Debate on the Address

Nigel Evans Excerpts

Tuesday 10th May 2022 Commons Chamber

[Jessica Morden (Newport East) (Lab)]

This Queen’s Speech confirms what we already know: this Government lack the vision and the ability to tackle the main challenges of the day. Last week, we saw voters in Wales deliver their message to this Prime Minister loud and clear at the local elections, and it was a very good Friday indeed for the Labour party in Wales. I congratulate all the successful Welsh Labour candidates in Newport East, in Newport and in Monmouthshire on the mandates they secured. I particularly congratulate colleagues in Monmouthshire, whose work has resulted in the Conservative party losing its only council in Wales. Ambitious Labour-led councils, such as Newport, have shown and will continue to show that there is a kinder, more positive and more proactive alternative to the Tory way of doing things.

Given the message that was sent last week, I am deeply frustrated on behalf of constituents in Newport East that this Queen’s Speech has failed to deliver anything meaningful to help people cope with the cost of living crisis now. In fairness, expectations were low. We only have to watch the Prime Minister’s disastrous interview with Susanna Reid last week to see that those in power have such little understanding of the sacrifices people are having to make. In the past few days, we have been bombarded with news of how household energy bills could hit £3,000 a year by October, how fire services across the country are reporting that they are dealing with blazes caused by people burning scraps of wood to keep warm, and, as was widely reported, how more than 2 million people are not eating every day because they just cannot afford it.

How, in the fifth largest economy in the world, are we in a position where our people are resorting to skipping meals and burning offcuts of wood to keep their heads above water? With food prices continuing to increase, the situation will only get worse, not better. That is why we should have seen more action in this Queen’s Speech to tackle that and to support households.

This Government continue to hit people on modest incomes disproportionately, but there is no hope today for those families, just an energy Bill that will eventually make energy cheaper and a nod to working to ease inflation. Like other Members, I see messages and emails daily from people who have nowhere to turn, who just do not want to live a life where they are worrying about whether they can heat or eat. There was little today to help them now, or even in the short term. There is no emergency Budget and no extra help. Given that the things announced today are essentially the Government’s programme for the next two years, I worry about all those families who are already out of options.

If the Government have run out of ideas of their own, it is still not too late for them to adopt our proposal to keep energy bills lower through a one-off windfall tax on oil and gas profits. That move was referred to by the CEO of Tesco on Radio 4 today, and it would save every household hundreds of pounds a year on their fuel bills and provide much-needed additional support to the lowest-income households. That is the right and fair thing to do, but the Government continue to side with major firms, such as Centrica, which today announced that it expects its profits to hit the top of their expected range, and oil and gas companies that describe their situation as having more money than they know what to do with, rather than those ordinary families. That speaks volumes.

While the UK Government clearly do not get the scale of the problem, I am pleased that the Welsh Labour Government do, and it is worth sharing a contrast with the Welsh Labour Government. The extra support in Wales includes a £150 cost of living payment to all households in properties in council tax bands A to D and to all those in receipt of any council tax benefit. That goes further than the UK Government’s equivalent announcement for England. There will be an extension to the Welsh winter fuel support scheme, which will provide people on low incomes and others with a non-repayable £200 cash payment—“non-repayable” being the key word—to help with their energy bills later this year, which they will receive on top of the £200 loan from the Government.

Unlike the Government, I also want to talk about steel, which is another important issue for Newport East and, indeed, the whole UK, if the Government are actually serious about levelling up. There has been no reference to steel or the industrial strategy in any Queen’s Speech since 2019, and this one was no exception. I declare an interest as a Community union member. It has highlighted that the world cannot decarbonise without steel, whether it is to build wind turbines, electric vehicles, energy-efficient buildings or anything else. It is a foundation industry that we need for our defence and national security, which is particularly important at the moment.

Sadly, we have a Government who are willing only to do the bare minimum at moments of crisis for the industry and are otherwise more than prepared to leave the sector hanging without support. Steel workers in my constituency at Tata Llanwern and Liberty feel that acutely. They want a Government who will give them the vote of confidence they deserve. A pressing priority is steel safeguards and tariff rate quotas, which I hoped would be addressed in the Brexit measures in the Queen’s Speech. Ministers should also move forward on previous commitments to a thorough review of the trade remedies system to ensure that we have a trade defence system fit for the 21st century. UK Steel and the all-party parliamentary group for steel and metal related industries have been calling for that for some time, and swift action is needed. We also need action on high industrial energy prices. Other countries in Europe can step in and help their steel industry, so why can’t we?

While, on the surface, promises of more policing powers to make our streets safer sound welcome, there is no detail on how those additional powers will be resourced. The new recruits we have seen over the past year are of course welcome, but the Government need to stop claiming that they are employing extra police officers. They are not extra officers, but partial replacements for those they have cut since 2010. Today, we have 11,000 fewer police officers, 7,000 fewer police community support officers and 8,000 fewer police staff in work than we did when Labour left office in 2010. We need new police hubs in every community and more protection for victims of antisocial behaviour.

I cannot help but wonder whether the failure to mention Wales today is simply because the Government know how badly their announcement on the shared prosperity fund was received last month. With Wales facing a loss of more than £1 billion in unreplaced funding over the next three years, it begs the question as to whether the Prime Minister seriously thinks that the people of Wales have forgotten his Government’s “not a penny less” promise to at least match, post-Brexit, the size of the EU structural funds that Wales would have received.

Moving on to rail, I welcome work to modernise and improve rail services, but what plans are there in this Queen’s Speech for the Government to address the appalling rail infrastructure underfunding in Wales? Wales accounts for 11% of the UK rail network, but still receives only 2% of rail enhancement funding from the UK Government. Wales’s rail networks are underfunded by billions of pounds, and that needs addressing today. I urge the Government to take a strategic look at what they can do to improve cross-border transport between south-east Wales and the south-west of England. A new station for Magor would help, and I pay tribute to the volunteers at the Magor Action Group on Rail, who continue to campaign so hard for that. Action on the group’s plan would be a positive step in the right direction.

To finish on a slightly more positive note, there were rays of hope in the Government’s response to the Crouch review on football governance recently, which was referred to in the Queen’s Speech today. I hope we will soon see the Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport make good on the pledge to introduce an independent football regulator. A timetable would be good, as would an assurance that Ministers will not cede to the demands of vested interests and delay or water down their plans on regulation. As Fair Game has highlighted, we also need an overhaul of the outdated parachute payments system and its replacement with a sustainability index that rewards conscientiously run clubs, such as Newport County AFC in my constituency, that prioritise good governance and strong relationships within the community. I hope that the Government will engage with Fair Game and other stakeholders over the coming months to ensure that momentum on these important changes is not lost, and that they will look at the Newport County model.

In short, what we have seen today is a Queen’s Speech that was written to shore up a listing PM, not a Queen’s Speech for families and workers who are looking for support right now. Deeply disappointing? Yes. Surprising? No.

[Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Nigel Evans)]

We have about a dozen Members left who want to speak, and even without being told to keep her speech to roughly 10 minutes, Jessica Morden spoke for nine minutes, so everybody will get equal dibs if we can keep to time. I call Peter Aldous.