Enterprise Bill [Lords]
Debate between Kevin Brennan and Mary Creagh
Kevin Brennan
I believe that the proposals on privatisation that the Government quickly brought forward following the election were seriously undercooked, if I can put it that way. The Green Investment Bank has only just started to turn a profit. We are glad that it is doing that, but it is a very small amount. When the Government said that they intended to privatise the bank, they prayed in aid the statutory obligation to invest in green projects that they now wish to remove from statute, because of what the ONS said about public debt and the Green Investment Bank being on the books. That proposal has been in trouble all along, and the way that the Government are scrabbling around for a solution shows that the original proposal was undercooked.
Mary Creagh (Wakefield) (Lab)
I praise my hon. Friend for tabling this new clause, and for the way that he scrutinised the Bill in Committee. Does he agree that things have moved on substantially since we met in Committee, with the Government’s publication last Thursday of the prospectus and the announcement that the sale was to proceed and will be a two-stage auction? It certainly looks as though the bank will be fully privatised, so all the debate and discussion that we had in Committee about whether the Government would keep a minority share in the bank, as recommended by the Environmental Audit Committee, seems to have been pretty much for the birds. The Minister probably knew that in Committee.
Kevin Brennan
I congratulate my hon. Friend on her election to the Chair of the Environmental Audit Committee. I am sure she will be as assiduous in scrutinising this proposal and other areas of Government policy as she was in Committee and on the Back Benches, along with my other hon. Friends. She is right to say that the publication of the Government’s intentions last week was interesting, and I hope that the Minister will answer her point about the Government’s intentions, and clarify whether they intend to maintain a stake in the Green Investment Bank after privatisation. When we probed the Minister on that in Committee, answer came there none. From the way that the proposals have been published, it would appear that the Government intend to fully privatise the bank, even though—as we discussed in Committee—it must be the worst possible time, given the current state of the market, to consider privatising this important public asset, if part of the purpose is to get good value for the taxpayer.
Mary Creagh
I will develop this point in my speech, but in Committee two weeks ago I mentioned the bear market, the slide in value of all bank shares since Christmas, and the softening of growth in China. Only this morning, Mark Carney and the Bank of England revealed the large amounts of liquidity that they are preparing to inject into the UK banking economy in the event of an exit from the European Union after the referendum, to avoid a complete meltdown and financial crisis such as the one that took place in 2007-08.
Kevin Brennan
My hon. Friend is right to point that out, and, by implication, to point out that the privatisation would of course occur after the referendum in the summer. The implications of a leave vote on the attempt to privatise the UK Green Investment Bank would be highly significant, as she points out.
Mary Creagh
I wonder whether my hon. Friend has had the chance to look at annex C, which was presented to Parliament last Thursday, on the proposed disposal of shares in the bank. It states:
“As a key part of any sale discussions, potential investors will be asked to confirm their commitment to these values”—
that is, green values—
“and to set out how they propose to protect them. Bidders’ stated intentions will be taken into account in the overall assessment of bids.”
I wonder whether we will hear what percentage will be allocated to that in the bidding process. All bids will be marked against a schema. I, for one, would be curious to know what weight and relevance will be given to the protection of green purposes when the Government decide to sell.
Kevin Brennan
I think we would all be interested to know that. Perhaps the Minister will be as informative as she possibly can and tell the House about that in her response. We have a legislative opportunity here, because after privatisation anything could happen. What guarantee do we have that the bank will not simply be swallowed up by somebody else, and that all the guarantees given by the original investors will not evaporate?
Mary Creagh
Does my hon. Friend share my disappointment that, although the Government have bent over backwards with the ONS to create a special purpose vehicle—a special charity—with independently appointed people to protect the green purposes, they have refused to make any such moves on another matter we debated in Committee, which is the transparency of executive pay, on which the bank is a rare exemplar in the banking sector? I hope to speak about that shortly.
Kevin Brennan
I agree. My hon. Friend has been dogged in her pursuit of that both in Committee and in tabling her amendments on Report, and I look forward to her contribution on that subject.
Will the Minister guarantee that privatisation will not dilute the bank’s green purposes, or must we just keep our fingers crossed? The Government still need to adequately answer questions that were not answered properly in Committee. Am I right that the legislative lock on the green purposes is being repealed purely to get the bank off the Government’s books? If that is the principal reason, is it a good enough reason to give up the statutory guarantee, given what I said about the technical nature of the accounting issue that the ONS raised?
Will the Minister indicate the Government’s view of the stake they expect to retain in the bank, if any, following privatisation? I understand that it is a market transaction, but we need an idea of the kind of return they expect from the sale. As was mentioned earlier, market conditions are so poor that the Chancellor had to abandon the sell-off of Lloyds shares, but we need to know whether they really expect a significant return from the privatisation, given all the pain associated with the process and the record of poor value for money for the taxpayer in previous privatisations. I do not expect her to be able to be precise, but she will want to avoid the criticism the Government encountered over the lack of value achieved previously, so will she gives us an idea of what she expects the Government to get from privatisation?
Is the Minister concerned that these matters will provide further uncertainty for low-carbon investors, at a time of real concern about the Government’s retreat from investment in wind power? We have learned over many years that making policy in haste is not wise—it is certainly not wise to privatise in haste—and we might well repent at leisure if this innovative and effective piece of public policy is lost as a result of a lack of care and a rush to privatise. That is no way to make sustainable policy, particularly in an area where we are trying to create a sustainable future for the country, which is why we have tabled new clause 4.
Enterprise Bill [ Lords ] (Seventh sitting)
Debate between Kevin Brennan and Mary Creagh(8 years, 8 months ago)
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Kevin Brennan
I congratulate Government Members on voting in the way they intended on that occasion.
Amendment 123 would exclude employees of the companies listed in new schedule 3, which are operated by the private sector, from the scope of the cap proposed in clause 35. Employees of Magnox and similar companies across the nuclear estate and elsewhere are employed by companies that operate in the private sector, so why are they being included in and affected by a measure that the Secretary of State told us on Second Reading is designed to hit public sector fat cats? Those employees never imagined for one second—one can understand why—that they were covered by the Conservative party’s manifesto commitment to cap public sector exit payments.
We raised that issue on Second Reading, and I know the Minister has subsequently met with Members of Parliament to discuss it further. Hopefully, by the end of the debate, we will have a solution and those employees will be excluded from the exit payment cap. These companies are in a unique position: they are mostly engaged in managing the safe closure of nuclear facilities, which is obviously a hugely important task for our country.
Mary Creagh (Wakefield) (Lab)
Does my hon. Friend agree that the recent terrible and tragic explosion at Didcot shows just how difficult and dangerous such decommissioning work is? That was a conventional gas-fired power station being demolished. I am sure the sympathies and thoughts of the whole Committee are with those affected and their families. The terrible tragedy that befell workers there shows what a difficult, dangerous and technical job they are doing. A great deal of specialist expertise is required to do it safely. Of course, the risks of a nuclear decommissioning site are exponentially increased because of the risk of anything escaping out into the wider environment.
Kevin Brennan
My hon. Friend is right. Exclusions have been made for those who serve our country, and I think these workers also serve our country in what they do—which is, as she said, difficult, technical and sometimes dangerous work.
