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12,868 spoken contributions under 12 words (interjections such as “Will the hon. Member give way?”) are hidden. Show them
Does the Minister not accept that the schemes and programmes to do with the world cup—let us hope England stay in for as long as possible to help those businesses—are merely small sticking plasters? We need longer-term solutions for these industries that are much more sustainable.
It is a pleasure to follow my hon. Friend the Member for South West Hertfordshire (Mr Mohindra). In so many debates, we learn a little about colleagues on both sides of the House, and this one gives us the opportunity to reflect on the summer jobs that many of us had. I think back to my first job—this will probably show how old I am now.
I will take 21 any day. My first job paid the grand sum of 50p an hour. At the end of the week, when I got my pay packet—it was a pay packet in those days; there was no bank transfer—I felt quite wealthy. For the first time, I had a bit of money of my own; I could spend it on what I wanted, instead of having to ask the bank of mum and dad for money.
It really was, but it was more than that. It got me used to the whole mindset of going to work: getting up, being there for a certain time, and asking, “Is there anything else I can do?” My job was waitressing, and the usual pot-washing. Alongside that, when I was old enough, I learned how to pull a pint. My sister did the same, as did other youngsters from our village and the local towns. The employer was fantastic; he would pick up those who did not have transport and whose parents could not take them, and he made sure they got home as well. To me, that was a responsible employer. That job gave me confidence. I was forced to speak to people in a restaurant environment, and had to handle cash and bookings—really important skills. The biggest skill of all was feeling confident that I could go out and work. We talk about working people; I very much think that the Conservative party is the party of working people. We have outnumbered Labour Members in this debate. When I was growing up, there was always an expectation that we would go through education and then go out to work. If we wanted something, we worked for it. That was the way that we were brought up. Today’s debate has highlighted something quite sad: young people today do not have the same number of opportunities to get a summer job. This is about gaining not just money, but experience. I speak to so many employers, and have done for some time, about the importance of employability. Too often, I hear that employers small and large want to take on young people, but those young people do not have all the skills. That is not their fault; it is because they have not had the summer job, or a newspaper round or whatever, which helps that little bit when starting a job. We need to take a long hard look at the employment market, and we need to look at what has happened in the last couple of years. We have heard today that youth unemployment is running at 14.5% for 18-to-24 year olds, up from 12% in 2024. Youth employment for those aged between 16 and 17 is at a staggering 30%, up from 24.7%. I read that 700,000 graduates are out of work and claiming benefits. There is something wrong there. We encourage young people to go through education and to go to university, and then they struggle to find employment. That is partly because unemployment is high, but it is also because of the burdens being placed on our businesses. We talk a lot about large businesses, but often, the SMEs and the micro-businesses—the lifeblood of local communities and high streets that I have the pleasure of representing across Aldridge Brownhills—are being buried in red tape. They have seen employers’ national insurance hiked, they are being blocked from employing under-16s, and they are suffering as a result of high energy costs. Any business that we go to will talk about the hike in energy costs, and for an energy-intensive industry, that hike is particularly difficult. In my constituency, we have a lot of brick makers; in the west midlands, brick making and the ceramics industry are really important. Although Denby is not in my constituency, who does not like picking up a piece of Denby pottery and seeing “Made in England” proudly stamped underneath? We are losing those businesses, which means that we are losing opportunities for young people, the opportunity to grow our economy and develop more skills, and our manufacturing capability, which is important. We saw during covid how important it was to have sovereign, UK-based manufacturing capacity and capability when we needed to manufacture the critical covid vaccines. That surely should have taught us something. We have to build up more home-made skills. I also urge the Government to look at skills and opportunities for young people and, more broadly, at what skillset we need for today and for the future. We talk about the opportunities that artificial intelligence will bring, but it will also bring challenges to some sectors. The big question is: are we ready for that? I do not think that we have done nearly enough thinking to get us to that point. We have to do that now, to make sure that we are developing the right skills. For years, people who did an apprenticeship in engineering or plumbing were seen as not earning as much as the graduates who had been to university and got the high-tech jobs. There were also the toolmakers—[Laughter.] We can laugh about toolmakers, but in the west midlands there is a history of toolmaking. My point is that AI will not be able to replace all those skills. We need to look at what we need in future, and our education system—our schools, universities and colleges—need to make sure that we are all working together. Critical to that conversation is business, and not just big business. I come back to my point about small business. We started our business many years ago with something called enterprise allowance. My husband had an idea, and the enterprise allowance paid us £40 a week. It did not seem like much at the time but, my goodness, we felt that the Government were backing us to create an income, a living and a business. We need much more backing and confidence for our business community. It is time that we created a culture that supports businesses—one where “business” is not the bad word. Business is not bad. It is not bad to make a profit, because that profit is so often put back into the business, into employment and into the young people who, we all agree, we want to nurture and encourage, so that they can get into employment, get a job and a skill, and have a bright future.
