Business of the House

Baroness Berger Excerpts

Thursday 17th February 2011 Commons Chamber

[Sir George Young]

Under Labour, roughly 1.5 million people spent most of the last decade on out-of-work benefits, and that benefit system cost every working family some £3,000. The Work programme will focus on encouraging people to get into work and reforming the welfare system, and it will have much better results than the programmes that preceded it.

[Luciana Berger (Liverpool, Wavertree) (Lab/Co-op)]

Earlier this week, Dave Morgan, a 75-year-old man, was seriously injured in my constituency after heroically dragging an out-of-control illegal dog away from an eight-year-old boy it was attempting to savage. Yesterday, a young person had a dog set on him in Picton, also in my constituency, in front of his youth workers. The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs’ consultation on dangerous dogs ended eight months ago, and the Government have so far done nothing. May we please have an urgent debate on the performance of the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, and the complacent attitude of her Ministers on this matter?

[Sir George Young]

I was sorry to hear of the incident in the hon. Lady’s constituency. I will contact my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State and see when she plans to respond to the consultation exercise. Of course, I understand the urgency of making progress.

Business of the House

Baroness Berger Excerpts

Thursday 27th January 2011 Commons Chamber

[Sir George Young]

I say to my hon. Friend that I honestly think I have provided enough time for the House to debate matters related to the EU. I see that a high proportion of the time that we have made available has been occupied by him—[Laughter.] I mean no discourtesy. The answer is that I will not provide at this stage additional time to debate the matter he raises.

[Luciana Berger (Liverpool, Wavertree) (Lab/Co-op)]

Liverpool city council workers have today been told the terrible news that 1,600 people are to made redundant as a result of the Government’s 22% cut in its funding—that is the hardest hit to any core city. The council has been praised by the Government for the action it has taken to cut the pay of senior managers and reduce administrative costs, but it has so far been unable to secure the Government’s agreement to spread the cuts over the spending period to protect front-line jobs. Instead, harsh, front-loaded cuts are being imposed. May we please have an emergency debate on the impact that the Government’s front-loaded spending cuts are having on employment and local economies?

[Sir George Young]

I understand the hon. Lady’s concern, and when we debate the local government revenue support grant, she will have an opportunity to raise it. However, the plans of the previous Chancellor were for cuts only £2 billion lower than the coalition cuts next year, so the sort of challenges faced by her local authority would have arisen whoever had won the last election.

Business of the House (Thursday)

Baroness Berger Excerpts

Wednesday 8th December 2010 Commons Chamber

[Hilary Benn (Leeds Central) (Lab)]

I rise to oppose the motion. I must say to the Leader of the House that I had been expecting a better justification to the House of the thinking that lay behind this timetable motion. Perhaps he is embarrassed by the shambles of the past two days. Those who read The Guardian newspaper, as many of us do, will have read with great joy about the reference to the Liberal Democrats’ hokey cokey when it comes to voting. Perhaps he did not want to be outdone and decided to have his own hokey cokey on this motion. The timetable motion was on the Order Paper for Monday and was objected to. It was on the Order Paper for Tuesday and the Government did not have the courage to move it, and it is back again tonight.

The Leader of the House says that he has not received any representations about the time that will be allocated. I have news for him: he is about to get a lot of representations, and the most important one of all will be when Labour Members all go through the Division Lobby to vote no to this motion.

The content of the motion is not surprising, even though it has changed a little since the version of yesterday and the day before. It is clear that the Government want one thing and one thing only: to spend as little time as possible on this matter, and to get it out of the way as quickly as possible.

[Luciana Berger (Liverpool, Wavertree) (Lab/Co-op)]

Does my right hon. Friend accept that if only half the Members of the House wanted to take part in the debate tomorrow, that would allow only 50 seconds per Member?

[Hilary Benn]

I do indeed, and that illustrates a point that I shall come to—the inadequacy of the time that the House is being given to debate the matter.

Business of the House

Baroness Berger Excerpts

Thursday 25th November 2010 Commons Chamber

[Mr Speaker]

Last but not least, I call Luciana Berger.

[Luciana Berger (Liverpool, Wavertree) (Lab/Co-op)]

Thank you, Mr Speaker.

My constituent Martine Taylor’s husband went missing one year ago. He left behind three young children and tens of thousands of pounds of debt, including two loans worth £34,000 from RBS, a bank which is 80% owned by the taxpayer. RBS has now sold that debt to bailiffs who may force Miss Taylor to sell her home to recover the debt, while RBS refuses to discuss my constituent’s case because the debt is not in her name. Please may we have an urgent debate on the debt recovery practices of Government-owned banks?

