Achieving Economic Growth

Tanmanjeet Singh Dhesi Excerpts

Wednesday 18th May 2022 Commons Chamber

[Mr Clarke]

As I will set out during my remarks, we have to be very careful, in setting our tax and welfare policies, that we do not worsen the very problems we are trying to manage. That is an important dynamic that we have to hold in balance as we seek to set fair offers on all these subjects.

It is still little more than two years since the onset of the pandemic and, as the Prime Minister told the House this week, its impact has been enormous, with the largest recession on record requiring a Government response amounting to nearly £400 billion. As the House well knows, the Government moved heaven and earth to support our economy, doing things that only weeks earlier no one could ever have expected us to even need to do, and those efforts worked. Human nature being human nature, it is easy to take it for granted when disaster is avoided, but there was nothing inevitable about this. The House and this country owe my right hon. Friend the Chancellor our thanks for steering us through the situation in such strong condition. The challenges we face now are global in origin and impact. We are seeing inflation as a consequence of the unsteady and tentative unlocking of the global economy post-pandemic. One need only look at cities such as Shanghai to see how disrupted the global supply chains currently are. This is particularly concentrated in fields such as energy and food.

[Mr Tanmanjeet Singh Dhesi (Slough) (Lab)]

I am glad that the right hon. Gentleman is saying that the Chancellor and his Ministers are moving heaven and earth to help the good British people, but would he agree that certain individuals also moved heaven and earth to give out billions of pounds’-worth of crony covid contracts to companies connected to Tory donors and friends? Who could forget, for example, that 11 PPE contracts were dished out to a pest control company, and that £252 million ended up going not to a PPE specialist but to a company specialising in offshore and foreign currency trading? Does he agree that, had those individuals not moved heaven and earth for those particular companies, the good, hard-working British people would not be in such a predicament now?

[Mr Clarke]

It is important to set out a number of facts about this situation, because it is the subject of repeated misrepresentation. The first thing to say is that 97% of all PPE that was purchased by the Government was fit for use. Secondly, we obviously had to proceed at enormous speed, given the exigencies of the pandemic, to procure that PPE. Those on the Opposition Benches were leading the charge on that. To the hon. Gentleman’s point about some of the sources that were being advocated, I would remind him that the shadow Chancellor herself recommended that we sought PPE from a historical re-enactment clothing company as part of the proposed solution. The point I would make is that there was a desperate situation and we responded to it at pace. Where there has been fraud against the Exchequer, I am as clear as any Minister and any Member of this House that we should pursue it, and we are funding a dedicated taxpayer protection taskforce from HMRC with £100 million to do exactly that.

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[Mr Tanmanjeet Singh Dhesi (Slough) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Thirsk and Malton (Kevin Hollinrake). This marks my fifth Queen’s Speech in this House. In that relatively short time, we have had two Prime Ministers, Brexit, a global pandemic and now a brutal cost of living crisis, yet one fact has remarkably stayed the same: this Government’s inability to rise to the challenge. They have not risen to the challenges faced by ordinary Brits, and sadly this Government-drafted Queen’s Speech follows the same disappointing pattern and fails to grasp the severity of the situation faced by millions of people across our country.

At every turn, the absence of any real help is an insult to hard-working people. The experts are clear: more than 1.5 million British households will soon face bills for food and energy that will exceed their disposable income after housing costs. Inflation is now at its highest level for 40 years at 9% and is set to soar very soon to more than 10%. Alarmingly, growth is forecast by the Bank of England to be negative next year.

Beyond these statistics are people. Many Members have already eloquently highlighted the real-life struggles their constituents face, and sadly Slough is no different. I have had constituents tell me that they have been forced to cut down to one meal a day or wear extra layers of clothes in their own homes. What is stopping Ministers from acting, for example with a one-off windfall tax on energy companies? Instead of taxing big energy companies posting extra profits in the billions, the Chancellor is more intent on taxing ordinary people, who are now afflicted with the highest tax burden since the 1960s.

Even when people are in work, they cannot expect to be offered adequate protection. The Queen’s Speech was 874 words, yet there was not one mention of workers’ rights. There was no employment Bill, as promised in the Conservatives’ election manifesto. We live in a time when workers’ rights are more important than ever, with insecure work, inadequate wages and unscrupulous tactics from employers, but instead of taking action, Government Ministers go about telling workers to work more or to get another job and do not offer a decent pay rise. It is absolutely absurd.

Where the Government have decided to legislate, they have completely missed the mark. Their priorities are all wrong. On crime in particular, we have had four Queen’s Speeches and three manifestos, yet the victims Bill still exists only in draft. That is of little use to the thousands of victims of crime unable to benefit. Crime is up and prosecutions are down to record lows. The number of arrests has dropped by 35,000, but victims and communities such as mine are still suffering. This Government have made huge cuts to Slough’s local youth services funding, made a real-terms cut to school budgets and cut community safety funding by 40% by 2024, even though our crime rate is 28% higher than the rest of the south-east and 27% above the national average. This Queen’s Speech offers nothing to address all that.

On housing, despite almost 1 million more people now living in private rented accommodation, it has taken this long for us to see the renters reform Bill. Although there is slow progress in some areas, there is no word on the promised 300,000 homes to be built every year by the mid-2020s, a lack of detail on the decent homes standard, and no mention of the lifetime deposit. Frustratingly, five years on from the deadly Grenfell tragedy, far too many of my Slough constituents remain trapped in flats with unsafe cladding and fire safety defects, with no end in sight.

