People with Learning Disabilities: Employment

Debate between Lee Anderson and Ben Bradley

Monday 4th December 2023 Commons Chamber

[Lee Anderson]

The hon. Lady makes a valid point. There is always more that Governments and local authorities can do, and thank goodness for the charity sector. Charities that support people with learning disabilities do great work.

We have a project called Rumbles in Nottinghamshire that runs two cafés, one outside my constituency and one in Ashfield on Sutton Lawn. It has been running for about 15, 16 or maybe 17 years and was set up to help people with learning disabilities. There are a couple of paid staff who train young people with special educational needs or learning difficulties in cooking, cleaning, doing the washing, serving people and operating the till. Those are great skills for young people with learning difficulties. It gets them out of the house, and gives their parents and families some respite. They get out and learn new skills and mix with people, making new friends. It is absolutely brilliant that we have these initiatives locally.

However, we have a slight problem and the Minister might be able to help me with it, because he came to visit the café earlier this year. This service, which is a lifeline to people and their families, faces the axe. This brilliant facility is facing closure after about 17 years in operation. The charity was paying the council a peppercorn rent of just a few hundred quid a year, I believe it was, but the council decided that it is such a good business it wants to put the rent up to £7,000 a year and it also expects the charity to maintain the public toilets next door at a cost of £10,000 a year. The charity has agreed to pay the £7,000 and it has some extra support to do that, but that is still not good enough for the local authority. The local authority does not realise that if this place closes and goes into the private sector, the young people with learning disabilities will have nowhere else to go. If this place goes, they cannot do their training and their work or meet their friends. I hope the Minister might be able to help and steer me in the right direction on how to convince our local authority to keep this lifeline open.

[Ben Bradley (Mansfield) (Con)]

My hon. Friend makes a really good point. Rumbles café—there are several across Nottinghamshire—does fantastic work with young people with learning disabilities, getting them into the workplace and supporting them. Does he agree that it is slightly strange that Ashfield District Council says that the closure of the café and kicking them out of the building is about the money, when only a few years ago the councillors spent five or six times as much to give themselves extra cabinet jobs and put it in their own pockets?

[Lee Anderson]

My hon. Friend is quite right—I forgot about this—that just a few years back, this same bunch of councillors created five extra cabinet positions when they first got elected, at a cost of about £60,000 and then created a political officer position at a cost of another £30,000. That is £80,000 or £90,000 there, so their maths do not stack up. In fact, their maths do stack up when it comes to giving themselves hefty pay rises, so maybe they should take a long, hard look in the mirror. I thank my hon. Friend for that intervention.

Rumbles café has helped literally hundreds of people across Ashfield over the years. I want to give a special mention to a lady called Helen Storer. She is 60 years old, bless her, and she lives in Selston. She has special educational needs—she says herself that she has her own difficulties—but she lives independently, on her own. She relies on the support of good neighbours and good friends in the community—it is a cracking community—and she worked at Rumbles. She volunteered there, learned new skills and made friends. She learned how to cook and other life skills, such as how to do housework and stuff like that, and she absolutely loved the place. It brought her on leaps and bounds.

Places like this are a lifeline. It should not be about making huge amounts of money. We should put people before profit in these sorts of situations. Look—it does make money, but it goes back into the caff to help support people to learn those new skills to live independent lives. It has no shareholders, just honest hard-working folk who are doing the best for people with special educational needs in the community.

I have said it before, and sometimes I get a little bit of opposition to trying to get people into work, especially disabled people. It is not cruel to get disabled people back into work. Most people, as we know from Mencap’s own figures, want to work and want to get into the workplace. It is up to us as a responsible society to try to give the support they need to get in the workplace and have a stake in society. I often think about little Jossie and her mum and dad, and the challenges they face. When parents have a little girl of six or seven who has got her difficulties, they are always thinking, “What’s going to happen to that little girl when she leaves school?” They want that little girl to have lots of opportunities. They want her to live independently and to be able to make some of her own decisions and just do the simple things in life—to go out and shop, run the house, budget, have friends and have a social life. That is so important. Not everybody like Jossie can live an independent life, but a lot can, and it is important that as a society we support these people.

We are very good at giving benefits away in this country to people, and rightly so—people need that financial support. With rent and council tax support, personal independence payment or disability living allowance, employment and support allowance and other bits and bobs, a single person with learning difficulties can maybe get up to 25 grand a year through the benefits system. I always say that if we can pay somebody on benefits 25 grand a year for being sat at home, surely we can pay them that for going to work, whether the support is from a charity, a Government-funded agency or whatever.

I am going to close on that. Once again, Mr Deputy Speaker, thank you for allowing me to speak tonight. This is a subject close to my heart, and I know from my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for South Swindon (Sir Robert Buckland) that it is close to his heart as well. I look forward to seeing what the Minister has to say.

Household Energy Bills: VAT

Debate between Lee Anderson and Ben Bradley

Tuesday 11th January 2022 Commons Chamber

[Ben Bradley (Mansfield) (Con)]

The debate on the cost of living and energy bills is obviously very important and pertinent, and I hope and trust that it is going on in the corridors of this place all the time, because it is a matter of huge importance to my constituents.

It is clear that cutting VAT on energy bills is one option to consider. The last I understood, I think it was the Prime Minister who said last week that it was under active consideration. There is obviously a decision to make on how targeted and effective that support might be. Clearly, such a measure would reduce energy costs, but it would mean spending taxpayers’ money on cutting energy bills for a lot of people who are not struggling and do not need that support. Indeed, it would be a tax cut for all of us in this room, despite the salaries that we are paid.

