Rio+20 Summit

Lord Hain Excerpts

Tuesday 26th June 2012 Commons Chamber

[The Deputy Prime Minister]

No one is in any doubt that one of the greatest boosts to prosperity across the world would be a successful completion of the very, very, very, very long-awaited Doha development round. It is immensely frustrating that getting agreement on it has proved so elusive. Many have written it off altogether, and it is difficult not to be pessimistic about it, but that does not mean that we should not continue to pursue the cause of multilateral trade liberalisation.

[Mr Peter Hain (Neath) (Lab)]

Given the frustratingly disappointing outcome of Rio and the crisis of investor confidence in solar PV, onshore wind and nuclear in Britain, is it not even more important that the Deputy Prime Minister joins the growing cross-party support for the Severn barrage, which would generate 5% of the electricity in Britain and create nearly 40,000 jobs—a green project that will deliver the Government’s renewable energy commitments?

[The Deputy Prime Minister]

I pay tribute to the fervour with which the right hon. Gentleman is throwing himself into this new cause in a political career of many great causes. I agree with the underlying assertion that for investors to make investments in major energy infrastructure of whatever kind, they need long-term stability and long-term certainty about the direction of Government policy. That is precisely what the electricity market reform aims to provide.

G20 Summit

Lord Hain Excerpts

Monday 25th June 2012 Commons Chamber

[The Prime Minister]

As ever, the Father of the House makes a very important point. One of the crucial things we want to see for the future of Syria, whatever the outcome, is that there is proper protection of minorities, including Christian minorities, in that country. We do not want to see sectarian conflict. It has become increasingly clear that there will not be a prosperous and safe future for Syria with Assad still in charge. That is why the political transition that Annan’s plan involves is so important and why we should keep pushing it.

[Mr Peter Hain (Neath) (Lab)]

Can the Prime Minister explain how Britain will retain its influence in the G20 given that his Government are isolating themselves from the main power brokers in the European Union? As Russia and China follow America in becoming superpowers, and as Russia flexes its muscles and India rises too, surely we should be right at the centre of the EU so that we are listened to more, instead of being followers on the margins of the EU?

[The Prime Minister]

If by that the right hon. Gentleman means, “Should we join the euro and just go along with everything that is suggested?”— [Interruption.] Well, that is what would follow, and I do not accept that for a moment. Britain can play a strong role in the EU, but where there are things we do not want to join, such as the Schengen no-borders agreement and the single currency, Britain should stay outside them.

In terms of our relations with the rest of the world, the Government have done a huge amount to increase our relations with China and India, as trade flows in the last few years show: in the last two years, exports to China up 72%, exports to India up 93% and exports to Russia up 109%. We are making a difference where it counts.

Oral Answers to Questions

Lord Hain Excerpts

Wednesday 12th October 2011 Commons Chamber

[Mrs Gillan]

As the hon. Gentleman knows, that is a matter for the Welsh Government, but I think the Welsh Government must carefully consider the conditions on the other side of the border in England, and ensure that inward investing companies and other companies in Wales are not disadvantaged in terms of taxation or non-tariff barriers. I encourage the hon. Gentleman to make his representations to the Welsh Government himself; I am sure that they will be interested in what he has to say.

[Mr Peter Hain (Neath) (Lab)]

As the Secretary of State will be aware, at least two coal mines in south Wales, Aberpergwm and Unity, have been in receipt of inward investment that is growing their employment and output. May I thank both mines for voluntarily helping to resource the rescue and investigation work following the terrible tragedy at the Gleision mine in the Swansea valley that caused the death of four experienced colliers, my constituents Charles Breslin, Philip Hill, Garry Jenkins and David Powell? May I also thank the Secretary of State for her support over this tragedy, which has included ensuring that the Government have agreed to provide the 25% uplift—equivalent to the charitable gift aid that could have been claimable—to the total raised by the Swansea Valley miners appeal fund, which is now rising towards £400,000, which shows an extraordinary and heartfelt public response? May I also thank the mines rescue service, the principal inspector of mines and the South Wales police for their dedicated and at times heroic work at Gleision?

[Mrs Gillan]

Like the right hon. Gentleman, I pay tribute to those who so valiantly led the rescue efforts in the immediate aftermath of last month’s tragedy at the Gleision mine, and I pay tribute to the right hon. Gentleman for his work in his constituency. He and I saw those efforts at first hand, and I know the impact that that event will have had on his local community. As the shadow Secretary of State says, I have agreed that the Government will contribute to the Swansea Valley miners appeal fund to cover the amount that the fund would have been able to claim back as gift aid while its application for charitable status was being processed. I am pleased to say that charitable status has now been secured, and we in the Wales Office are working with the fund organisers on the details of the Government payment.

