Spinal Muscular Atrophy

Debate between John Hayes and Kerry McCarthy

Thursday 25th July 2019 Commons Chamber

[Kerry McCarthy (Bristol East) (Lab)]

It is just so cruel. There was a party to celebrate the fact that my 18-year-old constituent Jake Ogborne would have access to Spinraza. There was no mention of eligibility criteria, but suddenly he was told that he would not be eligible because he had not been able to walk in the past 12 months. He lost his ability to walk about 18 months or two years ago. I raised this in Prime Minister’s questions. I got a response that basically told me what we already knew and just set out the rules on this. It is immensely cruel for an 18-year-old to be faced with a decision like that.

[Sir John Hayes]

Yes. The condition, as the hon. Lady suggests, is often degenerative. In cases such as the one she describes, which, as I mentioned, is not the first time she has raised it, a young person who would normally develop as we all did could be left with arrested development or, even worse, declining capabilities. Indeed, that has happened to my constituent too.

The hon. Lady will know that, following strong advocacy by families of SMA patients, Muscular Dystrophy UK, TreatSMA, Spinal Muscular Atrophy UK and many clinicians, NICE and NHS England made amendments to the managed access agreement. While amendments are far from unwelcome, the disappointing truth is that the new criteria will still exclude some SMA patients desperate for treatment in the way she and others have articulated.

The intensely difficult battle fought by SMA patients has highlighted deeper flaws in the system. Families report feeling that they have been pitted one against another as advocacy groups are forced to decide whether to push for wider accessibility, and as a consequence risk delaying treatment for those eligible, or, alternatively, to take what is on offer and exclude a minority of the SMA family.

Life can be intensely difficult. All our bodies are complicated and vulnerable, intricate and fragile. We are regularly reminded, are we not, that they can go wrong in a multitude of hard-to-understand ways. I have argued many times in this House that a society should be gauged by how it cares for, protects and promotes the interests of its most vulnerable members.

Ending Exploitation in Supermarket Supply Chains

Debate between John Hayes and Kerry McCarthy

Thursday 18th October 2018 Commons Chamber

[Mr John Hayes (South Holland and The Deepings) (Con)]

Supermarkets have decimated high streets, destroyed livelihoods and distorted the food chain. The exploitation to which the hon. Member for Bristol East (Kerry McCarthy) drew the attention of the House is not an aberration and is not marginal to supermarkets; it is intrinsic to their business model.

In my lifetime—I should say my short lifetime—I remember parades of shops on council estates, like the one on which I was brought up, across the whole of the country; shops run independently by people who knew their customers and knew those who supplied them. They had an interest in ensuring that their practices were sufficiently ethical to maintain their customer base and to preserve quality relationships with their suppliers. In my lifetime, farmers and growers in my constituency could sell the goods they made to a variety of people in a variety of places. They could go to local markets. They could sell in local produce auctions. They could walk away from deals if they were not fair, reasonable and ethical. In my short lifetime—I emphasise that again, Madam Deputy Speaker—our high streets were vibrant places. Our towns and cities were made lovelier by the variety and particularity that one found there. Sadly, all of that is no longer the case. What Napoleon called a nation of shopkeepers has become a nation of automated checkouts with contactless cards. We are all worse off as a result.

I want to deal in particular with the exploitation that the hon. Lady mentioned, and which I have said is implicit in the food chain model we have created. It is inevitable that farmers and growers must sell to the handful of places available to buy their goods. A report issued in 2000 by the Competition Commission demonstrated that a business able to control as little as 8% of the market has sufficient means to engage in exploitative trading practices. The big supermarkets do not control 8% of the market or even double that. Combined, the five big supermarkets control the vast majority of the United Kingdom’s grocery market. That concentration of power, made worse by Tesco’s recent absorption of the wholesaler Booker, magnifies and exaggerates the potential for exploitation right through the food chain, with my farmers and growers in Lincolnshire unable to walk away from bad deals as they have nowhere else to sell their produce. We know what those bad deals look like: up-front payments and delayed payments for the goods that suppliers provide, and sometimes, suppliers being obliged to fund “marketing campaigns” on behalf of retailers. Payments are now delayed for an average of 45 days, which puts small and medium-sized businesses on the brink of survival, as the supermarkets routinely engage in these practices.

The Agriculture Bill is welcome. Clause 25 gives new powers to Government— thanks to the insight, will and vision of the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, no doubt—to take action against supermarkets that behave in the ways I have described. I have implored him to use those powers with alacrity and determination, for they are needed. The supermarket adjudicator, introduced when I was a Minister in the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, has also made some progress, although I would like to see her powers extended and used more liberally.

