Delivery of Public Services

Stewart Hosie Excerpts

Tuesday 28th June 2022 Commons Chamber

[Stewart Hosie (Dundee East) (SNP)]

In April the UK had a national net debt of £2.4 trillion—that is 12 zeros. The Chief Secretary was brave when he spoke about fiscal responsibility. The motion starts by noting that

“UK economic growth is forecast to grind to a halt next year, with only Russia worse in the OECD”.

That would be bad enough, but when one actually analyses what the OECD says, the position is even more stark. It says:

“GDP is projected to increase…in 2022, before stagnating in 2023. Inflation will keep rising and peak at over 10% at the end of 2022 due to continuing labour and supply shortages and high energy prices. Private consumption is expected to slow as rising prices erode households’ income. Public investment will weaken in 2022 as supply bottlenecks hamper...investment”.

It is a gloomy prognosis.

The IMF’s numbers make for troubling reading. The 1.2% growth forecast for the UK next year is the lowest of the advanced economies. That growth is also lower than emerging and developing Asian economies; lower than Latin America and the Caribbean economies; lower than the middle eastern and central Asian economies; and lower than sub-Saharan Africa. All of that at a time when, as the motion says,

“food prices, petrol costs and bills in general are soaring”.

Given that inflation in the euro area was at 8.1% in May, one could make a credible case that this is a global phenomenon. However, some of the problems are self-evidently self-inflicted. Only a fool would deny that many of the continuing labour and supply shortages are a direct result of the self-inflicted economic harm that is Brexit, leaving the single market and ending the free movement of labour. I know that the Minister said that Brexit is done and we need to move on, but I am not sure that there is a way to resolve many of those issues without addressing the freedom of movement and the single market issues.

Who pays the price of the failures? The OECD rather helpfully tells us:

“Vulnerable social groups have been particularly affected by the pandemic and poverty is set to increase as jobs are lost and self-employed see incomes dwindle”.

It will not be the Tory donors and cronies who benefited from the dodgy personal protective equipment contracts who will suffer. It will not be the bankers whose bonuses are proposed to be uncapped. They will not suffer, but then these people never do.

When the OECD talks about poverty being set to increase, we must also remember that this is not all by chance. It is not all a result of covid. It is not all because of external inflationary pressures. It is not all other people’s fault. It is a result of removing the universal credit uplift. It is a result of increasing national insurance. It is a consequence of the Tory policy of taxing the country more than it has been taxed for the past 70 years.

However, the motion before us also recognises that this failing and out-of-touch Government are leaving the UK with backlogs, such as the long waits for passports, driving licences, GP and hospital appointments, court dates and at airports. These things are all happening; we are seeing them with our own eyes. Many of these problems are of the Government’s own making, and their failure to understand, let alone tackle them is, I think, to their shame.

Let us look at the passport fiasco. Three weeks ago, I went to the pop-up passport office in Parliament with 24 cases. I went again last week with a further nine. Those are not unusual numbers; every MP has this. The staff there are incredibly helpful, but it is clear that the entire system is broken. Staff are drowning in the backlog of work. This is about not only families desperate not to lose hard-earned cash through cancelled holidays because they do not get their passports in time, but the impact that this is having on business. A local businessman told me recently:

“I travel abroad regularly for business and was unable to send off my passport for what could be 10 to 12 weeks. I was planning to use the fast-track service or online premium as my passport runs out in September. In the last six weeks, there has been no availability from Glasgow and I was planning to travel to Belfast or Durham, which were the only passport centres available.”

He told me a couple of weeks ago that

“as of last week, the passport website has been down with no access or availability. My current passport runs out on 11 September. I have business trips booked through May and June and, while I believe you can travel with up to three months on a passport, there is no guarantee that the airlines will allow you to fly.”

What sort of Government allow their Departments and agencies to fail like this, effectively stopping businesspeople travelling overseas to win new orders or to source raw materials or equipment?

And on an associated point—this is another Government failure—I have a local business that had advertised a professional management role. It told me that it did not receive a single eligible candidate from the UK in five months. It did, however, find a very good candidate in the United States and applied for a sponsor licence under the skilled worker immigration route, only to be denied on the grounds that they had not, apparently, provided all of the required information, while at the same time receiving no request for any additional information. This is Kafkaesque bureaucracy. It is a system that is designed to fail. The problem is, though, it was not just one person who did not get a job. The failure to bring this managerial role person on board has resulted in the business postponing the recruitment of other managerial and supervisory positions. What sort of Government would deny businesses and therefore the economy the opportunity to grow because they cannot issue a visa to someone who is self-evidently qualified to receive it?

Of course, the failures and backlogs are not all in passports and visas. I want to turn briefly to another constituent and the DVLA. This alludes to something that the shadow Chief Secretary to the Treasury said. A constituent who wrote to me yesterday said:

“I voluntarily surrendered my licence in June 2020 due to ill health, I have since reapplied...after I was advised that I should reapply for my licence. Since then, 19 weeks have passed and I have only heard from the DVLA to advise they had all the information required, this was on the 16th May when I made contact with them. I have enquired a few times since... I have contacted them via a special e-mail address that is set up for front line workers as this is meant to be a faster process.”

God help the poor souls who do not have access to the faster process. He went on:

“I am currently working as a community mental health nurse...my team works with severe and enduring mental health and requires a lot of travel for home visits, some of which are emergency situations. As you would expect this is having a massive impact on the service that I as a community mental health nurse can provide due to not being able to drive.”

This is not just backlog Britain; this is broken Britain. It is businessmen who cannot travel, businesses unable to recruit and mental health nurses unable to visit their patients.

Instead of the underlying problems being fixed—I am not talking about the short-term mitigation—what do we have? Threats of privatisation. At its heart, that is what this is all about: more private profit from the public purse going to the same people and, as I am sure none of us would be in any doubt, a yet more expensive and even poorer service for the people who depend on all these agencies.