Debate on the Address

Matt Western Excerpts

Tuesday 10th May 2022 Commons Chamber

[Sir Jeffrey M. Donaldson]

Of course, the right hon. Member is correct: the EU is not doing so. I have listened to some Members of Congress, for example, lecture us on the need to abide by the protocol and to implement the protocol, yet this is a nation founded on a campaign of “No taxation without representation”. What do we have in Northern Ireland? We have tax laws—on VAT, for example—that apply to Northern Ireland, but we have no representation in how those laws are enacted. That is not the essence of democracy.

That is important because, in this Queen’s Speech, the Government state the measures they intend to take—for example, to help small businesses, to reduce regulations and to alter the way business is regulated—and one of the benefits of leaving the European Union is that we have more control over how we regulate our businesses. That will not apply to Northern Ireland, however, because we are regulated by the European Union for the manufacture of goods, for example, and we have to comply with EU standards, which means divergence from our main market—Great Britain.

We purchase four times more goods from Great Britain than we do from the European Union in its entirety, and we sell far more goods to Great Britain than we do to the whole of the European Union as well. Yet we find that the Irish sea border, this trade border within our own country, is harming our economy, damaging the ability of our businesses to expand and invest, and costing them more. I recently heard from one company, a small manufacturing business in Newtownabbey in the constituency of my hon. Friend the Member for South Antrim (Paul Girvan). It told me that in the first year of the operation of the Northern Ireland protocol, the additional costs of bringing component parts from Great Britain, transportation costs, delays in getting the goods in, additional paperwork and customs fees amounted to more than £100,000 for that small business alone. That is costing it jobs and means it cannot invest in the expansion of its business. This is harming business in Northern Ireland, and peace and prosperity go hand in hand.

A stable Northern Ireland does not just depend on the absence of violence; it depends on the growth of our economy, on creating jobs for our young people, and on giving them hope for the future. The protocol is harming our ability to do that because it is harming our access to our biggest market, in Great Britain.

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

I absolutely hear the passion and anger in the right hon. Gentleman’s voice, and it must be so frustrating for the community in Northern Ireland. I was interested to hear Marks and Spencer being quoted about the additional on-costs that it faces when selling its products in Northern Ireland, relative to the mainland. This is not supposed to be a difficult question, but what was it that the Prime Minister promised when he addressed the right hon. Gentleman’s party back in autumn 2019? Did he make clear the reality behind what he would do when negotiating with the EU?

[Sir Jeffrey M. Donaldson]

I can answer the hon. Gentleman clearly: the Prime Minister came to our party conference and told us that there would be an Irish sea border “over his dead body”. That is what he told us, and unfortunately the protocol created an Irish sea border and it is harming our economy. I am only asking the Prime Minister to honour the commitments that he made to us. I am not asking him to do anything more than that.

The hon. Gentleman referred to supermarkets. Let me point out the absurdity of what the protocol means. Sainsbury’s is one of the biggest supermarket chains in Northern Ireland. It has no supermarkets in the Republic of Ireland. Yet when Sainsbury’s moves goods—even its own-brand products—from Great Britain to Northern Ireland, for sale in Sainsbury’s supermarkets in my part of the United Kingdom, it has to complete customs declarations and pay fees. There is a delay in moving those goods which, as Members will know, can be vital for food products, and it costs the supermarket more. That is driving up the cost of food in Northern Ireland. For example, it is estimated that the additional cost of chilled food products is 18% as a result of the protocol, compared with the same products in Great Britain.

As we heard earlier, the Road Haulage Association has said that the cost of bringing goods from Great Britain to Northern Ireland went up by 27% as a direct result of the protocol in the first year of its operation. There can be no other impact of that additional cost than driving up the cost for the consumer when purchasing products in our supermarkets and shops. That is the reality, and when people say it is nonsense to link the cost of living to the protocol, the evidence is stark and clear. Yes, there is a cost of living crisis in Great Britain, but it is exacerbated in Northern Ireland and enhanced by the presence of the protocol and the Irish sea border.

