Oral Answers to Questions

Pat McFadden Excerpts

Tuesday 20th December 2022 Commons Chamber

[Mr Speaker]

I just remind everybody that Members’ letters must be answered when they put requests in, please. We now come to the shadow Minister.

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

I echo the good wishes to you, Mr Speaker, to the Minister and to the whole House for a very happy Christmas.

Last year, the then Prime Minister and the then Chancellor, who is now the Prime Minister, announced a star chamber to crack down on waste and fraud in public expenditure. How often has the star chamber met, and how much of the £6.7 billion estimated to have been lost to covid fraud and error has been recovered?

[John Glen]

As the right hon. Gentleman knows, we have instituted a range of interventions, investing in His Majesty’s Revenue and Customs fraud prevention measures to embed those in business as usual. I have been in post for the past eight weeks, and I will be having a series of meetings in January.

[Mr McFadden]

The Minister could not tell us whether the star chamber has met at all.

On top of all the examples that have been cited today, the rescue of the energy company Bulb is estimated by the Office for Budget Responsibility to be costing another £6.5 billion, partly as a result of our hedge fund Prime Minister’s failure to hedge against rising energy prices. Why do the Government not show more respect for public money and chase down every penny of these losses before putting up taxes for 30 million people at a time when the public already face the biggest cost of living crisis for generations?

[John Glen]

I agree with the right hon. Gentleman about the imperative of chasing down all waste. The Government are providing continued funding for the Bulb Energy special administration regime while the sale of Bulb’s customers to Octopus is pursued by the energy administrator as an exit route from the SAR, but I will look at what the right hon. Gentleman said and reflect carefully on what we can do further.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Speaker]

I call shadow Minister, Pat McFadden.

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

The end of the year is a moment for reflection, so let us look at the Government’s report card: a Tory mini-Budget that crashed the economy, waiting lists and times at record highs, trains delayed and cancelled all over the place, billions wasted on dodgy contracts, and a reshuffle policy that means everyone in the Conservative party gets to be famous for 15 minutes. Why is it that when nothing is working under the Tories, even at this time of seasonal gift giving, they still insist on making everyone else pay the price for their Government’s failures?

[Jeremy Hunt]

First of all, may I wish the shadow Chancellor, the right hon. Member for Leeds West (Rachel Reeves), a merry Christmas in her absence and a speedy recovery from the lurgy that I gather she has? I look back on the last 12 years of this Conservative Government with a great deal of pride. What the right hon. Gentleman never likes to mention in his comparisons is that Labour had a golden economic inheritance from the Conservatives in 1997 and left us with an economy that had run out of money. What have we done? We are the third highest-growing economy in the G7.