Fixed-term Parliaments Bill
Sheila Gilmore Excerpts(13 years, 12 months ago)
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Mark Durkan
With the exception of amendment 5, the amendments basically try to make the Bill more complete and more cogent by ensuring that there is less ambiguity about convention. That is particularly the case with amendment 25, which would remove from the Prime Minister and the Whips the ability to whisper confidence and no confidence in people’s ears, to play the question like a joker that is wild and to use it in relation to any issue that is uncomfortable for the Government or on which Back Benchers are exercising their consciences and discretion.
I gave the example in an intervention earlier of the way in which that process was used with the then Counter-Terrorism Bill. Labour MPs who had said that they would vote in good conscience against 42-day detention were prevailed on with the threat of its being a matter of confidence or no confidence. The then Prime Minister said to me that he would not even table a motion of no confidence if he lost that vote, but that he would deem it to be a vote of no confidence and would go straight away. In the first conversation, he said that the vote would have been followed by a no confidence motion but later on, he said that he would not even bother with a no confidence motion and would go straight to an election. I know that that threat brought some Back Benchers into line and they voted against their consciences and against their stated intentions.
If we are serious about altering the balance of the powers in the hands of the Executive and the Whips, we should support amendment 25, which states that a no confidence motion for the purposes of the Bill must explicitly be a no confidence motion in either the Prime Minister or the Government. Making it clear and explicit in those terms removes the ambiguity and bullying element and restores clarity.
The hon. Member for Epping Forest (Mrs Laing) has made strong arguments for amendments 36 and 37. They would remove possible ambiguity and abuse as well as a lot of confusion and speculation that might arise about otherwise serious circumstances. I commend all those amendments to the Committee.
Another virtue of amendment 25 is that it would go some way to mitigating many of the concerns about the Speaker’s certificate and the challenges and questions that might be raised about it, which are legitimately the subject of subsequent amendments. Because I care for the issues raised by those subsequent amendments, I would make the point that amendment 25 is relevant in containing the problems with the Speaker’s certificate that they aim to address.
Sheila Gilmore (Edinburgh East) (Lab)
As a new Member, I think that many of the public will be quite puzzled by some of the matters that are being discussed and will probably be quite surprised that there was such a lack of clarity about what a matter of confidence is. Given that the question of confidence in a Government is fundamental, as was expressed eloquently earlier by many speakers, it is very important that we get this right.
I have not been through some of the experiences that others clearly have, but I have heard them talk about them and it seems wrong that such a question should be used as a sword of Damocles over Members who might have legitimate views about a particular part of a policy—even if it is the policy of a Government whom they support. Had I been a Member of the previous Parliament, I am sure that detention would have been an issue on which I would not have supported the Government’s position. So I can see exactly why it is right to have a definition.
The Temporary Chair
Order. I have been listening to the hon. Lady very carefully, but she is beginning to use general language and I ask her to draw her remarks more closely to the amendments we are debating.
Sheila Gilmore
My comments arose out of the confidence issue. If we have a clear definition in relation to confidence at least, the proceedings of the House will be clearer to the public, which is important. If we agreed to the definition in the amendment, we would all be clear about when we were dealing with such an important matter. That is a very simple change.
Chris Bryant
As my hon. Friend is on the Select Committee, will she comment on its recommendation that there should be greater clarity regarding the circumstances in which a Government lose the confidence of the House and when that would trigger a general election? Were she and members of the Committee satisfied with the Government’s response to that recommendation? This still seems immensely ambiguous to me.
Sheila Gilmore
Members of the Committee were dissatisfied with various Government responses, including that one. It was partly because of the lack of clarity in this area that we came up with a number of amendments, including some of those being debated.
This is a simple matter. Let me bring it back to where the public are coming from and what they would want us to do. I think they would want us to produce something out of the Bill, even though it is not an ideal way of going about constitutional reform, that is simple, clear and understandable, and we should proceed on that basis.