That is why I have had to take the reluctant decision, as leader of the Democratic Unionist party, not to nominate Ministers to the Executive until this issue has been addressed. We are being asked to implement a protocol. Do not forget that Ministers in Northern Ireland oversee the ports. We are the people who are required to implement and oversee that, and it is simply not fair that as Unionists we are asked to engage in an act of self-harm against our own people in Northern Ireland, with the implementation—the imposition—of a protocol that we do not accept, do not support, and do not believe is necessary to protect the integrity of the UK internal market, or that of the EU single market.

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[Robert Jenrick (Newark) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Wirral South (Alison McGovern). I agree with her last point in that I hope that this Session is the one in which we can finally right that particular wrong and pass a measure to enable victims of great scandals and tragedies to have the legal representation they require. My experiences of working with survivors of the Grenfell tragedy lead me to believe that individuals and their families need all the support possible to help guide them through that difficult period ahead.

I pay tribute to the hon. Member for East Dunbartonshire (Amy Callaghan) and welcome her back to the House. We all admire the courage that she has shown in the struggles that she has had in recent months and welcome her back to her place.

Today, the country is in a particularly perilous position. During the debate, we have heard about the constitutional issues that we face. We have heard about the geopolitical issues, with the war not so far away in Europe, and the work we are doing to support our brave allies in Ukraine, and to help them to win and Vladimir Putin to lose. However, here at home, we see a challenging economic situation—perhaps the most challenging in my lifetime.

First, the hit to household incomes this year and next will be the greatest since records began—perhaps the greatest for 100 years. There may be a recession later this year. I do not think that that is certain, but only a fool would bet against it, given the economic indicators. There is a real risk of the start of a new inflationary era, which should concern us all. Of course, it should concern the poorest in society the most.

Secondly, economic growth is stagnant. That should worry us the most in the long term. The economy needs to generate the good jobs and tax receipts to help people into good careers and fulfilling lives and to pay for public services. In an era when public services will only cost more with an ageing population, and given the urgent need to invest in our transition to net zero and the desire shared across the House to invest in levelling up and greater productivity, we will need those tax receipts more than ever. Yet they are not forthcoming. If the Bank of England and the Office for Budget Responsibility forecasts are to be believed—they have been wrong in the recent past—we will experience several years of anaemic economic growth. We have to come together to tackle that.

Thirdly, there are a number of major issues on which the House should come together to tackle failure. Energy policy is clearly one. This year, we are reaping the whirlwind of decades of poor energy planning. There has been a failure to invest in renewables as fast as we could have done, and in nuclear power and other conventional sources of energy. That is placing an intolerable burden on individuals and families.

The other issue that comes to my mind is housing and the repeated failure of Governments to build more homes of all types and tenures, from social housing to those homes that aspirational young people want to buy to get on the ladder. We need to do more on those fronts.

In that respect, I welcome the Queen’s Speech because on several counts it outlines Bills that may answer the challenges. A series of Bills looks at longer-term economic growth, from online competition to reduce the impact of big tech and its stranglehold on our online platforms, to gene editing to help our farmers and agriculture sector compete, to improvements in financial services, when the City of London’s position is by no means secure and needs to improve if we are to continue to hold our strong position in the international community, to transport and to education. However, more needs to happen.

The Queen’s Speech is not a fiscal event, as many Members across the House have said in one way or another, but we must recognise that we have to intervene and take further steps, first, to support the poorest and most vulnerable in society. I think it is inevitable that we will uprate universal credit. That will doubtless happen at the next fiscal event as usual, but there is a strong case for doing it on a one-off, exceptional basis as soon as possible to help those poor and vulnerable families get some extra money and to alleviate some of the pain for the months ahead.

Secondly, it is clear that taxes on working people are too high. The tax burden is at its highest level for more than 40 years and we will have to work to bring it down. I appreciate the Chancellor’s position that a tax cut will occur in 2023 or 2024, before the end of this Parliament, but that does not seem soon enough to me and my constituents. We need a more competitive tax system. That means work now, when household incomes of any level are under strain, rather than in a year or two, when, potentially, inflation will start to ease and the need for tax cuts will be somewhat diminished. I hope to see those two changes, among others, in the months ahead.

