Budget Resolutions

Debate between Jim Cunningham and Jeremy Lefroy

Tuesday 30th October 2018 Commons Chamber

[Jeremy Lefroy (Stafford) (Con)]

Our country faces some immense challenges and this Budget—from a fine Chancellor, who I hope stays for many more Budgets—does good work in tackling a number of them, but there are several others that I want to address and that some colleagues have touched on.

The first challenge to which the Chancellor and the Prime Minister have risen is the need to fund healthcare properly. A number of Members across the House have regularly made the case for an increase of about £20 billion a year to bring our spending in line with German or French levels, and this is happening. But I agree with the point made yesterday by the hon. Member for Bassetlaw (John Mann)—that is, that we need to pay for this. It should not just come from additional borrowing, and we should continue to look at using hypothecated or other forms of revenue, particularly when it comes to social care.

A second challenge that the Chancellor has met—as, indeed, have employers up and down the country—is the need to increase and maintain employment, and to reduce unemployment to the lowest level in decades. The unemployment rate has fallen from 8% to 4%. In many constituencies, including mine, it has fallen much further than that, but every person out of work is still one too many. It is also welcome that on the whole jobs are gradually becoming better paid.

The third area in which the challenge is being met is defence and our global role, particularly in international development. The UK is one of the only major countries in the world—if not the only one—to maintain both the 2% defence commitment under NATO and the 0.7% official development assistance, and I welcome that. In difficult times, we can be proud that the UK will meet our international commitments as well as the commitments to our own people on safety and security.

Now, what about the challenges? The big and immediate one is clearly exiting the EU. It is absolutely essential that we reach a deal. I am a member of the Exiting the European Union Committee, and the more I hear of the consequences of no deal, the more apparent it is just how damaging it would be to the EU and to the UK. The Chancellor recognises this, and I sincerely hope that he does not have to come to the House with his alternative Budget. But this is not just about exiting the EU; it is about the future of the economy.

My hon. Friends the Members for Mid Norfolk (George Freeman) and for The Cotswolds (Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown) have mentioned the challenges we face and the future opportunities. The right hon. Member for Birmingham, Hodge Hill (Liam Byrne) and I recently produced a book on the future of work, looking at countries around the world that are meeting these challenges, including South Korea, Singapore and Argentina. Lots of people across the country are trying to meet these challenges, but they also exist globally.

It is an honour to follow the hon. Member for Makerfield (Yvonne Fovargue), who was right about funding for 16 to 18-year-olds. The years from 16 to 18 are a critical time, and funding dropping off at that stage poses some severe challenges to colleges and schools.

[Mr Jim Cunningham]

Like me, the hon. Gentleman is a west midlands MP, and knows that the west midlands economy is very important to the country. I am not sure whether the Government have clarified whether there will be more money for further education. Further education is the backbone of things such as apprenticeships, and we need more apprenticeships. Does the hon. Gentleman agree that we should be focusing on this important area?

[Jeremy Lefroy]

Indeed, and I think I just mentioned that. In my constituency, Newcastle-under-Lyme College and Stafford College do excellent work, as does South Staffordshire College, but they are underfunded, particularly at that level.

A further challenge is balancing the Budget. The OBR report refers to the Chancellor in terms of St Augustine, as it describes the Budget as Augustinian—“make me chaste, but not yet.” I believe that it is nearly 20 years since the UK has run a Budget surplus, and we are now pushing that back by a further two years. This is not the way to go. We have to look carefully at how we can return to a balanced Budget or a surplus, which can only come from growth, more efficiency or allowing tax rates to rise—we have some of the lowest revenues as a percentage of GDP in the G7—but that has not happened this time. If we are to maintain a sound fiscal policy, it will have to happen soon. The country needs to build up assets in better times to meet the challenges of hard times, and one of those assets is a surplus Budget and a reducing deficit.

Local government finance has been mentioned today. This is a great challenge because I believe, as do pretty much all colleagues in this House, in the importance of devolution and making decisions locally. However, the Government are placing more and more pressures on local government, without giving it the means to deal with them. Local authorities, including Staffordshire, have done excellent work to reduce spending while maintaining services over the last eight years. That cannot go on. Local government has reached the bottom. I welcome the additional money, but we need to see more, particularly in terms of loosening up the requirements for referendums.

The right hon. Member for Enfield North (Joan Ryan) rightly said that the Office for Budget Responsibility report talked about the low savings rate and rising personal debt. That incredibly important area has not been focused on, and I am extremely concerned about it. We need to help households rebuild their balance sheets. People cannot always look to Government to support them in times of difficulty. Personal assets are vital, and I urge the Chancellor to look at ways of encouraging saving, difficult though that is—including efficient lifetime savings accounts that people can draw on in times of difficulty, financial education in schools and further support for credit unions.

