Business of the House

Tommy Sheppard Excerpts

Thursday 18th June 2020 Commons Chamber

[Mr Rees-Mogg]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for raising an important question. Many of us represent constituents who have worked for British Airways and given long service over many years, and there are concerns about the way that they have been treated. This matter has quite rightly been brought before the House under an urgent question, and I think could be debated next week in the Petitions Committee debate relating to support for UK industries in response to covid-19. The matter clearly comes under that heading, so the debate will be available.

I note the point that my hon. Friend makes about the quarantine regulations, which of course are for a period and will be reviewed. The issue of safe countries is being looked at, as the Foreign Secretary said on the wireless this morning.

[Tommy Sheppard (Edinburgh East) (SNP) [V]]

First, may we have a debate on how the fiscal framework within which the devolved national Administrations operate should be changed to improve their capacity to deal with the current pandemic and its aftermath?

To date, the Scottish Government have spent more than £4 billion on covid-19. Most of it will be funded through Barnett consequentials, but several hundred million has had to be diverted from other priority spending. For the UK Government, that would not be a problem, as they can overspend if necessary and borrow unlimited amounts to cover the cost. Neither of those options are available to the Scottish Government under the fiscal framework. I hope the Leader of the House will agree that when the framework was devised, no one had in mind the need to cope with a crisis on this scale. On Tuesday, four out of the five parties in the Scottish Parliament united behind a call for additional fiscal responsibilities. Their motivation was practical, not ideological. When can we discuss this Parliament’s response to that call?

Sticking with responses to coronavirus, we have discussed previously how the crisis sadly brings out the worst in some people, and we now hear that companies such as BA are intending, under cover of the pandemic, to execute mass redundancies and then hire back fewer people on worse pay and conditions. My hon. Friend the Member for Paisley and Renfrewshire North (Gavin Newlands) has launched a Bill, with cross-party support, to outlaw such Dickensian employment practices. It would be an easy matter—would it not?—for the Government either to make time to discuss that Bill or to bring forward proposals of their own.

         Finally, I return to the matter of voting during the current emergency. It seems the Government are determined to do just about anything to stop Members voting remotely, including introducing new technology, as we have seen this week. Why do they not stop messing about and do the common sense thing by switching the e-voting system back on: a tried and tested system that not only allows Members who cannot attend to vote but makes it much safer for those who are on the premises?

[Mr Rees-Mogg]

To take the last point first, voting was carried out using parliamentary passes very effectively last night and with a proxy scheme that means that people can be present in the House. I think my hon. Friend the deputy Chief Whip voted for more than 40 Members of Parliament, and a similar figure was true for a leading Whip on the Opposition Benches. There are advantages for the Whips in the scheme, but it ensures that people are able to express their views, and that we have Parliament back, which means that we are getting the work done.

We have four Bill Committees up and running. We are working through the legislative programme, which we committed to doing in the manifesto. The British people expect us to be back at work. We are leading by example, and it is right that people are back, and that we have made provision for people who cannot be back. In that context, private Members’ Bills will be coming back in early July. That will be the opportunity for the hon. Member for Paisley and Renfrewshire North (Gavin Newlands) to introduce his Bill, so that it can be considered in the normal way for private Members’ Bills.

As regards money, £3.7 billion has gone from the central Exchequer to the Scottish Government—their share from the extra expenditure in relation to the coronavirus—so the funds that are going through are very substantial. Of course, part of the devolution settlement is that the Scottish Government have discretion regarding how they spend money and what they spend it on, and they have to work within that discretion.