Oral Answers to Questions

John McDonnell Excerpts

Wednesday 26th February 2025 Commons Chamber

[The Prime Minister]

I am not across the details of the right hon. Member’s case, as she will understand, but I am in favour of making sure that we can have the infrastructure and the houses we need to grow our economy. One of the problems we had over the past 14 years was an assertion or rhetoric that we wanted homes and infrastructure, but when the decision for all that came up, the answer was always no. The answer cannot always be no.

[John McDonnell (Hayes and Harlington) (Ind)]

I thank the Prime Minister and the Foreign Secretary for their efforts to secure the release of Alaa Abd el-Fattah, the British human rights campaigner who has been imprisoned in Egypt for over 10 years. The Prime Minister will know—he has met the family—that his mother is on the 150th day of her hunger strike and her health is failing rapidly. May I ask the Prime Minister to pick up the phone to President Sisi and seek the release of Alaa to save his life and that of his mother?

[The Prime Minister]

I thank the right hon. Gentleman for raising this really important case. As he says, I met the mother and the family just a few days ago. It is an incredibly difficult situation for them. I can assure him that I will do everything I can to ensure the release in this case. That includes phone calls as necessary. I have raised it before and I will raise it again. We raise it and will continue to do so. I gave my word to the family that that is what I will do, and I will.

Outsourcing: Government Departments

John McDonnell Excerpts

Wednesday 29th January 2025 Westminster Hall

[John McDonnell (Hayes and Harlington) (Ind)]

I have come to this debate because of our recent experiences of visiting picket lines, with regard both to Government Departments and, in particular, the railway sector. I have been a trade union rep in the public sector, but I have also been a manager in the public sector: I was chief executive of the Association of London Government and I also was in a London borough, managing large numbers of staff.

When you have the scale of disputes that we have, I think we have to recognise that there is an underlying industrial relations problem that has to be addressed. I would invite the Minister to join us on some of those picket lines over the coming weeks, because the disputes in the Government Departments are starting again next week and we will have picket lines for several Government Departments around Whitehall.

I have tried to identify the underlying problem causing these disputes, and when we talk to the workers themselves on the picket lines, it is strikingly obvious. Some of them—well, all the ones I have met—are on, I think, shocking levels of low pay. When you talk to them, particularly those based in London, you wonder how they are surviving on the pay that they are receiving. Also, they have conditions of work that I thought we had eradicated years ago. I am talking about lack of access to sick pay, some of them being paid below legal minimums at the moment, and many of them being without any pension rights whatever apart from the statutory pension. So we have a group of people who are on low pay, in insecure work, and feeling extremely exploited, so they have no other resort but to take industrial action. I want to point out what is interesting. I invite everyone to come on those picket lines and look around them, because the vast majority of those workers are from the BAME community; so there is also an issue with inequality in our employment practices as well.

Various unions have provided us with briefings for the debate today, and most of them have done surveys of their members to identify what is the issue facing their members that they should be putting to management. Some of the survey results are stark. The RMT did a survey, and I want to talk about the response that it had from its members. It has about 10,000 members who have been outsourced on trains; Transport for London, for cleaning, has 2,000; and Network Rail has 2,500. What happened then? In the survey results that came back, 80% of the workforce who had been outsourced were saying that they were struggling to meet their basic needs: to pay the rent, pay for food, and so on; 90% were worried about bills coming in. What was interesting was that more than 80% of them were saying, “We come to work when we’re sick, because we can’t take the time off—we can’t even afford to be sick.”

That is why the disputes are taking place, and they involve the same old companies: G4S, ISS, OCS and Mitie. These are companies that have made extensive profits out of the outsourcing, and the bulk of their profits is obviously made from the low pay that they are forcing upon their members of staff. It causes real anger among the workforce when they are seeing these companies paying out high dividends to shareholders, while at the same time they will not pay the staff a decent wage.

There needs to be an understanding in Government that if we are to have decent public services, there has to be a re-examination of how we provide those public services. I agree with what has been said by the deputy leader of our party, and by the Chancellor, which is that we need

“the biggest wave of insourcing…for a generation”,

because I think that is the way to tackle insecure work, low pay, and so on.

