Amendment of the Law

Debate between Mike Weir and Vince Cable

Thursday 19th March 2015 Commons Chamber

[Vince Cable]

The promise was not to abolish tuition fees, but to not increase them. We did increase them and that was a matter of regret.

[Mr Mike Weir (Angus) (SNP)]

I speak as a representative of the one party in this House that has not gone back on its promise on tuition fees. There are no tuition fees in Scotland. The Secretary of State talks about the costs of the policy, but was not one of the difficulties in the recession the huge amount of personal borrowing? Students are now leaving university owing a fortune because of tuition fees and the other costs of their studies. How will that work through the economy in the future?

[Vince Cable]

I was hoping that we would have an intervention from the Scottish nationalists, because they illustrate better than anybody else the stupidity of this policy. There have not been tuition fees in Scotland and the quality of university education is declining because there is less resource. The worst thing of all in Scotland is that in order to maintain this policy, they have raided the budgets of further education colleges, taking money from working-class children in Scotland to finance middle-class undergraduates. That is a very retrograde policy. If anybody wants to see where Labour’s policy will lead, they should indeed go to Scotland.

Let me turn to the bigger question of inequality, because many of the accusations that are made by the Opposition relate to the question of whether we have become a more unequal society. It is certainly true that if we talk about the top 1%, there is extreme wealth. Some of it—that created by entrepreneurs and risk takers—is totally understandable in a free-enterprise society, but much of it is not. That problem is shared across the world. It is true of the top 1% in social democratic Scandinavia and in communist China. These people can move, and they can move in and out of our country. It is to the credit of the Chancellor that he was able to say yesterday that the share of income tax that is paid by the top 1% has risen under this Government from 25% to 27%.

Of course, there is one way in which the ultra-rich in society can be made to pay that they cannot run away from, and that is by targeting high-value property. That is one area where my party has common ground with the Labour party.

If we take the wider issue of income distribution and the effects of austerity, the evidence is clear. People in the top 10% or 20% have contributed more than average in cash or percentage terms to the austerity programme and deficit reduction. For an objective measure of inequality, we should look to bodies such as the Institute for Fiscal Studies, which is totally independent and has been a thorn in the side of successive Governments. It has done an analysis of income inequality before and after this Government, looking at the basic Gini coefficient, and found that inequality in income is lower today than in 2007-08. If one digs into the figures a little further, one finds that the numbers depend on which consumer index is applied. However, even if one applies different consumer indices, the IFS analysis shows that, at the very worst, income inequality is no worse under this Government than it was under the Labour Government. I hope that when we hear the righteous indignation in future, the basic facts about this matter will be properly understood.

Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Mike Weir and Vince Cable

Thursday 20th November 2014 Commons Chamber

[Mr Mike Weir (Angus) (SNP)]

Yesterday Royal Mail said again that there was a danger to the universal service obligation from increased competition. That is very worrying, especially to people in rural areas. Will the Secretary of State press the regulator to take stronger action to look at the state of competition and take appropriate action to ensure that the USO is not put in danger?

[Vince Cable]

I do not press regulators on this or other issues. The simple truth is that the USO is embodied in law. It would have to be changed by both Houses of Parliament. Royal Mail was put in the private sector to enable it to compete, and although it was little observed at the time, for the first time in decades it has been able to raise hundreds of millions of pounds in the bond market to reinvest. There is a success story there.

Royal Mail

Debate between Mike Weir and Vince Cable

Wednesday 10th July 2013 Commons Chamber

[Vince Cable]

Yes, it will. There is a theological argument, as it were, about the circumstances under which public agencies should borrow, but at the moment the rules are such that Royal Mail would be directly competing with capital investment in schools and hospitals. That is not healthy, and it is much more sensible that the company is put in a position where it can utilise capital from the markets.

[Mr Mike Weir (Angus) (SNP)]

My hon. Friends and I steadfastly oppose the privatisation; that will come as no surprise to the Secretary of State. He says that the USO is safe, but Ofcom has already abandoned price controls apart from on second-class letters and confirmed that there is nothing to stop zonal pricing being introduced. Under what definition does that make it safe?

[Vince Cable]

It is a universal service obligation—that is what it says and that is what it means. It is embedded in law and there is no prospect of the scare the hon. Gentleman has just tried to generate for Scotland being manifested in reality.

Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (Performance)

Debate between Mike Weir and Vince Cable

Wednesday 2nd February 2011 Commons Chamber

[Vince Cable]

I can certainly reassure the hon. Gentleman that that organisation has a good record and a good future. If he wants to talk through the details, I am sure that the Minister of State, Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, my hon. Friend the Member for Hertford and Stortford (Mr Prisk) will engage with him on that subject.

