Economy and Jobs

Peter Grant Excerpts

Monday 20th January 2020 Commons Chamber

[Sajid Javid]

I agree absolutely with my hon. Friend and will come to that topic in just a moment.

The foundation of our new economic plan is fiscal responsibility. It has taken a decade of hard work by the British people to turn our public finances around. The deficit has fallen from 10% of GDP in 2010 to just 1.8% today. We are not going to throw that away. We were elected on a platform to manage the public finances responsibly, so it is a matter of trust, as well as economic credibility, that we deliver on that promise to the British people. We will be bound by a credible new fiscal framework that will keep our borrowing and debt under control while allowing for new investment in levelling up and spreading opportunity throughout the country. At the Budget, I will publish a new charter for budget responsibility that will give effect to those rules, and the Office for Budget Responsibility will scrutinise our performance against them.

Thanks to the hard work of the British people, we have got that deficit down, and debt is under control. We can now afford to invest more in levelling up and spreading opportunity right across our country. The first step will be our national infrastructure strategy. Better infrastructure can boost people’s earning power by making it easier to find work. It can help businesses access new markets. It can help us thrive and grow. It can boost communities and places and improve standards of living. It is simply not good enough that we have fallen behind so many other countries on infrastructure, and the Government are going to fix that.

[Peter Grant (Glenrothes) (SNP)]

The Chancellor may be aware that a very welcome infrastructure announcement was made just before Christmas, when the Scottish Government gave the long-awaited confirmation that the Levenmouth rail link will be reinstated. Exactly how much money do the United Kingdom Government intend to put into that vital project?

[Sajid Javid]

I am afraid I did not catch the name of the project the hon. Gentleman mentioned. If he wants to stand up again and mention it, I will reply.

[Peter Grant]

The Levenmouth rail link—I can give the Chancellor a map if he wants to know where it is.

[Sajid Javid]

The good news for our citizens, whether in Scotland, England, Northern Ireland or Wales, is that our infrastructure revolution and the funds we intend to use to build new infrastructure will benefit every part of the United Kingdom. When we set out our plans and provide more detail in the forthcoming Budget, there will no doubt be a lot more investment in Scotland.

--- Later in debate ---

[Peter Grant (Glenrothes) (SNP)]

I will ask for that in writing, Madam Deputy Speaker, because my wife will never believe that anybody asked me to speak for a bit longer than I had intended to.

I am very pleased to speak in this debate and I say, with all good grace, congratulations to all those who made their maiden speeches. Obviously, my preference was for my hon. Friend the Member for Gordon (Richard Thomson). I would have preferred not to have seen elected a number of those who spoke today, but they were. We have to accept the result and we look with considerable trepidation at what the implications of the Government’s new majority will be.

To all those who have been elected, having won the trust of their communities, and who have spoken with such pride about their constituencies, I offer my sincere congratulations. Those who drew a cheer from their own Benches when they said how long it had been since their party had won in their constituency were entitled to do that. I would only mention that by my own reckoning I am one of 25 SNP Members who are still the first and only SNP Member ever elected in their constituencies. The difference is that we plan to be the last MPs ever elected to those constituencies.

I wanted to speak about what the Queen’s Speech says about the economy in my constituency, but actually I need to talk about what it doesn’t say, because there is precious little, even in the 150-page dossier of propaganda from the Government at the back of the Queen’s Speech, that addresses the real problems facing far too many of my constituents. Most of the impact of their legislative programme will be negative. This week, Fife Council has published a consultative draft economic action plan for Mid Fife, an area that covers most of my constituency and most of the neighbouring constituency of Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath and a small part of North East Fife, down the east side of Leven. From any of the economic indicators for that part of Fife, it is immediately obvious that it should be a priority area for investment. The actions of Fife Council demonstrate that it agrees; the actions of the Scottish Government demonstrate that they agree; the actions of the UK Government demonstrate that, as the Chancellor proved today, most of them do not know where Levenmouth is, never mind understand its problems.

Mid Fife, as defined in that study, is below the national average on almost every measure of economic activity, though not through the fault of the people. They are as hard-working, charitable and honest as you will find anywhere, but they have been let down far too often. There are fewer businesses per head of population; the number of businesses is falling, contrary to what is happening in the rest of Fife and Scotland; of the businesses we do have, fewer provide knowledge intensive business services, which means that fewer of them are likely to generate the high-quality, high-paid jobs of the future; wages are well below the national average; and there are significantly fewer women in paid employment and significantly fewer households where more than one person is in paid work.

