European Council

Jonathan Ashworth Excerpts

Monday 30th June 2014 Commons Chamber

[The Prime Minister]

My hon. Friend asks an intriguing question and I do not know whether Labour will block the opportunity to put into statute now the need for a referendum before the end of 2017. Everyone in this House will have a chance to vote on that Bill, and I hope we will support it.

[Jonathan Ashworth (Leicester South) (Lab)]

Having so skilfully turned a divided EU into an EU united against his position, will the Prime Minister spell out at the Dispatch Box precisely where he expects to win in his renegotiation?

Oral Answers to Questions

Jonathan Ashworth Excerpts

Wednesday 25th June 2014 Commons Chamber

[Mr Maude]

Again, there were no arrangements at all to monitor what facilities were being made available to union officials at taxpayers’ expense. We have now put in place arrangements to try to find out exactly what is going on, but I regret to say that the data are not yet complete. However, we will continue to pursue this.

[Jonathan Ashworth (Leicester South) (Lab)]

The Paymaster General will of course be aware that many private sector employers, such as Rolls-Royce, Jaguar Land Rover and Airbus, all take advantage of facility time, because they know it helps with workplace relations and with their obligations to consult. The private sector can recognise the benefits of facility time, so rather than knocking facility time in the public sector, why can he not recognise its benefits for that sector?

[Mr Maude]

I do recognise the benefits, which is why—even if we wanted to, which we do not—we are not proposing to get rid of it altogether. All we are saying is that it should be in accordance with the law and the obligations that the statute places on us as employers. I am the first to recognise that there are often advantages in being able to resolve disputes quickly and locally before they escalate, which is why some facility time will continue to be available.

Debate on the Address

Jonathan Ashworth Excerpts

Wednesday 4th June 2014 Commons Chamber

[Keith Vaz]

I agree with my hon. Friend. I wish she had seen the Prime Minister’s appearance before the Liaison Committee, because he is a class act in respect of his evidence. He told the Committee that he is responsible for the immigration total not going below 100,000 because he has been going around the world drumming up support for students to come and study in this country. He looked no further. It is a great achievement. When he went to China, he told all the Chinese to come and study in the UK. When he went to India, as he has done four times—full credit to him for being the first Prime Minister to visit India four times—he told all the Indians to come to study in Britain. No wonder the target has not been met. He is responsible.

[Jonathan Ashworth (Leicester South) (Lab)]

I am grateful to my right hon. Friend and parliamentary neighbour for giving way. In the city that we represent we have two superb universities, both of which want to attract students from India. Yet the Home Office insists that students applying for visas have to go through credibility interviews. How on earth can the Government on the one hand say they want to increase our links and trade with India, and on the other hand make it more difficult for students from India to come to the UK?

[Keith Vaz]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. Both vice-chancellors were dying to get on the Prime Minister’s plane when he went to India, to get more students to come over. All that will do is increase the total.

Civil Service Reform

Jonathan Ashworth Excerpts

Thursday 3rd April 2014 Commons Chamber

[Jonathan Ashworth (Leicester South) (Lab)]

This has been an extremely good debate, with exceptional speeches from all Members who have contributed. I congratulate the hon. Member for Harwich and North Essex (Mr Jenkin) on securing the debate. His speech was very thoughtful, and in “Truth to power” his Committee has produced a weighty, detailed report that must be taken seriously. I hope in my remarks to give him a bit of guidance about what the Labour Front Bench thinks of his report’s recommendations.

Our deliberations have also benefited from recent reports from the Liaison Committee and outside bodies such as the Institute for Government. In addition, today my right hon. Friend the Member for Wentworth and Dearne (John Healey) and the right hon. Member for Arundel and South Downs (Nick Herbert) have launched GovernUp, which is described as an independent cross-party project

“to consider the far-reaching reforms needed in Whitehall and beyond to enable more effective and efficient government.”

Based on the thoughtful speeches of my right hon. Friend and the right hon. Gentleman, we look forward to GovernUp’s research and recommendations with some eagerness.

