from April, but we have yet to hear about concrete measures that I believe will be satisfactory. I hope the Government will take another look at this issue.

I want very briefly to mention international development, particularly in relation to Syria. With colleagues on the International Development Committee, I was privileged to see the work that the UK Government are doing with the incredibly generous Governments and people of Lebanon and Jordan, as well of those of Turkey, Egypt and Iraq, which we were not able to visit, who are hosting millions of refugees and providing education for their children—so much so, that in Lebanon there will shortly be more Syrian refugee children than Lebanese children in its state schools. That is an example of the excellent work done through the international development budget. It has received a lot of criticism in the press in recent days and it is quite right that we should investigate all those issues, but we should never forget the tremendous work done through that budget and the support given to the marvellous people who help those who are in the most difficult of circumstances.

With that, Mr Speaker, I wish you and all the staff a very happy Christmas and a blessed new year.