My hon. Friend the Member for Middlesbrough and Thornaby East (Andy McDonald) raised the other issue about outsourcing, which is that it has an impact on productivity. If a worker is exploited, if they are not paid properly, if they are worried at work about how they are going to survive, it does impact on how they deliver the service. That is inevitable; it would have an impact on all of us. As a result we have found that productivity issues are a real problem in some of these sectors. Unfortunately, because of the old Treasury Green Book model, that is resulting in even more outsourcing being justified: it becomes a vicious circle.

[Mr Gregory Campbell (East Londonderry) (DUP)]

The right hon. Gentleman said that he fully agreed with the deputy leader of his party. I wonder whether there was an undue emphasis on the word “deputy” rather than “leader”.

[John McDonnell]

I am lost on that one—completely. There are conspiracy theories here that I have never even heard of or even thought of, so I will pass on that one.

What we are asking the Minister for today is a strategy. The first step in that strategy must be to meet the unions themselves. A number of unions have asked whether they can they have a meeting whereby, Department by Department, they can work with the Government, looking at what contracts there are, seeing how those contracts can be brought in in this biggest wave of insourcing in a generation, and how the legislation, particularly the Employment Rights Bill that is progressing through Parliament at the moment, can include the initiative and rights and responsibilities to bring that insourcing about. There is a strategy that can be developed alongside the Government’s procurement policy, that can address all these issues and will be cost-effective for the Government in the long term.

Anniversary of 7 October Attacks: Middle East

John McDonnell Excerpts

Monday 7th October 2024 Commons Chamber

[The Prime Minister]

Yes and yes. It is a very important point. Journalists and those working in the media are risking their lives to ensure that the rest of us have information about what is happening on the ground. Too many have lost their lives, and we must respect that and pay tribute to the really important work that they do. I am grateful to the right hon. Gentleman for raising a really important issue.

[John McDonnell (Hayes and Harlington) (Ind)]

Today is a day for sombre remembrance of the suffering on all sides, but if the threatened war against Iran takes place, we will need to revisit that discussion in this Chamber. I am pleased that the Prime Minister has rightly demonstrated our concern about the suffering on all sides, and particularly mentioned the suffering of children. When the Ukraine war started, we set up the scheme to evacuate children who were seriously injured to come here for treatment. In January I raised the prospect of that scheme being introduced for Palestinian children and others. I raised it again in May. In July I wrote to my right hon. Friend, the Home Secretary and the Foreign Secretary. I wrote again in August, and again in September. There does not seem to be any progress on developing such a scheme, despite the willingness of clinicians here. Could the Prime Minister look at how we can achieve progress?

[The Prime Minister]

The right hon. Member is right to emphasise the impact that this has on children in particular. We have special responsibilities to children in any conflict. The first step to protecting children is to create the conditions for a ceasefire and de-escalate, which is why, working with our allies, we are spending so much time on that de-escalation and finding a route to a ceasefire.

Grenfell Tower Inquiry Phase 2 Report

John McDonnell Excerpts

Wednesday 4th September 2024 Commons Chamber

[The Prime Minister]

We must look at this question of external cladding. Some measures have been taken in the past seven years, as I referenced in my statement, but we need to look at this again. The description that I was given when I was at Grenfell Tower of how the fire spread, and the role played by the cladding, was chilling.

[John McDonnell (Hayes and Harlington) (Ind)]

Having read the summary of the report, may I say how difficult it has been to contain one’s anger? Like many west London MPs here, I visited the site soon after the fire. In the following months, we met the victims, the families of the victims, the firefighters, the local representatives, and the traumatised call centre operators, some of whom have never recovered. I was castigated then for using the expression “social murder”. This report defines; it was social murder. Exactly as the Prime Minister said, we need urgent action. We have been promised a debate. For that debate, may we have the definitive report for each of our constituencies on what action has been taken, what action will be taken, and what the deadline will be?

May I return to recommendation 113.7 in the report? In the building regulations, we defined higher buildings as above seven storeys or 18 metres. That takes no account of those other properties in which there are vulnerable residents in particular who are now at risk. The recommendation is to urgently review those regulations. May we have a timetable for that review, as it has consequences for many of our constituents?

[The Prime Minister]

I thank my right hon. Friend for making that point. On the debate, it is important that as much information as possible is made available and that we are able to deal with the questions that Members of this House have raised. That is why we are looking at the date of that debate. I wanted it to be as soon as possible, but I do not want it to be so quick that Members will be frustrated because they will rightly want information or assurances that need a little bit of working through. I will try to make sure that that happens. The safety of buildings that are not at the specific height is among the issues that we have to consider here. We are all well aware of these very troubling cases, and they have to be part of the debate.