Thomas Docherty
I regret that I have been unable to be here as much today as on other days, but hon. Members will appreciate that I had Select Committee business. I have been fascinated to see so many Liberal Democrats here. Perhaps the Minister will reflect on why a record number of Lib Dems have turned up to hear how to bring about the collapse of a Government now or in future. I am sure he will feed all this back to the Deputy Prime Minister when he next sees him.
I shall try to stick to the issue at hand, Mr Amess. I strongly welcome the work of the Political and Constitutional Reform Committee and it is a matter of some regret on both sides of the House that the Deputy Prime Minister did not take the time for any other pre-legislative scrutiny. Opposition Members and several Government Members have tried to strengthen the Bill. Of course, we are not opposed to the principle of fixed-term Parliaments, although we would prefer a term of four years to five. Our aim is to try to make sure that we have clarity, so it is disappointing that we have not yet heard from the Minister any of the necessary clarity about what would constitute a vote of no confidence.
Obviously, as a new Member, I do not have the same experience and length of service as many Members on both sides of the House, but having recently read Mr Alistair Campbell’s “Diaries”—an excellent read—I was struck by the account of an occasion when the previous Conservative Government threatened to use a no confidence motion to stay in office. I am sure the hon. Member for Stone (Mr Cash) and others can confirm that. You, too, Mr Amess, may recall those days.
It seems to me a slightly grubby, if not shabby, state of affairs for a Prime Minister of whatever hue to try to drive through legislation by using such a threat.
Fixed-term Parliaments Bill
Sheila Gilmore Excerpts(14 years ago)
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Sheila Gilmore
It is a great pleasure to serve under your chairmanship in this debate, Miss Begg. I want to focus on the practical issues, as we have heard quite a lot of constitutional theorising, and, indeed, a great deal of fascinating history. When I first saw these proposals, I assumed, perhaps rather naively, that the Government had simply made a big mistake, and that they had not realised that, as a result of going for five-year fixed-term Parliaments with immediate effect—that is, in relation to the length of this Parliament—the date of the general election would coincide with the Scottish parliamentary elections, the Welsh Assembly elections and the Northern Ireland Assembly elections. I thought that once they realised that that was a problem, they would rethink their proposition, if only in purely practical terms and even if there were a theoretical argument for five years being better than four—and I have certainly not heard one today—but they did not do so.
My hon. Friend the Member for Dunfermline and West Fife (Thomas Docherty) said that he hoped that when the Minister summed up the debate—on Third Reading, of course, the debate may be summed up by the Deputy Prime Minister himself—he would take some of those issues on board, but I fear that, if the previous constitutional Bill is anything to go by, that will not happen. The Deputy Prime Minister could have written his summing-up speech for the Third Reading of that Bill before the debate had even started. Indeed, I believe that he had, given that so little reference was made to the hours spent in Committee and the different arguments that had been put at that stage. It seemed that none of those arguments had been listened to.
I appreciate that many Government Members have no experience of the practical issues that we have raised. There is, after all, only one Conservative Member of Parliament who represents a Scottish seat. There are Scots who represent other seats, but there is only one Conservative MP who does so, and as far as I am aware he has not been present much during our debates or contributed much to them. Some junior members of the coalition—the junior partners—represent Scottish seats, but they too have been fairly conspicuous by their absence for much of the debate. However, the hon. Member for Edinburgh West (Mike Crockart) has now arrived, and the hon. Member for East Dunbartonshire (Jo Swinson) was briefly present earlier.
Mrs Laing
I simply must intervene to defend the honour of the Under-Secretary of State for Scotland, my right hon. Friend the Member for Dumfriesshire, Clydesdale and Tweeddale (David Mundell), who is indeed the only Conservative Member of Parliament in Scotland. He cannot take part in these debates because he is a Minister in a different Department, although he was here earlier, when the Committee was dealing with the important parts of the Bill that relate to Scotland. I cannot allow it to be on the record that he has not paid attention or that he has not taken part in these debates, given that he is not allowed to do so.
Sheila Gilmore
I accept the hon. Lady’s point that the Minister cannot take part in the debate, but I have not observed a great deal of discussion in the wider press, here or in Scotland, to which he has contributed.
