Oral Answers to Questions

Mike Freer Excerpts

Wednesday 23rd March 2016 Commons Chamber

[The Prime Minister]

The right hon. Gentleman is just a bit late, because the Budget passed through this House with large majorities on every single vote. Let me remind him: this Government are spending more on the disabled than in any year under the last Labour Government. We are spending more on the most disabled, including the most disabled children in our country. We have got more disabled people into work than ever happened under Labour. What we see with this Budget is the background of an economy that is growing, where employment is at a record high, investment is rising and businesses are creating jobs in Britain, which is the envy of other European economies. It is because we have a strong economy that we are able to provide this support. That is what we see: Britain getting stronger and the Labour party a threat to the economic security of every family in our country.

[Mike Freer (Finchley and Golders Green) (Con)]

Q2. I am sure the Prime Minister is as appalled as I am that incidents involving anti-Semitism are on the rise. Does he agree that all organisations, public and private, should root out anti-Semitism, without hesitation?

[The Prime Minister]

I completely agree with my hon. Friend; anti-Semitism is an absolute cancer in our societies and we should know that when it grows it is the signal of many even worse things happening to ethnic groups and different groups all over our country. There is, sadly, a growth of anti-Semitism in our country and we see it in attacks on Jewish people and Jewish students—it absolutely has to be stamped out. We should all, whatever organisation we are responsible for, make sure that happens. I have to say that we do see a growth in support for segregation and indeed for anti-Semitism in part of the Labour party, and I say to its leader that it is his party and he should sort it out. [Interruption.]

Oral Answers to Questions

Mike Freer Excerpts

Wednesday 10th June 2015 Commons Chamber

[The Prime Minister]

We want to make progress. The Scottish Government obviously have the advantages of the additional funding they have been getting under this Government. I notice that consensus in the Scottish National party has rather broken down over full fiscal autonomy. Of course, if they got full fiscal autonomy, they would probably not be able to afford to be a living wage employer. I have been following these things closely. The new hon. Member for East Lothian (George Kerevan) has called the policy “economic suicide”, while the new hon. Member for Edinburgh East (Tommy Sheppard) has called full fiscal autonomy “a disaster”. It seems that the SNP’s new approach is to demand something they do not want and then complain when they do not get it.

[Mike Freer (Finchley and Golders Green) (Con)]

Q2. A far-right neo-Nazi group is planning to stage a demonstration in Golders Green, an area with a large Jewish population, on Saturday 4 July. Will my right hon. Friend join me in calling on the police to use all their public order powers to combat this anti-Semitic demonstration?

[The Prime Minister]

I think that my hon. Friend speaks for the whole House. I can tell him that the Home Secretary recently wrote to the Metropolitan Police Commissioner about that specific demonstration, and has said that when any criminal offences are committed and when individuals have demonstrated anti-Semitic hostility, they should face the full force of the law. We do have freedom of speech and freedom of assembly in our country, but people should not feel free to extend those freedoms to harassment or threatening behaviour. That is not permitted, and it should be prosecuted.

Recall of MPs Bill

Mike Freer Excerpts

Monday 27th October 2014 Commons Chamber

[Nadine Dorries (Mid Bedfordshire) (Con)]

I speak to the amendments as someone who is accustomed to being in the eye of a political storm. I am possibly the only MP in the Chamber who has had an attempt at recall mounted against them. When my hon. Friend the Member for Richmond Park (Zac Goldsmith) first tabled the amendments, he asked me to speak about my own experience. At the time I decided not to do so, because I did not think it was particularly appropriate. But having heard some of the hot air in the Chamber tonight, I feel compelled to use my own example, and its consequences, to lay some of those bogus arguments to rest.