Kevin Brennan
I said earlier in the Committee that Government Whips should be seen but not heard, but of course that convention does not apply to Opposition Whips in Committee, as all Committee members will know. That is particularly useful, as it allows my hon. Friend to raise a constituency issue of such direct importance to what is under discussion. I am sure her constituents will take note of what she is doing in the Committee to defend their interests.
As I said, these companies are in a unique position. They are mostly engaged in managing the safe closure of nuclear facilities, which is a hugely important task that is very difficult to manage. By its nature, it involves working towards a specific end date, at which point the employees will in effect make themselves redundant. They are in a particularly different category. To get someone with the necessary skills to commit to that task when they are in, say, their early or mid-30s, we need to ensure that they know they will be provided for if they successfully complete their task by the time they reach their mid to late 50s, when finding re-employment in a similar role with their skills would be potentially very difficult.
As we have heard, if these companies cannot afford the packages necessary to compensate someone for the loss of their role when their task is completed, the companies will find it extremely difficult to prevent these highly skilled workers, who were mobile in earlier parts of their career, from simply leaving. That, in itself, will ultimately drive up the costs and risks associated with decommissioning and exacerbate an already difficult skills shortage in the industry.
Legislating now, as the Government are doing, to override long-standing arrangements in the nuclear sector where the employees involved have kept their end of the bargain faithfully, is pretty unconscionable in my opinion. How can it be right that workers who have stayed with a company to deliver successfully the safety commissioning of a site see their promised redundancy compensation reneged on by the Government when it is due to be paid?
The Treasury justification for applying the cap to the employees of those companies, as I understand it, is the old chestnut of the Office for National Statistics judging them to be publicly controlled. That technical, statistical designation, however, does not mean that applying the cap to those workers is either fair or necessarily value for money for taxpayers in the long term. It is unfair unilaterally to strike down agreements between companies and their employees. It will drive up overall costs for decommissioning as recruitment and retention in the relevant sectors take a hit. There is also no proof that taxpayers will receive any benefit, as the private operators of the companies often receive higher incentive payments under their contracts as a result.
Unless the Government decide to act on this, and I hope they do, employees in the sector will note that when it comes to pension provision and other issues the Treasury has excluded them from the public sector, but it considers them within scope for the cap in the Bill. Proceeding with imposing the cap on the employees of those companies will store up significant industrial relations issues. One can only guess how they will feel —actually, we do not have to guess, because we know from the evidence that we have received, which I will come on to in a moment. How will they feel when they discover that the Secretary of State considers them to be fat cats requiring legislation to limit their payments, even though they are employed by the private sector, while the Government absolutely reject any limit on anyone working in the banking sector? Why is a privatised banker not given the fat-cat treatment by the Secretary of State, but nuclear decommissioning workers are? Yet again it seems to be up with the bankers and down with the workers with this Government. What a shocking value-free zone the policy is, if the Government stick to it and do not accept that they have got it wrong and should support our amendment.
We have received strong representations from Magnox workers and from the trade unions that have represented them so ably. Other companies in the sector are covered and they are referred to in new schedule 3. For the record and for the sake of inclusivity in my remarks I will name those included in the new schedule: Sellafield Ltd, Westinghouse Springfields Fuels Ltd, Magnox Ltd, National Nuclear Laboratory, International Nuclear Services, Atomic Weapons Establishment Ltd, Low Level Waste Repository Ltd, Dounreay Site Restoration Ltd, RSRL Winfrith and RSRL Harwell. Note that none of those companies is called Fat Cats Ltd.
Mary Creagh
My hon. Friend made a good point earlier comparing the workers and the bankers. Does he agree that the list he has just read out is an interesting hangover from the privatisation of the electricity grid and the national nuclear authority? Some risks can only be borne by Government. One of those risks is the premature exit of a skilled, competent workforce equipped to deal with nuclear materials and their safe disposal. There are strong arguments for the Government to continue to bear the redundancy risk, or to allow the workers to be classified—I am not sure whether they are classified as being state or private sector workers, but the point is, when we privatise things, some risks only Government can bear, and that is what the amendment is all about.
Kevin Brennan
My hon. Friend is right. I am sure that the Minister will confirm that that is why those companies fall in scope, but that does not stop the Government from deciding actively to exclude them from scope. As I said earlier, they are radiant with the lawful power to do that; we are not, but they can do it. I encourage the Minister to commit to doing so in her response.
The Committee has formally received dozens of letters from Magnox workers. I have some here and I am sure hon. Members have read them. I congratulate the workers on the quality of representations they have made to the Committee as well as the trade unions. Kevin Coyne of Unite, whom I met, has co-ordinated joint union meetings to campaign on the issue. We are reaching the last stages of the Committee so there is not time to read all of the letters out, but they have been entered formally as evidence to the Committee, so they are available for people to read.
Kevin Brennan
Indeed. Those people are the definition of strivers; they are hard-working—the beating heart of the working people of this country. It shows in their letters to us. Neither are they swivel-eyed lefty loonies or anything of that kind. Their letters reveal that they are ordinary working people. Often they live in the constituencies of Conservative Members. The one I quoted earlier lives in Maldon, the constituency of the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, and there are many others in constituencies represented by Members from both sides of the House and all parts of the United Kingdom.
Mary Creagh
I do not know how many of those workers cast votes for the Conservatives in the election, but had they been apprised of the facts before the election obviously they might have chosen to vote differently in some of the marginal seats mentioned by my hon. Friend. Also, one of the letters that I have received mentions that the impact assessment says that this course of action will save in the low hundreds of millions of pounds over this Parliament. The woman who wrote the letter contrasts that with the £130 million of back tax that has been paid by Google, which is under the spotlight again, given the news that the French Government are asking for £1.3 billion of back taxes from that company.
The Chair
Kevin Brennan
Well, the Secretary of State used the term, and the Secretary of State is the Minister’s senior and I presume she agrees with what he says. She is constitutionally obliged to, actually, when she is talking on behalf of the Department.
Mary Creagh
Let me attempt to help the Committee. I am sure that the Minister meant, when she referred to payments of up to half a million pounds, that some of those will be making up the pension requirements. Let us say that somebody is made redundant at 50. Their contract states that they can have their pension made up as if they had worked until the state retirement age, which is 65. We are talking about 13 years of pension fund payments on a salary of, I think, £30,000 a year. Thirteen years of payment would amount to £156,000. That is not going into that person’s pocket; it is going into their pension fund, and they have planned for that in order to help to pay their mortgage and to help them save towards their retirement.
Kevin Brennan
Indeed. All their life decisions were taken on the basis that they had a good pension fund that they were paying into and that they could expect, under the terms and conditions, to receive. That was contractually promised and, at the time of privatisation, commitments were made and guarantees were given that these people going into the private sector would not be affected in the way they are now being affected. The Government are hiding behind the veil of the argument that the ONS has classed them as public sector. That is irrelevant because the Government have the authority to exclude them if they accept the argument put forward by the Magnox workers.
I know that the Minister has expressed some sympathy—that is why I was quite surprised at her last intervention—privately in relation to Magnox workers. [Interruption.] That has been reported to me. I should explain. I will put it on the record, then. My hon. Friend the Member for Ynys Môn (Albert Owen) told me that in the meeting that he and other Members from across the House had with her that she expressed some sympathy with the case that the workers were putting forward. Nevertheless, she has come to the Committee with nothing for them today and no indication that on Report the Government will come back with something better than they have produced today, which is the square root of very little, to put it politely.