[Sir George Young]

I am very sorry to hear of the misfortune of the hon. Lady’s constituent. I will raise the current regime for pursuing debts with my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills, and ask him to see whether there is any action the Government can take to help this poor lady and to write to the hon. Lady.

Business of the House

Baroness Berger Excerpts

Thursday 4th November 2010 Commons Chamber

[Sir George Young]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend. He will know, having listened to statements by Treasury Ministers, that we have had to deal with a large number of commitments by the outgoing Government for which the resources were not made available. On the specific issue, as he knows, Ministers are considering how to implement the judgment and, indeed, how to avoid the fines to which he refers. When the Government have made a decision, the House will be the first to know.

[Luciana Berger (Liverpool, Wavertree) (Lab/Co-op)]

May I press the Leader of the House? My right hon. Friend the Member for Leeds Central (Hilary Benn) mentioned that the Minister for Universities and Science has said that non-STEM—science, technology, engineering and mathematics—subjects will lose their teaching grant. Yet in a Westminster Hall debate that I took part in yesterday, the Minister for Further Education, Skills and Lifelong Learning said:

“We will continue to support the arts through the subsidy for teaching in universities.” —[Official Report, 3 November 2010; Vol. 517, c. 315WH.]

Please may we have an urgent statement on when universities will learn of their funding settlements in order to alleviate the uncertainty that so many universities, teaching staff, students and prospective students are suffering?

[Sir George Young]

Of course I understand the concern that the hon. Lady expresses. She will have heard my right hon. Friend the Minister for Universities and Science say yesterday in his statement that there would be a debate quite soon, after which there would be a vote on the order to raise the caps. That would be an appropriate point for the hon. Lady to raise her concerns again.

Business of the House

Baroness Berger Excerpts

Thursday 28th October 2010 Commons Chamber

[Sir George Young]

Of course I understand the hon. Gentleman's concern and I will raise with the appropriate Minister the distribution of grants for assistance to ports within the UK.

[Luciana Berger (Liverpool, Wavertree) (Lab/Co-op)]

A review of dangerous dogs legislation was initiated in March under the previous Government. The review concluded in June and, despite repeated requests from me and others at Business questions and in writing, the Government, four months later, have still to respond. Will the Leader of the House please urge the Secretary of State to update the House on the review of that legislation before, like John Paul Massey, who tragically died in my constituency last December, another child is savaged by a dangerous dog?

[Sir George Young]

The short answer is yes and I very much regret the incident that the hon. Lady has referred to. There are questions to the Home Office on 1 November, when she may have an opportunity to raise the matter.

Summer Adjournment

Baroness Berger Excerpts

Tuesday 27th July 2010 Commons Chamber

[Luciana Berger (Liverpool, Wavertree) (Lab/Co-op)]

I wish to use this debate to highlight the devastating impact that the coalition Government’s cuts in public expenditure will have on the city of Liverpool and, in particular, on my constituents in Wavertree. The Government’s proposals for cuts of up to 40% in some Departments will jeopardise the economic recovery, unfairly punish those in the most deprived areas and, according to the Office for Budget Responsibility, put 600,000 public sector workers out of work.

Members in all parts of the House acknowledge the effect of the global recession on the country’s public finances, but the new Tory Government have ignored this approach and instead opted to pursue an agenda described by the Institute for Fiscal Studies as amounting to the longest and deepest period of public spending cuts since the second world war. Despite what the Government would have the public believe, these cuts are not inevitable. They are the result of the ideological choices that the Conservative-Liberal Government are making. Economists such as Nobel prize-winning Professor Joseph Stiglitz have warned that the Tory Government’s Budget and their other cuts will result at least in a slowing of the recovery and at worst in a double-dip recession.

Merseyside will bear the brunt of the Government’s cuts far more than other areas of the country, not least because in some parts of the region 60% of the work force rely on the public sector for their income. While some of the more ideologically driven Members on the Government Benches may demonise the public sector as a drag on the private sector, those of us with a more clear-headed view know the important relationship that exists between the public and private sectors. For every £1 that a local government worker earns in Liverpool, they spend 70p there. If that money stops, we will see small businesses close, a spiralling welfare bill and public services straining under the weight of underfunding and increased demand.

Jack Stopforth, chief executive of Liverpool chamber of commerce, has said that the Government are being “unbelievably naive” over the effect of job losses and clearly have

“no awareness of the link between public sector services and private sector supply chains”.

