Showing every spoken contribution, including 5,731 under 12 words. Hide short remarks
The Minister mentioned that there is no set budget, so is this a blank cheque for Government spending? What will be the end point? Is this a white elephant, a black hole or just another project that will fall by the wayside? Why are the Government having a people’s panel when we have Parliament, and when people across the county are saying that they do not want digital ID?
Will the Lord Chancellor give way?
Will the Lord Chancellor give way?
Over 50% of properties in the Scottish Borders are not on the mains gas grid and are completely dependent on heating oil. They are being hammered by the increase to the price of heating oil over the last week or so, and they need to see concrete action from this Government to stop the excessive prices and the profiteering. What are the Government going to do?
5. Whether she has made an assessment of the potential impact of the Office for Budget Responsibility's growth projections for 2026 on future departmental spending levels.
Given that the Chancellor has pencilled in 0.3% real-terms growth in public spending in 2029-30, and assuming that health spending is at its historical average, the special educational needs and disabilities spend is as per the proposals, and defence is at 3%, that will leave a 2.5% real-terms cut in unprotected Departments. What plans do the Chancellor and Chief Secretary to the Treasury have to fill that £13 billion gap in the 2029-30 envelope?
Will the hon. Member give way?
The Chancellor promised in her first Budget that she would not extend the freeze on income tax thresholds, because it “would hurt working people. It would take more money out of their payslips.”—[Official Report, 30 October 2024; Vol. 755, c. 821.] In her second Budget, the Chancellor broke her promise with a £23 billion tax rise, bringing a million more people into paying higher rate tax. When people are set to struggle with the cost of living over this Parliament, why are the Government choosing to make their lives harder?
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Alec. The role of goods vehicles, whether heavy or relatively light, is critical to our economy. We know that the transportation of goods and logistics contribute billions to the UK’s GDP, yet they are often a forgotten element of our economy. In principle, therefore, I cannot object to measures that reduce the cost of doing business and that ensure that those using goods vehicles are not unduly burdened by the Government’s policies on electric vehicles. It would be a preposterous endeavour for the Government to encourage and mandate the use of electric goods vehicles and then to proceed to keep in place rules that would prevent them from carrying the same quantity of goods as their internal combustion engine equivalents. In addition, it is important to be proportionate when considering MOTs and driver hours. If we place too great a burden on individuals, without any demonstrable safety benefits, that places a cost on business that is not in the spirit of how the rules are drafted. However, we must acknowledge the context of these changes. They are not merely attempts by the Government to make proportionate changes to the regulatory burden to help business; they are against the backdrop of an initiative to move all drivers to electric vehicles. In the car market, with fleet sales put to one side, we have seen a stalling of electric vehicle demand, and market share even decreasing, with a Government mandate in place. Furthermore, the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders has highlighted that in 2025, despite small increases, battery electric van demand remained well below mandated levels, with the steep 2026 ambition set by the Government requiring urgent review. In that context, it is understandable that the Government are trying to pull every lever they can to try to stimulate demand, but at what price? Appropriately—the Minister mentioned this in his opening speech—the Government talked in their impact assessment about ensuring that there is no negative safety impact. In addition, it makes sense to monitor matters such as roadworthiness test failure rates. Nevertheless, when discussing direct and indirect costs in the impact assessments, the Government seem to have forgotten that the policy’s overall impact is to increase the weight of vehicles. Road damage increases exponentially with axle weight, and it would be a mistake not to recognise that this broader change, which encourages heavier vehicles, is unlikely to come without a cost to our roads. We need the Government to have a comprehensive understanding of whether these heavier vehicles could have any impact on road safety. I am not pretending that this statutory instrument on its own will alter our roads, but it is part of a broader trend where the Government have acknowledged that there will be heavier vehicles. Are the Government therefore making a broader assessment of the impact of this change on road surfaces? What assessments will they make? Furthermore, I hope the Minister can answer some specific technical questions on ensuring that the changes are practical. The specific changes to tachograph requirements will cause a divergence, and the Minister spoke in his opening remarks of the impact on Northern Ireland. I would be grateful if he could say more on the discussions the Department for Transport has had with officials in Northern Ireland to mitigate any impact, ensuring that we operate as one country—one United Kingdom—and one economy. Lastly, it is important that the Government retain the power to alter rules relating to matters such as road safety. When discussing aviation safety secondary legislation in September last year, I raised with the Government the impact of the expiry of the Retained EU Law (Revocation and Reform) Act 2023. At that time, they responded that they would have until the middle of this year. As we are fast approaching that point, do the Government truly have a plan for what they will do, as that legislative gap emerges, with regard to this statutory instrument?