Enterprise Bill [ Lords ] (Eighth sitting)
Debate between Kevin Brennan and Mary Creagh(8 years, 8 months ago)
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Kevin Brennan
Welcome back, Sir David. We have heard about people’s experiences. My first job was in Fine Fare, which is probably defunct now, stacking shelves and cleaning the toilets for 48.5p an hour. When I graduated to Marks and Spencer, my mother said it was the happiest day of her life. I have that grassroots experience of the retail industry, although it is not the considerable experience of the hon. Member for Bury St Edmunds.
I will not detain the Committee for a long, because of the time. We have had an extensive debate. Most of the issues have been aired pretty well, and I will not repeat all the points. The Minister, the right hon. Member for Broxtowe, often chunters about us talking about process, but there is a fundamental objection about the process and the manner in which the Government have gone about introducing these things. The Prime Minister made commitments in April and suddenly changed his mind upon discovering the internet a few months later and decided that something needed to be done desperately and urgently. In the meantime, the convenience of a general election had intervened, meaning he would not have to face the electorate for another five years.
Mary Creagh
Does my hon. Friend agree that the invention of the internet is an argument against Sunday trading, because it gives busy working parents the opportunity to buy online from supermarkets and department stores and to have things delivered at their leisure and convenience, rather than dragging the kids around the shops at the weekend? Frankly, that is something that most families detest and despise—certainly my family do.
Kevin Brennan
The other growing trend is ordering things on the internet and picking them up in the shop at another time. That is increasingly how people shop these days; certainly my own wife does it frequently. [Hon. Members: “Ooh!”] Wait for it. I have yet to do that myself, because as a former Marks and Spencer Saturday boy, I like to try my suits on before I buy them. There are also, of course, different consumer rights for those who order online.
The changes have been introduced halfway through the Bill’s life, conveniently swerving around the Bishops in the House of Lords, who might have had something to say, as might other Members of that House, about keeping Sunday special. It is a highly controversial measure, and there is concern about it across this House, on the Conservative Benches as well as in other parties. That is why we properly have an extra half-day of time carved out on Report to discuss the Bill.
I was going to suggest that if working on a Sunday is nothing to be concerned about, perhaps that debate should take place on a Sunday here in Parliament, and we should all come back—I see the hon. Member for Bury St Edmunds nodding in approval. I would be certainly happy to do so if the Government want to table it on a Sunday, because I am sure it is no inconvenience whatever to anyone to come to work on a Sunday. [Interruption.] I do not sense universal assent to my proposal, but the hon. Lady was in favour of it.
As a result of that extra time, we will have an opportunity to test the opinion of the whole House on this subject. As this is a House of Lords Bill, it is not enactable in this House, so constitutionally, in this instance it is the Lords who have a significant say, and no Salisbury convention applies, because it was not included in the governing party’s manifesto. Indeed, the Prime Minister said that he would do the opposite, and had no plans to do anything about Sunday trading until his sudden discovery of the internet.
Therefore, if the Bill survives Report in the House of Commons and their lordships get it back, I am sure they will want to spend extensive time on the measure, given that they were not allowed to consider it because the Government did not have the courtesy to introduce it at the beginning of the Bill. As one of my hon. Friends pointed out, the consultation was extremely short and was then sat on for months after the Bill had gone through its stages in the House of Lords before the Government announced, on the cusp of Second Reading, that they had had another sudden revelation and decided that they needed to put the measure into this Bill, even though it was halfway through its parliamentary journey.
We need time to cogitate further on the measure, but in doing so, I have certainly been convinced by the arguments made by my right hon. and hon. Friends that we are likely to oppose it on Report. I enjoyed all their speeches. My hon. Friend the Member for Newcastle upon Tyne North spoke with a great deal of knowledge, not least, as she pointed out, because of her family interest, in the form of her partner’s occupation. My right hon. Friend the Member for Don Valley entertained us hugely by telling us that she had foiled a bank robbery. The only disappointing thing was that apparently no video survives of that day; I am sure that we would all have liked to see it. We look forward to hearing the full story outside this room. She also made some vital points about why the measure should not be adopted. We also heard contributions in the form of interventions by my hon. Friend the Member for Wakefield, and my hon. Friend the Member for Sefton Central set out an extensive case for why the measure is wrong.
I say to our colleagues from the Scottish National party that when people were debating a British compromise or an English compromise, I was feeling slightly forgotten over here in the corner, as a constituency Member representing a Welsh seat, because of course these measures also apply to Wales. However, they will affect Scotland and Northern Ireland. I know that USDAW has communicated with Scottish MPs on behalf of its 46,000 members in Scotland to say that its view is that the sort of premium pay that is available to workers in Scotland, England, Wales and Northern Ireland for working on Sundays is already under severe threat as a result of the nature of the market and the prospect of these measures being introduced.
Enterprise Bill [ Lords ] (Sixth sitting)
Debate between Kevin Brennan and Mary Creagh(8 years, 8 months ago)
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Mary Creagh (Wakefield) (Lab)
I know from my time shadowing DFID that many questions were raised about the fact that we chose to be foundation sponsors of the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank. There were a large amount of questions about the human rights implications, in particular about the sort of projects the bank would be investing in, given that—along with the other founding partners—it is under Chinese state Government control, when they have a completely different approach to human rights and natural resource exploitation, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa, to that of our own country and the Department for International Development.
Kevin Brennan
I wish I had spent my lunch hour more productively, because somebody pointed out to me that a report is out today on human rights, businesses and the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills. With a busy day in Committee, I have missed the opportunity to give a brilliant response to my hon. Friend’s intervention. Nevertheless, she is right, and on trend in terms of today’s news cycle.
I am not saying that it is easy to solve this problem. As Kermit the Frog said, it is not easy being green. This is not an easy area to navigate, but the Government seem to want to make it more difficult than it is already. As I said earlier, the Green Investment Bank was an embryonic idea under the last Labour Government. It was mentioned by the former Chancellor of the Exchequer, Alistair Darling, in one of his Budgets and it was being developed in the Cabinet Office and in the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills when I was a Minister in both.
I was very pleased when the coalition Government brought forward proposals, having worked up those ideas so that they were workable, and when the Bill was passed and the bank was set up. I was also pleased about the good start the Bill has had and how well it got under way, which Members have also mentioned. There have been some criticisms about the straitjacket the Treasury might have put on the Green Investment Bank, but nevertheless it has been able to participate in the financing of projects that otherwise probably would not have taken place and that make a real contribution to meeting our commitments under the Climate Change Act 2008. I think we are all agreed that its creation is a good news story.
The Treasury does not want it appearing on the books because of the targets the Chancellor set for debt and deficit reduction. However, when we consider what we are doing here, we have come to a strange pass when even something that we all agree would be a good thing—that is, even good borrowing—is bad if it is on the Government’s books, and for no other reason than that. Sometimes we seem in this country to be the prisoners of public accountancy conventions in making public policy, rather than people who use common sense, as we are supposed to do in Britain, about when borrowing is good and effective and is used to invest—after all, that is what we are talking about—in growing our economy in the future in a sustainable way. During very difficult years following the banking crash, in which we were sometimes in recession, a significant part of recent growth in the UK came from the green economy. By some estimates it accounts for a million jobs in the low-carbon sector, worth more than £100 billion. It is disappointing that the Government are in danger, if they are not careful, of undermining one of the key drivers of that sector. If we were able to tap into our country’s potential in respect of wind, wave and tidal power, we could create hundreds of thousands more high-quality, sustainable jobs for our economy.