We have benefited from many former senior Ministers’ insights this afternoon. I am not a former Minister, but I am a former special adviser and had the privilege of working closely with my right hon. Friend the Member for Wentworth and Dearne. In my time in government, I found the civil servants who supported Ministers on policy advice to be wholly dedicated, impartial and exceptional men and women. I think sometimes we should be careful in debates such as this not to reinforce the stereotypes of civil servants as faceless bureaucrats. Thankfully, nobody has done that in this debate, but sometimes in popular culture that can happen. The reality is that civil servants are public servants. As well as serving Ministers, they serve our constituents, sometimes on a daily basis. and they serve some of the most vulnerable people we represent at their times of greatest need. Civil servants prosecute criminals, represent British interests abroad and help to protect our borders.

The model of our civil service has stood the test of time, ever since Sir Stafford Northcote and Sir Charles Trevelyan’s reports 150-odd years ago. It is a model of political impartiality, objectivity and integrity. Those values should be maintained at the heart of the civil service, and they are values to which I reiterate our absolute commitment.

The function of the civil service is not only to serve Ministers and the Government of the day. Civil servants prepare and transfer their expertise from one Government to the next. A fact that is sometimes overlooked is that the civil service enables us in Parliament to hold the Government to account. It is civil servants who draft answers to parliamentary questions—of course, Ministers sign them off and sometimes change them, but it is the civil servants who draft them in the first place. The civil service also provides factual information to our Committees and Libraries. A healthy, functioning and impartial civil service is important not only for a healthy, functioning Government but for enabling Parliament to hold Ministers to account. As “Truth to power” points out:

“Nobody…argues that the Civil Service should be immune from change.”

I am sure that everyone in the Chamber would agree with that.

I was impressed that my right hon. Friend the Member for Wentworth and Dearne, in making a point about the inertia of the civil service, managed to quote both Tony Blair and the Minister for the Cabinet Office and Paymaster General. That is quite an unusual coalition. My right hon. Friend was right to make that point; that is what the debate is about. It is about ensuring that we reform the civil service so that Ministers are able to pursue the agenda that they were elected to implement and that the British people supported when they voted for them.

We should also bear in mind that the civil service is undergoing a significant reduction in numbers, with an overall reduction of 138,000 planned by 2015. In that context, we need to ask ourselves what the policy-making functions and the implementation of policy in a much-reduced civil service will look like. We will need to make sure that a civil service with those numbers can continue to serve Ministers and to enable Parliament to hold those Ministers to account.

My right hon. Friend the Member for Barking (Margaret Hodge) said that her speech was merely skimming the surface. I thought she made an incredibly powerful speech, however, and I am impressed that she would describe a contribution of such depth as skimming the surface. She rightly talked about the way in which Departments work in silos. She also made a point about the nature of the Government and how the concept of individual Departments is completely alien to many of our constituents. The citizen is increasingly frustrated and baffled as to why their interaction with the Government has to be conducted through so many different agencies. How many times do they have to hand over their personal data—whether for a driving licence, a passport, a tax return or benefits—to many different Departments? We understand how it works, because we are politicians, but our constituents find the number of Departments increasingly baffling. Any Government who wanted to make changes in those areas would probably run up against the type of inertia that my right hon. Friend the Member for Wentworth and Dearne was talking about, but these are the issues that we have to confront in the modern world.

The right hon. Member for Arundel and South Downs made a thoughtful and, at times, quite sparky contribution to the debate. I was not expecting such a sparky debate, but I enjoyed his speech. He too alluded to the way in which Government Departments work in silos, as he did in his joint article with my right hon. Friend the Member for Wentworth and Dearne in The Times today. We really have to confront the problem of departmental silos, because many of the issues that we are going to have to deal with—long-term trends in health, climate change, the opportunity of opening up big data and raising the trend rate of growth over the medium to long term, for example—will require increased cross-departmental working. That is why I am particularly interested in the outcome of the research of the think-tank that my right hon. Friend and the right hon. Gentleman have established.