We have a duty in this place to ensure that taxpayers’ money is spent in an effective way and where it is most needed, so it is understandable and right that the Government will want to consider a whole range of measures to ensure that they come to the most effective conclusion both in targeting that support and for cost-effectiveness for the taxpayer. There are other options, including some of the green levies on bills, which have been discussed already, that make up a higher proportion of many energy bills than VAT. While it is true that the long-term answer may be investment in sustainable energy production, in the short term it makes bills more expensive. Reports from the TaxPayers Alliance in recent weeks suggest that the burden of those green taxes is likely to rise by as much as 40% in the coming years, and that will have an impact on the cost of living.

[Lee Anderson]

My hon. Friend is most generous with his time. We talk about the green levies, which affect poorer people the most in society, and we talk about cutting VAT, which will benefit the most wealthy in society, such as people in this place earning £80,000 a year. Does he think that that is unfair?

[Ben Bradley]

I thank my hon. Friend for that intervention, and he is absolutely right to say that many of our constituents who are ably described by Opposition Members as struggling to pay their bills would I am sure prioritise paying those bills and putting food on the table, rather than paying green levies on their energy bills for some future that they may or may not see. We know that that may be a short-term solution, but this is a short-term problem that we need to tackle now, and those levies are not helping people put food on the table tomorrow and to pay their bills tomorrow. We do need to think more about this than just to chuck an answer out there that may seem all right on social media, but actually relates to something in the region of about £1 or £1.10 a week for such constituents. It is certainly not the answer.

It is clear that there is an awful lot of work to be done, but there is already a lot of work being done to support people in need. We have had the list already from Conservative colleagues. There are warm home discounts, winter fuel payments, cold weather payments, winter support grants—it goes on and on—so let us not pretend that the Government are not acting on this. We know that these are tough times for a lot of people, but through covid, uncertainty, inflation and rising costs, the Government have acted, and they will act further and will help.

That debate is a legitimate and important one, but this is not that debate. The bit of the motion that may pass many of my constituents by—on the surface it is dry, internal administrative stuff, but it is actually really important to recognise this—is that it does not just ask the Government to tackle the cost of energy bills, but seeks to take us back to a time in the midst of Brexit negotiations when the Government lost the ability to control the business of the House through such a motion. The chaos that surrounded that whole scenario, with the damage that that process caused at the time to our Brexit negotiations and the illegitimacy of the premise that elected Governments should no longer decide what laws they introduce, was of absolutely no help to anybody. In fact, it made a mockery of this House and its procedures, and undermined both the democratic outcome of the referendum and the democratic outcome of the preceding general election, because it is of course Governments who are elected to make laws, not the Opposition.

This Opposition day debate does not just ask the Government to remove VAT; it asks the Government to give up control of the legislative agenda. It means we would just forget the measured consideration of which of the measures I described earlier might have the best impact and value, and instead allow the Opposition to set the agenda and timetable, and to legislate. That is not how Parliament works and it is not how democracy works. We have been there and tried that, and it was wrong at the time and it is wrong now. Sadly, the Opposition have turned what is otherwise a reasonable debate into something wholly unacceptable. If Labour Members’ answer to the rising cost of living is to knock a quid a week off energy bills and tell people it is a silver bullet, I think they need to go away and think harder, as the Government are doing, about how we genuinely support people in need.

Rail Investment and Integrated Rail Plan

Debate between Lee Anderson and Ben Bradley

Wednesday 8th December 2021 Commons Chamber

[Ben Bradley (Mansfield) (Con)]

It is easy for us as Members of Parliament to stand here and say that we want more—that we want it faster, bigger and that we want more money—because that is what we do. No doubt we will draw a line under the integrated rail plan and will come back next week and say that we want more for the next train line and the next plan. We would probably do ourselves a disservice if we did not do that—it is important—but it does not mean that this is not an excellent plan and an excellent investment in our region.

The integrated rail plan commits £12.8 billion of investment to the east midlands. That is probably more than we have had since the M1 was built, I would imagine, if that even cost that amount of money.

[Lee Anderson (Ashfield) (Con)]

This investment of £12.8 billion is a massive package. Is it true to say that, as the leader of Nottinghamshire County Council, he is now responsible for one of the biggest packages in the midlands?

--- Later in debate ---

[Lee Anderson (Ashfield) (Con)]

Now then—another Opposition day debate and another chance for the Labour party to demonstrate to my constituents in Ashfield and Eastwood how out of touch it is. Most residents in Ashfield, including a lady called Sue Hey, were delighted and breathed a sigh of relief when the integrated rail plan was published a few weeks ago with the news in it that the eastern leg of HS2 had been scrapped.

The eastern leg of HS2 would have come through the edge of my constituency and it would have been a case of, “You can see it, but you can’t use it.” What they can already see in my constituency is the Robin Hood line and the proposed Maid Marian line, which I have lobbied for since being elected to this place. The new Maid Marian line will see rail passenger services returned to the rural parts of Ashfield for the first time in nearly 50 years, with new train stations at Kings Mill Hospital and at Selston. That is what we call real levelling up in the north and midlands.

I was fortunate enough to be quoted by the Prime Minister in the IRP when I pointed out that many of my constituents are more interested in good local transport links than in the eastern leg of HS2. What we now have is a first-class regional package of £12 billion, and the good news is that we have a new batch of Conservative MPs who will ensure that that investment is delivered in Nottinghamshire and the east midlands.

[Ben Bradley]

I think my hon. Friend has underestimated the size of his package, because the amount for the east midlands comes to a total of £12.8 billion. Indeed, his package is much larger than even he thought it was.