Oral Answers to Questions
Mary Glindon Excerpts(2 years, 6 months ago)
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The Prime Minister
My hon. Friend is quite right to champion carbon capture and storage, which has a great future in Scotland in spite of all the gloomstering of the SNP. The Scottish cluster remains on the reserve. We will continue to study it and, we hope, bring it forward in due time.
Mary Glindon (North Tyneside) (Lab)
The Prime Minister
The hon. Lady is absolutely right that the River Tyne is a massive economic asset for the whole of the north-east. It has suffered from historic contamination, but we are going to work with the North East local enterprise partnership to invest another £6 million to help to develop clear plans for sustainable economic growth along the whole of the estuary.
Oral Answers to Questions
Mary Glindon Excerpts(9 years, 4 months ago)
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The Prime Minister
It is important that people register to vote. That is why local authorities have been given over £7 million to help in that process. Individual voter registration will help to cut out some of the fraud and some of the systems that were used in previous elections.
Mrs Mary Glindon (North Tyneside) (Lab)
Q3. This week, Channel 4’s “Dispatches” did an excellent job of exposing the reality of life for millions of people who are in low-paid, part-time and insecure work. Can the Prime Minister not see that his failure to promote decent jobs with decent pay is still a fundamental problem for our economy?
The Prime Minister
If the hon. Lady looks at the figures, she will see that eight in 10 of the jobs that have been created in the last year are full-time jobs. The Labour party comes here trying to make a case, but I am afraid that all the evidence has moved away from it. Originally, it was said that no jobs would be created. We now see more people in work than ever in our history. Then we were told that all the jobs would be part time. We now see that the majority of the jobs are full time. Then we were told that the jobs would not pay more than inflation. We now see wages rising ahead of inflation. Of course, that is helped by the cuts in income tax that we have made to help people who are low-paid and take them out of income tax altogether. That is the programme that we are pursuing. There is not an ounce of complacency, because there is a lot more work to do, but we are on the right track.
Oral Answers to Questions
Mary Glindon Excerpts(9 years, 5 months ago)
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The Prime Minister
My hon. Friend raises an important point about sea bass stocks but also about fish stocks more broadly. Under this Government there have been improvements in the way that fisheries policies work in the EU, with a greater level of devolution. We need to keep pushing that forward to ensure that our fisheries and stocks can recover, as that is the only way to ensure a long-term, sustainable industry.
Mrs Mary Glindon (North Tyneside) (Lab)
Q6. Will the Prime Minister please explain why the Government have borrowed almost £4 billion more this year than at the same time last year? Does he regret his firm promise to balance the books by next May?
The Prime Minister
This Government have had to borrow a lot of money because we inherited the biggest budget deficit in the world. [Interruption.] Yes, it was 11% of our GDP when we came to government. We have already cut it by a third, and we will hear in a moment or two how we are now getting on. I would like to highlight something the shadow Chancellor said this week. He said that he would be tough on the deficit and tough on the causes of the deficit. As he is one of the causes of the deficit, I think we have just found the first ever example of political masosadism. [Interruption.]