Debate on the Address

Neil O'Brien Excerpts

Thursday 19th December 2019 Commons Chamber

[Neil O'Brien (Harborough) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Bristol West (Thangam Debbonaire) and the thoughtful contributions we have heard from my hon. Friend the Member for Reigate (Crispin Blunt) and the wonderful, passionate one nation speech by my hon. Friend the Member for Cheltenham (Alex Chalk). It is also a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Glasgow North East (Anne McLaughlin). I am incredibly sorry to hear about her loss. As somebody who met many heavy heroin users in the six years that I worked with street homeless people, I agreed with much of what she said about the need to fight this terrible addiction. It was a powerful speech.

Apart from the commitment to get Brexit done, the great highlight of this Queen’s Speech is the commitment to enshrine in law a multi-year budget for the NHS and the extra nearly £34 billion a year that we will be spending on it—a huge increase in funding for our national health service. Having a multi-year budget and the certainty that comes with it is something that I have long argued for. Being able to plan not year to year or hand to mouth but for the long term is what will enable us to take forward huge projects such as the £450 million investment that is being made in Leicester’s hospitals, which will benefit my constituents. It means in practice that we will have a new maternity hospital, a new children’s hospital and upgrades to all the operating theatres and wards. It means additional car parking, because at the moment someone can spend as much time driving around the royal infirmary as they spend actually in there. These are the things that this Queen’s Speech actually means on the ground for my constituents.

On health, there is much else to welcome. There is the new NHS visa, so that those who want to serve the NHS can get into this country without hassle. There is the Bill to accelerate access to new medicines. All of those in the House who were involved in the campaign to get rare drugs such as Spinraza approved quickly and who saw the torment of the families who were waiting for them will really welcome that piece of legislation. The return of nurses’ bursaries is hugely important, as is the extra £700 million for more GPs and more GP appointments, which is probably one of the things I heard about most during the campaign.

Equally, with the new money for the NHS, the other hugely important commitment that we see in the Gracious Speech is the commitment both to increase funding and to reform the basic structure of social care. I believe that, since about 1997, there have been about 13 different commissions, consultations, Green Papers, and so on and so forth, and we have talked about this for too long. Although there has been progress through things such as the better care fund, there are still a large number of my constituents who I know, even today, are not getting the care they need because of our broken social care system. Let me welcome that commitment in the Queen’s Speech and quote the Prime Minister: “Let’s get this done!”

Closely tied up with the whole question of fixing social care is the whole question of fair funding for our local government, which of course funds it. In the last Parliament, I spent a lot of time banging the drum for fair funding—for the Leicestershire model of fair funding, because Leicestershire has been the lowest funded county council anywhere in the country for many years. If we were funded at the same level as Camden Council, we would have an extra £350 million a year to spend, and such imbalances in funding simply cannot be fair. I have banged the drum for it, the Government have listened and we have the commitment to introduce a fair funding formula. Now we must land that, and the detail of it.

On schools, again we have seen a move towards more fairness. Again, we have the welcome certainty of a multi-year financial settlement. Leicestershire schools have been among the lowest funded in the country for many years, and I think we are the seventh lowest funded authority. It is not fair that, while the average pupil in Islington or Kensington and Chelsea is getting £6,000 a year, pupils in Leicestershire have been getting just under £4,300. That imbalance is just too big. But, through this Queen’s Speech and through the fair funding formula, we are now going to make progress. In fact, the average increase in per pupil funding for schools in my constituency next year will be in the top fifth of the country. We have a 4.6% increase per pupil and, because there are 21 primary schools below the new funding floor, they will see an even bigger increase of over 6% a year. That is really welcome change for my local schools.

I will continue to campaign on a personal passion of mine, which is for small and village schools. In the last couple of decades, there has been a huge decline in the number of village schools and small schools. In 1980, there were 11,464 small primary schools with fewer than 200 pupils, but by 2018 there were just half that—5,406—and a disproportionate number of those losses have been in villages. Of course, small schools are at the heart of village life, and we cannot afford to lose them. Now that we have the multi-year funding settlement, I hope we can use some of the money to help smaller schools by doing things such as upgrading the lump sum, which is so important for schools in my constituency, including little primary schools such as Foxton at the top of the hill above the village. I remember hearing the children playing above the village during the campaign. It is a wonderful sound and we have to keep it.

I welcome the additional 20,000 police. We are getting 107 extra police this year in Leicestershire, and I want to make sure that we get our fair share of those new police. Although I am limited on what I can say about it, I hugely welcome the commitment to end automatic early release, to have the fundamental review of sentencing—I called for that before it happened—and to have a wider review of the functioning of the criminal justice system. These are hugely important.

The last thing I will talk about is something that has been a passion of mine for many years, which is the whole issue of levelling up poorer places and poorer regions. I welcome the Prime Minister’s strong personal commitment to this. In the Queen’s Speech, we see a lot of good things. We see the White Paper on levelling up capital investment across the regions across. We see the commitment, finally, to roll forward devolution beyond where it has got to in England, which is hugely welcome. There are measures to cut and to reform business rates, which is so important to help high streets that are competing with the internet. There are things such as the commitment to roll out and to fund the roll-out of faster broadband, and the shared Rural Services Network for mobile phones, which will improve coverage in blackspots, in constituencies like mine, in places such as Husbands Bosworth.

A lot of positive things are being done, but there is an awful lot to do. It cannot be right that so much of the Government’s most growth-enhancing spending is concentrated in already wealthy areas. It cannot be right that half of the fundamental science budget is going to just three cities—Oxford, Cambridge and London. It cannot be right that transport spending per head in London is twice the national average, but half the national average in the east midlands. It cannot be right that so many funding formulas have a circular logic, so that housing spending is directed towards areas with high house prices, and transport spending towards areas with high congestion. There is a circularity to that, which is like trying to put out a fire by pouring petrol on it, or saying that I will not water my plants until they start growing.

As well as changing the Government’s growth and spending we should also consider what the tax system can do to help drive private sector inward investment into poorer places—that is the fundamental thing that will help to change the pattern of decline that we have seen in too many places over the years. Manufacturing needs twice as much capital investment per head as other types of economic activity, yet our tax system is probably less friendly to capital investment than anywhere else in the G20. If we can change that, outside the EU we will have much more freedom to enhance those capital allowances that will help manufacturing. That in turn will help the regions where manufacturing is more dominant, which tend to be poorer areas. Finally, we must learn from countries such as Ireland, which has been aggressive in the way it has competed for inward investment around the world, and also ensured that a lot of high-wage, high-skilled employment has gone to poorer areas. People have been very clever in doing that in Ireland, and we should learn from them.

This Queen’s Speech is about better healthcare, a stronger NHS, better schools, more police and stronger law and order, and about having more chances to get on in places that have been left behind for a long time. This is about a levelled-up country, performing strongly across the board, firing on all cylinders, and I commend it to the House.