Financial and Social Emergency Support Package

Lord Beamish Excerpts

Wednesday 25th March 2020 Commons Chamber

[Jeremy Corbyn]

My hon. Friend makes a very strong point. Indeed, that has been raised by my right hon. Friend the shadow Home Secretary and others on many occasions. It is absurd that we have highly skilled people in our society who are awaiting a letter from the Home Office before they are able to contribute to our society. We are talking care workers, doctors, social workers—all sorts of highly skilled people. They want to contribute to help us out, so I absolutely agree with my hon. Friend and I strongly support the view that he is putting forward to the Home Secretary.

We should also take a moment to say thank you to civil servants in the Department of Health and Social Care and other Departments. They are putting in incredibly long hours. I talk to local government workers in my local authority who are working really hard to try to ensure that the community and society are safe.

We should thank teachers who are having to go into school to ensure that there are some facilities and teaching available for the children of essential care workers, as well as for children who have very special needs. Let us value them and the work they do, and thank the National Education Union and the other teaching unions for the work that they have put in to ensure that that takes place.

Let us also thank those who deliver stuff—delivery workers, delivery riders and delivery companies, and also our postal workers—for what they do. Our postal workers suspended their industrial action—their wholly justified industrial action, I might say—to ensure that essential deliveries can carry on throughout this crisis. We should say thank you to the Communication Workers Union and to those workers for all of that.

When we talk about key workers, it is not only those I have mentioned who keep society going. On Monday, the Minister for Crime and Policing, the hon. Member for North West Hampshire (Kit Malthouse), said that

“when we emerge from the crisis…there will be a general reassessment of who is important in this country and what a ‘key worker’ means.”—[Official Report, 23 March 2020; Vol. 674, c. 15.]

He is absolutely right. We can all now see that jobs that are never celebrated are absolutely essential to keep our society going. Think of the refuse workers, the supermarket shelf stackers, the delivery drivers, the cleaners—those grades of work are often dismissed as low skilled. I ask the House: who are we least able to do without in a crisis—the refuse collector or the billionaire hedge fund manager? Who is actually doing more for our society at this very moment? Let us value people for the contribution that they make and respect the skill of the cleaner, the refuse worker, the postal delivery worker and all those others. Let us have respect for those who are part of the glue of our society. Right now, they need our help, and I hope that, as we look beyond this crisis, they will continue to get our respect, because people we respect should not be treated in the way they have been treated throughout the past decade of austerity.

Right now, we must guarantee for our NHS staff the personal protective equipment that they are crying out for. There must be no excuses: get it there and deliver it for NHS staff, care staff and all the others. Doctors have said they have had to go along to Screwfix to buy face masks. They need visors, long gloves, surgical gowns and hand sanitisers—and they need them now. It is not as if this crisis happened yesterday; the coronavirus broke out in China some months ago and has spread rapidly across the whole world. One doctor was quoted as saying:

“I feel totally abandoned. We don’t have the protective equipment that we desperately need and our children are being treated like orphans and sent off to care camps.”

NHS staff are putting themselves on the line for the rest of us; we must not let them down for a moment longer. It is a matter of their safety and the safety of their patients. For the same reasons, let us test all our NHS staff for the virus as quickly as possible. It is an absolute requirement to accelerate testing throughout the population—“test, test, test”, as Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the head of the World Health Organisation, instructed us all to do quite some time ago. I pay tribute to him and the World Health Organisation for their steadfast and calm leadership during this crisis, and for pointing out that a world pandemic is going on and some countries are better able to cope with it than others.

