Diego Garcia Military Base
Debate between Jerome Mayhew and Lindsay Hoyle(2 weeks, 3 days ago)
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Mr Speaker
Shaking your head and making comments —that is certainly not the example I want to see when I am looking to keep the House calm. I do not need the backchat; that has been going on for a while.
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Debate between Jerome Mayhew and Lindsay Hoyle(3 weeks, 3 days ago)
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Jerome Mayhew (Broadland and Fakenham) (Con)
Greater Anglia supports economic growth in the east of England with modern, quiet, fast trains, paid for by £2 billion of private sector investment. Its service is the most punctual in the country, it is popular with its passengers, and it is run so efficiently that instead of costing the taxpayer, it pays money into the Treasury. It is currently train operator of the year. Greater Anglia knows that nationalisation is coming, and it has offered to extend its operations to allow the Government to focus on the worst performing operators first. Why did the Government refuse? Is the Secretary of State focused on improving the lives of passengers, or is it an ideological determination to put the unions back in charge of the railways?
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Debate between Jerome Mayhew and Lindsay Hoyle(2 months, 1 week ago)
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Jerome Mayhew (Broadland and Fakenham) (Con)
We are told that nationalisation is the answer to improving passenger rail performance. If that is the case, surely it would make sense to start by nationalising the worst performing operators. CrossCountry comes last out of all train operating companies for passenger satisfaction and it is not complying with its obligations. The Secretary of State could call in that contract, so why is it not the first operator to be nationalised under GBR?
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Debate between Jerome Mayhew and Lindsay Hoyle(3 months, 3 weeks ago)
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Jerome Mayhew (Broadland and Fakenham) (Con)
I am very interested by that last answer, because the Government do think that nationalisation will reduce the cost of rail travel. What lessons has the Secretary of State learned from the SNP’s nationalisation of ScotRail?
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Debate between Jerome Mayhew and Lindsay Hoyle(4 months, 4 weeks ago)
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Jerome Mayhew (Broadland and Fakenham) (Con)
I, too, welcome the Secretary of State to her post, and look forward to helping her to do an excellent job.
As we can see following the last few days of flooding, changing weather patterns are damaging our roads and increasing potholes. The last Government allocated an additional £8 billion for road improvements, paid for by the cancellation of the northern leg of HS2, yet all we have seen from Labour is a commitment of £1.8 billion for this financial year. Will the Secretary of State commit to matching the additional £8 billion for road maintenance?
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Debate between Jerome Mayhew and Lindsay Hoyle(6 months, 2 weeks ago)
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Jerome Mayhew (Broadland and Fakenham) (Con)
We will all miss John Prescott. He was a titan of our politics, and a man not afraid to come out swinging for what he believed in.
The figures show that capital spending on transport is not rising under Labour; it will fall by 3.1% in real terms next year. We have huge tax rises and a more than £70 billion increase in tax. Labour’s black hole myth has been debunked by the Office for Budget Responsibility, the Financial Times and the Institute for Fiscal Studies—all real economists—so why the cut in capital spending? The Secretary of State was out of her depth when she negotiated a £9,000 pay rise for ASLEF train drivers with nothing in return. Was she out of her depth when she negotiated with her own Chancellor?
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Debate between Jerome Mayhew and Lindsay Hoyle(7 months, 1 week ago)
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Jerome Mayhew (Broadland and Fakenham) (Con)
After receiving millions from the trade union paymasters for its election, Labour is rewarding them with a package of 1970s, French-style workplace regulations, which will increase the cost of doing business in the UK to the tune of £5 billion a year, disproportionately falling on SMEs. That is before the £25 billion body blow to business delivered by the Chancellor yesterday in her anti-business Budget of broken promises. Does the Minister agree with the Office for Budget Responsibility that this Government’s decisions will make workers poorer, not richer, as increased employment taxes are passed on in lower wages, and that business investment will fall, not rise, as a direct result of this Government?