International Development (Official Development Assistance Target) Bill

Debate between Mark Reckless and Philip Davies

Friday 5th December 2014 Commons Chamber

[Mark Reckless]

I thank the Minister for his intervention. It reveals the extent of the weight he attaches to the views of our constituents. Members are voting in large numbers to increase and put into law the 0.7%, which represents a rising amount of output, as though they were doing something on behalf of their constituents, when they know that the vast majority of their constituents do not want them to do that.

[Philip Davies]

Does the hon. Gentleman agree that his constituents, like mine, would not support the premise of the Bill, which means that, as spending as a percentage of GDP goes down as the cost of government as a whole is reduced, the Government will be spending a higher and higher percentage of their income on overseas aid? My constituents certainly would not want that, and I am sure that his would not want it either.

[Mark Reckless]

The hon. Gentleman is quite correct. He is one of the very few Members who appear actually to vote as their constituents would wish them to.

We have heard today that the numbers are being revised upwards still further. We are now going to be spending £12.4 billion on overseas aid. My party wants to reduce that amount—[Interruption.] We do not want to eliminate it entirely, as the hon. Member for Shipley (Philip Davies) might wish, but we want to cut it by 85%. That would give us a saving of £10.5 billion to spend on the priorities of our constituents.

The other question that Members around the House simply seem to ignore is that of whether we as a country can afford this. If we want to give overseas aid on a sustainable basis, we have to sell overseas more than we buy from overseas, yet we now have a current account deficit coming close to 5% of GDP. That figure is usually the sign of a country in crisis and in an unsustainable position, yet we are going to enshrine in law an obligation to make an overseas transfer of 0.7% of our GDP indefinitely, through force of law.

We saw the autumn statement and the Office for Budget Responsibility and its three-men-and-a-dog approach to forecasting the current account deficit. This blithely assumed that the 5% gap would disappear and become less than 2% over the forecast horizon. For some reason, it was assumed that overseas transfers would trend lower, but there is no serious prospect of that happening while we are handing over 0.7% of our resources as overseas aid, never mind our contributions to the EU and the rising amount of remittances that we see transferred overseas as a result of the degree of immigration we have seen in this country.

National Health Service (Amended Duties and Powers) Bill

Debate between Mark Reckless and Philip Davies

Friday 21st November 2014 Commons Chamber

[Mark Reckless]

That is an excellent website, which I recommend to all Members. The Minister has said that my hon. Friend made those observations when most of the Committee stage of the Bill had been completed. Was that during the “pause” that had been invented as a new mechanism for Parliament? My hon. Friend is not here at the moment, but I think he would agree with me that the 2012 Act is not as it was billed to us by those on the Government Front Bench. It has led to an extraordinary degree of additional complexity in the NHS, and the introduction of competition bodies—and, in particular, European competition law—into the NHS is not welcome.

[Philip Davies]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

[Mark Reckless]

No, I will continue for a bit, if I may.

I do not think that the extent of the difficulties that doctors and others would encounter as a result of section 75 of the Act and the bureaucratic, market-based—or quasi-market-based—commissioning rules that it requires was any more apparent to my hon. Friend the Member for Clacton than it was to other Members, although some Opposition Members may have had premonitions of it. I thought that the Bill was intended to allow the various local bodies to get on with running the NHS in their areas. Some would run it better than others; there would be local decision-making and discretion, and people would learn from each other. Now, however, there are centrally determined rules that force everyone into, in particular, commissioning or contracting behaviour, but do not make sense in the context of the service that is being delivered.

[Philip Davies]

I congratulate the hon. Gentleman on his victory in last night’s by-election. It was an excellent result for him and it would be churlish not to point that out. I know that he is a long-standing believer in localism. Is he not worried by the British Medical Association’s concerns that the Bill would give much wider powers to the Secretary of State, thereby centralising powers and taking the day-to-day running of the NHS away from clinical staff and putting it in the Secretary of State’s hands? As a champion of localism, is he not worried by that?

[Mark Reckless]

I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for his congratulations; that is very decent of him. I am not a fan of quasi-autonomous bodies, of great amounts of regulators or of overlapping layers of bureaucracy; they rarely work. Given the degree of complexity that has now been brought into the NHS, I think it is possible—although I am not certain—that the centralisation of power in a single Secretary of State who is at least accountable to the House might be better than the current diffusion and fragmentation of powers, which does not seem to be working effectively. My party would like to replace the alphabet soup of regulators and the overlapping layers of bureaucracy with a single, elected health board for each county area. That would give a degree of clarity to the oversight and management of the NHS.