My right hon. Friend the Member for Barking, the hon. Member for Ealing Central and Acton (Angie Bray) and many others have referred to the skills gap and capability problems in the civil service. We are all familiar with the horror stories that have appeared in the press, including those relating to the west coast main line and to the contracts for broadband roll-out. The Minister for the Cabinet Office and Paymaster General has been candid about the failures in introducing universal credit—indeed, there have been some spiky exchanges across the Dispatch Box on that subject. His candour has been refreshing, but we have to acknowledge that there are commercial problems within the civil service, and we must tackle them.

The report pulls no punches in its assessment of the skills gap across the civil service. Lord Adonis, in evidence to the Committee, said that, in his experience, some civil servants were

“poorly trained and their experience of the sectors in which they work is very poor”.

The Institute for Government has recently found that the civil service has suffered from “weak corporate leadership”. I think I am correct in saying that the data published by the Cabinet Office when it launched the civil service reform plan showed that out of 15 permanent secretaries at the main delivery Departments, only four had significant operational delivery or commercial experience. We would warmly welcome initiatives that increased the commercial experience of the civil service and developed the skills of the work force. I hope that the Department and Ministers involve all the workplace trade unions in meaningful discussions about and in the design of any such initiatives.

I am also worried about the general sense that there is a quick turnover in civil service posts. I recall from my few years working in government that civil servants moved quickly and Ministers would sometimes be surprised that a civil servant with whom they may have had a close working relationship on a particular project was suddenly moved to another part of the Department and working in a different area. My worry is that we sometimes lose, or we can lose, expertise in that way, although I understand that civil servants want to develop their skills. Again, we need to think about this carefully.

None the less, Labour Members believe that a number of the Government’s reform proposals have merit, such as requiring greater scrutiny of major projects, reducing the turnover of senior responsible officers, and the plan for integrating corporate functions. On the latter measure, may I press the Minister to say something about the shared services centres for functions relating to IT, human resources, pay and payroll? When they were created, some TUPE-ing over of staff took place, with time-limited agreements on no compulsory redundancies. We now understand that there will be job losses and offshoring of work, so will he give us his views on that? Is he confident about the data security issues?

Some Members have referred to the extended ministerial offices. We will want to study the Government’s proposals on that and what they mean for accountability of Ministers and of civil servants. More generally, when we are discussing these issues, we must remember that the morale of civil servants is important—a happy work force is a more productive work force. We have previously had exchanges across the Dispatch Box about check-off, and Departments are reviewing that. I would be grateful if the Minister updated us on those reviews and when he expects Departments to report back, if it is not going to be the Cabinet Office doing this.

The Opposition are examining and thinking carefully about our views on civil service reform. We warmly welcome the initiatives taken by my right hon. Friend the Member for Wentworth and Dearne and the right hon. Member for Arundel and South Downs. The case for a parliamentary commission made by the hon. Member for Harwich and North Essex should be taken seriously. We are not going to commit today to supporting such a commission. It would need to have cross-party support, and some Members have spoken in favour today and others have spoken against. We are not ruling such a commission out indefinitely, but today we do not feel we can commit to supporting it. None the less, these debates should be taken seriously and I look forward to the Minister’s response.

Oral Answers to Questions

Jonathan Ashworth Excerpts

Wednesday 12th March 2014 Commons Chamber

[Mr Maude]

I of course welcome that inquiry. This is an important issue that should be kept under considerable review. Where the Executive and Parliament forgo the ability for a public activity to be directly accountable to Parliament, we need to understand very clearly how that responsibility is being executed.

[Jonathan Ashworth (Leicester South) (Lab)]

I am not sure that the row has come to an end, because in recent weeks we have learned that a Tory donor has been made chair of Natural England, that a former Tory Member of this House has been made chair of the Care Quality Commission, and indeed in the Cabinet Office an impartial civil service post, heading up the appointments unit, has gone to a former member of Conservative central office. So can the Minister, who is of course a former Tory party chairman, explain why an exemption was agreed to give Laura Wyld that Cabinet Office post?