Despite that important relationship, the Government seem determined to further crush any project that would bring necessary jobs and investment to Merseyside. The withdrawal of funding for the Mersey gateway, which would bring 5,000 jobs, and the cancelling of Liverpool’s 26 Building Schools for the Future projects, which has already cost 1,000 jobs, are evidence of that. Today, the Northwest Development Agency has announced more than £52 million of cuts to 101 projects, many of which fall in Liverpool.

There have been a number of short-sighted cuts, particularly the decision not to introduce a tax relief for the video games industry. In 2009, the industry brought approximately £1 billion to the UK’s gross domestic product, and in my constituency and across Liverpool there are a number of video games developers including Genemation, Bizarre Creations, Magenta Software and Playbox. Sony Computer Entertainment, based at Wavertree technology park, employs more than 600 people, and introducing a games tax relief would protect and increase a figure of £415 million in new and saved tax receipts for the Treasury, far outweighing the £192 million that the relief would cost. Can the Deputy Leader of the House explain why the Red Book highlighted only the cost of the tax relief and not the net benefit?

Decisions such as that and the cancellation of the loan to Sheffield Forgemasters highlight the Government’s short-term thinking and strike at the very premise behind their strategy to pursue a private sector-led recovery. They seem adamant that the gap created by their public sector cuts will be filled by increased demand and job creation in the private sector. However, businesses in areas such as Liverpool rely more heavily than others on income from public sector workers.

Not only will the Government raise unemployment with their cuts, but they seem to want to punish those who are unfortunate enough to find themselves out of work. All of us in the House recognise the value of helping people off benefits and into work. That is important for self-esteem, well-being and the economy, and jobseekers should be supported, not castigated. The Government’s plans to freeze jobseeker’s allowance—[Interruption.] Oh, I will sit down. Sorry.

Business of the House

Baroness Berger Excerpts

Thursday 8th July 2010 Commons Chamber

[Sir George Young]

I agree. It is a serious issue that ought to be debated and it seems to me an appropriate subject for Westminster Hall.

[Luciana Berger (Liverpool, Wavertree) (Lab/Co-op)]

May I echo the request made by many of my hon. Friends and ask the Leader of the House to find time for an urgent debate on BSF? On a number of occasions, the right hon. Gentleman has referred to the opportunities offered by Opposition day debates, but as far as I am aware an Opposition day debate has not been allocated before the recess. One hundred and ten of the projects slashed were schools in the north-west, and 57 of them were in Merseyside and Cheshire alone. We need to debate the disproportionate impact of those cuts on the life chances of children from across the north-west.

[Sir George Young]

I am sorry to have to give the same answer as I gave a few moments ago. I cannot find time for an urgent debate on that subject. I have outlined the debates that are likely to take place between now and the end of the month. Again, I have to say that the reason for the announcement was the over-commitment of the outgoing Government of funds and the absence of the cover necessary in Departments to meet those commitments.

Business of the House

Baroness Berger Excerpts

Thursday 17th June 2010 Commons Chamber

[Luciana Berger (Liverpool, Wavertree) (Lab/Co-op)]

Two weeks ago, I asked the Leader of the House if he would kindly urge the Home Secretary to update us on the review of dangerous dogs legislation initiated under the last Government. He said that the Home Secretary would do so during the Queen’s Speech debate, but unfortunately that did not happen. May I again urge him to ask the Home Secretary to come to the House and update us on the review of that legislation?

[Sir George Young]

I am grateful to the hon. Lady, and if there has been a discourtesy, I apologise. I will pursue the issue further, and Home Office questions will be held on 28 June, when she may have an opportunity to raise the matter again.

Business of the House

Baroness Berger Excerpts

Thursday 10th June 2010 Commons Chamber

[Sir George Young]

I am delighted with the new seating arrangements and so are my hon. Friends. May I amplify what I said earlier about Short money? It is for the Clerk of the House, as accounting officer, to ensure that Short money payments are made in accordance with resolutions of the House. As for the voting record, the hon. Gentleman will find that Members of the last Parliament who sat on the Government side of the House very occasionally voted against the Government.

[Luciana Berger (Liverpool, Wavertree) (Lab/Co-op)]

Patients and NHS staff would have been as concerned as I was to learn yesterday that decisions on capital projects in the NHS that had already been announced, such as the vital rebuild of the Royal Liverpool hospital, will not be forthcoming until the autumn. Will the Leader of the House ensure that the Chancellor of the Exchequer or one of his Ministers comes to the House to make an urgent statement about the delay?

[Sir George Young]

That is probably better raised with the Secretary of State for Health, but I say to the hon. Lady that we were the only party at the last election to pledge an increase in real terms in spending on the NHS, so whatever the prospects are for her hospital, they are better than they would have been.