Ministry of Justice Shared Services
Debate between Simon Hughes and Paul Flynn(9 years, 10 months ago)
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Paul Flynn
My hon. Friend is right. There is general puzzlement about the conflicting statements that come from the Government. Perhaps they can be cleared up this morning. There is a scheme: the jobs will be privatised, and I do not know how the Government can exercise control if that happens. We are told that they are against offshoring jobs. The Prime Minister said so a short while ago; he said he wanted us to “reshore” jobs and bring them into this country. It seems an act of madness to take successful jobs from an initiative developed in Newport and send them overseas, and to spread the profits to a foreign company—a French company.
I am rather surprised when I see the Minister who is replying to the debate, whom I have greatly admired in his political career. We have been in the House a long time, and in his sensible period, when he was a Liberal Democrat, before his metamorphosis, he would have agreed with every word of my argument, as he has on many occasions. The red boxes have a strange effect, and change people’s personalities, but I am sure that it is possible to revert. I was the right hon. Gentleman’s constituent for many years. He used regularly to send me letters and would ask me what the Lib Dems should do for the country. I always made interesting answers and suggestions, not all of which he followed up.
Paul Flynn
Some he did, yes. He did not give us eternal life or a Labour Government, which were the main things I thought would be of benefit.
Simon Hughes
No, I am going to finish what I have to say, otherwise I might not be able to complete my remarks in the time. The Secretary of State made a commitment and we have had reference to the commitments from the Prime Minister. I repeat the commitment to British jobs here in the UK, and I hope that that is very clear to everybody.
Paul Flynn
Who will take this decision? There seems to be a different view in the Cabinet Office on this. Can he give a guarantee that the Ministry of Justice will have an absolute ban on these jobs going abroad?
Simon Hughes
I have not been in post since the beginning of this whole debate, but according to my understanding, the deal is that any such proposal to offshore would require the consent of the Ministry of Justice, and the current Secretary of State has made it clear that while he is in office, he would not give that consent. I repeat that on my own behalf and on behalf of the Ministers in the Department.
New Nuclear Power
Debate between Simon Hughes and Paul Flynn(11 years, 3 months ago)
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Simon Hughes
I have been to Finland, though not to look at the waste issue. When I was party spokesperson, I went to Sellafield and had tours of the site. I am very happy to go to Finland again.
I was making the point that there are three strong arguments. I have made the arguments that on cost and on safety in the long term, nuclear does not work. Thirdly, it is the most depersonalised form of power in the world—there is no community control. It becomes the plaything and business of the few, rather than the energy of the many. It is not something that a community, village, town, city, region or country can control, but something that is developed and run internationally. We need to have control of our power sources, and the best way to achieve that is through renewables and energy that we produce and control ourselves.
The debate is about what we do now and what we ask the Government to do. The Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change, who has been a friend of mine for many years, has an important responsibility. Our party kept its anti-nuclear position right up to the general election, and it was in our manifesto. When we negotiated the coalition agreement with the Tory party, which is pro-nuclear, with a few dissenters, obviously we had to come to a deal. We would have had to have the same conversation in negotiations with the Labour party, because it is overwhelmingly pro-nuclear too. It would not have been any different; it would have been the same. I guess that we would have had the same outcome and retained our anti-nuclear position as a party. The deal we were willing to do in Government was that we would let it go ahead if it was needed, provided there was no subsidy. When we voted on the plan there was, as my hon. Friend the Member for Cheltenham (Martin Horwood) said, an opt-out clause for Liberal Democrats and we did not vote in favour of the plan that included nuclear. The big question therefore remains: what is a subsidy?
Paul Flynn
Can we anticipate another principled stand by the Liberal Democrats, like the one they took on boundaries, to oppose any subsidy on nuclear power?
Simon Hughes
The hon. Gentleman is being mischievous. He and I are on the same side in this argument, so he should love and care for his friends, and not seek to be rude. Indeed, the Welsh Labour party was desperately pleased that the new boundaries did not go through, so let us have a little less of the attack on us.
We have our position that we negotiated in the coalition agreement; that is fine and we will deliver on it. However, my job and that of my hon. Friend the Member for Cheltenham is to hold my right hon. Friend the Minister, the Department and the Government to account. That is why we need to nail what is currently going on and stop—either in the Energy Bill, which is in Committee and will be coming back here, or elsewhere—any mechanism whereby power is given to Ministers to do deals with companies such as EDF that could produce the sort of hidden subsidy mentioned by the hon. Member for Newport West.
The hon. Gentleman referred to Professor Tom Burke, who is a friend and constituent of mine, and I had a long and up-to-date conversation with him on this issue only this weekend. I am clear that the figures cited by the hon. Gentleman are the figures we are talking about. The reality is that if the strike price is £100 per megawatt and there is a 30-year contract life, that would be a subsidy of £1 billion a year above today’s wholesale price for electricity. That would be £30 billion to EDF from Britain’s householders and businesses—the very people we are trying to protect from high energy bills. If the whole of the 16 GW nuclear energy currently planned by the Government were financed on similar terms, that figure would be £150 billion by 2050.
Somebody asked—I cannot remember who it was; I think it was my hon. Friend the Member for Cheltenham —whether there had ever been any suggestion of such a large amount of money going through without scrutiny. The answer, as you will know as well as anybody, Mr Deputy Speaker, is that in this place we have often authorised huge amounts of expenditure with no debate. Indeed, when my right hon. Friend the Minister was a spokesman on Treasury matters for the Liberal Democrats he used to complain that we would spend lots of time debating taxation, but almost no time debating spend. Consolidated Fund Bills relating to billions of pounds of expenditure would go through with no debate at all. We are trying to say that we should stop and check now because we believe there is a danger of a really big subsidy being agreed under the table, as it were, in terms of parliamentary transparency, that we cannot then pull out of or unscramble.