The point that I was making, however, is that many Government Members have no practical experience of the position that obtained in 2007. I think that Government Members are inclined to make light of it and to imagine that we are stirring up a storm in a teacup over something that did not really matter, but it was important. It was a bad day for democracy when so many things went wrong with that combined election. Yes, it did have something to do with the design of the forms; I am not going to say that it did not, for the design did not help. However, the real issue in that context, which was addressed after 2007, was the decoupling of the local government and Scottish Government elections, with an arrangement to ensure that that would not happen again. It seems odd to voters in Scotland, and certainly to political activists there, that we are not just returning to the position in which we found ourselves in 2007, but, I would argue, putting ourselves in a considerably worse position.
Although this will not simply be a matter of practicalities, I should like to draw attention to some of the practicalities of which Government Members may not be aware. The boundaries relating to the Scottish Parliament and the Westminster constituencies are now very different. They have moved apart because the number of Scottish constituencies represented here was reduced in 2005. The Scottish Parliament boundaries have been changed very recently. Their size has not been reduced and the numbers have not changed, but there has been a substantial redrawing which, in most cases, has moved them even further from the Westminster boundaries. There are some very strange boundaries, making it difficult for people to understand who represents them and what constituency they are in.
People who live in the southernmost part of the constituency of my hon. Friend the Member for Edinburgh South (Ian Murray) for Westminster purposes will be in Edinburgh Eastern for the purposes of the Scottish parliamentary elections next year. Given that they live in the far south of Edinburgh, they find it quite difficult to fathom why they have effectively been transported to a different part of the city. That will cause not just a potential for electoral confusion, but serious practical problems relating to the organisation of the elections.
Even more important is the blurring and confusing of the real political differences that have emerged since devolution. I am sure that the same applies to Wales, although I probably do not know enough about its politics or history. No doubt my colleagues will rush to enlighten me. Our politics in Scotland, however, have developed very differently. Not many of the political parties represented in the Scottish Parliament take the lines adopted by the coalition Government here.
For instance, the coalition Government have decided that they want to stop funding the building of affordable housing through grants—I assure you that this point is relevant to the debate, Miss Begg—and instead to fund it by raising rents, which means that tenants will pay for the building of their new homes. I am absolutely positive that no party represented in the Scottish Parliament, even the Conservative party, will espouse such a position in Scotland through the Parliament. In the past—although the situation may change—all the parties in the Scottish Parliament have signed up to free personal care for the elderly. At that time a different view was taken at Westminster, and a different view was taken by my party and by others. However, although some might find it surprising, the Conservatives in Scotland have signed up to that policy in the past.
Mrs McGuire
In a radio programme that I heard on Friday, a leading member of the Liberal Democrat party in the Scottish Parliament said that in no circumstances would the Liberal Democrats introduce tuition fees. Has my hon. Friend any idea how we could conduct a debate about tuition fees—given the position of one of the partners in the coalition Government, the Liberal Democrat party—while also trying to conduct a debate about funds for students in Scotland, with all that happening at the same time as the two elections?
Sheila Gilmore
I entirely agree. That is another illustration of where the difficulty lies. It is not that people are stupid. It is not that the voters cannot understand that there are two elections ongoing. It is that the issues will not be properly debated, and there will be confusion about what the various parties stand for. For example, Scottish Liberal Democrats may, as has been suggested, wish to campaign strongly about the way they think universities should be funded. As that is clearly different from the position taken by their leadership here at Westminster, they are going to find it much harder to get their point of view across.
Martin Horwood (Cheltenham) (LD)
I am surprised that the hon. Lady thinks this will cause confusion since Labour seemed to manage such a situation: they supported the abolition of tuition fees in Scotland as part of the coalition there while simultaneously opposing that for the rest of the United Kingdom from the Government Front Bench here in the last Parliament.