Following on from that last question, the loan charge and taxpayer fairness APPG, which I co-chair, wrote to Ministers on 1 July, 22 September and 25 November last year, with questions about the 2005 preferential deal with the large banks. Does the Minister feel that it is acceptable that we have not had a reply to those letters? When will we get one?
Richard from Beverley tells me that he paid £304 for his last tank of heating oil, yet if he orders it again now—and he needs to do so within four weeks—it will cost him £862. Families across rural areas such as Beverley and Holderness rely on heating oil to keep warm, yet because they are off-grid, they get no protection from the energy price cap. Some 1.5 million people across the country are affected, so what steps can the Chancellor take to alleviate the situation for rural families such as Richard’s, who are facing a huge spike in the cost of living through no fault of their own?
It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Bolsover (Natalie Fleet). Although she is on the opposite side of the debate from me, she always speaks with huge passion on these issues. I should start with a couple of declarations. First, my wife is a sitting employment judge, and therefore the tribunal element of the Bill pertains to her. Secondly, like many right hon. and hon. Members in this Chamber, I was a barrister immediately prior to coming into this place, and I maintain my practising certificate. I hope the hon. Lady will indulge me if I pontificate on this issue for a few moments. While I was not a criminal barrister, I did a significant amount of inquest work, so I had face-to-face, first-hand experience with jurors, and I can say without a shadow of a doubt that they are the most remarkable, ordinary people, who give up their time for civic engagement. They sit there quietly, listening to the evidence; they take their role seriously; and they sit in judgment and make findings of fact. That is a huge constitutional principle. We have talked about rights, and I am not going to pretend that there is an innate right to a trial by jury, but there is a firm constitutional principle of ensuring that justice is not merely done to the public, but that it is done with the public. We all know about the problem of court backlogs. It would be a farce to pretend that this is not a significant and serious issue—it is a failure of the state that we have got to this place. It is a failure of successive Governments, and we recognise that across the board, but the question we have to ask ourselves is not whether trial by jury should be abandoned; it is whether the reforms that are before this House, with the scrutiny that has been undertaken and the impact assessment that accompanies the Bill, constitute sufficient evidence for making such a reform to this country’s constitution. What the Bill asks for is very clear, and we have to be honest about it. We are asking for a shift in the balance between the state and its people, and that may lead to inequality before the law. Take the prime example raised by my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Torridge and Tavistock (Sir Geoffrey Cox): that of two individuals who, on a factual matrix, committed precisely the same crime. Those individuals appear before the court, but one has a string of previous convictions. Are we really saying that a person should be denied the opportunity of a jury trial if they have not previously been of bad character? That is a nonsense, and it does not achieve what we should be seeking to achieve. The further point, of course, is that if we are making such a constitutional change on the basis that it will enable us to deal with the backlog in the criminal courts, why is there no sunset clause in the Bill? Why are we not saying that the purpose of the Bill is to shift the dial and make progress, but that we recognise that it should not be a blank cheque for the state? We should recognise that if this change has to be made—although I do not believe it does—it should be made on a limited basis, because if we are to change a right that is older than most institutions in this country, the least Parliament should do is base its decision on more than just an assumption in the impact assessment. Let me turn to the modelling, which was also raised by the shadow Justice Secretary, my hon. Friend the Member for West Suffolk (Nick Timothy). In this House on 3 February, I asked the Lord Chancellor a question about the 20% reduction in the time taken by court hearings. He gave me a very clear answer—that he accepted Sir Brian Leveson’s findings, but that the Government would publish their own modelling alongside the Bill. However, page 10 of the impact assessment is very clear that the Government have adopted Sir Brian’s assumption. That is an assumption; it is not modelling. There is a distinct difference. Analysis is helpful, but modelling is critical, and if we are weighing up the evidence base for the Bill, we have to have more than analysis alone.
My right hon. Friend is right. There is a reason that judges wear a wig and barristers wear a wig and gown. It provides a shield between the arm of the law and the citizen. To dilute that would fundamentally upset the settlement that has been reached over hundreds and hundreds of years.
