Statutory Gambling Levy

Debate between Paul Blomfield and Clive Betts

Tuesday 7th June 2022 Westminster Hall

[Paul Blomfield]

As I said in an intervention on my hon. Friend the Member for Swansea East, from my experience of tackling the payday lending industry on a cross-party basis, the argument that it came up with to defend its own profits was, “Be afraid of illegal loan sharks, so do nothing about us and the misery that we are causing, because there is that threat out there.” We need to tackle both. That strategy needs to be developed and funded by a statutory levy.

Let me return to Jack’s case and the conclusions that were raised at his inquest by the coroner, who insisted that, despite small changes in regulation and treatment since Jack’s death, significantly more needs to be done by the state to protect people. Crucially, Jack did not know his addiction was not his fault. Liz and Charles think that if his addiction had been recognised as a health problem and treated more effectively—if he had been given the correct information and the doctors had been better informed—he could still be alive today, and so would many others.

Medical experts agree. Dr Matt Gaskell, who leads the NHS Northern Gambling Clinic, explained to the inquest that the treatment Jack received was insufficient, and he spoke about the impact gambling has on the brain, causing major changes as addiction develops quickly. He underlined that the whole public are at risk, not just a vulnerable few, and I know that that is also the view of the Minister responsible, the Under-Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, the hon. Member for Croydon South (Chris Philp), who has previously said that gambling harm could affect any of us.

Obviously, a new approach is needed—one that promotes harm prevention and information about risk, as well as treatment and provision for early diagnosis. We have the skills and knowledge in our NHS, but we need the investment to make those services available to all who might need them. The hon. Member for Blackpool South said the NHS should be doing much more, and he is right, but the big flaw in his argument is that that should not be at the cost of other NHS services. It should be based on the “polluter pays” principle: those who do the harm should cover the cost of addressing it.

On the intervention made by the hon. Member for Shipley (Philip Davies), the levy should be set at the rate necessary to cover the costs of mitigating the harm and providing the treatment. If the problem gets worse, the levy may have to go higher; if it is reduced as a consequence of effective treatment, the levy may go lower. The levy should be responsive and based on the “polluter pays” principle. However, I am conscious of the time and of the fact that you are glaring at me, Mr Betts, so I will finish on that point. I hope that the Government recognise the power of these arguments.

[Mr Clive Betts (in the Chair)]

The guideline is now that speeches should be six minutes. Can we try to stick to that, to make sure all colleagues get in?

EU Structural Funds: Least Developed Regions

Debate between Paul Blomfield and Clive Betts

Wednesday 26th June 2019 Westminster Hall

[Paul Blomfield]

My hon. Friend is right to highlight the impact on all our areas if there is not adequate investment in economic development.

[Mr Clive Betts (Sheffield South East) (Lab)]

On the shared prosperity fund, a recent report by the Housing, Communities and Local Government Committee called for consultations to begin before the end of April. The Government response simply stated that

“the Government will consult widely on the Fund and final decisions are due to be made following the Spending Review”,

and that

“the Government continues to review our approach to consulting on the Fund accordingly.”

That is not very definite. At some point, we will also need to ask the Minister what, if there were no spending review—which there probably will not be, or at least not a four-year one—that would do to consultations on sorting out the shared prosperity fund.

[Paul Blomfield]

That intervention clearly comes with the great knowledge and experience that my hon. Friend brings as Chair of the Select Committee. I hope that the Minister will pay attention to his concerns in the closing remarks.

I do not necessarily have a lot of confidence in that. I wrote to the Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government back in February, bringing the CPMR report to his attention and reminding him of the Government’s commitment that regions should not lose out as a result of Brexit. I called on him to commit to providing the equivalent funding to what we would have received had we remained members of the EU. The Minister responded on the Secretary of State’s behalf, but did not make that commitment. I asked the Minister that same question again in May during the Westminster Hall debate on the shared prosperity fund led by my hon. Friend the Member for Barnsley Central. The Minister again did not make that commitment.

Our experience is that where the Government have the opportunity, they shift funding from areas in need to other parts of the country. We have seen that markedly with local government. I therefore simply do not have the confidence that the Government will do the right thing by areas such as ours. In conclusion, I will ask the Minister again, the simple and central question of the entire debate. We were told that there would be no losers as a result of leaving the European Union. Indeed, I pressed that with David Cameron at Prime Minister’s questions in the week after the referendum result. Had we remained a member, South Yorkshire would have received £605 million between 2021 and 2027; other regions would have received comparable amounts. Therefore, will the Government commit to providing, from whatever source, regional development funding at least equivalent to the money that we would have received from the European Union?