The CBI’s “The colour of growth” report says we have a £130 billion share of a global low-carbon marketplace that is worth about £4 trillion. That will rise hugely, given the opportunities around the world in years to come, but we are in danger of slipping down the ranks. We must not abdicate at this point our leadership on this issue. If we do, our prosperity, as well as our environment, will ultimately suffer.
Privatisation is not the only way that the Green Investment Bank could go out and borrow in the market; that could be done under the current legislation, in any case. However, because of the Government’s financial orthodoxy and desire to be able to say what they want to say about their targets, they are extremely reluctant to allow the Green Investment Bank to do it.
Mary Creagh
One thing that came out in the Select Committee’s evidence session was that the Green Investment Bank was very keen for the Government to retain their minority shareholding in the bank. That confirms my hon. Friend’s point about the fiscal orthodoxy with which the Government are pursuing this sale. Obviously, the bank’s green purposes would be protected as long as the Government’s minority share was in place.
Kevin Brennan
We have had a very exciting afternoon, as I am sure you would agree, Ms Buck. The Government have adopted what might be called the “Boris principle” on voting—namely, that they can ignore the result of the first vote if they do not like the way it came out and demand a second. We live and learn about parliamentary procedure. We obviously respect your ruling on the matter, Ms Buck, with absolute and total respect.
We now come to part 8, which interestingly has nothing to do with enterprise, despite the Bill’s title. This has been called a “Christmas tree Bill”, because it has lots of different baubles on it. If that is the case, part 8 is an Easter egg hanging on the Christmas tree, because it has absolutely nothing to do with enterprise. Nevertheless, the Government chose to include it and it was ruled to be in scope, so it is completely in order for us to discuss these matters as part of the Enterprise Bill.
Let me make it clear from the outset that the Opposition agree that excessive exit payments in the public sector should not be paid, and that abuses in that regard should certainly be ended. The problem with the Government’s approach is that they are attempting to govern by headline in a very complex area. In doing so, they are creating anomalies and unfairness, and—that old favourite of ours—legislating to invoke the law of unintended consequences. That is what is likely to happen as a result of legislating rigidly on this matter, as they are doing.
Governments often resist legislating rigidly in Bills because they understand the mess that can ensue. It was Otto von Bismarck—not Leo from “The West Wing”—who first said that people should not see how two things are made: laws and sausages. This is a very good example of that. Putting such things in the Bill is basically a Government headline for the tabloid press about public sector fat cats—an odious remark that the Secretary of State made on Second Reading, which was an insult to many thousands of decent, hard-working people in this country. By legislating in that way, all sorts of messy, sausage-like substances will seep out.
The first group of amendments to clause 35 are about where an exit cap should be placed, who should be covered and who should be exempt. They are largely probing amendments, but I may press one of them later to test the Committee’s opinion on it, because it refers to what the Government said their intention was in introducing this legislation on exit payments. The amendments also cover an annual revaluation to ensure that the value does not diminish and that more workers are not caught inside the exit cap net.
Let me go through the amendments in turn. Amendment 116 would provide that regulations may make provision to secure that the total amount of exit payments made to a person in respect of a relevant public sector exit does not exceed a maximum of no less than £95,000. In other words, it seeks to ensure that the cap cannot be lowered further without legislation. I would be interested to hear from the Minister what the Government’s intension is on the question of whether it can be lowered without further legislation.
Amendment 109 probes why the cap has not been set at a level similar to the NHS level, which was £145,000. Although it is a probing amendment, I am interested to know why the provision introduces a disparity between different sets of public sector workers. The NHS caps underwent proper research, consultation and subsequent scrutiny, and were seen to be fair. I am afraid that that compares very badly with a completely rushed consultation with minimal research and the resultant limited scrutiny that these Government proposals have had.
In the other place, Baroness Neville-Rolfe said:
“A cap even at the level proposed by the Government will not affect the large majority of public sector workers”—[Official Report, House of Lords, 4 November 2015; Vol. 765, c. GC366.]
Will the Minister supply the Committee with the figures for the workers who would be affected by an exit cap payment of £95,000? The words, “a large majority” are a bit woolly; we need a bit more precision than that when we are legislating. What are the exact projections for the cap of £95,000 and what would the exact projections be if the cap were introduced at £145,000? I do not intend to press the amendment to a vote—it is a probing amendment—but we want to understand who is being affected and what we are talking about. Perhaps the Minister would supply the Committee with the cost to the public purse of the cap set at those two limits. I hope that she is able to do so. If she is not accepting on the grounds of costs, she will obviously have those figures to hand.
Mary Creagh
Has my hon. Friend looked into whether the employees of the UK Green Investment Bank would be covered by the cap? Obviously there are several executives who, as I mentioned previously, get significantly more than the £147,000 cap. Looking into their terms and conditions, I notice that they have a six-month notice period and that pay can be given in lieu of notice. In the event of that happening for one of the Green Investment Bank employees, does my hon. Friend think that this cap would click into force? Give that the Green Investment Bank might not be privatised until 2018 or 2019, how does he think that those employees would be affected?
Kevin Brennan
As I understand it from the Secretary of State, they would be affected only if they were officially classified as fat cats. If they are not affected, they are not officially fat cats in the eyes of the Secretary of State and if they are affected, they are officially fat cats according to the Secretary of State. It remains to be seen whether those employees are fat cats under the Government’s own definition.
Amendment 112 would subject the amount of the cap to an annual re-evaluation. Amendment 122 covers a similar subject. It is vital that any proposed cap is flexible and updated on a regular basis to take into account differences in pay and increases in separate areas of the public sector. In considering the scope and impact of the policy, it is important to note that the proposal to make the cap effective at £95,000 means that it will not just impact on higher paid senior managers.
If the £95,000 figure is not uprated, it is likely to affect more and more grades, so we ask the Government to consider re-evaluating it annually, perhaps using the same uprating as for public sector pensions. Similarly, will the Minister open discussions with the relevant stakeholders on technical considerations such as whether the cap will include other means by which an individual can access an unreduced pension, such as on compassionate grounds?
Uprating is important if workers are not to fall further behind. Having the uprating enshrined in primary legislation rather than being devolved to secondary legislation would ensure that it is reviewed annually. I would be interested to hear the Government’s explanation for why they are not picking this route and why they want to do it through secondary legislation. We will listen to that explanation with an open mind.
Amendment 114 would exempt from the cap those earning below the national average wage, who, by definition, could not be called the best paid—they would, however, be called fat cats by the Secretary of State. It is hard to see how the Government can include that group of workers if that is really what they think the measure is about. What are the specific reasons for not including people earning below the national average wage in an exemption from the exit cap? The only way those workers could get up to the cap is through decades of long service, and surely that kind of loyalty is not something the Government want to punish.
How many workers earning below the national average wage will be included in an exit cap of £95,000? I would be interested to hear the Government’s figures. I am sure they will have crunched the numbers carefully in considering and developing the policy, and I presume the Minister will have the figures to hand and examine them carefully before deciding whether to oppose our amendment.