We have the biggest current account deficit in the G7—from memory, it is about 3.8%. That is down from 5.1%, but it is still too much. We are too dependent on resources from other countries, and we need to build up our network of foreign assets, from which we receive income. At the same time, we need to reduce our balance of trade deficit.

Finally, we have the challenge of supporting people on the lowest incomes who are long-term sick or disabled. At a time when many people in this country are seeing their incomes continue to rise and are living in prosperity, which I welcome, we need to meet the needs of those who suffer from disability, sickness or low income. I welcome the changes to universal credit, but it still does not work for everyone. I welcome the additional money, but we have to make sure that nobody loses out in the transfer to universal credit, most particularly disabled people. Others, including my hon. Friend the Member for South Cambridgeshire (Heidi Allen) and the right hon. Member for Birkenhead (Frank Field) yesterday, have spoken about how that could be done.

This Budget is a chance to tackle long-term challenges in difficult circumstances, with the coming exit from the EU. The Chancellor has seized the chance to address some of those areas, on which I congratulate him. I believe that, but for this challenge of exiting the EU, he would have tackled other areas, too, but the challenges that remain cannot be put off for ever.

UK Development Bank

Debate between Jim Cunningham and Jeremy Lefroy

Wednesday 20th June 2018 Commons Chamber

[Jeremy Lefroy]

The hon. Gentleman is right to suggest that we do not want a return to the days when countries were burdened with unpayable debts that eventually had to be relieved, at great cost to the countries themselves and to taxpayers around the world. He rightly points out that there are such financial institutions around the United Kingdom. I was not aware of the Scottish Investment Bank, but it is great to hear about it. No doubt that model could be built on.

[Mr Jim Cunningham (Coventry South) (Lab)]

I congratulate the hon. Gentleman on securing this debate. Before he moves on to the international aspect, does he agree that, in the light of Brexit, this country will need an investment bank? Let us not forget that we trade a great deal, and that trade creates jobs in other countries as well. We will lose regional aid in 2021 as a result of Brexit, and that aid is vital to the midlands in industrial and development terms. He is a midlands MP, and I think he would agree with me on that.

[Jeremy Lefroy]

I entirely agree with the hon. Gentleman. That is why I am saying that the development bank should be for development in the UK and globally—not one or the other, but both. The two are intimately entwined, as he rightly suggests.

We already have a financial institution that deals with investment in developing countries. It is the CDC—formerly the Commonwealth Development Corporation—and it does a fine job. The Government have increased its capital, with the support of Parliament, over the past few years, and I welcome that, but that largely involves equity. There are some loans as well, but it largely involves equity and mostly operates in the private sector. A development bank would deal with the public and private sectors, and it would concentrate on long-term loans that would eventually be repaid, as the hon. Member for Glasgow North (Patrick Grady) suggested.

A development bank has three advantages over a grant-making organisation, which the Department for International Development generally is. DFID does a fine job in many areas, but it works largely with grants. Long-term development loans would offer accountability over a long period. When I was a member of the International Development Committee, I sometimes used to ask what DFID had been doing in a particular country 15 or 20 years previously. That was difficult to know, because projects tended to last two, three, five or, at the most, 10 years. There are some fantastic exceptions such as the community forestry project in Nepal, which has been going for decades and has done a great job, but projects tend to be relatively short term. With a long-term loan, development can be tracked, and there is accountability and regular reporting, meaning that we can see year-on-year results for the financing.

Secondly, and obviously, the finance is returnable. It is recyclable. It can be used more than once. In round 18 of the replenishment of the International Development Association, which is the World Bank’s fund for the poorest countries, a substantial percentage of the money—well over 35%—was returned funds from previous loans. The IDA was able to raise around $75 billion in round 18, which runs for three years, and a large percentage of that was money that had come back in repayments. About a third of it was new grants of course, but that shows just how much leverage a development bank has because it uses returned funds. It is not about grants.

Thirdly, a development bank can raise money on the markets through bonds, and I will give the example of the AFD—the French development bank. Members may be interested to know that it was formed in London in 1941 during the darkest days of the second world war. General de Gaulle wanted a bank to promote development, particularly in French overseas territories, but also presumably in France when it was liberated. So a development bank has been founded here, but it was French, and I long to see a UK development bank founded here.

My proposal is to establish a development bank both for the UK and for developing countries. Funding would come from several sources, including the return of our capital in the European Investment Bank and from the international development budget—it would be a legitimate use of that. We are already rightly putting significant sums into the CDC, which is another form of returnable capital. The International Development Committee has considered the matter and recommended it in at least one report over the past few years. I remember being part of the discussions and the general consensus was that a development bank was something that the UK lacked and needed. We have a fantastic organisation for making grants overseas through DFID—it is probably the best in the world—and we have an excellent organisation for equity capital investing in the private sector through CDC, but we lack that middle, which the French, the Germans, the Japanese, the Brazilians and many others have.

