Business of the House

Rosie Winterton Excerpts

Thursday 8th July 2010 Commons Chamber

[Ms Rosie Winterton (Doncaster Central) (Lab)]

Will the Leader of the House give us the forthcoming business?

[The Leader of the House of Commons (Sir George Young)]

The business for the week commencing 12 July will include:

Monday 12 July—Proceedings on the Finance Bill (Day 1).

Tuesday 13 July—Proceedings on the Finance Bill (Day 2).

Wednesday 14 July—Motion relating to police grant report, followed by motion to approve a Statutory Instrument relating to the draft Terrorism Act 2006 (Disapplication of Section 25) Order 2010, followed by motion to approve a European Document relating to the European External Action Service.

Thursday 15 July—Proceedings on the Finance Bill (Day 3).

The provisional business for the week commencing 19 July will include:

Monday 19 July—Second Reading of the Academies Bill [Lords].

At 10 pm the House will be asked to agree all outstanding estimates.

Tuesday 20 July—Proceedings on the Consolidated Fund (Appropriation) Bill, followed by proceedings on the Finance Bill (Day 4), followed by business nominated by the Backbench Business Committee.

Wednesday 21 July—Proceedings on the Academies Bill [Lords] (Day 1).

Thursday 22 July—Proceedings on the Academies Bill [Lords] (Day 2).

I should also like to inform the House that the business in Westminster Hall for 15 July will be:

Thursday 15 July—A debate entitled “Reform of the Law of Defamation”.

[Ms Winterton]

May I thank the Leader of the House for the business and say how pleased we are to have him back, knowing his commitment to protecting the rights of Members of the House? Although he seems increasingly isolated in that quest, he remains our leading man. I use that term because, as it happens, it is exactly how he was described by The House Magazine, in a marvellous account of his rise to power and his duties as Leader of the House. It includes some fascinating reminiscences about the Thatcher years. For example, he says:

“When we won power in 1979 we were less prepared than today.”

[Mr Speaker]

Order. This is absolutely fascinating stuff, but it suffers from the notable disadvantage that it bears absolutely no relation whatever to the business of next week or the week after. I know that the right hon. Lady, who is a dextrous performer, will now speedily move on to matters of current interest, namely the business of the House next week and the week after.

[Ms Winterton]

I certainly will, Mr Speaker. One of the matters on which I wanted to question the Leader of the House with reference to his duties was the “serious training” that he said shadow Ministers had been given in order for them to be able to move quickly to implement some of the policies in the coalition agreement. I think that that “serious training” explains the speed with which the Thatcherite cuts in public service are being implemented. However, the interview does not tell us whether the duties of the Leader of the House include arranging training for Liberal Democrat Ministers enabling them, for instance, to explain during next week’s debate on the police grant report how cutting £125 million from this year’s policing budget will not affect police numbers—especially given that the Liberal Democrat manifesto stated that there would be 3,000 extra police on the streets.

Will the Leader of the House ensure that the Minister for Police explains in next week’s debate what statistics the Prime Minister was using yesterday when he said that violent crime had doubled, given that the UK Statistics Authority has said that it is misleading the public to use anything other than the British crime survey as a measure of long-term crime trends? The survey shows that, in fact, there has been a 41% reduction in violent crime since 1997.

May I also ask whether the “serious training” referred to by the Leader of the House involves training in how to make apologies? If so, I am afraid that the Education Secretary needs a refresher course. On Monday, he released his first list of schools that would no longer be refurbished or rebuilt. He released that list to the media. By Tuesday afternoon he had released a third list. My hon. Friend the Member for Gedling (Vernon Coaker) raised the matter with you, Mr Speaker, and last night the Education Secretary was forced to come to the House to apologise. He arrived with a fourth list, but said he

“would be grateful if hon. Members would ensure that any information they had that pointed to inaccuracies was put to me”.—[Official Report, 7 July 2010; Vol. 513, c. 492.]

Naturally, Labour Members rose to the challenge and pointed out that Monkseaton high school in Tynemouth, which was listed as having been cancelled, had in fact been opened last year, and had been visited by the one and only right hon. Member for Witney (Mr Cameron) when he launched the Conservative local election campaign. That is completely chaotic, and suggests a hurried and unreliable process.

[Mr Peter Bone (Wellingborough) (Con)]

Will the right hon. Lady give way?

[Ms Winterton]

If the hon. Gentleman has any suggestions for the Secretary of State, I am sure that the Secretary of State will listen to them.

Will the Leader of the House ask the Education Secretary to come to the House and, as a minimum, publish the criteria that were used to decide which school building projects would be cancelled, so that parents and teachers can see for themselves whether their school building programme has indeed been cancelled by any kind of reasonable and fair process? That is a minimum; but the fact is that the Education Secretary should simply withdraw the list altogether, and think again about destroying the hopes and aspirations of at least 700 communities around the country. Surely it is obvious that this whole process has become discredited, as has the Education Secretary himself—not least because he keeps telling the House that funding had not been agreed for these schools. He continued to say that in the House even after the permanent secretary had issued a letter saying that it was categorically not the case.

Finally, last week I asked the Deputy Leader of the House to place in the Library the Treasury paper on the 1.3 million people who were going to be thrown out of work because of the Budget. Neither that nor the advice given to the former coalition Chief Secretary on the future jobs fund has appeared. That meant that we had an Opposition day debate yesterday on jobs and unemployment with those two crucial documents withheld from us. How can the Leader of the House possibly justify that when the coalition agreement specifically refers to openness and transparency in government? Will he now place these documents in the Library as a matter of urgency?

[Sir George Young]

I am grateful to the right hon. Lady for her questions, and I hope that the The House Magazine might one day carry an article entitled “Leading lady”, in which she features. I got on very well with Lady Thatcher—so well that she appointed me to her Administration not once, but twice.

On the police grant order, there will still be an increase in the resources available to the police even after that order, which will be debated next Wednesday. The right hon. Lady knows full well the reason for that order: in the words of the Labour Chief Secretary, “There is no money left.”

On crime, it is important that the actual crimes recorded by the police are used alongside the statistical analysis of the British crime survey. Indeed, that was the measure most often used by Labour Members when they criticised our record in government. We have quoted the only statistics that are available on recorded crime across the period, but I can tell the right hon. Lady that the Home Secretary has written to the shadow Home Secretary stating that we are reviewing how crime statistics should be collected and published in future, and we will make further announcements in due course.

On the subject of apologies, both the Home Secretary and the Education Secretary have had the decency to come to this House and apologise when things have gone wrong. We have had no apology from the Labour Benches, however, for one in five young people being unemployed, and we have had no apology for Labour selling the gold at the lowest level for some 20 years, or for leaving us with the worst budget deficit in Europe.

The right hon. Lady will have seen the question the hon. Member for Gateshead (Ian Mearns) asked about the school list, to which my right hon. Friend the Education Secretary replied:

“It is my belief that the list we have placed in the Vote Office is accurate.”—[Official Report, 7 July 2010; Vol. 513, c. 492.]

He went on to say that he understood that double-checking was now taking place within the Department. My right hon. Friend also set out the criteria used to make the decisions at some length in his statement on Monday, and he was questioned about them for an hour and a quarter. The right hon. Lady should remember, however, that the reason for the statement was the over-commitment of resources by the outgoing Secretary of State, who acted irresponsibly by over-relying on end-year flexibility when the resources simply were not there.

We had a debate on unemployment yesterday, and the Minister of State, Department for Work and Pensions, my right hon. Friend the Member for Epsom and Ewell (Chris Grayling), pointed out that over the next few years there will be an increase of 1.5 million in the number of people working.