Government Policies (Wales)

Debate between Owen Smith and Chris Bryant

Wednesday 26th November 2014 Commons Chamber

[Owen Smith]

Let me tell the hon. Gentleman something very simple that he could do to stop this back and forth about numbers: he could think about the impact on people in his constituency and mine, and those of all other hon. Members, and he could scrap the bedroom tax tomorrow. That is what Labour will do if we are elected. We will get rid of it in a heartbeat. Frankly, the nonsense about who has applied for which grant demeans this debate, which is a serious debate about the impact on real people.

[Chris Bryant (Rhondda) (Lab)]

Does not this argument miss the fundamental point, which is that if the Government have to create a system in which there is a discretionary housing payment, which means that some local authorities will be mean at the beginning of the year and generous towards the end of the year, and that some local authorities will be meaner than others, they have completely lost the plot? That is why we have to get rid of the bedroom tax in its entirety.

[Owen Smith]

Introducing a tax that is reliant on people being able to move to smaller properties was, in and of itself, barmy, because there are not the properties for people to move into. That is why 60% of social housing associations in Wales are struggling to rehouse people.

Of course, it is not just the people who are hit by the cuts to welfare payments that are affected, but the wider population. Sheffield Hallam university produced a report just a few weeks ago that said that the welfare cuts will result in a £1,000 reduction in the incomes of all people across the south Wales valleys eventually, as reductions in aggregate demand, reductions in spending and further job losses—it suggested that 3,000 jobs might be lost across south Wales—result in a less dynamic and resilient economy. It is not just the people who are directly impacted by the welfare cuts who are affected, but the wider economy.

On top of the welfare cuts, ordinary workers who are not in receipt of benefits are losing £1,600 a year. That is why Labour will do something about low wages in Wales. We have made it very clear that we will set the national minimum wage at 58% of median earnings by 2020. That will mean a minimum wage of £8 in Wales and will put an extra £2.50 per week in the pockets of working people. It will mean 60 quid a week or £3,000 a year for hard-working families. [Interruption.] The Secretary of State laughs and giggles once more, as I discuss low wages.

Wales Bill

Debate between Owen Smith and Chris Bryant

Monday 31st March 2014 Commons Chamber

[Owen Smith]

I put to the hon. Gentleman the impact assessment and the explanatory notes from his own Government. They make it clear that this is a partisan measure that will only benefit the minority parties in Wales, among which we count the Conservative party. That is what this is about.

[Chris Bryant]

Is it not particularly irritating that Leanne Wood can stand in Rhondda? She has done it before: she stood in 2001 for the parliamentary seat and lost very heavily. The people of Rhondda will, I am sure, return Leighton Andrews in the next Assembly elections, because he is the best Assembly Member in Wales. They cannot prevent Leanne Wood from being elected, however, because they have no means of affecting the order on the Plaid Cymru list. She gets two goes.

[Owen Smith]

Absolutely. The only thing I would contest in my hon. Friend’s intervention is the suggestion that Leighton Andrews is the best Assembly Member in Wales. That particular accolade goes, of course, to Mick Antoniw, the AM for Pontypridd.

Finance (No. 4) Bill

Debate between Owen Smith and Chris Bryant

Wednesday 18th April 2012 Commons Chamber

[Owen Smith]

I am not going to indulge in this procedural nonsense much longer, because frankly the country is interested in the substance of the debate. However, if the Exchequer Secretary wants to intervene on me one more time, he can take the opportunity that the Prime Minister eschewed earlier today and correct the misleading comments that he made about the 50p rate, which he said raised no money. We know that it did raise money. We know that page 52 of the Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs report makes clear how much money it raised and how much it would have raised in future. If the Exchequer Secretary wants to intervene on that point he can, but as for our amendment, drafted on the Clerk’s advice, we are confident in it, we are happy about it and we will debate the substance rather than the nonsense.

