Covid-19: Economy Update

Tony Lloyd Excerpts

Thursday 22nd October 2020 Commons Chamber

[Rishi Sunak]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right, and I thank her for her warm words. She knows, as someone who is a huge champion of small businesses in her area, repeatedly bringing their concerns to this Chamber, how damaging it would be to inflict unnecessary pain and suffering on those businesses and those people’s jobs and livelihoods. That is why the Prime Minister’s and this Government’s approach of a regional, tiered strategy is absolutely the right one.

[Tony Lloyd (Rochdale) (Lab) [V]]

The Chancellor will recognise that, although the tier system is only a few weeks old, Greater Manchester has been de facto in tier 2 for three months, before moving into tier 3 this week. The Chancellor told the House, in reply to my hon. Friend the Member for Bradford West (Naz Shah), that these grants will now be retrospective. Can he be absolutely clear: will the grants for Greater Manchester go back to the beginning of our period of de facto tier 2 and not simply to when the Government introduced the more formal, legalistic tier 2?

[Rishi Sunak]

Yes, I can, and I hope I did, provide that reassurance. For all areas that have been suffering essentially de facto restrictions, as the hon. Gentleman said, we will backdate the grants through to the beginning of August as required, and that will benefit many local businesses in Greater Manchester. I am grateful for the representations I had on this matter from many colleagues around the House, including many of those I mentioned in my statement.

Spring Statement

Tony Lloyd Excerpts

Tuesday 13th March 2018 Commons Chamber

[Mr Hammond]

Creative industries is an increasingly important part of the UK economy, and one in which we have a significant comparative advantage, and the best way the Government can support the creative industries, apart from the obvious one of training and skilling, is through supporting the roll-out of digital technologies on which so many of the creative industries these days depend.

[Tony Lloyd (Rochdale) (Lab)]

The Chancellor’s constituency will have families on the national living wage, and I have many more. Does he agree with the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, which has demonstrated that a two-parent family with one working and two children will, because of tax credit cuts, be £450 a year worse off? That is not fair shares, is it?

[Mr Hammond]

The national living wage has given a pay rise of more than £2,000 a year to anyone in full-time work since it was introduced in 2015, and of course it is not just the national living wage; it is also the increase in the personal allowance, which means that people are now able to keep more of what they take home, and because it is an allowance, rather than a rate cut, it disproportionately benefits those on the lowest earnings.

RBS Global Restructuring Group and SMEs

Tony Lloyd Excerpts

Thursday 18th January 2018 Commons Chamber

[Mr William Wragg (Hazel Grove) (Con)]

I congratulate the hon. Member for Norwich South (Clive Lewis) on securing this debate. I was pleased to be a member of the Backbench Business Committee when his application came before us, because such debates show the House at its best.

I have a confession to make: I am a capitalist. But I am a capitalist who believes in a system that depends upon sound financial management. The dishonest practices and systemic mismanagement by RBS in this case fundamentally undermine capitalism. We know that the behaviour of the bank was wrong, both legally and morally, as reported and evidenced in the Tomlinson report and the FCA’s skilled person reports. The injury to individual businesses and the business banking system as a whole has been compounded by the system of redress, which is judged to be inadequate by many.

Like many hon. Members on both sides of the House today, I have constituents who have been affected by this case. Just one such example of malpractice was the forced liquidation in 1998 of Pickup and Bradbury Ltd, a company formerly owned by a constituent of mine, Mr Eric Topping. Pickup and Bradbury was a building and joinery company based in Stockport. It was a business customer of RBS and, like many other businesses, used an overdraft to manage its cash flow. In 1998, the overdraft was £345,000—not an unreasonable amount for a business of that scale—and the company had been happily trading and growing under that arrangement for several years. Then, in February 1998, RBS wrote to Mr Topping saying that it wanted to reduce the overdraft facility to £200,000 and, moreover, that the company owed the bank over £700,000—a figure that is still in dispute today.

Unable to operate under more restrictive conditions, the company was moved into RBS’s Global Restructuring Group, according to RBS, to help it to repay the money it owed. While under the administration of the GRG, the bank’s advisers consistently undervalued the company’s assets, while simultaneously overvaluing its liabilities, to support its claim the company was unviable and, in July 1998, it forced Pickup and Bradbury into receivership. The GRG engineered the fall of the company by demanding aggressive repayment plans and allowing insufficient time for company directors to appoint independent valuers to prove the worth of the company’s assets and its solvency. Mr Topping believes the difference between RBS figures and his own was around £2 million.

Knowing that time is short and that many right hon. and hon. Members want to contribute, I will move on from that case and put some questions to the Treasury Bench. A scandal such as this, just like LIBOR before it, is yet another reason why people and businesses lose faith in the banking sector. Faith in the banks is essential for faith in our whole capitalist system, which I have hitherto been proud to defend. This scheme was organised fraudulent asset stripping on a massive scale, leading to the forced liquidation of many businesses—companies that people had poured a lifetime of effort into and which were their livelihoods. In the case of my constituent and many others, those businesses were their nest eggs for retirement. RBS likely made billions from the activity, but how many lives and livelihoods did it crush in the process?

