Local Services: London Suburbs
Debate between Stewart Hosie and Jake Berry(4 years, 10 months ago)
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Stewart Hosie (in the Chair)
It is a half-hour debate, so I call the Minister to respond.
The Minister for the Northern Powerhouse and Local Growth (Jake Berry)
If the hon. Member for Putney (Fleur Anderson) wants to speak briefly, I will make my response quick.
Stewart Hosie (in the Chair)
In that case, I call Fleur Anderson to make a very short speech.
Local Government Reform: Greater London
Debate between Stewart Hosie and Jake Berry(6 years, 2 months ago)
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Westminster Hall is an alternative Chamber for MPs to hold debates, named after the adjoining Westminster Hall.
Each debate is chaired by an MP from the Panel of Chairs, rather than the Speaker or Deputy Speaker. A Government Minister will give the final speech, and no votes may be called on the debate topic.
This information is provided by Parallel Parliament and does not comprise part of the offical record
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government (Jake Berry)
Perhaps the hon. Gentleman will take this opportunity to express the Scottish Government’s view on the devolution of powers that are currently held in Holyrood to towns and cities of Scotland. I am sure the people there would like to take control of their lives and have proper devolution from Holyrood to other areas of Scotland—
Stewart Hosie (in the Chair)
Please stay within the context of the debate, which is rather narrow.
Stewart Hosie (in the Chair)
Order. Now the politics are out of the way, I am sure we will get back to local government reform in Greater London.
Jake Berry
Well, of course the GLC was in league, through the Militant movement, with Derek Hatton’s Liverpool Labour party. It is worth focusing on the GLC. The hon. Member for Oldham West and Royton (Jim McMahon) parades the veneer of a gentle left—of herbivorous, lentil-munching, north London lefties—but the people of Liverpool and those who lived under the GLC know what the hard-left Labour party is really like. Labour councillors went around Liverpool handing out 30,000 redundancy notices to the people who worked in that city. As someone from Liverpool, let me take the opportunity to say that we will never forget that we could not get our bodies buried or our bins emptied. That is what the hard left of Militant and Momentum does to cities.
Amendment of the Law
Debate between Stewart Hosie and Jake Berry(12 years, 9 months ago)
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Jake Berry
The hon. Gentleman is being extremely generous in giving way. Before I came to this place, I worked in a law firm. We had three offices—one in Manchester, one in Liverpool and one in London. We all did the same job, but we were all paid different salaries. Does the hon. Gentleman think that that was wrong?
Stewart Hosie
That was in the private sector. I am sure that the hon. Gentleman would say that he would negotiate his own wages or join others in a union to negotiate wages. We are talking about public service. If the hon. Gentleman’s attitude is the same as that of his party’s Front Benchers, he will seem to be saying that a public servant in Dundee or Dudley is not worth the same as a public servant doing the same job in Dartmouth. That would be worrying.
The real actions needed to kick-start the economy were almost wholly absent from today’s statement. The limited action on bank lending was announced yesterday and we have heard many of the promises before. I hope that the national loan guarantee scheme works, but to ensure that it does can we have transparency? Can we disaggregate the numbers so that no sector and no part of the UK is sold short in respect of that additional covered lending?
There was no specific action to get people to work or keep them in their jobs. Nowhere is that issue more important than with young people. The introduction of a national insurance break to help employers take on youngsters who do not meet the criteria for the Work programme would have been very welcome, but that was missing.
Shamefully, there was no action on direct capital investment, the most important thing that any Government can do. I am surprised that those on the Treasury Bench did not listen when the OBR said in 2010 that the impact multiplier for direct investment was 1:1, that for tax cuts it was 1:0.3 and that direct capital investment was three times more important and three times more beneficial at creating GDP growth than tax cuts. The Government even kept the squeeze on the very businesses that we need to create the growth. There was no change to the miserly annual investment allowances and that was a shame.
The Chancellor said that the Budget was fiscally neutral. To pay for his tax cut for the rich, he is squeezing the cash for services for those who need them most. When one considers that the total cost of the fiscal consolidation by 2015-16 will be £155 billion, that year and every year after that, and given a ratio of 4:1 spending cuts over tax increases, we can see where the priorities of the Government lie—not with people, not with jobs and not with growth.