I very much support the desire for the west midlands, like other places, to have consistency with mayoral authorities—but that is not what the Government are doing elsewhere. Take Cambridge: we have a metro mayor in Cambridgeshire and the Government have just announced a Greater Cambridge Development Corporation. That is on top of the Greater Cambridge Partnership, which also looks at roads, and on top of the county council, the district councils and the Oxford to Cambridge railway, which is another arm’s length body. Yes, it is right for WMCA to have clarity on what it is responsible for, but why is there so little consistency in areas such as Cambridgeshire, where residents find it very difficult to understand who is responsible for what, because more tiers of Government keep being added?
If this is an issue of practicalities, as we have heard, can we not assume that there might be common ground on the idea of withdrawing visas from those countries that will not take back their offenders? That would lessen the pressure to release as many prisoners as are projected to be released.
The hon. Member for Cambridge (Daniel Zeichner) referred to the use of solar panels on all sorts of buildings to provide shade, and we could include car parks in that. But what we should not be including is grade 1 agricultural land. Whether the Minister likes it or not, we have lost far too much agricultural land in east Kent already. It is not possible to farm under solar panels, and it is disingenuous to say that the land will be returned to agriculture in 30 years’ time, because the panels are mounted on concrete and we all know that that will never be ripped up. When is the Minister going to face reality?
In view of what my hon. Friend has just said, the constituents of Members across the House just want a clear undertaking that dangerous criminals—rapists and others—will not be set free. The Government have obviously dug themselves into a hole and have thrown in the towel this afternoon. We have a limited amount of time left before the summer recess. Is my hon. Friend in a position to say very clearly, for the benefit of those in this Chamber and outside, that the Opposition are willing to throw our weight in behind the Government if they will make the necessary amendments to win the time that they need to get this right?
There are people in the Gallery and in the public out there who want to know that dangerous criminals will not be released at the start of September. That is what they want to hear; we do not want to hear the history. We want an answer from the Minister. He heard the offer from the shadow Secretary of State in reply to my question. We are prepared to back the necessary legislation before the recess to put a stop to this. Is he prepared to take that offer—yes or no?
I am sorry to labour this point, but given the consensus that I think there is in the House this afternoon, and in the light of what the hon. Member for Liverpool Wavertree (Paula Barker) said, let me say this. By my reckoning, we have five working days, or a maximum of six, before the summer recess, and some potentially dangerous people are likely to be released in September. We can use the time that we have, and can work with the Government to get whatever is necessary on the statute book to address this issue in the short term, while we deal with the longer-term issue. Am I right?
I am a little puzzled by this excuse that offenders can always be recalled if they breach the terms. Presumably, a breach means that there has been a fresh victim of a crime, so it is rather pointless to give that as a reassurance. Does my hon. Friend know what proportion of the prison population is made up of serious sexual or other serious offenders? I cannot believe that it is such a high proportion that even if the prison system were utterly full, they could not release other inmates rather than such serious criminals.
I have a fairly simple question. Does the Minister have a clear idea of what categories he regards as constituting dangerous offenders, and if he does, what percentage of the prison population is made up of these people? If it is something like 10%, 15% or 25%, that still means that there are 75% or more of other categories of prisoners who could and should be released before those in that dangerous category are even considered.
By coincidence, last night, BBC Three rebroadcast the three-part series about the online predator Alexander McCartney, who was caught when a victim reported him. It turned out that he had groomed 3,500 victims online around the world. In one case in America, he caused a 12-year-old girl to shoot herself dead; he knew that she was threatening to do that. The programme ended with the chilling statistic that out of 3,500 victims, only four had actually reported him to the authorities. It was one of those reports that led to the end of this terrible campaign. Back in 2024, the programme revealed that he had been sentenced to life imprisonment, with a minimum term of 20 years. What do the people who saw that series think about the fact that it now appears that he might be out in a fraction of that time?