Let me tackle one or two of the arguments against a development bank. One argument is that we already subscribe to development banks—such as the World Bank, the African Development Bank and the Asian Development Bank—so we do not need one. We do have influence with those banks, but we do not control them and cannot specify where their money goes. Clearly, they could not lend money into the United Kingdom.

The second is that such banks are not really what the UK does, and the Treasury views them as anathema. Well, that can no longer be said, because the Treasury supported the establishment of the British Business Bank and the Green Investment Bank over the past half-dozen years. Both have been successful, and I believe that the British Business Bank has a portfolio worth at least £9 billion after a relatively short time. The hon. Member for Glasgow North mentioned the Scottish Investment Bank, which is based in Glasgow. We already have some examples, but I am talking about something on a larger scale and with a larger remit.

The final argument is about the use of taxpayers’ money. I have already said that I am not suggesting that large sums of new taxpayers’ money should go into a development bank; I am suggesting that existing streams could be put into such a bank. In respect of our official development assistance budget, it would seem to me an extremely good use of aid to recycle—I use that word again—development aid through a development bank, because it would mean that it could be used more than once. In fact, DFID already does that through various projects, in which it is called returnable capital. I know that the Treasury has wanted to see DFID do more with returnable capital, and this is certainly one way in which it can.

The European Investment Bank will be leaving us—sadly, in my opinion, but it will be—and here is an opportunity for us to replace it, and to replace it with something that would be very beneficial to the United Kingdom economy and to our work globally. We are a world leader in finance, and this gives us an opportunity to show our innovation and expertise in a type of finance of which the United Kingdom perhaps has not done so much in the past few years.

The United Kingdom now has an opportunity, let us seize it. There is a lot of support for this on both sides of the House. Let us take this opportunity, and let us take it quickly.

Yemen

Debate between Jim Cunningham and Jeremy Lefroy

Thursday 30th November 2017 Commons Chamber

[Jeremy Lefroy (Stafford) (Con)]

It is an honour to follow the Chairman of the International Development Committee, the hon. Member for Liverpool, West Derby (Stephen Twigg), who has spoken powerfully on this matter not only today, but on several previous occasions. His commitment is wholehearted, as is that of my right hon. Friend the Member for Sutton Coldfield (Mr Mitchell), whom I congratulate on securing this debate today and who I know takes a huge personal interest in the matter. I also thank my right hon. Friend the Minister, because I know just how hard he works on this issue, and how close it is to his heart. He brings to his work a passion, which, if not unique, is certainly hugely important in Government.

I wish to use the words of other people in my speech, as I do not know a huge amount about the area. International development is something of great concern to me, as is foreign affairs. I thought that I would write to somebody I know who has much more experience of the situation in Yemen and who has been working with the World Food Programme. He has sent me a couple of emails this week, and I will quote from them and from a couple of other things that he has sent me. He writes:

“From a food perspective, the situation is ‘beyond bleak’. It is a catastrophe beyond anything that I have ever seen before. We are talking of 17 million food insecure people. The World Food Programme is giving food and vouchers to around 6.5 million people across most of the country. Obviously this has been hampered over the last three weeks due to the blockade. Thankfully, that horror is now over and ships are docking. Remember that even pre-crisis Yemen was almost entirely dependent on food imports.”

He goes on:

“The blockade only served to make food a weapon of war. The World Food Programme expects that 3 million of the 17 million will be pushed into a deeper level of food insecurity as a result of the blockade. Market availability is acceptable but remains inaccessible due to inflation”—

hence the high prices.

He goes on:

“Cholera I believe is stabilising but still at around 800,000 people. It is the largest outbreak in modern history and utterly shameful.”

I will not go into the statistics, because the hon. Member for Liverpool, West Derby has done so already.

[Mr Jim Cunningham (Coventry South) (Lab)]

Like the hon. Gentleman, I have had letters from constituents voicing grave concerns about the situation in Yemen, particularly the blockade, food shortages and lack of medical supplies, so I agree wholeheartedly that something has to be done.

[Jeremy Lefroy]

The hon. Gentleman is absolutely right. There is a huge lack of critical medical supplies, including vaccines and treatments to control the spread of cholera, and now of course that deadly disease, diphtheria.