Debate on the Address

John McDonnell Excerpts

Wednesday 17th July 2024 Commons Chamber

[John McDonnell (Hayes and Harlington) (Lab)]

I add my commendations for the speeches that introduced this debate. I have only one anecdote about my hon. Friend the Member for Bootle (Peter Dowd), who was in my Treasury team: he is a fan of Shostakovich, and on one occasion, we went to the Royal Albert Hall to listen to a Shostakovich symphony. It was the symphony with which Dmitri Shostakovich upset Stalin, and it almost cost him his life. We thought the performance was superb, but there were two grumpy old men in front of us, and at the end of the symphony, one turned to the other and said, “Stalin may have had a point.” We enjoyed it. I thought the speeches today were superb.

I want to get to the business of the next few days: examining the King’s Speech. We all come to this House with a mandate from our constituents, so it important that we bring to the House their experience. When the exit poll landed on election night, in my community, there was almost a collective sigh of relief that we were ending 14 years of Conservative Government. My constituency, like many others—my hon. Friend the Member for Hackney South and Shoreditch (Dame Meg Hillier) has said this—could not take any more, to be frank.

In my constituency, like that of my hon. Friend, one in three children are living in poverty; according to the statistics, some of them are living in destitution. I have got a housing crisis, even though 4,000 properties are being built in the centre of my constituency. Most of my constituents cannot afford them; those who have scraped the money together and have got leaseholder access to those properties are now being hit by massive increases in service charges, and some of them want to hand the keys back. I have got rents spiralling out of all control, and I have got slum housing reappearing. The back-to-back has been reinvented in my constituency, where one family will rent the front of a normal house and another family will rent another floor or the back.

Turning to employment for my constituents, wages have virtually been frozen for the past 14 years. I have Heathrow in my constituency; people would fight to get a job at Heathrow because the wages were so good, but not any more. We are running low pay campaigns, and insecure work is endemic in my constituency: it was Heathrow Ltd that started fire and rehire. The same could be said about public services—we will all say this. In my area, the NHS is on its knees. I just do not know how the staff have coped. In the teaching profession, the stress is such that we cannot retain teachers: no matter how committed they are, they do not survive under that sort of pressure. For many of our areas, social care is almost non-existent, and I meet family members who are caring for other family members and unpaid carers. It is now almost inevitable that if you are looking after someone in your family—someone who has a disability or whatever—you are living in poverty as a result of the lack of support.

Yes, people voted for change, but we on the Labour Benches have to be realistic and have some humility in our assessment of the election. Only one in five of the population voted for us, and what worries me in my constituency is that our turnout has gone from 70% when I was elected in the 1990s to 51% in this election. We need to be wary of that, and to understand the reasons for it. The More in Common poll that was published this week confirms the scale of disillusionment that there is with politics overall, which has been reflected in some of today’s debate. My fear is that we now have others on the political scene, in this country and elsewhere, who will feed on that disillusionment. We should guard against the far right mobilising again, as has happened in Germany, France and Italy.

We as a Labour Government have to deliver. As for all Governments, the honeymoon will inevitably be short-lived, but I welcome the King’s Speech because it does set out the elements of a programme for rebuilding our country. I must say that there are elements I have to smile over in that much has been drawn from the 2017 and 2019 manifestos—but maybe we should not mention that—such as on employment rights, the new deal, rail nationalisation, buses, Great British Energy and the national investment fund, which reflects the national investment bank that we put forward then. In fact, there are sections of the King’s Speech that could almost be the work of my hon. Friend the Member for Middlesbrough and Thornaby East (Andy McDonald).

People want and expect delivery sooner rather than later. I want to focus on four areas of policy on which I am desperate to see change. The first is poverty. Child poverty has to be our priority. There are 14 million people living in poverty, including 4.3 million children, with 1 million in destitution. I never thought that, in my lifetime, we would ever debate destitution again in this House, but destitution there is. I welcome the announcement today of the taskforce that will look at poverty overall, but I have to say that setting up a taskforce is one thing, and acting is another.

There is one simple act, and we all know it, that could lift 300,000 children out of poverty this month: scrapping the two-child limit. I was in this House when the Tories introduced it, and it was introduced as part of stigmatising all those on benefits. In my speech I said that

“I would swim through vomit to vote against the Bill”.—[Official Report, 20 July 2015; Vol. 598, c. 1314.]

