Meg Hillier
Main Page: Meg Hillier (Labour (Co-op) - Hackney South and Shoreditch)
Mr Davey
I am disappointed that my hon. Friend seeks to deny the science of climate change. He may have heard Sir John Beddington, the Government’s recently retired chief scientist and a very distinguished scientist, say that the science showing climate change was human-made was “unequivocal”. When it comes to science, I like to listen to the experts.
It is important that we gain jobs, especially green jobs, through our investment in low carbon. We also need to ensure that these are profitable enterprises in which people can invest. We need £110 billion of investment in our energy infrastructure over the rest of this decade. That will be in low carbon, in gas and in other energy security measures.
On prices, we have to drive a wedge between the rising global prices and the bills that people have to pay. We also have to rise to the climate change challenge. We need to recognise that the challenge is serious and that—contrary to what my hon. Friend suggests—the science tells us that we have to act.
Meg Hillier (Hackney South and Shoreditch) (Lab/Co-op)
The Secretary of State talked about investments in our infrastructure. The green investment bank could be fuelling jobs in the green sector if it were also investing in SMEs that are developing and bringing to market technology in this area. Why are the Government failing to deliver on that?
Mr Davey
The Government have delivered on the green investment bank. The hon. Lady should know that investment banks are not controlled by Government. They are given a remit to make investments, and the green investment bank is doing so and is extremely effective. Indeed, it is world leading. I am sorry that the hon. Lady is criticising it and I hope that she will look at what it is doing and realise that it is making a big difference. Our performance on green growth and green jobs shows that we are delivering on the coalition agreement promise to build a new economy from the rubble of the old.
We have this massive infrastructure opportunity because nearly a quarter of our capacity will close over the next decade. We have to replace that to keep the lights on, but at the same time we can begin, and really go for, the transition to a low-carbon energy economy. We need to do that by investing especially in energy efficiency. I have stressed that from day one as Secretary of State. We have several policies already, such as the green deal and the energy company obligation, but in the last year we have developed some very interesting proposals on electricity demand reduction. We will publish the response to our consultation on that shortly.
Around 1 million people work in the green economy, and the support that we are giving to clean energy will fuel the rise in the area. Between now and 2020, the support we give to renewables will increase year on year to £7.6 billion—a tripling of the support for renewable energy and a record the Government can be proud of. We already have 110,00 jobs in the renewable energy sector directly, and 160,000 jobs in the supply chain. By 2020, we believe the sector will have more than 400,000 jobs.
We also have the prospect of a new generation of nuclear power stations. I am engaged in discussions with EDF for a proposed nuclear reactor at Hinkley Point C. If we reach agreement, it will result in more than 5,500 jobs during construction, more than 1,000 ongoing jobs at Hinkley Point C and more in the supply chain. Our proposals on carbon capture and storage—we have two preferred bidders, Peterhead in Aberdeenshire and White Rose in Yorkshire—will also result in lots of jobs and deliver a pathway to commercial CCS in the next decade, which will be very important in meeting our climate change targets.
We sometimes forget the oil and gas sector, perhaps because it is not as green as renewables, nuclear and CCS, but it will be essential as we make the transition from a fossil-fuel economy to a low-carbon economy. We will still need an awful lot of gas and oil during that process and in the next few decades. I am delighted to report to the House that investment in the North sea is booming. We are seeing record levels of investment in the North sea, which is good for our energy security as we do not have to import so much gas from other parts of the world. I hope that right hon. and hon. Members will welcome that.
I have made it clear that we will also support the development of shale gas. If it has potential—and we do not know that yet—it could be beneficial, especially to our energy security. We are going to need gas for many decades. It replaces coal, so it can help us to meet our climate change targets. At the moment, we have to import increasing amounts as the amount coming from the North sea is declining. If we can exploit shale gas commercially, that will make sense, and I hope that we can reach agreement on that. We are going about this in a way that is designed to keep the public with us. In other countries that have rushed headlong into it, the public have reacted very badly, leading to moratoriums and bans. We want to ensure that we think things through carefully, which will help us do it properly.