Two years ago today, I took part in a reality TV programme called “I’m a Celebrity…Get Me Out of Here” and I disappeared to Australia. The hon. Member for North Durham (Mr Jones) asked what would happen if a local or national newspaper ran a campaign against an MP, but I had every national newspaper against me and not just for a day but for a month—in my study they stand waist high. Of course, none of those newspapers said that Parliament was in recess. None of them said that I did not miss any Government legislation. None of them said that I had spent every day of the summer in my constituency office and the trip was my holiday. There were even Members who joined in the outcry against me, giving comments to the newspapers from their sun loungers from Barbados to Benidorm. Nobody said, “Oh, by the way, we are in recess”, and a massive media storm ensued. Even my local radio station, BBC Three Counties, went to my constituency and vox-popped constituents. It did not take comments from constituents who were backing me—it refused to do so. The national media created a perfect storm and rode on the crest of it for an entire month, giving them thousands of column inches.

In the middle of all of that, someone decided that I should be recalled and that they would get together a national petition. Out of the entire UK population of 65 million, one month to the day after the furore started, a national online, click and send petition—the type to which someone can contribute when they have had a bottle of red wine, or been down the pub, or read the local newspaper and got really angry with what they have read—had just 766 signatures. Facebook was a different story. The petition got just 16 likes.

So it is nonsense to say that the media can attack Members or whip up their constituents to get them recalled. There was no national newspaper, political programme or radio station that did not have it in for me during that month when I was in Australia—

[Mike Freer (Finchley and Golders Green) (Con)]

Will my hon. Friend give way?

[Nadine Dorries]

I am not going to give way at all.

Anyone would think that every one of my constituents loathed me, but they did not. In fact, hardly any of my constituents signed that petition.

Tributes to Baroness Thatcher

Mike Freer Excerpts

Wednesday 10th April 2013 Commons Chamber

[Mike Freer (Finchley and Golders Green) (Con)]

If I may, I shall speak briefly about my predecessor, the Member of Parliament for Finchley and Friern Barnet. Many people have talked about her role on the global or national stage. I wish to talk about the woman who represented Finchley for 33 years, the woman whom my party members remember never, ever as Maggie, but simply as Mrs T or, more fondly, “our Margaret”.

From the outset Finchley Conservatives knew they had a winner. One of my stalwarts, Derek Phillips, recounts how as a young Conservative he went into that selection meeting saying, “I’m not voting for a woman.” He came out having voted for that woman. He changed his mind in short order when she was clearly head and shoulders above the men, and from that day on, she remained head and shoulders above the men around her.

Much is said about Mrs Thatcher’s background. She is described, often disparagingly, as the grocer’s daughter and the housewife who knew the value of thrift and of living within one’s means, as if there was something wrong with that. For me, Mrs Thatcher illustrates clearly and sharply what shapes our views as Members of Parliament, whether it is ideology, background or our casework. It is probably a blend of all three.

Finchley and Friern Barnet was and is a suburban constituency. Mrs Thatcher would have seen at first hand how Government policies affected the lives of local families —families who had worked hard to buy their home or families who struggled to make ends meet, including the many pensioners in the constituency. When commentators describe her as driven by ideology, they fail to understand the woman. They fail to understand that the constituency was her touchstone.

As might be expected, Finchley has a wealth of memorabilia. I came across an election address dating back to 1974. I also searched for a photograph of one young Finchley student called John Bercow who, I am told, approached Mrs Thatcher at one of the hustings and was firmly told to go and join the Young Conservatives. You will be pleased to know, Mr Speaker, that no photographic evidence exists. I have searched.

If I may be forgiven for using a prop, I found an election address dating back to 1974. I shall highlight a few excerpts from it. Mrs Thatcher said in her local election address of 1974, 40 years ago:

“As a nation we must stop living on borrowed money. We must gradually reduce the debt over a period of three or four years.”

That sounds familiar. She went on to say:

“We must keep public spending within the capacity and willingness of our citizens to foot the bills.”

The address goes on to talk about helping first-time buyers with their deposits, of helping council tenants to buy their homes and of easing the rates burden. That was 40 years ago and some would say nothing has changed.