My hon. Friend is right. First, there is the argument that this is of such constitutional significance that it should have been in a manifesto. Secondly, there is the argument that there was a proposal within the manifesto that the Government are not bringing forward. Thirdly, this is about getting the right settlement for the public, where they are judged by a body of their peers on the evidence before them. That is as opposed to a distant judge, who perhaps at times appears aloof, which fails to achieve that balance. We are being asked today to curtail a constitutional safeguard that has been apparent for so many years, and it goes much further than Sir Brian’s report. There were many good things in that report, but this legislation goes much further than any of his suggestions. We have to ask what the real issues are. They are plain to see. There are too few judges and too few advocates able to prosecute or defend the cases. There are too few functioning courtrooms. Removing jury trials will not fix any of that. There is a further issue that the Government have failed to address, which is around the recruitment of magistrates. We know that in this country, recruitment cycles of magistrates have often not returned the numbers required. The presumption must be that the reason the Government did not adopt Sir Brian’s recommendation of having two magistrates as wing members was because they knew they could not recruit a sufficient number of magistrates to implement it. There is logic on that front, but if we are pushing more cases down to the magistrates court, who will be able to hear them and listen to them? Who will be able to draw those conclusions? My final point, which I will make briefly, pertains to parliamentary scrutiny. The Bill will be rushed through this House and through Committee. It will get a mere five days in Committee, but it is of such constitutional importance. There is strong feeling across the House both for and against these proposals. Would it not be wiser in such circumstances to adopt an approach similar to what we do for armed forces Bills, for example, where we have a Select Committee of the House? Members with experience within the law and with experience of being victims could scrutinise the legislation and come back with a report. We could then do Report stage on the Floor of the House. That way, the country can know that we have given this legislation the due regard that it deserves. There is a reason that jury trials have endured, and it is because they command the trust of the public. They ensure that the law is exercised with public participation. If the Government believe in diluting that right, they must provide the evidence for that change, and thus far they have failed to do so.
It has been a positive debate in terms of the exchange of ideas, and there have been some fantastic contributions. I pay particular tribute to the hon. Members for Bolsover (Natalie Fleet) and for Warrington North (Charlotte Nichols) for the very personal way in which they made their cases. There is consensus that for victims, the current waits are terrible and an experience that they should not have to go through. It is not only damaging for them as individuals, but some of them drop out as a result. We see perpetrators who would have been found guilty walking away and escaping justice, and we see defendants who would have been found innocent having to wait too long to have the accusations over their head removed.
Not yet. We must have a serious discussion about why that is. It was disappointing for those who sought to put forward a credible analysis of what has happened that the Justice Secretary and most Labour Members did not mention the word “covid” once. In reality, the backlogs in the Crown court under this Government before covid were lower than those we inherited from the previous Government. It is fair to say that for many years—25 years, as we heard from the hon. Member for Congleton (Sarah Russell)—it has been accepted that not enough political attention has been paid to our justice system. The question is, what do we do about it? There is no single answer to that question, because there is no single problem. A whole variety of things are going wrong in our justice system. We are seeing late pleas because of insufficient early advice, faulty courtrooms, a lack of reports from probation services, and problems with prison transport. All those problems, and others, cause the delays and other issues. The central recommendation of the Leveson report was for more sitting days— 130,000—and that will require more venues, more court staff, more prosecution staff, more solicitors and more barristers. However, as I have mentioned, there are simpler things that we can do ahead of that, and we need look no further than Liverpool Crown court under the leadership of Andrew Menary. At a time when the national average wait from charge to trial is 321 days, that court manages an average wait of 206 days. As far as I am aware, neither the Justice Secretary nor any of his team has visited Liverpool Crown court to speak to the judge and hear how he does that. In fact, he achieves it partly through the use of early guilty pleas. Nationally, we lose court time because too many people—31%—plead guilty on the day of a trial. In Liverpool, the proportion is just 6%. Those are not bold reforms. They are not measures that allow a Secretary of State to give a grand speech and consider himself a great reformer. It is just hard work, or what one Member described as “pretty boring” stuff that gets the job done. As was pointed out by the hon. Members for Warrington North and for Walthamstow (Ms Creasy), these reforms will not only fail to achieve what the Government claim they will; they will be an overbearing, destructive distraction from that sort of hard work. And what will the Government gain? Certainly not what they claim in the impact assessment, which is full of assumptions and fantasies, and certainly not anything that might be described as modelling. The Government want us to believe that 24,000 Crown court days will simply be converted into 8,500 magistrate days, but they have no evidence for that claim. They want us to believe that trials without juries will be 20% shorter, but they have no evidence to support that claim either.
