Business of the House

Laura Farris Excerpts

Thursday 27th January 2022 Commons Chamber

[Mr Rees-Mogg]

I am glad to see the Chairman of the Backbench Business Committee nodding. It is a truly important day. I agree entirely with the hon. Lady that education is so important. The more people know and understand the horrors that went before, the more likely it is that such horrors will be avoided in future.

The hon. Lady then asked a wide range of questions about Government policy. May I say how pleased I am that she has finally moved off cake? It has seemed to me over the past few weeks that all the Opposition could ever talk about was cake—whether we have had our cake and eaten it, whether there has been no cake, whether there never was any cake, or what cake there may have been; how it was baked, how many eggs there were in it, whether it was made with margarine or butter, or what type of cake it was: did it have sponge or was it chocolate? All these issues about cake have been an obsession of the Opposition, so I am glad that we are now getting on to some more serious subjects.

The hon. Lady referred to the cost-of-living issue, and here the Government have been extremely active in helping people, including families. The national living wage will rise to £9.50 from April, which will mean an extra £1,000 a year for full-time workers. Nearly 2 million families will receive an extra £1,000 a year through our cut in the universal credit taper and increased work allowances. There is also a £140 rebate on the energy bills of 2.2 million low-income households this winter, and there are seasonal cold weather payments of an extra £25 a week for up to 4 million people during sustained colder periods.

However, the key to ensuring that the economy works lies in the steps taken by the Government during the pandemic, when they introduced the furlough scheme and bounce back business loans to ensure that the structures of the economy survived it. That is fundamental to why we now have the highest payroll employment in our history, the lowest recorded youth unemployment in our history, and the economy back to where it was before the pandemic. So the real question on the cost of living is whether the economy is being managed well, and the answer to that is “Yes, it is, because of the decisions that this Government made.”

The hon. Lady then raised the issue of fraud, and the £4.3 billion that has come out of the covid supplies. That is about 1% of the amount of money that British taxpayers provided. However, the Government have already stopped or recovered £743 million in overclaimed furlough grants. We have prevented £2.2 billion in fraud from our bounce back loan scheme, and our Taxpayer Protection Taskforce is set to recover an additional £1 billion; its investigations are under way. The Government take this seriously, but if we want to know who are the real experts in wasting taxpayers’ money, it is the socialists. When they were in opposition, what happened to the NHS computer system? How many billions were frittered away through their irresponsible approach to taxpayers’ money?

The hon. Lady raised the national disability strategy and yesterday’s court judgment. The DWP has sought permission to appeal against that judgment, which is solely about technicalities and the requirements to consult. The DWP has engaged with disabled people, disabled people’s organisations, carers and others as part of the national disability strategy, which is one of the broadest packages of real, practical action put together so far to improve the lives of disabled people in relation to jobs, housing, transport, education, shopping, culture, justice, public services, data and evidence. There is a real push to help disabled people.

Then we come on to the Afghanistan animals. The Ministry of Defence got 15,000 people out of Afghanistan in an extraordinary and amazingly successful operation, but again the Opposition are dealing with the fripperies and the trivia, not with the really big picture. All they care about are cake and animals, whereas we are getting on with the important business of government.

[Laura Farris (Newbury) (Con)]

Families in west Berkshire have told me about waits of up to two years to receive diagnoses of either autism or attention deficit hyperactivity disorder for their children, often at a catastrophic cost to their educational and social development. However, I understand that the problem extends much more widely than west Berkshire. May I invite my right hon. Friend to make Government time available for a debate to discuss the provision of child and adolescent mental health services?

[Mr Rees-Mogg]

I thank my hon. Friend both for her question and for her campaigning on children’s mental health issues, which are of great importance and, I think, recognised as such across the House.

The Government have announced that £17 million of extra spending to build on the existing mental health support will be available in education settings, including £7 million for the wellbeing for education recovery programme and £9.5 million to fund training for mental health leaders in about a third of all state schools and colleges. That is on top of the £79 million to boost mental health support for children and young people that was announced in March. NHS England has consulted on the potential to introduce five new waiting time standards, and a response will be published in due course. I think it is accepted that there is a problem, and steps are being taken to tackle it.