It has been widely mentioned—this is really important and I will come back to it later—that the then Exchequer Secretary to the Treasury, the right hon. Member for Witham (Priti Patel), said in January 2015 on exit payments:
“This commitment, which will be included in our 2015 General Election manifesto, will cap payments for well-paid public sector workers at £95,000.”
I give her credit for her clarity on that. She went on to say:
“Crucially, those earning less than £27,000 will be exempted to protect the very small number of low earning, long-serving public servants.”
That commitment was given by a Treasury Minister a year ago. When the Conservative party manifesto came along, it said on page 49:
“We will end taxpayer-funded six-figure payoffs for the best paid public sector workers.”
On Second Reading in the House of Commons, the Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills said that the measures were needed because
“Too many public sector fat cats are handed six figure pay-offs when they leave a job”—[Official Report, 2 February 2016; Vol. 605, c. 817.]
If someone is affected by this provision, according to the Secretary of State they are a fat cat. The amendments will allow us to explore exactly why that is a dreadful thing to say.
Mary Creagh
Has my hon. Friend seen any figures on the impact of the measure according to gender? Does he know whether there has been a gender impact assessment? I am thinking in particular of people who have worked for a long time as, say, teachers or nurses and who will be above the £27,000 a year de minimis requirement set out by the Treasury Minister, but who find themselves unable to continue, perhaps after a traumatic event or injury at work, and are able after a period of 30 years to leave. How does he think they will be affected? Does he see that there could be a discriminatory impact?
Kevin Brennan
My hon. Friend’s astute intervention saves me from going into too much detail on that score, but she is absolutely right: we simply do not know the equality implications of the measures, particularly in regard to gender, because the Government have not supplied us with the figures. It seems intuitively highly likely that the impact will be skewed heavily against female workers in the sorts of occupation that she outlined and perhaps in other public sector occupations.
The Bill, as it stands, does not have any such exemption as the Treasury Minister indicated it would last year. As far as I can make out, that was not the initial intention or, indeed, what was stated in the Conservative party manifesto. Despite the Government’s arguments, while the public sector exit payment cap includes pension entitlement within its scope—that is a key issue—it will affect employees on even lower salaries, as current pension protections wither on the vine.
Mary Creagh
That is a key point. We know that people working in the public sector have certain protections. In some services, those protections kick in at age 50, and in others at age 55. By including pension rights, people who may be forced to retire on the grounds of ill health or their simple inability to carry on working will find a cap on exit payments, meaning that they can get the six months’ notice. But the far more lasting injustice will be that their pensions cannot be made up as though they had worked to 60 or, in some cases, to 65. They will suffer detriment for the rest of their lives through loss of pension income that will not have been made up.
Kevin Brennan
That is not what we are discussing here. We are discussing the terms and conditions that public sector workers signed up to in agreement with the Government. In many cases, such people may have been in service for a long time and may well have given up the opportunity to earn more in the private sector by working as loyal public servants.
During the clause 26 discussion on Report in the Lords, Baroness Neville-Rolfe indicated that a drop of £500 would not be disproportionate for someone previously entitled to a pension of £12,500. I have to say that a drop of 4% is significant for somebody on a relatively small income, especially when that income is below that of someone on the national minimum wage. To say that a 4% cut is not significant is highly misleading.
The Government made the case in the House of Lords that leaving with a payment of £95,000 or above would be a large amount for any employee. For example, the Minister in the other place said that she does
“not accept that those exiting with a payment of £95,000”—
which is not the case—
“will generally be subject to hardship”.
The idea that someone will receive £95,000 is a myth. A large amount will never actually be seen by employees on low to average incomes, because the payment includes compensation paid to the pension scheme. My noble Friend Baroness Hayter pointed out that
“they cannot go off and use that money to live on while trying to retrain or move or find another job; it is an actuarial payment that never comes near their bank account… This is not a sum of money they can use to buy themselves an annuity to help train or move or anything else—it is money they never see.”—[Official Report, House of Lords, 30 November 2015; Vol. 767, c. 984-985.]
Mary Creagh
On the point made by the hon. and learned Member for South East Cambridgeshire, I did a quick Google search and discovered a headline relating to Tesco, which we have discussed in Committee previously:
“Ousted Tesco boss is handed £20million payoff”.
I do not know whether that was three times his annual income, but that is what the Daily Mail reported was received by Philip Clarke, 54, who stepped
“down after 3.7% drop in like-for-like quarterly sales”.
Kevin Brennan
As ever, I cannot fault my hon. Friend’s interventions, even if I might fault her sources from time to time. She is right to point that out to the Committee. Let us take a hypothetical example of how someone might be affected. The Government are trying to make out that people will not be affected, but, to take her point, if we take someone who has been a librarian in the public sector for 34 years and who has reached the age of 55 with a career-average salary for pension calculation purposes of £25,000, their pension accrued at one 49th per year of service would add up to £510.20 for each year of service. With 34 years of service that would come to £17,346.93. Under the regulations, if it came to pass that that person had to leave the service owing to redundancy, they would get a pension of £17,346 11 years earlier than the normal retirement age of 66. Therefore, if we take those 11 years and count in the pension, that adds up to £190,816 of pension paid before normal retirement age.
The payment required by the pension fund to enable that unreduced pension to be paid would be likely to breach the Government’s proposed £95,000 exit cap. There are technical reasons why it does not add up to the full amount of £190,000, but the so-called strain payment required is highly likely to exceed the Government’s proposed cap, so the employer would not be able to make the member redundant without breaching either the proposed cap or the current local government pension scheme regulations.
On Report in the House of Lords, Baroness Neville-Rolfe said of that example that that person would not be affected by the cap if they were aged 52. That is correct, but that misses the point as no pension payment would be in play if someone were made redundant earlier than age 55. That would be a simple redundancy payment, paid directly to the member of staff in the normal way, which would be unlikely to breach the cap. The issue is with people made redundant after the age of 55 who are automatically entitled to early retirement rather than a straightforward redundancy settlement.
It is important to note that in the example I gave the normal retirement age is 66 and while many local government employees who are currently 55 will have some protections in place to mitigate the worst effects of such a cap, that will not be true for all employees, nor will it be true for staff as time moves on. We must remember that the proposals are expected to be in force for some considerable time and all current protections are withering on the vine as we speak.
Amendment 115 would seek to protect workers who earn less than £27,000 and have many years of loyal service. The Government’s manifesto referred to “best paid workers”, so I wonder whether they consider a worker earning £27,000 a year to be one of the best-paid workers in the country who should be covered by the cap. I do not think that was the original intention—in fact, I know that, because as I said earlier the right hon. Member for Witham, when in the Treasury, said that
“those earning less than £27,000 will be exempted to protect the very small number of low earning, long-serving public servants.”
She did not think that they were fat cats at that time and she thought they should be protected, so we need to understand why that is not happening in the Bill.
Why not accept amendment 115? Will the Minister outline the unusual circumstances, as Baroness Neville-Rolfe did, in which workers will be caught out? Why was a lower earnings floor not included given that the Government promised that a year ago in their manifesto, which said that they would pursue the “best paid workers” and that that was the cap’s intention? Of course, once the election was over, the Government ignored what they had said. The Minister referred to the small number of low-earning, long-serving public servants, but can this Minister supply the Committee with her estimate of how low-paid and long-serving workers will be affected by the cap?
