Oral Answers to Questions

Julian Brazier Excerpts

Wednesday 19th January 2011 Commons Chamber

[The Prime Minister]

I find that the best way of calming down is by reading the hon. Gentleman’s poetry—I find that very instructive. All police forces are facing a difficult financial settlement. I accept that. The context for all this is the vast budget deficit that we were left and the huge mess that we have to clear up. I have the figures for the South Wales police force. Next year, it must find a 5% cut. That will take it back not to some figure of the 1980s, but to the spending it had in 2007-08. Her Majesty’s inspectorate of constabulary has said that it is quite possible to make those sorts of reductions—[Interruption.] If the hon. Gentleman asks a question, he should have the manners to listen to the answer. The fact is that HMIC said that it is possible to achieve those reductions while not losing front-line officers. That is what needs to be delivered.

[Mr Julian Brazier (Canterbury) (Con)]

Does my right hon. Friend agree that the Government’s social security reform programme is the first serious attempt since Beveridge to get back to the principle that—to coin a phrase—we should be offering people a hand up and not a handout?

European Council

Julian Brazier Excerpts

Monday 20th December 2010 Commons Chamber

[The Prime Minister]

Normally, there are long discussions about banks and bonuses. We had a lot of discussion about the need to improve the performance of banks, their balance sheets and their lending practices, but there was no long discussion about bank bonuses. There have been good international agreements on bank bonuses, and we have added to them in this country through the bank levy, which will raise more in every year than the previous Government’s bonus tax raised in just one year.

[Mr Julian Brazier (Canterbury) (Con)]

Does my right hon. Friend agree that what is best for the poorer countries of eastern Europe, which were mentioned earlier, is best for people in this country? That is economic recovery in Europe. Although he rightly says that fiscal changes alone will not deliver that, without fiscal changes and restraint not only by Governments but by the EU, there will be no sustained economic recovery.

[The Prime Minister]

My hon. Friend is right. Some Labour Members talk as if there were a choice between going for growth and dealing with the deficit. The truth is that the deficit must be dealt with to get the confidence that is needed for growth. If Labour Members sat in the European Council and argued that deficits were not a problem, their fellow socialists in Portugal, Spain and Greece, who are in difficult circumstances, would think that they had gone completely and utterly mad.

NATO Summit

Julian Brazier Excerpts

Monday 22nd November 2010 Commons Chamber

[The Prime Minister]

I discussed that issue with President Obama and others at the G20 summit in the Republic of Korea, because obviously that country is so close to the line of control that what happens in North Korea is very much on everybody’s minds. What we want is a return to the six-party talks and to put pressure especially on North Korea’s neighbours to try to get that country to go down a more sensible path.

[Mr Julian Brazier (Canterbury) (Con)]

Does my right hon. Friend agree that no amount of skill and courage by our troops at the sharp end can substitute for muddled command and control structures, especially at the military-political interface, and that to avoid the kind of mistakes that disfigured the early years in Afghanistan we need the kind of reforms that he introduced nationally with the National Security Council and which he is now pressing for, and got a first stage for, at the NATO conference?

[The Prime Minister]

My hon. Friend has huge expertise in this area. I think that NATO in Afghanistan did initially suffer from having a slightly divided command between an ISAF mission to secure Afghanistan and Operation Enduring Freedom to combat al-Qaeda, particularly in the Tora Bora. It has taken some time to have a more unified command and a greater focus on what was necessary not only militarily, but politically and diplomatically. I think that the whole process is now much better run and managed, but we must make sure we make the most of the remaining few years that we have in order to ensure we can hand over a stable and secure Afghanistan.

Departmental Business Plans

Julian Brazier Excerpts

Monday 8th November 2010 Commons Chamber

[Mr Letwin]

No. As I think the hon. Lady knows, because she has great expertise in this area, one of the decisions that we made centrally during the spending review was to focus a very large part of total capital investment on the roads. That was done to reduce congestion, improve safety and achieve the kind of goals that she was describing. These plans are consistent with the spending review and with that focus on the need to improve our transport systems.

[Mr Julian Brazier (Canterbury) (Con)]

Does my right hon. Friend agree that the only way of achieving a movement of power from the top to the sharp end and a movement of the money from the Government monopoly out to the voluntary sector, which can very often deliver better value, is by very strong and transparent political direction?

[Mr Letwin]

Yes, my hon. Friend is of course absolutely right. Part of the purpose of these plans is to ensure that we hold ourselves to fulfilling that vision. We recognise that there will be all sorts of pressures on the Government to recentralise, to re-control and to lunge for immediate interventions that will ostensibly achieve a particular result, and we know that we need to be kept to the straight and narrow of the vision of the transfer of power in this country from the centre out to the people.

European Council

Julian Brazier Excerpts

Monday 1st November 2010 Commons Chamber

[The Prime Minister]

What I can say is that when there was a motion in the European Parliament to support a freeze, 12 out of 13—I think it was—Labour MEPs voted against that, so they had the opportunity to stand up for what some of their colleagues have stood up for today, and they failed to do it.

[Mr Julian Brazier (Canterbury) (Con)]

In the light of my right hon. Friend’s opening remarks and his comments on his bilateral with the German Chancellor, does he agree that Britain is very well placed to lead the transition in Europe towards the era of information-age terrorism, especially as we have GCHQ, and as his new National Security Council has made such a strong commitment to more spending against cyber warfare?