Meg Hillier
Will my right hon. Friend add to her list the trap that many of my constituents find themselves in, not earning an £81,000 salary and unable to afford the £17,000 deposit on an average-priced property—generation rent trapped in an unregulated private rented sector? What comfort are the Government giving them?
Caroline Flint
They are offering them no comfort, and I will address that issue later, as too will my right hon. Friend the Member for Leeds Central (Hilary Benn).
Even by the Government’s own tests, they have failed to face up to the stark reality that whatever the intention, after all the cuts, pain and hardship, the plan is not working. The credit rating test was to ensure our triple A status, but that has been downgraded by not one, but two agencies. The borrowing test was to eliminate the deficit by the election, but that is £245 billion off course. Struggling families, pensioners and businesses cannot afford another two years of stagnation, so the challenge for the Government in this Queen’s Speech was to get our economy back on track, get people back to work and stop the slide in people’s living standards.
Meg Hillier
Does my hon. Friend have the impression that the Prime Minister may be in power but not in control?
Jim Dowd
I see quite easily how a logical person could reach that conclusion.
I myself am in favour of a referendum on the question of Britain’s continuing relationship with the European Union, but I believe that it is a matter for the next Parliament. I hope that we can prevail on the Opposition Front Bench to include a manifesto commitment, but of course the manifesto for the next election is still two years away.
Seema Malhotra
Yet again, we see how the Conservative Government are so out of touch and so complacent, not acknowledging any of the challenges—rising unemployment and a rising cost of living—that people in Britain are facing today; they are not taking any responsibility.
A recent report by the London assembly found that more than 95% of teachers asked in London said that children in their schools regularly went without breakfast—more than half of such instances were because families could not afford food. That is completely unacceptable in modern Britain. The health, educational attainment and life chances of these children are threatened by hunger, and the Government continue to do nothing to help with the cost of living.
Meg Hillier
Teachers and head teachers in my constituency have given me similar messages. One school has what it calls a “tack room”, where it takes in young people’s mobile phones or a deposit—little bits of money—towards a blazer or school equipment, because the children cannot afford that or their school lunches.
Seema Malhotra
My hon. Friend makes a moving contribution. We have seen how schools are increasingly picking up the pieces so that children can have something to eat and at least then be able to study.
The Government are even making things worse. A recent Institute for Fiscal Studies report into child poverty found that between 2010 and 2020 absolute child poverty will increase by 55%, with the IFS saying that the projected surge is a result of the fiscal and social security policies of this Tory-led Government. A great sign of weakness is not admitting when you have got it wrong, and it is a shame that the Government did not take the opportunity of this Queen’s Speech to put forward real solutions to meet the challenges our businesses and families are facing. As Labour’s alternative Queen’s Speech argued, the focus should have been on those matters that will make a real change: jobs; growth; tackling rising consumer prices; and banking reform to back our British businesses. Last month, the International Monetary Fund published figures showing that in 2012 the UK economy grew by just 0.2%. That was 0.7% less than Germany, 2% less than the United States, and 3.8% less than India. We are, of course, in a global race, in which Britain can lead, although not under this Government if the last three years are anything to go by.
The Queen’s Speech has been a missed opportunity—another chance missed to improve the prospects of Britain’s families. It is a no-answers Queen’s Speech from a tired and failing Government. They are out of touch, out of ideas and losing the global race for Britain. My constituents in Feltham and Heston deserved better. It is not too late for the Government to change course, and I look forward to the Minister’s response.
Mr David Ruffley (Bury St Edmunds) (Con)
It is always a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for North Antrim (Ian Paisley).
Our membership of the European Union affects, one way or another, the living standards of our constituents and the prosperity of our people. Membership of the European Union has primarily been founded on an economic case that membership is in our economic interests. In 1973, the argument was principally that we wanted to join a common market because it would raise living standards in this country. More recently, proponents of our membership of the EU say that one fifth of all EU direct inward investment comes to the United Kingdom, representing a source of jobs.