Let me look to the longer term and speak about three Bills in the Queen’s Speech of which I have some experience, having been responsible for them until recently. First, I was very pleased to see the Bill to reform the regulation of social housing. It originated under my right hon. Friend the Member for Maidenhead (Mrs May) when she was Prime Minister, from the experience of speaking to social housing tenants in the immediate aftermath of the Grenfell tragedy. As she said in her contribution earlier today, it was clear that too many of those individuals feel ignored and disrespected by the providers of their social housing. Some of those providers, particularly the largest housing associations, have a poor record of listening to their tenants and responding with good-quality housing and good-quality consumer service. This Bill will go some way to changing that by putting in place better regulation and a better, more consumer-focused regulator to respond to those complaints and concerns, and I strongly welcome its inclusion in the Queen’s Speech.

Secondly, a Bill will be introduced to complete the journey towards leasehold reform. In the previous Queen’s Speech, I started the first half of this two-stage legislation, which I hope will enable any leaseholder in this country to easily enfranchise their property. Leasehold is a product of our history. It is a feudal system that has little place in today’s society. We are the only major developed economy in the world to continue with that system and it does now need to come to an end. I hope that this will be an ambitious Bill that not only enables people to enfranchise their property and to purchase a share of freehold, if that is what they want, but leads to the end of leasehold. I hope that we as a House can set an end date for that system, from which point we can move wholeheartedly towards commonhold, a better system that is used and enjoyed by citizens and homeowners in every other major developed country.

Thirdly, I am pleased to see the levelling up and regeneration Bill included in the Queen’s Speech. There are two elements of this that matter to me. The first is devolution: enabling more devolution deals to be done with cities and counties across the country, those deals to be done faster, and greater power and responsibility to be handed to local communities.

Reflecting on my period as Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government during the pandemic, I am very clear that the one area of our state that performed consistently well during that crisis was local government. Almost every other Government Department or area of state has, at best, a mixed record; there are triumphs and failures. Within local government, it is mostly a story of success. It is also a story of thrift and value for money.

As Secretary of State, I gave £9 billion to all the local councils in England to help to get them through that period—to look after the homeless, to dispense grants to our local businesses, to look after the most vulnerable, to do local contact tracing and many other responsibilities. That is a fraction of the funding that we gave to other areas of the state. If I have one regret it is that I did not win the battle within Government for contact tracing to be done exclusively by local government rather than the expensive system that was ultimately created of track and trace. The record of local government is good and we should build on it with further devolution.

[Matt Western]

rose—

[Robert Jenrick]

I am conscious of time, but I will give way briefly to the hon. Gentleman.

[Matt Western]

I just want to applaud the right hon. Gentleman for what he said about the terrific work of local government throughout the pandemic and about the action that it took. However, the Government did promise to do everything necessary to support local authorities financially through that time, “whatever it takes”. Unfortunately, local authorities such as Warwick District Council and Warwickshire County Council, in my area, are really struggling now because they did not receive that support.

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

It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Glasgow North (Patrick Grady). It was also good to see the hon. Member for East Dunbartonshire (Amy Callaghan) back in her place earlier, and to hear the very good maiden speech by the new hon. Member for Southend West (Anna Firth). We have been reminded of the three good colleagues we have lost: David Amess, James Brokenshire, whose memorial service took place yesterday, and, of course, our own Jack Dromey. They are all missed.

I intended to say a few words about the Prime Minister, but I will save that for another day. I will touch on a few issues. The Government have put forward a higher education Bill, and I look forward to that. I am particularly interested in proposals for lifelong learning, but there are huge issues across the educational sector in terms of what is happening in our schools and nurseries. There is the haemorrhaging of teachers, teaching assistants and senior leadership teams because the budgets are not there, the pressures are so great and morale has sunk through a lack of respect from the UK Government.

The priorities that the Prime Minister is missing are around the cost of living. The Prime Minister and his Chancellor are really out of touch. We should remember that the Prime Minister said in the autumn that any talk of high inflation was unfounded. I hate to say this, but I was on BBC Coventry and Warwickshire Radio last September, saying how concerned I was that inflation might reach 6%—it was only 3.5% at the time. Of course, it has now run away.

We should have had an emergency Budget. Why do we not have one? People are hurting badly. One in seven people are food insecure and an estimated 2 million people are unable to eat every day. People going to food banks are saying, “I’m sorry, but I won’t take food that needs cooking. I’ll only take food that’s cold because we can’t afford to cook it.” I know that from visiting food banks in recent weeks. That is the harsh reality.

