House of Commons
Prayers
This information is provided by Parallel Parliament and does not comprise part of the offical record
Oral Answers to Questions
(11 years, 1 month ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Fiona Mactaggart (Slough) (Lab)
1. What assessment he has made of the value of the work done by women’s centres with women offenders; and if he will make a statement.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Justice (Mrs Helen Grant)
Women’s centres are a key element in our approach to women in the criminal justice system. Since April 2012, we have been monitoring referrals made by probation trusts to the 31 women’s centres funded by the National Offender Management Service. Feedback indicates that users, staff and magistrates see the centres as a valuable resource.
Fiona Mactaggart
May I first declare an interest as chair of Commonweal, a charity that established the Re-Unite programme, which helps women offenders to reunite with their children when they come out of prison? The programme is run by many women’s centres and those we have been working with are anxious about their future funding and about the lack of strategy from the Ministry for women offenders and women in the criminal justice system. Will the Minister meet me, together with representatives from the women’s centres, to reassure them about future funding for the wonderful programmes they run?
Mrs Grant
I am happy to meet the hon. Lady, and I hope to reassure her. During the last few weeks, I have been visiting women’s centres around the country, in Gloucester, Reading and London, and I have been very impressed by what I have seen. Overall, I want to see more provision for women in areas where it does not exist at the moment. I also want existing provision in the centres deepened and strengthened further. Funding may be readjusted for some services; there has to be redistribution and some centres may have to do a little more with less, but I assure the hon. Lady that funding is continuing and we are increasing it by £300,000 for this financial year.
Dr Julian Huppert (Cambridge) (LD)
I visited the excellent Dawn projects in Cambridge and Peterborough, where they do a huge amount of work with female ex-offenders and save the state far more than they cost to run. They are both concerned about the future of their funding. The Minister has given some reassurance, but can she give further reassurance that the Dawn project will continue to get the support it needs?
Mr Elfyn Llwyd (Dwyfor Meirionnydd) (PC)
These excellent centres are facing problems financially, as the Minister appreciates. She will also appreciate that on a cost-benefit analysis, short-term expenditure will pay dividends; it will keep women out of the prison estate, without further costs for children in care and so on. Ultimately it is a great investment.
Mr Robert Buckland (South Swindon) (Con)
2. What progress he has made on improving special educational needs provision within the youth custodial estate.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Justice (Jeremy Wright)
The House will know of my hon. Friend’s interest and expertise in the subject, and he will know that a significant proportion of young offenders have some level of special educational needs, which might only be identified once they enter custody. Young people have an educational assessment on entry to custody, and anyone who shows signs of a learning difficulty or disability will be screened so that they can be directed for further assessment and can receive the provision they need. Through our consultation paper “Transforming Youth Custody,” we seek to improve further what we do in that area.
Mr Buckland
As my hon. Friend knows, the Children and Families Bill is currently making its way through the House, but it has no provision relating to young people in custody. Will he work closely with the Department for Education to ensure that there will be a co-ordinated approach to help young people in custody with SEN?
Jeremy Wright
Yes, we certainly will do that; indeed we are doing it. My hon. Friend will be conscious of the fact that there are specific arrangements, whether educational or otherwise, that cannot be taken with the young person into a custodial environment, but that does not mean that we do not need to work hard to make sure that the transition into, and out of, a custodial setting is managed appropriately for young people.
Andy McDonald (Middlesbrough) (Lab)
Does the Minister agree that, given the incidence of special educational needs in our custodial system and the incidence of acquired brain injury there, a lot of young people who are in custody should not be there? Does he agree that there ought to be earlier intervention at an earlier screening, long before they get into custody?
Jeremy Wright
I agree substantially with what the hon. Gentleman has said, and we need to work harder, together with our colleagues in the Department of Health and elsewhere, to ensure that such young people are diverted away from the criminal justice system earlier. However, it is also right to say that we have a responsibility to ensure that provision is appropriate for those young people who do need to be in custody, and that a large proportion of those, as he says, have special educational needs and other issues.
Peter Aldous (Waveney) (Con)
3. What progress he has made on introducing payment by results for the rehabilitation of offenders.
The Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice (Chris Grayling)
We want to introduce payment by results to incentivise providers to reduce reoffending. It makes sense as a way of improving effectiveness and getting a good deal for the taxpayer.
Our “Transforming Rehabilitation” consultation closed on 22 February 2013. We will respond to it and bring forward detailed plans in due course.
Peter Aldous
I am grateful to the Secretary of State for that answer. There is, however, a concern that a payment-by-results approach can favour larger national companies. What measures are being put in place to ensure that local voluntary and charitable organisations, which often have a proven track record built up over many years, will not be squeezed out?
Chris Grayling
I agree with my hon. Friend. Within the voluntary sector, we find very many of the mentoring skills that I am so keen to harness in preventing reoffending. That is why we have a team in the Cabinet Office working with the voluntary sector to ensure that they are as well prepared as possible for this exercise, and why I am making it absolutely clear that I do not believe that winning contracts can take place without a contribution from the mentoring skills to be found in the sector.
Keith Vaz (Leicester East) (Lab)
How does he intend to deal with the issue of payment by results in drugs rehabilitation? He will know that the Home Affairs Committee recommended the mandatory testing of prisoners on entry and exit from prisons. Will he look at that proposal, because it is the best way of ensuring that we break the devastating cycle of drug dependency?
Chris Grayling
I do not underestimate the drug challenge that we face. The right hon. Gentleman is well aware, from the work he has done on his Select Committee, how big a part drug addiction plays in the crime and disorder problems we face in this country. We are working closely with the Department of Health. He will be aware that we have many localised drug treatment pilots using payment by results. It is my clear objective to ensure that what we deliver in the Ministry of Justice synchronises carefully with the work that is being done with the Department of Health.
Glyn Davies (Montgomeryshire) (Con)
18. A key objective of Government policy must always be to reduce the number of prisoners, and there is no better way to do that than through rehabilitation, which prevents reoffending. What steps is my right hon. Friend taking to target rehabilitation at those who are serving less than 12 months, where it would be most effective?
Chris Grayling
My hon. Friend is absolutely right. One of the things that I have found most surprising about the system that we currently operate is that we do not currently provide all-round support for those who get sentences of less than 12 months. A central part of our reforms is to change that. It is this group who have the highest propensity to reoffend. It is simply not acceptable that we continue not to provide them with the same level of support as longer-sentenced prisoners when they leave jail.
Mr Andy Slaughter (Hammersmith) (Lab)
I do not know whether the Secretary of State has looked at the National Audit Office’s response to his consultation. It says that, in the Work programme, the majority of providers were big private companies. It also says that it is likely that the most difficult, prolific offenders will not be picked and that there will be cherry-picking. So despite his warm words, does he not think that this is going the same way as his failed Work programme? Is he intending to have moved on before this fails as well?
Chris Grayling
I hate to disappoint the hon. Gentleman, but the Work programme is succeeding in getting very large numbers of people into work, and is delivering much better value for the taxpayer than the programmes that we inherited from the previous Government. The truth is that the National Audit Office has contributed some valuable thoughts to our preparations for this exercise. I have listened to its contributions, as I will listen to all contributions, and we will deliver the most sensible, rounded package, particularly one that ensures that no one is left at the fringes of the system and that we provide rehabilitation and support to all offenders.
Andy Sawford (Corby) (Lab/Co-op)
4. What recent assessment he has made of reoffending rates; and if he will make a statement.
The Minister for Policing and Criminal Justice (Damian Green)
Reoffending has been too high for too long; 47.2% of those released from custody in the year to March 2011 reoffended within a year.
We want to reduce reoffending and extend rehabilitation services to those who need it. Our recent consultation on reforming the way offenders are rehabilitated in the community set out our plans for this area.
Andy Sawford
Northamptonshire probation trust has a great record of reducing reoffending, and local probation workers are shocked that the Government intend to put its core work out to tender. Will the Minister confirm whether, if the trust sets up a special purpose vehicle to bid, that will be ultra vires as the National Offender Management Service has suggested, and whether the staff involved would have to resign first?
Damian Green
I am happy to reassure the hon. Gentleman that not only would that not be disallowed, the Cabinet Office is providing advice for probation trusts that want to do that.
Mr David Nuttall (Bury North) (Con)
Does the Minister agree that long prison sentences are more successful in deterring reoffending than short sentences?
Damian Green
Those who are sentenced to less than 12 months certainly have a higher propensity to reoffend—57% as opposed to 47%—but the length of a sentence is dictated by the seriousness of the offence. A failure in the current system, which the scheme that we are introducing will address, is that those who come out after a shorter sentence have no rehabilitation. We will provide that under the new system, and we hope and expect that that will bring down the reoffending rate among precisely the group he complains about.
Kate Green (Stretford and Urmston) (Lab)
Will the Minister acknowledge that preventing reoffending among women requires the provision of specialist and specifically targeted and designed services to meet their holistic needs within the context of the criminal justice system? What steps will Ministers take to ensure that the payment-by-results model will protect that specialist provision for women?
Damian Green
The precise point of the payment-by-results system and of bringing new people into the system will be to allow providers with specialist skills—for example, in dealing with women offenders—to bring those abilities, skills and experience to bear so that we have much more targeted and tailored rehabilitation than in the past. Specific groups, including obviously women offenders, will be rehabilitated more effectively in the future.
Stephen Metcalfe (South Basildon and East Thurrock) (Con)
Seven out of 10 young people released from prison go on to reoffend within 12 months. Despite all the best efforts of those involved in the current system, it is obvious that it is failing. What does the Minister intend to do to improve the situation?
Damian Green
As my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State explained, we completely agree with my hon. Friend’s analysis that the current system is not good enough. Reoffending rates have been broadly flat for the last 10 years, despite an enormous increase in public spending in that area. We want to introduce payment by results, new ideas, new people and new providers not just so that more people are rehabilitated after they leave prison, but so that the rehabilitation system is better and more targeted.
Steve Brine (Winchester) (Con)
5. What plans he has to prevent young people from entering the criminal justice system.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Justice (Jeremy Wright)
Preventing young people from entering the criminal justice system in the first place is vital, and we have made considerable progress in reducing the number of first-time entrants to the system. Police and crime commissioners will provide strong local leadership in preventing and reducing crime and reoffending and addressing community safety needs. Youth offending teams also play a key role, as do cross-Government initiatives such as the troubled families initiative, the liaison and diversion programme and the ending gangs and youth violence programme.
Steve Brine
The aforementioned “Transforming Youth Custody” Green Paper brings together the Justice Secretary and the Education Secretary, which rightly recognises that it is not just criminal justice issues that are involved. Does the Minister plan to deepen the work with the Department for Education to reach pre-primary and primary schools following the lead of, for example, Hampshire county council, which has just employed an army of speech and language therapists to work with children with identified communication needs to stop the spiral of poor behaviour starting in the first place.
Jeremy Wright
Yes, and what my hon. Friend says about the importance of early intervention is entirely right. I take this opportunity to thank him and his colleagues on the Select Committee on Justice for the report that they produced last week. It was extremely welcome and we will look at it in detail and respond in due course. What he says about early intervention is important, and we will certainly work with colleagues across Government to ensure that that continues.
Dr William McCrea (South Antrim) (DUP)
What part does the Minister believe that parental responsibility and a stable family unit play in preventing young people from entering the criminal justice system?
Jeremy Wright
The hon. Gentleman is right. Early intervention is crucial and we want to make sure that it looks not just at criminal justice, but at family structures, education and health care. A whole range of different interests across Government must be represented in this exercise if we are truly to get to the bottom of the many problems and often chaotic background that some young people come from.
Simon Hughes (Bermondsey and Old Southwark) (LD)
May I commend to Ministers paragraph 21 of the youth justice report that has just been referred to and the proposal that the Government might legislate as soon as possible to erase out-of-court disposals and convictions from the record of very early, minor and non-persistent offenders at the age of 18? I have constituency cases in which people’s careers have been blighted by a minor infraction for which they got a telling off, but which appears on their criminal record.
Jeremy Wright
I have a good deal of sympathy for what the right hon. Gentleman says and we are considering the matter carefully for precisely the reasons he has given. We will look carefully at the issue of cautions in the round—not only how they are administered, but how long they last and in what circumstances—and report back.
Robert Flello (Stoke-on-Trent South) (Lab)
Around 7% of the youth offending team’s budget has been transferred to police and crime commissioners as part of the community safety grant. As there is no increase in the PCC budget, that money has effectively disappeared. With budget cuts totalling 16% and cuts to local authorities and police, how are youth offending teams to prevent young people from entering the criminal justice system, when sleight of hand deprives them of funding of hundreds of thousands of pounds?
Jeremy Wright
Well, there is no sleight of hand here, and it is right to point out that police and crime commissioners can increase the precept if they think it appropriate to do so and bring more money into their budgets, but the hon. Gentleman’s point is about the importance of prevention. We should recognise that youth offending teams are already doing good work in that regard and having considerable success, bringing down the number of people who come into the criminal justice system in the first place. We hope that that progress will continue, but prevention is a key part of what youth offending teams do and it will continue to be so.
Naomi Long (Belfast East) (Alliance)
6. What discussions he has had with the devolved Administrations on the proposed opt-out from the EU third-pillar arrangements.
The Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice (Chris Grayling)
Before the Home Secretary’s announcement, on 15 October last year, of our current thinking, my officials were in regular contact with colleagues in the devolved Administrations to inform the initial analysis of the measures subject to the 2014 decision. Those discussions have continued, and I was in Belfast in February meeting the hon. Lady’s colleague, the Justice Minister, David Ford, to discuss that very issue.
Naomi Long
I thank the Minister for his answer, but he will be aware that, as Northern Ireland is the only part of the UK with a land border, moves to opt out of the third pillar could affect the effective operation of the European arrest warrant system between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland. Will he assure the House that the Northern Ireland Executive and the Justice Minister will be fully engaged in the issue, given its importance?
Chris Grayling
I can absolutely give the hon. Lady that assurance. I very much recognise the issue that she mentions, which was discussed at my meeting with David Ford. I can reassure her that we are mindful of the situation in Northern Ireland and giving it due consideration as we reach our decision.
Sir Alan Beith (Berwick-upon-Tweed) (LD)
Why are Ministers not engaging properly with the House on those opt-in decisions, given that the five memorandums promised for mid-February have not yet been produced and the Government appear to be discussing with the Commission important opt-ins without having discussed them with important Committees of the House?
Chris Grayling
I can give my right hon. Friend, and indeed the House, a clear assurance that this Government will go further than any Government in ensuring that the House is involved in the decisions that are taken, and that as we reach agreement within the coalition on the way forward, we will need fully to engage Parliament, his Committee and, indeed, all the Committees with a vested interest in the matter, so that they are able to express a proper view on it.
Simon Danczuk (Rochdale) (Lab)
7. What his Department’s policy is on victims of crime.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Justice (Mrs Helen Grant)
For many years now, victims have felt completely overlooked and unsupported by the criminal justice system. As victims Minister, I am determined to put that right. That is why we are implementing a range of reforms that will put victims at the very heart of the criminal justice system, which is where they belong.
Simon Danczuk
Two weeks ago, The Sunday Times revealed that investigations of sexual abuse in Rochdale are faltering because police are failing to win the trust of victims. Does the Minister believe that a higher conviction rate would be achieved against the predators if Greater Manchester police had more officers with better skills for supporting vulnerable victims?
Mrs Grant
I cannot comment on individual cases, especially those that are at a sensitive point in the investigation, but I can assure the House and the hon. Gentleman that the Government are committed to bringing forward changes that will help to support victims of sexual abuse at every stage of the criminal investigation.
Priti Patel (Witham) (Con)
Reports by the organisation Support After Murder and Manslaughter Abroad consistently highlight the fact that more support is required for bereaved families—those who have lost loved ones through murder and manslaughter abroad. What steps is my hon. Friend the Minister taking to address those shortcomings?
Mrs Grant
We do a considerable amount of work, and we provide funding for families of homicide victims. I attended a conference run by a gentleman called Frank Mullane to discuss what he does for families who go through that appalling difficulty. I am happy to talk further with my hon. Friend about what measures are being taken and what else we are doing on those issues.
Sadiq Khan (Tooting) (Lab)
I have to tell you, Mr Speaker, that this Government have failed to implement the main recommendation made by the last victims’ commissioner, Louise Casey, before she left her post 18 months ago, which was to implement a victims’ law. The Government have also slashed the compensation available to victims of crime. During the last Justice questions, we heard that the Justice Secretary believes that it is the fault of the victims of rape that so many men receive cautions for rape. Does the Minister believe that it is possible to have a criminal justice system that is on the side of victims while her party is in government? If so, when will it happen?
Mrs Grant
The Government are absolutely committed to looking after victims and witnesses of crime. As the right hon. Gentleman knows, we currently spend £66 million on victim services. Not content with that, we want to raise even more money for victims—up to £50 million—through the victims’ surcharge. We are also raising money through the Prisoners’ Earnings Act 1996, giving victims a louder voice through the appointment of Baroness Newlove as victims’ commissioner and clarifying victims’ entitlements through reform of the victims’ code, on which we will consult in due course.
Rehman Chishti (Gillingham and Rainham) (Con)
On the victim surcharge, what is being done to ensure that all the fines are being collected so that they can be used to support victims?
Mrs Grant
The victims surcharge is potentially a large amount of money that will be raised for victims and witnesses. As Minister with responsibility for courts as well as for victims, I assure my hon. Friend that Her Majesty’s Courts and Tribunals Service will continue to prioritise collection of financial penalties, including the surcharge.
Mark Pawsey (Rugby) (Con)
8. What representations he has received from the voluntary and charitable sector on his proposals to introduce payment by results for the rehabilitation of offenders.
The Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice (Chris Grayling)
We want to open up rehabilitation services to a more diverse market and harness the expertise of the voluntary sector in dealing with the complex difficulties that repeat offenders face. We received more than 500 written responses to our recent consultation, including from the voluntary and charitable sector. We are considering them carefully and will introduce detailed plans in due course.
Mark Pawsey
Charities and the voluntary sector can play a big part in the rehabilitation of offenders. What information will be made available to bodies in the sector so that they have an opportunity to introduce effective strategies?
Chris Grayling
In April we will launch a justice data lab, which will allow all kinds of organisations involved in the issue to access data on reoffending so that they can be clear about the effectiveness of their work. We will do everything that we can to help them identify that impact in a way that encourages them in the role that they intend to play.
Richard Fuller (Bedford) (Con)
17. One consequence of payment by results is that it creates working capital problems for many charitable and voluntary organisations. Social impact finance is one solution to bridging that working capital gap. What conversations has the Secretary of State had with Big Society Capital and others about promoting social impact finance in that area?
Chris Grayling
I have met personally with representatives of Big Society Capital and other organisations in the social finance sector. I believe that this is an enormous opportunity for the sector, and I want it to be involved in the work that we are doing. Combining the skills of the voluntary sector with the social finance sector could play a powerful part in what we are trying to achieve.
Gavin Williamson (South Staffordshire) (Con)
9. What powers there are to confiscate unauthorised property found in prisoners’ possession.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Justice (Jeremy Wright)
Prison governors or directors have the power under prison rules to confiscate any unauthorised item found in the possession of a prisoner or elsewhere within a prison. In addition, following the excellent stewardship of my hon. Friend the Member for Pudsey (Stuart Andrew), the Prisons (Property) Act 2013, which received Royal Assent on 28 February, will, when commenced, provide prison governors and directors with a statutory power to destroy or otherwise dispose of unauthorised property confiscated from a prisoner.
Gavin Williamson
Many of my constituents in South Staffordshire believe that many prisoners have far too many home comforts in their cells, and that there is far too much contraband in the prison system. What action has my hon. Friend taken to make sure that we run a spartan regime, and not a holiday camp?
Jeremy Wright
My hon. Friend can reassure his constituents that prisoners will no longer watch Sky subscription television channels, and they will no longer watch 18-rated DVDs. As my hon. Friend knows, we are looking comprehensively at the incentives and earned privileges scheme in prisons to make sure that prisoners earn any incentives and privileges that they receive.