What our membership of the EU has never been, in the eyes of the British people, is, to use the treaty language, a project for
“ever-closer union among the peoples of Europe”
Since 2010, this Government and their Ministers have been engaged in pushing back against the onward march of greater economic integration and the attendant political integration that follows from that. We saw that when our Ministers ensured that we did not contribute to the bail-out mechanism for sovereign states in difficulty. In the banking union proposals, where the rules of the European Central Bank could have seen banks dancing to the tune of a European regulator, they ensured a double majority system to protect UK financial services.
We have also had to push back on greater justice and home affairs integration. The Home Secretary has sensibly entered a reservation on 130-odd justice and home affairs measures, including the European arrest warrant and DNA fingerprinting.
Mr Ruffley
I will not at the moment because time is short.
It is also the case that, historically, we have been against greater integration. Why else did we secure an opt-out from the euro—that disastrous project that we did not want anything to do with at the outset and that we will not, I trust, wish to join in the future? We were also, of course, one of the few EU countries to say that we would have nothing to do with the Schengen arrangements, whereby many of the other EU members decided to throw their borders wide open.
The question of whether UK membership of the EU is in the national economic interest is being asked with increasing urgency. Telling interventions have been made in recent days by Lords Lamont and Lawson and Michael Portillo, who have asked a question that has for too long been ignored: what are the costs and what are the benefits? They have come to the preliminary conclusion that the costs probably outweigh the benefits, but it is not just the words of Conservative politicians of the past that we should take into consideration.
Some important work has been done by Goldman Sachs. Jim O’Neill, who to my knowledge is not a card-carrying member of the Conservative party, has calculated that trade patterns are very much in flux. He says that if we look at German trade patterns from 2000 to 2012 and extrapolate to 2020, we will find, interestingly, that Germany will export 25% of its exports to the BRIC countries—Brazil, Russia, India and China—and a falling proportion of only 30% to the EU, and that 15% of them will be to China alone and just over 8% to France. The world economy and its trade patterns are in flux, and the idea that we have to be wedded, as an article of faith, to the single market deserves serious scrutiny and examination.
I regret the absence of a referendum Bill in the Gracious Speech. In the case of any hypothetical amendment so regretting that omission, I will gleefully and proudly support it for this reason and this reason alone: we have to have a rigorous and well-informed national debate about the costs and the benefits to our people of membership of the European Union.
Meg Hillier (Hackney South and Shoreditch) (Lab/Co-op)
I draw the House’s attention to my entry in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests.
The cost of living in my constituency, as in others up and down the country, is a real concern. Wages have been depressed, unemployment is still too high, and many of the new private sector jobs that the Government like to trumpet are zero-hours contracts or part time, with no opportunity for increased hours. I will not repeat the comprehensive list that my right hon. Friend the Member for Don Valley (Caroline Flint) gave from the Front Bench about the challenges that face our nation.
I want to focus on housing, particularly private rented housing in my constituency, where the social rented sector accounts for 44% of households. Around 26% of my constituents are owner-occupiers and 29% are in the private rented sector, which has increased exponentially. The number of people in the private rented sector is projected to be double the number of people who own and occupy their own home in the next 15 years or so. Rents are high and growing.
On Saturday I hosted the Hackney housing summit, bringing together a range of people who are experts in their field and on living in Hackney. We said that enough is enough. We in Hackney think that the Government should listen to some of our solutions, but sadly the Queen’s Speech did not include any of them.
My constituency epitomises the challenge facing private sector renters—generation rent—who have no opportunity to get on the housing ladder, if that is what they want, and are trapped in an endless cycle of poor housing and high increases in rent, evictions or the like through extortionate rent increases. As a percentage of London rent, my constituency, across nearly all the quartiles, has more than 100% the average rent for properties of every size in London, except for the highest priced four-bed properties. All my constituents pay more than the average and the cost is going up. Costs are high, rents are increasing without limit and housing supply is woefully low.
This Government have a poor record: house building is down, homelessness and rough sleeping are up, people are struggling to get mortgages and to get on the housing ladder, and the rapidly growing private rented sector has so little security, with people having to pay increasing rents at a record high—not just in my constituency, although it epitomises the worst of it—and suffer poor quality accommodation.