The day-to-day issues that faced Mrs Thatcher as a local constituency MP influenced her policies. Finchley was where she came to recharge her batteries. She knew that when she came to Finchley, she would leave the advisers behind and she would hear the unvarnished truth, as seen by her constituents and, equally importantly, by her supporters and her activists. One of her agents tells the story that within minutes of Mrs Thatcher returning to Downing street, the No.10 machine would be on the phone, demanding politely to know what she had been told in Finchley, because she had returned to Downing street full of vigour, demanding to know what was going on with this or that. Finchley brought home to her what needed to be done.

There is one incident that perhaps explains her drive to abolish the rates and introduce the community charge. This is an example of how I believe her constituency work shaped her policies. The rights and wrongs of the community charge are not for today, but the casework that Mrs Thatcher came across drove home the inequality of a household with several wage earners paying the same as a pensioner. She saw at first hand the struggle that many on low and fixed incomes had with the rates. One experience I will relate. I am told that one elderly resident came to see her in a state of distress. The resident had paid her rates in cash in an envelope to the town hall. The cash went astray. Mrs Thatcher knew the hardship that having to find the rates once had caused, let alone having to find them a second time to make up the cash that had gone astray. It is not commonly known that Mrs Thatcher quietly sent a cheque and paid the rates for that resident. She was far from the heartless caricature portrayed in the media and by her opponents.

Mrs Thatcher took enormous interest in her constituents, and her ability to remember their names and their concerns, often months after first meeting them, was truly astounding. In the early 1990s when I was a local councillor in Finchley, Mrs Thatcher came to a summer fete, which was held every year on a small council estate. She arrived bang on time, for she was a stickler for punctuality. She swept in, in the Jaguar. Out she came, as immaculate as ever. She ignored the local dignitaries such as humble councillors, went straight across to the organiser of the fete, whom I will call Mrs Smith, and said, “Now, dear, how did your daughter get on with her GCSEs? She sat them last year, didn’t she? Wasn’t she sitting seven?” I was completely bowled over by this. I spoke to her agent and asked if he made copious notes while no one was looking so that he could brief her before she arrived. I was firmly told, “No, she simply remembers.” That was the measure of the woman as a constituency MP.

Mrs Thatcher had an amazing knack of being able to put anyone at ease, usually because she knew that what was important to them had to be important to her. The dripping tap that the council would not repair was the most important thing to that constituent, and so it became the most important thing to Mrs T. There are countless examples of her warmth and her compassion. The devotion of those who worked with her and stayed with her after she was no longer the Prime Minister is testament to that. Many of her close protection officers chose to stay with her, rather than move up the ranks. One of them recently told me of a Christmas time at Chequers. He came back to the police mess room to find that Mrs Thatcher had been in. She had tidied up and decorated it with Christmas decorations. She had cleaned out the hearth, laid a fire and left a flask of coffee on the table for her police officers. That is the woman few people saw.

It was said by my noble Friend Baron Baker of Dorking that we shall not see the like of Mrs Thatcher again. Well, we probably will see a woman party leader. We probably will see a woman Prime Minister again. But will we see the intellect, the drive, the passion and the core beliefs to shape events, not bend to them? Will we see the whole package? I do not think so. “Our Margaret”, as my members remember her, was an outstanding constituency MP. Finchley is proud to have selected her, and we are grateful to the Thatcher family for lending her to us.

Regional Pay

Mike Freer Excerpts

Wednesday 20th June 2012 Commons Chamber

[Rachel Reeves]

I am sure that the 11,500 public sector workers in the hon. Lady’s constituency will know that she is sticking up for them.

[Mike Freer (Finchley and Golders Green) (Con)]

If the Opposition are so vehemently opposed to regional pay, will the hon. Lady be instructing Labour London MPs to give up their London weighting?

[Rachel Reeves]

I will come to the regional flexibility that is already in the system in inner and outer London for teachers and those in the health service. The point is that it is not necessary to dismantle the national system in this way to get the flexibility that we need.

We can imagine the impact that these changes might have on regional economies. If the north-east had a further year’s pay freeze imposed on it next year and the 1% increase that the Chancellor has announced was concentrated in more favoured areas, it would deprive the region’s economy of £78 million a year. If the same happened in other regions, Wales would lose £97 million a year, Yorkshire and the Humber £130 million, the south-west £140 million, as I said before, and Scotland £162 million.

