Delivery of Public Services

Matt Rodda Excerpts

Tuesday 28th June 2022 Commons Chamber

[Paul Holmes]

It happened partly because we were investing in services. The hon. Gentleman said in his speech that the Government were woefully in debt. I take it, then, that he did not back the action that we had to take during the unprecedented pandemic and global situation to protect his constituents and the businesses in his constituency. The people out there will take what they need to from his speech.

The action that I have outlined led us to have 7.5% of economic growth in 2021, which was the largest increase in economic growth anywhere in the G7. That has now stalled, but that is because of the global situation in which we find ourselves. Let us remember that if the Opposition had been in charge, we would have come out of the pandemic more slowly, because they wanted to keep us in lockdown. We would have had a slower vaccine rollout—this Government spent the money necessary to get the vaccines onboard—and lower economic growth. Opposition Members now have the cheek to absent themselves from acknowledging the pandemic and the global situation. Once again, they present a vision full of hindsight that is lacking in any reality whatsoever.

[Matt Rodda (Reading East) (Lab)]

The hon. Gentleman is talking about the pandemic and growth as we come out of it. Will he comment on how the Government failed to lock down quickly at various key points, which prolonged the pandemic and made the related reduction in economic activity deeper and worse?

[Paul Holmes]

My comment to the hon. Gentleman is that this country lifted back up while his party was still calling for us to be in lockdown. We lifted up quicker than the Leader of the Opposition wanted us to; he wanted us to lock down again, so I will not take any lectures from the hon. Gentleman about what the Government have done in lifting us up and getting the economy moving.

The action I was outlining means that £37 billion has been invested in the economy; at no stage today was that acknowledged by the shadow Minister, the right hon. Member for Wolverhampton South East (Mr McFadden). It means £650 for recipients of means-tested benefits, £300 for pensioners in receipt of the winter fuel payment and £150 for people in receipt of disability benefits—and we have cut taxes for 30 million people to the tune of £330 a year.

However, there is an issue on which I have some sympathy with Members and those outside this House. I am a Conservative—I do not think that I need to declare that in the House—but I am a Conservative who believes that we can grow the economy if we keep more money in people’s pockets. I gently say to the Chief Secretary that people are looking to him for tax cuts—for the economy, the middle classes and vulnerable people. We need to go further with tax cuts, so that we get the economic growth that we need.

The Labour party should not be allowed to be disingenuous with this motion; the Government have invested in public services. I want to pick up on two points that the shadow Minister outlined. What kind of world do we live in when the Labour party, the supposed party of the NHS, moans that we are under-investing in the NHS while consistently voting against the Government’s record investment in it? The Liberal Democrats voted against it, too. We put £36 billion of funding into the NHS, which is £12 billion a year of extra funding, and they opposed it at every turn. They opposed us in every Division we had on NHS spending, and now they say that we are not doing anything. That is not a consistent approach from the Labour party. There are record numbers of doctors—124,000 of them—as well as 300,000 extra nurses, and I remind the House that Labour Members, the Liberal Democrats and those from other parties voted against those measures.

In the passports debate two weeks ago, I said to the shadow Home Office Minister, the hon. Member for Aberavon (Stephen Kinnock), that although the Opposition say that the Government are not taking any action on passports, 700 extra staff are being recruited to the passport service. There are 500 already, and they are not privatised staff, but staff of Her Majesty’s Passport Office, whom we are investing in, so that passport applications are completed on time. Some 90% of applications are completed within six weeks; 98.5% are completed within 10 weeks; and 1 million passports were processed in March 2022. Seven million would be processed in a normal year. I say today what I said then: there is a lack of acknowledgment of the effect that the pandemic and lockdown have had on international travel. They have meant that more people are applying. However, we are taking the action necessary to make sure that passport applications are completed on time.

Today we have heard about Labour failure in Wales and Manchester. As this debate has gone on, we have heard about Labour failure in London; the Metropolitan Police Service is being put into special measures. It is controlled by a Labour politician, but nobody on the Labour side of the House criticises the Labour party, or those in power who have the budgets and the means to make the changes that the people they represent need. The Labour party attacks us. The public see that the party has no vision for this country, and that it does not play on a level playing field, given that its elected politicians are failing because of the same circumstances that Labour Members have mentioned today. What we see here is what the public will see, which once again is a carping Opposition with no practical, constructive or sensible solutions for the unprecedented problems of the day. They need to stop voting against measures that tackle the problems that they complain about. They complain about us not taking action, but why do they not march through the Division Lobby and vote with this Government for record amounts of money for public services, and then come up with a constructive solution afterwards? They have not done that at all.

Finally, it would be nice if, just once—even if they disagree with the core principles of this Government—Labour Members told the truth: that they would not, and could not, have done much differently, given the circumstances we faced in the pandemic, and with the global economic crisis. The public would respect this Parliament a lot more if we genuinely worked together, instead of Labour Members carping from the sidelines. This Government are taking action on the NHS and passports, and are making sure that the most vulnerable people in this country are looked after. That is why I was elected to this House, and why the Government were elected to office in 2019. Labour Members should stop criticising. They should come to the table and provide solutions, but I doubt we will ever hear them.