[Mark Reckless]

There is an argument for doing that, and a judgment has to be made. It might be possible, depending on the different areas of the countries—particularly in the devolved Administrations—that the solution to that question might be different. My general view is that it is much better to have democratic accountability than not to have it, and in many areas I would prefer that to be local. My party wants to see health boards elected on a county basis.

My party also wants European competition law to be taken out of the NHS, and the Bill is exemplary in that regard. I strongly support that provision.

I have signed a pledge on TTIP, along with most other candidates in the by-election, except for the Conservative—[Interruption.] No, not the Liberal one—that was not a good one to sign—although I did vote against tuition fees, along with most Opposition Members. I would like to see the NHS excluded from TTIP. There are arguments as to whether it will be or not, but those arguments should be settled in the House as per this Bill, rather than being left to the unpredictability of future legal actions.

[Philip Davies]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

[Mark Reckless]

I am just reaching my conclusion, if I may.

The hon. Member for Eltham made a mistake in talking about the UK negotiating on TTIP. That is an area of exclusive competence for the European Community, and it is therefore the EU Commission that will negotiate with the United States on that matter. When I first heard about TTIP, it sounded as though it would be all about free trade and I thought that it would be broadly a good thing. The more I looked into it, however, the more it seemed to be not about free trade but about the creation of a single set of transnational regulations between the US and the European Union, and that it would be illegal for anyone not complying with them to sell goods and services. I am therefore very sceptical about TTIP and I am not sure it is something that I would want to support. I certainly do not want to see the NHS included in it.

I congratulate the hon. Member for Eltham on his Bill, and I look forward to supporting him in the Lobby.

Further and Higher Education (Access) Bill

Debate between Mark Reckless and Philip Davies

Friday 4th March 2011 Commons Chamber

[Philip Davies]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. As it happens, I voted against the Government on tuition fees for the simple reason that I did not want people from poorer backgrounds to be denied the opportunity to go to the best possible universities. Tuition fees are being increased to pay for more and more people to go to university, and the argument is that if we want more people to go to university, students are going to have to pay a higher price. That is a perfectly logical argument, but I do not want more people going to university. Too many go to university; I want fewer to go. I want universities to be the bastion of high standards again.

In an intervention on my hon. Friend the Member for North East Somerset, my hon. Friend the Member for Gillingham and Rainham (Rehman Chishti) inadvertently touched on that point when he asked, “Shouldn’t people who want to go to university have the opportunity to do so?” My answer to that is no. It should be a question not of whether someone wants to go to university, but whether they have the aptitude and have reached a high enough mark to do so on merit. That should be what determines whether they go.

Otherwise, it is like asking athletes whether they would like to compete in the Olympics—I am sure they all would, but surely nobody is advocating that any athlete who happens to fancy a crack at the 100-metre sprint should be allowed to compete at the Olympics. Most people accept that athletes have to reach a certain level before they are even considered for the Olympics, and the same should apply in education: people should not go just because they want to; they should go because they have reached the level in their education that allows them to go. That is the whole point of merit and, as I see it, of this Bill.

All the other factors that people are trying to introduce into the system can only devalue our education system—dumb down the standards. Then the Government will say, “Isn’t it marvellous? Haven’t we been good for education, because now X% of people have a degree?” Well, no it would not be marvellous—not if the result had been achieved only by dumbing down standards.

[Mark Reckless (Rochester and Strood) (Con)]

My hon. Friend notes that fees have gone up to £9,000, and I, like he, opposed that measure. He says that they are going up to allow more people to go to university, but are they not going up, at least in part, to pay for students from the European Union to go to university? EU students go to university for free in Scotland, while students from England have to pay. My hon. Friend the Member for North East Somerset (Jacob Rees-Mogg) supports loans, but 46% of EU students who take out such loans are not paying them back when they should be. What does my hon. Friend the Member for Shipley (Philip Davies) have to say about that?

[Philip Davies]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. As he knows, I share his robust opinion on the merits of being in the European Union—that is, that there are no merits of being in the European Union. One problem with allowing more and more people to go to university and increasing tuition fees is that the people who go there on merit end up paying over the odds to subsidise those who do not go there on merit and who will not end up paying back their loan. That is, in effect, the system that the Government have introduced. I think that that puts a penalty on merit. I do not see why people who go to university on merit should subsidise those who are not going on merit.