I was going to talk about the poor quality of the consultation. I do not want to detain the Committee for too long, but the consultation was in no way of the same quality—I pay tribute on that score at least to Lord Maude—as the consultation done when caps were introduced previously in the civil service. Further problems have emerged as a result of how poorly the consultation was conducted. Usually, a full consultation takes 12 weeks rather than the four weeks taken by this one, which began on 31 July 2015 and concluded on 27 August 2015. Problematically for a lot of workers in education, of course, that coincides exactly with the summer recess, and the measure could have a big impact in schools and education. The National Association of Head Teachers has pointed out that there are particular problems relating to the proposals as a result, and that it did not get a proper opportunity to consult its membership about them.
That takes me to amendment 128, which would ensure that the restriction on public sector exit payments is set at a level linked to inflation and earnings growth, of which arbitrary fixed caps do not account. If the cap is introduced, there must be a commitment to index-linking it to ensure that it meets the original intention without becoming more and more punitive over time. Any cap must include a mechanism for index-linking in line with pay and prices.
This is a long group of amendments; I apologise, Ms Buck, but I must go through each one. Amendment 104 would exclude from the cap compensatory payments made by an employer to a pension scheme that do not go to the person leaving the service. That refers back to strain payments, which I was discussing earlier.
Mary Creagh
My hon. Friend is making an excellent point, and I agree particularly with his amendment to ensure that exit payments are linked to inflation and earnings growth. Otherwise, the cap would become an arbitrary bar that could dissuade people from going into public sector jobs.
For the record, I wanted to draw to my hon. Friend’s attention, particularly in terms of pensions, the payoff of £3.6 million made to Richard Glynn, chief executive of Ladbrokes. When Dalton Philips, chief executive of Morrisons, left after a chequered reign, his payoff was £4 million. The boss of Barclays, which of course is partially state-owned, left with £28 million in cash and shares. On the pensions point, the disgraced chief executive of Volkswagen, Martin Winterkorn, left with a €21 million pension pot. Just to be clear about the—
Mary Creagh
I am not clear whether the provision applies retrospectively or about how far back it goes. Does it not potentially open the door to class actions from large groups of people? I can see one class action in development from the Magnox employees, who are working for a privately owned company that has been nationally owned. Does my hon. Friend find it interesting that the Minister was so keen to resist our amendments this morning that would have provided transparency on the remuneration of executives of the Green Investment Bank yet is so very keen to impose a cap on people working for a formerly state-owned company that is now a private company?
Kevin Brennan
I do not believe the provision is retrospective—retrospective legislation is rare in the direct sense—but it certainly affects existing agreements and undermines previous agreements that the Government made and said were fair and would stand for a very long time. In the case of contractual obligations, the provision raises serious questions as to whether the Bill as it stands is legally sound. As well as the practicalities of the measure to include notice pay in the cap, there is also the impact on those who are too ill to work. Modelling by the National Association of Head Teachers shows that a headteacher who is compelled to leave work due to developing a physical condition and who is unable to work out their notice due to illness will be significantly worse off compared with an able-bodied head because of the proposed cap currently being drafted to include pay in lieu of notice. Does the provision to include notice pay and holiday pay comply with the provisions of the Equality Act 2010? What advice has the Minister had on that?
My next point relates to the way in which schools are run, because they are different from other organisations in relation to notice for obvious term-time reasons. The Government have committed to academise poorly performing schools. That can often include the removal of a headteacher from a school. How would that be possible under the provisions if that same headteacher decided to work out their notice, rather than leave straightaway? That is what anyone would do if their payment in lieu of notice was to be included in the exit payment. If a school is trying to make a fresh start under a new head, it will find it very difficult to remove the incumbent swiftly, because that person will seek to work out their notice rather than depart immediately. That is understandable, because who would act in a way that was financially disadvantageous to them in such circumstances?
The real problem is that notice periods for headteachers are often exceptionally long. If a headteacher is leaving just after Christmas, their period of notice might not technically run out until after the summer holidays in some cases. Schools and pupils could suffer under these plans if there were such delays. Has the Minister considered that? What is her response to that problem?
Amendment 105, on which I may well seek the Committee’s opinion, provides that regulations may exempt from the public sector exit payment cap those earning less than £27,000. Amendments 115, 105 and 106 offer protection for low to moderately paid public sector workers who have provided long service. I will not repeat the arguments made earlier, but the fact remains that excluding workers who earn less than £27,000 per year would protect workers earning the average wage of £26,400. A promise to protect those workers was made by the Government; that is the point.
Kevin Brennan
Let us make sure that that “very few, if any” is none. We have the opportunity to do that now. We could fulfil the Government’s objective and, if the Minister is right that no lower-paid workers will be affected, it would cost nothing at all, but it would provide assurance to people who are not fat cats on high pay in the public sector that the provision is not intended for them and will not affect them.
Mary Creagh
Does my hon. Friend think the Minister was being slightly misleading when she said that people in the private sector would be entitled only to the maximum statutory redundancy pay of £14,500? That is the statutory maximum, but, as I said in earlier interventions, when people are made redundant they are often entitled to pay in lieu of notice, so it is slightly misleading of the Minister to use the statutory maximum for redundancy in the private sector as a comparator.
Kevin Brennan
I do not think the Minister was being misleading, because had she been, it would have been out of order, but she was perhaps using an example that was not directly comparable, if I can put it that way.
Enterprise Bill [ Lords ] (Fifth sitting)
Debate between Kevin Brennan and Mary Creagh(8 years, 8 months ago)
Public Bill CommitteesRead Full debate Read Hansard Text
Kevin Brennan
Through that intervention the Minister has helpfully shortened the letter that she will have to write to the Committee. With her assurance on the privatisation question, I am happy, at this point, with the promise of correspondence from the Minister, to allow clause stand part to proceed without any intervention on our part.
Question put and agreed to.
Clause 29 accordingly ordered to stand part of the Bill.
Clause 30
Disposal of Crown’s shares in UK Green Investment Bank company
Mary Creagh (Wakefield) (Lab)
I beg to move amendment 129, in clause 30, page 48, line 2, at end insert—
“6B Report on remuneration of chair, non-executive directors and executive team
(1) For each year following a disposal of shares held by the Crown in a UK Green Investment Bank company the Secretary of State must lay before Parliament a report on the remuneration of the company’s chair, non-executive directors and executive team by the company.
(2) The report shall include a statement of the framework or broad policy for the remuneration of the above individuals.
(3) The report shall include the value of the following, where applicable, in respect of each individual—
(a) salary or fee;
(b) pension;
(c) other cash or non-cash benefits, including bonus or performance-related payments; and
(d) shareholdings in a UK Green Investment Bank company.”
This amendment would require, following a disposal of shares in a UK Green Investment Bank company, that the Secretary of State report annually on the remuneration of the Chair, non-executive directors and Executive Team of the company.
The UK Green Investment Bank began operating in 2012 as a fully Government-owned bank. It purpose is to invest in viable green infrastructure projects that would not otherwise be able to obtain funding due to market failure, or to stimulate the market. It has invested in 58 projects with a total value of more than £10 billion.