Given some of the speeches from the Tories at the time, I almost had to. It was an appalling form of attack on the poorest in our community. We need to lift that stigma —that impact—but we need to do it quickly.

Yes, let us set up a taskforce by all means, but we must produce a timetable that within weeks we will scrap the two-child limit. The argument is whether we can afford it and whether it will be within our fiscal rules. Many Members will know that, over the last few weeks, the OBR has lifted or revised its growth figures upwards. The International Monetary Fund has dramatically increased the growth figures upwards. That has nothing to do with the Tories building a new economy or anything like that; it is the natural business cycle, and it is also part and parcel of some companies recognising that a Labour Government were coming. Let us take the benefit of that. It is no longer an offence against the fiscal rule: the resources are there and we can lift those poor children out of poverty with this simple act. So I appeal to my own party—to the Labour Front Bench—to by all means get the taskforce working, but to now commit ourselves to scrapping the two-child limit and doing it rapidly.

On employment, the new deal for workers, which we developed when we were in opposition, is now going to be legislated on. I want no more watering down, and at the same time I do not want it delayed by endless consultations. We have consulted at length for five years nearly: it is there and it is ready. We want to scrap fire and rehire and we want to scrap zero-hours contracts, but one of the most important ingredients of that legislation should be the extension of sectoral collective pay bargaining. So far, we have committed to doing that in the social care sector, and I welcome it, because that is where poverty wages really are being paid. However, we now need to start, as we promised before, to extend that across the economy. We can build into the Bill the mechanisms for doing that stage by stage—yes, with discussions and so on, but it can be done effectively. In some areas, sectoral collective bargaining was scrapped only a few years ago, for example in agriculture. One area in which I would like to ensure that we have that is transport, and then we would have no more P&Os.

We need to be honest about the state of our public services, in terms not only of their delivery but of their finances. I did a report last September with Andrew Fischer on the incoming Labour Government’s in-tray. It is calculated that, between 2010 and now, the Conservatives cut £80 billion. No one expects that £80 billion to be discovered overnight, but we need a plan for reinvestment over the length of this Parliament. That means being honest about the debate that we must have about not just this Budget but future Budgets.

People recognise that we will need to find the money. Yes, we will get some from growth, but 1% of growth brings in about £12.5 billion. To achieve 1% of growth is hard work; it requires investment and it takes time. If we can get back up to 2%, fine, but that will take time. In the meantime, we need the resources for our public services, and that means that we have to have an honest debate about taxation and the distribution of wealth in our country. It means, for example, that we need to grasp the nettle of levelling capital gains tax with income tax, making sure that our tax reliefs and the corporate welfare that is going on is effective and not simply subsidising profits. In addition, I believe we must have a discussion at some stage about what we do about wealth distribution overall.

There has been a lot of discussion about reform of public services. I agree with that, but I want reform to be placed in the hands of the frontline staff themselves—the experts in delivering the service—and for them to then work with the recipients of those services, the patients and others, so that there is co-production. The disability movement has developed the theme of “Nothing about us without us”, and that should apply to every sector of public service, so that we work not just with those who deliver the service, but with those who receive it. I also agree with what has been said about unpaid carers and the way in which we treat disabled people who, I am afraid, now live in poverty and were stigmatised under the previous Government. We can come to those debates as we run to the next Budget. My conclusion is carpe diem—seize the moment. We have a large majority. We must beware the danger of the far right mobilising if we fail, but we must also recognise the potential that we now have.

Finally, I do not know what it was like in other constituencies, but overhanging our whole debate was the humanitarian crisis in Gaza, coming in night after night and seeing more children being slaughtered and war crimes being committed. I do not think we will solve this problem unless we seek an immediate ceasefire that will enable us to have the hostages released. However, I think we can take some immediate steps: stopping the arms sales to Israel, respecting the International Criminal Court and ensuring that we recognise that war crimes should be punished.

Since January, I tried to mobilise the previous Government to accept, as other Governments across the world have been doing, seriously injured children from Gaza so that they could come here for treatment, but not one visa has been issued to a Palestinian child for that purpose. I have written to the Foreign Secretary and the Home Secretary, and I hope that our Government can welcome those children here so that they can receive the treatment they need, before hopefully they can be returned to a Palestinian state that we recognise and that lives in peace.