Sheila Gilmore
I was not suggesting that it is either confusing in general terms or wrong that parties in different parts of the United Kingdom should take different views. That has also happened in Wales, and it has happened on health issues and education issues. It is right that we should develop in that way; I think it is extremely healthy. It is a sign of the strength and success of devolution since 1999 that there can be such differences of opinion even within political parties that are very close and see themselves as part of the same party.
Thomas Docherty
For the benefit of those Lib Dems who are only arriving now, so very late to the debate, may I ask my hon. Friend whether she agrees with the following point made tonight by the leader of Plaid Cymru and others—that confusion will be caused by having two elections on the same day, especially as they will be preceded by TV debates with on one night the party leader for the UK saying that his party will pursue one policy and the following night the party leader in Wales or Scotland saying something else?
Sheila Gilmore
I absolutely agree. The problem is not to do with people taking different positions; it is to do with what will happen in the month or few weeks before an election when the issues are being debated on the hustings and being reported in the newspapers. I have an awful vision of us running two sets of hustings and trying to get people to come out to slightly chilly church halls to listen to completely different debates on different nights—although it is perfectly possible to get people to come out to such events when elections take place at different times. Why make this happen when we do not have to?
Chris Bryant
Is the point not that elections to the Assemblies of Wales and Northern Ireland and to the Parliament in Scotland feel like general elections? Indeed, effectively the law treats them like general elections in that a free post is allowed through the Royal Mail and the broadcasters have to report events in certain ways. A conflict will arise if every 20 years we hold these elections on the same day.
Sheila Gilmore
I thank my hon. Friend for that information, and I do not think that Government Members appreciate that aspect. What we are talking about is not a local government election that we might be facing next year or in 2015. The elections we are talking about are not less important than general elections for people in Scotland, because people in Scotland consider the Scottish Government to be the Government of the country for the purposes for which they have powers. They are a Government: they have a First Minister, a Cabinet and a national aspect in the sense that they are the Government in a Parliament that covers the part of the UK that is Scotland. I am not trying to ignore Wales or Northern Ireland at all in this, and the same principles apply to them.
If we respect what we have achieved through devolution, it is important that we do not allow that to be swamped. We have those different debates and policies, and people have their chance to vote differently, which they do—I am not for a minute going to suggest that people will not vote differently on the same day, because I know that that can happen. The genuine ability to separate out these areas of politics and to allow each legislature its real place and presence within our constitution is simply being ignored by these measures. As I have said, it seems to me that there is no reason for that.
Mrs McGuire
My hon. Friend is making a powerful argument on the practical issues. Has she also had time to consider how the broadcasting authorities will maintain some element of balance, as they will have to schedule programmes for two different elections with two different political dynamics—with different parties being in different positions in different parts of the country? Are we not placing an impossible burden on those whom we are asking to implement the legislation currently going through the House?
Sheila Gilmore
I agree with my right hon. Friend. Yet again, that is another aspect of a situation that we are creating. Apparently—the hon. Member for Epping Forest (Mrs Laing) let the cat out of the bag—this is being done not for any good and strong constitutional reason or because we can argue about the history of the past 200 years, but because it suits this coalition Government to have this Parliament last for five years. It suits them to have this provision wrapped up with the other parts of the Bill, which will be debated later, to try to ensure that the coalition holds together. This is being wrapped up as a constitutional Bill and it is being presented as something that will last into the future but, given our constitution, it is possible for a future Parliament to change that, so we are not entrenching things.
Thomas Docherty
My hon. Friend mentions the future. Has she, like me, worked out that if we have a second five-year term, we will run slap bang into the local government elections in Scotland, which we have put back by a year? We would then have an even worse situation than the one in 2007, with a general election and the local government elections leading to hundreds of thousands of spoiled ballot papers.
Sheila Gilmore
I thank my hon. Friend for that information, because it adds to the important case that we are presenting. The people who find this highly amusing clearly have not had the experience that we had. It is incumbent on a Government who said that they would want to look at the evidence and make decisions on the basis of hard facts to listen to the evidence being given by people who have been through this process and who understand the complexities of devolution in a situation where we still have a UK Government. We have had experience of this, as have the elected bodies, which have given their view very clearly to the UK Government but have been ignored. They were not consulted before this, but they gave their view and told of their experience, so it is not asking too much of any Government to say, “Perhaps we have not got this right.”