There is a perpetual uncertainty about this issue, as my hon. Friend describes, but at the heart of it is the distance between the popular expectation of what criminal justice should deliver, and what the Government are putting in place. I am not saying that this began with this Government—there is a more fundamental and existential problem—but, in the end, every time Governments do this kind of thing, people lose faith in the justice of the criminal justice system.
The hon. Gentleman is right: prisons were closed that, in my view, might have been kept open. Has he looked at those prisons to see if any of them could be brought back quickly into use? Clearly that would be much faster than building new prisons. Has he looked to other secure facilities that might be used as prisons? During covid, the Government acted quickly, passed laws and put Nightingale hospitals in place. Why can we not have emergency prison places rather than letting these dangerous people on to our streets to do more harm?
I am grateful to the Minister for giving way a second time—he is very generous—and for his kind remarks about my consistency. He also mentioned our differences, and I will explore those in greater detail in due course, with your indulgence, Madam Deputy Speaker. I wonder whether I can be helpful to the Minister. This matter seems to go well beyond party politics, because we have a crisis in prison numbers and this is an occasion on which we might find common cause and seek a way forward. Indeed, that offer has generously been made by those on the Opposition Front Bench, so perhaps the Minister, who I suspect is a rather decent man at heart, should take up that offer in the spirit in which it has been made, and see whether we can sort this out in a way that protects all our constituents from harm.
Disraeli, the great Conservative Prime Minister, said: “Justice is truth in action.”—[Hansard’s Parliamentary Debates, 11 February 1851; Vol. 114, c. 412.] When criminal justice deviates from what the public see as the truth, the faith in its delivery is undermined. People want to see that justice is done and seen to be done, and that punishments for wickedness are dealt with appropriately. I take a different view from the Minister about the character of a retributive approach to criminal justice, as I do think that retribution is an important part of satisfying a legitimate public thirst for appropriateness—that is to say, when something awful is done, people expect the person responsible for that horror to be treated accordingly. They do not take the view, which has prevailed for successive decades affecting all kinds of Governments, that we should, in the first place, treat the criminal as though suffering from an illness. The treatmentist approach has dominated thinking on criminal justice for most of my lifetime is out of tune with popular sentiment. The truth is that crime is not an illness to be treated; it is a perverse choice by those seeking to gain from it. That might be financial or, in the case of sexual crime, about lust. When we speak of wickedness, let us be straightforward: these kinds of instincts have been endemic in humankind since we fell from the state of grace, so we should not assume that people are not capable of the worst horrors—all of human history shows that they are. When that occurs, people expect those who exercise power to deal with it emphatically, without fear or favour. We need a criminal justice system that defends the innocent and punishes the guilty, and I make no apologies in making a case for punishment. People should be punished when they do awful, wicked things, so I want to see more people locked up for much longer. I do not think I am out of tune with my constituents, because I think they would say exactly the same. What we actually have is public policy that is taking us in exactly the opposite direction. We are seeing people sentenced and, as though that sentence is meaningless, then serving half of it. What is the purpose of a judge agreeing a sentence when the victims of the crime know that the person responsible for it will only serve half the time that the judge insists is necessary for punishment to be done? Early release will not just affect minor criminals; we have heard from Members across the Chamber that it will be applied to people of all types. When my right hon. Friend the Member for New Forest East (Sir Julian Lewis) asked for clarification about numbers, answer was there none. We do not know how many of those who will be released remarkably early are likely to pose a considerable danger to my constituents, the Minister’s and my right hon. Friend’s. I was not generous but accurate in describing the Minister as a decent man, and I think the least he owes us is, before the debate concludes—he can get a message sent to him from on high, by which I mean the Box over there, not from God—to be precise about the number of people in each of the categories that have been described today who will be released early. How many people convicted of manslaughter, how many child sexual offenders and how many rapists will now be on the streets as a result of this policy? The Minister has come to the House and said, “This is a matter of practicality because there are insufficient prison places to hold all those there.” We know that there are two reasons for that beyond the desire to lock people up. One is the number of foreign national offenders in our prisons, so let us have some clarity about the number of those who are being deported. Is the number increasing dramatically, and if not, what are the impediments to those offenders returning to their country of origin? Secondly, there are large numbers of prisoners on remand because the throughput of the courts is insufficient. How many people are on remand? How long have they been in prison? What steps will the Government take to improve the throughput in our court system that allows fewer of those people to be clogging up our prisons? We have to assume that some of them are innocent; not everyone who is on remand will later be found guilty, so there may be innocent people in prison, but we are going to let guilty people—we know they are guilty, because they have already been sentenced—free. That seems to me to be entirely inappropriate.