I wonder whether the hon. Gentleman read the entire statement. What the institution actually said was that the modelling “relies on several assumptions—some of which are highly uncertain.” Did he read that part of the statement? I do not think he did, because it claims that there will be reductions of only 2% in trial time as a result of these reforms. What are we being asked to give up? We are being asked to give up 800 years of English legal history. A sledgehammer is being taken to the cornerstone of our system, and to fundamental rights. Thousands of accused people risk spending years in prison, losing their livelihoods, losing their families, losing their homes, and not being able to make the simple request for a forum of their peers to make that decision—a part of the justice system that is trusted and supported more than any other. That is perhaps why it is being defended so robustly by those within it. Just today, thousands of retired judges and retired and working legal professionals asked the Justice Secretary to think again. What has been the Government’s response to that? It has been to denigrate the role of jury trials. We have had the appalling sight of the Lord Chancellor comparing three years in prison to a scraped knee. We have heard the Minister for Courts say that being accused of an offence of sexual assault, which could be considered either way at the moment, was not serious—an accusation that, if proven, would lose someone their livelihood. It is shameful and desperate stuff from a desperate Government. In contrast, what did the Prime Minister say? He said: “The right to trial by jury is an important factor in the delicate balance between the power of the state and the freedom of the individual. The further it is restricted, the greater the imbalance.” Now he asks us to upend that balance in a historically unprecedented way. Of course, we can talk about the facts and figures, as woeful and thin as they have been, but at the end of the day, these decisions come from political instinct and a deep sense of what is right and wrong. That is not shallow; it is based on knowledge and years of experience —the sort that the hon. Member for Kingston upon Hull East (Karl Turner) and my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Torridge and Tavistock (Sir Geoffrey Cox) have. That experience told them, before they saw the figures, that the Government’s approach was not going to work. They have been proven right by the figures. Is it any surprise that the Prime Minister does not understand this? Time and again, we have seen that he is absolutely devoid of any sort of deep political instinct. His only instinct is to chop and change his mind as it suits him on any particular day. No wonder he has been, more than any other Prime Minister in recent history, an agent of the civil service. He has forgotten the golden rule that civil servants advise and Ministers decide. The Conservatives have said yes to more resources, to efficiency and to the hard work of getting things done, but we have said no to eroding a fundamental right, no to more overbearing state power, and no to gutting and scouring away the mechanism by which all of us watch the watchmen. The Courts Minister tells us that the Bill has been introduced on a point of political principle, whereas other Members have argued that it is a matter of necessity and resource. Too often, Labour Members have said yes to a Prime Minister to whom they should have said no. They have an opportunity tonight to say no to the Prime Minister when it counts. Let us hope they have the courage to do so.
I should first declare an interest as an NHS consultant paediatrician who has given evidence in court in that capacity. The references to the Magna Carta are particularly profound for a Lincolnshire MP, because one of the copies of Magna Carta from 1215 is kept in Lincoln. The Father of the House, my right hon. Friend the Member for Gainsborough (Sir Edward Leigh), and my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Torridge and Tavistock (Sir Geoffrey Cox) talked eloquently and at length about jury trials, why they should remain, and why removing the right of appeal for magistrates court decisions is the wrong thing to do, so I will not focus on that in the few minutes I have. I will focus on clause 17, which removes the presumption of involvement of parents in their child’s life. When there is dispute over who cares for a child, courts can make decisions: they can decide who a child is to live with; they can decide who has contact with the child, for how long, and when; they can decide what form that contact takes, whether it is by telephone, in a supervised contact centre or face to face; and they can make specific decrees such as where the child is to go to school. The law is clear that when courts are making those decisions, the welfare of the child is paramount. They can take into account the child’s wishes if old enough and capable of making decisions in that respect. They can think about whether the child has been subject to any harm. They can talk about whether the child is at risk of further harm. They can talk about whether the parents are capable of providing for the needs of the child. However, section 1 of the Children Act 1989 is clear that the courts must presume, unless shown otherwise, that the involvement of both parents is in the child’s best interests.
That is why I have explained that the presumption is that the parents have involvement. The court must take the risks to the child into consideration and, unless shown otherwise, give contact to both parents. If the child is at risk, however, the court has the absolute right to prevent the child from seeing those parents or to restrict contact to different forms and timeframes. The welfare of the child is key in those decisions. That is in line with international law, which I know the Government are fond of. The UN convention on the rights of the child says that parents and children should maintain “personal relations and direct contact with both parents on a regular basis, except if it is contrary to the child’s…interests.”
Not for the moment. Article 8 of the European convention on human rights provides the right to family life and suggests that consideration be given to all alternatives before ordering no contact. The Government, however—
I give way.