Debbie Abrahams (Oldham East and Saddleworth) (Lab)
10. What the Government’s policy is on membership of the European convention on human rights.
The Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice (Chris Grayling)
As a coalition Government, we remain committed to the European convention on human rights, and we are also closely involved in the process to reform the Strasbourg Court. Individual political parties will choose what approach to take at the next general election.
Debbie Abrahams
The Home Secretary wants to leave the European convention on human rights; the Justice Secretary has said that he is not too sure, but he wants to abolish the Human Rights Act. Apart from being another omnishambles, does that reflect their lack of commitment to human rights, the fact that they want to leave the European Union, or both?
Chris Grayling
What I think is far more shameful is the complete resistance by the Labour party to any measures designed to stop a situation in which terrorist suspects with a clear goal of doing damage to the citizens of this country can use human rights law to try to defend their right to stay in this country.
Chris Bryant (Rhondda) (Lab)
This is ludicrous equivocation from the Government on the ECHR, which was written by a Conservative Home Secretary in the 1940s and 1950s. How can we possibly say to countries such as Turkey and Russia, where British citizens need to have their rights protected, that they should adhere to the ECHR when the Justice Secretary cannot even stand up for justice?
Chris Grayling
When I was younger I was a human rights campaigner, and my idea of human rights is not providing artificial insemination to prisoners in our jails. It is up to the Labour party if it wants to defend that. I am going to carry on arguing for change, and I hope that when we are a majority Government we will deliver it.
Jeremy Corbyn (Islington North) (Lab)
Does the Secretary of State not recognise that the ECHR has done a great deal to improve the lot of people who were discriminated against and abused in many countries across Europe. It is an important statement of intent by a large number of countries. Can he not just get behind the principle that human rights are universal? The universal declaration is important, and the European convention was a major landmark in improving human rights around the world?
Chris Grayling
The issue is not about the original convention, which contains a sensible balance of rights and responsibilities. The issue is about how far we have moved over 60 years from the original intentions of those who wrote the convention. That is why a change is desperately needed.
Pat Glass (North West Durham) (Lab)
11. What plans he has for the future of the probation service; and if he will make a statement.
Paul Blomfield (Sheffield Central) (Lab)
12. What plans he has for the future of the probation service; and if he will make a statement.
Jeremy Wright
The transforming rehabilitation consultation closed on 22 February 2013. Our proposed reforms will help reduce reoffending by opening up the provision of probation services to a wider range of providers and by extending rehabilitative provision to those serving less than 12 months in prison. We will respond to the consultation and bring forward detailed plans in due course.
Jeremy Wright
As I said, we will provide the detail of the proposals when we have had a chance to look in detail at the responses to the consultation, but we expect a progressive year-on-year reduction in reoffending as a result of the improvements that we want to make.
Paul Blomfield
My probation trust in south Yorkshire is not alone in being concerned about the proposal to split responsibility for offenders between public and private providers, depending on the level of risk, as that introduces a dangerous artificial divide that fails to take account of the way in which risk fluctuates. Will the Minister tell the House how many offenders on licence saw their risk level change between medium and high over the past 12 months, and how many of them committed serious offences in that period?
Jeremy Wright
The hon. Gentleman is right that one of the major issues that has arisen through this process is the dynamic nature of risk, and we fully appreciate that that is an important subject. None the less, it is important to look at the need to make the best use of the skills of the probation service. There are considerable skills within the probation service in managing the risk of serious harm, which is why we propose that those offenders who pose the highest risk should be managed directly. We also think that it would be good to bring in new ideas from those who work in the voluntary and private sectors to manage the reoffending rates of medium and low-risk offenders. As to the point he makes, it will be clearly crucial for good relationships to exist between the public sector probation service and those providing work for medium and lower-risk offenders, and we will build into the system those safeguards.
Mr Crispin Blunt (Reigate) (Con)
The Government’s proposals for the reform of probation offer the prospect for probation officers to be able to deliver rehabilitation in a much more effective, creative and positive way. However, they will be working for a multitude of different organisations, which will mean that all the things that bind the probation service together will have to be strengthened. What proposals does the Minister have in mind for that, if he can say anything before he announces the response to the consultation?
Jeremy Wright
My hon. Friend is right to say that there will be a variety of different organisations providing rehabilitation services for which those currently employed by the probation service might end up working, and I hope very much that we will retain the skills within the system. He is also right that the proposals present the opportunity for increasing the professionalisation of the probation service of which he is a great champion, and we want to ensure that those proposals are not overlooked in the consultation process and beyond.
Mr Philip Hollobone (Kettering) (Con)
I commend to my hon. Friend the Minister the response to the consultation from the Northamptonshire Probation Trust, which has an excellent reputation. Although it is supportive in principle of the concept of payment by results, it, like my hon. Friend the Member for Waveney (Peter Aldous), has concerns that large and remote contracts—if the Department goes down that route—will not place sufficient emphasis on the joined-up local delivery of effective probation services.
Jeremy Wright
Again, that is a realistic concern and one that we will address. It is important that we maintain those crucial local partnerships, and we will expect anyone taking on this work to do that. We will also want to ensure that not only the design of the contracts but the management of those contracts and the relationships with smaller and local organisations, particularly in the voluntary sector, are maintained and nurtured. We will look carefully at all bids to ensure that they do that.
Jenny Chapman (Darlington) (Lab)
I hope that Ministers are listening to the concern that is coming from Members on both sides of the Chamber about the proposals. Last year, 17,000 offenders were recalled to prison by their probation officer, so that is 17,000 crimes that were prevented and victims spared because of decisions made by probation officers. Am I right in saying that in the future private providers of probation services will lose payments for supervising an offender if that offender is recalled to prison?
Jeremy Wright
The clue is in the title. If, under payment by results, a provider gets the right result, they will get a payment; if they do not, they will not get a payment. Let me make it clear to the hon. Lady that under the proposed system, the decisions on recall will be made by public sector probation officers and not by providers, so the responsibility for that decision remains in the public sector where we believe it belongs.
Alec Shelbrooke (Elmet and Rothwell) (Con)
13. What the cost is of putting a child through (a) a young offender’s institution and (b) other forms of youth detention.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Justice (Jeremy Wright)
In the current financial year, the average cost of a place in a young offender institution is £65,000 a year; the average cost of a place in a secure training centre is £178,000 a year, and the average cost of a place in a secure children’s home is £212,000 a year.
Alec Shelbrooke
East Garforth primary school in my constituency has recently shown me the benefits of play therapy and early intervention at key stage 1. Has my hon. Friend’s Department, in conjunction with the Department for Education, made any assessments of their own as to the benefits of this early intervention as a tool to reduce youth offending?
Jeremy Wright
I am not aware of any specific research on that particular programme. However, what I can say is that I agree entirely with my hon. Friend that early intervention is crucial, and, as I said a moment ago, it is important that we work across Government with the Education Department and others to ensure that that happens. That is a good way of ensuring that we prevent young people from entering the criminal justice system in the first place, which is clearly preferable than trying to deal with them when they are there.
Bill Esterson (Sefton Central) (Lab)
One way to reduce the cost of putting children in prison is to ensure that care leavers have proper support. Some care leavers see crime as the only way to survive, so what discussions has the Minister had with ministerial colleagues in other Departments to ensure that children do not return to crime when they leave care?
Jeremy Wright
The hon. Gentleman is right to focus on care leavers. He may be aware, if he has had a chance to look at the matter, that the Select Committee on Justice report contains a section on the criminalisation of those who are in care and on what is fairly described in many cases as an over-reaction to incidents that would not have resulted in the intervention of criminal justice agencies had they happened outside the care system. As I said, that is something that we will want to look at more carefully and respond to properly.
Philip Davies (Shipley) (Con)
14. How many people convicted of robbery were not sent to prison in each of the last three years.
The Minister for Policing and Criminal Justice (Damian Green)
In 2009, 3,509 people were not given an immediate custodial sentence for robbery. In 2010, that figure was 3,568 and, in 2011, 3,710. The majority of those were young offenders. However, in the same period, nearly 16,000 offenders were sent to custody for robbery. Robbery is a serious crime carrying a maximum penalty of life imprisonment. Armed robbery is on the list of offences which can attract a “two strikes” mandatory life sentence.
Philip Davies
Recently, John Calvert was convicted of mugging a woman student in Bradford city centre. At the time of his offence, he was on a 12-month intensive community order for robbing a 13-year-old girl of her mobile phone. Is the Minister proud of presiding over a criminal justice system that allows dangerous offenders committing those kinds of street robberies to walk free from prison and to go out and commit other crimes across the Bradford district?
Damian Green
My hon. Friend would not expect me to comment on individual cases. I am happy to reassure him that the sentencing guideline on robbery states that the offence will usually merit a custodial sentence but that exceptional circumstances may justify a non-custodial penalty for an adult or, more frequently, for a young offender. However, sentencing in individual cases is a matter for the courts. I hope that he will join me in welcoming the fact that it is a matter for the courts, rather than for politicians.
Mr Barry Sheerman (Huddersfield) (Lab/Co-op)
May I press the Minister on this matter? We know that serial burglars are not locked up but is it right that Vicky Pryce and Chris Huhne should be imprisoned when it would have been much better if they had been given a community sentence and were working in the community?
Damian Green
The hon. Gentleman is slightly suggesting that politicians should set sentences. I am happy to reassure him that the average sentence for burglary is going up—if he wishes that to happen, I can assure him that it is happening. The adult custodial rate for robbery in 2011, the last year for which figures are available, was 84.3%, so the vast majority of people who commit robbery do end up in jail.
Mr Gregory Campbell (East Londonderry) (DUP)
According to the figures that the Minister has just given, 100 more people in each of the last three years were not sentenced to prison as a result of a conviction for robbery. What steps is he taking to reassure people throughout the UK that that figure will be reduced in the next three years?
Damian Green
As I say, the average sentence is going up. One of the things that has been discussed a lot in Question Time today is how more effective rehabilitation is dealing with some of the most prolific offenders. As has been said, a lot of robberies are committed by reoffenders, so getting rehabilitation right earlier in the system, so fewer people commit such crimes, is the best defence we have against more of these prolific offenders being out on the streets committing offences.
Diana Johnson (Kingston upon Hull North) (Lab)
15. What his sentencing policy is for the most serious and violent offenders.
The Minister for Policing and Criminal Justice (Damian Green)
Serious and violent offenders deserve to go to prison. That is why we introduced mandatory life sentences for anyone convicted for a second time of a very serious sexual or violent offence, and tough extended determinate sentences for other dangerous offenders. The new regime restores clarity, coherence and common sense to sentencing.
Diana Johnson
In Hull last year, the clear-up rate for actual bodily harm was 41%, but for sexual offences it was only 28%, and we know that 7,000 fewer violent crimes were solved nationally. Mandatory life sentences are available only for second offences of a very serious sexual and violent nature, and many offenders are not convicted in the first place. With indeterminate sentences having been abolished for that particular group, is the Minister satisfied that the public are protected from these very dangerous offenders?
Damian Green
I hope the hon. Lady is reassured by, for instance, the new extended determinate sentence, under which the offender receives a custodial sentence plus a further long extended period of licence set by the court. Offenders receiving that sentence will serve at least two thirds of the custodial term, which is higher than has been the practice in recent years, showing that the system is not just more coherent, but, for these kinds of serious offences, tougher than before.
Miss Anne McIntosh (Thirsk and Malton) (Con)
Does my right hon. Friend agree that in north Yorkshire one of the difficulties with sentencing and bringing people to trial is the lack of a sexual assault and rape centre? What plans do the Government have to bring one forward?
Damian Green
My hon. Friend will have heard the victims Minister, my hon. Friend the Member for Maidstone and The Weald (Mrs Grant), set out the much good work she is promoting in terms of victims’ centres, and in particular rape victim centres. I assure my hon. Friend the Member for Thirsk and Malton (Miss McIntosh) that Ministers are taking that issue very seriously in all parts of the country, and particularly in north Yorkshire.
Mr Henry Bellingham (North West Norfolk) (Con)
16. What plans he has to ensure that high net worth defendants do not receive legal aid.
The Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice (Chris Grayling)
The Ministry of Justice is considering ways in which high net worth defendants can be obliged to pay the costs of their defence privately, without receiving legal aid first. We have also announced measures to strengthen Crown court means-testing to help ensure that defendants who can pay towards their legal aid costs at the Crown court are made to do so. Last night, of course, there were additional provisions to the Crime and Courts Bill, which received its Third Reading in this House.
Mr Bellingham
I am grateful to the Lord Chancellor for that encouraging reply, and I thank him for the work he is doing in this area, but does he agree that for far too long these rich defendants have had their cases financed through legal aid by the taxpayer, which is completely unacceptable at a time when he has had to make changes to the legal aid budget? Does he agree that more can still be done to access wealth from frozen accounts?
Chris Grayling
I very much agree with that, and, of course, the measures in the Crime and Courts Bill open the door to our doing that for the first time. I wish to see us recover funds from those who can afford to pay for their own defence.
Grahame M. Morris (Easington) (Lab)
T1. If he will make a statement on his departmental responsibilities.
The Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice (Chris Grayling)
Last week I launched the “legal services on the international stage” action plan. It sets out the immense contribution Britain’s legal services sector can make both to reinvigorate our economy and to ensure that Britain remains ahead in the global race. Legal services employ 340,000 people nationwide, and contribute over £20 billion to the UK economy. Beyond London, the north-west, Scotland and Wales are also emerging as centres of excellence. The Government want to encourage and export Britain’s leadership in this industry. The action plan we have published sets out how we intend to do that. It requires opening up legal markets abroad and selling the benefits of British law firms and the English legal system, as well as championing our offer to overseas legal students. I am sure the House will want to back our industry and the efforts both my Department and UK Trade & Investment are making to help our businesses spread our footprint around the world.
Grahame M. Morris
I thank the Justice Secretary for his reply, but may I draw his attention to the Public Accounts Committee’s damning report on the Ministry of Justice’s handling of the court translators contract? Again it is a case of being penny wise and pound foolish. Two hundred cases in England and Wales had to be cancelled, costing the public purse millions of pounds. Experienced and trained translators are still refusing to work with Capita, which was awarded the contract. Will the Minister, as part of his action plan, rescue our justice service and abandon this failed contract?
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Justice (Mrs Helen Grant)
I hear what the hon. Gentleman says, but we are working very closely with Capita. Our success rate is good, but it can, of course, improve, and it will improve. The British taxpayer will save some £15 million per annum as a result of this contract, and I am fully convinced that the new contract will be more accountable, transparent and effective than the old one.
Peter Aldous (Waveney) (Con)
T3. Has the Secretary of State considered increasing the maximum sentences available to magistrates from six to 12 months, so that justice can be delivered more efficiently, fairly and quickly by magistrates who live in, and have a good understanding of, the communities they serve?
The Minister for Policing and Criminal Justice (Damian Green)
We are considering the case for increasing magistrates’ custodial sentencing powers in the way that my hon. Friend and, indeed, the Magistrates Association has suggested. I agree that magistrates have a very important role to play in our society and we should be thankful for the work they put in. We are exploring other ways to make use of the skills and expertise they bring.
Sadiq Khan (Tooting) (Lab)
I am sure the Justice Secretary agrees that we need not only to ensure that people do not become victims of crime in the first place, but that those responsible for crime are caught and dealt with appropriately by the criminal justice system. Burglary can have a devastating impact on the victims of crime and leave families traumatised. What are the Justice Secretary’s views on those accused of burglary being given a caution?
Chris Grayling
I regard burglary as an extremely serious crime. As I have said publicly, I also have reservations about the way cautions are currently being used, and I have been clear that we are looking at this as a matter of priority. I can reassure the shadow Justice Secretary that in fact, the length of time burglars spend behind bars is increasing, not decreasing.
Sadiq Khan
The right hon. Gentleman may therefore be interested to know that last year, 3,359 cautions were given for burglary, and in 2010 the figure was 3,484. There is concern that the use of more out-of-court disposals such as on-the-spot fines and cautions is cheapening our justice system. Although that may be desirable for the Treasury, it is not what law-abiding victims of crime want. The use of cautions and on-the-spot fines can lead to the public losing confidence in our criminal justice system. Does he agree and what is he going to do about it?
Chris Grayling
Actually, I do agree. I have reservations about the number of cautions being used. Of course, one has to remember that the current culture of the use of out-of-court settlements dates back to when the last Government were in power, and the use of cautions was much higher three or four years ago than it is today. I am very clear that we have to look again at the way cautions are used, and I have reservations about the way they are used for some serious offences. It is work we are currently doing.
Pauline Latham (Mid Derbyshire) (Con)
T5. What progress has been made on the Secretary of State’s plans to introduce a greater emphasis on education into the youth custodial estate?
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Justice (Jeremy Wright)
My hon. Friend will know that we are consulting on the idea that we should provide more education for those in youth custody than is currently provided. We are looking for good ideas—from wherever they may come—on how that might be done better, but she is entirely right: education needs to form more of a part of what we do. We have a responsibility to educate these young people, and doing so more effectively will assist in reducing reoffending.
Mr Barry Sheerman (Huddersfield) (Lab/Co-op)
T2. May I push the Secretary of State on the question of victims, particularly the families of victims of murder? Just over 10 years ago, eight members of a family in my constituency were murdered, five of whom were children. One of the two men who were found guilty has been released by the Parole Board, which is considering releasing the other one. What sort of justice is it when this decision is not communicated to the family of the eight people who died?
Chris Grayling
I am absolutely clear that it is not acceptable for people who have been the victims of horrible crimes to discover, without their knowing anything about it, that those who committed those crimes, having served an appropriate sentence, are on the streets again. I intend to ask the new victims commissioner to look into this as a matter of urgency. Tragically, she has direct experience of how this can affect families, and I believe there is nobody better qualified to fulfil that role. I absolutely understand the point the hon. Gentleman is making.
David Mowat (Warrington South) (Con)
T6. A continuing issue is convicted criminals who hide their wealth or in other ways refuse to abide by financial assessment orders. Is there more we can do in this area?
Damian Green
As my hon. Friend knows, the Government recently published details of measures to strengthen the Crown court means-testing scheme. They include steps to ensure that if a defendant fails to co-operate with the new legal aid agency, and if it believes they have sufficient means to pay, they may be pursued for all their outstanding legal aid costs following conviction. From July, the Government will also introduce motor vehicle order regulations so that the agency can seize a defendant’s vehicle if they refuse to pay their contribution towards their costs. Significant action is being taken in this area.
Nick Smith (Blaenau Gwent) (Lab)
T4. The failed contract with ALS/Capita is a year old. Does the Minister agree that her claims of massive savings cannot be demonstrated, given that the Ministry refuses to publish details of how much is spent off-contract to purchase interpreting services?
Mrs Grant
I think that I have made the position clear, but I will repeat it. The contract is operating at a very good success rate, but further improvements can be made. Having worked as a solicitor in the old regime, I can say that it certainly was not perfect. I am satisfied that the new regime will not only save the taxpayer a considerable amount of money, but be more effective, transparent and accountable than the old regime.
Charles Hendry (Wealden) (Con)
Far too many young people are essentially illiterate and innumerate when they start custodial sentences. Even worse, they still are when they finish them. What assessment has the Minister made of the extent to which the costs of providing educational services would be offset by savings through a reduction in reoffending rates?
Jeremy Wright
My hon. Friend makes a good point. We are already obliged to provide education for such young people, whether they are in custody or not. He is right that literacy and numeracy are a huge issue. That is partly because there are very high rates of exclusion from school among young people who eventually end up in custody. We need to do more to take advantage of the period of stability, which for many young people is unusual, that they have while in custody. We must do more to educate them in custody and to ensure that that education continues when they leave it.
Pat Glass (North West Durham) (Lab)
T7. What is the minimum percentage that the Justice Secretary thinks needs to be in a contract for it to be considered a payment-by-results scheme?