In June 2015, the Government announced plans to privatise the Green Investment Bank and this Bill, introduced in the House of Lords, is the legislative means to do that. The Government’s primary goal is for the Green Investment Bank to be reclassified as a private sector organisation, so that its finance will not contribute to public sector net debt. To achieve that, the Government believe that they must remove reference to the Green Investment Bank’s green purposes and identity from the Enterprise and Regulatory Reform Act 2013.
I am sure that the Minister will argue that a privatised Green Investment Bank will have access to a greater volume of capital and a larger range of sectors. I have just come from a meeting with the Aldersgate Group about the European Commission’s circular economy package, which was published on 2 December. That is a whole new area in which the Green Investment Bank could invest over the next five years and which is set to create 90,000 new green jobs in the UK economy.
The Green Investment Bank supports the move, and the Government have drawn on that support as a primary motivation for their plans to proceed. The Environmental Audit Committee heard in an inquiry that concluded just before Christmas that the Government had not undertaken enough consultation on the decision to privatise the Green Investment Bank. That is often contrasted with the detailed consultation that went into the original formation of the bank, from which, the Committee was told, privatisation so soon after creation was not discussed. The EAC also heard that the Government had not presented enough evidence for privatisation, or considered a wide enough range of alternatives to a sell-off. There are obviously many different ways in which a Government can decide to privatise or part-privatise their assets.
In its response to the EAC report, the Government said that their announcement to privatise had been followed up
“by substantial engagement with stakeholders and the media to explain the case”
for privatisation. The Government also claimed that they had undertaken unpublished market testing over the course of two years. I am interested to hear from the Minister whether she would be willing to publish that market testing.
The Government said that they would not publish an impact assessment because there were no regulatory or significant cost impacts of the sale of the Green Investment Bank or changes to its pre-existing policy goals. We will talk about that later when we come to clause 32.
So the only robust consultation that the Government can point to, if they do not publish the market testing, is that with the Green Investment Bank itself. The Government also relied heavily on the support of the Green Investment Bank and its executives for privatisation in evidence and in response to the Committee.
The amendment that I and my right hon. Friend the Member for Don Valley have tabled invites the Government to commit to providing information to Parliament on the remuneration of the Green Investment Bank’s senior management and board after privatisation. After all, what could they possibly have to hide?
The information set out in our amendment is currently provided in the Green Investment Bank’s annual report. How much will those in charge of the Green Investment Bank stand to gain personally from the privatisation process? How objective can their views be, if they are to gain personally from the bank’s privatisation?
This amendment follows a long series of difficulties with banks that have, by necessity, been taken into public ownership and in which large numbers of senior executives have continued to receive very large bonuses. At a time when people in my constituency have barely seen their pay rise over the past seven years, we do not want employees of a state-owned bank suddenly having a huge payday from the privatisation of this bank.
The Government will continue to act as a minority shareholder in the short term. The Environmental Audit Committee wants that minority shareholding to continue in the longer term, but the Government have implied that that will not happen. As such a shareholder—for the time being—will the Government continue to be represented on the remuneration committees of the privatised banks? As a shareholder, what are their current expectations for remuneration? Does the Minister envisage any change to those expectations post privatisation? With that, I commend the amendment to the Committee.
Kevin Brennan
That was not the Secretary of State’s responsibility, but I am pointing out that being lectured by Government Members on trusting investment bankers might occasionally provoke a response from us. If the hon. Lady does not like that, that is tough.
My right hon. and hon. Friends have made extremely important points about what could happen following privatisation unless better assurances are given by the Government. To complacently say that after privatisation the Government—who, despite what the Minister said, will probably retain a stake in this bank and will almost certainly have some part to play in providing finance to the bank for its green investments—should have no influence over the remuneration of the directors of the bank seems to be a complete abdication of responsibility. I encourage my hon. Friend the Member for Wakefield, should she choose to do so, to press the amendment to a vote.
Mary Creagh
This has been a lively debate, which is always a good thing. I take issue with some of what the Minister said. First, we have just had our half-term recess, so Committee Members may have seen the excellent, Oscar-nominated film “The Big Short”, but if any have not seen it, I recommend that they do so as soon as possible to see exactly what was happening in the banking industry in 2007.
Mary Creagh
If it is such a small deal, I do not understand why the Minister is resisting it so vigorously. I think the Prime Minister once said that sunshine is the best disinfectant. My understanding is that, at the moment, those Green Investment Bank executives are classified as public sector employees and as such cannot earn a greater salary than the Prime Minister of this country. I can 100% guarantee that that will change as soon as the bank is privatised. [Interruption.] This Committee can at least ensure that we find out what is happening. I may come back on Report with stronger amendments.
If the Minister chooses to criticise that, I may reconsider and see whether we want to table something more stringent—perhaps a pay cap. Other clauses of the Bill cap the pay and exit conditions of people in a private company, Magnox—I am sure we have all had plenty of letters from them—and interfere in the workings of private businesses to introduce an apprenticeship levy, which Labour Members support but which many private sector companies are most unhappy about.
Kevin Brennan
If there is a fundamental objection to interfering with the pay and conditions of people working in the private sector following privatisation, why are the Government doing that later in the Bill on exit payments?
Mary Creagh
Good point, beautifully made. The issue of remuneration is of concern to the Government. This started off as a probing amendment, but I will take it all the way to a Division. It has grown legs. The more the Minister has argued, the more that I think there is something here.
Enterprise Bill [ Lords ] (Fourth sitting)
Debate between Kevin Brennan and Mary Creagh(8 years, 8 months ago)
Public Bill CommitteesRead Full debate Read Hansard Text
Kevin Brennan
Of course, the expansion that the Minister referred to in the stand part debate on the previous clause was achieved by converting Train to Gain trainees over the age of 25 into apprenticeships. That was a very clever statistical sleight of hand. I congratulate the Government and the Minister’s PPS on giving us those statistics, although I had to ruthlessly deconstruct them for the Committee’s benefit.
Following Second Reading of the Bill in the Commons, the Minister wrote to my hon. Friend the shadow Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills outlining a number of amendments that the Government intended to table for debate in Committee. Many of these late additions to the Bill—which, after all, is more than halfway through its parliamentary journey—refer to other parts of the Bill. Earlier, we heard about the new clause on Sunday trading that the Minister tabled, and which we will debate later.
The Minister signalled in her letter to my hon. Friend the shadow Secretary of State her intention to amend the Bill to establish a new independent body, the institute for apprenticeships. We support that concept and proposal but, despite the Bill having gone all the way through the House of Lords and despite the fact that the Minister wrote to the shadow Secretary of State on 2 February—some nine days ago—I understand that the Government have not been able to find the time to draft the amendment that we were promised in her letter in time for our discussions on this part of the Bill.
Ms Buck, you will be aware, having served as a Minister and as a shadow Minister, of the difference in the level of resources available in government and in opposition even before the Chancellor announced his intention to cut further the money available to Her Majesty’s loyal Opposition to do their vital work in holding the Government to account, which is why we had the urgent question in the Chamber this morning. There is simply no comparison to be made—as we both know, Ms Buck, as former Ministers and shadow Ministers—between the support available to Ministers in the Government and the meagre rations that the Opposition have to exist on. Ms Buck, as an avid music fan, you will appreciate the aptness of the line from the song “Sit Down” by James:
“If I hadn’t seen such riches I could live with being poor”.