Does the Minister really think that this policy will contribute to economic rebalancing? Is it really the best that the Government can come up with? Their only policy for jobs is to make it easier to fire people and their only policy for the regions is to cut the pay of public sector workers. It is no wonder that we are back in recession. It would be laughable if it was not so depressing.

There is no credible evidence to support the claim that the difficulties faced by the private sector are the result of national pay frameworks in the public sector.

--- Later in debate ---

[Margaret Curran]

While we are on the subject of party leaders, perhaps the hon. Lady, who is a member of the SNP, will tell us why the First Minister of Scotland is very clear about the levels of corporation tax that will be paid in Scotland and what banks will pay, but never seems to be able to tell us what the level of public pay in Scotland will be. Is it not time that the SNP was clear about that?

The debate has also featured the now predictable undermining of Government policy by the Liberal Democrats—or so it would seem from the outside. We must ask ourselves exactly what is going on in this Government. We have omnishambles and U-turns, splits in briefings, and the announcement of a policy one day only for it to be questioned minutes later. The shadow Chief Secretary to the Treasury and I both have the pleasure of shadowing Liberal Democrat Ministers, both of them Scottish at that, but where are they today?

I have been in the House for only a short time, but I have learnt one thing. When the Minister for the Cabinet Office and Paymaster General is at the Dispatch Box, it is a clear sign that the Government are in trouble , so we have to ask ourselves why the Lib Dems are not prepared to do their job by coming to the Chamber and defending this Government—are they off the hook just because they are Lib Dems?

[Mike Freer]

Will the hon. Lady give way?

[Margaret Curran]

I do not have time.

To be fair, the disagreements over the Government’s approach are not just between Lib Dems and Tories; there are also differences within the Tory party itself, as was made clear by the hon. Member for Hexham (Guy Opperman), in what was a powerful and sincere contribution.

In a recent vote in the Welsh Assembly, the Tories voted against regional pay and pointed out the damage they thought it would do in Wales. Tory Finance spokesperson Paul Davies stated:

“As a group, we have not seen any evidence at all of the benefits of introducing a regional pay system in the United Kingdom.”

In the now-infamous Budget, the Chancellor clearly signalled support for the break-up of the national pay negotiating machinery. Have we now reached a stage where the Chancellor of the Exchequer cannot command support among the Tories in the Chamber, or, indeed, the country?

As we have heard in this debate, there are grave concerns about the real purpose behind the Chancellor’s comments. As many Members have said, it appears that the Government wish to deliver a cut in the cost of public sector employment on the dubious premise that it will produce a private sector recovery and economic growth throughout the UK.

Public Services (Social Value) Bill

Mike Freer Excerpts

Friday 25th November 2011 Commons Chamber

Again, a proper, well-thought-through strategy might consider how to ensure that all communities are covered and monitored, and that the characteristics of areas and authorities where fewer social enterprises were being developed were thought about, understood and considered for further support. A strategy would also think through what roles other non-Whitehall players could play in the Government’s ambition for more social enterprises. Further education colleges could perhaps play a role in meeting the training needs that I have just described. Key voluntary sector bodies could perhaps offer further support, and NHS trusts, foundation trusts and mutuals that are already part of the third sector in that sense could certainly have a role to play in supporting further NHS spin-outs. A strategy could help to lock in those key non-Whitehall players to help grow the social enterprise sector further.

[Mike Freer (Finchley and Golders Green) (Con)]

Before we move off new clause 1, may I draw the House’s attention to subsection 5(b), which contains a definition of “social enterprise”? As I read it, Barratt Homes would qualify here, because one could argue that by building houses it is improving social infrastructure; the provision of affordable homes meets the criteria. Section 106 agreements, which provide affordable homes for rent, housing facilities and health facilities, all meet those criteria. In addition, the definition could exclude those seeking to provide fair trade services, because they do not provide or improve social or environmental well-being in the United Kingdom. Will the hon. Gentleman clarify how that provision would actually be applied? Would it not, in fact, open the door to every business?