Chris Grayling
I have been very clear that I find it profoundly unsatisfactory that people who get sentences of less than 12 months are not provided with supervision post-prison. The changes that we have put in place will include that group and people who receive community sentences. We must remember that 80% of those who end up in our prisons have completed a community sentence, so that part of our system is not working either.
Duncan Hames (Chippenham) (LD)
The risk posed by offenders can change, as was illustrated all too vividly by news reports from Chippenham last week. Under his proposals, how will the Secretary of State ensure that medium-risk offenders are assessed to enable them to receive attention from skilled and experienced probation officers should they become a higher risk to members of the public?
Chris Grayling
We are very clear that there has to be a simple mechanism for offenders whose risk profile is changing to be reassessed by a public probation officer. As a result of our consultation, we are working through the details of how that process should work. I am very clear that the responsibility for protecting the public from the risk of harm should and will remain with the public sector.
Paul Goggins (Wythenshawe and Sale East) (Lab)
T8. During the Report stage of the Crime and Courts Bill, there was unfortunately insufficient time for Ministers to speak to Government amendment 110, which provided for statutory guidance on the use of restorative justice. Will the Minister take this opportunity, given that there was extensive discussion in Committee and outside on this issue, to explain to the House how that amendment will extend and strengthen the use of restorative justice in the criminal justice system?
Damian Green
First, I thank the right hon. Gentleman for his kind remarks on Third Reading of the Crime and Courts Bill last night. The Bill gives judges explicit powers to defer sentencing to allow restorative justice to take place between a victim and an offender. The amendment provides that restorative justice practitioners must
“have regard to any guidance that is issued”
by the Secretary of State, with a view to “encouraging good practice” in the delivery of pre-sentence restorative justice. That is a significant step forward for restorative justice and I know that the right hon. Gentleman will welcome it.
Andrew Selous (South West Bedfordshire) (Con)
Will the Government aim to ensure that no prisoner leaves prison without being able to read and write as that would further reduce reoffending and give prisoners a chance of finding work when they leave?
Jeremy Wright
Yes, we will make every effort to ensure that prisoners learn to read and write if they cannot do so when they arrive. A good deal of the excellent work to achieve that is done by volunteers, mentors and charities. That foreshadows what we hope we can achieve with the wider transforming rehabilitation agenda. My hon. Friend is right to focus on this issue because literacy skills mean that somebody has a greater likelihood of getting and holding on to a job, which helps to reduce reoffending.
Natascha Engel (North East Derbyshire) (Lab)
T9. After 1 April, the courts will be full of people defending themselves because they cannot afford professional advice and no longer have access to legal aid. What is the Department doing to ensure that everybody gets access to justice, not only those who can afford it?
Chris Grayling
Opposition Members must realise that they left behind not only the biggest deficit in our peacetime history, but also the most expensive legal aid system in the developed world. We must take tough decisions and have a system that is realistic, given our financial constraints. I believe we have achieved that with the reforms we have put forward. We will monitor the impact of those reforms and ensure that we adjust anything that needs to be adjusted. Opposition Members should not believe that there are alternatives to what we are doing.
Stephen Metcalfe (South Basildon and East Thurrock) (Con)
Felmores approved premises in my constituency is located near a school, a nursery, a playground and a densely populated housing estate. Does my right hon. Friend agree that although the provision of such premises is essential, a location such as the one I have described is inappropriate? Will he encourage probation trusts to work with the local community to find alternative locations?
Chris Grayling
I have a lot of sympathy with my hon. Friend and I will ask the Minister responsible for prisons and probation whether he will work with him to look at the situation described. Clearly, it is not sensible to locate such facilities in highly sensitive locations, although my hon. Friend will agree that their provision in the community is vital.
Meg Munn (Sheffield, Heeley) (Lab/Co-op)
The Government have proposed to move personal injury cases below a certain level into the small claims court, which will mean more people representing themselves in person. That is likely to mean that a lot more time will be needed for those cases, as well as a lot of negotiation, which will lead to more costs. How does the Minister think that such a move will save the public money?
Chris Grayling
I am not sure whether the hon. Lady has experience of the small claims court, but this plays to the point raised by her hon. Friend the Member for North East Derbyshire (Natascha Engel). The small claims court is more of a mediation environment than a combative legal environment, and that is a better way of dealing with many of the smaller claims that people need to bring.
Mr Philip Hollobone (Kettering) (Con)
Jamaican and Nigerian nationals make up a big proportion of the foreign nationals in our jails. What progress is being made on negotiating compulsory prisoner transfer agreements with Jamaica and Nigeria so that we can send those people back?
Jeremy Wright
As my hon. Friend rightly says, Nigeria is a significant country in that respect, and he will know that one obstacle to negotiating such an agreement concerns the constitutional restrictions in potential receiving countries. My hon. Friend will be pleased to know that the Nigerian legislature has now passed legislation that makes such an agreement feasible, so we are making considerable progress with Nigeria.
Mrs Madeleine Moon (Bridgend) (Lab)
Schedule 2 of the Armed Forces Act 2006 means that a commanding officer does not automatically have to refer to the service prosecution authority incidents of sexual assault, voyeurism and exposure. Will the Minister talk to his equivalent in the Ministry of Defence to ensure that victims, whether in the civil service or the military, have access to the same justice as in the civil justice and military systems?
Chris Grayling
Access to justice is obviously important for everyone, but the matters to which the hon. Lady refers are for my colleagues at the Ministry of Defence. I am sure that they will note her comments in Hansard and be aware of what she has said.
Dr Julian Huppert (Cambridge) (LD)
The Defamation Bill is a key piece of legislation, helping people to protect their reputations and supporting free speech. It was held up in the other place, but what progress is now being made and does it have a target date for Royal Assent?
Chris Grayling
I very much hope that now that cross-party issues on Leveson have been dealt with, there will be no obstacles to bringing forward the Defamation Bill in its original form, without the Lords amendments.
Mr Nigel Dodds (Belfast North) (DUP)
On compensation for people with pleural plaques, will the Minister look at what has happened in Northern Ireland, which has overturned the House of Lords ruling and restored the right of people to sue in the civil courts for compensation for that condition?
Mrs Grant
Yes, I am happy to look at that, but the law does not prevent a person with pleural plaques who goes on to develop any recognised asbestos-related disease from bringing a claim in relation to that disease. Obviously, England and Wales have a different legal system from those in Scotland and Northern Ireland.
Human Rights in India
Ms Gisela Stuart (Birmingham, Edgbaston) (Lab)
I have a petition signed by many people in the west midlands and across the country, who ask the House of Commons to urge the Government to appeal to India to take immediate action to stop the human rights abuses facing minorities in India; that India should sign and ratify the Rome statute of the International Criminal Court and the UN charter against torture and other cruel, inhumane or degrading treatment or punishment, which encompasses the death penalty; and thus India should abolish the death penalty.
And the Petitioners remain, etc.
Following is the full text of the petition:
[The Petition of residents of the United Kingdom,
Declares that the Petitioners believe that the UK Government, together with the UN and EU, should encourage the Indian Union to take immediate action to stop human rights abuses facing minorities in India and that India should sign and ratify the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court and the UN Charter against torture and other cruel, inhumane or degrading treatment or punishment which encompasses the death penalty and thus India should abolish the death penalty as it is a cruel, inhumane or degrading form of punishment; further declares that the UK Government should campaign to stop Balwant Singh Rajoana's death sentence and have him released from jail as he has served 17 years in custody and that the Indian Union should release all prisoners facing the same situation and those who have been imprisoned without trial.
The Petitioners therefore request that the House of Commons urges the Government to appeal to India for the above actions to be taken, and request that the Government bring these issues to light in the European Union and United Nations.
And the Petitioners remain, etc.]
[P001164]
European Council
(11 years, 1 month ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Urgent Questions are proposed each morning by backbench MPs, and up to two may be selected each day by the Speaker. Chosen Urgent Questions are announced 30 minutes before Parliament sits each day.
Each Urgent Question requires a Government Minister to give a response on the debate topic.
This information is provided by Parallel Parliament and does not comprise part of the offical record
Mr William Cash (Stone) (Con)
(Urgent Question): To ask the Minister of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs if he, on this occasion only, will make a statement on the European Council on 14 and 15 March, and its conclusions of 15 March.
The Minister of State, Foreign and Commonwealth Office (Mr Hugo Swire)
With permission, Mr Speaker, I would like to make a statement on the European Council meeting held in Brussels—
Mr Speaker
Order. I think I need to explain this for the benefit, clearly, of the Minister of State, and of the House. The Minister is not “with permission” making a statement; he has toddled into the Chamber to respond to an urgent question application from the hon. Member for Stone (Mr Cash), which I have granted. The Minister has not volunteered a statement; he is responding to a requirement to come to the Chamber. That is the position.
Mr Swire
Thank you, Mr Speaker. It gives me very great pleasure to respond to the question from my hon. Friend the Member for Stone (Mr Cash) on my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister’s attendance at the summit in Brussels on 14 and 15 March.
Discussions focused on economic issues and growth, and in particular on the European semester process. The Council also covered the deteriorating situation in Syria and the EU-Russia relationship. The Prime Minister took the opportunity to offer the Council an update on key issues to be covered in the UK G8 summit in Lough Erne in Northern Ireland in June, which include tax, transparency, trade and terrorism.
The Prime Minister pushed for reforms to make the EU more competitive. Working with our European partners, including Chancellor Merkel, he set out practical steps that need to be taken to boost European economies and create jobs and growth, including reducing the red tape that continues to constrain our businesses, especially small and medium-sized enterprises. The European Council agreed that the European Commission will set out proposals on how to reduce burdens on small and medium-sized enterprises and, in autumn 2013, a list of unnecessary EU rules to be scrapped.
On Syria, my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister and President Hollande of France argued that, with 70,000 dead, and with more than 1 million refugees destabilising the region, it was important for the EU to be able to respond to the pace of events and the deterioration of the situation on the ground. The Prime Minister and President Hollande secured agreement from European partners that, ahead of the deadline for renewing, amending or ending the EU arms embargo at the end of the May, EU Foreign Ministers should consider further changes to broaden support for the National Coalition.
The Council also discussed EU-Russia relations. The Prime Minister made the case for working together for prosperity and security while being honest about matters on which we disagree with one another.
Mr Cash
Given that there are 11 pages of European conclusions, who decided to report to the House on the European Council for the first time by way of written ministerial statement, and why? Why did the Prime Minister not make the statement on the EU Council, as announced by the Leader of the House last Thursday? Does the Minister agree that, as the Prime Minister negotiated at the European Council, he should also make the statement and answer all questions?
The conclusions astonishingly state that much has been accomplished in the EU in recent years. Given the dysfunctional nature of the EU, the eurozone crisis and low growth, and the state of affairs in Greece and Italy, and now in Cyprus and Spain, how can such a statement be justified?
What specific steps are being taken to help small and medium-sized businesses, given that, despite all the protestations and initiatives, and 20 summits in 20 months, there is zero growth in the EU? Why is that? How does the Minister believe the single market can be a key driver for the UK’s growth and jobs when our trade deficit with the 27 EU member states is £48 billion, whereas we have a surplus of £20 billion with the rest of the world? Given past hopeless performance, what reason is there to believe that the burden of European regulation on small and medium-sized businesses, and other businesses, will ever be reduced?
Finally, what are the specific legislative proposals for the single resolution mechanism, and how will the level playing field be achieved for the City of London given the current state of play?
Mr Swire
I sometimes hope that my hon. Friend will see something good in the EU, but that might take a lifetime. It is to the credit of my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister that he takes his responsibilities extremely seriously. Since he took office, he has given 15 oral statements and two written statements following European Councils. He issued a written ministerial statement this morning, and I understand that my hon. Friend had a discussion with him on this subject yesterday.
Had my hon. Friend been with us at the debate earlier today on UK Trade & Investment, he would have recognised the feeling across the House—in fact, not right across the House, because there was nobody there from the Opposition. [Interruption.] Well, the Opposition spokesman was there, the Democratic Unionist party was there, but the Labour party was not there because it does not seem to be interested in small and medium-sized businesses. If my hon. Friend had been there this morning, he would have recognised the feeling that while SMEs are the way forward, they are over-regulated. Small and medium-sized enterprises provided 85% of new jobs in the EU in the past decade. As a result of the Council, we now have concrete measures to reduce regulations, including the top 10 most burdensome EU regulations, by June. The measures include rules on chemicals, product safety and customs. We believe the single market is the way forward and that EU trade agreements are vital. That is our vision of Europe, and one that I hope my hon. Friend shares.
Emma Reynolds (Wolverhampton North East) (Lab)
I recognise the importance of yesterday’s events, but I seek reassurance from the Minister that the Prime Minister will continue to make oral statements to the House after European Council meetings.
The Council conclusions call for member states to introduce short-term, targeted measures to boost growth and prioritise growth-friendly investment. Will the Minister tell us how the Government will put the measures he signed up to in Brussels into practice here in the UK, given that our economy is still flatlining? Specifically, what will the Government do to implement the youth guarantee mentioned in the Council conclusions signed up to by the Government in February?
On Syria, the crisis, killing and violence continue unabated. An estimated 70,000 people have lost their lives and there are more than 1 million refugees. There are major concerns about moves to lift the EU arms embargo. Once an arms embargo is lifted, it is close to impossible to guarantee in whose hands weapons will end up. That presents dangers, both now and after the conflict. How do we ensure that the lifting of the arms embargo does not simply lead to a further influx of weapons to the Assad regime, or spill over into other countries in the region? Finally, would the lifting of the arms embargo heighten or diminish the prospect of political transition in Syria? The primary aim of the Minister and the Government should be to ensure a reduction, rather than an intensification, of violence.
Mr Swire
The hon. Lady raises a number of issues. First, there is a precedent for a post-Council statement to be made by a written ministerial statement, if it is not possible for an oral statement to be made on the next sitting day. For example, the Prime Minister gave a written ministerial statement on 11 October, following the European Council on 16 Sept 2010. Yesterday, we were rather busy deliberating on Leveson.
We have secured exemptions and lighter regimes for small and medium-sized enterprises in 17 areas in the past year. We recognise that, with our European partners, we need to do a lot more to reduce the burden of regulation. As the hon. Lady acknowledges—it is acknowledged right across the House—SMEs are the growth engines and the wealth generators of tomorrow. We therefore have to drive this forward and ensure that we do not just talk about cutting red tape to SMEs, but deliver.
The situation in Syria is extraordinarily important. I do not want us to get ahead of ourselves. I made a statement a week or so ago, before the Foreign Secretary made a statement, on the change in the embargo regime for Syria. The hon. Lady will be aware that the situation in Syria deteriorates by the hour. She quite properly alluded to regional instability and spill over into countries such as Jordan, which is very worrying. We have taken a decision, with our European partners, to see what more we can do. The French are keen on not necessarily waiting until May-June, but on reviewing the situation on a regular basis. I think that that is the right thing to do. We should watch the situation as it develops and see how better we can respond to help those who are afflicted by this appalling tragedy. The bottom line is that Assad has to go and we have to do everything we can to support a credible opposition in order to bring some kind of peace and then some kind of democratic accountability to any replacement Government, and we will work with our European partners to that end.
The United Kingdom should be very proud of the role it is playing in alleviating the hardship by providing money and finance to refugees. Charities, NGOs, the Department for International Development and other organisations are stepping up to the plate, and it would be good if other countries followed our lead. It is an horrific and appalling situation that we see on the news every night, so it is right that we do everything we can and examine every avenue available to bring it to a speedy end.
Sir Menzies Campbell (North East Fife) (LD)
No ones disputes that the situation in Syria is appalling, but does my right hon. Friend understand that some Members have grave reservations about the apparent move by Britain and France towards the supply of arms to the opposition—reservations, because it is a principle of intervention that we should intervene only when satisfied that we would make things better? Secondly, what does he say about the prospect of a proxy war between permanent members of the UN Security Council being fought out in Syria?
Mr Swire
The right hon. and learned Gentleman, of all people, will be aware of the situation—as I have said, 70,000 people are dead and there is a huge refugee and humanitarian crisis. The bottom line is that Assad is still in place and is being strongly supplied and strengthened by others. I am not going to talk, however, about our arming anyone, as it might never happen. We have made our position perfectly clear. There are Members on both sides of the House who, for understandable reasons, are extremely nervous about getting dragged further into this appalling situation, but I stress that we are not, at this point, discussing arming anyone. Were that to occur in due course, and were our European partners to take that decision, clearly it would need to be properly debated in this House. There is no change in our position, however, as was stated very clearly in the last statement.
Chris Bryant (Rhondda) (Lab)
It is just tawdry to pretend that the Prime Minister could not have given an oral statement. He could perfectly easily have done so today, and he should have done so. We do not do EU scrutiny well in this House, and are doing it even worse as a result of today.
May I ask the Minister specifically about relations with Russia? One year ago, the Under-Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs, the hon. Member for North East Bedfordshire (Alistair Burt), stood up in the Chamber and accepted a resolution, unanimously agreed by the House, that we would ban people involved in the death and murder of Sergei Magnitsky coming to this country. He said that we would wait to see what the Americans did. The Americans have now passed legislation to ban those people going to the US. When will the Government do the same?
Mr Swire
On the hon. Gentleman’s remarks about the Prime Minister, I can do no better than repeat what the Prime Minister said to my hon. Friend the Member for Stone (Mr Cash) yesterday:
“We now have more European Councils than sometimes is altogether healthy, and certainly more than there have been in the past. There are almost always oral statements, but I think that on this occasion, when it was very much a take-note European Council rather than one packed with exciting things, a written ministerial statement will probably suffice.”—[Official Report, 18 March 2013; Vol. 560, c. 680.]
I have nothing to add to that.
The hon. Gentleman will be aware that the Russian Foreign Secretary was in London last week and had extensive discussions with my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs.
Mr Swire
Will the hon. Gentleman allow me to finish? Russia is a major player in the world. We continue to have extraordinarily important discussions with it about Syria and about the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea and other issues, and we continue to review—and raise when appropriate—the situation there regarding human rights.
Mr John Redwood (Wokingham) (Con)
Given the importance of low-energy prices to industrial recovery and jobs, did the Prime Minister take advantage of the summit to ask the Germans how they were managing to run their coal stations for much longer, under EU rules, and to have cheaper energy, and did he give notice that Britain needed to do the same?
Mr David Winnick (Walsall North) (Lab)
With respect to the right hon. Gentleman, no matter how many times the Prime Minister has made statements on the European Council, it is still the Prime Minister’s responsibility to come to the House and make such a statement whenever the Council has met.
On Syria, is the Minister aware that no one in the House disputes for one moment the sheer brutality of the Syrian regime or its total indifference to human suffering? At the same time, however, I believe that there should be a test of feeling in the House—a vote, perhaps—on the issue of arming the other side. Far from helping the situation, it could escalate the violence, the suffering and the crimes against humanity that we see on our television screens. I praise the humanitarian work that the Government are doing, with our support, for the children and the rest. That is absolutely essential.
Mr Swire
I agree with the hon. Gentleman’s second point; he is absolutely right. His first point was somewhat hypothetical. Of course there is understandable concern among Members on both sides of the House about the direction in which Syria is going, and about what might or might not happen, but there is no change in our position today. I have come to the House to explain what was discussed at the summit, and it is absolutely right that we keep all options under review. I think he would agree that what has been done to date has not worked very well, as we continue to see a greater deterioration in the country and greater humanitarian suffering. It is therefore quite right that we keep all our options open.
Mr James Clappison (Hertsmere) (Con)
May I say gently to my right hon. Friend that he is much more likely to persuade my hon. Friend the Member for Stone (Mr Cash) to become an evangelist for the European Union than to persuade the European Union to desist from creating burdensome regulations? Is it not deep within the DNA of the European Commission and the European Parliament to go on producing regulations, day in, day out, that impose burdens on our business? Is it not in our national interest to be outside the legal structures of the European Union as much as possible, and does not that illustrate the many merits of my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister’s policy of renegotiating our relationship with the European Union and having a referendum on that issue?