[Mr Maude]

One has to admire the gall of the hon. Gentleman, given that the Government of whom he was a supporter relentlessly stuffed public bodies full of Labour donors and Labour lickspittles. It was the most appalling abuse of power. We are running things in a substantially better way, as the statistic I have just disclosed illustrates. Further, I can inform the hon. Gentleman that the number of women appointed to public appointments is now up to 45% for the last period, which is significantly better than anything his Government ever even began to achieve.

Oral Answers to Questions

Jonathan Ashworth Excerpts

Wednesday 29th January 2014 Commons Chamber

[Mr Maude]

The hon. Gentleman may have more experience of the latter activity than I do, but the truth is that Ministers are not actually required to manage Departments; that responsibility sits very clearly with the civil service leadership. I think that they would be the first to accept that he makes a valid point. We have a deficiency in leadership and management skills as well as in commercial skills, and we need to address that. Concerns about the quality of the leadership and management of change come up consistently in the civil service staff survey, and as great organisations are always changing, we need to rectify that deficiency.

[Jonathan Ashworth (Leicester South) (Lab)]

Of course we agree that we want greater commercial skills, and indeed management skills, in the civil service, but with the fiasco over the west coast main line, botched contracts over rural broadband roll-out and the lamentable implementation of the universal credit, with the Minister squabbling publicly with the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, when will Ministers, rather than blaming officials, take some responsibility for their own shambles?

[Mr Maude]

On that last point, the hon. Gentleman will know that it was my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State who spotted that things were not right with the implementation of the universal credit and commissioned the review that disclosed the problems to the Department for the first time, as the National Audit Office and Public Accounts Committee report makes absolutely clear. Far from evading responsibility, it was my right hon. Friend who spotted the problems and set to work solving them.

Oral Answers to Questions

Jonathan Ashworth Excerpts

Wednesday 11th December 2013 Commons Chamber

[Mr Maude]

A lot of this work simply was not being done under the previous Government, but the predecessor organisations employed more than twice as many members of staff as the efficiency and reform group now employs, and the simple fact is that in the last financial year it was responsible, with its colleagues across Government, for delivering savings of more than £10 billion by eradicating waste left by the Government of which the right hon. Gentleman was a member.

[Jonathan Ashworth (Leicester South) (Lab)]

We know that universal credit will not be delivered on time, that £40 million has been wasted, that £90 million will be written down and that the IT system Agile was deeply inappropriate. The Opposition have learnt that Agile was used on the insistence of the Cabinet Office, so will the Paymaster General, who boasts of his efficiency drives, give us a full explanation of his Department’s role in this debacle and publish all guidance the Cabinet Office sent to the Department for Work and Pensions?

[Mr Maude]

Oh dear. Is that the best the hon. Gentleman can do? I suggest he read the report by the Public Accounts Committee on what went wrong with universal credit. The problems only came to the attention of the DWP because of a review commissioned by my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions.

Afghanistan and EU Council

Jonathan Ashworth Excerpts

Tuesday 2nd July 2013 Commons Chamber

[The Prime Minister]

First, Britain supports the EIB. Our policy has always been one of saying, “Look, on fiscal policy we do have to take tough and radical actions, but on monetary policy we should be looking at all the ways we can help to get money from banks and other institutions into businesses.” That is what the funding for lending scheme is all about and what this EIB expansion should be about. On energy, we continue to push for the completion of the energy single market, where progress has been made, but it is an ongoing battle.

[Jonathan Ashworth (Leicester South) (Lab)]

The Prime Minister is right to say that we need to expand trade and overseas investment, and I am pleased that he discussed trade with the Prime Minister of Pakistan. Does he think that his efforts on trade will be helped or hindered if the Home Secretary imposes a £3,000 visa bond on visitors from India and Pakistan?