As we look beyond this crisis, our NHS staff should be treated with respect, which means ensuring that the health service in which they work is well funded; bringing down their levels of stress, which are enormous; and ending the threat of the privatisation of their jobs and the outsourcing of services in NHS hospitals. Right now, can we ensure that our social care workers have the very best protective equipment that they need, and can we also have full testing for them? They also need financial security, an issue I raised at Prime Minister’s Question Time four weeks ago. A quarter of social care workers are on zero-hours contracts. Their job is, as we know, to travel from house to house, making contact with those often at the highest risk of death from this virus. They sometimes see 12 or more clients a day, spending time in their homes and potentially passing on the virus from one home to another and another. A lack of testing increases that danger all the time, so it is not just urgent, it is super urgent—like today, it has to be done. They need to be given the security to know that they can afford to stay off work if they have symptoms, yet none of them are included in the Chancellor’s scheme to pay 80% of wages. That must be addressed immediately. I pointed out in Prime Minister’s Question Time the situation for construction workers, and exactly the same applies to care workers.

As we look beyond the crisis, we need to learn the lesson and end the scandal of paying so little to those entrusted with the care of our loved ones. Let us end the disgrace of 1.4 million people being denied the social care that they need. Right now, the Government can give peace of mind to all self-employed and insecure workers with an income protection scheme equivalent to the one devised for employees. The Prime Minister said he would work on this very quickly, and it has to be done very, very quickly indeed; otherwise, we are all put at greater risk and danger.

Freelancers, workers on zero-hours contracts and those with no recourse to public funds still have no support. From cabbies to childminders, actors to plumbers, people are being told to do something absolutely extraordinary: to stop earning a living. Having made that demand, the Government—yes, the Government—have an awesome responsibility to ensure that these people do not fall immediately into hardship and that they are able to do what is necessary for public health.

[Mr Kevan Jones (North Durham) (Lab)]

Does my right hon. Friend agree that there has to be a crackdown on some employers? Constituents have contacted me this morning to tell me that employers are insisting that people go to work and telling them that if they do not turn up, they will not get paid. Even businesses that are clearly not on the list of key industries have done this. Does he think the Government should crack down on employers that are putting their employees at risk?

[Jeremy Corbyn]

If employers are putting us all at risk by forcing people to work in a non-essential industry or company or non-essential work, they should be sanctioned, and those sanctions should include fines. They have to understand that they have a responsibility as well.

The Government should ensure the closure of any construction work that is not urgent or health and safety-related, just as Transport for London and the Scottish Government have already done—and remember, both have many major building projects going on at any one time.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Kevan Jones (North Durham) (Lab)]

I know that all right hon. and hon. Members will want to pass on their condolences to the family and friends of the 435 people who have died in this coronavirus epidemic. Each of those deaths is a personal tragedy for them and their families, and, sadly, we know that there will be more in the coming days and weeks. I also want to put on the record my thanks to those working in the NHS, our vital emergency services, including the police; the civil service; and to local government officers, some of whom are working round the clock; retail distribution workers; postal workers; and those in our armed forces. Mention was made earlier of cleaners, whom we should thank in particular, because they are going to be important in fighting this epidemic. We need to be honest and say that these are fraught times and tempers may get frayed in the coming weeks and months, but may I urge people not to take it out on the individuals who are there working on our behalf—shop workers and others—who will be vital in getting us through this crisis?

I am disappointed that the Government have not brought forward measures to support the self-employed. Last Thursday, I raised the case of Andrew Brown, a graphic designer in my constituency whose business folded overnight last week. Since then, I have been inundated with questions from individuals who are in real need—taxi drivers, self-employed individuals, and people who run businesses. Let me say to the Minister, as I said to the Chancellor last week, that these individuals do not have recourse to independent wealth and do not have masses of savings. In most cases, they are living and working week to week. Some, such as taxi drivers, have ongoing bills, for example for the rental of cars, that they have to meet. If they cannot work, they do not have recourse to funds that they can suddenly find somewhere else. It is important that a sense of urgency is brought into this, and I am not sure the Government recognise the deep upset, hurt and fear that these people are facing.

[Catherine West]

My right hon. Friend is making an excellent speech. Does he agree that it is deeply disappointing that the package is likely to come out tomorrow or Friday, when the House is not sitting, so Members will not be able to scrutinise it in the way in which we are accustomed to do?