Not for the first time, the hon. Lady has brought both insight and character to our considerations. She has been consistent in raising this issue in the House. From the experience in Northern Ireland and elsewhere, we know the effects of early release: many of the people released early will go on to commit other crimes. The figures are really quite shocking. Official data shows that there were 870 notifications of serious further offences committed by released prisoners in 2024-25, including 56 murders and 107 rapes. When, from time to time, I make the case for capital punishment as a sentence available for the worst possible crimes, I am told that we could not possibly have that because we might make mistakes. However, we know that many people who have committed murder and subsequently been released have murdered again. Some of the people we are about to release will commit awful, horrible crimes. Not only will their victims be traumatised by fear, but crimes are almost bound to be committed by those people, in reality, notwithstanding the efforts of the Probation Service and the police, and that will be on the Minister’s head—I do not think he wants that, for he could not possibly defend it to his constituents. I do not think that that any Member of the House would be comfortable with the idea that a decision taken here might have that effect. I implore the Minister, as I did earlier, to speak to the shadow Minister to see if the House can come together to find a solution to the problem. I know it is not straightforward, and that other Governments have wrestled with it. None the less, this issue surely stretches beyond the party divide, and is one that we can all use our endeavours and our imagination to try to solve.
The hon. Lady is right. If you will allow me to digress for a moment, Madam Deputy Speaker, I am often asked by constituents—I imagine other hon. Members are asked the same question—“How on earth do you get on with people on the other side of the House?” I respond by saying that I get on with them just as well as I do with the people on my side when we come together to fight a battle, take up a campaign, or defend a cause that we believe is right and good. No party has a monopoly on wisdom. No Government get everything right. Governments make mistakes, as indeed do parties, and when we are big enough to acknowledge that publicly, we grow in respect; we are not diminished by it. The hon. Lady has grown today by her suggestion, and I hope that the Minister, too, will grow when he accepts it.
Before I deal with that directly, may I say that in championing the interests of victims, my hon. Friend has done the Conservatives and the whole House proud? He has a remarkable record of standing up for victims, having met victims’ groups and formed a connection with them that has rightly encouraged their trust. I always take his interventions on this subject seriously. He is right that there is space and an opportunity to have a mature discussion, not about where we have come from—that is pointless, as was said earlier—but about where we go from here. There are ways in which we could address the matter that would avoid our letting the most dangerous criminals on to the streets.
My right hon. Friend is right. The figures are stark: one in eight prisoners is a foreign national taking up valuable prison space. There are 10,376 foreign national criminals in our prisons today, which represents around 12% of the total prison population, and they cost almost £650 million a year. Absolutely, we should address the issue that my right hon. Friend raises; we should look at those countries that will not take back offenders, and at how obstacles might be overcome. That would relieve pressure on prison space and perhaps provide a way for the Government to confirm that they will not let violent offenders, child groomers and sexual offenders on to our streets.
My right hon. Friend is right. We are perfectly entitled to make that request of Government, as he has done in eloquent terms. It seems to me that the plan to release up to 6,000 criminals in September needs to be stalled, so that we can think again. There is a good argument for removing sex offenders, rapists, those guilty of manslaughter and those involved in grooming children from the list of those to be released. That is the least that could be done, and the opportunity is there to do it. If I may say so, the fact that a Member as senior as my right hon. Friend has made that suggestion should in itself carry significant weight.