I come to the second of my quotations from an eyewitness—Mark Lowcock, the emergency relief co-ordinator, whom the Chairman of the International Development Committee, I and several other colleagues met a couple of weeks ago. After a visit earlier this month, he said:

“Everywhere I went, I saw roads, bridges, factories, hotels, and houses that had been destroyed by bombing or shelling… I visited hospitals… Both had barely any electricity or water… I met seven-year-old Nora. She weighs 11 kg – the average weight for a two-year-old, not a seven-year-old. Dr. Khaled, the manager of Al Thawra hospital, where she is being treated, said staff there regularly turn away gravely ill malnourished children because they cannot accommodate them.”

There is, of course, a solution. I believe that a political solution is the only way forward: a lifting of the blockade, a cessation of hostilities. Without that, we will indeed face the worst humanitarian disaster in decades. The numbers sometimes seem almost too vast. There are other consequences as well.

I will quote again, finally, from the OCHA report, about a widow and mother of six—five daughters and a son—who

“had to abandon her home in….At Taiziah district in Taizz governorate, fleeing airstrikes and fighting in the area. The family left their village with only the clothes they were wearing, and settled in a nearby, somewhat more peaceful village. Uloom rented a small shop, but the business is struggling and cannot sustain the family’s basic needs such as food, water and medicines. To ease the burden, Uloom decided to marry off her three young daughters. ‘I didn’t have money and couldn’t feed all of the children’, she said. ‘I didn’t want to marry off my daughters so young, but I couldn’t stand them crying and starving. I regret what I did very much’”.

That is one of the desperate individual human consequences of what we are seeing now.

Yesterday, I had the honour of chairing in Speaker’s House a meeting at which we discussed the tremendous progress made on countering malaria over the last 17 years. Millions of lives, including children’s lives, have been saved. Here we have an entirely preventable disaster looming. Tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of lives, perhaps even more, mainly of children and women, are at risk. We have the opportunity to act globally. I ask that the coalition, the Government of Saudi Arabia and their allies lift the blockade immediately to ensure that those lives can be saved. I thank the Prime Minister for what she said yesterday and today, and I urge the Government to continue in their efforts, day in, day out, until the crisis is resolved.

Trade Union Bill

Debate between Jim Cunningham and Jeremy Lefroy

Monday 14th September 2015 Commons Chamber

[Jeremy Lefroy (Stafford) (Con)]

Within a few months of starting as a foreman in a motor factory in the early 1980s, I managed to cause a walk-out. It only lasted half an hour and I subsequently discovered that it was a part of choreography between the management and the unions to settle a particular dispute. I think they settled on my shift as the one in which to do it because I was probably the most naive of the factory foremen.

I tell that story to show how far we have come since then in relationships between management and unions. I can think of one instance in my own constituency just a few years ago when an hon. Member, whose name I will not mention, helped to sort out a strike action that could have been very damaging. I understand the great importance of that kind of work.

I entirely agree with my right hon. Friend the Member for Haltemprice and Howden (Mr Davis). There is a real need to protect the interests of the public and to ensure that they are as little inconvenienced as possible. I pay tribute to the Fire Brigades Union, which in my experience has always ensured, even when involved in ongoing strike action, that it is done in a responsible manner. That was particularly the case when the fire brigade had to attend a devastating and tragic fire—it led to the deaths of two people—in my constituency last October. It put all its concerns aside to attend to the needs of those who were in great difficulty.

[Mr Jim Cunningham (Coventry South) (Lab)]

The hon. Gentleman has said that he has worked in industry as a foreman. Surely he agrees that it is far better in the private sector when major companies are prepared to deal with trade unions and give them time to go about their trade union duties. Does he agree that that is more enlightened employment than the stone-age stuff we are getting from the Government?

[Jeremy Lefroy]

I absolutely agree that it is extremely important to have time to conduct those duties in a responsible manner, but it is also extremely important to protect the interests of the public, particularly those who have to get to work and who need childcare. On the other hand, I do not think that we as a Parliament or a Government should be looking to interfere in the running of trade unions in some of the ways set out in the Bill.

I will mention three or four of those areas. First, I cannot see what the problem is with check-off, provided that the cost of it is paid for. The Staffordshire County Council representatives who operate check-off tell me that the union pays 2% for it, which is probably more than it costs the council to operate it. The same applies in other public services. I have no problem with that and I ask the Government to look again at the issue and perhaps not introduce that proposal.

I do not see the problem with electronic voting, either. It will eventually be introduced, and if we are to ask for higher turnouts, electronic voting is a must. I will not go into the picket line issues, because my right hon. Friend the Member for Haltemprice and Howden has already addressed them more eloquently than I ever could.

Finally, on the political fund, I believe that the right way forward is proper reform of political funding across the board. It is very difficult to do that without a comprehensive solution. I know it was tried in the last Parliament and it did not work, but I urge the Government and the Opposition to sit down and try to sort it out once and for all.