[Mr Hain]

I am grateful to the Secretary of State for that. I believe that there are a number of important lessons from the Gleision tragedy for the future of mines safety and rescue. Will she therefore ensure that the Government delays the report of Professor Lofstedt, due by the end of this month, on regulations covering mining, among other sectors, so that account can be taken of a submission that I plan for her and her Cabinet colleagues?

[Mrs Gillan]

I understand that Professor Lofstedt is conducting an independent review of the overall regulatory framework covering health and safety legislation and its effectiveness. He issued a call for evidence in May and is now in the process of writing up his report. As this is an independent review, it would not be appropriate for my right hon. Friend the Minister with responsibility for employment or the Government to intervene in the timing of the report. However, I am sure that any lessons that can be learned from the investigation into the tragic events at the Gleision mine will be incorporated into any recommendations from Professor Lofstedt’s report that are taken forward by the Health and Safety Executive. I look forward to receiving the right hon. Gentleman’s submission on this subject.

Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill

Lord Hain Excerpts

Monday 6th September 2010 Commons Chamber

[Mr Peter Hain (Neath) (Lab)]

After 36 excellent speeches, this debate has revealed serious objections, from all parts of the House, to the constituency changes proposed in the Bill. Indeed, as the right hon. Member for Belfast North (Mr Dodds) and my hon. Friend the Member for Great Grimsby (Austin Mitchell) pointed out, almost nobody, on either side of the House, spoke fully in favour of the Bill, with the exception of the Deputy Prime Minister. The hon. Members for Broxbourne (Mr Walker), for Aldridge-Brownhills (Mr Shepherd) and for Christchurch (Mr Chope) all made impassioned speeches about the dangers of diminishing the numbers of Back Benchers compared with the Executive and about the balance of power in this House. The right hon. Member for Haltemprice and Howden (Mr Davis) made a telling point: that abolishing public inquiries will actually trigger a much greater spate of judicial actions based on objections to the new constituencies from local electors.

My hon. Friends the Members for Glasgow North West (John Robertson) and for Rutherglen and Hamilton West (Tom Greatrex), and the hon. Members for Camborne and Redruth (George Eustice) and for Na h-Eileanan an Iar (Mr MacNeil) all pointed out the serious problem of staging the referendum on the alternative vote on the same day as national elections in Scotland and Wales. My hon. Friend the Member for Caerphilly (Mr David) pointed out the astonishing reality that the Deputy Prime Minister and the Government failed to consult the Governments of Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales on the decision simply to impose the referendum on the same day as their elections—and by the way, also on the same day as elections for local councils of different electorates.

My hon. Friend the Member for Nottingham North (Mr Allen), the distinguished Chairman of the Select Committee on Political and Constitutional Reform, made the point that not only has there been no consultation across the country or with the elected Governments of Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales, but there has been no consultation with this House. There has been no pre-legislative scrutiny or any recognition of the need to build constitutional reform Bills by consensus—a point also made powerfully by the right hon. Member for Belfast North and my right hon. Friend the Member for Torfaen (Paul Murphy). With his Northern Ireland experience, my right hon. Friend made the point about the importance of taking forward constitutional change on the basis of consensus rather than simply imposing change, as this Bill is doing.

The Deputy Prime Minister—the leader of the Liberal Democrats—has brought forward a Bill changing constituencies in a way that is fair only to the Conservative party. Some Liberal Democrat leader he is! The proposal is grossly unfair to Labour and especially and blatantly unfair to Wales, which will lose fully a quarter of its representation. It is also grotesquely unfair to local communities, imposing on them new constituencies from Whitehall and depriving them of their traditional rights to be fully involved in a process that is at the very heart of our system of parliamentary democracy.

Having swallowed a Budget that is unfair to the poor and pensioners and, quite astonishingly, most unfair to the poorest parts of Britain, including the north-east of England and Wales, now the Government are also destroying the fairness at the heart of our parliamentary democracy. They trumpet the case for equalisation of constituencies as though it were a novel concept, but equalisation has been the all-party principle behind our constituency system for generations. We are all signed up to it, but the boundary commissions have applied it in a flexible way over the generations, and in a way that is independent and takes proper account of local views, community identity, rurality and sparsity. In other words, the boundary commissions have operated the equalisation principle by consensus, in a way that is fair, practical and sensible. The Government have abandoned that consensus, in a way that is unfair, impractical and arrogant.

