Government Policies (Wales)

Lord Murphy of Torfaen Excerpts

Wednesday 26th November 2014 Commons Chamber

[Owen Smith]

My hon. Friend is of course right. That is why it looks increasingly as though the bedroom tax will cost the Exchequer money, not save it money. It is voodoo economics of the worst kind, because it penalises the most vulnerable people in our society. It is having an even greater impact in Wales, and the Secretary of State should acknowledge that.

[Paul Murphy (Torfaen) (Lab)]

On the bedroom tax and the discretionary grant, the Secretary of State will know that the grant is given to local authorities, and most of it is made up of local authorities’ own money, not a direct extra grant from central Government.

--- Later in debate ---

[Paul Murphy (Torfaen) (Lab)]

I have been called some things over the years in politics, but I have never been called a metropolitan liberal before. I rather fancy that most of my colleagues in the Welsh parliamentary Labour party would never be called metropolitan liberals.

I believe the Secretary of State is genuine and sincere about wanting to work with the Welsh First Minister, and I believe that his attendance at various events is, as I said, something that we can admire, but I fear that his boss is not of the same mind. He might have been standing next to him last week in Newport, but since the last general election, when the Prime Minister said that there would be a respect agenda in Wales and in Scotland, that has effectively collapsed. It collapsed when the Government tried to ensure that the number of Welsh parliamentary constituencies would be unfairly reduced. It collapsed at the time of the Scottish referendum, when the Union itself was under threat, when the Prime Minister came out and said that all that mattered to him now was not to keep the Union going but to diminish and downgrade the presence of Welsh and Scottish Members of Parliament and their responsibilities in this House of Commons.

The Secretary of State went on to talk about us all wanting to talk down Wales and the Welsh economy. For the past 18 months the Government have not stopped talking down the Welsh national health service. What is the difference? Does the right hon. Gentleman not understand that talking down the Welsh health service means that he is demeaning consultants, GPs, nurses and everybody else who works in the Welsh national health service? We cannot have it both ways. Either he says that there is devolution, Wales must go its own way and the Government will accept what happens there, or he intervenes for party political purposes and talks down, in this case, the health service.

The Secretary of State referred to a point made by my hon. Friend the Member for Alyn and Deeside (Mark Tami) about the jobs growth policy of the Welsh Government, and more or less said that that does not matter and that people would have jobs anyway. That is a preposterous thing to say, because the Jobs Growth Wales programme has been a magnificent success, with 16,000 new job opportunities over two years. Only last week, there was an announcement of 350 new jobs in my constituency —good jobs, too. What my colleagues have been saying here in this Chamber is that of course we welcome the reduction in unemployment, but the jobs that people are going into are not of the sort we particularly want them to go into. The new jobs that have come to Cwmbran are precisely the sort of jobs I want my constituents to work in.

The Minister also talked about Europe, responding to a point made by my hon. Friend the Member for Rhondda (Chris Bryant). A great Tory grandee once said that the secret weapon of the Conservative party is loyalty. Over the past few months, the Conservative Back Benchers have erupted over Europe, with the loss of two Members to the United Kingdom Independence party and possibly more to come. What sort of signal does that give to businesses that want to invest in Wales? What sort of signal does it give to firms in my constituency which rely overwhelmingly on our membership of the EU? Component car manufacturers in my constituency would go to continental Europe literally on the day we left the EU.

[Jonathan Edwards (Carmarthen East and Dinefwr) (PC)]

As always, the right hon. Gentleman is making very considered points. However, will he explain why the Welsh Government have decided to cut the budget for Jobs Growth Wales if it is such a great success?

[Paul Murphy]

I fancy it is because of the money that has been cut from the budget generally, because of what the Government here are doing by reducing the amount of money that is coming through the block grant. The Secretary of State actually said somewhere in his speech—he is getting a bit like his boss now, making things up from time to time—that there was no inward investment in Wales in 13 years of the Labour Government. That is rubbish—of course there was inward investment in Wales during those 13 years. As Secretary of State, I went around talking to firms that had benefited from inward investment and so on.

[Stephen Crabb]

I did not actually say that, and I apologise if I did give that impression. The point I was making was that there was a collapse in the inward investment: compared with what we had seen in the ’80s and ’90s, there was a huge decline over that 13-year period in the amount of inward investment coming to Wales. Thankfully, with the Welsh Government and UK Government working together, we are seeing that go back up.

[Paul Murphy]

The Welsh Government are certainly doing it, because foreign investment in Wales has increased by 30% whereas the figure for England is 10%—I rather suspect the work of the Welsh Government has made the difference.

The other issue the Secretary of State has to take into account is the welfare policies of the Government. In effect, those changes in Wales are doing two things that are detrimental to the people of Wales. I agree with reforming the welfare agenda and I agree that we should not have workless families in Wales—we all agree on that—but the great brunt of the cost of these welfare reforms often falls not on those who are out of work but on those who are in work. Those people in work are suffering sometimes more than anybody else.

Last week’s report by Sheffield Hallam university showed graphically how the south Wales valleys have been hit harder by welfare reform than any other part of the United Kingdom. We can talk about the impact on individuals, which is catastrophic, but we can also talk about the sucking out of the local economies the money that would have gone in had these people still been receiving these benefits. The reforms will cost £34 million a year in my constituency alone, and the average loss of income per working age adult in Torfaen is nearly £600 a year—in one ward, Trevethin, the figure is £850. Some 3,000 jobs in the south Wales valleys could have been created but for the impact of these so-called welfare reforms put in place over the past few months and years, which have been pretty botched.

Finally, I wish to refer to the bedroom tax and make no apology for doing so. One of the first things the new Labour Government will do is abolish it, and everybody in Wales will cheer. Not only is it cruel and wicked, but it is not working. Some 20% of housing benefit claimants in my constituency are affected. In the first year of the policy Bron Afon, which runs social housing, had 268 tenants fall into arrears; we are talking about some £63,000 of arrears that people never had before until this came about. That is not helping anybody. It does not help the tenants, the local authority or the social landlords, and it again takes out of the local economy vital money that could be used to boost local businesses, particularly small and medium-sized enterprises. Ultimately, that is why we have seen an enormous increase in the number of people using food banks in both my constituency and the rest of Wales. Until two or three years ago, I never saw a food bank. Now, we visit them time and again. Our churches and our chapels collect for them every Sunday. That increase is a direct result of the Government’s policies in Wales, which will undoubtedly be rejected by the people of Wales next year. We will then have a Government in Cardiff and a Government in Westminster working together for the benefit of the people of Wales.