Mr Swire
It is worth saying that we secured agreement from the Commission at the Council to come up with plans to reduce the top 10 most burdensome EU regulations by June—including rules on chemicals, product safety and customs—and to produce proposals by the autumn on the unnecessary European rules that need to be reversed and removed from the statute book. We also secured agreement on action to improve the implementation of single market legislation, including the services directive. I hope that my hon. Friend will agree that, if implemented directly, those will be welcome steps that will enable businesses in his constituency and in mine to grow.
Ms Gisela Stuart (Birmingham, Edgbaston) (Lab)
First we abolished pre-Council discussions; now we are doing away with post-Council statements. Is it the policy of Her Majesty’s Government that the Prime Minister will talk about Europe only when he thinks that the meeting was “exciting”, and that we are otherwise to be kept informed only in writing or through a junior Minister who has been forced to come here?
Mr Swire
The hon. Lady is making the great mistake of imagining that I was forced to do anything. I came here very willingly, as the Speaker has pointed out, to respond to the urgent question from my hon. Friend the Member for Stone (Mr Cash). I have stated the Prime Minister’s position and, thanks to the indulgence of the Speaker in allowing me to repeat verbatim what the Prime Minister said on this subject to my hon. Friend the Member for Stone yesterday, I have nothing further to add.
Mr Bernard Jenkin (Harwich and North Essex) (Con)
Will my right hon. Friend commend the Prime Minister for setting out the need for a new relationship with our European partners? Is not that need underlined by the fact that, despite vetoing the fiscal union treaty last year, the presidency conclusions contain four new pieces of legislation on economic consolidation that apply to the UK? They include a national fiscal policy making framework, strengthening the surveillance of national fiscal and structural economic policies, an accelerated procedure for dealing with member states with an excessive deficit and a new procedure for monitoring the build-up and correction of macro-economic balances. Why does that apply to us at all, given that we are not going to join the euro?
Mr Swire
The hon. Gentleman should also acknowledge what was discussed, particularly in the Council, and the emphasis that was placed on the single market and on cutting red tape for small businesses. The Prime Minister is setting out what will be discussed at the G8 at Lough Erne, when we will be talking about issues such as tax, transparency and getting businesses going. Those are the things that we want to concentrate on. I agree with my hon. Friend that those other things are not so relevant.
Kate Hoey (Vauxhall) (Lab)
Did the Prime Minister have any discussions on the fringes of the European Council meeting about Zimbabwe, and about the fact that, after this weekend, the European Union will lift many more of its restrictive sanctions? Does the Minister realise that there is concern about that? There is still a problem in Zimbabwe. There are huge human rights issues, and it is important that the European Union should give the matter careful thought before lifting those sanctions in the lead-up to the elections in July.
Mr Swire
The hon. Lady makes some extraordinarily good points on the sanctions against Zimbabwe. I was not aware that the matter was not on the European Council agenda. I was not privy to any private conversations that might have taken place, but she has made some extremely pertinent points.
Mr Peter Bone (Wellingborough) (Con)
At business questions last Thursday, the Leader of the House started by saying that, on Monday 18 March,
“I expect my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister to make a statement following the European Council.”—[Official Report, 14 March 2013; Vol. 560, c. 494.]
We know that the Prime Minister was here on Monday, and it is absolutely unacceptable that he has not come to the House to report on the European Council. Will the Minister at least confirm to the House that he himself was present at the Council?
Mr Swire
I can confirm that the Prime Minister was there, that he took a lead, and that he has come back. I am now reporting back on what was decided at the European Council. The hon. Member for Wellingborough (Mr Bone) makes the point again about whether the Prime Minister should have come to the House, but he might have noticed that we did have Leveson this week. No doubt his points will have been heard by those who organise the House’s business, however.
Kelvin Hopkins (Luton North) (Lab)
Was there any discussion about the continuing fragility of European banks, especially in the weaker eurozone member states? In the light of the raid on Cyprus’s bank accounts, can we now expect depositors to start withdrawing cash from their accounts in those weaker banks, resulting in the serious risk of bank runs?
Mr Swire
No, I do not think we can. Cyprus was not on the agenda but, if you will allow me, Mr Speaker, I will make this point. This question was answered extensively by the Financial Secretary to the Treasury, my right hon. Friend the Member for Tunbridge Wells (Greg Clark) —yesterday, I think—and everything is being done to protect British servicemen and those working for the diplomatic service who are exposed to what is going on in Cyprus. The fact that it is happening in Cyprus, however, does not necessarily mean that it is going to happen elsewhere. Indeed, we very much hope that it will not.
Martin Horwood (Cheltenham) (LD)
European Ministers have rightly considered broadening support for the Syrian National Coalition, given that it is opposed to the murderous Assad regime and to the equally undesirable alternative of a jihadi state, but is it not Russia to whom the Syrian National Coalition needs urgently to speak? Will the Minister update us on any progress that we have made on promoting dialogue between the Syrian National Coalition and Russia, which is, after all, arming the regime very freely?
Mr Swire
My hon. Friend makes a good point. Like Russia, we want to see an end to the violence, to create space for discussions on a Syrian-led, inclusive political transition. We encourage Russia to persuade the Assad regime, which is still in place, to enter into discussions with the Syrian opposition to bring forward political transition. Russia has a key role to play.
Mr Nigel Dodds (Belfast North) (DUP)
The Minister said that there was a precedent for having a written statement following a European Council when there had not been time to make an oral statement. However, there was an opportunity to make an oral statement on Monday and today so, with the greatest respect to the Minister, will he personally take back to the Prime Minister the strength of feeling on both sides of this House that, in future, he should come and give a report on the outcome of European Council meetings?
Mr Swire
I am sure that people are hearing this loud and clear, but I would say to my right hon. Friend that there is a precedent for a post-Council written ministerial statement if it is not possible for an oral statement to be made on the next sitting day. The Prime Minister gave a written ministerial statement on 11 October 2010, following the European Council on 16 September 2010.
Mr Andrew Turner (Isle of Wight) (Con)
It is becoming more and more likely that we, and especially the military, will be dragged into a war in Syria. My constituents do not want the former Prime Minister, Tony Blair, advising us or the Government on what to do following Mr Hollande’s views. Does the Minister agree that some silence from the former Prime Minister would be appropriate?
Barry Gardiner (Brent North) (Lab)
Does the Minister understand that it is the trajectory that worries Members? First, we lift the arms embargo, then we supply arms, then we supply military advisers, then personnel and then those very arms are used against the personnel. The best way to put a fire out is not to put more fuel on it.
Mr Swire
The best way to put a fire out is not to light it in the first place, which is something President Assad would have done well to adhere to. As I said, there is understandable nervousness on both sides of the House about where this is leading, but we are living in a fool’s paradise if we think that the spillover—the knock-on effects from what is going on in Syria—will not affect us. It is unsettling countries in the region—I mentioned Jordan and others—and creating a humanitarian problem with appalling political consequences that we cannot stand by and ignore. I say again, publicly, to all those who continue to support the brutal regime of President Assad that they must stop. Like us, they must engage with the official opposition in Syria to bring about a transition to peace and a democratically elected Government. That will take time, but in the meantime we should leave everything on the table to make sure that we look after those who are exposed—the women, the children and the elderly—to the most horrible of situations.
Mr Philip Hollobone (Kettering) (Con)
If our membership of the European Union is going so well, how come we are running a £48 billion trade deficit with our European partners, in contrast to a £20 billion surplus with the rest of the world?
Mr Swire
Again, I regret that my hon. Friend was not with us at our debate this morning in Westminster Hall where we stressed the importance of trading—[Hon. Members: “He chaired it.”] If my hon. Friend had heard me correctly, he will know that I said that it was unfortunate that he was not able to take part in the debate in Westminster Hall that he so ably chaired. Having listened to all sides of the argument this morning, he will be aware that we see our future both within Europe as well as outside Europe. We want to ensure that the single market is there, and we want many more EU trade agreements with America and other parts of the world. This allows me to put on record again how ably my hon. Friend chaired this morning’s deliberations.
Mark Lazarowicz (Edinburgh North and Leith) (Lab/Co-op)
The precedent for the written statement was not really a precedent at all, was it? On that occasion, the European Council was followed by 25 days of recess, so it was hardly surprising; an oral statement would not have had the same immediacy when it was eventually made to the House. On the meeting itself, the Minister told us that it was a take-note meeting where nothing much happened. Given the discussions about Syria, it seems to have been quite a major meeting, but if it was a take-note meeting where nothing much happened should not the Prime Minister have been making things happen? Should he not have been trying to do something to get Europe to follow a much more effective growth strategy, which is what we all need?
Mr Swire
I was purely quoting the Prime Minister, and I quote him again. He said that
“it was very much a take-note European Council rather than one packed with exciting things.”—[Official Report, 18 March 2013; Vol. 560, c. 680.]
There were things, which we have gone through during the last 30 minutes or so, to kick-start the European economy, make it more competitive and cut regulation so that we can make sure that European companies are in a good position to help trade out of the appalling deficit in which we all find ourselves.
Mr Crispin Blunt (Reigate) (Con)
I hope it is of some comfort to my right hon. Friend that I think that the Government’s response on the European Council through a ministerial statement was entirely correct, particularly having read the conclusions. It also gave us the opportunity to hear my right hon. Friend answering the urgent question, and that is a benefit of the process.
On the substantive point about Syria, I am delighted that my right hon. Friend was able to tell the House that there has been no change in the policy on Britain’s position since the Foreign Secretary’s last statement on Syria. Given that it was spun that the Prime Minister was supporting the President of France in trying to obtain more flexibility about changes to the arms embargo, there was a possibility that we might be in the same position as the French on the merits of lifting it. Plainly, we are not and I hope my right hon. Friend will take note of the concern about the issue that has been expressed on both sides of the House.
Mr Swire
My hon. Friend knows the area as well as anyone in the House, so he will be aware of all the things I said about the regional instability created by the continuing problem in Syria. It is not something we can let alone. We are working extraordinarily closely with the French. That is the case. Today, I have nothing further to add about our position, because it has not changed, but I say again that we need to keep the ever-changing situation in Syria under constant review. Unfortunately, it is an ever-changing situation that deteriorates hour by hour, with appalling humanitarian effects. We take nothing off the table, but at the moment we continue as I outlined in the statement a couple of weeks ago.
Mrs Louise Ellman (Liverpool, Riverside) (Lab/Co-op)
Did the Prime Minister urge French and German Ministers to proscribe Hezbollah, considering its role in killing civilians in Syria and murdering Israeli tourists and a Bulgarian national in Bulgaria?
Mr Swire
The whole point of bringing some assistance to the Syrian official opposition, and bolstering them and allowing them to present themselves as a credible alternative to the Assad regime, is so that all the other organisations, backed by Hezbollah or whoever, do not get traction in Syria. The hon. Lady would have to agree with the action the Government have taken to date in bolstering the Syrian opposition, which we see as the only credible long-term alternative to the current regime in Damascus.
Mr Henry Bellingham (North West Norfolk) (Con)
Was Mali discussed at the Council, and the EU’s policy towards the Sahel? Can the Minister of State give the House a quick update on the progress of the EU training mission?
Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)
The impact of the war in Syria on the Christian community there is causing great concern to many people in this country and elsewhere. At the EU summit, was there any discussion of the displaced Christian community who are caught between President Assad’s regime and the anti-Government forces?
Mr Swire
I am not aware that there was specific discussion of the Christian community in Syria, but as a Government we take it extremely seriously not just in Syria but elsewhere in the world when Christians find themselves under unprecedented levels of attack. I pay tribute to the continuing work of my noble friend Baroness Warsi, who takes her duties as Minister for faith extremely seriously, including the protection of Christians.
Mr David Nuttall (Bury North) (Con)
British businesses want to see action not just words on reducing the burden of EU regulation, so may I urge the Minister to encourage the EU to adopt our one in, two out policy on new regulations, which will show whether it really is serious about cutting the burden of red tape?
Mr Swire
I see nothing to disagree with in that statement. It seems to me that our companies still suffer from over-regulation. All of us in the House are guilty of talking about cutting red tape; at the next election, let us not be judged by the electorate as guilty of having not cut red tape. Of course, my hon. Friend is right; we need to free our businesses from red tape, particularly the smaller ones that we need to grow. There were concrete moves towards that in the recent Brussels Council.
Rehman Chishti (Gillingham and Rainham) (Con)
Is the Syrian opposition led by Mr Khatib fully united in supporting the new transitional Government in Syria presiding over rebel opposition-held areas?
Mr Swire
We continue to discuss everything with the Syrian opposition Government. We continue to support them and we continue to believe that they are the only viable alternative to Assad for the reasons that I outlined to the hon. Member for Liverpool, Riverside (Mrs Ellman).
Bob Stewart (Beckenham) (Con)
We have reached the 10th anniversary of the second Iraq war. It was perhaps with good reason that we involved ourselves in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya, but it cost us a lot and people now in power blame us quite a lot. Did the European Council consider what more the Arab world can do, rather than just asking us again to help out?
Mr Swire
This is something not just to be discussed at a European Council; we believe, particularly on the humanitarian side, that there is plenty more that the Arab world can do. Also, we would urge all countries in that part of the world to look very closely at where they are putting their support. We believe that the official Syrian opposition is best placed to provide a transitional Government to replace the brutal dictatorship of Assad.
My hon. and gallant Friend is showing a certain nervousness about what is going on in Syria, understandably, but I hope he would agree that as of today we are in the right place on this. I believe the Government are not getting ahead of themselves. But we do have a very serious situation, which is deteriorating by the minute, and it is only right that we should be flexible in our approach to how we help bring it to a speedy and long-overdue end.
Chris Heaton-Harris (Daventry) (Con)
Does my hon. Friend agree that it is strange that Cyprus was not discussed, especially in the context of conclusion 13, where the directive for deposit guarantee schemes was discussed and there was awareness of trying to protect taxpayers in the context of banking crises? As this was within hours of a depositor haircut happening in Cyprus, would this not have been worth noting at that point?
Mr Swire
At least the right hon. Gentleman was paying attention. I was not even there; we have got that straight, anyway.
My hon. Friend the Member for Daventry (Chris Heaton-Harris) is right. What we are concentrating on now, in this country, is ensuring that those of our servicemen or diplomatic service, and so on, who are in Cyprus are not adversely affected; as he would expect, discussions are going on to that end.
Hinkley Point
The Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change (Mr Edward Davey)
With permission, I would like to make a statement.
I am today publishing a development consent order which authorises the construction of a 3,260 MW nuclear power station at Hinkley Point, known as Hinkley Point C. The order will allow, from a planning point of view, NNB Generation Company Limited, a subsidiary of EDF Energy, to construct two European pressurised reactors, each of a capacity of 1,630 MW. It will also enable the company to construct associated development, such as freight handling and road improvements, and to carry out the necessary work to obtain land and rights over land, by compulsory acquisition if necessary.
My decision to grant consent comes after a long process of consultation and analysis, first on the policy that underpins the decision. As set out in the national policy statements that were approved by this House in July 2011, a new generation of nuclear power stations are a key part of our future low-carbon energy mix, tackling climate change and helping to diversify our supply, contributing to the UK’s energy security. Low-carbon energy projects will also bring major investment, supporting jobs and driving growth.
Secondly, on the proposals for Hinkley Point C itself, these were considered, with full public engagement, by a panel of five experienced planning inspectors from the Planning Inspectorate, whose conclusions and recommendations I have followed very closely. I am grateful to them for all their work, and to all those who engaged in that process, which was completed within the statutory time scale of six months. Copies of my decision, together with the panel’s report and other supporting documents, have been placed in the Library.
In recommending that development consent be granted, the panel concluded that the benefits of the proposed Hinkley Point C station outweighed the impacts, including those on the local communities, particularly when taking into account proposed mitigation measures. These include the provision of a bypass around Cannington; enhanced landscaping and access for amenity purposes; and ensuring that the work force do not cause any additional burden on local services such as health, education and housing. In making my decision, I also took into account representations made too late to be considered by the panel and not therefore included in its report. My consideration of these late representations is set out in my decision.
I expect the wide range of mitigations and controls provided for in the order and elsewhere to be effective in reducing the impact of the construction work on local people, but I also recognise that as these works are carried out, those who live in the area may well have their daily lives disrupted in one way or another. This disruption is, in my view, outweighed in the final analysis by the benefits that the project would bring. Chief among these is the very significant contribution it would make to the achievement of energy and climate change policy objectives. The energy national policy statements make it clear that the construction of new low-carbon electricity generation infrastructure is of crucial national importance. There is also significant potential for local benefits including new jobs, with a work force of up to 5,600 during construction, and contract opportunities for the supply chain including local businesses.
I said that the order authorises construction from a planning point of view. There has of course been an entirely separate process scrutinising the nuclear safety aspects of the project, with decisions taken by independent regulators in the Office for Nuclear Regulation and the Environment Agency, including the issuing of a nuclear site licence.
Some further regulatory approvals remain to be taken, including the Marine Management Organisation’s marine licence and site-specific aspects of generic design assessment from the Office of Nuclear Regulation, but the decision I am announcing today, together with those already taken by the nuclear regulators and a number of other permits issued last week by the Environment Agency, means that NNB Generation Company Limited now has the majority of the consents it needs to build and operate the plant.
That, of course, is not the end of the story. Decisions remain to be made on the funded decommissioning programme and strike price. Discussions on both these subjects are ongoing and intense, but I expect them to be concluded shortly. As confirmed in my January statement to Parliament, the Government are committed to their existing policy on long-term disposal of nuclear waste and are pressing ahead with plans to identify a geological disposal facility in order to put in place a permanent facility for disposal of radioactive waste from both new and existing plants.
Affordable new nuclear will play a critical role in a secure, diverse electricity supply for Britain and make a significant contribution to the transition to the low-carbon economy needed to tackle climate change. Therefore this decision on planning aspects of the first new nuclear power station in a generation represents an important milestone in that process to decarbonise our electricity supply and economy. I commend the statement to the House.
Caroline Flint (Don Valley) (Lab)
I thank the Secretary of State for early sight of his statement. When we last debated nuclear power on 7 February, I was clear that we strongly support and are absolutely committed to facilitating new nuclear build in Britain at a fair price, and I very much welcome the Secretary of State’s strong support for nuclear power in the House today.
We believe that nuclear power will have an important role to play as part of a more balanced, secure and, importantly, low-carbon energy supply for the future. That is why we have supported the Government’s efforts to attract investment in new nuclear, which began under my noble Friend Lord Hutton and my right hon. Friend the Leader of the Opposition, as well as ensuring the establishment of a statutory Office for Nuclear Regulation. I also commend the role of the local MP, the hon. Member for Bridgwater and West Somerset (Mr Liddell-Grainger), whose ancestor, Queen Victoria, oversaw during her reign an industrial revolution. He is playing a small part in the new, clean, low-carbon industrial revolution for the 21st century.
Today’s announcement granting planning permission for new nuclear reactors at Hinkley builds on the progress in recent months which has seen the ONR approve the reactor design and the Environment Agency granting the necessary environmental permits, all of which we welcome.
On the specific point about planning consent, let me ask the Secretary of State three questions. First, as we know, new nuclear build has the potential to contribute to economic growth and job creation. Hinkley Point C alone could require as many as 500 new construction apprentices and 200 operations apprentices. Last year, the Prime Minister signed an agreement with France on nuclear energy, but what specific steps is the Secretary of State taking to ensure that the UK supply chain and the local work force are able to benefit as much as possible from this development? Many of the people we hope will be building and operating this power station are probably still in school, so we have got to equip them with the skills they need.
We must also be mindful, however, that any development of this magnitude, if not properly dealt with, could have a detrimental impact on the local area. Secondly, therefore, will the Secretary of State tell the House in more detail what measures will be put in place as part of the planning agreement to ensure that any mitigation measures needed to reduce or eliminate this impact are implemented?