As my hon. Friend will know, the Sentencing Act facilitated early release. Did we not ask then for clarity about what that meant, in the terms that he describes? What kind of criminals would be released? What damage might they do? What assessment had been made of the risk of this policy? It is not as if the Government were not pressed on all those things, but there has been a remarkable lack of clarity—for example, the Prime Minister said, “It is impossible to say who will be released, where and when.” Frankly, you cannot get less clarity than that, can you, Madam Deputy Speaker? We need to know that more innocent people will not be put at risk. The very least we should do is deal with the issue of serious sexual offenders and, in particular, those responsible for abusing children. I make no apology for quoting particular cases. Shabir Ahmed, the Pakistani ringleader of the Rochdale grooming gang, was freed despite warnings that he was “unsafe” to be released into the community. He was jailed for 22 years for 30 child rape offences. The parole documents that reveal that he was deemed unsafe for release into the community include his belief that it was “acceptable to sexually abuse children”. That is a chilling thought, and I know that decent people across this House, and across this country, will be shocked by it. A woman groomed and raped as a child by a friend of her family has appealed to the Government to abandon their plans to free him nearly two years early. Jade Belgrove waived her anonymity to describe the Government’s early release scheme as an “absolute disgrace”. Her case highlights that women and children are at risk from rapists and sex offenders who are freed early. She was raped aged 14. She deserves justice, if justice is indeed “truth in action”, as Disraeli said. I differ from the Minister on the purpose of criminal justice. I believe that the treatmentist perspective that has dominated for a very long time needs to be challenged; I believe that just retribution should be at the core of how we deal with the wickedness that I have outlined. However, let us put all of that to one side. Those are issues of principle, and although there may be differences of principle between us, the Minister did not come to the Chamber to advocate for a principle. He did not say, “We are doing this because of some high-minded view about how we should deal with crime”; he said, “We are doing this because we can do nothing else—because of practicalities.” Therefore, as we are dealing with practicalities, let us look at what can be done to fix the problem, and let us do so early, so as to find a solution to it before September. In doing so, let us broadcast a message from this House today that people need not walk in fear because dangerous people are going to be released on to the streets of their village, town or city; Parliament has said that that cannot be so. If we were to do that, public faith in Parliament would be a little stronger, a little restored. That is the request that I make of the Minister, because I stand by and for the people, having been chosen by the people to do so.
My hon. Friend has done a heroic job in highlighting the perennial problem in his area and beyond it. The reluctance to acknowledge that these grooming gangs were run largely by men of Pakistani origin is exacerbated when those very people, once caught and convicted, are released early. The lack of faith that was bound to come from that reluctance will now be exaggerated—doubled—when these people are let out of prison, where they ought to stay, probably forever.
My hon. Friend is making a powerful speech. It would be straightforward for the Government to issue a statement—a written statement would do, actually—on the back of this debate simply excluding the kinds of offenders that have been highlighted by a variety of hon. Members, and in particular by my hon. Friend the Member for Keighley and Ilkley (Robbie Moore). When the Minister winds up, she might confirm that the Government intend to issue such a statement, and we could then move on.
There are times in this place when a combination of popular sentiment and the power of argument become overwhelming. I have seen it happen whoever has been in government. At that point, it is important for Governments to change tack and, as I said earlier, Governments grow when they do so. It seems to me that those two things have been evident beyond doubt in this short debate. Will my right hon. Friend echo those calls made earlier to implore the Government to take a step back, think again and act quickly?
The concept of parole is age-old, but parole was based on merit; people were considered for parole if they were felt to be worthy of it. This is entirely different—this is about an automatic process, regardless of merit, and it flies in the face of both popular sentiment and natural justice.
It is always great to have the Minister at the Dispatch Box; we always have a lot of fun. I have had to juggle this issue myself, so I want to ask him a very important question: does he honestly think that making the starting rate for national insurance payments almost half the previous rate has no effect on part-time employment? Does doing so not discourage those who would like to give people starter jobs? It makes that much more difficult; surely that is the reality.
I have always thought that a zero-hours contract was a terrible name for what is actually flexible hours. There was always an ideological opposition to it, but in practice over two thirds of those who were on the contracts—adults as well, often with caring responsibilities—loved the idea of being able to work when they could but not having to do so when they could not manage it. That is the kind of flexibility that is necessary in an economy. It was loved by people in Europe, who wanted to do the same but never got around to it.