[The Prime Minister]

My hon. Friend makes a very good point. Prime Ministers and Ministers often praise the security services, and it is good to put on the record the very hard work that people at GCHQ in Cheltenham do; they are among the best in the world at what they do. That gives us an opportunity to combat this new threat of cyber terror and cyber attacks that affects not just our defences but many, many businesses in our country. There is a chance to have some real leadership in this respect, and other countries, including France and Germany, are coming to us wanting to work with us in combating cyber threats because of the investment we are managing to put in.

Strategic Defence and Security Review

Julian Brazier Excerpts

Tuesday 19th October 2010 Commons Chamber

[The Prime Minister]

I can absolutely give the hon. Lady that assurance. We want to ensure that as many of the job losses as possible are found through voluntary redundancy and retirement, rather than through making people redundant. I can also confirm what has been said before, which is that we will obviously not be making anyone redundant who is in Afghanistan or whose units are in Afghanistan. That will not be happening; that is extremely important.

In terms of the industrial base, of course there will be impacts—for instance, with the decision on Nimrod—but if we look across British industry as a whole, and at the decisions on shipbuilding, on the A400M and on the joint strike fighter among many others, we can see that there is a strong future for defence manufacturing in our country.

Let me just put on record how much we should value the MOD’s civilians and how hard they work, because I know that they sometimes feel undervalued. I was at the Permanent Joint Headquarters today and saw many civilians working alongside their military counterparts to co-ordinate our efforts in Afghanistan; they were doing a fantastic job. It is right that we reduce the number of civilians in the MOD—it has got too big—but we need to ensure that we do it in as sensitive a way as possible.

[Mr Julian Brazier (Canterbury) (Con)]

I thank my right hon. Friend for the honour that he has done me in putting me on to the commission. I also find it deeply humbling that five parliamentary colleagues have been among the 27,000 men and women who have served in Afghanistan and Iraq as reservists over the past eight years. I welcome this wide-ranging study, and my right hon. Friend made it clear that it goes across all three services and will look at the balance between regulars and reserves. Has he thought about who else he might put on to the commission?

[The Prime Minister]

First, I thank my hon. Friend for taking part in this. I want the vice-chief of the defence staff, General Nick Houghton, to lead it, and I think that my hon. Friend should be the deputy. General Lamb, who has served our country outstandingly in Iraq and Afghanistan and was taken on personally by the Americans in Afghanistan because of the great work he has done, has also agreed to serve. My Parliamentary Private Secretary, my hon. Friend the Member for New Forest West (Mr Swayne) is one of the many people in the House who has served in the reserve forces, but I am afraid that he will not be free to do this. I once suffered a capability gap when he went to Iraq during the last Parliament in the rather hard-to-explain role of liaising with the Italian forces—something I know everyone thinks he is uniquely qualified to do.

Oral Answers to Questions

Julian Brazier Excerpts

Wednesday 15th September 2010 Commons Chamber

[Mr Julian Brazier (Canterbury) (Con)]

Does my right hon. Friend agree that one of the saddest legacies the Government inherited is the fact that one child in five grows up in a household in which nobody is in work? Does he agree that it is not just an economic but a moral imperative that we should, to coin a phrase, move from a handout to a hand up?

[The Prime Minister]

My hon. Friend is entirely right. If we want to tackle poverty, we must go to the causes of poverty. The chief cause of poverty is people being out of work generation after generation and, as he says, young people growing up in homes where nobody works, where there is no role model to follow. That is why we are pursuing the welfare reform agenda so vigorously, because we want to help people to get out of unemployment and into work. We want it to be worth while for everybody to work or to work more than they do now. That is what our welfare reforms, so scandalously neglected by the previous Government, have set out to achieve.

European Council

Julian Brazier Excerpts

Monday 21st June 2010 Commons Chamber

[The Prime Minister]

We did not discuss regional policy specifically. It is important that we make sure that investment continues into the regions, and the hon. Lady will know that we have announced plans for how we think we can do even better than the regional development agencies have done. I recently read out a list about some of the very wasteful amounts of spending they have been engaged in. What we want is real money going into our cities to make sure that development takes place. [Interruption.] The right hon. Member for Doncaster Central (Ms Winterton) shouts about Sheffield. I ask her to look at the shareholder structure of that organisation to see who would really benefit from that not very well thought through piece of financial engineering.

[Mr Julian Brazier (Canterbury) (Con)]

I welcome my right hon. Friend’s comments on progress on Iran, but does he agree that the future of Afghanistan is also important to all members of the European Union? Does he agree that it is time that some of our European partners did more to share in the sacrifices of blood and treasure that our forces are making there?

[The Prime Minister]

My hon. Friend makes an excellent point, and it is one that we should, and do, make all the time in the EU and NATO. As he knows, one of the things we should push for is the reform of NATO, so that we get a common operational fund so that countries such as Britain that are making such a big contribution do not have to pay twice. So we believe in trying to do this. We should also be clear to other countries, which perhaps feel that they cannot do more in the front line, that there is huge amount of logistic support—helicopters, transport and other support—that they can do now and that is incredibly welcome.