Oral Answers to Questions

Pat McFadden Excerpts

Thursday 3rd June 2010 Commons Chamber

[Vince Cable]

What I said is that Yorkshire, together with the north-east, the north-west and the west midlands, has particular structural problems that do need to be addressed.

[Mr Pat McFadden (Wolverhampton South East) (Lab)]

I welcome the Secretary of State and his ministerial team to their post and wish them well. The Secretary of State and I have something in common: we both used to work for the late John Smith in times past, but that of course was before the Secretary of State fell in with the wrong crowd—and now he has fallen in with an even worse crowd.

The Secretary of State has said several times in recent weeks that his Department will be the Department for growth. I am not going to begin these exchanges by denying that whoever won the election, there would have been difficult decisions to take on deficit reduction, but does he accept that the £300 million of cuts to RDA budgets this year are not efficiency savings? They will mean real cuts in real business support, with less private investment leveraged in and cuts to important regeneration projects. Is it not the case that the specific feature of these cuts and his plans for replacing RDAs is that they will impact on our capacity to secure the very growth that is necessary to make deficit reduction a success?

[Mr Speaker]

There were two questions there. One brief answer will suffice.

--- Later in debate ---

[Vince Cable]

I understand the importance of that project to the hon. Gentleman’s constituency and to Sheffield, but he needs to understand that we inherited a very large number of projects that were agreed in a hurry in the run-up to the general election. I do not want to speculate about the motives, but we inherited a lot of projects that were of variable quality. We now have to judge those projects, including this one, according to the criteria of value for money and affordability.

[Mr Pat McFadden (Wolverhampton South East) (Lab)]

Let me assure the House that the Sheffield Forgemasters project was not agreed in a hurry. Does the Secretary of State understand that the decision of the last Government to provide a loan, not a grant, to that company was about not just support for one company but our ambition to secure a national capability for the United Kingdom in making key components for the nuclear supply chain that is set to grow throughout the world in the coming years? Does he also accept that if the damaging uncertainty not only about this but about other important projects, such as the electric car at Nissan and the automotive assistance to Ford, is not resolved soon, all the Government’s talk about supporting a lower-carbon economy will be seen as nothing more than rhetoric, with their actions going in entirely the opposite direction?

[Vince Cable]

I understand the issue because I have studied the reasoning behind the project. However, the hon. Gentleman has got to understand that we must do due diligence and a lot of projects have to be reviewed. There is also the basic question of affordability. We have inherited a very serious financial situation and all such projects must be judged against whether money is available for them.