Perhaps the simplest thing for the Government to do is not to try to see whether they could slip the election by a month, as has been suggested by some people. That would represent the worst of all possible worlds for the voters, let alone for the political parties. The simplest thing would be to say, “We have got this wrong, but we believe in fixed-term Parliaments.” The Labour party proposed fixed-term Parliaments in its manifesto and the Liberals believe in them too. I am not sure whether the Conservatives believe in them, but they introduced this legislation so presumably they now do. We all seem to agree that there should be fixed-term Parliaments. On that basis, why are we having this debate? Because the coalition Government are so determined to stick to their first thought, which was to have five years.
The Government may be doing that only for advantage and to feel that they have the longest possible time in which to be the Government. I have to say to the hon. Member for Epping Forest that she and others on the Government Benches may feel that they have an entitlement to sit for five years, having been elected, but a lot of people in the country have a very different view. The majority party in the coalition did not get a majority for its policies. The junior partner in the coalition went to the people on a different set of policies, so the people who voted for the Liberals did not vote for the programme of this coalition Government. The Government’s approach seems particularly unfortunate for democracy in this country, given that the Government do not have a mandate to rule in the majoritarian fashion that they are doing.
Lorely Burt (Solihull) (LD)
Is the hon. Lady therefore saying that her party does not accept that a coalition of two parties is sufficient to run the country? Does she believe only in first-past-the-post majority rule, and must we keep having elections until we get some sort of majority Government by default?
Sheila Gilmore
Coming from Scotland and having seen both coalitions and minority Governments in operation, I am very open to various ways of running a Government. I would not for a minute want to suggest that it always has to be an absolute majority, that first past the post is what we need or that we need majorities.
Nic Dakin
My hon. Friend is making an eloquent and forceful argument, drawing on the arguments that we have heard before. She is saying very well that there is consensus in this House about fixed-term Parliaments, but that constitutional change should be undertaken very carefully to ensure that it creates a settlement that is sustainable and stable. Separating national elections from UK elections is an important part of that, because it makes for a crisper, more certain mandate from the people whom we have a duty to serve. When the people are going to the polls for the Assembly or the parliamentary elections, they should be clear that those are the prime elections to focus on. When there is a UK election, they can focus on that. For that reason, four-yearly terms would be much better at this time.
Sheila Gilmore
I thank my hon. Friend for his intervention, with which I wholly agree.
Ordinary electors thought that a hung Parliament would be a good idea, because they genuinely believed that there would be openness and that people would listen to different points of view. That has not happened. The strong views of the elected Governments of Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland have not been listened to. The bulk of the evidence given to the Select Committee on Political and Constitutional Reform, of which I am a member, was clearly in favour of four-year fixed-term Parliaments. Why should that weight of evidence be ignored? Was that what people expected from a more consensual and open approach? I think that a lot of people thought that coalition meant that we would get the best bits from everyone and that everyone would sit around and have discussions—
Sheila Gilmore
The hon. Lady seems to think that they did get the best bits from everyone, but that makes it clear to me that she did not believe in the manifesto on which she stood because so many parts of it seem to have been ditched in favour of the policies of the other party.
A small and simple change—a very small concession—that would not in any way interfere with the principle of fixed-term Parliaments would make it far easier for the Bill to be passed relatively quickly. It would allow national elections in all parts of the United Kingdom to go forward in the best possible way and our devolved Parliaments and Assemblies to present their policies to the electorate in the way they want to.
Fixed-term Parliaments Bill
Sheila Gilmore Excerpts(14 years, 2 months ago)
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Sheila Gilmore (Edinburgh East) (Lab)
Thank you, Mr Deputy Speaker, for giving me the opportunity to speak in this debate. I will be brief.