Thirdly, nuclear power stations are national assets, but we should also recognise the contribution of the communities that host them on our behalf. Last year, the Government launched consultation on the community benefit of onshore wind. Will the Secretary of State tell us what community benefit package, beyond what he has already mentioned, the Government believe is right for new nuclear developments? Will he also provide a little more detail about how any package would be split between West Somerset council, which covers Hinkley Point, and other local authorities, such as Sedgemoor district council, which will also be affected by the development?
Given that EDF is still in negotiation with the Government to agree a strike price for the power it generates at Hinkley Point, it is difficult to debate today’s announcement on planning consent without some reference—the Secretary of State has already mentioned this—to the financing that will determine whether the development goes ahead. I understand that details of those discussions are commercially sensitive, but there has been much speculation in recent weeks that a deal is imminent.
The Secretary of State will know that the length of the contracts, as well as the price, will face scrutiny whenever a deal is reached, but can he provide an update on those negotiations and on when he hopes to reach agreement? He knows that we believe that the process for agreeing contracts for difference could be improved to make it more robust and transparent and to ensure that it delivers value for money for consumers. Will he tell us what, if any, further consideration he has given to our proposals in respect of the Energy Bill, which include ensuring that agreed investment contracts are laid before Parliament within three days of being entered into, provisions to ensure that any change to the contracts are published and subject to proper scrutiny, and greater protection for bill payers in the event that construction costs are lower than projected?
Today’s announcement is an important milestone in the development of new nuclear build in the UK. There is no doubt about that. On behalf of the Opposition, I am pleased to welcome it and to reiterate our support for nuclear power alongside an expansion of renewable energy and investment in carbon capture and storage as part of a clean, secure and affordable energy supply for the future.
Mr Davey
I pay tribute to the right hon. Lady and the Labour party for their support and welcome today. Their support and indeed the work by the previous Government in their last few years have allowed investors and nuclear operators to see that there is cross-party support, which gives people confidence—[Interruption.] I hear some coughs from my party’s Benches and they remind me that it has hon. Members who do not support the proposal. However, we have coalition agreement that helps that cross-party approach.
The right hon. Lady was right to pay tribute to my hon. Friend the Member for Bridgwater and West Somerset (Mr Liddell-Grainger), and I hope that we will hear from him shortly. He has played a leading role in his community, working with local councils there, and we should also pay tribute to those in all authorities, but particularly local authorities, who have worked so hard on the matter.
The right hon. Lady asked me some questions, including on planning, and I hope to give her the reply she wants. She rightly talked about the importance of the local supply chain. Already, a huge amount of work has been done on that, primarily by local councils and others. Bridgwater college is at the centre of trying to ensure that young people and the wider work force in the area benefit from the work that will be created directly and indirectly. She may be aware that my Department has been working with my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills on an industrial strategy for the nuclear supply chain, and we will publish it in due course. Whether at Hinkley Point C or any future nuclear power stations, we want to ensure significant British content—British firms and British workers—in the nuclear supply chain.
The right hon. Lady asked about work in the local area and conditions in the development consent order to make sure that local people’s lives are not disrupted. My decision letter, which I will place in the Library, includes a whole range of issues, most of which follow on from the independent panel—the examining authority. I have made one or two changes to its proposals, particularly concerning Combwich wharf to try to ensure that more freight can come by sea. Our proposal will further reduce traffic in Cannington. We have made decisions to protect local residents.
On community benefits, which the right hon. Lady rightly raised again, I confirm that there will be a package of such benefits, which will be announced in due course. I cannot say any more about that, but the Minister of State, Department of Energy and Climate Change, my hon. Friend the Member for South Holland and The Deepings (Mr Hayes), is working on that.
The right hon. Lady closed with a request for an update on the negotiations. She will be aware that I have steadfastly refused the temptation to give right hon. and hon. Members a running update because the negotiations are commercial and it would be improper to do so. However, as we have said on several occasions, when the deal has been concluded, we will be completely transparent about its terms, including the strike price, the duration and other key terms and conditions.
The right hon. Lady was right to say that we will need state aid clearance in the usual way, and that will also enhance transparency. Finally, she referred to the issues that the Opposition have raised fairly and reasonably during discussion of the Energy Bill. We will respond to many of those issues on Report.
Mr Ian Liddell-Grainger (Bridgwater and West Somerset) (Con)
This is a very good day for Britain and a phenomenally good day for Bridgwater and West Somerset. I thank not only the Front-Bench team, which has been phenomenally important in that, but the Opposition, and especially the Leader of the Opposition, who signed this off when he was Minister of State. I am incredibly grateful to the House, and my constituents are more than grateful to everyone here who has played such an important part.
The importance of the announcement is that we can now kick-start the civil nuclear programme in the United Kingdom, and that is crucial. The innovation, jobs and input from across the industry are staggering. The Nuclear Industry Association is holding its conference across the road from here at the Queen Elizabeth centre, and it is like a cat on a hot tin roof, ready to go. We are Hinkley-ready, and we will be on time and on schedule.
Will the Secretary of State continue to wax lyrical, if I may tempt him, on what the decision will mean for Sedgemoor council, West Somerset council and Somerset county council areas? Those in Sedgemoor will feel the pain, especially in Bridgwater, because they will facilitate the plant, although it will be in West Somerset, as the right hon. Member for Don Valley (Caroline Flint) said. It will be important for education, innovation, industry and local people. I would be grateful if the Secretary of State continued to wax as lyrical as he has done so far, and I thank the House.
Mr Davey
I have already paid tribute to my hon. Friend, and what he has just said shows why that tribute was appropriate. Much of his work and that of local councils, my Department and others has been aimed at maximising the economic benefit for the area, and indeed the whole country. He will be aware of the nuclear skills academy, which is based at Bridgwater college, and that Sedgemoor and other councils have attracted new investment to the area for additional construction, as well as support for schools in the area. He will also know that even before we unveil the community benefits project, the decision provides significant benefits to the local area.
My hon. Friend is right in saying that there will be some pain for some local people in the local community during the long construction phase, but I hope that they and he believe that the panel’s recommendations and my decisions will mitigate that as much as possible.
Paul Flynn (Newport West) (Lab)
Does the Minister agree with himself, as the Lib Dem spokesman, that nuclear power is possible only with a vast—that was his word—taxpayers’ subsidy or a rigged market? Does he also agree with himself, as a supporter of the coalition agreement, which said that there would be no subsidy for nuclear power? Can he now deny the claims that the strike price, which was originally £50 per megawatt-hour, is being negotiated at £97, and that we will be giving to a near-bankrupt French company a short-term subsidy of £30 billion that could turn out to be £150 billion in 35 years?
Mr Davey
The hon. Gentleman is right to say that my concerns on nuclear power for some time have related to the price, because the history of nuclear power in this country and elsewhere is that it has turned out to be expensive. That is why this coalition Government —and, indeed, the previous Labour Government—have gone about the third generation of nuclear power stations very differently from how Government’s went about things in the past to ensure that the consumer, business and the taxpayer are protected. That is why the coalition agreement says that there will be no public subsidy. I have to say to him that I simply do not recognise the figures he quoted.
Dr Liam Fox (North Somerset) (Con)
I congratulate the Government on finally getting our civil nuclear programme moving after too long a period of paralysis in this country. It is vital for our energy security and our low-carbon generation. The Secretary of State will be well aware that the transmission from Hinkley will be through 450 kV cables as opposed to the current 132 kV. That will require electricity pylons more than twice the height of those we have now. Where is the overall green gain if we get green generation, but the transmission results in a blight on our environment in some of the prettiest parts of the country, and what can the Government do about that?
Mr Davey
I am grateful for the right hon. Gentleman’s welcome for the statement. I should make it clear for him and the House that today’s decision is about planning. We still have a number of issues to resolve, but we are in intense negotiations.
The right hon. Gentleman makes the point about the infrastructure and pylons. He and I met to discuss the matter recently. I will repeat part of what I said then: every bit of green infrastructure has to be considered case by case; National Grid, under statute, is responsible for examining those cases; and, when planning issues result, the Secretary of State clearly cannot comment on them, as it would be improper to do so. When we met, I undertook to look into the issue. We are looking at it with my hon. Friend the Minister of State, who is energy Minister.
Mr Jamie Reed (Copeland) (Lab)
I commend the Secretary of State on his statement. In making this decision, he has clearly listened to many people in all parts of the House over many years, and I particularly commend him on his intellectual honesty in reaching this position.
It goes almost without saying that I, my constituents and my community will continue to assist the Secretary of State and his Department with the solutions required for radioactive waste management in this country, but will he now, in addition to introducing clarity on the strike price, undertake to bring forward a clear critical path for all the sites identified for new nuclear development so that we can further remove the uncertainty surrounding their development?
Mr Davey
I am grateful for the hon. Gentleman’s comments. He has been a real champion for the nuclear industry, both for his constituents and more widely. I cannot say much more today on the strike price. I hope he understands that. He is right to say that we remain focused on finding a solution on the waste issue. I look forward to continuing to work with him and others on it.
Martin Horwood (Cheltenham) (LD)
Will the Secretary of State—my right hon. Friend—confirm that this planning decision does not represent a decision to go ahead with Hinkley C, in which respect it pales into insignificance beside the strike price negotiation? If he will accept my figures, which are hypothetical, and if the maths adds up, £97 per MWh for 35 years would guarantee an uncompetitive French nationalised energy company nearly £90 billion over time from British bill payers.
Mr Davey
My hon. Friend is right to say that today’s decision is purely about planning. We have read, studied and listened to the detailed report from the independent Planning Inspectorate and the examining authority that looked into this matter over some time, and we have had a small team of planning officials looking at it in the Department, separate from the policy officials. The decision is completely separate from the issue around the strike price.
Again, I do not recognise the figures that my hon. Friend uses. I hope he realises that I shall not comment on the negotiations on the strike price.
Thomas Docherty (Dunfermline and West Fife) (Lab)
I congratulate the Secretary of State on his work on the matter and welcome the Liberal Democrats to supporting new nuclear power stations. May I press him to say more about the skills base and what steps the Government will take to ensure that we have enough civil engineers and nuclear physicists going forward?
Mr Davey
That is an important issue and the hon. Gentleman is right to raise it. I mentioned what is being done locally with the nuclear skills academy and EDF working with Bridgwater college and others. When we introduce the nuclear supply chain strategy with the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, we will say more on that matter. Already, work is under way with higher education institutions and others, and he will be aware that the chief scientific adviser has made the point that the issue needs to be tackled. Work is under way.
Charles Hendry (Wealden) (Con)
May I say how delighted I am that the Secretary of State, as a Liberal Democrat, has now consented to more new nuclear capacity than any Minister since Tony Benn? Does he agree that that shows that the new planning system is working as intended, with tens of thousands of pages considered and agreed within about a year? Will he join me in paying tribute to officials in the Planning Inspectorate, the Department of Energy and Climate Change and the other parties involved for all their resolve in bringing a nuclear renaissance in the UK one big step closer?
Mr Davey
I am grateful to my hon. Friend for his comments. I certainly will pay tribute to the officials in my Department and elsewhere who have been critical to bringing the decision forward and, indeed, taking forward the new nuclear programme. I also pay tribute to him. He was an excellent Minister and he played a significant role in the new nuclear renaissance under this Government. There are Liberal Democrats who will not necessarily agree with not so much the decision today, but the overall new nuclear building programme. However, many Liberal Democrats in the local area and in the national party believe that we need to focus on climate change as a real and present danger to our country and the planet. Difficult decisions are required if we are to tackle climate change.
Caroline Lucas (Brighton, Pavilion) (Green)
There are much faster, cheaper and more affordable ways to tackle climate change than nuclear, but my question to the Secretary of State is about the only two nuclear power stations under construction in Europe today. They are billions of pounds over budget and delayed by an ever increasing number of years. Italy, Switzerland, Belgium, Holland, Spain, Germany, Sweden and Denmark are all rejecting new nuclear. Even France is aiming to reduce its reliance by 25%. What do all those countries know that we do not? Why is the Secretary of State locking UK consumers into artificially high energy prices for years to come—to the benefit of the French Government, not the UK taxpayer?
Mr Davey
The hon. Lady has pushed her views for some time, and I have respect for them, but tackling climate change means that we need every form of low-carbon generation possible. The risk and the challenge are so great that it is wrong for people who are worried about climate change to turn their back on the issue. She points to other countries, but around the world many countries are looking again at new nuclear. She is right that the two new nuclear power stations that are being built are over budget and out of their original time schedule. That is why we are being extremely careful in our approach to those negotiations and to the new nuclear programme, learning the lessons of the past and from other countries so that we do not repeat those mistakes.
Damian Collins (Folkestone and Hythe) (Con)
I welcome the Secretary of State’s statement, which gives a huge boost to the confidence of everybody involved in the UK civil nuclear industry. Is not the statement also a statement of hope for other communities, such as Dungeness in my constituency, which aspire to be part of the revolution in the British nuclear industry?
Mr Davey
I agree with my hon. Friend. Many people—not only in the nuclear industry, but in the low-carbon energy sector generally—will see the statement as a key moment and welcome the boost to confidence more broadly. He has been a doughty champion for Dungeness. He and I have already met formally and talked about the work that he wishes to do locally, and I encourage him to keep going.
Barry Gardiner (Brent North) (Lab)
I welcome the Secretary of State’s announcement. I visited Hinkley in November as part of the Select Committee visit and was most impressed by the arguments for community benefit, of which he has spoken. However, he rightly said that this is not the end. I do not wish to press him on the strike price—I understand that those matters are commercial—but will he at least acknowledge two principles? First, the strike price will be based on the construction costs. Therefore, will he incorporate a clawback into the formula, should those costs be overestimated? Secondly, does he accept that Jean-Paul Chanteguet, Chairman of the Select Committee in the French Parliament, has said that Flamanville, on which Hinkley is based, will be producing at €72 per MW, and that that must, in anybody’s account, form the baseline for assessment of the negotiations in which the Secretary of State is engaged?
Mr Davey
I pay tribute to the hon. Gentleman and the other Select Committee members who have not only grilled me on this and other issues but made inquiries into the matter and been generally supportive. On the details of negotiations, clawbacks and the actual price, I am afraid that I must disappoint him; I will not be drawn on those. We are determined to get a price that represents value for money, that is fair and affordable and that bears scrutiny.
Mr Philip Hollobone (Kettering) (Con)
When does the Secretary of State expect the first regular stream of electricity to start flowing from the plant?
Mr Davey
Assuming that we can conclude the negotiations with EDF on the funded decommissioning plan and the strike price, and assuming that one or two of the remaining regulatory approvals are granted and that construction can therefore begin later this year or early next year, EDF believes that it can start generating power by the end of this decade or early in the next decade. Of course, one should not be held to clear timetables in these matters, as we all know the dangers of overrun, but when I have discussed it with officials and EDF, I have been impressed by the amount of careful pre-planning done to ensure that the delays seen in Flamanville, in Finland and elsewhere are not repeated here.
Ms Margaret Ritchie (South Down) (SDLP)
I thank the Secretary of State for his statement. He referred to the fact that the Government are still pressing ahead with plans to identify a geological disposal facility. Taking on board the legacy going back 25 years with Nirex and the failure to find a facility—I hasten to add that I am not in favour of such a facility—can he indicate what sites are being explored? Does he agree that it is necessary to take into account the geological rock structures and framework of substrata in any such discussions?
Mr Davey
The strategy to locate a site for a geological disposal facility was set out under the last Government, and we are following their policy. Some of the issues identified by the hon. Lady would need to be considered as it is developed. We have made it clear that we are sticking to the voluntarist approach set out by the last Government. We think that it is important that a geological disposal facility is not imposed on an area but is willingly accepted.
The recent Cumbria vote was interesting. The district councils of Copeland and Allerdale voted heavily in favour, and only Cumbria county council, with councillors representing areas a significant distance from the proposed sites, vetoed it. I believe that we will be able to find a site for a geological disposal facility using the voluntarist approach.
Andrew George (St Ives) (LD)
Half my right hon. Friend’s Department’s budget is already spoken for to pay for the nuclear clean-up, and the coalition has adopted a policy of no public subsidy. I have listened to what he says about not discussing individual figures, but anything other than a free market commercial strike price for that product would surely represent public subsidy. What can he say to reassure me and the House that the settlement will not be tantamount to a public subsidy for new nuclear power?
Mr Davey
May I correct my hon. Friend? This year, 69% of my Department’s budget is being spent on decommissioning past nuclear power stations. That is why I, probably more than anyone else in the House, am determined that we do not make the mistakes of the past. Any strike price negotiated will take into account the costs of decommissioning and of waste disposal. It is absolutely critical that when we agree a deal with EDF or any future nuclear operator, it must do the clean-up and the decommissioning. That must be part of the agreement. The costs must be integrated, not left alone as they have been in the past.
Kerry McCarthy (Bristol East) (Lab)
I, too, visited Hinkley Point a year or so ago in response to concerns raised with me in Bristol, mostly about safety, which I accept is a separate process, but also about the impact on biodiversity and marine life in the area. When is the marine licence likely to be granted, and is anything specific holding it up?
Mr Davey
I am grateful for the hon. Lady’s question. When she reads the decision letter, she will notice that the panel and I have spent some time on those issues. Section 4 of the decision letter discusses the habitats regulations assessment, and section 5 considers the environmental impact assessment. She is right that a regulation approval from the Marine Management Organisation is outstanding, but she will also understand that it is an independent regulatory body. I believe and am told that its examination of the issue is well under way, but I cannot hold the MMO to a timetable.
Mr Mike Weir (Angus) (SNP)
The strike price at Hinkley Point will send an important message to other potential nuclear developers. When the chief executive of EDF appeared before the Energy Bill Committee, he said that he was anxious for transparency on the strike price. The Minister has said that he will publish the contract, but will he also publish enough information for everybody to see how that strike price was arrived at and that there was no public subsidy behind it?
Mr Davey
The hon. Gentleman is right that we will be transparent about the process, but of course some cost information will be commercial in confidence. We have never undertaken to publish every single document relating to the negotiation, but the key terms and conditions will be published.
Joan Walley (Stoke-on-Trent North) (Lab)
Given that the announcement today is about planning, what discussions has the Secretary of State had with the European Commission on whether the proposed financing will contravene state aid rules? It comes down to whether or not it is public subsidy.
Parish and Town Council Precepts (Referendums)
Kris Hopkins (Keighley) (Con)
I beg to move,
That leave be given to bring in a Bill to give effect to Schedule 5 of the Localism Act 2011; to amend section 52ZC of the Government Finance Act 1992 (inserted by that Schedule) to require parish and town councils to conduct local referendums in the event that they choose to increase their precept by 2% or more in the following financial year; and for connected purposes.
Before I came to the House, I had the great privilege of serving as a district councillor for the Worth Valley ward in Keighley. During my 13 years as a councillor, I got to know and respect many of my colleagues from across the political spectrum. I also had a good relationship with many colleagues on town and parish councils across the metropolitan district. Many individuals in the first tier of local government have given decades of public service, and I put on record my thanks for their unpaid and tireless efforts to do good in their communities with the aim of making them better places.
As Members will know, responsibility at parish and town council level is limited. Although they undertake an enormous amount of additional work, they have sole statutory responsibility only for allotments. However, with the support of district councils and other partners, parish councils have often taken on other responsibilities. One example is the excellent work undertaken by Keighley town council, which has taken over Keighley’s cenotaph and town hall square and done a tremendous job. I also cite the excellent consultation undertaken by Oxenhope and Addingham parish councils, which have done extensive, first-rate, highly competent work on planning and potential housing numbers. Finally, Silsden town council has a youth council that has been making a contribution to youth provision in the town, driven by motivated, thoughtful and determined young people doing their bit for where they live.
However, there is a “but”. While I fully support all this work and commend it to others, I question the actions of a few councils. Hawarth, Cross Roads and Stanbury council, and Keighley town council, have raised their precept in recent weeks by 60% and 73% respectively. In the case of Hawarth, Cross Roads and Stanbury council, the argument in favour of such a rise appears to be that the Secretary of State might cap such a rise next year, so it has decided to bank it this year. There are no firm spending intentions, but the council has taken the money without holding a meaningful debate with residents. I acknowledge that it has good ideas in the pipeline, which may merit future increases in the precept, but residents have been taxed for ideas, and I think that residents should pay for services.
