Management of the Economy and Ministerial Severance Payments

Laura Farris Excerpts

Tuesday 15th November 2022 Commons Chamber

[Laura Farris (Newbury) (Con)]

Implicit in the wording of this motion is a rebuke, and I start by accepting it; errors were made during the tenure of the former Prime Minister. But I take issue with the Opposition in three parts: first, on the suggestion that the mini-Budget is responsible for the economic situation in which we find ourselves; secondly, on the suggestion that my right hon. Friend the Member for South West Norfolk (Elizabeth Truss) should be treated differently from any other Minister, current or historic, in this Parliament; and, thirdly, on a suggestion that was not really developed by the hon. Member for Wigan (Lisa Nandy) in her opening remarks, which is that my right hon. Friend should pay some sort of compensatory amount of £6,000 and that there should be some form of atonement. That theme has been heard more than once from those on the Opposition Benches. I think it was the voices on the left who said it was not enough that Tony Blair should take the country into war, but that he should stand trial and go to prison, and in this case people are saying that my right hon. Friend should pay some kind of reparations, of a figure that has no basis in reality. I refute that and I will set out why. I know that Opposition Members will react if I suggest that some of the economic predicament we find ourselves in is a result of external forces, but when I say that the Bank of England base rate has been climbing all through 2022, I challenge them to name a country in the G7 where the base rate has not been doing that, just as every country on mainland Europe has suffered a huge inflationary spike as a result of the war in Ukraine and the energy blockade that has been the decision of Vladimir Putin. I challenge them to name a country in western Europe that has not suffered those effects. I also respectfully remind the Opposition that the 10 years we have had of unprecedented low interest rates were part of a one-off sustained emergency response by the Bank of England to the 2008 financial crisis that happened on their watch, and I will come back to that.

I wish to talk for a moment about the ministerial severance package. I have looked at the legislative journey of the law that underpins it. When the Ministerial and other Pensions and Salaries Act 1991 went through the House, the Opposition did not vote against it. Section 4 of that Act said ministerial severance is paid irrespective of rank, length of service, performance in the role and the circumstances in which the Minister leaves. The Labour party did not complain when that was applied to more than 300 Ministers who served at one time or another under the Blair and Brown Governments, irrespective of their performance, even in the case of people such as Peter Mandelson, who got this twice in 24 months. When the last Labour Government saw fit—through the Constitutional Reform and Governance Act—to revisit the legislation in April 2010, six weeks before the general election, they made extensive changes to the terms of ministerial severance, but none to the qualifying criteria or the terms of repayment. There was no change even though the country was in the grip of the most serious economic crisis of my lifetime, even though there was, in the immortal words of the right hon. Member for Birmingham, Hodge Hill (Liam Byrne), “no money left”—he will never be allowed to forget that—and even though they were responsible for the catastrophic economic decision to sell off our gold reserves. That was presumably because they were lagging in the polls, they were six weeks away from a general election and they were all looking forward to receiving their own pay-outs, which they did.

We are, in this debate, talking about a former Prime Minister, but I cannot let the moment pass without saying a few words about the former Leader of the Opposition, who, when he departed office, was entitled to an almost identical amount of severance despite his having led the once great Labour party into a sewer of antisemitism. I was recalling some of the main acts of his tenure. In 2018, the former Member for Liverpool Wavertree was hounded out of a party that she described as “institutionally antisemitic”. The serious and systemic discrimination that certain Members endured—

[Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Nigel Evans)]

Order. Did you inform Jeremy Corbyn that you were going to make reference to him?

[Laura Farris]

I did not.

[Mr Deputy Speaker]

In which case, can I ask you to move on then, please?

--- Later in debate ---

[Laura Farris]

I did not inform the right hon. Member for Birmingham, Hodge Hill, but he has been referred to more than once.

I will confine my point to this: whatever the Opposition say about severance payments, it might be surprising to learn that the former Leader of the Opposition would have been entitled to exactly the same severance payment. The only reason he did not get it was that he was over the age of 65—it was timed out on age criteria—but I am not drawing an equivalence in any event.

Whatever mistakes were made by the former Prime Minister, and I conceded at the start that mistakes were made, the ambition was laudable—as, to be fair, it so often is for Leaders of whatever stripe when they are at the helm. She was seeking to create a rapidly growing economy for the good of the country, even if her execution in that ambition failed. It is an ambition that many of us on these Conservative Benches share, and it is an ambition that Opposition Members share, too, as shown by the wording of their next motion, which is all about economic growth. But Conservative Members do not spend our time calling for scalps, or jail sentences, or compensation, or unique terms because a politician has failed. Rather than wasting time seeking social media clips, we think government is about the serious endeavour of delivering for the British people and providing answers to the issues that matter.

[Mr Deputy Speaker]

If we are to get everybody in and move on to the next debate at 4 pm, wind-ups will have to start at no later than 3.40 pm. If everybody stuck to about eight minutes without my putting the clock on, that would be helpful.