Roger Gale
Main Page: Roger Gale (Conservative - Herne Bay and Sandwich)Department Debates - View all Roger Gale's debates with the Leader of the House
Business of the House
Roger Gale Excerpts(1 month, 2 weeks ago)
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Sir Alan Campbell
I am grateful to my hon. Friend for raising that line in the House, and I pay tribute to him for all his hard work to secure it. I also pay tribute to the hard work of our late hon. Friend Ronnie Campbell, who worked extraordinarily hard on the project while he was a Member of this House. He was much respected and is much missed.
The Government are bringing rail services back into public ownership to ensure that our railways work for all the communities they serve. I recommend that my hon. Friend seeks an Adjournment debate to make his case not just about the remarkable success of the current line, but about its potential for expansion in the area he represents.
Sir Roger Gale (Herne Bay and Sandwich) (Con)
Mr Speaker, you will recall that on 16 April I raised with the Leader of the House the failure of Capita to administer properly the civil service pension scheme. Ever courteous, he passed that information and my concerns to the Cabinet Office. The deputy director of the Government People Group responded on 30 April, saying:
“The Second Permanent Secretary at HMRC…is personally leading a specialist Pensions Recovery Taskforce to restore service levels…we are now focused on a backlog of approximately 25,000 outstanding pension quotations.”
In response to my concerns about Capita, she said:
“Capita is a strategic supplier to the government”
and it has
“more than 80 contracts across the public sector.”
She also said,
“we are holding Capita to rigorous account through every available commercial lever.”
May I gently ask the Leader of the House whether it is not now time for the Cabinet Secretary to come to the House to make a statement and face questions on this matter?
Sir Alan Campbell
The right hon. Gentleman is clearly frustrated on this matter, and he is right to be, because this has been raised not just by him but by other Members of the House for almost as long as I have been in this role. The response he got does reflect the fact that the Government take this seriously and that efforts are being made to improve the situation, but he is seeking an update, and I will go to the Department and see if we can get that update.