RBS Global Restructuring Group and SMEs
Debate between Melanie Onn and Clive Lewis(6 years, 3 months ago)
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Clive Lewis
That is a very valid point. I hope we will hear from the Government today that there will be action on this issue. Owners of small and medium-sized businesses, including many of my constituents and those of other Members, are tired of the foot-dragging that has gone on for long enough. The Treasury Committee supports the report’s publication, and even the Financial Conduct Authority would probably conclude that it would be far more helpful for it to be published. Its publication is long overdue. People need to see the full extent and scale of what RBS and, potentially, other banks have been up to.
Melanie Onn
My hon. Friend said earlier that this situation affected failing businesses. My constituent Andrea Willows is in the public Gallery today. Her business was not failing, but the bank absolutely refused to provide any kind of funding for a shorter-term loan payoff, attributing it all to a larger loan pay-off instead. She had to come up with the full cost of multiple loans to pay off about £635,000, which made things completely impossible for her. That is exactly what these banks have done: they have made it impossible for hard-working people to continue to run their businesses although they were not in trouble in the first place.
Clive Lewis
I agree with my hon. Friend. During my time on the all-party parliamentary group on fair business banking and as a Back-Bench MP before that, I heard many similar stories of companies that had been forcibly distressed, or had been described as being distressed by the bank and then carved up like a Sunday roast.
Exiting the EU and Workers’ Rights
Debate between Melanie Onn and Clive Lewis(7 years, 6 months ago)
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Clive Lewis
That is a really important point. What we did not hear from the Secretary of State was any promise or guarantee that employment legislation will not, once it comes out of international law, simply go into secondary law. We want to see it in primary law, and our concern is that once it goes into secondary law, the Government will use statutory instruments to undermine employment law and workers’ rights, and that is not what we want to see.
Let us carry on. I am talking about the Foreign Secretary, who described the weight of EU employment legislation as “back-breaking”. Then there is the Secretary of State for International Trade who dismissed the idea of protecting workplace rights as “intellectually unsustainable”. Then there is the Secretary of State for Exiting the EU who spent years attacking employment rights embodied in EU law as “unnecessary red tape”.
Melanie Onn
Does my hon. Friend also recognise that the former Minister for Employment, the right hon. Member for Witham (Priti Patel) went so far as to call for the UK to
“halve the burdens of EU social and employment legislation”
after Brexit?
Clive Lewis
The list is lengthy.
Let us go back. Who spent years attacking employment rights embodied in EU laws as unnecessary red tape before undergoing his recent makeover into an ally of the working class, insisting that it is only “consumer and environmental protections” that he regards as unnecessary? As an aside, it is worth emphasising that those protections are as important to the quality of life of working people as employment rights, but they are not the topic of today’s debate.