[Chris Bryant (Rhondda) (Lab)]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend and neighbour from Pontypridd for giving way. He will know that my constituents, like his, find it inconceivable that the Government should be trying to reduce the tax rate from 50p to 45p at this time. Will he confirm that literally the only people in this House who can even table an amendment to put it back to 50p are Ministers of the Crown? That is what they should be doing today, rather than hiding behind the procedure of this House.

[Owen Smith]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend because he reiterates the point that I have made. The Government are the only body in this House who can choose to raise taxation.

--- Later in debate ---

[Owen Smith]

The 50p rate was introduced, as I said earlier, when we were in the depths of the biggest global recession—[Interruption.] I add the word global, unless Government Members are still suggesting that the collapse of Lehman Brothers in the US was the fault of the Labour Government. Among the many risible claims of the present Government, that is right up there with “expansionary fiscal contraction”. While we are still asking the poor to pay the price for that global recession and piling misery upon misery on them, with VAT changes, increased job insecurity and wage stagnation, cutting the 50p rate is fundamentally the wrong thing to do.

[Chris Bryant]

My hon. Friend the shadow Minister has referred to several things that are uncertain, but has it not already become clear that two things are absolutely certain? The first is that the Prime Minister gave us a pork pie earlier when he was talking about how much the 50p rate would raise. Secondly, the only reason there have been so many cock-ups in the Budget and the Finance Bill is that the Government have had to try to justify to the public their cut to the 50p rate. The whole mistake of the Budget hangs on that one initial mistake in cutting the 50p rate.

[Owen Smith]

I grateful for that intervention. I am not sure whether the pork pie was served at ambient temperature, but it was certainly a pork pie.

West Lothian Question

Debate between Owen Smith and Chris Bryant

Tuesday 29th March 2011 Westminster Hall

[Owen Smith (Pontypridd) (Lab)]

I cannot resist starting my contribution by responding to the extraordinary revelation by the hon. Member for East Londonderry (Mr Campbell) that the Prime Minister has not yet been to Northern Ireland. Perhaps that pays tribute and is testimony to the excellent work done by my former right hon. Friend Tony Blair in securing a lasting peace in Northern Ireland. Of course, many hon. Members worked over many years, if not generations, to secure that.

The debate on this question has run long in the House. I arrived only 10 months ago but, as a Welsh Member and historian, the debate was familiar and dear to my heart. However, I did not imagine that the debate would raise its head again so quickly, and would gather this degree of momentum, within a few short months of my arrival. The phrase “the West Lothian question”, coined by Tam Dalyell, has been around since the 1970s, but the question has been around a lot longer. It was inherent in Gladstone’s first Home Rule Bill in 1886. The lack of representation for Irish Members addressed by that Bill was effectively the first instance that the West Lothian question was raised in legislative terms. That prompts the question why it has not been satisfactorily addressed. We can all see that there are issues relating to representation across the nations and regions of the UK.

Why has it not been addressed? Why has it been placed so often in the “too difficult” box? Is it that those issues are so fiendishly difficult that we cannot possibly address them, or that they are insoluble? I think it is not a cop-out that it has not been addressed. In some respects it is a reflection of the intelligence of this legislature, this House, in realising that certain things—given our unwritten constitution and the historical evolution of our Parliament and representation—will be imperfect, asymmetrical and untidy. To interfere with those things and seek a perfect solution is, in my view, misguided, unrepresentative of the historical evolution of our country and fundamentally problematic. I believe many hon. Members would share the view that an undesirable consequence would be the break-up, the disaggregation of Britain.

As we have heard, asymmetry is a key feature of our settlement in the UK. That should not unduly concern us, as it has been a feature of our country and others for a long period. All of our nation states in pre-modern Europe were fundamentally asymmetrical, in the nature of the division of power between legislatures, Churches and other aspects of the state. Post-Union in 1707 there has always been asymmetry. The first representation from Scotland after the Act of Union was fundamentally asymmetrical and predicated not on populations but on the relative contribution to the Exchequer of the Scots versus the English. We have subsequently moved to a position based more on relativities in respect of population, and have now taken it to its conclusion in the partisan Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill. After the next election it will be based on relative population size, and that solves lots of the issues.