This Queen’s Speech simply fails to address the problems that ordinary people up and down our country face, because Government Members do not fully understand the everyday realities of hard-working people. Where is the ambition to decarbonise our economy and our public transport system, to insulate our homes and to accelerate the transition to renewables? Where are the annual rolling programme of rail electrification, annual targets for more rail freight, and huge investment in green industry jobs? What are a Government for if not to protect people?

Privatising Channel 4 over helping families with household bills, street referendums for extensions over investing in youth services, arguing over what human rights to scrap instead of delivering a properly funded state pension—this Queen’s Speech was written by a Government who are out of touch and out of ideas. I implore Ministers to see what is so plainly happening around them and to do something to help the millions of struggling Brits. If they will not address the serious issues facing our country, they should step aside for those of us who will.

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[Mr Rees-Mogg]

That is particularly good news. It is welcome that Northern Ireland, where there are difficulties over the protocol, is seeing genuine benefit from our free trade agreements.

I wish to make a point about fraud, which was an issue raised during the debate. Two years ago, it was of fundamental importance to get money out to businesses quickly. That was the right thing to do and it was supported across the House. It is now right to follow up to make sure that all that money was used honestly, and that if people did not use it honestly, they are subject to proper processes. So £750 million of taxpayers’ money is being committed to following up on fraud. We are setting up a public sector fraud agency and we are working with the banks, who own the loans, to ensure that the bounce back loans are repaid properly and honestly. But it was right to get the money out quickly two years ago and everybody wanted to do it.

[Mr Dhesi]

Does the Minister think it was right for more than £4 billion to already have been written off as unrecoverable fraud? Does he also think that the Minister who resigned at that point in time, on a matter of principle, was wrong to resign?

[Mr Rees-Mogg]

I would correct the hon. Gentleman, as the money has not been written off. In addition, Lord Agnew has been in touch with me, and I have spoken to him and been seeking his advice on how to ensure that our anti-fraud efforts are as effective as possible. He highlighted the issue very effectively. May I also thank the hon. Gentleman for his contribution, along with the hon. Members for Bolton South East (Yasmin Qureshi) and for Paisley and Renfrewshire South (Mhairi Black) for theirs? In my humble opinion, they are three of the most sensible and civilised Opposition Members, but I think they decided that the Queen’s Speech was an occasion for them as it is for the heralds: they put on their tabards and their fine show in order to have a theatrical display, rather than to say something that they normally say, in well-rounded and moderated tones. All three of them went to the wildest fantasies of excessive criticism of the Government.

[Mr Dhesi]

rose—

[Mr Rees-Mogg]

I have already given way once. As I was saying, it was splendid but it was not really what the debate was about. I admire the heralds as well. They are a great addition to the state opening and I hope that the three of them will make this a traditional part of Queen’s Speeches in future, being able to over-egg the pudding when it comes in front of them.

I have a feeling that you, Mr Deputy Speaker, and the many others who are now assembling for the vote may be glad to hear that I am coming to my—[Hon. Members: “Hear, hear!”] It is so easy to win cheap popularity. The Government see this post-Brexit world as an historic chance to seize the opportunity for innovation and regulatory reform now that we are free of Brussels diktats. Our future is one of innovation and enterprise, spurred by competition. Following the end of the transition period and the beginning of the UK’s new trading relationship with the EU, many businesses have prepared for and adapted to the new environment. It has been a period of change made all the more extraordinary by the need to tackle a global pandemic at the same time.

The cost of business regulation is too high. Too much EU regulation has been written at the expense of consumers and entrepreneurs with new ideas. Many of the EU’s regulations—such as Solvency II or the rules on general data protection regulation—benefit big incumbents rather small competitors and deprive consumers, including Members of the House, of new technologies or better products and services.

Our future is in building on our competitive advantage as a knowledge economy. Our success will be based on the quality of our ideas, on working hard to turn those ideas into new industries, on reforming and enhancing our old ones, and on exporting those ideas. Now that we are outside the EU, we have the opportunity to think boldly, to conceive and implement rules that put the UK first, and to get rid of things—the nonsense, the folderol, the port services directive and such like—that do not help or benefit us.

We are going to have a Brexit freedoms Bill that will make it easier to get rid of bad EU law. It will be deregulatory in principle, remove the supremacy of EU law and ensure that our statute book is one of Scottish, English, Welsh and Northern Irish law, rather than one of EU law. Even the leader of the Scottish National party in Westminster, the right hon. Member for Ross, Skye and Lochaber (Ian Blackford), is looking chirpy at the thought of having that degree of control.

Our Procurement Bill will make life easier for small businesses. I think it was my hon. Friend the Member for Thirsk and Malton who said in the debate that small and medium-sized enterprises are the lifeblood of our economic activity. They are the ones that create the jobs, defeat the monopolists and help to bring down prices.

Ultimately, there is a clear choice on this Queen’s Speech. It is a choice brought into sharper relief by the inflation that we currently face and a choice faced by previous generations in this House and in this country: do we wish to go down the false path of socialism? Do we want to follow the hon. Member for Leeds West with higher taxes, higher regulation and wasteful spending? Or do we want freedom and liberty and enterprise? I commend freedom, liberty and enterprise.

Question put, That the amendment be made.