I was reviewing some of the areas where the Government inherited major problems and are now trying to deal with them—university administration, further education colleges, apprenticeships and regulations—but let me mention another, which does not even figure in the motion: the appalling history of Royal Mail and the Post Office. One of the things that we have done, which the previous Government were not able to do, is pass through the first stage of parliamentary scrutiny of a process that will eventually get those organisations on a sound footing.

Let us remind Labour Members what we inherited: a collapsing post office network, which had declined from 19,400 post offices to 12,000, mostly as a result of a forced planned closure programme; and a Royal Mail that had a negative cash flow in the last financial year of £520 million, an operating loss of £320 million and a pension deficit of almost £10 billion. We are taking the necessary action to solve those problems, whereas the previous Government had an opportunity to do so but walked away from them.

[Mr Mike Weir (Angus) (SNP)]

rose—

[Vince Cable]

I am not taking any more interventions, because I have been very generous.

I wish to conclude by discussing some of the other issues that the Government now have to deal with. These are major issues that we have inherited and where major policy is required in order to strengthen growth. The first issue is trade. That is fundamental to recovery, yet does not even merit a word in the Opposition’s long motion. Do they not understand its importance? In the next few days a trade White Paper will: set out a new approach to the Export Credits Guarantee Department, a largely moribund organisation to which we are giving a new suite of products; refocus the activities of UK Trade & Investment; and stress the importance that we attach—I am personally involved in this—to trade liberalisation within the single market, in bilateral agreements with India, Brazil and the European Union, and through multilateral trade.

One of the things that we do, and I do—the Prime Minister has given his personal leadership on this—is ensure that Ministers spend a lot of their time attracting inward investment and opening up the big emerging markets that will be crucial to our growth. The right hon. Member for Southampton, Itchen asked what I had been doing in the past few weeks and months. Most recently I have been to India twice; I have also visited China, Brazil and Russia trying to open up markets and attract inward investment that will provide the growth and the jobs of the future, many of which are now materialising.

The second issue covers finance and the banks, which have been referred to on several occasions. The only reference to it in the motion is a factually incorrect one to tax revenue.

Postal Services Bill

Debate between Mike Weir and Vince Cable

Wednesday 27th October 2010 Commons Chamber

[Vince Cable]

The amendment to which my right hon. Friend refers was tabled by the nationalists rather than by the Labour Opposition. I think that it was drafted before the nationalists were aware of our proposals to strengthen the network. I hope that when they hear what we have to say they will rethink their amendment, because we will have done a great deal to meet their concerns.

[Mr Mike Weir (Angus) (SNP)]

It will be interesting to hear what the right hon. Gentleman has to say. The National Federation of SubPostmasters has raised its concern about the split between Royal Mail and Post Office Ltd. It has pointed out that it cannot find anywhere else in the world where there is such a split between the delivery network and the post office network. Can he give us such an example?

[Vince Cable]

I will address the matters that the hon. Gentleman has described in detail. I remember him campaigning on this issue in the previous Parliament, when he lost nine sub-post offices in his constituency. We are implementing measures that will stop that happening in future. When he hears about them he will be considerably reassured.

Turning to the background to the legislation, there is, as I have said, a lot of common ground.

--- Later in debate ---

[Vince Cable]

As I say, investment capital availability ultimately comes down to the individual decision of individual postmasters. As my right hon. Friend the Member for Wokingham (Mr Redwood) pointed out, these are individual investment decisions, but the network will in future be put on a structurally sound, properly funded basis. That is the essence of the reforms that we are introducing.

[Mr Weir]

rose—

[Vince Cable]

I will press on. The hon. Gentleman has had his say.

In addition to funding, we are injecting new ideas. We have been re-thinking the role of post offices in providing Government and banking services, and we will be coming back shortly with a fuller statement on that problem, setting out some new and positive ideas that I hope will command support on both sides of the House and in the country.

I would like to reassure the House with respect to the relationship between the Post Office and Royal Mail. The Post Office is currently a subsidiary of Royal Mail, but they are separate companies and they are very different businesses. As part of our plans for both companies, the Bill will allow for the separation of Royal Mail and the Post Office. Separation will give the Post Office management greater freedom to focus on the branch network and providing new services, but I want to make it clear that in this case at least, separation is not a first step towards divorce.

The Post Office and Royal Mail will continue to work closely together. Each company needs the other. Post offices carried out over 3 billion mail transactions for Royal Mail last year. The two companies are closely linked in the public mind, and are bound together by an overwhelming commercial imperative. There is currently a long-term contract in place between the two companies, and there will continue to be a long-term commercial contract in place. The chief executive of Royal Mail has said that it would be “unthinkable” that there will not always be a strong relationship between the Post Office and Royal Mail.

I shall move on to Royal Mail ownership and the processes involved in the sale of shares.