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Jones]

I totally agree with my hon. Friend. I have been raising this issue for the past week, as I know other colleagues have. The Federation of Small Businesses, for example, has been lobbying not only us but the Government, asking them to do something urgently about this.

Another key point is that some individuals, if they are not supported now, will not be in business after the crisis is over. All our communities need the services that those businesses supply. It is about not only supporting individuals, but supporting those businesses in our local communities. I urge the Government, as I have been doing for the last week, to do something about that urgently. I hope that that comes in.

When the Financial Secretary to the Treasury opened the debate, he talked about communications, which the Government have not got right. The hon. Member for Glasgow South West (Chris Stephens) mentioned companies that are still asking people to go to work. It is okay for the Prime Minister to go on television and say, “This is what you can do,” but this morning I received telephone calls from individuals who have been told by their employer that they must go to work in their local engineering company or they will not be paid.

That is fine for people who have great savings or access to a trust fund, or for those who are independently wealthy, but some people need that money to survive. The messaging is okay when it is said, but turning that into action is another thing altogether. As the hon. Member for Gordon (Richard Thomson) said, some companies know that their workers are not needed with regard to the criteria that have been laid out. They are putting not just those individuals at risk, but the rest of us as well.

The other issue is the support that has already been given to business. I welcomed the comprehensive package that was introduced last week for business but, again, communication is an issue, and the Government need to look at that. As the debate started, I received an email from Scott Hawthorne, who runs a waste disposal company in my constituency. He asked whether it would be possible to get clarification on the announcement on furlough funding, because he wants to keep people on. However, he cannot do so, since he cannot explain the basic, simple messages to people because he does not have the information about what the deal is. His finance director cannot make an assessment regarding cash flow, who they can keep on, and whether they will get the money in time.

Earlier in the week, that waste disposal company offered its services to the local county council. The company wants to do good, but the messaging has to get out. I know the people at this company; if they are having difficulty interpreting the Government’s scheme, I am sure that others will be in a similar situation. That is leading to a lot of uncertainty on behalf not only of companies, but the individuals they employ. There are companies that want to do the right thing by their employees, and we should support them. I urge the Minister to ensure that that advice is put up on Government websites and reaches such companies as a matter of urgency.

In Durham, we have a number of prisons and a lot of prison officers live in my constituency. There is an issue for prison officers regarding exposure to the virus in prisons. The Government need to take some steps as a matter of urgency to ensure that those prison officers and other people working in prisons have protective equipment. I think the Government will also have to make the decision to release individuals to take pressure off those hard-working staff.

On communication, the hon. Member for Southend West (Sir David Amess) mentioned MPs having hotlines. If those hotlines are anything like the one that the Foreign Office set up, do not bother, because it did not work. We have people abroad. The message has been put out: “Please return home from overseas.” However, if people do not have the means of doing so, that needs to be put right straightaway. In Prime Minister’s questions, my right hon. Friend the Member for Warley (John Spellar) raised the issue of leasing aircraft. That needs to be done as a matter of urgency, to get those people home.

I will finish on the issue of community support. These are dark times but there is a lot of good will out there. I have been humbled by the great work being done in my constituency. People have been coming forward to help Pact House, a community charity in Stanley in my constituency that is delivering meals and support to local people. Local people want to do the right thing, but they need to know how to do it. I congratulate Stanley Town Council, which yesterday provided £63,000 to a number of community groups, to support their efforts in these difficult times.

The Government need to address the point made by my hon. Friend the Member for Mitcham and Morden (Siobhain McDonagh). We supported charities in 2008—I can remember doing it. Without direct financial support, some of these charities—we need them now and we will also need them in the future—will go under. It is important that that is also done as a matter of urgency. There are demands on their services now and we are going to need them in the future. Without them, we will find it very difficult.

Finally, I wish you and your family all the best, Madam Deputy Speaker, in staying safe in the coming weeks and months. I also extend those wishes not only to all right hon. and hon. Members of this House, but to the hard-working staff who have worked really hard over the past few weeks to keep us going. Let us think about them in the coming weeks and months.