On Saturday we heard very moving testimony from Rosie about Digs, a private rented sector body in Hackney that has been set up to campaign against the challenges. In nine years living in Hackney, she has had to move nine times and only one of those moves was voluntary. She also spent £50,000 on rent during those nine years. In order to buy an average sized home we would need an income of £81,000 and a deposit of £17,000. There are, however, many Rosies out there; she is not alone.
The Government must look again at the issue. I urge them to look at Treasury borrowing rules. A strong message from Saturday’s summit was that they should give local authorities the freedom to invest in new homes. It would provide construction jobs and homes in the private rented sector. Why not allow a good local authority to be a private rented landlord? The assets could ultimately be cashed in to pay off the initial investments, or they could be sold to the individuals, thus increasing home ownership, or, in boroughs such as mine, I would like to think that they could be turned into socially rented properties at affordable rents for local people so that those on the lowest incomes are not driven out of my borough.
In addition to those housing costs there is the huge challenge of paying for child care. This Government have reduced tax credit and child benefit for those on higher incomes, as well as other work-related benefits. No wonder there is a high turnover of population in my constituency, and no wonder young families are priced out of the area. We have to take a serious look at what sort of balance we want in our inner cities. People must not be driven out. We need an increase in housing supply, on which the Government have a woeful record. Their record on new starts over the past two years is the worst of any peacetime Government since the 1920s. In the past year alone there has been an 11% decrease in housing starts.
The proposed consumer rights Bill, which has not yet been mentioned, is a real opportunity to improve the rights and the lot of private tenants. Their rights should increase, including a right to repair and protections against landlords who evict or who increase rents exponentially after reasonable requests for basic repairs. We should also tackle the practices of unfair letting agents, particularly with regard to fees taken at source, not just after the event, which has been addressed by a welcome amendment that was agreed to the other week. The decent homes standard should be applied to the private rented sector. We also need to see the licensing of landlords and to look again at section 21 notices, which are not fit for purpose, because they frequently are misused by landlords to evict people on spurious grounds.
I also call on the Government to look at rents. We need to grapple, on a cross-party basis, with the issue of spiralling rents in the private sector without any notice of the impact on tenants and their homes.
Jim Dowd
Does my hon. Friend accept that another facet of the spiralling cost of rent, particularly across London, is the increased pressure it is putting on social housing and local authorities? I am sure that she, like me and many other MPs for London and for other parts of the country, is visited by more and more people asking for assistance with regard to social housing on the grounds of cost.
Meg Hillier
Absolutely. Without the supply, none of those issues will be solved. One man who came to see me was a kitchen porter struggling to support his family—he had two children. The jobcentre asked him to go for jobs further afield, but the combined cost of extra travel and child care meant that he could not afford to travel a couple of boroughs away. That is the reality of the cost of living and life in constituencies such as mine. This Government’s Queen’s Speech was detached from the lives of people who want to work hard but who often cannot get the extra hours and of private renters who cannot ever hope to earn in the required bracket.
Justin Tomlinson (North Swindon) (Con)
I would add to the hon. Lady’s list of housing costs the practices of some leasehold management companies, which trap tenants with ever increasing service charges while not allowing them the access they should to the right to manage.
Meg Hillier
Absolutely. Although there has been good cross-party work in the House to reform leasehold management, there is much more to be done. It is no wonder that there is a demand for home ownership in this country, because it gives people greater control. However, that is now out of the reach of so many people that reforming the rights of tenants is long overdue across all sectors, but particularly in the private rented sector, including leaseholders.
I call on the Government to look seriously at rents and at the growing housing benefit bill. The £45 billion a year that is spent on housing benefit could, if capitalised, provide a huge opportunity for bodies such as local authorities, housing associations and perhaps others to invest in building new homes at affordable and intermediate rents, which would provide homes for the very people in my constituency who are being driven out by high costs.
Finally, I want to touch on the Government’s policy of providing new social housing at 80% of local private rents. I will give the private rents in my constituency to give the House a flavour. A two-bedroom flat in my constituency in the lower quartile costs £300 a week. One in the upper quartile costs £400 a week. For a three-bedroom, family-sized property, the average rent in the lowest quartile is £388. Even if only 80% of those rents is paid, how affordable are they?