It is always good to speak with the hon. Member for East Renfrewshire (Blair McDougall) on the Front Bench. Were we discussing the threats that we face or the problems we have with China and the desperate way that they have undercut the market using slave labour, we would be on the same side of the House completely. My respect for him is enormous. However—[Laughter.] I do want to talk about today’s subject. I was not planning to say anything about summer jobs, but my first experience of one was in Italy, where I had been studying. I had gone to the coast to find a job. All I could find was a job working as a plongeur, as it were, in the dishwashing section of a restaurant. I was a useless waiter and got told to stop sitting down and talking to those who were eating, so I was sent back to the kitchen. During the evenings I had nowhere to stay, but I had managed to borrow a Fiat 600—an old one that I could start with the end of a teaspoon—and I drove it round to the car park and used to sleep in the back. It was wonderfully cheap but not exactly very comfortable. I am not quite sure what I learned from that—I did learn a few lessons, but I am not prepared to divulge them all here. Washing in the sea was one of them, though I have to say I am not sure how that has stood me in any good stead for the last few years. We will move on from that. We can overstate the lessons to be learned from a job, but being in work does teach young people about working to get a salary, turning up on time, as colleagues have said, and recognising that if they do not do so, the employer has every right to get rid of them. That is the key bit that we constantly talk to our families about. I want to come back to the problems that we face. When I was Secretary of State for Work and Pensions when we came to power in 2010, we had just had a huge, difficult recession. We had high unemployment, and we had to get that unemployment down. I say to the Government is that the cost of all their problems is not one issue alone—it is when they fail to realise the impact of one change after another on what is ultimately the most at-risk group. I agree completely with my right hon. Friend the Member for East Hampshire (Damian Hinds) that the most at-risk group is young people. When the Government make changes to employment regulation, add on costs and change people’s rights, it is always younger people who are the most affected. They are the easiest to move out of employment, and they are almost invariably the last ones in. They are also the most expensive to look after while they are in work—for a good reason. When I used to tour the jobcentres I spoke to young people who were there looking for a job. I used to ask, “What is the biggest hurdle that you face?” They would say that every time they go in front of an employer, the employer would ask them what experience they have in work. They would say, “I have no experience.” Then the employer says, “Well we cannot take that risk. I am looking for someone else, so you will not get the job”. As my right hon. Friend the Member for East Hampshire said, not only is it a marginal cost but it is also about the complete lack of experience and the risk that an employer takes on when they hire the younger person. The triple whammy of the national insurance charge, particularly on part-time work, the Employment Rights Act and the rise in the minimum wage are the vice that is squeezing this situation. Any one of those we probably could have got through, but to have all three of them hitting employment is the real problem that we face, and unemployment is the result. Youth unemployment at 16.2% is staggering. We used to pride ourselves on having a lower youth unemployment than the rest of Europe, but that is not necessarily the case now. The latest figures show us categorically that now have three times the NEET rate as the Netherlands has. The Netherlands is probably the closest type of economy to us in Europe; it is often quite flexible, and it often looks to the UK to import some of its flexibilities. The reality, therefore, is that the group who will suffer—they were always going to—is young people. Without that work experience, they will not go on to get that job they want—in fact, it is the job that they need—as a starter job. Turning to apprenticeships, an individual apprentice is now much more likely to get a full-time job and go on to earn more money than somebody who has studied at university. The collapse of the relationship between university and a brilliant career will fundamentally change the nature of who we are as a country if people who go to university with the promise that they would earn much more money than they would ever have to pay in debt then find that is a broken concept. That is a matter for both sides of the House. We must deal with it. I have family who are paying off debts. The astonishing interest rate on those debts has become staggering, and it is trapping them—they are unable to look at buying houses or anything else. That is the pressure on those people, and sometimes what they earn at work is not enough for them to be able to get by and do well. The Opposition’s motion, which I will come to, is really important. The point is that we have to make a change. The Government may want to have young people in work and want there to be those so-called Saturday jobs, but Alan Milburn says in his report that the “first rung has thinned. The clearest examples are the decline of the Saturday job…For earlier generations, these were…the routes through which young people first entered working life. They provided income, but they also helped young people build confidence, learn the habits of work and show employers what they could do. For too many young people now, those opportunities are weaker or have disappeared altogether.” We did not really need the Milburn report to know that—we knew what was going on—but his saying that must be telling for the Government. The Government have overstepped the reality. For example, zero-hours contracts were flexible and were liked by the vast majority of those who had them. Older adults—mostly those with caring responsibilities—liked the flexibility of being able to go to hospital appointments or take those with disabilities to hospital appointments one week, while on other weeks they could work, doing more hours to make up the money. That flexibility helped them. It also helped students coming out to do all the big jobs in entertainment, hotels and short-term affairs such as Wimbledon. It is travesty that the Government have tightened that up. They need to learn from this. I stress again that most people liked the idea of zero-hours contracts as they gave them flexibility in work that allowed them to get work experience, which they could sell when going to get a full-time job, as well as the chance to earn some money to subsidise themselves while doing other work, studying or whatever. It is astonishing that the Government have got rid of that. My party’s motion rightly mentions the astonishing high street business rates. We rightly talk about wanting to protect our high streets against competition from online retail and so on, and the majority of those part-time, small jobs are on the high streets. Those small businesses and shops need people to help them make their business grow, but business rates for some of the shops on the high street in my area have risen by 60%. It is unbelievable to think that a small business will be able to survive a 60% increase. That business has to make choices, which mean that not only can it no longer hire someone, but it has to lay people off—it can no longer keep them in employment. We have seen dramatic layings off and closures on the high street for the simple reason that people cannot afford to run their business.