[Mr Jeremy Browne (Taunton Deane) (LD)]

I have 84,000 constituents. How many does the right hon. Gentleman have?

[Mr Hain]

I have just under 60,000, although my constituency is different. I would be happy to see more constituents in my constituency if this Bill were proceeding on a fair basis, with public inquiries and taking local consultation into account. The only exception to the equalisation principle, allowing some flexibility, is in the protection given to four geographically large seats in Scotland, three of them Liberal-held. As my hon. Friend the Member for Aberdeen North (Mr Doran) pointed out, we can conclude in respect of Ross, Skye and Lochaber only that this preferential treatment was the price paid to keep its Member, the former leader of the Liberal Democrats, from defecting to the Labour party.

Obviously, in the Government’s definition of equalisation, some seats are more equal than others, as my hon. Friend the Member for East Kilbride, Strathaven and Lesmahagow (Mr McCann) said. Wales, because of its own special characteristics, has always had special consideration by this Parliament and by the Boundary Commission for Wales, with cross-party support over the generations. For that reason, Parliament first decided in 1947 that there should be no fewer than 35 Welsh seats. Since then, rises in and shifts between the population over the past 60 years have led the Boundary Commission to increase the number of seats by a further five to 40. As a note from the Commons Library of 28 July 2010 confirms in paragraph 3.1, during the passage of the Boundary Commissions Bill in 1992, the then Home Secretary, the right hon. and learned Member for Rushcliffe (Mr Clarke), rejected the argument that over-representation of Wales should be tackled, referring to it as a long-standing constitutional arrangement—a point eloquently explained by my hon. Friend the Member for Caerphilly.

This Bill, however, will impose on Wales the most savage cut of all—a fact that the hon. Member for Cardiff North (Jonathan Evans) actually celebrated. Wales will lose three times the proportion of MPs as the average for the rest of the United Kingdom—a reduction of a full quarter from 40 to 30. As my right hon. Friend the Member for Torfaen said, how can that possibly be justified? Wales is long used to the Tories treating it unfairly and punitively, yet now the Liberal Democrats are doing the very same thing. I hope that the Deputy Prime Minister and the Minister replying will have listened to the arguments of the hon. Member for Ceredigion (Mr Williams), who asked for the changes in Wales to be delayed at least until after the referendum, given that successive arguments are being made within the Welsh Conservative party.

In the vast rural areas of mid and west Wales, the four constituencies—none Labour-held—including Brecon and Radnorshire, Montgomeryshire and Ceredigion, cover hundreds of square miles, yet under the Bill those four large seats will become two monster ones, each thousands of square miles in size. Until this Bill, every Parliament and every boundary commission has accepted an elementary verity about the Welsh valleys. In former coal mining constituencies, it is impossible to visit the next valley by the shortest route, because that happens to be over the top of a mountain. The only way to do so is by travelling either down to the bottom of the valley or up to the top of it and right around to the next one.

The Bill will produce a monumental list of other anomalies. The hon. Member for Isle of Wight (Mr Turner) is absolutely right to be incandescent about the carve-up of his island constituency, but let me say this to the rest of the House. Just wait until every Member in every area realises what will be done to their own constituencies based not on natural communities, not on natural towns or parts of cities, but on an arithmetical diktat imposed by the Deputy Prime Minister and the Government on the boundary commissions. [Interruption.] Government Members shake their heads, but I predict that they will all find that when it comes to their own constituencies, there will be rebellions in their local areas against this diktat from the centre on an arithmetical basis.

What we are seeing and what people find most offensive about the Bill is the way in which it sweeps away local democracy, as the hon. Member for Foyle (Mark Durkan) said. For generations, constituency boundaries have been reviewed and adjusted by local agreements, not by central imposition. Local people have had the opportunity to object if community identities were threatened or unsuitable mergers with nearby towns or villagers were proposed. Formal hearings would hear representations, and a final decision would be agreed, if not always by total consensus then at least with broad support. Last time, the process necessarily took fully seven years in England.

The Bill has unilaterally dumped that process for a rigid two-year deadline in a straightforward fix, abolishing the right to trigger public inquiries and destroying a bipartisan, independent system of drawing up boundaries, which has been the envy of countries elsewhere in the world. So much for big society localism. The Prime Minister tells us that the big society is about “empowering local communities”—a favourite phrase of the Deputy Prime Minister. As the hon. Member for Aldridge-Brownhills has said, however, the Bill destroys the essence of the British parliamentary democratic system, by imposing from the centre rather than developing from a pattern of constituencies. It rides roughshod over and breaks up local communities, as my hon. Friend the Member for Slough (Fiona Mactaggart) said. It proposes an arbitrary and partisan reduction by 50, to 600 seats, because that would hurt Labour most. A steeper reduction would have abolished too many Conservative seats.