We on the Conservative Benches in particular rightly tell the country we stand up for hard-working people. Mr Topping, and hundreds of business owners like him, are just such hard-working people, yet they have had their assets stripped by RBS and now have very little to show for it. It is time that we stood up for them. I have some questions for my hon. Friend the able and newly appointed Economic Secretary to the Treasury. While Her Majesty’s Government have a controlling stake in RBS, what is he doing to ensure that the bank does the right thing by its former customers, both by the law and by the sense of common decency on which all civilised business ultimately depends?

[Tony Lloyd (Rochdale) (Lab)]

The hon. Gentleman is making an excellent speech, but may I ask him to widen his ambition? My constituent Derrick Cullen was the victim of Lloyds bank, so it is clear that the conspiracy was not confined to one bank, but was industry-wide— the lies spread across the industry. On that basis, the Government should do more than use their powers on a nationalised bank; the action must be systemic across the whole banking system.

[Mr Wragg]

The hon. Gentleman is right to highlight the broader practice in the banking sector. I have confined my remarks to RBS given that it was a constituency case, but he is absolutely right and perhaps draws on the work of the all-party parliamentary group on fair business banking and finance. I pay tribute again to the hon. Member for Norwich South and to my hon. Friend the Member for Thirsk and Malton (Kevin Hollinrake) for their assiduous work on that APPG.

The hon. Member for Rochdale (Tony Lloyd) is generous in allowing me an extra minute through his intervention, but I have only one more sentence to say to the Minister. I will put it as simply as this: what does my constituent have to do to get back the money that was stolen from him?

Oral Answers to Questions

Tony Lloyd Excerpts

Tuesday 16th January 2018 Commons Chamber

[Mr Hammond]

Membership of the European economic area, which EFTA would entail, involves under current rules compliance with the four freedoms, and that means free movement of people, which the British people rejected in the referendum in 2016.

[Tony Lloyd (Rochdale) (Lab)]

T5. With Carillion now the poster child for dodgy market capitalism, what duty does the Treasury owe to the wider public to prevent Government spending Ministers from engaging in inappropriate contracts, and what steps did the Treasury take?

[The Chief Secretary to the Treasury (Elizabeth Truss)]

We have very clear rules about managing public money. Let me point out to the hon. Gentleman that we are not bailing out this company. It has gone into liquidation, and we are taking the proper steps to protect public services, which is the right approach to take.

Oral Answers to Questions

Tony Lloyd Excerpts

Tuesday 24th October 2017 Commons Chamber

[Andrew Jones]

I will take that as a Budget representation. The basic point is that we are clearly very ambitious to unlock, through transport investment, both residential and commercial opportunity. That has been a feature of Government policies over the past few years, and I am sure that it will continue to be.

[Tony Lloyd (Rochdale) (Lab)]

In Cheshire and across the north, the reality is, as the Minister says, that infrastructure investment will unlock productive capacity. Does the Minister recognise that the disproportionate investment per head between the south-east and the rest of the country is unacceptable and must change?

[Andrew Jones]

The hon. Gentleman’s assessment is simply mistaken: Government investment is broadly equal across the different regions of our country. I highlight to him that the central Government investment going into the north during this spending period is £13 billion, which is a record in British history.

Oral Answers to Questions

Tony Lloyd Excerpts

Tuesday 18th July 2017 Commons Chamber

[Stephen Barclay]

My hon. Friend rightly champions that key sector which provides £71 billion of tax to fund public services. It is in the interests of the UK and the EU to avoid fragmentation because that will increase costs, and the Prime Minister has made it clear that we are ambitious, in terms of the trade deal that we reach with the EU, to come to an arrangement that delivers regulatory equivalence.

[Tony Lloyd (Rochdale) (Lab)]

Does the Chancellor accept that the confusion and conflicting ambitions of the Government’s policy on Brexit are already having an impact on investment? In the long run, that will be massively damaging to the economic prospects of this country.

[Mr Philip Hammond]

No, I do not accept that. However, I readily agree with the hon. Gentleman that, as I have said many times in the Chamber, the process of negotiating our exit from the European Union and then executing that exit is bound to create uncertainty, and uncertainty is always unwelcomed by business. The challenge for us is to secure as much certainty as possible as early as possible for business, and that is our focus.

Public Sector Pay Cap

Tony Lloyd Excerpts

Wednesday 5th July 2017 Commons Chamber

[Elizabeth Truss]

My hon. Friend’s great expertise as a former nurse is shown by the detailed question she has asked. We need to make sure that we reform public services and give people the opportunity to progress and be trained in the roles they fill. One of the roles of the pay review body is to look at such structures, as well as at rates of pay. During the processes they go through, those bodies certainly take evidence from frontline workers, unions and experts in the area, and I hope that they will take such issues into consideration.

