Speaker’s Statement
Debate between Liam Byrne and Jess Phillips(2 years, 10 months ago)
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Liam Byrne (Birmingham, Hodge Hill) (Lab)
Jack Dromey was my mentor, my teacher, my political partner and my friend for almost a decade and a half in Birmingham. Like for many of us here today he was like a father to me; indeed, he was at school with my dad, at Cardinal Vaughan in west London, part of that extraordinary generation of second-generation Irish kids: sharp, chippy, pushing, determined to make a contribution to social justice.
It didn’t always start smoothly: my godfather, Spud Murphy, then a prefect at Cardinal Vaughan, used to talk to me fondly about having to give Jack a clip round the ear for smoking behind the bike sheds at school. But Jack was not a rebel without a cause: his cause was social justice, and he fought for it his entire life. His glorious life was one long crusade for the underdog; he fought for them whenever and wherever he found them. His campaigns in Birmingham are innumerable: he fought for more police numbers, he fought for covid families, he fought for the food bank, he fought for Erdington High Street, he fought for manufacturing jobs, he fought for the factory at GKN—and this was all just in the last week of his life.
As you will know, Mr Speaker, Jack brought a particular approach to all his campaigns. It generally started with a very, very long list of bullet points, and Jack would start off by saying, “Just three points”, and we would tease him as he got to, “And seventeenthly”, but he brought to every single one of his campaigns what he used to fondly say was a certain “je ne sais quoi”. He made sure that at the core of every single one of his campaigns were the stories, because we have all been educated in the legend of Joe and Josephine Soap in the Dog and Duck in Erdington. He also brought to all his campaigns not just the art of coalition building but incredible calm, along with persistence. He used to very proudly say that his nickname in the union was “Never snap, never flap Jack”, and he reminded me of that very often as I was losing my rag over the last year and a half.
On the last day of Jack’s life we were working together on a book about the future of our great region, the heart of Britain, and as ever he brought to that an extraordinary optimism. He put the green industrial revolution at the core of what he wrote, and this is what he wrote:
“I am passionate in my belief that change is possible. However, as my experience as an MP for a constituency with high levels of inequality and poverty, it is crucial that any change is not just ambitious in the objective of dealing with climate change, but radical in creating opportunity for all. There is much to do and little time to achieve it before it’s too late.”
I say to the Mother of the House, my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Camberwell and Peckham (Ms Harman), and the family watching today, like you we have all struggled with the shock of loss. I myself have found comfort in the words not of an Irish poet but of a Greek, who wrote centuries ago:
“Even in our sleep, pain…falls drop by drop upon the heart, until, in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God.”
The wisdom we draw from Jack Dromey’s life is very simple: we should all try to be more Jack. Our community, our country, and this House of Commons will be a damn sight better for that.
Jess Phillips (Birmingham, Yardley) (Lab)
It is a pleasure to follow my colleague and friend from Birmingham, my right hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Hodge Hill (Liam Byrne), and what I want to say is going to be all about Birmingham. Jack did not sound like me. He was not groomed as I was, just as a child loves their parents no matter what, to love Birmingham, because it was given to me at birth. Jack did not have that, and he loved it way more than me. He would talk about Birmingham in terms that made it unrecognisable to me. I love the place, don’t get me wrong, but Castle Vale, while I love it, is not a place of great beauty. The Aston expressway is not a thing to behold, yet when Jack talked about Birmingham and Brummies, he felt so much as if he was from the tradition of the place of my birth. I think much of that is to do with his Irish ancestry, which so many of us in Birmingham have, but there could be no greater advocate for the city of Birmingham.
I know that many people want to speak, so I will touch slightly not only on Jack being an honorary Brummie—not even “honorary”, Jack Dromey was a Brummie through and through, without question—but on him being an honorary sister. The first time I ever spoke in this building, it was Jack Dromey who sat next to me. He put his arms around me afterwards and said, “I am so proud of you. I am so proud to see you here”—mainly because I was a girl from Birmingham and he loved Birmingham. The last time I ever sat in this place with him was just a week before he died, and we had just been put on the same team together, the shadow Home Affairs team. He said to me, as I sat down from asking a question of the Home Secretary, “It is so delightful to be completely outsmarted and outflanked by brilliant women.” That came as no surprise to me. I say to my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Camberwell and Peckham (Ms Harman), all her family and her children that Birmingham will truly miss Jack Dromey. All the love of a sometimes not very beautiful place is with you and your family.
Local Government Funding: Birmingham
Debate between Liam Byrne and Jess PhillipsWestminster Hall is an alternative Chamber for MPs to hold debates, named after the adjoining Westminster Hall.
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Jess Phillips (Birmingham, Yardley) (Lab)
As always, it is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Ms Dorries—everyone has said something different. I have just come out of the debate on Aleppo, and a Government Member who served in the armed forces stressed that perhaps we would not be so ready with some of our suggestions had we seen some of the things that he had seen. I express exactly the same sentiment here. If some of those in the Department for Communities and Local Government, including the Secretary of State, the right hon. Member for Bromsgrove (Sajid Javid), had seen some of the things that I have seen in my work with the homelessness services in the city of Birmingham, they would not have made the decisions that they have made in the past six years and are continuing to make.
The people who use those services rely on them for their lives. Compare that with the money we spend on other things. I have seen people’s lives saved. These people are not just about managing; they are surviving. Without the refuges, without the St Basils youth homelessness service and without Sifa Fireside—I invite the Minister to sit and eat breakfast with me every morning at Sifa Fireside—we are condemning these people to death with a cut of £5 million to £10 million in Birmingham City Council’s budget for those services.
I am not shroud-waving. I am an expert—I know we do not like experts any more—and I know what even half the proposed budget cut to our current Supporting People services will mean. It will basically mean that the services cannot function any more. There are 4,000 victims of domestic violence in the city of Birmingham. Already, every single day, hundreds of people in our city are turned away from specialist services. We are about to start turning away many more.
On average, there are 97 homelessness applications in our city every single day. We used to have services all across the city where people could go to get help and advice, which reduced the number of homelessness applications. I set up some of those services. Birmingham & Solihull Women’s Aid used to provide specialist support in each of our neighbourhood offices so that there was a specialist, not a checkbox, there when a victim of domestic violence came in needing support for their housing. Those specialists have been gone for about two years; the centres they were housed in no longer exist.
My hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Selly Oak (Steve McCabe) began his powerful comments on the subject of social care. I put in a freedom of information request to every single council in the UK, asking how much they spent weekly on adult social care in care homes. In Birmingham, the spend is £436 per week. That is £100 less than it costs the care homes in my constituency to care for the people who need adult social care, so the poorest people in our country are paying a top-up fee. In Buckinghamshire, the weekly cost provided by the council is £615; in Richmond, it is £805.
Yesterday, I asked the Care Minister, the Under-Secretary of State for Health, the hon. Member for Warrington South (David Mowat), do the nans and grandads, the aunts and uncles, the mums and dads in Buckinghamshire and Richmond matter more than my nan and grandad, than my mum and dad? Because that is what those figures tell me—and that is post-precept. Those figures show an already widening gap, where some people matter and some people don’t. That is what is being created all around the country.
Liam Byrne (Birmingham, Hodge Hill) (Lab)
How does my hon. Friend think the situation will now unfold, given that the funding gap in social care in our city grows to something like a quarter of a billion pounds by 2020-21? Never has a social care system had to withstand this kind of pressure. The situation that she describes is only the beginning.