I understand what the hon. Gentleman is saying. I will continue my speech and perhaps he will listen to what I have to say. The purpose of court decisions is, as the hon. Gentleman said, to prevent unsafe contact and to prevent tragedies. As a paediatrician, I have seen situations where children have been given back to parents and have come to significant harm as a result. I have dealt with and looked after those children, and unfortunately they have not been protected or saved in every case. The law is there to prevent unsafe contact, but the children’s needs must be put first, with the power to restrict access where they are in danger. The court must listen to all the evidence available, but no system is infallible and sometimes judges get it wrong. When they do, the outcomes can be hugely tragic, leading to the loss or serious injury of a child. I know that this legislation has been brought forward with good intentions. The test is whether it will prevent such harm and such tragedies. I think that it might not. The reason is that the impact assessment produced by the Government says that it is “unlikely to materially change” the outcome in court. If that is the case, what is the point of the legislation? Will it, on the other hand, reduce the likelihood of children seeing their parents? Will that, in and of itself, cause some harm? Will it prevent some children from having the contact they need with their family members? Will it prevent the tragedies that we wish to prevent or not? Will it isolate those children who will come to harm? Do we have the right risk assessments to do that? Every single one of us in this House wants to protect children. We need to improve the risk assessments and ensure that social workers have time to make proper risk assessments so that they identify the children who may be at risk and separate them from those who are not. We also need to improve the representation of children in court. I was once in court, in the witness box, and the barrister who was representing the children got up to speak. He asked me a question, but he had forgotten the name of one of the two children in the family and I had to remind him from the witness box. We really need to improve the quality of the representation of children.
I will not. This legislation is potentially just a distraction—something that makes people feel like they are doing something and making a difference, when the impact assessment that the Government have produced suggests it will not. Is this change going to make any difference or not? Is this a lost opportunity to improve the risk assessments, children’s representation and social work and to actually make a difference?
The hon. Lady is being very generous with her time, and this has been a fascinating debate. Runnymede and Weybridge is frequently hit by flooding, but I have noticed that one problem is that there are so many different responders, sometimes seemingly acting independently. When residents contact the flood line, they find that it operates more like an intercom service, as opposed to taking information and giving them a direct response. I am calling for a flood control centre—a single point of contact that can co-ordinate flood response and preparatory works in my area. I am happy to speak to the hon. Lady after the debate about the work that I am trying to lobby the Government about. By the sounds of it, that could also help with the response in Cornwall.
Will the Minister give way?
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Vickers. I draw the House’s attention to my entry in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests on my roles as an unpaid parliamentary vice-president of both the Local Government Association and London Councils. I congratulate to the hon. Member for Surrey Heath (Dr Pinkerton) on securing the debate. He, the hon. Member for Crawley (Peter Lamb) and my right hon. Friend the Member for East Hampshire (Damian Hinds) set the tone of a debate that has engaged, with a high degree of seriousness, not only with the issues that stem from the specifics of what is happening in Surrey but with what they say about the wider local government reorganisation debate. It was interesting as a parliamentarian to be present, a short time ago, at a Delegated Legislation Committee in which Committee members agreed the abolition of the historic county of Surrey and its replacement with two unitary authorities. That was the conclusion of a long period of debate in which, as the hon. Member for Crawley outlined, the leaders of county councils in particular argued strongly that local government reorganisation on the footprint of the existing county structure would be a way to save money. Many district councils argued strongly against that idea, and it was called into question by many experienced unitary leaders. We all recognise that there is a need to look again at our local government settlement. This country is already very under-represented in democratic terms at the local level, with the fewest elected politicians per capita of any developed democracy. It is also intensely centralised by comparison with most other countries, with decisions that would as a matter of routine be local decisions in most other democracies taken by Parliament or central Government. I have a huge amount of sympathy for the Minister, because while she is from the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government, council services touch on the work of the Department of Health and Social Care, the Department for Education, the Department for Transport, the Treasury, the Ministry of Defence and the Home Office. The observations that other Members have made about the impact of special educational needs and disabilities demonstrate that complexity, where an issue that sits outside the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government is one of the single biggest factors in the viability of local authorities. The last time we faced each other across the Dispatch Box, I asked the Minister, with particular respect to Surrey, whether there was an update on negotiations. Surrey had set out very clearly that its deficit on SEND spending sits at around £350 million, and the Government had been clear—in fairness, it was Department for Education Ministers—that they would pay off 90% of that deficit. The offer to Surrey was £100 million, which was significantly less than the 90% that we were promised at the Dispatch Box. This is not simply a matter of what happens in a single Government Ministry; it brings together services, activities and decisions across Government. Reflecting on the long history of local government reorganisation, it probably predates the existence of our country as a unitary state. Certainly the role of some ancient Saxon kingdoms is quite akin to the behaviour of some local government leaders today. The particular challenges that come from the difficult relationship between central and local government are manifest here today. With regard to recent developments, I spent 12 years in local government under the previous Labour Government and a further 12 years there under the Conservative Government who left office in 2024, and many of the decisions that were made then by central Government—statutory