Police
Debate between Joan Ruddock and Lord Hanson of Flint(11 years, 10 months ago)
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Mr Hanson
That is absolutely right. The Minister asked how we would reduce crime, and I remind him that crime fell in every year of the Labour Government, as it did in the last two years of the Major Government, and as it has fallen now. Let me put on the record that I welcome that fall in crime and think it is a good thing. I do not want people in our constituencies to face criminal actions—a victim is 100% a victim. The key issue for the Minister to reflect on is that there are crimes that are starting to rise, including acquisitive crime, street crime, burglary, robbery and car theft. Areas of violent crime are starting to rise, and the Minister must recognise that policing is not just about discovering crime but about community reassurance, being visible and accessible, and carrying out many tasks such as football ground management that involve not solving crime but providing a presence and a community resource.
Dame Joan Ruddock
My right hon. Friend will know that we believe one great success of the Labour Government in reducing crime was through the Safer Neighbourhood partnerships and the neighbourhood teams that under Labour were at the strength of one sergeant, two PCs and three police community support officers. Is he aware that the London Mayor is now proposing that such teams will include one PC, one PCSO and no dedicated sergeant? Surely that is a way to reduce community confidence and possibly allow for a rise in crime.
National Insurance Contributions Bill
Debate between Joan Ruddock and Lord Hanson of Flint(13 years, 11 months ago)
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Mr Hanson
This is a Treasury-led issue, but it will self-evidently have an impact on businesses. I would have expected the right hon. Member for Twickenham (Vince Cable) to use his Business Secretary responsibilities to bat very hard to ensure that the measure has an impact on London, the south-east and the east. Amendments that we will talk to later focus on those areas and show key issues that will be highlighted by the annual report, even if the Bill does not include London, the south-east and east regions.
If I look randomly at the figures before me, I can see that the unemployment rate in the constituency of my hon. Friend the Member for West Ham (Lyn Brown) is 6.8%, compared with the 1.6% unemployment rate in the North Somerset constituency of the Secretary of State for Defence. His constituency will get the benefit of the scheme; my hon. Friend’s will not. The annual report to Parliament will show whether businesses are being drawn to North Somerset at the expense of, for example, the micro-region of Somerset—Bristol and other areas—where there might be even higher levels of unemployment.
Joan Ruddock (Lewisham, Deptford) (Lab)
In my constituency, sadly, unemployment is even higher, but I want to make a different point to my right hon. Friend. Is there not a need to provide this assistance where there is the greatest risk of companies failing in their first year? In some of the most deprived areas, people with the fewest resources face the greatest difficulties in setting up businesses, and their business failure rate in the first year is highest. If we are to be fair, we should not be giving so much money to areas where that does not apply, and that is another reason for looking again at the distribution of this measure.
Mr Hanson
My right hon. Friend touches on an important point to which I will return when we discuss the group of amendments on London’s exclusion. She will be interested to know that the number of business deaths in London was 13.7% higher than anywhere else in the country. While business births are higher in London, at 12.6%, the figure for business deaths shows that there is a higher turnover and a greater loss of businesses in London than anywhere else.
London, the south-east and east region is not included in the Bill. However, even with the Bill as currently constituted, an annual report by constituency would clearly show where the business successes are, where new start-ups take place, and how many employees are being employed as result of the scheme—in other words, it would clearly show its success in meeting the Minister’s stated objectives. Without the annual report, I will have to table questions to find out that information. The Minister will need to have the information to monitor the progress of the scheme and look at its take-up and distribution, but it will not be public unless we have an annual report.
Mr Hanson
The purpose of the amendments is self-evident and clear. We discussed this issue at great length in Committee but it is worth revisiting today to see whether the Minister has reflected over Christmas and the new year on the views that we put forward in Committee. The amendments would do one simple thing: include the regions of London, the south-east and the east in the regional secondary contributions holiday in the Bill. As I have said in relation to earlier amendments and throughout the Bill’s proceedings, we welcome the idea of a payment holiday but we do not believe that its implementation is fair or that it meets the objectives that the Minister has outlined of helping to tackle problems in areas with high public sector employment that will be disadvantaged by the pending public sector cuts, which will impact on both local government and central Government services throughout the country.
I accept, as my hon. Friend the Member for Luton North (Kelvin Hopkins) has said, that the Bill as a whole is not a panacea for tackling long-term unemployment or, indeed, the impact of public spending cuts and further potential unemployment across the board. What it does do, however, with its limited scope, is ensure that we provide an incentive over a short period—the next three years—for new businesses to be established. They will receive a payment holiday for national insurance contributions, which will be a small but a significant help towards the establishment of new businesses.
The Minister’s logic is that the scheme will operate in the selected regions because it should be used to help businesses where there has been a major impact on public sector employment, and he has specifically excluded the whole of the London, south-east and east regions. Let me chide him slightly, because I think he has fallen into the trap of believing that the whole of the London, south-east and east regions are similar in characteristic, have low levels of unemployment, low levels of deprivation and a low level of public sector employment. If the Government did not believe those things, he would have included those three regions in the scheme.
There are certainly high levels of employment and great prosperity in the east and south-east regions and there are certainly constituencies and even sub-regions with low levels of public-sector employment. However, there are also areas, as I am sure my hon. Friends who represent those areas will testify today, with extremely high levels of deprivation, unemployment and dependency on public sector employment that will be excluded from the potential benefits of the secondary benefits holiday because the Minister has excluded those three regions from the scheme.