I want to address in particular the length of the proposed fixed terms and how, by choosing the dates that have been chosen, we are running into totally unnecessary conflict with the devolved Parliaments. In opening the debate, the Deputy Prime Minister suggested that he had now realised there was an issue with this. When he came to the Political and Constitutional Reform Committee before the recess, that issue was pointed out to him very clearly, but until today he appeared to have chosen to ignore it or to brush it off as irrelevant.
There may have been confusion in some people’s minds between the potential coincidence of next year’s Scottish Parliament elections and the AV vote and the potential clash in 2015. There are some problems with both things, but I concede that next year’s clash is not in any way as serious as the potential clash in 2015 and the one that would come along some years further into the future, although most of us would probably not be around to deal with it—not as elected Members, at least.
The coincidence of the two general elections is a serious issue. I do not know whether everybody is aware that in Scotland a decision has been taken to move the local elections, which should have been due next year, to another year, to avoid the clash that happened in 2007; that was between local elections and the Scottish Parliament election. We have already made that move, only to discover that in some ways it has been completely undone by what might be allowed to happen here in Westminster.
The matter has been raised not only by the Select Committee but by many other commentators and it should have been addressed before now. There is no reason not to address it. Given that the bulk of the information and evidence that has come to the Select Committee also supports four-year terms, the easiest way out of the difficulty is for the Bill to be amended to allow for such terms. All the complications about whether to have the elections a month apart, which, as the hon. Member for Perth and North Perthshire (Pete Wishart) said, would be absolutely ludicrous, or six months apart, which would be equally unacceptable, would disappear if we set four-year terms in train.
The change would be simple to make and it would be nice to think that we could carry it out without getting into complicated cross-jurisdictional issues about election dates. The elections are different and the issues are very different. It is undoubtedly true that the issues that the devolved Parliaments would want people to pay attention to will simply be swamped if there is a Westminster general election at the same time. I do not mean that we as politicians would cause that to happen; the media, however, would certainly concentrate on what they would see, rightly or wrongly, as the big election.
Let us not underestimate the differences between boundaries. When the Scottish Parliament elections take place next year, my Westminster constituency will have four different MSPs in it; that is how different the boundaries are. These are no minor differences.
Sheila Gilmore
We appear to have lost coterminosity entirely in Scotland, and that is an issue because the situation there is making it extremely difficult for people to have more engagement in politics and a better relationship with their elected representatives. When I tell people, “I am your Westminster MP, but this person will be the candidate for that part of the constituency, although not in your sister’s area, which is not that far away,” it is difficult to make them understand. We also have local government boundaries, which are completely different again.
I am not necessarily saying that we have to change the situation in Scotland immediately; we are learning to live with our different boundaries. However, there is absolutely no need to walk into the situation that I have described. A simple change, backed up by the evidence, to a four-year fixed term, would cure the problem. I hope that the Government will at least consider the issue again—and quickly, so we can get it out of the way.
Obviously, there are other issues. I am not qualified to comment on the detail of some of them, but they are important and we need to spend time on them during the passage of the Bill. I hope that at last the Government have heard the question.
Mr Stewart Jackson (Peterborough) (Con)
I fear that the hon. Lady is perhaps underestimating the sophistication and intelligence of her constituents and those in the rest of Scotland. The evidence seems to suggest that when elections have coincided—for instance, the local elections on 6 May this year and the county council elections previously that coincided with general elections—people have been discerning and have made separate decisions. I would vouchsafe that that was the case in Scotland.
Sheila Gilmore
I am not suggesting that people cannot make separate decisions, but there are practical difficulties. However, over and above those difficulties—which we saw clearly in 2007 and because of which we have taken a step to move elections apart—the overwhelming objection is that we would be in danger of drowning or swamping the important issues of the different legislatures. That is important for what we have built up under devolution. I may now be an elected representative in this place, but those of us who fought hard for devolution did not do so to see everything disappearing in the way that it would in such elections. That is why we should simply amend the Bill to have four-year terms. Then I would be much more supportive of it than I am in its present form.