It is all about throwing out the baby with the bathwater. I fully understand that the Government want to regulate some of that employment to ensure that people are protected, but the Employment Rights Act is so all-consuming and far-reaching that there is not just the cost—estimated at about £5 billion—for companies and businesses but the knock-on effect for those who need a job but can no longer be employed, as well as for those who would employ them but will have to close their businesses. Flexibility is critical in employment—it always has been. It has always been a case of, “What is the risk in hiring you? Do you have the experience? Can you do the job? Can I afford to pay you the wages? Do I have to do half that job for you as a result?” For small businesses, that is a real problem. The Employment Rights Act has been a real nightmare. The issue is not just that £5 billion cost but the way in which that impacts on economic growth. Regulating employment is not an isolated issue that does not affect anything else; it affects growth in the economy. I talked earlier about the triple whammy. With business rates alongside that, businesses face even higher costs and problems. They are being regulated a great deal, they do not have flexibility in employment, and they have to pay more. The third critical issue in our motion is the cost of energy in the United Kingdom, which is astonishing. We have the highest energy costs in the developed world—it could be said that we have the highest energy costs in the world as it is—and a huge amount of that is to do with the ridiculous helter-skelter drive to get to clean energy no matter what. We are now threatening businesses with fines—the car industry gets fines if the right cars are not produced—and energy costs are so high that businesses can no longer manage to manufacture goods here. We will need to manufacture goods when we need to spend the money that we do not have at the moment but will have to have for the defence industry. That is a manufacturing case, yet none of those industries says that it can afford to expand its manufacturing base because the cost of energy is so high. Those three things are critical. I therefore support the Opposition’s motion. I finish with one single fact. We have all been talking rather blithely about what we did in those summers and how we got our first jobs, but it is worth reminding ourselves that for the generation going through now, the flexibility, opportunities and ability to earn are far less than they have ever been. When we talk to our children, we discover how difficult employment is for them. We can talk to them about being able to earn the right money, about being able to pay for a house or about sky-high rents. This is a serious problem. If we want to face it and take it on, we should think of the old health dictum, “do no harm”. I say to the Government that when they pile those three massive burdens on to industry and the individual, they are doing great harm to those we need to protect. My advice to the Government is simply this: think again about the triple whammy and reduce the burden they have put on industries.
As Members of Parliament, we often go around our constituencies and talk to many of our constituents across the political spectrum, and the thing I always say is that the people who come to this House—not that we do not get things wrong, and not that we do not disagree—are doing so because they want to make a real difference to people’s lives. They want to make an impact. While we may sometimes disagree about how that is to be achieved, there are good intentions right across the political spectrum. When we face a situation such as the one we face today, it becomes so much more important that we do not act in a party political manner, but in a way that is in the best interests of those who have been hurt the most. We have all witnessed it. Every single one of us has seen constituents who have been impacted by the 7,000 letters that went out, informing them that the people who have done them harm will be released early. I cannot imagine how crushing that must be. This is not something that we have to sit idly by and just accept; it is something that we can genuinely change. The statistics have already been covered by so many others, but I must say that there is something fundamentally wrong when 62% of rapists and 83% of child groomers will be let off early. This is not about party politics; this is just about good judgment and doing the right thing. I understand that the Minister has been sent out by her absentee boss to make the argument. I know, because we have all been in that situation when we have been in ministerial office, where we are sometimes sent out to make arguments we do not feel comfortable with or are not necessarily happy making. I urge the Minister not to ignore the victims and the people who have been impacted by this legislation, but to take action. She can utter mild and inconsequential words at the Dispatch Box, but this means that victims are going to spend not just another day and not just another week, but multiple weeks, not knowing what is going to happen. As we go into summer recess, it will be week upon week without clarity, and that will erode their confidence and make them worry about the person who has done them so much harm. I urge the Minister to do what is right by the victims, against what is right by her absentee boss.