Most outrageously, the Government have said that they intend to redraw the boundaries based on the December 2010 register, when they know that the current register is missing more than 3.5 million eligible voters, predominantly the young, poor and black and minority ethnic social groups. As my hon. Friend the Member for Vale of Clwyd (Chris Ruane), a champion of this point, tellingly argued, the problem of under-representation is greatest in urban areas, student towns and coastal areas of high social deprivation. As my hon. Friend the Member for Islington South and Finsbury (Emily Thornberry) said, London will be especially badly hit.

The Liberal Democrat leader has allowed himself to be sandbagged by his Tory partners in his otherwise laudable attempt to introduce a fairer electoral system, risking a once-in-a-generation opportunity for electoral reform. Instead of introducing a separate Bill on the alternative vote referendum, which would have been supported by the Labour party in a vote through Parliament, in line with our manifesto commitment, the Government have spatchcocked it together with the most blatant gerrymander of parliamentary constituency boundaries since the days of rotten boroughs.

As our amendment argues, the Government should decouple the proposals into two separate Bills: one on the alternative vote referendum and one on constituencies. In the constituency one, they should ensure that the original, fairer, more transparent and consensual boundary review system is restored, and that new boundaries are not applied in such a dogmatic, rigid and politically discriminatory fashion. They should ensure that Wales is treated fairly and not punitively, and statutory automatic registration from other public databases must be included in the legislation. That way, we might get two better reform Bills, based on consensus; we might even get the alternative vote, which I have supported for decades.

The Government should stop trying to rig democracy and ride roughshod over local community views, and they should withdraw this Bill now.

Oral Answers to Questions

Lord Hain Excerpts

Wednesday 23rd June 2010 Commons Chamber

[Mr Speaker]

May I just gently ask the Secretary of State to face the House rather than having her back to the Chair? That would be very helpful.

[Mr Peter Hain (Neath) (Lab)]

May I join in the commiserations to Lord Walker’s family on his death?

May I congratulate the right hon. Lady, especially on being the first woman Secretary of State for Wales? However, as accounts given to the media have traduced the truth, I must ask whether she is aware that as Secretary of State, on Monday 10 May, in the Wales Office, I specifically asked and received an assurance from senior officials that work I had put in train months before would have enabled a referendum to be staged this October. Before she answers, may I remind her that whatever she has been saying to the media, she must not mislead this House, especially as she will not have seen the official papers detailing my preparations for the referendum?

[Mrs Gillan]

I thank the shadow Secretary of State for his welcome. I cannot comment on the advice received by the former Administration; however, I do have access to documents that have indicated to me that no work was done on the question before the general election. If the right hon. Gentleman wishes to have a discussion with me about the matter, he is quite able to do so, but no work was done by the Department. The only work carried out was on the order that was to be laid before the House. This was the first question that I asked when I walked into the Department.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Jones]

The Government are committed to ensuring that Wales is properly funded, but it is clearly right for the Treasury’s energies to be concentrated on tackling the deficit left behind by the Labour party. We will certainly give careful consideration to the Holtham commission’s final report, which is to be published this summer. My right hon. Friend the Secretary of State has already met Mr Holtham, and intends to have further meetings with him.

[Mr Peter Hain (Neath) (Lab)]

Do the Minister and the Secretary of State recall that last November the Treasury was persuaded to accept an historic reform ensuring that Wales was not disadvantaged under the Barnett formula? Why are they not ensuring that the agreement to protect the Welsh Budget is implemented? On Barnett, the Chancellor promised on 12 February 2010 to

“move on it pretty quickly, as soon as a new Government is elected.”

How on earth can the Secretary of State and the Minister have allowed that pledge to be dumped in the long grass? Instead of capitulating immediately to savage cuts, why do they not stand up and fight for Wales as their Labour predecessors did?

[Mr Jones]

Having read the so-called pledge that the right hon. Gentleman received from the Treasury, I think it fair to say that it was almost meaningless. As he knows, the Holtham commission is due to report substantively next month. My right hon. Friend and I intend to have further discussions with Mr Holtham, and it would be wrong to pre-empt his decision.