We need to tackle what affordability means if we are serious about helping people into work and getting the economy moving. If people are in work and have disposable income, they will spend. At the moment, they are struggling to survive and the Queen’s Speech does nothing to help them.
Mike Crockart
I agree with the hon. Lady to a point. I believe that the Energy Bill will help to ensure that extra power generation of a cleaner and greener nature will come further down the track. I will say a little about that later, if I have time.
The Energy Bill will ensure that the changes for energy companies become legally enforceable from summer 2014. We are working with the companies and urging them to implement the changes voluntarily ahead of that date, but the signs of such voluntary change are patchy. When I met one of the big six energy companies recently, it spoke animatedly of its plans for the future, but the talk was not of simplification. Instead, it talked about personalising the tariff to my individual circumstances and tailoring the charges to mirror my lifestyle and work pattern. To put it another way, it made it so complex and confusing that the chances of me understanding it and switching my energy supplier were minuscule. That is not the way forward. We want to empower energy customers by untangling the maze of tariffs. The Bill will do just that and make energy suppliers more accountable and more focused on the needs of their consumers.
We are raising awareness of and supporting collective switching schemes. That is one way in which customers can save money on their energy bills. DECC allocated £5 million to 31 successful projects in the Cheaper Energy Together competition, which spans 94 local councils and eight third sector organisations in Great Britain. One of the successful bids came from South East Scotland Together, which is delivered through Changeworks. It received more than £400,000 to help people in my constituency to save money. Such measures to ensure that consumers get the best deals on their energy prices reflect our determination to tackle rising energy bills.
Energy education for consumers is also key. I have spoken in previous debates about the necessity of reducing energy use. Reduction is the one step that will not only help households to reduce their bills, but help us to achieve a greener future. To quote from the report by the Energy and Climate Change Committee,
“Demand-side measures…are potentially the cheapest methods of decarbonising our electricity system…reducing overall demand”.
Knowing how we use energy in our homes and workplaces is key to reduction. That is why the single largest infrastructure project on which the Government are embarking in this Parliament is to roll out smart meters by 2019.
As was acknowledged in a written ministerial statement on 19 December last year, smart meters are the best tool that we have in energy reduction. They have the potential to give customers accurate, real-time information about how much energy they are using and how much it costs. In my constituency, British Gas has installed 837 smart meters. With the average home saving 5% through the use of a smart meter, that is a potential saving of £54,405 in my constituency alone. More importantly, that is 5% of their energy use that we no longer have to generate. It is essential that smart meters have the capacity for real-time management, as well as the ability to record the energy that is fed back into the distribution network from co-generation sources, such as wind turbines and solar panels.
Unfortunately, the pressures on wholesale energy prices mean that household energy bills will probably go up in the medium to longer term. We must be clear that wholesale energy prices are a reason to increase our investment in renewables, which will increase our energy security and help to insulate this country from the unpredictable wholesale market, rather than a reason to run headlong towards the mirage of cheap shale gas. Our commitment to a diverse, low-carbon energy mix is radical and positive. Our reforms will ultimately ensure that people get the best value for money by shielding them from the volatility of global fossil fuel prices.
While we have been building a stronger, greener economy and a fairer society, our support for the people who need those things has not wavered. In government, the Liberal Democrats are helping millions of low-income and vulnerable households with the cost of living through the warm home discount, which is available to about 2 million households. That includes 1 million of the poorest pensioners, who are eligible to receive a rebate of up to £130 on their electricity bill during the winter. There is the winter fuel payment for more than 12.6 million pensioners in 9 million households, and additional cold weather payments, which during this year’s cold snap helped the most vulnerable people in my constituency to keep their homes warm. Last winter, 5.2 million individual payments were made in the UK, worth a total of £129.2 million. That level of support for our most vulnerable is available only because, in 2010, the coalition Government reversed Labour’s plans to reduce the payment to £8.50 and instead made it £25 permanently.
I do not have time to talk in detail about the green deal, our Government’s flagship—[Interruption.] I am astounded that Members seem to find something funny about the possibility of saving hundreds of pounds every year on their constituents’ bills.