[Tony Lloyd (Rochdale) (Lab)]

The Chief Secretary referred to productivity increases in the public sector. We recently saw firefighters racing into Grenfell Tower, paramedics and police racing into the Manchester Arena after the bomb, and doctors, nurses and other medical professionals working around the clock to save people’s lives. What advice would she give to her hon. Friends on the Government Benches about productivity increases by those people, who have served the people of this country?

[Elizabeth Truss]

Those firefighters, police and others in the emergency services have done a tremendous job, and I am sure we are all extremely grateful to them for regularly putting themselves on the line of danger. The hon. Gentleman is right to point that out.

What does productivity mean? I talked earlier about empowering people on the frontline to be able to make decisions and do things more quickly. When I talk to nurses and teachers, they sometimes say that they want less bureaucracy so that they can get on with the real jobs that they have been employed to do, and that is why more police are spending more time on the frontline. Productivity means giving people more job satisfaction—spending more of their time doing the job that they have come in to public services to do—and that is why we are reforming public services and seeing improvements.

Public Service Pensions

Tony Lloyd Excerpts

Tuesday 20th December 2011 Commons Chamber

[Danny Alexander]

I cannot give my hon. Friend a precise figure for the number of women workers who will benefit, but about 60% of the public sector work force are female, and all those people will benefit from the terms of the scheme. Unfortunately, women workers tend to be among the lowest paid at the moment, and tend to have steady rather than rapidly rising salaries, but they will particularly benefit from the scheme that we are putting in place under the agreement announced today.

[Tony Lloyd (Manchester Central) (Lab)]

I hope that the Chief Secretary to the Treasury’s remarks about reaching a settlement through negotiation will not have been lost on his colleagues on the Treasury Bench who were gagging for further industrial action. If he believes that negotiation is the right way forward, will he continue to talk to those unions that still need to resolve important points of detail in the interests of their members?

[Danny Alexander]

No one on the Treasury Bench wanted to see industrial action; in fact, the only people who seemed to welcome it were some of those on the Opposition Benches. Of course, we are talking about heads of agreement, and further fine details within each scheme remain to be resolved over the coming weeks. That process will continue to involve the unions, precisely as the process has done up to now. The agreement on the heads of terms is complete; that process is over, and this is the final position. On the question of the fine details, however, I can give the hon. Gentleman a positive answer.

Eurozone Crisis

Tony Lloyd Excerpts

Thursday 3rd November 2011 Commons Chamber

[Mr Hoban]

I think my hon. Friend would recognise that if a monetary union is to be successful, it requires closer fiscal integration. That is a precondition of the success of monetary union. When the decision was made to opt out of the Maastricht treaty and to keep sterling, one reason for doing so was that monetary union had to be underpinned by fiscal integration. One follows the other as surely as night follows day. That is why I think we were right to take that position then and we are right now to encourage the eurozone, if it wants the euro to be successful, to move towards closer fiscal integration. Frankly, if it does not, it will cause huge economic damage to all of us.

[Tony Lloyd (Manchester Central) (Lab)]

Is it not a matter of plain fact that the Government’s negotiating position and therefore the protection of our national interest is hamstrung because all the time this Minister and his colleagues have to address the Eurosceptics? Britain has got to be involved in these negotiations through the IMF and at Cannes. The Minister needs to face down his Eurosceptics and explain why, if the euro goes down, we lose.

[Mr Hoban]

I find the position adopted by Labour Members quite curious. They want us to be at the top table, yet they voted against the increase in our subscription to the IMF, so we would not be at the top table. I believe we have played an important role through European Councils by trying to push our eurozone partners to make progress on tackling problems in the eurozone. We are very clear that matters such as the completion of the single market, competition and financial services should be dealt with by all 27 member states, not by the 17. I believe that this Government are punching way above their weight.

Public Service Pensions

Tony Lloyd Excerpts

Wednesday 2nd November 2011 Commons Chamber

[Danny Alexander]

I am grateful to the hon. Lady for her comments. I sensed from our earlier discussions that the trade unions recognised that this was a constructive step by the Government. It is the best offer that is going to be on the table; I think it is important that it is understood in that sense.

[Tony Lloyd (Manchester Central) (Lab)]

Neither the Chancellor yesterday nor the Chief Secretary today answered the question about part-time workers—specifically about those earning less than £15,000 whose wages would be above that if they were working full time. Will the Minister tell us clearly whether those people will end up paying the 3% contribution? If so, he must understand why there cannot be an easy consensus on the issue.

[Danny Alexander]

As I said in answer to the shadow Chief Secretary, the proposals are on a full-time equivalent basis, which is exactly the way pension reform was carried out under the previous Government. Of course, the matter was open for discussion in the consultations about the first year’s contribution increases. We look forward to hearing the results of those consultations.