However, we must do much, much more, because as well as the exploitative practices that the hon. Member for Bristol East raised and which I have tried to amplify, we must consider the character of our high streets. Most towns now suffer from out-of-town developments that draw people away from the small shops that remain. With footfall decreasing, fewer shops can survive, because they rely on busy town centres to attract their customers.

Hon. Members know the scene as well as I do in large parts of Britain, with boarded-up shops, boarded-up banks and decimation in many places. People who do shop at out-of-town estates are forced to drive there, as they can no longer walk or cycle to the shops. They are encouraged to buy in large volume because they visit the shops infrequently, so there is then the problem of over-purchasing and food waste. We are told that around 30% of the food purchased ends up being thrown away. Encouraging over-buying more than offsets the claim from supermarkets that they have driven prices down. They may have kept prices down, but people no longer buy what they need; they buy much more than they need and much of it goes to waste.

[Kerry McCarthy]

Food waste is not just about the food that has been bought; the issue exists throughout the supply chain. From farm gate to fork, between 30% and 50% of food is estimated to be wasted. A lot of it never even gets on to supermarket shelves, and that is an absolute scandal. If food waste was a country, it would have the third highest carbon footprint in the world.

[Mr Hayes]

The hon. Lady is absolutely right. There are any number of cases, for example, of suppliers having food rejected that they have grown to supply supermarkets, because it has not met the standard or because the supermarket has changed the volume that it requires. Much food goes to waste that was grown to meet the supermarket’s original need or requirement. That is another example of the sharp practice that I described.

The truth is that in constituencies across the country, this is the secret exploitation which dare not speak its name. Farmers, growers and food firms—primary and secondary producers—dare not say what I am saying today, because they know that if they did, they would no longer be permitted to sell their goods to the few people available to buy them. That is why the supermarket adjudicator finds it so difficult to get evidence. Even with the confidentiality that is part of her remit, people are still reluctant to tell the truth, because they so fear what the supermarkets might do in retaliation.

It is time for the Government to act. The Agriculture Bill is helpful—I was delighted when I read clause 25, as I said—but we need to think about planning reform. We need to encourage people back into town centres and to our high streets. We need to give the adjudicator additional powers to deal with these exploitative terms of trade. We need to protect the workers in supermarket businesses in the way that was highlighted by the hon. Lady, whom I congratulate on bringing this matter before the House. We also need to recognise that far from extending choice, supermarkets have restricted it. If the only place someone can go to buy their groceries conveniently and affordably is a single store in a single place, how is choice extended and protected?

The Government really need to step up, and no Minister is more capable of doing so than my great friend and Lincolnshire neighbour who will respond to this debate. I ought to pay tribute, too, to the hon. Member for Swansea East (Carolyn Harris), who will sum up for the Opposition, because she is also a friend—there is no favouritism here. I know that they will both want to use this opportunity to expose this dreadful secret, as I have called it—this thing that dare not speak its name, this exploitation at the very heart of all that supermarkets do and are.

Before I close—this case is so self-evident that its amplification demands brevity rather than loquacity—I want to say that around the corner there is another spectre: the amalgamation of two supermarkets, with Sainsbury’s and Asda coming together. I spoke a moment ago about the consolidation of the market that resulted from the takeover of Booker by Tesco. This further step would give the combined business 30% of the market. I call upon the Competition and Markets Authority, which did so little about the Booker case, by the way, and which I have written to recently, to recognise in the investigation that has been announced that further consolidation of the groceries market will be injurious to the interests both of consumers and of those who supply them, with all the ill effects for the workers and customers that have been highlighted in this debate.

Let me end—I am coming to my peroration, and I like to give notice of that so that enthusiasm can build—by saying this: two futures are available to us, and we must choose which path we take. We can once again have vivid, vibrant, vital, vivacious high streets, full of eclecticism and particularity and full of choice, or we can have the dull, deadening, draining ubiquity of supermarkets, of out-of-town megastores. That choice is available to us, but we will only choose the first, to the immense benefit of the people, if we are determined to take decisive action to make that come true.

There is a cruel deception—this is an easy thing to misjudge—that the future lies in hands other than ours, that it is pre-determined, that we are somehow simply acting out a script written for us. In fact, the future can be as joyful as we choose it to be, and if it is not fixed, influenced and shaped by the people in this House, we will be failing in our duty to pursue the national interest for the common good.