[Chris Bryant (Rhondda) (Lab)]

It will be based not on population but on the number of registered electors. We will be the only country in the world doing it on that basis.

[Owen Smith]

That is of course right. I was using shorthand and have fallen into the trap set by the Minister in so many of those debates, even when we did not get to the Welsh clauses.

Asymmetry also exists in other countries. Canada has an asymmetrical system of devolution, as has Spain. One could argue that de facto we have a federal system of sorts, a unique British federal system, but it is certainly asymmetrical. Why is the issue raising its head? Why are we so worried about it now? It has never been true that any individual Government have held a majority purely predicated on the basis of Scottish and Welsh votes. There can be no concern that political imbalances arrive by virtue of there being more Scottish Members, or having misrepresentation from Wales and Scotland. That issue has ostensibly been dealt with by the Government. I fear the headlong rush is due to opportunity, momentum and a partisan view from the Government. There is a sense that the iron is hot, the moment is right for the Tories to strike and secure electoral advantage. That underpins the decisions taken in respect of the constituencies Bill, and I fear it is driving the considerations we are looking at today.

It would be foolhardy to pursue that. History tells us that inevitably not just in this country but others, when constitutional reforms are pursued for electoral reasons and the partisan politics of one party, they fail.

Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill

Debate between Owen Smith and Chris Bryant

Monday 25th October 2010 Commons Chamber

[Chris Bryant]

This is entirely speculative, but it might be something to do with the Bill acting as the Araldite that holds the coalition together. The fact is, however, that the Deputy Prime Minister—or Sandie Shaw, as we normally know her, or him, now—is so Araldited to the Prime Minister that there is probably no need for the Bill to be introduced in precisely this way.

There should have been pre-legislative scrutiny of the Bill. I am sure that a Joint Committee would have said that it should not have been constituted in this way, and that it was inappropriate to try to foist combined polls on Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland when they had expressly said that they did not want a combination of a referendum and their own elections, especially in Northern Ireland, where on the same day there will be local elections as well as Assembly elections. I am pretty certain that such a Committee would have found that inappropriate.

Indeed, we can be pretty confident of that because the Political and Constitutional Reform Committee, which is chaired by my hon. Friend the Member for Nottingham North (Mr Allen), made it absolutely clear that it believed that it had not had enough time to consider the Bill before it suddenly had its Second Reading. The Select Committee had only five days in which to read the Bill and to get constitutional experts to talk to its members and provide evidence. Those witnesses themselves thought that it was inappropriate that such haste was being adopted.

[Owen Smith (Pontypridd) (Lab)]

May I draw my hon. Friend’s attention to the report from the Welsh Affairs Committee that came out today? No doubt he will already have read it in detail. It reaches precisely the same conclusion as he has drawn. The Committee has a Government majority, but it nevertheless concluded that the Bill was being railroaded through with undue haste, and with completely insufficient scrutiny by this House. It also believed that it would have a significant constitutional impact on Wales. Does my hon. Friend agree that this is a disgrace?

[Chris Bryant]

I do not agree with my hon. Friend if he is suggesting that the Committee’s report is a disgrace, because it is excellent in highlighting the implications for Wales of the Government’s proposals on constitutional reform. But my neighbourly Friend makes a good point: the Committee is not comprised of rabid left-wingers—or, for that matter, entirely of members of the Labour party—and those who voted on this matter, those who turned up, were predominantly Conservatives. In fact, one of them is now a Parliamentary Private Secretary. Many of us deprecate the fact that there are PPSs sitting on Select Committees, but I note that the PPS who sits on this one chose to absent himself from the vote. I can presume only that that was because he agreed with the findings of the Committee. My hon. Friend the Member for Pontypridd (Owen Smith) is absolutely right to say that the Committee makes it clear that there has not been adequate scrutiny of the Bill, particularly in regard to Wales. It also makes the wider point about the amount of time that has been allowed in general.