Health and Social Care Budgets

Debate between Paul Blomfield and Clive Betts

Tuesday 14th March 2017 Westminster Hall

[Mr Clive Betts (Sheffield South East) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to follow the two Select Committee Chairs, my hon. Friend the Member for Hackney South and Shoreditch (Meg Hillier) and the hon. Member for Totnes (Dr Wollaston); we have worked very closely on these issues. It is also a great pleasure to see so many other colleagues in the Chamber today. It is obvious that social care and health issues are now coming very high up the agenda, which is absolutely right.

I will refer to the report that the Communities and Local Government Committee has just produced, “Adult social care: a pre-Budget report”. In the next few weeks, we will produce a longer report about longer-term issues in social care. To begin in the here and now, the Committee welcomed the fact that the Government have allowed local authorities to increase the precept in the next two years and have encouraged local authorities to take up that offer, while still recognising that there are challenges around the fact that the precept raises very different amounts of money in different local authority areas. We asked for an immediate further injection of £1.5 billion, so it is welcome that the Chancellor announced an increase of £1 billion, even though £1.5 billion would have been more welcome—I think that is how the Committee will look at that.

Recognising that that would not be a permanent solution for this Parliament, however, we asked for the National Audit Office to be given the responsibility to look at what is required for the rest of this Parliament—the further two years of the spending rounds—to address the issues in social care. Those issues are very real, with an increase by a third in the number of people in their 80s or 90s over a 10-year period, with local authority spending on social care down by 7% since 2010 in real terms, with the increase in the minimum wage, with the Care Act 2014 and with all these other pressures.

[Paul Blomfield (Sheffield Central) (Lab)]

Does my hon. Friend recognise that there are two groups of victims of the crisis in social care? They are not only those who depend on the services, but those who work in the sector and who face, for example, widespread non-compliance with national minimum wage legislation, which the Government are aware of but not acting on. Does he agree that needs to be recognised in a future settlement? We need a paradigm shift in how we view care work.

[Mr Betts]

We will return to the proper training, long-term commitment and pay of staff in the care sector in our Committee’s further report, but we certainly had evidence to that effect.

We need another way of dealing with the funding gap for the rest of this Parliament. For the longer term, I very much welcome the announcement of the Green Paper, but I echo the comments of the two previous speakers. We need to get cross-party agreement on a sustainable, long-term settlement that will last not merely for the next Parliament, but for several Parliaments after that. There are major challenges. I agree that we should look at health and social care together, but there are fundamental differences in governance and accountability between the two systems, so how do we resolve that?

We should certainly look closely at what is happening in Manchester, to learn about the devolution deal there and how the two can work together within the same governance structure. Personally, I feel that losing the local accountability that the social care system currently has and simply centralising the whole system would be a mistake. That would take us in the wrong direction, so it is important to look at what is happening in Manchester. We have two very different funding systems. We have the health system, which is free at the point of use, but I do not think that anyone suggested in evidence that we could fund social care on exactly the same basis. We will have to consider something slightly different to fund social care, but how the two systems fit together will be a challenge.

If we are considering the future for social care funding, we should bear in mind that currently we have a mixture of funding. We have some central Government funding, local authority funding and the personal contributions that come through people paying for their care, particularly in residential homes, and what happens to their estate when they die. Will that mean a bit extra from those different elements—a bit more from central Government, local Government and personal contributions—so that the total whole grows? However, the Government have said that they will introduce the Dilnot proposals in the next Parliament—that is what the Minister said to us—which will cap and reduce the contributions that may come in from people’s private estates when they die, so does that mean more money from somewhere else?

I am sorry that the Chancellor did this, because everything should be on the table, but he ruled out a different way of taxing or receiving contributions from people’s personal estates when they die: taking a percentage of everyone’s estate. Currently, people contribute their estate if they end up with dementia and go into a care home, but if they have a heart attack, they tend to contribute nothing. Is that system fair? Is that a challenge we must look at? Even with Dilnot, the £72,000 limit would take most of the estate from a small house sold when someone in my constituency dies, but it would be only a fraction of the value of a property sold in the more expensive parts of London. Is that fair either? Do we simply scrap the whole thing and go on to a German system of social insurance?