Keighley town council has interpreted localism as an opportunity to empire-build. Bearing in mind the fact that its sole responsibility under statute is for allotments, it has taken it upon itself to purchase the old police station in Keighley and offer the town a new civic centre at a cost of £1 million, despite the fact that the town already has a town hall and a brand new community centre within 400 yards of the civic centre. Sadly, the business plan does not service the debt that has been incurred, so residents have to pay a 72.6% increase in the precept. This is a shambles, and it is of the council’s own making. Rather than sting local residents, it should look at its overheads, and address staffing levels and its transport bill, rather than impose an extra burden on hard-pressed families.
Kris Hopkins
No.
I want to touch on the false assertion that these are only small amounts of money, and are not important. My hon. Friend the Member for Harlow (Robert Halfon) has fought an effective campaign on a 1p increase on a litre of petrol. There are 2,494 pennies in the council precept in Keighley. Parish and town councils do not have an accountable body, so we have a duty to ensure that the public have a say in any rise in the precept, and a clear understanding of why that rise has been introduced. Many people are struggling, and we should make every effort, however small individually, to reduce the demands on the household purse. I urge the House to support the Bill and give a clear voice to residents who face a rise of more than 2% in their council tax.
Question put and agreed to.
Ordered,
That Kris Hopkins, Dr Thérèse Coffey, Stuart Andrew, Alec Shelbrooke, Craig Whittaker, Simon Reevell and Julian Smith present the Bill.
Kris Hopkins accordingly presented the Bill.
Bill read the First time; to be read a Second time on Friday 26 April, and to be printed (Bill 151).
Jobseekers (Back to Work Schemes) Bill (Amendments, etc.)
Ordered,
That, in respect of the Jobseekers (Back to Work Schemes) Bill, notices of Amendments, new Clauses and new Schedules to be moved in Committee may be accepted by the Clerks at the Table before the Bill has been read a second time.—(Mr Lansley.)
Jobseekers (Back to Work Schemes) Bill (Allocation of Time)
(11 years, 1 month ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
The Minister of State, Department for Work and Pensions (Mr Mark Hoban)
I beg to move,
That the following provisions shall apply to the proceedings on the Jobseekers (Back to Work Schemes) Bill—
Timetable
1.–(1) Proceedings on Second Reading, in Committee, on consideration and on Third Reading shall be completed at this day’s sitting.
(2) Proceedings on Second Reading shall be brought to a conclusion (so far as not previously concluded) four hours after the commencement of proceedings on this Motion.
(3) Proceedings in Committee, on consideration and on Third Reading shall be brought to a conclusion (so far as not previously concluded) six hours after the commencement of proceedings on this Motion.
Timing of proceedings and Questions to be put
2. When the Bill has been read a second time—
(a) it shall, despite Standing Order No. 63 (Committal of Bills not subject to a programme order), stand committed to a Committee of the whole House without any Question being put;
(b) the Speaker shall leave the Chair whether or not notice of an Instruction has been given.
3.–(1) On the conclusion of proceedings in Committee, the Chairman shall report the Bill to the House without putting any Question.
(2) If the Bill is reported with amendments, the House shall proceed to consider the Bill as amended without any Question being put.
4. For the purpose of bringing any proceedings to a conclusion in accordance with paragraph 1, the Chairman or Speaker shall forthwith put the following Questions (but no others) in the same order as they would fall to be put if this Order did not apply—
(a) any Question already proposed from the Chair;
(b) any Question necessary to bring to a decision a Question so proposed;
(c) the Question on any amendment moved or Motion made by a Minister of the Crown;
(d) any other Question necessary for the disposal of the business to be concluded.
5. On a Motion so made for a new Clause or a new Schedule, the Chairman or Speaker shall put only the Question that the Clause or Schedule be added to the Bill.
6. If two or more Questions would fall to be put under paragraph 4(c) on successive amendments moved or Motions made by a Minister of the Crown, the Chairman or Speaker shall instead put a single Question in relation to those amendments or Motions.
7. If two or more Questions would fall to be put under paragraph 4(d) in relation to successive provisions of the Bill, the Chairman shall instead put a single Question in relation to those provisions, except that the Question shall be put separately on any Clause of or Schedule to the Bill which a Minister of the Crown has signified an intention to leave out.
Consideration of Lords Amendments
8.–(1) Any Lords Amendments to the Bill may be considered forthwith without any Question being put; and any proceedings interrupted for that purpose shall be suspended accordingly.
(2) Proceedings on consideration of Lords Amendments shall be brought to a conclusion, if not previously concluded, one hour after their commencement; and any proceedings suspended under sub-paragraph (1) shall thereupon be resumed.
9.–(1) This paragraph applies for the purpose of bringing any proceedings to a conclusion in accordance with paragraph 8.
(2) The Speaker shall first put forthwith any Question already proposed from the Chair.
(3) If that Question is for the amendment of a Lords Amendment the Speaker shall then put forthwith—
(a) a single Question on any further Amendments to the Lords Amendment moved by a Minister of the Crown, and
(b) the Question on any Motion made by a Minister of the Crown that this House agrees or disagrees to the Lords Amendment or (as the case may be) to the Lords Amendment as amended.
(4) The Speaker shall then put forthwith—
(a) a single Question on any Amendments moved by a Minister of the Crown to a Lords Amendment, and
(b) the Question on any Motion made by a Minister of the Crown that this House agrees or disagrees to the Lords Amendment or (as the case may be) to the Lords Amendment as amended.
(5) The Speaker shall then put forthwith the Question on any Motion made by a Minister of the Crown that this House disagrees to a Lords Amendment.
(6) The Speaker shall then put forthwith the Question that this House agrees to all the remaining Lords Amendments.
(7) As soon as the House has—
(a) agreed or disagreed to a Lords Amendment; or
(b) disposed of an Amendment relevant to a Lords Amendment which has been disagreed to, the Speaker shall put forthwith a single Question on any Amendments moved by a Minister of the Crown and relevant to the Lords Amendment.
Subsequent stages
10.–(1) Any further Message from the Lords on the Bill shall be considered forthwith without any Question being put; and any proceedings interrupted for that purpose shall be suspended accordingly.
(2) Proceedings on any further Message from the Lords shall (so far as not previously concluded) be brought to a conclusion one hour after their commencement; and any proceedings suspended under sub-paragraph (1) shall thereupon be resumed.
11.–(1) This paragraph applies for the purpose of bringing any proceedings to a conclusion in accordance with paragraph 10.
(2) The Speaker shall first put forthwith any Question which has been proposed from the Chair.
(3) The Speaker shall then put forthwith the Question on any Motion made by a Minister of the Crown which is related to the Question already proposed from the Chair.
(4) The Speaker shall then put forthwith the Question on any Motion made by a Minister of the Crown on or relevant to any of the remaining items in the Lords Message.
(5) The Speaker shall then put forthwith the Question that this House agrees with the Lords in all the remaining Lords Proposals.
Reasons Committee
12.–(1) The Speaker shall put forthwith the Question on any Motion made by a Minister of the Crown for the appointment, nomination and quorum of a Committee to draw up Reasons and the appointment of its Chair.
(2) A Committee appointed to draw up Reasons shall report before the conclusion of the sitting at which it is appointed.
(3) Proceedings in the Committee shall (so far as not previously concluded) be brought to a conclusion 30 minutes after their commencement.
(4) For the purpose of bringing any proceedings to a conclusion in accordance with sub-paragraph (3), the Chair shall—
(a) first put forthwith any Question which has been proposed from the Chair but not yet decided, and
(b) then put forthwith successively Questions on motions which may be made by a Minister of the Crown for assigning a Reason for disagreeing with the Lords in any of their Amendments.
(5) The proceedings of the Committee shall be reported without any further Question being put.
Miscellaneous
13.–Paragraph (1) of Standing Order No. 15 (Exempted business) shall apply so far as necessary for the purposes of this Order.
14.–(1) The proceedings on any Motion made by a Minister of the Crown for varying or supplementing the provisions of this Order shall (so far as not previously concluded) be brought to a conclusion one hour after their commencement.
(2) Paragraph (1) of Standing Order No. 15 (Exempted business) shall apply to those proceedings.
15. Standing Order No. 82 (Business Committee) shall not apply in relation to any proceedings to which this Order applies.
16.–(1) No Motion shall be made, except by a Minister of the Crown, to alter the order in which any proceedings on the Bill are taken or to recommit the Bill.
(2) The Question on any such Motion shall be put forthwith.
17.–(1) No dilatory Motion shall be made in relation to proceedings to which this Order applies except by a Minister of the Crown.
(2) The Question on any such Motion shall be put forthwith.
18. The Speaker may not arrange for a debate to be held in accordance with Standing Order No. 24 (Emergency debates) on a day on which the Bill has been set down to be taken as an Order of the Day before the conclusion of any proceedings to which this Order applies.
19.–(1) This paragraph applies if the House is adjourned, or the sitting is suspended, before the conclusion of any proceedings to which this Order applies.
(2) No notice shall be required of a Motion made at the next sitting by a Minister of the Crown for varying or supplementing the provisions of this Order.
20. Proceedings to which this Order applies shall not be interrupted under any Standing Order relating to the sittings of the House.
21.–(1) Any private business which has been set down for consideration at 7.00 pm, 4.00 pm or 2.00 pm (as the case may be) on a day on which the Bill has been set down to be taken as an Order of the Day shall, instead of being considered as provided by Standing Orders, be considered at the conclusion of the proceedings on the Bill on that day.
(2) Standing Order No. 15(1) (Exempted business) shall apply to the private business for a period of three hours from the conclusion of the proceedings on the Bill or, if those proceedings are concluded before the moment of interruption, for a period equal to the time elapsing between 7.00 pm, 4.00 pm or 2.00 pm (as the case may be) and the conclusion of those proceedings.
I do not wish to detain the House long, because I am sure that we want to spend as much time as possible discussing the Bill. We seek the approval of the House to consider all stages of this important Bill in a single day. The motion allows for a total of six hours of debate, with up to four hours on Second Reading, with the balance of time spent in Committee and on Third Reading. With the co-operation of the House, the Bill will ensure that the taxpayer does not have to repay previous benefit sanctions to claimants who have failed to participate in certain employment programmes, and it ensures that we can properly impose sanctions for such failures. Without this Bill, the cost to the taxpayer would be up to £130 million.
Debbie Abrahams (Oldham East and Saddleworth) (Lab)
Is it not the case that test case law from 2012 refutes the argument that the Government are making in terms of the requirement for sanctioned benefits to be recouped?
Mr Hoban
The hon. Lady makes a helpful point, but the legal position is as follows. If the Supreme Court does not give us leave to appeal, the regulations will be quashed, and we would have to repay sanctions to claimants who had not participated in schemes to help them back into work. The Bill is therefore needed. Hon. Members may have received briefings from third parties saying that that was not the case, but I can assure her and others that it is.
The Department has applied for permission for leave to appeal to the Supreme Court, but there is no guarantee that that will be granted. We therefore need to expedite the Bill so that we are not in a position where we have to repay benefit sanctions to people who have neither participated nor accepted the help that we have offered them.
Mr Speaker
I take it that the Minister has concluded his remarks. He cannot be accused of doing so with a fanfare of trumpets, but we are grateful to him for moving the motion.
Stephen Timms (East Ham) (Lab)
We find ourselves in a deeply unsatisfactory situation with the Bill and, indeed, the programme motion. We do not quite know what happened between the court case and the decision that prompted the measure. My right hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Hodge Hill (Mr Byrne) and I were told about the problem a couple of weeks ago; there was a three-week gap when we did not know what was happening. The House of Lords Constitution Committee will, I believe, opine on the measure tomorrow, but equally we do not want to risk an additional £130 million cut to benefit spending over the period ahead, particularly not on a day on which it has emerged that the Government want to cut £2.5 billion from spending across Government, some of it doubtless from the budget of the Minister and his right hon. Friend the Secretary of State. Nor do we want to be in a position in which people who were sanctioned months ago—in many cases, well over a year ago—have to be refunded because of the appalling mess that the Government have got themselves into.
The way forward proposed by the Bill and the programme motion is deeply unsatisfactory, but it is less bad than the alternatives, and for that reason I shall not urge my hon. Friends to oppose it.
Mr Speaker
If no one else wishes to contribute, the debate has been pithily concluded.
Question put and agreed to.
Jobseekers (Back to Work Schemes) Bill
(11 years, 1 month ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
16:57 - The House divided: - Ayes: 277 / Noes: 57 - Question accordingly agreed to.
The Minister of State, Department for Work and Pensions (Mr Mark Hoban)
I beg to move, That the Bill be now read a Second time.
I hope that I conduct this debate in a workman-like way, as I did the debate on the allocation of time motion. The Bill will ensure that following the recent Court of Appeal judgment in the case of Wilson and Reilly v. the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, the taxpayer will not have to repay to claimants the benefits lost because of their failure to take part in mandatory back-to-work programmes. It will also enable the Government to impose benefit sanctions on those who fail to participate in a mandatory programme where a decision has been put on hold because of the Wilson and Reilly case.
Caroline Lucas (Brighton, Pavilion) (Green)
Is it not the reality that this is a multi-billion pound failed flagship scheme, which was condemned by the Public Affairs Committee as extremely poor? Having lost a case and fearing that they will lose the appeal, the Government, instead of respecting our justice system, are abusing our emergency procedures to fix the consequences of losing? Does that show not a shocking disrespect both for our courts and for the principle that workers should be paid the minimum wage?
Mr Hoban
The hon. Lady clearly has a press release that she wants to set out this afternoon. [Interruption.] From a sedentary position, she says that it is a good press release. I wish it were an accurate one. The reality is that our schemes are helping to get people back into work. It is vital that people who are looking for work are given help to get into work, and we are offering that. Up to the end of September, 200,000 people found work as a consequence of the Work programme. If she thinks that that is a failure, she is insulting the people who have got work through the Work programme. She should recognise the benefits that such schemes bring. To allow people not to take part in them is breaking a contract between us and the unemployed. We give them the support that they need to get back into work and we expect them to take up that offer of support. If they do not take up that offer, it is right that they are penalised.
Dr Julian Lewis (New Forest East) (Con)
Will the Minister tell the House how our employment rate compares with that of eurozone countries and even with that of the United States?
Mr Hoban
My hon. Friend makes a good point. The unemployment rate in the UK is below the average of the eurozone and the European Union. We are seeing one of the fastest rates of job creation in the developed world and we have record numbers of people in work, and record numbers of women in work. Our policies to help people into work are effective. On the whole, jobseekers welcome them and it is important that they continue to take advantage of the schemes that are on offer.
John McDonnell (Hayes and Harlington) (Lab)
Is it not true that the Office for National Statistics has confirmed that the Government have included in their employment figures those who are not being paid for their work?
Mr Hoban
If the hon. Gentleman looks at the detail of the Office for National Statistics labour force survey, he will see that there are people who are on schemes who say that they are in employment, but that was the case under the previous Government. I have raised that issue with the ONS, because I agree that they should not be included in the numbers who are employed, but it rejected the argument on the grounds of international consistency. We cannot ignore the fact that, excluding those schemes and any reclassification, we have seen more than 1 million net new jobs created in the private sector since May 2010. Perhaps the hon. Gentleman should congratulate us on achieving that.
Debbie Abrahams (Oldham East and Saddleworth) (Lab)
Is it not the case that the employment rate now is lower than the rate—not the absolute numbers—in 2008?
Mr Hoban
The hon. Lady must recognise that we are in a very different economic climate from the one in 2008, when we saw a debt-fuelled boom that undermined the strength of the British economy. The economy is going through a healing process at the moment, and since May 2010 we have actually seen the private sector creating an extra 1 million new jobs. She should welcome that, because it has given people across the country an opportunity to get into work. We have seen the effectiveness of our welfare reforms—230,000 fewer people are claiming out-of-work benefits than they were in May 2010—and they have contributed to an increase in the numbers of people in work. People are coming into the labour market and finding jobs, and I would have thought that the hon. Lady would welcome that.
Before I go into the detail of the Bill and the background to the Court of Appeal judgment, let me outline why the Government believe that, in certain circumstances, jobseeker’s allowance claimants should be mandated to take part in employment programmes. and that when they fail to participate without good reason, they should face a benefit sanction.
First, this is a policy that is supported not only by Members from all parts of the House, but by the vast majority of the British public. According to the British social attitudes survey, 85% of the public believe that someone who is unemployed and on benefits should be required to do some unpaid work in the community while keeping their benefits. Sir Stanley Burnton, one of the Appeal Court judges in the Wilson and Reilly judgment, said:
“Parliament is entitled to authorise the creation and administration of schemes that are designed to assist the unemployed to obtain employment...it is not easy to see what objection there could be to them. Parliament is equally entitled to encourage participation in such schemes by imposing sanctions, in terms of loss of jobseekers’ allowance, on those who without good cause refuse to participate in a suitable scheme.”
Fiona Mactaggart (Slough) (Lab)
Is not the issue the fact that sanctions can work if people know the consequences of failure to action? Did not the court rule that the information that was sent to people who were sanctioned did not comply with the regulations passed by this House?
Mr Hoban
A clear message was sent that people who failed to participate in schemes could lose their benefit for up to 26 weeks. That is the maximum they could lose. What the Court of Appeal said, and what the High Court said previously, was that we should make reference to the fact that if someone had committed a first offence, as it were, we should give details of the amount of benefit they would lose the first time they did not participate in a scheme. In fact, we have changed the notices as a consequence of the High Court judgment. The notice that we sent out said that people would face a loss of up to 26 weeks benefit if they did not take part in the scheme. What the High Court wanted was details of the lower levels of sanctions that could apply in that situation.
There is a broad consensus that mandatory back-to-work schemes are a necessary part of the approach that we take to get people back to work. When a person signs on to receive jobseeker’s allowance, they accept that they have certain responsibilities. It could be called a contract between the jobseeker and the taxpayer. We will offer a huge amount of support to jobseekers, including help to search for jobs, work experience and jobseeker’s allowance. That is our part of the deal. The jobseekers’ part of the contract is to take up the help that we offer. While the vast majority of jobseekers live up to their part of the contract, there are a small minority who are reluctant to do everything they can reasonably be expected to do to get back into work.
Mr Hoban
In a moment. For that group of people, it is right that we have the power to mandate them on to different back-to-work schemes, which we think will help them improve their chances of finding work. I am sure that the right hon. Member for Birmingham, Hodge Hill (Mr Byrne) supports that sentiment.
Mr Byrne
A couple of years ago now, the Secretary of State gave an assurance to the House that individual jobcentres or jobcentre districts did not have targets for sanctioning jobseekers and that there were not any kind of league tables that ranked jobcentres or districts for sanctions. Will the Minister confirm that that is still his Department’s policy?
Mr Hoban
Absolutely. There are no league tables in place. We do not set targets for sanctions; I have made that point in previous discussions with, I think, the right hon. Member for East Ham (Stephen Timms). The decisions that need to be made are the right ones. They need to be based on whether people have breached the agreements they have set out with the jobcentre, and there are no targets in place.
Let me set out in a bit more detail the programmes that exist. The programmes might vary from a training course that the Government have paid for so that the claimant gains some essential skills that will increase their chances of finding work, or they might involve a community work placement, whereby claimants can pick up the basic disciplines, such as turning up on time, that every reasonable employer will expect.
We also know that those schemes work. Recent research on our mandatory work activity scheme found that nine in 10 participants said that they better recognised the benefits of a working routine, and around three quarters said that their confidence and ability to work as a team had improved. More than half said that they felt more positive about work than they did before attending.
Sheila Gilmore (Edinburgh East) (Lab)
Is it not the case that the research on the mandatory work schemes found that, afterwards, people were as likely to be on benefit as they were before?