Given that the Minister has not been able to get her amendment in on time for this part of the Bill, despite having the Rolls-Royce service of the civil service available to her, we have tabled new clause 20, which sets out a statutory framework for the new institute for apprenticeships. We welcome the Government’s recognition of the need for a more substantial body to oversee apprenticeships. We have taken the initiative to move forward with the institute proposal, which was in the “English Apprenticeships: Our 2020 Vision” report.
We tabled new clause 20 to establish the institute for apprenticeships and spell out how it could operate. The first three subsections of the new clause set out the institute’s role. Subsection (4) relates to the composition of the institute’s board. It cannot be emphasised enough how essential it is for the board to have wide-ranging representation, including all key components of apprenticeship creation and delivery. That is not only a matter of dry process. If the institute is to have people’s confidence, it will need to command that confidence, so it must have a broad-based make-up.
The Apprenticeship Delivery Board announced by the Prime Minister in January, which is tasked with advising the Government on how they can achieve their target of 3 million apprenticeship starts by 2020, is made up of members who are all able people, I am sure, but who are drawn from a relatively narrow section of business—with, incidentally, only one woman among their number. There has been no role thus far for others such as further education providers, universities, trade unions, local authorities or, for that matter, any British manufacturers in the Apprenticeship Delivery Board as far as I can see.
It is therefore crucial that the remit and board of the institute for apprenticeships are broadly based. The board must have at its heart employers, and especially small businesses. It also requires input from a broader-based background of further education providers, colleges, universities—especially given the crucial role of higher skills and degree apprenticeships—and relevant trade unions, which have key experience to offer in this area.
Mary Creagh
My hon. Friend makes a good point; I have been listening with interest. This is surely evidence, if evidence were required, of the cocktail and canapé circuit we were talking about on Tuesday. Does he agree that if we are to ensure apprenticeships are the stepping-stone to further and higher-level educational qualifications, it is imperative that advanced engineering, advanced manufacturing and, in particular, transport and construction providers are part of that board? If we fail to do that, we will not enable people who are going into those careers to progress to the highest levels and we will be reliant, as we have been in many transport and civil projects, on bringing people in from other countries.
Kevin Brennan
My hon. Friend is right to raise that point. I am personally more of a beer and meat pie circuit man.
The people who make up the Apprenticeship Delivery Board all seem highly eminent; I am not disputing that at all. We have the chief executive of Channel 4, the head of apprenticeships at Barclays Bank, someone from the City of London, the chairman of Sun Mark Limited and people from the Compass Group, Fujitsu and Wates Construction. I am sure they are all perfectly eminent people, and as I said, one of them is a woman, but there should be a broader base to the group if we are talking about apprenticeships, particularly from manufacturing and trade unions. If we are going to make real progress, we need a partnership approach to the provision of apprenticeships. That means all of the people who are charged with trying to get apprenticeships up and running and delivering them should have some involvement. That is the broader point I am making.
Mary Creagh
Does my hon. Friend agree that it is imperative we have someone to represent the FE and college sector, perhaps from the Association of Colleges, the National Institute of Adult Continuing Education or the open college network? A variety of training providers offer ongoing lifelong education, often in partnership with trade unions, to ensure that people who perhaps missed out on apprenticeships at the start of their life have access to ongoing adult education. It is important that older learners are not excluded from the career progression that an apprenticeship provides.
Kevin Brennan
Yes, I do think that, but I am not sure the Government do. That is why we have phrased new clause 20 on the institute for apprenticeships as we have. I will be interested to hear the Government’s view on the issue that my hon. Friend laid out.
Mary Creagh
I am very surprised to hear that. I remember that during the horse meat scandal one of the big problems was that there were not enough trading standards authority officers to go round and do the job, with an enormous amount of testing and enforcement activity in terms of human health and environmental health, and food testing and technology. That was in 2012, or 2013, and I would be surprised if the number of those trading standards officers had risen since the horse meat scandal. This measure that we are discussing is an example of the Government putting an extra burden on local authorities at a time when their budgets have been cut across the piece over the past five years by about 30%.
Kevin Brennan
I hate to refer back once again to the days when my hon. Friend and I were radiant with lawful power, but as a former Consumer Minister I was in charge of the trading standards at one point; it was one of the many different responsibilities that one has as a Minister, from time to time. I can confirm that what my hon. Friend said is right and that trading standards officers are already severely stretched.
It is a serious and valid point to ask the Minister how she can ensure that those officers will have the adequate resources to carry out these additional tasks that we are discussing, when they are already struggling greatly to deal with all the additional responsibilities they have, and the challenges of the new forms of consumer—
Kevin Brennan
Fraud that is going on—exactly—and we now know that such fraud is going to form a huge part of the crime statistics in the future. It is causing great problems and is very difficult to investigate. So it is imperative that the requirements of trading standards in this area are achievable, effective and proportionate, as our colleagues in the other place said during the passage of the Bill in the Lords.
The new institute for apprenticeships must play a part in ensuring that capacity is available to enforce new accreditation. However good a job trading standards officers do, and many local ones provide an excellent service, all local authorities in England, in the shape of trading standards or public protection standards, have had their ability to supervise and enforce weakened by the Government cuts. That is why we need to keep a close eye on how effective this mechanism proves to be, and why we have tabled this particular amendment.
Mary Creagh
The penny is dropping in all sorts of places. Basically, is the idea that people who currently go round checking bakeries and doing health and safety checks, and monitoring safe working practices in warehouses and checking when there are falls from height and those sorts of issues, are now being expected to regulate the quality of apprenticeships? I can see that these are people who are already going into employers’ areas, but they are looking for very different things compared with an Ofsted-like person or a skills person, who would look at evidence of learning progress, qualifications acquired and progress towards learning targets, rather than safe working.
Obviously, we want safe working for these apprentices—there is no doubt in my mind about that—but I am not sure that trading standards is the best regulatory authority to ensure the quality of workplace-based learning.
Kevin Brennan
My understanding is that the Government intend that trading standards will enforce the new frameworks for apprenticeships, and perhaps the Minister in her response can outline how exactly that will work.
Kevin Brennan
I would not agree that our proposal does not seek a truly independent institute. Independence is a point of agreement, so I am surprised that the Minister is not accepting new clause 20 today. However, I accept that, generally speaking, the Opposition have their say and then the Government have their way if they can produce a majority. As Disraeli once said:
“A majority is always the best repartee.”
The Minister unfortunately does not have to prove her argument because of the nature of the Government having a majority. However, when dealing with such legislation, it is important that the Government are able to explain their proposals and are able to bring them forward so that we can properly scrutinise them, which is our job, and have the Government prove their case. We will want to have a proper look at the Government’s proposals when they are down in writing.
Mary Creagh
My hon. Friend is a poet and does not know it—[Interruption.] It is late in the day. May I, through him, encourage the Minister to consider some of the Government’s big investments, such as High Speed 2 and the new rail college, which will be located in and around Doncaster near the constituency of my right hon. Friend the Member for Don Valley? I think there might be another skills site in Birmingham, so how will that feed in? Hundreds of apprenticeships will be created in those two centres of excellence over the next few years. I am keen that the Committee considers how both Government and private investment can be maximised so that we get the best possible bang for our buck from the new institute.
Kevin Brennan
I hope that we will get that opportunity.
The Minister asked me whether I will give way, so I am happy to do so if she still wants to intervene.