requirements placed on local authorities such as SEND arrangements, social care, the fair access criteria that were introduced, housing—were never fully funded. Since the early 2000s, there has been steady growth in the share of local government spending that is consumed by social care and housing. We have seen an erosion of the ability of our elected local leaders to deploy locally raised resources against local priorities, to the extent that social care now consumes around 70% to 80% of the budget of a typical social care authority. That is not sustainable. Other Members have spoken passionately and with a degree of criticism about the impact that investment decisions at the council level have had. We all recognise that councils led by all of the parties represented here have made both good and bad decisions when it comes to investment, but we should be wary of criticising local leaders for having made decisions in good faith that did not end well. At a time when the public works loan board interest rate was 0.25%, the decision—even by a council—to take a loan and put it in the bank would have generated additional finance that could have supported local government services. Those decisions were not always innately wrong, but the impact of covid on local authorities’ investments in commercial property was absolutely devastating. Spelthorne, which has been mentioned today, is one example of that: what would have looked like an extremely sound commercial investment turned into a very bad one because of the impact of covid. We find ourselves today in a situation where Surrey is unusual. It is the only authority announced for the devolution priority programme that has got to the point of creating new successor unitary authorities. At the outset of this process, the Government were very clear that they were going to cancel the elections in all the devolution priority programme councils, which we voted against at the Delegated Legislation Committee that considered that matter. They did so on the basis that elections for the new unitaries and mayors would take place across the country. There were supposed to be elections this May for new mayors in Suffolk, Norfolk, Essex, Hampshire and many other places. Political parties and local leaders had been working on that basis, only to find after a 24-hour U-turn last December that the elections that were promised to go ahead were suddenly being cancelled. All this delay and dithering is imposing costs. I met yesterday with a finance company that told me that the procurement of new finance systems across the local authority sector has simply ground to a halt in the absence of any clarity from Government about what is happening. The commissioning of new services in social care to address homelessness has collapsed, which I know concerns the Minister, as has the delivery of housing—both the pipeline of new applications and the completions of new properties. Two thirds of London boroughs report no new net additional homes. That is an absolute indictment of the state in which many of our councils find themselves because of the delay imposed by this process. As the hon. Member for Crawley outlined, both the Government and the wider argument for this reorganisation rely on a now rather old report that was prepared by PricewaterhouseCoopers at the instigation of the County Councils Network to support the case for county-based reorganisation. It is clear from the evidence he presented that the hon. Member, who left us in no doubt about what he thinks of this process, knows of what he speaks. The start of the process was simple. Half a million people was the minimum footprint in order to secure savings. That was the level that the Treasury expected to see delivered. However, that is significantly larger than the existing footprint of most unitary authorities. As my right hon. Friend the Member for East Hampshire described, it risked losing the sense of place and identity. Ministers quite wisely backed off. They looked at the bids from the local authority areas that were instructed to submit them and settled on a smaller footprint. That fundamentally undermines the case that this will result in significant revenue savings to the Government in the medium to long term, for the reasons outlined by the hon. Member for Crawley. A concern that the Opposition have raised a number of times on the Floor of the House is that the Government have no independent modelling or independent financial analysis to back up their direction of travel on these reorganisation decisions. As all Members who spoke passionately about their enthusiasm for getting local Government right recognised, when we compare ourselves, sometimes unfavourably, to other European countries and ask why they seem to be able to build railways and public transport infrastructure faster than the United Kingdom, the answer is largely that those decisions are made at local and regional level; they are not made by central Government. Delivery of rail networks or citywide transport, for example, which I know is of concern to a huge number of Members where lots of good projects are on the stocks, is much faster and cheaper in many other countries. We need to look at what we can learn from their experience. We need to reflect on the role of the Treasury. I have heard former Chancellors say that when the demand for additional day-to-day spending becomes unbearable, the temptation is to simply slow down the exit of capital from the door on major projects. One of the benefits of localisation is that it removes that temptation from Chancellors and ensures that things that are committed to, become deliverable at a local level. There are many urgent pressures. One of the key concerns I hear from councils all the time is that the Government do not have a huge amount of time to think, not just in the sense of the parliamentary timetable but when we look across our country. Unemployment has been relentlessly rising every single month since the Government took office, homelessness has surged up 27% in London alone since the Government took office, debt is rising rapidly, planning decisions are grinding to a halt and housing delivery is grinding to a halt. We need to give local communities hope that there is a prospect of solving some of those matters. I share a concern with the hon. Member for Crawley, which affects us very directly. The decisions that the Government have made in the Home Office, speeding up decision making on asylum seekers, pushing those people out the door and up the road to the town hall which then has responsibility for housing them, is putting acute pressure on my local authority, his local authority and many others across the country who are doing their best in difficult circumstances. It is very clear that a whole range of issues are brought to our attention by what is happening in Surrey. I am grateful to all hon. Members who have set out their particular concerns. I hope that, as a result of the observations made in the debate, we may see the Government come back with a revised set of policies that reflect a clear sense of place and the opportunity for all our constituents to know that they will have elected representatives who can make the decisions that they want to see made at a local level.