[Mr Thomas]

The hon. Gentleman makes an interesting point about Barrett Homes. I draw his attention to subsection 5(d) of new clause 1, which refers to the business being

“majority-owned and controlled in the interests of improving the social or environmental well-being of the United Kingdom.”

Given that Barrett Homes has a substantial shareholder base, it would be difficult to justify in any court of law that it met that definition.

The hon. Gentleman's interesting point relates to Fairtrade, too, and if the Government accept the new clause, a small amendment in the other place could help to ensure that Fairtrade organisations were not excluded. I am open to the idea that his suggestion might work and I gently suggest that it would require the Minister to have a slightly more open mind than he demonstrated in Committee. Perhaps the hon. Gentleman will have more luck in encouraging the Minister behind the scenes than I did in Committee.

New clause 2 highlights the key role that local authorities will play in helping to grow the social enterprise sector. Indeed, many of the representations I have received about the Bill stress the importance of local authority commissioners for social enterprises. A requirement for a proper strategic look at the needs of social enterprises in each local authority area would mean that Conservative councils, desperate simply to privatise services, would have to at least to consider the merits of the social enterprise sector. They would do well to look at the example of the many Labour-run co-op councils around the country that are already doing much to encourage social enterprises to develop.

In Committee, a number of Members noted the danger of strategy documents gathering dust and achieving little, which none of us in the House of Commons would want to see. I accept that that is a risk, and new clause 3 is designed to help minimise that risk. I have been struck by the enthusiasm of many of the organisations included for consultation on new clause 3. New clause 3 requires an annual report to be laid before Parliament with the clear involvement through consultation of a diverse range of representative bodies from the sector and others, such as the National Audit Office, which, if it wanted to do so, could comment effectively on the success or otherwise of the commissioning for social value part of the Bill. The Charity Commission would be able to provide a view on the effectiveness of the Government’s strategy to encourage further charities that are social enterprises, while the Office for National Statistics clearly needs to be encouraged to develop statistics to enable the sector’s strength and performance to be properly understood.

Evidence-based policy making and proper evaluation of what has worked and what has happened so that one can learn from mistakes is surely always a sensible approach for Ministers and Parliament to encourage. The National Council for Voluntary Organisations, the Association of Chief Executives of Voluntary Organisations, Social Enterprise UK and Co-operatives UK are all strong, excellent bodies that could offer insightful comments to help Ministers and, crucially, Parliament, to assess the effectiveness of the Government’s policies for encouraging the sector to grow.

I was struck by the recent Public Administration Committee’s report “Change in Government: the agenda for leadership”, published in September. The Committee noted the Prime Minister’s promise on, among other things,

“re-empowering…communities as part of the ‘Big Society’”.

Two paragraphs on, it stated:

“The principal message of this report is that unless there is a comprehensive change programme for government, there will be little of the real change”

that the Conservative manifesto promised. There are three new clauses before the House today that all offer the chance of that comprehensive change programme for social enterprise to be embedded across Whitehall.

My final point on the three new clauses is to draw the House’s attention to the new suggested definition for the sector. In Committee and in her intervention today, my right hon. Friend the Member for Salford and Eccles (Hazel Blears) rightly raised the issue of an asset lock to protect taxpayers’ assets to stop them simply being transferred to the private sector. In Committee, my right hon. Friend received support for the principle of an asset lock from the hon. Member for Bedford (Richard Fuller) and even from the Minister.

As I said in response to the intervention from the hon. Member for Finchley and Golders Green (Mike Freer), subsection 5(d) of new clause 1 seeks to add a key description to the definition of social enterprise which locks in any public assets transfer to the social enterprise. That matters because the Opposition remember the bus privatisation scandal of the 1980s. The bus industry was transferred lock, stock and barrel from public ownership to employee mutuals. It was not that long before the employee mutuals handed themselves over to what had become big corporate bus businesses. Those businesses gained the assets on the cheap while the community and employees lost some of the social value implicit in those public assets, which were taken out as profits of those private businesses to reward their shareholders.

