Oral Answers to Questions
Tulip Siddiq Excerpts(1 week, 6 days ago)
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John Grady (Glasgow East) (Lab)
Tulip Siddiq (Hampstead and Highgate) (Lab)
Mohammad Yasin (Bedford) (Lab)
Seema Malhotra
I thank my hon. Friend for his question and I completely agree with him. Indeed, I also attended a wonderful interfaith iftar in Hounslow on Friday. Islamophobia is completely abhorrent and has no place in our society. No one should ever be the victim of hatred because of their religion or belief. The Government have established a new working group to provide the Government with a definition of anti-Muslim hatred and Islamophobia, and advise the Government and other bodies on how best to understand, quantify and define prejudice, discrimination and hate crime targeted against Muslims.
Tulip Siddiq
I thank the Minister for her commitment to mandatory ethnicity pay gap reporting. However, I was disappointed to learn that the Financial Conduct Authority and the Prudential Regulation Authority are rowing back on their proposals to boost diversity in financial services. I feel that risks pushing away the very best talent from the sector. Only 4% of financial services firms disclose their ethnicity pay gap. The announcement will only slow the pace of change that is needed to tackle inequalities. Does the Minister agree that initiatives that aim to reduce the ethnicity pay gap are not anti-growth, but pro-talent and pro-growth?
Seema Malhotra
Fair and equal treatment at work is a right, not a privilege. Companies like Deloitte, which I visited recently, are reporting voluntarily on their ethnicity pay gaps, and I have attended roundtables chaired by organisations such as Change the Race Ratio and ShareAction, which promote the benefits of ethnicity pay gap reporting. There has been progress; last week, the Parker review showed that there is an increasing number of ethnic minority board members in our FTSE companies. I agree with my hon. Friend that pay gap reporting can help employers to identify and remove barriers to progression for their workforces, and unleash talent from all our communities, thereby supporting economic growth, and I thank her for her work on this.
Oral Answers to Questions
Tulip Siddiq Excerpts(2 weeks, 6 days ago)
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The Prime Minister
Everyone should be equal before the law, and that is why the Lord Chancellor has taken up the issue with the Sentencing Council, but the hon. Gentleman needs to do his homework. The proposal that he complains about was drafted in 2024, and the last Government were consulted. When they were consulted, what did they say? They said they welcomed the proposal. I understand that the shadow Justice Secretary, the right hon. Member for Newark (Robert Jenrick), is taking the Sentencing Council to court. Perhaps he should add himself as a second defendant, so that he can get to the bottom of all this.
Tulip Siddiq (Hampstead and Highgate) (Lab)
The Prime Minister
I thank my hon. Friend for raising the subject of those deeply concerning reports. It is completely unacceptable for anyone to experience racism, discrimination or prejudice in the health service, and I know that my right hon. Friend the Health Secretary takes such reports extremely seriously, because it is a fundamental principle that the NHS provides care and treatment for everyone, regardless of race, faith or background.
Ukraine
Tulip Siddiq Excerpts(4 weeks, 1 day ago)
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The Prime Minister
I do understand the right hon. Lady’s concern. As I explained to the House last week, the decision on defence was not one I wanted to take, but the defence and security of Europe required us to take it. On the fiscal rules, economic stability is vital. If we lose that, we will lose far more out of all our budgets. I will work across the House, in whatever ways we can, to increase development aid, notwithstanding the budgetary constraints. I spoke to the president of the World Bank on Friday to have that very discussion. Those discussions are to be had with other countries and institutions, and innovation and discussion across the House would be a valuable part of that exercise. The principle behind her question is the right one: we must support international development and aid.
Tulip Siddiq (Hampstead and Highgate) (Lab)
My constituency has welcomed hundreds of Ukrainian refugees into the community. I pass on their thanks to the Prime Minister for the strong leadership that he has shown over the past few weeks. The majority of these Ukrainians want to go back to their country when it is safe to do so, but a small minority of young Ukrainian refugees have approached me to say that they have laid down roots, built careers and started relationships here, but have no route to settled status. What consideration has the Prime Minister given to the lives of these young Ukrainians who want to make London their permanent home?
The Prime Minister
My hon. Friend is my MP neighbour, and I remember that together, we saw some of the first Ukrainian refugees arrive in her constituency in the very early days. Obviously, we need to take this step by step, dealing with the conflict that it is. Many will want to return; some may not, but we are not, unfortunately, at the happy place where those who want to return can return. That has to be the first priority.