T2. I am the Member of Parliament for one of the largest rural constituencies in the United Kingdom, so the rise in the cost of heating oil is obviously a major concern for me. I welcome the opportunity to meet the Financial Secretary, and I hope that liquefied petroleum gas can also be on the agenda for that meeting, because that is a heating source for many of my constituents. People such as Craig Ritchie in Symington will be looking for concrete outcomes from that meeting, given that they face a 200% rise in their oil costs.
My long experience is that the Scottish Government are quite prepared to ignore consultations, especially on the views of my constituents. Will the Minister set out how this system will work if the Scottish Government do not co-operate in it and instead use it to try to take forward their independence agenda?
It is a great pleasure to see you in the Chair, Mr Vickers. I commend the hon. Member for Surrey Heath (Dr Pinkerton) for bringing this important subject to the House today. It is great to see MPs from across the House here in Westminster Hall, although with 400-odd Labour MPs and quite a few in the south-east these days, we might have expected more than one to come to speak in favour of this flagship Government policy—it is not entirely apparent to all of us why it is a flagship Government policy, but there we have it. Let us be frank: the hon. Member for Crawley (Peter Lamb) made an unconventional pitch to the Whips Office, but it was a pleasure and privilege to hear his very well reasoned and well thought-out case, obviously based on many years of experience. There are two big things going on at the same time that quite often get conflated: the creation of mayoralties and the bringing together of different local authorities at unitary level, which we call local government reorganisation—LGR. The two things often get conflated, but today we are talking primarily about the second. I will be honest: we can make arguments in favour of unitary authorities, in favour of two-tier authorities, and in favour of three tiers—we can make all sorts of arguments—but if we are going to have this change, how we divvy up and carve up areas makes a huge difference. In my area, East Hampshire district council and Hampshire county council have been working hard on putting forward a good proposal. One of the reasons this matters so much—previous speakers have raised this point—is the very high-cost items that will go into these new unitary authorities, principally adult social care and the high needs block, or SEND. In order to fund those costs for people at either end of the age scale, we need quite a lot of people in the middle. We need working-age adults contributing, and businesses contributing their taxes as well. The hon. Member for Crawley talked about housing. One of the points that has not yet quite registered with everybody is the way that housing development planning will change. It will be on a different level, which will be further away—more remote—from the areas that are affected and could involve quite a lot of rebalancing of where housing goes. The hon. Member expressed the opposite view, but my fear is that in this new set-up, there will be the risk of more encroachment on to rural areas, because in the dominant urban areas, they will see less physical constraints for more sprawl out from those urban settlements. The other point that I am not sure has quite permeated the public discourse is about identity. People often identify with the county and the town or village they are in. We have not yet given names to any of the new unitary authorities that might be created in the county of Hampshire, but they are almost certainly going to end up being, to some extent, artificial constructs—in the same way that, back in 1974, a lot of new identities were created, which was sometimes a difficult thing for people to deal with. Whatever the pros and cons of different forms of local government, there is always a difficulty in the short term. Whenever anything is changed or reorganised, as anyone who has worked in business knows, there will be a great argument for, for example, moving the sales force to a regional level or back to a national level. Along the way, however, a lot of cost is incurred and effectiveness is eroded because people’s attention is moved from the key task in hand to what is happening in the organisation. Buildings have to be sold and redundancies made. All sorts of things affect operational effectiveness. There is then still the question: what, ultimately, is the balance in terms of cost saving? I think that we are all grateful to the hon. Member for Crawley—I will call him my hon. Friend—who set out that it is really quite difficult to find material savings unless it is at a big scale. So many of the proposals that are coming forward are not at that scale—often for good reason, because it is difficult to create a meaningful identity in such a big area. There will, however, be some economies of scale. If bin collection is taken from the lower tier and put into the unitary, it should be possible to do that on a lower unit cost. There will also, however, be some diseconomies of scale, because some things will come from the upper tier and be moved into a smaller unit of geography, creating a diseconomy. I have no idea what the balance of those two things is, but we seem to be launching into this massive change—wholesale reorganisation—without knowing. On the point about the upheaval along the way, whatever the end state is, I promise that in year one, there will not be a saving. There might eventually be something to look forward to, but we have enough economic troubles that I find it stunning that the Government should be considering entering into something that will make their fiscal task harder, at least in the short term and possibly in the long term. I have tabled a number of parliamentary questions that have been answered in the name of the Minister before us today. Those answers have all been elegant, but they have not been illuminating. The charitable explanation came from her hon. Friend the Member for Crawley: maybe the Government just do not know what the data are. That might be true. It might also be true that they have a working assumption, but we are not being told.