Seasonal Migrant Workers

Debate between John Hayes and Kerry McCarthy

Thursday 1st March 2018 Commons Chamber

[Kerry McCarthy]

Exactly: to what extent do we keep chasing? As other countries become more affluent, why would people come here and not go to other countries where they would be able to earn more without—

[Mr John Hayes (South Holland and The Deepings) (Con)]

The hon. Lady will know, presumably, as she has clearly studied these matters very closely, that SAWS brought in people from all kinds of places—from Africa, Asia, and so forth. When that scheme ended, that opportunity ended for those people too. Does she welcome that?

[Kerry McCarthy]

I think we are going to have to look further afield. I am not arguing against reintroducing SAWS; I am just casting doubts on whether that will be enough to address this problem and whether we will be able to attract workers. We will find that this applies even to some of the countries that we previously recruited from. For example, British companies in Kenya are sourcing beans, flowers or whatever—monocrop cultures—and employing workers there. Will we be able to attract workers to come over to Britain for the British summer when there is production in their own backyard?

There is much talk of stepping up recruitment of British workers—the Government focused on that quite heavily in their response to the EFRA report. We hear about having more skills, and the role of agriculture in universities and in high tech. It is very important that we encourage far more people to go into agriculture and the food sector, but those are not the types of jobs that we are talking about. The problem with attracting British workers is that the areas with the highest unemployment do not tend to be that close to the areas that need these seasonal workers. Students are often mentioned, but they have many other options. Moreover, as the hon. Member for Angus said, this is quite tough work. It is not just about fruit picking in the summer when the sun is shining, if it is, given the British climate; it is about jobs like picking Brussels sprouts in the freezing cold. It is backbreaking work, not something that people do because they fancy a little holiday while getting a bit of pocket money on the side.

As the Environment Secretary acknowledged in his recent speech, the sector will also have difficulty in accessing skilled labour when freedom of movement ends in areas where shortages are currently filled by European economic area workers. Some 90% of abattoir vets come from EU countries, and the vast majority arrived in the past five years, so they are not automatically covered by the right to stay here. The existing immigration system for non-EU skilled immigration is complicated, expensive and slow. There is no Environment Minister here today, but I would like to know—perhaps the Immigration Minister can tell us—whether the Environment Secretary has made a submission to the Government’s Migration Advisory Committee on the future visa needs of the sector, as well as pushing for SAWS.

At a broader level, the Environment Secretary sees the long-term solution to this problem lying in the move from

“a relatively labour intensive model of agriculture to a more capital intensive approach.”

However, automation and mechanisation, such as robotic fruit harvesting, is said to be at least five years away from commercialisation, and that means five years of missed harvests and countless farms going under. Even after those five years, probably only the largest, most profitable businesses will be able to afford to buy into such technologies. There are also some areas in which, I am told, automation is simply not possible. Asparagus has to be picked individually. Raspberries are too delicate not to be picked by hand.

This is part of a much broader concern. I would have liked the Environment Secretary to come before the House this week when the agriculture Command Paper was published. In fact, as chair of the all-party parliamentary group on agroecology for sustainable food and farming, I have just put out a statement welcoming very much of what is in that Command Paper and the whole concept of moving to public money for public goods. I hope that he will consider the strong case made by people in the agroecology sector for making farming more sustainable and more environmentally friendly. We also need to look at the economic viability of the sector. Sufficient labour is absolutely crucial to that. We need some answers here today from the Home Office. We also need a much stronger focus from the DEFRA team, who are not here, on what they are going to do to address this impending crisis.

Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between John Hayes and Kerry McCarthy

Thursday 31st January 2013 Commons Chamber

[Mr Hayes]

As my right hon. Friend knows, the Secretary of State has made it clear that he has put in place conditions, regulations, and secure and safe circumstances that will allow the continued exploration for shale gas. Shale gas is a potential virtue, but it has to be pursued in a way that is safe and secure, and guarantees public support.

[Kerry McCarthy (Bristol East) (Lab)]

Will the Minister take heed of the words of his predecessor, the hon. Member for Wealden (Charles Hendry), who warned against “betting the farm” on shale gas? Will the Minister assure me that the Government’s perspective on this issue is not influenced by the over-inflated claims made by firms that are major donors to, and have close links with, the Tory party? Such firms include the one that put in the recent planning application for exploratory drilling in Somerset and has given £500,000 to the Tories.