Mark Durkan
Did my hon. Friend not previously give an answer to the hon. Member for Peterborough (Mr Jackson), when she said that the issue was not whether voters could cope with the different issues, but whether the media could handle the spread of coverage and, in particular, whether the broadcast media could handle the detailed legal requirements for balanced coverage, which would be almost impossible to achieve if those elections were melodeoned together?
Superannuation Bill
Sheila Gilmore Excerpts(14 years, 2 months ago)
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Sheila Gilmore (Edinburgh East) (Lab)
Notwithstanding the warm, or perhaps lukewarm, words from the Minister about our civil servants, I see the Bill as part of a concerted attack on the public sector and those who work in it. The war on the public sector is being waged by some parts of the media without contradiction from the Government, and, indeed, by large parts of the Government.
Creating a straw man or woman simply to knock it down is lazy politics, but that has been done this evening by speaker after speaker. It is a case of picking up an extreme example partly in order to divert public opinion from the reality. The aim is to win over public opinion—to make the public think, “Oh, that is dreadful! How can people receive payouts, or salaries like that? We must do something about it”, rather than see the reality.
We cannot get away from the economic argument. Earlier, one of my hon. Friends feared that, if he drifted on to the subject of the wider economy he might be accused of irrelevancy, but that subject is not irrelevant. We see a clear divide between the two sides of the House, not because Labour Members are not concerned about the deficit but because we have a different view of the economy, how it should be built, and how we should emerge from recessions. Members on the other side of the House obviously see the public sector as a drag on the economy and something that must be shrunk, and they tell us that lo and behold, the private sector will leap up to pick up the pieces.
Richard Graham
Does the hon. Lady accept that those of us on the Government Benches who have worked in the public sector find that very disappointing to hear?
Sheila Gilmore
Members on those Benches may find it disappointing to hear, but it is what many of my constituents who work in the public sector are hearing. They are witnessing a concerted attack on the sector and on public service. I am sure that many Members on the other side of the House genuinely believe that the public sector is pulling the economy down, but we do not believe it. We believe that we must not at this stage cut the public sector in such a way that the economy is put at risk, but that is what will happen if the Bill is passed.
Public sector cuts will increase unemployment, and my constituents are asking me where the other jobs are. Over the past few weeks redundancies have been announced by Standard Life, which is a big employer in my city, and by the Royal Bank of Scotland, which has also been a big employer there. My constituents are seeing such developments all around them. The construction industry has an administrative side, and people might otherwise have thought of working in that, but the sector has been decimated, and they know that there are no jobs.
We could all throw in such terrible examples. Members have spoken of low redundancy payments in the private sector, but we could cite the amount of money that Fred Goodwin received when his employment was terminated. Is it right for us to “equalise down”? We talk of equality, but why is it assumed that we should look to the least good employment conditions, and try to reduce the conditions of our public servants to that level? Some workers in the private sector do not receive sick pay. Where will it stop? Are we going to say, “That is a good idea—perhaps we should equalise downwards”? Such thinking constitutes a slippery slope, and in my view it is quite wrong. I am not surprised that my constituents are anxious.
Like some of my colleagues, I visited the local Jobcentre Plus during the summer break, and in many ways I found it an inspiring experience. It is a far cry from the old days when the staff sat behind glass barriers, frightened to come out, and people on the other side sat on chairs that were fastened to the ground—presumably in case they lifted them up and threw them—to arrange to sign on. A real effort has been made to do something that every party in the House considers important—to get people back to work—but how can that be done if the morale of the people who should be doing the job has been lowered?
I do not think that the Bill is the right way to deal with the situation. If we were serious about the outliers, the Bill would be about them. If the problem is people on very high payouts—we have heard about that from several Members today—why is the Bill not about that? If that is the problem, the Government should deal with it, rather than introducing a Bill which will hurt all civil servants including the low-paid, and which is being used as a bargaining tool to force people to agree to even worse terms than those proposed by the Government. What is clearly being said is, “If you do not agree to much worse terms than you have at present”—although perhaps slightly better terms than those in the Bill—“the terms in the Bill will be what you have.” That is really what the legislation is about.