There are success stories. Over the years, there has been huge investment by Diageo, though some of that, I know, is a bitter pill to swallow as it has meant closures in other parts of Scotland. I only wish that some of the world-leading branded products Diageo sells around the world were actually marked “Made in Fife”. I wish it would stop trying to pretend they were made in a different country altogether, so next time you sip your Tanqueray or your Gordon’s, know it was made in Fife, not London.

Apart from that, it sometimes feels as if the only growth industry in Glenrothes and Levenmouth is food banks. Going through the names of some of these communities in Mid Fife, many will immediately see a pattern—I guarantee that if Dennis Skinner was still here, he would see the pattern. I am thinking of names such as Methil and Buckhaven, Kennoway, Balgonie, Wemyss, Dysart, Seafield, Kinglassie, Bowhill, Lochore and Ballingry—trace out those names on a map and you trace out the coalfields of Fife from a bygone age. The sad and shameful fact is that most of the economic and social problems that stretch across that swathe of Mid Fife were created not just by the pit closures but by the way they were closed and the utterly inhuman way the people and the communities that made these islands such a powerhouse in the world economy were treated: when their labour was no longer needed they were thrown on the scrapheap.

That is why, in communities where generations of people lived through those times and remember who treated the miners and their families and communities with such contempt, hon. Members will find that under a local government electoral system that gives a candidate a seat if they get 15% of first preference votes, there are still huge swathes of that part of Mid Fife that are Tory-free zones. It is maybe not surprising that, to the best of my knowledge, in the recent general election the Tory candidate never showed their face in the constituency. I certainly never saw them during the entire campaign.

That is not to understate the work done by community organisations, the local authority and the Scottish Government: the new Queensferry crossing, built without the evils of the private finance initiative, has been a huge boost to the economy; the building of a new school, Levenmouth Academy, funded in such a way that the net long-term cost to the council will be nil; the funding of the energy park in Fife—not helped by the UK Government sabotaging the renewables industry at every opportunity; and the recent commitment by the Scottish Government to reopening the rail link to Leven. Incidentally, rail networks in Scotland should be jointly operated by the Scottish and UK Governments. When will the UK Government honour their obligation to fund that alongside the Scottish Government?

Why is this particularly relevant to today’s debate and the wider debate on the Queen’s Speech? Well, we are facing another drastic change in employment related to the extraction of the earth’s natural resources, and I want to make sure we at least learn the lessons of what went wrong last time. Oil & Gas UK estimates that there are about 270,000 people in the UK whose jobs directly or indirectly depend on the oil and gas industry, and about 40%—about 101,000—of those jobs are in Scotland. Between 2019 and 2024, that industry is going to deliver £8.5 billion to the Treasury—not bad for an industry that in 2014 they said would be finished in five years. If we are serious about moving to a zero carbon economy—we have been talking about climate emergencies for the last several weeks at least—how many of those 270,000 jobs in the UK, including the 101,000 in Scotland, will still exist as they do now in 10, 15 or 20 years? If we do not expect those jobs to be there, what are those 101,000 people in Scotland and those 270,000 people across the UK going to do for a living?

The SNP is calling for all the £8.5 billion the Treasury expect to get from oil and gas to be reinvested in helping the industry to prepare for a carbon-free future and to helping communities such as those in many parts of Aberdeen and around Falkirk and Grangemouth to prepare so that, when the transition to a carbon-free economy comes, the people in those communities will be treated as human beings with rights and with a future, which is more than can be said about far too many of their predecessors in the communities I represent. It would be unforgiveable if the workers in Aberdeen in the future were treated as shabbily as those in Aberhill and other parts of Methil and Buckhaven were.

Finally, I have tried to get answers on the shared prosperity fund before. Several of the communities I have mentioned are helped enormously by community organisations that get significant amounts of money from the European Union, and that then brings in match funding and shared funding from others sources. I am genuinely worried that this will become a carve-up for the Government and that the money will go to Government pet projects that are not based on the priorities of the people of my constituency or the people who have been delivering projects in places such as Methil, Cardenden and Kinglassie. It will not even be run past anyone in the Scottish Government. I am concerned from answers on that from the Welsh Office that the Government are preparing a Cardiff bypass and a Holyrood bypass so that any money that does trickle into Scotland will be spent where a Conservative Government in London want it spent, not where the people in Fife and of Scotland think it should be going. That kind of contempt is one reason why I am as convinced as I ever have been that the MPs now on these Benches will be the last ones our country ever has to send to represent our people in this place.