My right hon. Friend is absolutely correct. We have a moment of what I believe is cross-party unity, because behind the Minister, I believe that those on the Back Benches of the Labour party do not want the Government to go down this course. On the Opposition Benches, we do not want the Government to go down this course. We want to make sure that there is a solution that supports and protects victims—the people who Ministers said would be protected but who have not been as a result of the measures in the Sentencing Act. It is important to act. As has already been pointed out, there are acres of legislative time and opportunities. It is not as if the general debates that are pencilled in, as worthy, important and valuable as they are, could not be moved to facilitate the legislation and the votes in this House to get this corrected. I would say to the Ministers that they must not sit there passively acting as a shield for their absentee Secretary of State, who does not seem to care or be interested in the victims who are being impacted by his legislation—not our legislation, but his. Action is required, and if Ministers sit there and do not take the action that is required, they will be as guilty as the Secretary of State is for bringing such flawed legislation to the Floor of this House in the first place. Do not sit by as victims suffer. Do not sit by as people worry, stress and fear about what will happen to them in the weeks ahead, while the Labour party is going through internal trauma and is not providing a clear and direct way to help these victims. I implore the Minister to be bold, to act and to show some leadership, which has been completely absent from the Secretary of State.
My hon. Friend had a very important UQ here in the Chamber, and Mr Speaker himself asked that Ministers respond to Members of Parliament when they make requests for information about their constituencies. I followed Mr Speaker’s guidance and tabled those questions to the Minister as named-day questions. None of those has been answered, and it has been quite a number of days since the named day passed. Does my hon. Friend agree that the Minister should address these points and answer these questions as quickly as possible?
On a point of order, Madam Deputy Speaker. Could you advise me on whether the Minister, in summing up the debate, is meant to touch on the motion at hand? It seems to be being largely ignored at present.
I am just wondering if the Minister is looking forward to a new summer job at the end of July. Can he give us any confidence that the right hon. Member for Makerfield (Andy Burnham) has any new ideas to get young people into work? If he does, I am not aware of them yet.
The Climate Change Committee has condemned the Government for failing and falling short of adapting to climate change and accepting the reality as it is, which is that by the end of this century, global temperatures will have increased to between 3.5° and 4.5° above pre-industrial levels. What are the Government doing to adapt, rather than trying to prevent this from happening?
My hon. Friend will know that the right to guaranteed hours contained in the Employment Rights Act is of great concern to hospitality and leisure businesses. In Burnham-on-Sea in my constituency, they are worried that if they enjoy a period of good weather during which they engage more casual staff, followed by a period of poor weather when they have potentially very few customers, they will be compelled to offer guaranteed hours to those staff they have no need of. Does he share my concern that the right to guaranteed hours will prevent many young people from getting their first job this summer?
Does my right hon. Friend recall that when the Government put forward their proposals, they said that the most serious and heinous crimes would not be affected by the scheme? The reason we are in this position is that statements made at the Dispatch Box were, to put it mildly, inaccurate. In fact, very serious and heinous criminals will be released in September unless, as he suggests, the scheme is paused, and paused it should be.
Does my hon. Friend agree that in tackling the Crown court backlog, the Government were far too slow in uncapping the maximum number of sitting days for Crown court judges and that they are also wasting a great deal of time and effort in trying to curtail the right to jury trials, which will have no appreciable effect on the Crown court backlog? That is in fact wasting parliamentary time and civil service time on a reform that we know the right hon. Member for Makerfield (Andy Burnham) will most probably junk.