I do not criticise the entrepreneurs who set up and now run the bus industry, as the rules at the time allowed them to do what they did. I am certainly not against privatisation. It has its place, although that is not everywhere and not all the time. If that is the Government’s intention for an industry or a particular part of a sector, however, we should have proper, transparent debate about its merits.

--- Later in debate ---

[Fiona Bruce (Congleton) (Con)]

May I, too, pay tribute to my hon. Friend the Member for Warwick and Leamington (Chris White) for the foresight, diligence and perseverance with which he has brought forward the Bill? He has already achieved much by influencing mindsets and stimulating public debate, and those involved in the commissioning of and bidding for public services have already become much more aware of the importance of social value to the process. So, even before the Bill has passed into law, I congratulate him on all that he has achieved.

In opposing the new clauses proposed by the hon. Member for Harrow West (Mr Thomas) I must say that if a key aim of the Bill is to stimulate and encourage creativity and innovation in the growth of social value and social enterprise, particularly locally, and if, as I think we all agree, we are on a journey in that respect, much can be achieved, as my hon. Friend has already demonstrated, without unnecessarily defining or delaying the process through a national strategy. Let us get on with it and see the Bill passed into law.

The broad potential improvements and impact of the Bill are substantial. I shall touch on some of them now and, if time permits, on some of the ways in which, in my local authority already, there is refreshed thinking about the importance of considering social value when awarding contracts.

One of the key merits of the Bill is its proposal to expand and embed the concept of social value in the bidding process for public sector funding, and that is true not just when social enterprises are involved, but when private sector providers compete against one another. Providers are likely to lever social value into many more submissions for public funding, and in that respect the Bill will have an exponential effect on the bidding landscape.

The Bill will, I hope, introduce more flexibility to tendering. When I discussed it with the head of CVS Cheshire East, she said that the tendering processes need reviewing and

“need to be relevant to the service that is being commissioned”.

She went on to say that

“grants are often used to encourage creative solutions to a need or problem…A tender often doesn’t enable this to happen, as the method for solving the need has already been set.”

Another way in which I hope the Bill will add social value is by opening up the often complex and baffling area of public procurement to smaller local social enterprises. They work at the grass roots of their community and with an ear to the ground, and they are often best placed to work most effectively for their communities and to add social value by levering in, for example, volunteering, but until now they have felt that the bureaucratic barriers to tendering have been just too great. For local authorities to say, “We welcome you, recognise what you have to offer and are going to proactively work with you through the application process to help you successfully bid,” will be a real step change for such enterprises.

Many faith-based organisations augment our local communities, adding so much social value through youth work and work with the homeless, the elderly, the addicted and the lonely and in many other areas, but in recent years they have felt discouraged from applying for public sector funding, perhaps because of concerns that in procurement their ethos does not tick all the right boxes. I therefore hope also that, as a result of the Bill, they will be encouraged to make such applications in future. So often, what injects faith-based organisations with their tremendous energy, dedication and perseverance springs from that very ethos, and in a truly diverse society let us celebrate, not seek to neutralise it, because at the end of the day all organisations have an ethos; none can be wholly devoid of one, or totally neutral. So let us welcome such valuable organisations fully into the public procurement process. The Bill sends out the right signals in that regard, and I welcome that aspect of it.

I now quote some specific comments on the Bill from social enterprises in my constituency and cite some examples of good practice among them, showing how very much they welcome the Bill. Plus Dane is a housing association based in Cheshire and Merseyside that manages 12,500 homes and works as a neighbourhood investor. Mike Doran, its manager, who is based in Congleton, said:

“I believe the Bill will be of great benefit both to organisations such as ourselves but also to the wider community of locally based social enterprises…The need to demonstrate social value within procurement activity will ensure that a double bottom line of both economic and social good can be generated.”