Mr Hoban
The scheme is used particularly for those who are some distance from the labour market. We know that we need to make a range of interventions to get people to move closer and closer to the labour market. The scheme changes people’s attitude to work. Those on the scheme can put that work on their CV and demonstrate to employers that they are ready for work. That makes a contribution to moving them closer to work. As the evaluation that the hon. Lady referred to pointed out, people themselves feel the benefits of taking part in the scheme. It is therefore right that when claimants refuse to take up the support that is available, and then fail without good reason to attend these mandatory programmes, they face the consequences of their actions—a benefit sanction.
Mr Hoban
I want to make some more progress. We have four hours, and I am sure that the right hon. Gentleman will have time to make a contribution.
On 12 February, the Jobseeker's Allowance (Employment, Skills and Enterprise Scheme) Regulations 2011 were found to be ultra vires by the Court of Appeal on the ground that the programmes covered by the regulations were not described in the regulations in sufficient detail. Those are the regulations that provide for most of the mandatory back-to-work schemes, such as the Work programme and the day one trailblazers, which we are running at the moment.
The Court of Appeal also held that the notices sent to claimants advising them that they were required to take part in a programme within the ESE scheme did not comply with the requirements of regulation 4 of the ESE regulations. It is important to remind all Members that the Court of Appeal has ruled that there was no breach of article 4(2) of the European convention on human rights, meaning that these schemes cannot be equated with slave labour. As I have already stated, the judgment was supportive of the principle and policy of our employment schemes.
Mr Howarth
Will the Minister confirm that he intends to appoint an independent person to produce a report on this matter? The intention is that they will report within 12 months and the Secretary of State will consider that report for some unspecified period. I know that it is a complex issue, but does the Minister agree that that could be done much more quickly, and the issue could be resolved much more quickly, if that process were shortened, rather than the period being 12 months and then as long as it takes to consider the report?
Mr Hoban
I will touch on this in a bit more detail later, but we will appoint an independent reviewer to look at the way in which the sanctions regime works under the Bill and to report to Parliament; that is dealt with in new clause 1, which we will discuss later. The Secretary of State will lay the report before Parliament. The operation of the sanctions regime will be looked at within a 12-month period. If it could be looked at more quickly, that would be a good thing. That is one of the helpful products of the discussion between the two Front-Bench teams over the past couple of weeks. I hope that that gives Members reassurance on the nature of the review. I will come back later to the new clause, which will provide further reassurance.
In response to the judgment of 12 February, the Department laid new regulations, which came into force with immediate effect, so that we could continue seamlessly to mandate claimants to these vital back-to-work schemes. We have also written to everyone already taking part in the schemes to ensure their continued participation in schemes designed to help them to get back into work.
Derek Twigg (Halton) (Lab)
Could the Minister clear something up? Does he believe that the Court’s judgment is basically about a technicality, or was there a serious oversight by the Department? Many of my constituents think that there was a serious oversight.
Mr Hoban
No, there was not a serious oversight; the judgment was about a technicality. The High Court agreed that the regulations were satisfactory. It did not have a problem with the amount of detail in the regulations, whereas the Appeal Court did. I therefore believe that the judgment was about a technicality; it was about the amount of detail in the regulations. The Appeal Court thought that there should be more detail about the schemes. We felt, for reasons of efficiency and responding quickly to identify schemes that would help people to get back into work, that it was helpful to have some detail in the regulations but not as much as the Appeal Court wanted. To ensure that we could respond flexibly to the changing labour market and the changing needs of the unemployed, we designed the regulations in the way we did. We are seeking leave to appeal to the Supreme Court to continue to press that point about the amount of detail that should be in the regulations.
Mr Russell Brown (Dumfries and Galloway) (Lab)
On the very points that the Minister is making, of course it is right that those involved in the system—those seeking employment and training—should have as much information as possible. Does he recognise that the wider public need to be confident that the system—what is happening out there to find employment and training for those in need—should be robust and stand up to scrutiny, including scrutiny by the courts?
Mr Hoban
I think that the system is robust and that it does stand up to scrutiny by the courts. That is why the High Court accepted the amount of detail in the regulations. The Appeal Court disagreed with that and we are seeking leave to appeal to the Supreme Court to argue that point. It is not unusual for there to be a limited amount of detail in regulations and much more information to be supplied in guidance or notices provided not just by the DWP but by other Departments.
Mr Hoban
I have given way already to the hon. Lady. I want to make some progress.
As I have made clear, the Department fundamentally disagrees with the Appeal Court’s verdict, which is why it has applied for leave to appeal to the Supreme Court in respect of both grounds. We believe it is right that the regulations should allow for flexibility, so that we can respond rapidly to improve jobseekers' chances of finding work, such as trialling new approaches in Derbyshire and London to help young people get vital experience to bolster their CV. A more prescriptive approach—the one proposed by the Appeal Court—to the content of the regulations would create inflexibilities that would ultimately hinder the jobseeker's chance of finding work.
Those are the arguments that we will make before the Supreme Court, if we are granted permission. Those arguments will not be affected by the Bill. We are hopeful that we will obtain permission and that we will win our appeal. There is, however, no guarantee that we will be granted permission to appeal, or that we would win the appeal. Were that to happen, claimants who have been subject to a sanction for failing to take part in the schemes would be entitled to a refund of that sanction. It would also mean that we had no power to impose sanctions in relation to failures under the ESE regulations, in cases where no sanction decision has yet been taken—the so-called stockpiled cases. If that were to happen, the cost to the taxpayer would be up to £130 million.
It is vital that, in the present economic climate, the public purse be protected from such claims. The Bill will ensure that the taxpayer does not have to repay benefits lost by claimants who have failed to participate in employment programmes, and can properly impose sanctions for such failures. It would be unacceptable for claimants who have failed to take all reasonable steps to increase their chances of finding work to receive an undeserved windfall payment. The Bill will prevent that by providing that any decision to reduce jobseeker's allowance under the ESE regulations cannot be challenged on the grounds that the ESE regulations were invalid or the notices given under them inadequate. It makes similar provision in relation to the mandatory work activity regulations in respect of notices given under those regulations.
Paul Goggins (Wythenshawe and Sale East) (Lab)
Following on from the intervention by my hon. Friend the Member for Halton (Derek Twigg), who pressed the Minister on whether the judgment was about a technicality or not, may I draw the Minister’s attention to the comments of Lord Justice Pill? He said:
“Claimants must be made aware of their obligations and of the circumstances in which, and the manner in which, sanctions will be applied.”
I do not think that he regarded it as a technicality, but if it is, next time the Department makes a mess, will the Minister come and seek a further retrospective Bill, in the way he has done today?
Mr Hoban
The High Court upheld the steps that we took in setting out the detail in the regulations. As I said earlier, the letter that we sent to claimants who were required to participate in the schemes set out the fact that they could be subject to sanctions of up to 26 weeks’ worth of benefits. That is not the only communication we have with jobseekers. The jobseekers who come into Jobcentre Plus will have discussed the requirements with their personal adviser, so there is a range of ways in which we will communicate to jobseekers their obligations under the schemes. That is vital. It is important that people are aware of those obligations. We believe that the notices and regulations provide sufficient detail, and that will be backed up by the conversations and other communication that jobseekers have with personal advisers.
Mr Hoban
I want to make some more progress.
The Bill will ensure that the Government will not have to refund sanctions on the basis of the Court of Appeal’s judgment and will be able to make a decision in cases where no sanction decision has yet been made.
As I have previously stated, the Government have applied for leave to appeal to the Supreme Court. However, to ensure that we are not faced with having to repay benefit sanctions, we have had to press ahead with this fast-track legislation.
I would like to put it on record that I am grateful for the constructive way in which the right hon. Members for Birmingham, Hodge Hill and for East Ham have approached this topic. In supporting the Bill, they have allowed us to expedite its progress, thus safeguarding taxpayers’ money.
Following discussions last week with the shadow Secretary of State, the right hon. Member for Birmingham, Hodge Hill, we will be proposing two Government amendments in Committee. The first will reiterate in the Bill that a claimant’s appeal rights against a sanction decision remain unchanged in all matters, apart from those covered by the High Court and Court of Appeal judgments. For example, when a claimant felt that they had good cause for not participating in one of these schemes, they would still be able to appeal to the first tier tribunal on the basis of good cause. That is a helpful reconfirmation of the right of claimants to appeal. Similarly, the Bill will not overturn appeals that have succeeded on the basis of good cause. I hope that our amendment on that provides the clarification that the right hon. Gentleman seeks.
Mr Byrne
Will the Minister now confirm that the grounds of good cause in respect of appeals will remain undisturbed and will include the grounds covered in DWP guidance, which says that good cause can include an unsuitable course, full-time study, health and caring reasons, travel time that is inappropriately long, religious belief, bereavement, attending court and other emergencies? Will he also confirm that, ultimately, the timetable for lodging appeals will remain at 13 months?
Mr Hoban
We have been very clear in this amendment. We are confirming the right to appeal, and appeals can proceed on the grounds that are usually available in these situations, which the right hon. Gentleman has listed. The Bill does not change people’s right to appeal, save for appeals based on High Court or Supreme Court judgments.
The second Government amendment that we will bring forward in Committee will require the Secretary of State to appoint an independent person to carry out a review of the operation of the sanctions validated by this legislation during the first 12 months after Royal Assent. That review will report as soon as possible after the 12-month period, and the report will be laid before Parliament. I hope that these assurances are satisfactory.
To conclude, this Bill is necessary to ensure that the taxpayer does not have to repay up to £130 million in benefits lost through the failure of claimants to take up the Government’s offer of support. It is vital that scarce public resources are targeted at those who need and deserve them most. It would be unacceptable for claimants who have failed to take all reasonable steps to increase their chances of finding work to obtain an undeserved windfall payment. This Bill will prevent that, and I commend it to the House.
Mr Liam Byrne (Birmingham, Hodge Hill) (Lab)
This is a very dark day for the once-proud DWP, and it beggars belief that this once-proud Department has found itself in this position under the Secretary of State’s leadership. The organisation of back-to-work schemes is now in a state of total chaos. Once upon a time, back in 2010, the Secretary of State boasted that the Work programme would be the
“most comprehensive, integrated work programme in existence, certainly, since the war”.—[Official Report, 22 November 2010; Vol. 519, c. 17.]
What do we have instead? We have a Work programme that is literally worse than doing nothing. Just 2.3% of people referred on to the programme have found sustained jobs. As has been said, the Public Accounts Committee stated—
Mr Byrne
The hon. Lady will want to reflect on this. The Public Accounts Committee said this about the Work programme:
“Actual performance was even below the Department’s assessment of the non-intervention rate—the number of people that would have found sustained work had the Work programme not been running.”
Maybe the hon. Lady can tell me whether she is proud of that.
Jane Ellison
I am grateful to the right hon. Gentleman for giving way, but I was going to tell him that this morning the Work and Pensions Committee was at Willesden Jobcentre Plus. I asked the staff running the programme there, helping people get back to work, how they felt about their efforts being described as worse than nothing. They said it was deeply demoralising and incredibly insulting to their efforts on behalf of the unemployed.
Mr Byrne
The truth is that jobcentre staff have so little confidence in the Work programme that they are not referring people to Work programme contactors at anywhere near the rate the Department has estimated. That is the reality of how jobcentre staff feel.
We have had universal credit now beginning its descent into universal chaos, and now we have the news that the regulations designed to encourage jobseekers to take work were so badly drafted that the Court of Appeal struck them down and the Department may as a result be on the hook to repay £130 million in sanctions. The judges could not have been more unequivocal. Here is what they had to say:
“The 2011 Regulations must be quashed.”
I therefore put it to the Secretary of State that this is a day of shame for his Department. The House of Commons Library cannot find an instance of DWP legislation being struck down in this fashion since 1996, under the last Conservative Government. If the Secretary of State had delusions of adequacy, they have been swept away by today’s proposed legislation.
Pete Wishart (Perth and North Perthshire) (SNP)
Will the right hon. Gentleman therefore explain to claimants, trade unions and everybody who has looked at this Bill why the Labour party will be abstaining today? If this Work programme is no better than no work programme at all, why on earth is the Labour party sitting on its hands?
Mr Byrne
I will address that point directly, as the answer is very simple: because this Bill restores the general legal power of the DWP to issue sanctions. It is a broad sui generis power that has been in place since 1911. I will be interested to hear later the hon. Gentleman’s argument on why he thinks the power to issue sanctions, which has been in place since 1911, should now be struck down for the period in question.
The worst aspect of all this is that the Secretary of State was warned that he was heading for a failure not simply in this House, not simply by commentators opposed to his plans, and not simply by people who had a profound disagreement with him, but by the very specialist Committee he set up to advise him on these questions. This is what the Social Security Advisory Committee said about the 2011 regulations:
“SSAC ask why the Department did not opt to narrow the scope of the original regulations”,
Indeed, it was, of course, their broad and unspecified content that the Court of Appeal objected to.
Mr Russell Brown
I want to take my right hon. Friend back to the recent intervention of the hon. Member for Perth and North Perthshire (Pete Wishart), from the Scottish National party Benches. Has my right hon. Friend picked up from those comments that the SNP is totally opposed to sanctions of any kind?
Mr Byrne
My hon. Friend is absolutely right. I am afraid that no other conclusion can be drawn from that intervention.
The Secretary of State said to us in the House a couple of weeks ago:
“That advice came to us; it was checked and it said that the regulations were fine.”—[Official Report, 11 March 2013; Vol. 560, c. 19.]
Well, either the lawyers are bad or the Secretary of State made the wrong judgment. The only conclusion that can be drawn is that there are a huge number of questions that the Secretary of State must now answer.
If this were the only recent example of such incompetence by a Government Department, we might look on it more sympathetically, but all of us clearly remember the west coast main line debacle that cost taxpayers so much money and all of us remember that the Department for Transport responded by appointing an independent reviewer to get to the bottom of exactly what went wrong and how so much public money was put at risk. That is the response we must see now from the DWP. There must be an independent inquiry into how the Department got this so badly wrong.
Mr Nick Gibb (Bognor Regis and Littlehampton) (Con)
May I bring the right hon. Gentleman back to the Bill? Does he agree with its impact assessment, which states that a retrospective transfer of £130 million of
“public money to this group of claimants would represent poor value to the taxpayer and will not help those unemployed enter employment”?
Surely, in the current climate he should welcome the swift action taken by the Government. Listening to his interventions and his speech, I am not sure that he or Labour are ready to be custodians of this country’s public finances.
Mr Byrne
Right—so a Member of a Government who have just put at risk £130 million of public money says that we would not be safe custodians of public money.
The Secretary of State was given the judgment by the Court of Appeal on 12 February. Weeks later, there was the request for urgent legislation, please. That is highly unsatisfactory. Tests for retrospective legislation have been repeatedly set out in this House and the other place. Tomorrow, the Lords’ Constitution Committee will opine on this Bill. I suspect it will have harsh things to say about its rushed nature which, because it is retrospective and set to a fast timetable, represents the worst of all worlds.
The Secretary of State will be aware, like me, of the principles set down by the Constitution Committee in its 15th report, where it opines on fast-track legislation. There is a need to maintain clear, transparent parliamentary scrutiny, and to maintain “good law”. The right of interested parties to put forward views must be observed. There is a need to ensure that legislation is a proportionate, justified and appropriate response, and is set out so that fundamental constitutional rights are not jeopardised. Crucially, the policy-making process within Government should be transparent. I look forward to hearing how any one of those principles is honoured by the process before us. The test is all the sharper, in that the Secretary of State is in this pickle because he rushed the legislation, against the recommendation of his advisers.
The test for fast-tracked retrospective legislation is the toughest of all. It was a principle the Lords set down in their report on criminal evidence legislation in 2008, which said:
“Legislation to make lawful an action that was done without legal authority…needs to be scrutinised carefully.”
My concern is that this timetable does not deliver that.
At the heart of this debate is the question whether the programmes the Government have in place, which rest on the power the Secretary of State is seeking from us, are in any way effective.
Caroline Lucas
Does the right hon. Gentleman not recognise that many people in this country will be shocked to learn that the official Opposition want to vote for this Bill precisely because they want to impose sanctions on people on workfare? Let me give him the example of a 58-year-old constituent of mine who has been unemployed for seven months. She was told that she had to travel miles to work in a Scope charity shop in Worthing or lose benefits. She could not afford to get to Worthing, so she offered to work in the Scope shop in Brighton, but the jobcentre would not allow it. Should she be sanctioned?
Mr Byrne
The hon. Lady raises an extremely important point, and that is why we have sought to ensure that the Bill includes our safeguards, which preserve the right to appeal with good cause, and the 13-month appeal window during which people can lodge objections to the sanctions regime. To answer the hon. Lady directly, I do believe that the DWP should be equipped with the power to issue sanctions. That general foundation has been in the hands of Ministers for more than a century. The new deal programmes and the future jobs fund that Labour put in place had sanctions attached to them—indeed, they were tightened by the Welfare Reform Act 2009—and I do not believe that those powers should be empty ones. However, nor do I believe they should be in the ether—in the hands of Ministers who have no obligation to put in place genuine back-to-work programmes that are better than doing nothing, unlike today’s Work programme.
Derek Twigg
Is there not evidence in our constituencies of people being taken off benefits for no good reason? For example, a constituent who was attending the funeral of a close relative had her benefits stopped. People with mental health issues, particularly young men, are kicked off benefit for no good reason.
Mr Byrne
My hon. Friend is absolutely right to flag that up. He will know that the DWP’s own guidance says that “good cause” for appealing against a sanction decision includes bereavement where the claimant was arranging or attending a funeral of a close relative or friend. That is why it is vital that we seek to protect these appeal rights in the Bill.
The ultimate test of whether a back-to-work programme is working is perhaps the one the Secretary of State set out when he spoke in Easterhouse all those years ago. He said that
“we need a jobs revolution. Every working-age adult capable of earning a decent living for themselves and their dependants must be helped to have the opportunity to do so”.
Since he took office, unemployment has increased in three quarters of the estates with the worst unemployment levels in Britain. It has not got better; it has got worse.
Nick de Bois (Enfield North) (Con)
More than half the first cohort on the Work programme are in work. Why does the right hon. Gentleman describe that as a failure?
Mr Byrne
The hon. Gentleman would do well to pay attention to the DWP’s own statistics and to the judgment of the Public Accounts Committee. They are categorical; they do not hem and haw or hedge their words; they make it clear that the Work programme today is worse than doing nothing. On the estates where unemployment is worst, the situation has got worse, not better since the Secretary of State took office. By any measure, that must be a failure.
That is why we say there has to be a different macro-economic policy. Unemployment is high because there are not enough jobs to go round. My constituency has the highest youth unemployment of any constituency in the country. There are 30 people chasing every single job. There are not enough jobs to go round, and we need a different plan for growth and jobs—an argument that my right hon. Friend the shadow Chancellor has set out with some power. We also need a different plan at the DWP. It is now Labour authorities and the Labour party nationally that are setting out the way forward for this Government. We have said that it would be wise to put a tax on bankers’ bonuses because we know we could use that money to get more than 100,000 young people back into work quickly. That is decisive action, which we hope to see from the Chancellor tomorrow. If anybody rejects an offer of a real job with real wages and real training, sure, perhaps they should face sanctions. But let us be clear: young people today deserve a real choice of a real job with real wages, but that is being denied them by this Government.
Mr Byrne
That is cold comfort to a constituency with the highest youth unemployment in Britain. Does the hon. Gentleman know what people at my local jobcentre say when I visit it? Can he guess? They say, “I wish this Government would bring back the future jobs fund because it was the best programme we ever ran.” What a shame his party cancelled it, and that is why we propose its restoration.
The Secretary of State for Work and Pensions (Mr Iain Duncan Smith)
Will the right hon. Gentleman give way?
Mr Byrne
I will in a moment, if the Secretary of State will allow me.