[The Prime Minister]

What the Home Secretary is looking at is the idea of using bonds in some immigration circumstances to make sure we do what needs to be done and what the previous Government did not do, which is to differentiate between people who want to come here to contribute, for example, by studying at a British university and those who want to come here simply as economic migrants. We need an immigration policy that really does have an emphasis on quality and on control, and that is exactly what we have. One of the points I was able to make in Pakistan, as I made in Kazakhstan and as I have made before in India, is that under our rules there is no limit on the number of overseas students who can come to study at a British university. There is no limit at all; they just have to have an English language qualification and a place at a British university. That is what is required. But, at the same time, we have shut down about 180 bogus colleges that were operating while the hon. Gentleman was assisting his Government.

G8

Jonathan Ashworth Excerpts

Wednesday 19th June 2013 Commons Chamber

[The Prime Minister]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right to raise this issue. It is not just that officials have to be relentless and engaged on this, but where there are blockages and problems, that needs to be elevated to politicians and Ministers, so that we can try to drive forward the agenda. Otherwise, these trade talks get bogged down in difficult areas.

[Jonathan Ashworth (Leicester South) (Lab)]

Everybody in the Labour party abhors the Assad regime, but on the question of Iran, given the Iranians’ traditional influence over the Syrian regime and given the election results, is the Prime Minister absolutely sure that we do not now have a window of opportunity to try to engage Iran in helping us to find the political solution in Syria that we all want to see?

[The Prime Minister]

I think we should certainly engage with the fact that Iran has elected a relative moderate. I think that is a positive sign and we should look for opportunities; but as I said, really, if we are going to put so much weight on the Geneva process and the Geneva principles, it is important that everybody, Iran included, signs up to them.

Oral Answers to Questions

Jonathan Ashworth Excerpts

Wednesday 20th March 2013 Commons Chamber

[Miss Smith]

I congratulate the hon. Lady on the award that she has won in connection with her work on this matter. My previous answer covered what the Government are doing. We are extremely keen to see good practice pushed throughout the supply chain. We are ensuring that more business goes to SMEs, which is good for growth. All told, that is a good thing and something of which the Government can be proud.

[Jonathan Ashworth (Leicester South) (Lab)]

T1. If he will make a statement on his departmental responsibilities.

[The Minister for the Cabinet Office and Paymaster General (Mr Francis Maude)]

My responsibilities are the public sector Efficiency and Reform Group, civil service issues, the industrial relations strategy in the public sector, Government transparency, civil contingencies, civil society and cyber-security.

[Jonathan Ashworth]

I thank the Paymaster General for his answer. When I talk to voluntary organisations across Leicester, many of those that took part in the future jobs fund tell me that it had a positive impact. Today, we have seen unemployment across Leicester rise again. The chief executive of the National Council for Voluntary Organisations recently called the Work programme

“a slow motion car crash”.

When are we going to have a scheme to get our young people back to work that truly harnesses the expertise of the voluntary sector?

[Mr Maude]

It would have been nice to hear the hon. Gentleman celebrating the rise in employment and the fact that since the election 1.25 million new jobs have been created in the private sector. It would be very good if he and his colleagues would occasionally support that.

--- Later in debate ---

[The Prime Minister]

I certainly join my hon. Friend in praising that family for the incredible bravery they have shown. When someone suffers such a tragedy, it must be so much easier to try and put it behind them and forget about it, but to go on and campaign for peace and to bring together the people of Warrington as they have done shows enormous character and fortitude. They have the backing of the whole country.

[Jonathan Ashworth (Leicester South) (Lab)]

Q5. Has the Prime Minister had time to consider the remarks of the leader of his MEPs in the European Parliament, who said of the decision to cut the 50p rate that it was“one of the biggest mistakes that we’ve made so far in this parliament”and “disastrous to do so in a recession”.Is Mr Callanan right or wrong?

[The Prime Minister]

When the hon. Gentleman’s party put the top rate of tax up, millionaires paid £7 billion less in taxation. We are having a lower tax rate that will raise more revenue. That makes pretty good sense.