Storm Éowyn
Tulip Siddiq Excerpts(2 months ago)
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Pat McFadden
Let me echo what the hon. Gentleman says about different parts of the community who opened their doors to help their neighbours—he is absolutely right about that. On the Northern Ireland Executive, I actually want to pay tribute to the role played by the First Minister, the Deputy First Minister and the Executive in recent days. As I said, we believe it was the worst storm to affect Northern Ireland since 1998 or thereabouts. This is an emergency and a time when people in different parts of the country should pull together. I was very happy to chair a Cobra meeting and do whatever else—other calls over the weekend—to make sure that we got as much help to Northern Ireland as quickly as we could to where it was needed. I will continue to do that over the next few days.
Tulip Siddiq (Hampstead and Highgate) (Lab)
Whether our constituencies are rural or urban, the destruction that we saw last week should remind us of the need for urgent climate action. In the summer of 2021, my constituency experienced an extreme rainstorm, and homes in south Hampstead were invaded by water and raw sewage. One of my constituents, a recovering stroke victim, was left on the street with nothing but a small bag of belongings, and is now homeless. The same area was flooded in 2002 and in 1975, but no drainage improvements have been made. Can my right hon. Friend, who knows my constituency well, confirm that drainage infrastructure will be included in the Government’s resilience review?
Pat McFadden
I can certainly confirm that the risk of flooding and extreme weather events will be covered in the review. It is important that we publish a national risk register that is updated constantly: we published our latest version just 10 days ago. As climate changes—and, indeed, as terrorism and other threats change—it is especially important, when we are considering resilience and how we should prepare and protect the country, that we are not caught in the past but look to the way in which the world is changing.
Income tax (charge)
Tulip Siddiq Excerpts(5 months ago)
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Sir Bernard Jenkin
I am not going to give way any more. We need only look around the world to see that the idea that an ever-larger state makes the people richer is confounded by economic experience, otherwise the richest countries in the world would be those with the biggest state. It is businesses and free enterprise that generate the wealth that pays for the public services we need.
We can all recall Milton Friedman’s four ways to spend money. There is people’s own money that they spend on themselves: they think about it, spend it very carefully and make sure they get the maximum value for money. There is money that people spend on other people, such as when they buy a present: they may want to keep the cost down and may not be sensitive about whether the person really wants a particular gift or not. There is somebody else’s money that people spend on themselves: when people use expense accounts, they go on the most expensive aeroplane or get the biggest car their company will pay for. Finally, there is somebody else’s money that is spent on other people: that is what Governments do. It is a reality that Governments are the worst allocators of resource for ensuring future wealth creation. That is just a fact.
The record will always confirm that if we want to create more wealth, the smaller the state can be, the faster economic growth will be and the more we can afford to then spend on public services. This Government are profoundly un-strategic—just look at what the OBR says about investment:
“Tax rises in this Budget weigh on real incomes, so private consumption falls as a share of GDP”—
that means people are going to be getting poorer. It continues:
“Corporate profits are expected to continue falling as a share of GDP in the near term”.
It adds that
“business investment falls as a share of GDP as profit margins are squeezed, and the net impact of Budget policies lowers business investment.”
Is that good for the British economy? I submit not.
What about debt? If someone has too much debt, the one thing they should do is not borrow more money, if they want to get out of a debt trap—[Interruption.] Members on the Government Benches have surgeries attended by people who are in debt. The one thing hon. Members will tell them not to do is to stack up more debt, but that is what the Government have chosen to do. That is not a long-term policy.
Finally, what about GDP? I take no pride in saying that growth in GDP has been struggling for a decade or more—
Sir Bernard Jenkin
Yes, I do not think we did enough to dynamise the British economy. We did not do enough, but I was very grateful for the support of the Liberal Democrats for the first five years of the Conservative Government. That helped us to keep public expenditure under better control so we could begin that process.
GDP per head has really been flatlining. We are falling significantly further behind the United States, but what are the trends? On these trends, we will be overtaken by Poland by 2030 in terms of GDP per head. What are this Government doing to address the real long-term trends? Let us look to 2050. What is the shape of public expenditure going to look like in 2050? This Budget does not begin to address that. What will be our national debt on a long-term basis? What is happening to our demographic, including the ageing population and the ratio of people in work and out of work? What are this Government doing to address that trend and to address the immigration trend, because that is adding to the cost of our economy?
How will we be able to increase defence spending? The Chief of the General Staff has recently said that this country could well be directly involved in a war within the lifetime of this Parliament. We will have to spend more on defence, as well as controlling the rest of the public sector. It is many decades since health, education and welfare started swamping out every other kind of expenditure in the Government. If we are to survive as a country, we will have to address these very damaging long-term trends.