Yeah!
As with many projections, some things are more uncertain than others. Typically, in business, revenues are really hard to project, but costs are a lot easier. Can the Minister share with us what the costs of the reorganisation are anticipated to be?
I meant reorganisation costs.
The Chancellor will review mileage rates, but with her fuel duty freeze coming to an end in September and the next fiscal event not happening until later in the year, will she commit to review that decision at the end of this parliamentary Session if petrol prices are significantly higher than they are today, for the sake of people’s cost of living?
It is an absolute honour to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Stuart; you delivered the title of this legislation with a dryness that belies its purpose and impact on our economy. The instrument looks tiny—there is hardly anything in it—yet I am going to argue that the Committee should vote against it this afternoon. It may look like a technical mechanism, and the Minister described it as such, but it equips the Fair Work Agency with state-level surveillance tools previously reserved for tackling the serious and organised crime that occurs in the gangmaster sector, and applies those investigatory powers across our entire economy. The creation of the Fair Work Agency, a consolidated super-regulator with enhanced snooping powers, represents a significant overreach of the state into the private operations of British businesses. I hope that not only my Conservative colleagues, but possibly Labour colleagues, and certainly Liberal Democrat colleagues, will vote against this instrument. Currently, the Gangmasters and Labour Abuse Authority focuses on high-risk industries, such as agriculture and fishing, where there have been abuses. These changes will allow the Fair Work Agency to snoop everywhere across every workplace in this country. We oppose this statutory instrument as it formalises the transition towards a more litigious and more monitored labour market, which will inevitably stifle start-ups and entrepreneurs and increase the regulatory burden on small and medium-sized enterprises. It is not a proportionate or balanced approach to enforcement. We have heard repeatedly from business groups about the cumulative pressure that they are under. The British Retail Consortium has warned that margins in retail are already at breaking point. The Confederation of British Industry speaks of a “chilling” effect on hiring as firms brace for more aggressive enforcement. This instrument will give those powers. The Federation of Small Businesses has been clear that tighter scrutiny, combined with rising employment costs, will force many small firms to reduce hours, cut staff or automate roles entirely—something that we are sadly already seeing in the monthly unemployment statistics. The Minister claimed that the statutory instrument simply ensures continuity following the abolition of the Gangmasters and Labour Abuse Authority. Of course it does as far as that sector is concerned, but in so doing widens that to the entire economy via the Fair Work Agency. It is not a like-for-like replacement. We are seeing a super-regulator with a far wider remit and far stronger powers. Those reasons, alongside our commitment to repealing the vast majority of the job-destroying Employment Rights Act, are why we oppose this statutory instrument today. We urge all other hon. Members to do so, too.
I am genuinely shocked and surprised to hear the Liberal Democrat line, because I seem to remember when these investigatory powers—including the right to snoop on communications—were first brought in, the hon. Lady’s party was vehemently against them, yet here we are giving these powers to an agency that will cover every job in this land.
Order. I suggest that the hon. Gentleman might like to stay within the scope of this Bill rather than discussing asylum hotels.
Order. I propose putting in place a five-minute time limit after the next speaker.
Members will be aware that a large number of people still wish to speak, so I will reduce the time limit to four minutes after the next speaker.
Order. The hon. Lady’s time is up.
My constituents have been incredibly vocal in telling me that they do not want this. Frankly, because trust in the Government has eroded so much, this scheme is dead in the water. If the Government go ahead with it, what will they do to ensure that there is no single depository containing the data of millions of citizens that could present a single point of failure from a security perspective?