Mike Crockart
No, I will not, because I have only one minute left.
Nor do I have time to talk about the UK Green Investment Bank, the excellent Edinburgh institution that has already invested £635 billion in green projects, leveraging the overall figure up to £2.3 billion. That investment will ensure that there is enough secure, indigenous, low-carbon energy to provide for more than 2 million homes in the United Kingdom.
The Government have a once-in-a-generation opportunity to decarbonise and ensure that there is a more competitive energy sector in the future. I am proud that we are seizing that opportunity while delivering policies to help families with the cost of living and investing in the future of our economy.
Clive Efford
I say that we need to build more houses. I said that when we were in government, I am saying it now and I will continue to say it consistently.
There is nothing in the Queen’s Speech on sport. We have just had the greatest year for sport that this country has ever known, but the Government have not come up with a coherent strategy across the whole of Government that will deliver sport in our communities and use the armies of volunteers up and down the country who are working hard in sport. We need a coherent strategy that will allow them to plan ahead for the long term and deliver the elusive sporting legacy, but there was nothing of that in the Queen’s Speech.
All that we have had is the Government parties falling into warring factions over different parts of their own Queen’s Speech. It started with the Deputy Prime Minister saying within 24 hours of the Queen’s Speech that he was not happy about the changes to child care ratios in nurseries. We have heard from several people who have been advising the Government on the matter, such as Professor Cathy Nutbrown, whom they commissioned to conduct an independent review of child care qualifications, and Dr Eva Lloyd and Professor Helen Penn, two more experts whom they commissioned. Professor Cathy Nutbrown said:
“Watering down ratios will threaten quality. Childcare may be cheaper, but children will be footing the bill.”,
and Dr Eva Lloyd and Professor Helen Penn said:
“Deregulation in the UK would lead to a reduction in quality.”
Clive Efford
I hope my hon. Friend will forgive me, but I do not have time to give way.
These things were known before the Queen’s Speech was written, so it is incredible that the Deputy Prime Minister then discovered that he did not support the measure included in it. He said:
“When we as a government consulted on changing the number of little toddlers that each adult can look after, the response from experts, from parents, from nurseries was overwhelmingly negative…They felt that the risks outweighed the benefits and it wouldn’t necessarily reduce costs. So that’s what I still have reservations about, about this change.”
That is the Deputy Prime Minister within 48 hours of the Queen’s Speech to which he put his name.
We are told that there is no reference to a referendum on Europe in the Queen’s Speech because the bullying Liberal Democrats stopped the Conservative party including it. That may be so, but what about the little toddlers to whom the Deputy Prime Minister referred? If he has a veto on a referendum on Europe, why did he not veto the measure on little toddlers and staff ratios in our nurseries? It seems to me that more than one party on the Government Benches is obsessing about Europe, and that is the Liberal Democrats. They have clearly got their values wrong on this issue.
All Governments face rebellions—I have even rebelled myself in the past—but I have never heard members of the Cabinet say that not only will they abstain on something, they will abstain on their own Queen’s Speech right at the start of the parliamentary Session. Can that be right? Is that the way we expect our Governments to behave, by falling apart almost immediately? The Secretary of State for Defence has effectively issued a warning to his leader that unless a change in the deal with Europe is achieved, he will vote against us remaining in the European Union. The Secretary of State for Education has said that he intends to abstain if a motion is put before the House on the matter of regretting the absence of a referendum on membership of the European Union in the Queen’s Speech.
While that is going on—this, in my opinion, is where the public start to fall out of love with politicians—the Prime Minister is in the USA promoting on behalf of the UK a trade agreement that will be negotiated directly between the USA and Europe. He is enthusiastically supporting that agreement over there, while at the same time his party over here is falling asunder on whether to vote against its own Queen’s Speech because there is no reference to a referendum on membership of the European Union. No wonder the public are wondering what we as politicians are about.
The word “omnishambles” has often been mentioned in relation to this Government, and I think it will enter the vocabulary of the UK, just as “Fergie time” will. I say to the coalition that it is playing in Fergie time, and people out there are blowing their whistles and calling time on this Government.