I congratulate Cheshire East council as a forward-thinking council in this respect which absolutely recognises the value that organisations, community groups and social enterprises can add to our community livelihoods. I am delighted that in the recent past it has worked with Plus Dane on various projects. Plus Dane is delivering grounds maintenance and environmental services to the local authority. It is providing training and work for young people who have been long-term unemployed or have a history of getting into trouble with the law, enabling them to go on to gain full-time employment elsewhere. Plus Dane is working with the council in the provision of house building, with 35 apprentices, and it is supporting the development of a local apprenticeship initiative in Congleton that has involved the chamber of commerce, Congleton town partnership and local schools. This type of project is laudable, and this Bill will encourage a far greater recognition of such partnerships across local communities, which can make an exponential difference.

Another example is an enterprise called Visyon, which provides advice to young people who are suffering from abuse, the results of family breakdown, bullying and so on. It recently acquired devolved premises in my constituency through the local authority community transfer of assets scheme. In this respect, I commend the work of the right hon. Member for Salford and Eccles (Hazel Blears), who did so much to instigate that scheme. The hon. Member for Harrow West, who is not in his place, talked about the possibility of assets going out on the cheap. Visyon has received a local hall that was not being used to its maximum potential. The local authority has awarded it a contract that will enable those premises to support the development of many other groups across the constituency and their work within the local community. It is not about assets being passed across on the cheap but about a broader, better and more beneficial use of those assets for the whole community.

I pay tribute to my hon. Friend the Member for Warwick and Leamington. I feel privileged to have been able to support him on the journey that this Bill has undertaken, and I will continue to do so in future. I look forward to its outworking right across our nation.

[Mike Freer]

I, too, pay tribute to my hon. Friend the Member for Warwick and Leamington (Chris White) for getting his Bill this far. I characterise the remarks of the right hon. Member for Salford and Eccles (Hazel Blears) in that my business career was in the private sector but I also led one of the larger councils in the country. To be honest, when I first saw the Bill my heart sank, because I shared the prejudices that so many others have had regarding social enterprises. It was only when I started to see the Bill progress and to understand more of what was being done that the scales fell from my eyes and I became a supporter of it. It is better that a sinner repenteth than not change at all, if I may mix that analogy.

Although I support the Bill, I have some concerns that I hope the Minister can deal with. I believe that the definition of “social enterprise” needs to be clarified. As I said in my intervention on the hon. Member for Harrow West (Mr Thomas), there are many private sector organisations that we may not believe to be social enterprises but of which we could argue that part of their business is to improve the social welfare of the United Kingdom, although we may disagree. That is why unless we specify what is a social enterprise—including types of ownership, not just outcomes—we could end up with a lawyers’ charter as many companies argue that they have a social angle to their enterprise and should therefore qualify.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Hurd]

I am very much prepared to accept, as I have in public on many occasions both in the House and outside, that we are building on some excellent work, to which consistency is fundamental. The point that I made earlier was that it was a Labour Secretary of State who sent a very mixed message to the market by giving an explicit statement that the NHS was to be the supplier of choice. I am delighted that there now seems to be cross-party support again for a message that is more positive for, and supportive of, social enterprises and charities and the opportunity for them to deliver public services.

The hon. Member for Harrow West mentioned the Work programme, and he is right that it is early days. There is certainly some frustration and cynicism out there in the social sector, and I am listening to it and liaising closely with the Minister of State, Department for Work and Pensions, my right hon. Friend the Member for Epsom and Ewell (Chris Grayling), on it. However, we cannot lose sight of the fact that under one of the most important of the Government’s programmes, deliberately structured as a payment-by-results system to incentivise primes to work with organisations that have a track record and a good opportunity to deliver results, we have 300 social enterprises and charities in the supply chain. Depending on their delivery, I believe they are set to earn several hundred million pounds over the life of their contracts. That is definitely a step forward.

The Work programme is not just about encouraging different suppliers of existing services. We are trying to get the system to think differently about how services are commissioned, so we are working with four local authorities on troubled families with multiple problems. I think we all know from our constituencies that the state has historically not done a very good job of supporting such families. We are encouraging those local authorities to consider working in a different way and structuring a more holistic service based more on prevention and an openness to working with different suppliers under a payment-by-results contract. We hope that will lead to four new social impact bonds, to encourage social investors to come in and share some of the risk and return.