The Communities and Local Government Committee went to Germany to have a look at its model. There are pros and cons to it, but we really need to put everything on the table and not rule out any possibilities. We need something that we can, in the end, reach cross-party agreement on, recognising that the social care system will probably be different in its funding from the health system. How they can fit together and be governed together will be absolutely crucial to the success of a long-term settlement, when we eventually reach one.

Higher Education

Debate between Paul Blomfield and Clive Betts

Wednesday 3rd November 2010 Westminster Hall

[Paul Blomfield]

That is a very important point on our position in relation to competitors in the OECD. We have made enormous progress in the funding of higher education over the past 13 years. We did not get to where we needed to be, but we were moving in the right direction. This Government are reversing that direction and taking us backward.

Let me return to the point about the negative message being sent out about arts, humanities and social science courses, and share with Members the views of the vice-chancellor of the university of Sheffield, Professor Keith Burnett. He is an outstanding leader of an outstanding university, and a scientist. He said:

“In the last few days I have been thinking about how I would feel if my subject – Physics – had been identified as fundamentally unimportant to the UK, or at least unworthy of its investment, in the way that many of our colleagues’ subjects have been. I would be gutted….When I see what richness the work of our colleagues…has brought us…Sir Ian Kershaw’s books on Hitler…shed a unique light on how fascism emerged…offered insights and judgement which can’t be ignored. Mike Braddick’s new book on the Civil War…helps us understand how we came to be who we are as a nation…Focusing on a period when fundamental questions were being debated…casts new light on the transition of Britain’s passage from one era to another…One of our most powerful resources as a country, and as a University, is our cultural insight, our deep questioning of our own society and ideas – perhaps we have never needed that analysis more as we consider how best to go forward. In a world of global competition and profound change, we want our children to have more than just bread to live on.”

I turn now to the point that my hon. Friend the Member for Washington and Sunderland West (Mrs Hodgson) made on education maintenance allowances. Fundamentally—the Minister himself acknowledged this—participation in higher education is in many senses determined by people’s experience of the education system in their early years. We know that for many people who aspire to go to university the critical decision is at the age of 16, and that in low-income families with no history of post-16 education there is huge pressure not to be a further drain on the family’s financial resources. I have talked to constituents across Sheffield, and have been left in no doubt that education maintenance allowances have transformed life chances. Last year, almost 7,000 EMAs were awarded across the city. In the comprehensive spending review, the Chancellor talked about replacing

“education maintenance allowances with more targeted support.”—[Official Report, 20 October 2010; Vol. 516, c. 964.]

I suggest that that is a deeply cynical use of language. What could be more targeted than allowances that are assessed according to family income, with the level of payments being determined according to need? The Minister cuts a rather lonely figure today, and I regret that there are not more Members of other parties interested in the debate. I hope that the Minister will address my remarks in his contribution.

[Mr Clive Betts (in the Chair)]

Before I call the next speaker, I remind Members that I will start the wind-ups at 3.40 pm.

Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill

Debate between Paul Blomfield and Clive Betts

Tuesday 19th October 2010 Commons Chamber

[Paul Blomfield]

Obviously, we would all like to see better electoral registration. The point is that we know there are significant groups within all our communities for whom it is difficult to achieve the levels of registration that we wish to see.

[Mr Betts]

My hon. Friend is making a good point; the information that he has given the Committee about the great disparity in registration levels between his constituency and Sheffield, Hallam is very stark. But if he looks at information that was given to a Select Committee hearing in the Parliament before last in the House, about initial returns to the registration officer from different parts of Sheffield, he will find that registrations from Manor, an inner-city part of his constituency, were only just over 50% at first instance, while in the Dore ward in Hallam they were over 95%. And if we use a December figure before the canvassing has really got going to get additional people on the register, those initial returns and the disparity between them will be even greater than the disparity between the registers as they now stand.

[Paul Blomfield]

I thank my hon. Friend for making that point, because it highlights the particular difficulty of using the December register. There can be only two reasons to use December as the point at which to measure registered electors: either because there is undue haste in trying to push through this process, or because there is a recognition that at that point those voters who some would wish to see disregarded will not be reflected within the register.

The Government would claim that the Bill is about new politics, but a failure to address these concerns will send a message to the public that this represents the very worst of old politics, putting party advantage before democracy and, as one Government Member said on Second Reading, putting decisions behind closed doors before transparency. If the Bill proceeds unamended, it will not only damage the Government but damage confidence in our democracy.