The Business, Enterprise and Skills Committee heard from the energy companies, which anticipate that 40% of UK households will be in energy poverty by the autumn. They estimate that a typical annual bill will be £2,900 for households come the autumn. That is why the chief executive of ScottishPower said the other day that he believes that 10 million homes will need something like £1,000 per household to see them through the energy crisis. Of course, no money on anything like that scale is coming from the Government.

Yet we could have that—we have proposed a windfall tax. When we hear the figure of £9 billion a quarter, it sounds like a telephone number—it is hard to get our heads around it. Just 12 years ago, the company I worked for was worth £3 billion, and that was the Peugeot-Citroën corporation globally, yet here we are considering £9 billion in one quarter. It is a huge amount of money and a windfall tax could allay so much of the financial crisis for households throughout the country. The energy cap in France was 4%. How can they do that, but we cannot?

On inflation, the Federal Reserve says that it is a serious problem that will be sustained, whereas the Bank of England is being slightly too optimistic in its forecast.

The outlook for the economy is not good. We will have the worst economic performance of the G7 countries next year. We also had the worst economic performance in 2019, before the pandemic, so we are the hardest hit. I am not sure how that is getting the big calls right. That is probably the most marked indicator of how the Government and this Prime Minister got it wrong. We have had 15 tax increases since the Chancellor took over two years ago.

I would have liked some talk of an industrial strategy in the Queen’s Speech, addressing the challenges of our automotive industry, which has seen a 34% reduction in production this year. Last year was not that great, either. We need to address the global supply chain issues and the issue of semi-conductors. We also need to urgently get our heads around the need for the transition to electric vehicles and hydrogen motor power, sourcing lithium production, cheaper energy and the gigafactories, such as the one proposed in Coventry, that we desperately need.

On the energy Bill, Warwickshire is one of the few counties that has no onshore wind turbines. We desperately need that. It is the cheapest form of energy and we should be investing in it.

On housing, I cannot believe that we are so way off the pace on the sort of housing that we need, the mix and the volume. The fact is that zero-carbon homes should have been built from 2016. The last Labour Government would have delivered 1 million zero-carbon homes. Instead, I see houses, to this day, with 50mm insulation, which is nothing. That is why we have the worst housing stock in Europe when it comes to energy efficiency.

I would love to see what is going to come out on planning. We had the national planning policy framework in 2012. The Localism Act 2011 promised the public and communities more say, but guess what? That did not happen. Communities up and down my constituency do not have the required infrastructure—the bus services, the shops, the cycle routes and so on.

There is a lot of other legislation on which I would love to touch, including the issues for renters and the precarity that they face, with the increase in the private rental market. There were a lot of warm words on the environment. We have to address that with the onshore wind energy that I mentioned earlier. Fracking is not the right solution. It would be deeply damaging to our environment. It is not necessary and we could have anticipated the energy shortages a long time ago by building in resilience.

On justice and the police, of course we want safer streets, but we have lost 7,000 police since 2015. It was clear what was going to happen on our streets—hence the rise in knife crime in constituencies such as Warwick and Leamington, a rise in drugs, a rise in antisocial behaviour, a rise in speeding and so on. We need more community support officers on our streets and the police hubs to go with them.

When it comes to security, we should be talking much more about food security and sourcing more food from the UK. My constituency has some excellent farmers, but we are losing land to housing development and potentially to quarries, as is happening just outside Barford.

There are several omissions in the legislation that the Government have put forward. I have only touched on some of the Bills that have been proposed, but I see that there is nothing in terms of legislation on business reforms. For example, there is a need for legislation on auditing and governance. Let us think about the £4 billion that was lost in covid loans. How did that happen? There is no true oversight. We need an audit watchdog, which is something that the Institute of Directors has been calling for. It is disappointing that the Government’s football measures have been dropped from the Queen’s Speech. We desperately need them and clubs such as Leamington FC and Racing Club Warwick would have loved to see them as well.

A lot of legislation is being proposed by the Government. I hope that they can change their priorities because the public are desperate to be heard and desperate for their needs to be met. The cost of living is such an immediate crisis, as is the climate crisis. So many of these issues are inter-related. I fear that, without the right strategies in place, such as the industrial strategy that I mentioned, for housing and for the automotive industries, those priorities will not be met.