Joan Ruddock
Perhaps my right hon. Friend is aware that the average level of public sector employment in the UK is 21.7%, but the figure in my constituency is 30%. Does he share my astonishment that my constituency and other parts of London with such a high level of public sector employment—leading, I am sorry to say, in these times, to high public sector unemployment—are being excluded?
Mr Hanson
My right hon. Friend makes that point in relation to Lewisham and her constituency, but as I shall discuss, it is not just her constituency and Lewisham borough that will be excluded and disadvantaged by the scheme. For example, the constituencies of Oxford East; Luton North; Lewisham East; Canterbury; Southampton, Test; Eltham; West Ham; North Thanet; Hackney North and Stoke Newington; Tooting; Islington North; Dulwich and West Norwood; and Brighton, Kemptown all fall, by the Minister’s own criteria, in the top 60 constituencies for public sector employment, but they will not be eligible for the scheme because the Minister is excluding them from it.
If the Minister looks, as he has, at the House of Commons figures that I raised with him in Committee, he will see that 23 of the top 100 constituencies for public sector employment in England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland fall within the three regions that are excluded from the scheme. So my right hon. Friend makes a clear and telling point on behalf of her constituents, but 23 of the top 100 constituencies fall into the same category.
Mr Hanson
I am happy to discuss macro and micro-economic issues with the hon. Gentleman. There is a clear divide between the current Government and the previous Government. We had a deficit reduction plan over three years. We would have cut public expenditure and made savings. In the Department in which I was a Minister in the last Government, we had earmarked £1.5 billion of savings over the next three years. We would have done that.
There is a difference about the scale and depth of the cuts. The hon. Gentleman and I can argue about that, but he needs to recognise that, if he walks through the Lobby to vote against the amendment today, he will be denying new businesses in his constituency the ability to gain access to the scheme, while allowing areas with lower unemployment and lower deprivation, perhaps in parts of the north of England, which are not completely a desert, to benefit from the scheme. He has to wrestle with that issue. Let me advise him that however he deals with it, we have the ability to let the residents of Crawley know what he will do on the issue. He and others need to look at that. There is still time for him to vote with the Government today, but then to speak to the Minister privately, to get his colleagues from Kent, other parts of Sussex, Berkshire and Hampshire together, to get them to talk to the Minister, and to get the Minister to reflect on this in the other place, so that we can make the scheme much wider. Colleagues from London and I would give him credit for doing that.
I put this to the Minister: the unemployment rate in London is higher than in the south-west, in my region and in that of the hon. Member for Carmarthen East and Dinefwr (Jonathan Edwards), in Wales. It is higher than in Scotland, the east midlands and the north-west, and it is above the UK average. The unemployment rate in the constituency of my hon. Friend the Member for West Ham was 6.8% at the last count. The rate is 7.7% in Tottenham, and 6% in Camberwell and Peckham; in Tatton, Richmond and Derbyshire Dales, it is under 2%.
I have no objection to a scheme being developed to help create employment where employment is lost, but if the logic of the scheme is what the Minister has made it out to be—to deal with public sector employment —I should point out that at the moment 23 of the 100 constituencies with the highest levels of public sector employment are not included. If it is to deal with unemployment, which is higher in the places that I have mentioned than in other parts of the country, the Minister needs to reflect on that in relation to what he has done today.
The Minister does not need to listen to me; John Walker, the national chairman of the Federation of Small Businesses, has said:
“With small firms in the South East most likely to be working below capacity, this shows how wrong the Government is to not include this vital region, as well as the East and London, in its proposals for a National Insurance holiday…With 600,000 public sector jobs expected to be lost, stimulating private sector job creation…in small firms, will be vital to rebalancing the economy.”
The Thames Gateway London Partnership makes similar points:
“the data clearly shows that…the National Insurance Holiday is unfair as it excludes areas in the Thames Gateway which we believe would otherwise be targeted for government support.”
The partnership has helpfully shown—this backs up what my right hon. Friend the Member for Lewisham, Deptford (Joan Ruddock) has said—that there are high levels of public sector employment in the London area, which would benefit from the scheme.
Joan Ruddock
I am most grateful to my right hon. Friend for giving way yet again. He may be aware that of the 10 Thames Gateway London boroughs, seven are in the 40 boroughs with the highest levels of multiple deprivation. My borough is at No. 39. Surely we have to be included in the scheme.
Mr Hanson
My right hon. Friend makes an important point supporting my central argument. I am trying to argue on the Minister’s own grounds. He argues that the scheme aims to help where there is loss of public sector employment. If 23 of the 100 constituencies with the highest levels of public sector employment do not benefit, the Minister’s scheme is not meeting the needs that he has set it to meet.
Let us look at public sector employment in the London Thames Gateway region. Some 21% of people employed in Barking and Dagenham work in the public sector. The figure is as high as 31% in Greenwich, 30% in Lewisham, 33.6% in the borough of Newham, 28.4% in Redbridge, and 26.6% in Waltham Forest, in the constituency of my hon. Friend the Member for Walthamstow (Dr Creasy). The Thames Gateway London partnership has helpfully provided me with information on the subject. Even boroughs represented by two Conservative Members of Parliament, such as Southend-on-Sea, will not benefit from the scheme, although it has 24.66% of people employed in the public sector. Let us look at authorities in Kent, represented not by Labour Members of Parliament, but by Conservatives. In Medway, nearly 24% of people are employed in the public sector. In Gravesham, it is 22.2%, and in Swale it is 19.7%. Those are areas with high public sector employment that will not benefit from the scheme.