That action and activity is intended to break down what the right hon. Member for Salford and Eccles and others know is a tremendous aversion to risk in the system. No one can pretend that that is easy, or that publishing a strategy document or even Government guidelines will instantly break down the culture of risk aversion in the public sector. She rightly talked about the need to support commissioners better, because they are operating in systems that are tremendously averse to risk. I have sat around tables with commissioners who get what we are talking about and want to make progress and work more with social enterprises and charities to restructure services. However, I have had queues of people at the door saying, “You can’t do that.” I am sure she knows—she has been there—that the more we consider the matter, the bigger the challenge gets.

We are thinking afresh about how we support commissioners, and the Minister for the Cabinet Office has talked about our plans to set up a commissioning academy to try to support commissioners, develop more intelligent commissioning and raise the status of the profession and the qualifications in it. We want to develop learning resources that build on the best practice that is being developed around the system, and that is a serious project.

The Bill will add value to that process—perhaps not in ways that every Member would like, because we all know that politics is the art of the possible at a given moment and that there are compromises to be made, but we are on a journey. The Bill will complement the best value duty, which Opposition Members did not mention but which my hon. Friend the Member for Finchley and Golders Green (Mike Freer) brought up. That was an important piece of guidance from the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government to local authorities, setting out an expectation that commissioners should consider the overall value of service provision, including economic, environmental and social value. That covered the full procurement chain for services and goods, and was a very clear new piece of guidance.

We believe that the Bill will complement that useful guidance by sending an additional signal to commissioners outside local authorities that, where it is relevant and proportionate, they should consider social value at the pre-procurement phase when they are considering commissioning services. That is how we can balance out the areas in which we think the biggest impact can be made now and our desire not to impose too many disproportionate duties and burdens on people who are doing already very difficult jobs. That is where we are comfortable with pushing the agenda forward.

[Mike Freer]

I am grateful to the Minister for his clarification of the guidance from my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government. Guidance is fine, but from memory I believe it is still open to a local council tax payer or resident to challenge a local authority’s accounts if they believe that the local authority has not achieved best value. We need to go beyond guidance and ensure that the legislation all lines up.

[Mr Hurd]

I accept that point, and to some degree that is what we are doing today. We are moving forward on that. My hon. Friend mentions the concept of the right to challenge, which had not previously been mentioned in the debate. Again, we are moving forward on that, because we are moving into a world in which there will be much more information about what commissioners are doing and how public money is being spent. Through the Localism Act 2011, which I am delighted to say has completed its passage through Parliament, the right to challenge is now set in statute, with regulations to follow shortly to clarify how it will work. That is progress on the journey that I have described.

Oral Answers to Questions

Mike Freer Excerpts

Wednesday 7th September 2011 Commons Chamber

[Mr Hurd]

The right hon. Lady knows from our Second Reading debates that there are strong opinions on this subject. I refer her to what I said before; the mechanism that we have set out is for a genuine debate on the proposed reforms. That is what the Bill enables, and she and I, or appropriate colleagues, will have that debate in Committee in forthcoming weeks and months.

[Mike Freer (Finchley and Golders Green) (Con)]

4. What estimate he has made of the savings to the public purse arising from the work of the Efficiency and Reform Group in 2010-11.

[The Minister for the Cabinet Office and Paymaster General (Mr Francis Maude)]

The Government saved £3.75 billion in their first 10 months after taking office by stopping unnecessary and wasteful spending. We saved £800 million by renegotiating with the biggest suppliers to Government. We cut spending on consultants by 70% and on advertising by 80%. This is just the beginning; there is much more to be done.

[Mike Freer]

I thank the Minister and welcome the initial savings of the Efficiency and Reform Group. He will be aware, however, of the £1 billion of additional savings that my own research has identified. Will he agree that I could meet the chair of the Efficiency and Reform Group to discuss these savings further?