Exiting the European Union (Consumer Protection)

Debate between Matthew Offord and Mary Creagh

Monday 25th February 2019 Commons Chamber

[Dr Offord]

rose—

[Mary Creagh]

rose—

[Dr Coffey]

I would like to bring this to a close fairly soon, because I am conscious that some Members have put in to speak, as would normally be the case rather than the Minister taking interventions.

Fashion Industry

Debate between Matthew Offord and Mary Creagh

Thursday 31st January 2019 Commons Chamber

[Mary Creagh]

I thank my hon. Friend the shadow Minister for that question. He is absolutely right. If we have just 12 years to tackle damaging climate change before we reach certain tipping points, every sector and industry in the UK economy is going to have to tackle its carbon, waste and water footprints. Signing up to initiatives such as SCAP will literally be their licence to do business and their licence to operate. It is not a nice cherry on the cake or just a nice thing to have.

The fact that the sustainability manager and the buying manager often run in parallel in such companies, rather than the buying manager’s work feeding into the sustainability manager’s, is a problem. The cost per garment is put against the environmental and social cost per garment, and the financial cost always wins out. We need to change that relationship.

I agree with my hon. Friend that, through our clothes, we are wearing the fresh water supplies of people in India and in Uzbekistan, and we are destroying the environment. We have heard about the drying up of the Aral sea in Uzbekistan, where cotton farming has contributed to an economic, social and environmental disaster. We have not made our final recommendations, but I promise him that, when we do, they will be pretty far-reaching.

[Dr Matthew Offord (Hendon) (Con)]

The hon. Lady makes the point that considerations about the fashion industry relate not just to economic conditions but social conditions around the world, so I am sure she would agree that it is in everyone’s interest not just to buy from the highest ethical producers, but from British companies too. Will she take this opportunity to confirm to the House that the first evidence session at the Victoria and Albert Museum was the highest attended public session of this Parliament? I had some scepticism about this inquiry at the beginning, but the number of people interested in it has convinced me. To confirm what my right hon. Friend the Member for Wantage (Mr Vaizey) says, we will not allow the report to gather dust. There is a great deal of interest in it out in the country.

[Mary Creagh]

I thank the hon. Gentleman, who is a passionate and committed member of the Committee. We were thrilled to be hosted by the V&A. Its amazing “Fashioned from Nature” exhibition contains earrings made out of little birds 150 years ago, showing how we have consistently stolen from nature to decorate ourselves. There is nothing new under the sun.

The hon. Gentleman is right about our very large Committee hearing. We are breaking all sorts of new bounds with this Committee. When we launch the report we are going to have some cartoons to accompany it. I think that will be a first for Parliament, too. As the right hon. Member for Wantage says, the real value of a garment comes not in its price but in the number of times it is worn. That is where we get real value. A £50 garment worn 100 times is better than a £5 dress that is worn just once.

Water Industry (Financial Assistance) Bill

Debate between Matthew Offord and Mary Creagh

Wednesday 29th February 2012 Commons Chamber

[Mary Creagh]

I will make some progress, and then I will give way. Where specific issues required careful consideration, we brought in experts to advise us. We commissioned the Pitt report after the 2007 floods, the Cave report to look at competition and innovation, and the Walker report, which analysed water charging and looked explicitly at the problem of high bills in the south-west. My hon. Friend the Member for Ogmore (Huw Irranca-Davies) legislated for water companies to introduce social tariffs in the Flood and Water Management Act 2010. I shall now examine each of those issues in turn.

Some have questioned why the Tory and Lib Dem Government wanted to extend £40 million a year in financial assistance to a region dominated by Tories and Lib Dems. I will leave others to speculate about the politics, but it is clear that customers in the south-west face bills that are, on average, 43% higher than in other areas. That is why we examined the issue in government and did the groundwork on helping those 700,000 households. I pay tribute to colleagues in all parts of the House, and to our former colleague, Linda Gilroy, for their work on the issue.

[Mr Matthew Offord (Hendon) (Con)]

Perhaps the hon. Lady could tell the House the average cost of a water bill in the south-west pre-privatisation, and say how that compared with bills in other parts of the country.

[Mary Creagh]

I do not know what the costs were, but I can say that all water bills were considerably lower pre-privatisation. If the hon. Gentleman looks at graphs of what happened to bills post-privatisation, he will see that they went up exponentially, particularly in the early 1990s. They were kept down in ’91 and ’92, and then they went up exponentially across the board. From memory, they were around £250; that has gone up massively.

[Mr Offord]

How much was it in the south-west?

[Mary Creagh]

I do not have those figures. Does the hon. Gentleman have them? Perhaps he will share them with the House in the debate.

We accept the argument that the south-west requires additional help to keep water affordable, but stopping there misses the point. Ofwat, the independent regulator, estimates that a fifth of households are already spending more than 3% of their income on their water bills, yet Ministers have failed to bring forward any plans to tackle high bills, apart from in the south-west, which has the highest bills in the country. There, around 200,000 people spend more than 3% of their disposable income on water bills, but in the Thames region there are a staggering 1 million people in the same predicament, so surely we should be working towards extending help through a national affordability solution. Without one, the effect of the Government’s £50-a-year payment in the south-west will soon be wiped out by price rises; prices will rise by more than inflation in each of the next three years. The assistance is welcome, but decoupled from wider reform, it will provide little lasting help on water affordability. I hope that answers the point raised by the hon. Member for St Ives (Andrew George).

We know from Ofwat that the groups most vulnerable to water poverty are single parents, pensioners and jobseekers. When we were in government, we introduced WaterSure, a national affordability scheme paid for by a cross-subsidy from water customers, and paid only to metered households with three or more children or to people with certain medical conditions, but the limitations of the scheme are apparent, because not everyone in water poverty has three or more children, and many pensioners and jobseekers will not be eligible for the scheme.

There is a further problem of penetration of WaterSure. Only a third of eligible households access the scheme, so there is big issue relating to the role of the water companies in educating their customers about WaterSure and the role of places such as jobcentres in making sure that people have access and understand their entitlement.