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[Matt Rodda (Reading East) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Southend West (Anna Firth).

I wish to speak in favour of the motion and to pick up on some of the serious concerns about backlog Britain, illustrating how it is linked to the long period of low growth and under-investment in key public services that goes back to the austerity period and the decisions made by Governments since 2010. Before I do, I wish to pay tribute to our public sector and public service workers, who have done the most incredible job for a very long time—for their whole careers—but particularly in the past couple of years, during this unprecedented crisis the country has faced. I am sure that all of us, across the House, want to wish them the very best and show our support for them. We respect them and think they do the most wonderful job for our communities across this country.

While I touch on the work that those workers have carried out, I want to ask Ministers to think seriously about what it feels like to be a frontline public sector worker. I ask them to imagine themselves into the position of a nurse in the Royal Berkshire Hospital in Reading, of a local GP or of many other local public sector workers in my constituency. I ask them to think about that and respond in the fullness of time.

In particular, I ask Ministers to think about not only the pressures caused by the pandemic, but the long effect of austerity, the lack of funding and particular local problems we face in our area. For example, two GP practices have closed in my constituency and others are under severe pressure. We have a problem with looming GP retirements and other pressures arising from severe shortages of skilled staff. We have problems with numbers being reduced in Thames Valley police. Admittedly, the Government are recruiting more police, but they are doing so belatedly and there are questions as to whether they will be able to replace the officers who have been lost. There are serious problems with school funding and pressures on school budgets, because of the misunderstanding of the way in which the teachers’ pensions need to be funded by schools. There is a series of serious problems, and I ask Ministers to think deeply about that and address them when they respond to us later today. I hope they can learn the lessons of these mistakes and rethink Government policy.

In the time available, I wish to focus on one service that has caused serious problems in my constituency. I refer to the mismanagement of the passport service during the past few months, as we have come out of the pandemic. Let me illustrate some of the problems that I have encountered as a constituency MP. I have dealt with 59 cases in recent weeks of people waiting for passports, sometimes for up to 12 or 14 weeks. Those affected include not just families who want to go on holiday and rightly deserve to do so after the awful time of the pandemic, but people waiting to see terminally ill relatives and people who need to go abroad for urgent reasons. The delays are lengthy and there is a lack of communication with residents in my area, and I understand that colleagues from across the House have suffered with this as well. People are not being given updates. I have often had residents come to me saying, “I am about to go on holiday. I am due to go in two weeks but I still have not heard anything from the Passport Office.” That is not good enough and it reflects a wider lack of planning, which I want to pick up on in a moment.

[Margaret Greenwood]

My hon. Friend is making an excellent speech. We know that the Government want to cut 91,000 jobs from the civil service. On 2021 figures, that would mean the loss of almost a fifth of all civil servants. Those cuts could mean more than 11,000 job losses in the north-west, where my constituency is based, with 3,500 in Merseyside and 400 in Wirral. Does he agree that if the Government go ahead with these job cuts, my constituents, the region’s economy and the level of services that people receive will suffer?

[Matt Rodda]

My hon. Friend makes an excellent point. She is highlighting clearly the issues in her area, and the same applies across the whole country. The Government are expecting public service workers to catch up and deal with an unprecedented backlog, while threatening deep cuts. As she has rightly said, many of the services provided by the civil service are in Government agencies rather than in Whitehall, which employs only a tiny proportion of the overall headcount.

[Matt Western (Warwick and Leamington) (Lab)]

My hon. Friend is making a powerful speech. To add to his point, it is foolish to suggest that there is somehow some unnecessary flabbiness in the civil service or in local service delivery, because so much that has been added was driven by the need to make trade deals, with teams being brought in to negotiate those deals, and to support the Afghan situation and now the Ukraine situation. That is why we have so many people in our civil service right now.

[Matt Rodda]

My hon. Friend makes a good point about the need to respond to crises and the pressure on the public sector as a whole.

I thank the Minister for Security and Borders, the right hon. Member for East Hampshire (Damian Hinds), who is in his place, because he and his colleagues have been generous in supporting me in dealing with some of my constituency cases. However, the fact that Ministers have to intervene illustrates some of the management failures in the system, which ultimately reflect poorly on them and their colleagues in government.

I ask Ministers to think about the case study of the Passport Agency. It provides a vital public service, and it has been expected to catch up with a large backlog very suddenly. Why, when the pandemic was clearly coming to an end, was there not more planning, more foresight and a more strategic look ahead at the likely implications for the head count needed in the offices that process passports, as well as the implications for the public and the economy of severe delays in that vital public service? I am afraid that the Government have been found very wanting in that instance, and it illustrates the wider failure of leadership and management in the current Administration that dates all the way back to their election in 2010. I urge the Government to think carefully about the implications of the problems we now face.

That issue also links to the way the Government operate at a political level. It is interesting that many of the problems are occurring at the very time when we see turmoil in the governing party. All too often it suggests that Ministers are more bothered about the internal factional issues in their party—the Prime Minister’s survival or demise—than about managing public services in a responsible, sensible way. I ask them to get back to the day job and get a grip on those vital services, support public service professionals, provide them with the correct amount of resource, and encourage them in their vital work.