When we look around the country, we now see Labour councils leading the charge to get young people back into work. In Sheffield, they are looking at how to intervene better in schools to help prevent young people from becoming unemployed. In Wakefield, they are bringing together colleges and businesses in a new way to get people back to work. In Leeds, there are new programmes to help get young people back into work. In Manchester, there is now a UCAS-style clearing house to get people back into apprenticeships. In Bradford, there are now industrial centres of excellence that bring the council, colleges and young people together. In Glasgow, the Labour council is guaranteeing a job for any young person out of work for too long. In Wales, they are making the same kind of commitment. In Birmingham, the Labour council—my own authority—has brought together a coalition of the willing to make progress on youth unemployment. In Liverpool, there is now an apprenticeship training agency, set up by the council and a local college. In Sandwell, Newham and Cardiff, Labour councils, local colleges and business communities have set up job brokerages. That is the kind of decisive action the Secretary of State can learn from. Perhaps he will give a commitment to go and look at what I have seen first hand and incorporate it into his policy.
Mr Duncan Smith
I am grateful to the right hon. Gentleman for giving way. Youth unemployment is lower than when the previous Government left office and there are more people in work than ever before. He is extolling the virtues of our localisation agenda, and I congratulate him on that.
I want to ask the right hon. Gentleman about a simple point. He has laid out for the hon. Member for Perth and North Perthshire (Pete Wishart) and others why his party will, by and large, not vote against the Bill. In doing so, he has said constantly how much he opposes emergency legislation and how terrible it is. Will he confirm that under Labour, there were 12 cases of emergency legislation being brought through this House in a hurry? Is he not crying crocodile tears on that point?
Mr Byrne
No. The Secretary of State should set out the detailed individual circumstances of every piece of legislation that he has referred to. He knows as well as I do what underpinned them. The point, as well he knows, is that he is making retrospective, fast-track legislation that touches on rights of appeal and property rights, all because of the mistake that he and his Ministers made in 2011 in bodging the regulations so badly that the Court of Appeal has struck them down.
To conclude, the assurances that we have heard from the Minister this afternoon are extremely important. The safeguards for appeal rights that have been set out are vital to ensure that people who are hit by sanctions have a wide-ranging set of good causes that can trigger an appeal.
Mr Byrne
In a moment.
First, ensuring that the appeal window of 13 months is preserved is crucial for people who are hit by sanctions. Secondly, as has been referred to by my hon. Friends, it is vital that there is an independent review of the sanctions regime. My right hon. Friend the Member for East Ham (Stephen Timms) will set out the questions that we believe need to be answered.
I have heard the Minister’s assurances this afternoon that there is no series of targets and that there are no league tables. We will hear further evidence on that point over the course of the debates in this House. I hope that the assurances that we have heard this afternoon withstand those tests.
Mr Angus Brendan MacNeil (Na h-Eileanan an Iar) (SNP)
Is it not the case that it is not only the low-paid, but the non-paid that Labour are not backing? By sitting on their hands, Labour Members are helping the Government to ensure that the people who are already being affected by the bedroom tax get no further support. It is worse than two bald men fighting over a comb.
Mr Byrne
It was the Labour party that opposed the bedroom tax when the Welfare Reform Bill went through this House, it is the Labour party that has consistently voted in opposition to the bedroom tax, and it is the Labour party that has forced the concessions out of the Government to protect foster parents and armed forces families.
In conclusion, it beggars belief that the Secretary of State has had to come before the House to fast-track retrospective legislation to fix a problem that he created when he got things wrong all those months and years ago. That is why it is so important that there is an independent Laidlaw-style review to get to the bottom of what went wrong. We need answers on how the Secretary of State has landed himself in this position. We need those answers to come before this House so that we can come to a judgment about whether he is still fit to be Secretary of State for Work and Pensions.
Debbie Abrahams (Oldham East and Saddleworth) (Lab)
I would like to put on the record once again my belief that anyone who can work should work. For that to happen, we first need to have good quality jobs. As I suggested in my intervention, the percentage of such jobs that are available is getting worse, not better.
Mr MacNeil
The hon. Lady says that those who can work should work. Does she agree that they should be paid for that work, and that they deserve the support of MPs to be paid for their work?
Debbie Abrahams
I was about to make the point that schemes such as work experience, when they are co-determined, can be valuable tools in enabling people who are yet to find a permanent, full-time job to find one.
The Bill is a new low for the Government. It is the result of an abuse of power and incompetence, mixed with an ideological drive to run down our welfare state. I, for one, do not support it.
The recent court ruling that the Bill seeks to overturn quashed the 2011 jobseeker’s regulations, which failed to describe the specifics of the employment schemes and the requirements to participate in those schemes, including the time that must be spent on them. The Secretary of State had empowered himself to make regulations, but the form that he had chosen was judged to be unlawful. The regulations did little more than name the scheme.
The second part of the judgment related to the sanctions that were applied to claimants. DWP letters failed to explain what they were required to do. The ruling stated:
“the answer to my mind is plainly that there could be no question of sanctions being validly imposed if no proper notice of the sanction consequences was given.”
Again, I support the principle of a sanctions regime. If somebody consistently fails to turn up for work experience or a Work programme scheme, sanctions should be applied. However, I believe that sanctions are being applied indiscriminately. For example, one of my constituents was a beneficiary of employment and support allowance after they had retired on grounds of ill health as a result of a heart problem. He was required to attend a work capability assessment with Atos. During the assessment, he was told that he was having a heart attack and the nurse said that she had to stop the assessment. He got a letter a couple of weeks later saying that he had withdrawn from the assessment and, as such, was being sanctioned. That beggars belief. I have other examples, as I am sure do colleagues.
I welcome the opportunity for a review of the sanctions regime, which my right hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Hodge Hill (Mr Byrne) has proposed, and the provisions on the appeals process. As he suggested, there is an indiscriminate approach to sanctioning. I was contacted by a Jobcentre Plus employee who was concerned that he was being forced to sanction people inappropriately. I hope that more whistleblowers will come forward during the review to describe the issues with the schemes.
The Government say that the Bill is needed so that they do not have to pay back the sanctioned benefits. That is absolute nonsense, as was suggested earlier. There is test case law from 2012 that disputes that argument.
Not only are the Government trying to push through retrospective legislation that undermines the judiciary and the rule of law, with all the appalling implications that that has; I believe that the Bill is part of the divide-and-rule narrative that underpins the Government’s ideology. They are again pointing the finger at the undeserving poor. They are emaciating our hard-fought-for welfare system on the convenient back of austerity. I believe in our country and our people. I believe that in good times and bad the welfare system is there to protect them. There will always be a few who abuse that system and we need to have measures in place to prevent that. However, the Bill goes beyond the pale and I, for one, will fight this emaciation of our welfare system.
Ian Lavery (Wansbeck) (Lab)
In the Reilly and Wilson v. Secretary of State for Work and Pensions court case on 12 February 2013, the applicants challenged the Jobseeker’s Allowance (Employment, Skills and Enterprise Scheme) Regulations 2011 on four grounds. The first was that the scheme named in the 2011 regulations was beyond the powers of section 17A of the Jobseekers Act 1995. In other words, the regulations did not comply with the requirements of the Act. Secondly, the regulations could not be enforced in the absence of a published policy. Thirdly, notices to individuals mandated to take part in such schemes were inadequate. The fourth part, which was set aside, was the suggestion that the regulations conflict with article 4(2) of the European convention on human rights, which provides, subject to exceptions, that
“no one shall be required to perform forced or compulsory labour.”
Many organisations totally oppose this Bill for a wide and varied range of reasons, and it is unfair to claimants to legalise retroactively penalties that the Court has judged unlawful. Contrary to Government claims, it is not obvious that the DWP would have to repay sanctioned benefits to all claimants, so the stated £130 million potential loss is inaccurate. The Government already have anti-test case law rules that would prevent them from having to repay anything for sanctions served prior to 6 August 2012, and more information on that point would be extremely helpful when the Minister responds to the debate.
It is of constitutional concern if the DWP undermines the judiciary and the rule of law by using retroactive legislation to avoid accountability for its own errors, and to negate any further appeal judgment by the Supreme Court that upholds the Court of Appeal judgment. Legal representatives who were in court for the Reilly and Wilson case stated categorically their belief that:
“The emergency Bill is a repugnant attempt by the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions to avoid his legal obligation to repay the thousands of jobseekers who…have been unlawfully and unfairly stripped of their subsistence benefits…The use of retrospective legislation, which is being fast-tracked through Parliament, smacks of desperation.”
I believe that is polite in the extreme. They went on:
“It undermines the rule of law and means that Iain Duncan Smith is once again seeking to avoid proper parliamentary scrutiny of his actions…It is time for his Department to admit that maladministration and injustice costs.”
Other civil liberty groups and human rights campaigners have today explained to the press—it has just been released on the BBC—that they believe this type of retrospective legislation is a typical component of oppressive regimes. They could not have put it any stronger than that. The measure has been described by some organisations as “almost unbelievably disgusting”, and they said that the DWP
“broke the law, now they want to retroactively change the law so that they didn’t break the law in order to keep £130m out of the pockets of some of the poorest people in the country…The High Court found workfare unlawful precisely because people had no way of knowing the rules that applied. It shows an incredible level of arrogance and disregard for the poorest to now attempt to backdate laws to challenge this ruling.”
It has been correctly argued that the Bill would set a dangerous legal precedent if passed, and send a message that when citizens defeat the Government in court, the Government can overturn the Court ruling retrospectively with primary legislation—effectively making the Government, and the DWP, above the law. Who is in charge?
If this Bill is enacted, it is not clear what would happen in the cases of those who have successfully appealed against decisions to impose sanctions. It appears that there have already been successful appeals against sanction decisions at first-tier tribunals, following the Court of Appeal judgment. The Government’s argument is that the Bill will protect taxpayers by saving them a bill of £130 million. May I dare to suggest that that is denying those claimants their legal entitlement? Taxpayers will be better served if back-to-work schemes are properly scrutinised to ensure efficacy and that taxpayers are receiving value for money. That is a separate argument and has been stated well from both sides of the House this afternoon.
We can see from the poor performance of the Work programme so far, with only 3.5% of people referred to the programme finding a long-term job, that people are more likely to get a job without that scheme than with it. Is there a £130 million liability that would have to be repaid? The Government argue that legislation is necessary to protect the public purse from having to repay £130 million of sanctions that have been imposed. As I said earlier, however, significant anti-test case provisions already within the social security system mean it is highly unlikely that the Government would be required to repay all the sanctions. Section 27 of the Social Security Act 1998 allows the DWP not to change decisions that were only shown to be wrong by a decision of a court. It means that the DWP could probably resist repayment in all cases where the sanction was imposed and served before the High Court decision of 6 August 2012, as well as decisions after that date where no appeal is sought.
When researching for my contribution to this debate I looked at the explanatory notes and the impact assessment published with the Bill, and a number of issues really stuck out. Paragraph 9 states:
“The Bill has been introduced to avoid the need to repay claimants who have been sanctioned for failure to comply with requirements under the ESE Regulations and to be able to impose sanctions where decisions have been put on hold since the decision of the High Court or Court of Appeal. If this were to happen, the cost to the taxpayer is estimated to be up to £130 million.”
The Bill is being introduced to save the taxpayer up to £130 million, yet it deprives the most vulnerable people who have been on workfare and are looking to better themselves in employment. It has been introduced to deny £130 million compensation to 300,000 people who would like decent employment with decent wages, terms and conditions. The Government have introduced emergency legislation to prevent those people from getting only what the Court of Appeal says they deserve. That is an absolute outrage.
The explanatory notes state:
“The effect of the Bill will be that any decision to sanction a claimant for failures to comply with the ESE Regulations cannot be challenged on the grounds that the ESE Regulations were invalid or the notices given under them inadequate, notwithstanding the Court of Appeal’s judgment. This is to ensure that the Government is not faced with the situation whereby jobseekers previously sanctioned (or to be sanctioned) for non-compliance under the ESE Regulations can receive an unfair advantage over compliant claimants.”
Again, that is an outrageous statement. The notes continue:
“The Bill also addresses the risk that previous notifications to claimants made under the MWA Regulations—”
mandatory work activity regulations—
“which contain the same notification provisions as the ESE Regulations, may also be open to challenge on the basis of the Court of Appeal’s judgement.”
The explanatory notes state:
“The impact upon individuals is that JSA claimants who have not complied with requirements under the ESE Regulations will not be repaid sanctioned benefits as they might expect following the judgment or may have a sanction imposed. The Bill effectively restores the status quo to a situation before the High Court and Court of Appeal judgments. Once the Bill is enacted, claimants who might have appealed against previous sanction decisions on the grounds upheld by the Judicial Review will be unable to do so. Sanctions imposed under the…legislation can continue and sanctions decisions currently stayed can be made in accordance with the original intent of the legislation. This is to ensure that the Government is not faced with the situation whereby jobseekers who failed to comply with their requirements and were sanctioned under the quashed ESE Regulations can receive an advantage over claimants who have complied with their requirements and is necessary to safeguard the economic interests of the state.”
I wonder whether denying ordinary and mainly poor people what they have been granted in a Court of Appeal hearing is in the best interests of the country and the economy.
Ian Lavery
I am certain that the 300,000 people the Court says have a claim because of the illegal actions of the Minister’s Department should receive it—there is no doubt about it. The Bill is being introduced by the DWP and the Government to deprive many hard-working people, and many people who want to be hard-working, of any finance whatever. Is that in the best interests of the economy? It is an absolute disgrace. Those people will spend money in the economy. They might get £50, £100 or £72 a week, but they will spend it, because it is the only money they have. The Minister should not seek to deprive those people and leave them with no finances whatever.
Ian Lavery
I have not disagreed with anyone up until now other than the Government, because they wish to deny ordinary, hard-working people—people who wish to get on in life—what the Court of Appeal says they should have.
Dr Julian Lewis
I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for giving way and am sincerely impressed with the passion with which he makes his case. However, if I were in his shoes, I would be determined to vote against the Bill. Perhaps I have misunderstood something. My understanding is that Opposition Front Benchers are proposing not to vote against the Bill. If so, why not?
Ian Lavery
I am not sure whether the hon. Gentleman has misunderstood the situation, but perhaps when the vote takes place, he will be much better informed.
The Bill turns my stomach. The impact assessment states:
“A retrospective transfer of public money to this group of claimants would represent poor value to the taxpayer”.
What a disgrace to say such a thing in Government documents with reference to the people I have mentioned 10, 15 or 20 times previously. That will not give them self-esteem. They are doing their very best.
Justin Tomlinson (North Swindon) (Con)
Jobless households trebled under Labour and increasingly became the norm for the next generation. Surely we owe it to those children to assist their parents to get their first foot in the door of a job. Specifically, I recently spoke to one parent who said that her children were full of pride when she got an opportunity. Why deny that to others?
Ian Lavery
Members of Parliament discuss with constituents, and often people away from the constituency, the merits and otherwise of policies. I often meet people with a very different view from the people the hon. Gentleman has met. That is not to say that that has not been said, but the people I meet want decent jobs. They want the opportunity to get up in the morning and go to work for a decent wage. They would accept the minimum wage even though, at this point in time, it is not high enough. Where I live, 25 people are after every single job in the jobcentre. That means that 24 are not getting employment for every single opportunity. People want to work for the best intentions and the right reasons. They want self-esteem and finances. People where I live want to work—I am sure that extends throughout the country.
Saying that paying claimants the money that the Court says they should be paid—the result of the ruling means that the £130 million can be paid—does not represent good value for the taxpayer is an absolute disgrace. It is not the type of language we would expect from any Government. It is not right to talk about people as, “This group of claimants.” They are ordinary people with feelings, and many of them want to get on in life.
Ian Lavery
People have received sanctions for a range of reasons. The Government should not overrule a Court of Appeal ruling and introduce retrospective legislation against people just because they have received sanctions. I am sure the Minister is not suggesting that people who have, for whatever reason, received a sanction, should under no circumstances claim some sort of subsistence, even if the courts have agreed in a ruling that they should receive it.
Mr Jim Cunningham (Coventry South) (Lab)
I do not know whether my hon. Friend has come across such cases, but I have come across a number of people who have gone for a number of jobs, and been told, when they go back to claim JSA, that they are not trying hard enough. What an attitude in the 21st century!
Ian Lavery
I fully understand my hon. Friend’s point. As I have said to the hon. Member for North Swindon (Justin Tomlinson), every MP has received many representations with regard to the wide and various workfare schemes.
The impact assessment states:
“If the Department cannot make these retrospective changes, then further reductions in benefits might be required in order to find the money to repay the sanctions.”
That is blackmail of the highest order—I make no apology for the strength of my feeling on that. If people are due finances, they should get them, particularly following a court ruling, but the Government are saying, “If we pay these people, we might have to cut benefits for other people as a result because that is where we have to find the money.” That is emotional blackmail. It is totally and utterly bang out of order. They are trying to set people who are looking for work and on benefits against each other. That is absolutely unacceptable.
To conclude, I have some questions for the Minister to answer in his winding-up speech. Is it right that claimants face financial penalties for failing to participate in schemes when the possibility of those penalties had not been properly explained to them? Is it right that the Government can flout the will of Parliament, which had clearly expressed its wish to have some oversight of the schemes, especially given that the schemes that were designed and imposed on claimants without an opportunity for parliamentary scrutiny do not appear to be working?
Is it true that the DWP continued to issue letters to claimants that did not explain things properly even after the High Court had stated that the letters were inadequate?
Ian Lavery
From a sedentary position, the Minister says that that is not true, but I hope he will clarify that.
Ian Lavery
That is debatable.
Finally, what is the Department’s understanding on whether section 27 of the 1998 Act protects people from having to repay some of these sanctions? Some 300,000 people will be denied their legal rights if the Bill is passed. This is just another ideological attack on the unemployed and the less well-off, despite a High Court judgment. Why does the Minister not just accept the court of law? Give these people what they are entitled to. It is the Minister’s mess. Why should they suffer?
Mr Russell Brown (Dumfries and Galloway) (Lab)
It is an honour and pleasure to follow my hon. Friend the Member for Wansbeck (Ian Lavery). My contribution might pale into insignificance compared with his comments of the past 20 minutes or so. He has probably saved me some time, because he has obviously taken to heart what the Child Poverty Action Group has been telling us all about the inequity of workfare schemes in the past couple of years. However, my starting point will be some 15 or 16 years ago.
I want to compliment Department for Work and Pensions staff. We sometimes forget the job of work that people do in their day-to-day life, and how difficult it can be. I only have to look back to when I came into this place in 1997. At that time, DWP staff were doing excellent work and were up for the challenge, keeping in mind that unemployment levels were excessively high when we came into government. They took on board the task of delivering for the then Labour Government the whole concept of new deal: new deal for long-term unemployed, new deal for young people, new deal for lone parents and new deal for disabled people. It made a vast difference to the lives not only of individuals, but of families and communities the length and breadth of the country.
It is therefore disappointing when things go wrong and DWP staff get castigated—it is grossly unfair. In recent weeks, I have held a couple of welfare reform summits, with some 30 or 40 different organisations attending. A member of DWP staff attended, explaining fully the changes that are about to hit many families across the country. As I said to people at the meetings, “Do not shoot the messenger.” The member of DWP staff explained what would be happening. The fault does not lie at the door of DWP staff; it lies at the door of the Department and the Ministers who are pushing the policies that everyone is faced with on a day-to-day basis.
One worrying aspect of the Bill is that this is emergency legislation. The point has been made about the number of times the previous Labour Government pushed through emergency legislation, but my right hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Hodge Hill (Mr Byrne) knows full well what that emergency legislation was about. I have to tell the House that it was not in the realm of what we are seeing today. The retrospective element of the Bill is galling. My right hon. Friend knows that yesterday I had certain difficulties with the Bill. I still do—I have to be honest with the House. However, I recognise that he has worked hard to secure concessions from the Government to make the pill just that little bit less bitter than it would have been had he not made any such attempt.
The element of sanction is important. There are sanctions in all walks of life. We live in the real world, not the ideal world. If we lived in the ideal world, we would not have to have sanctions at any time, anywhere. The fact of the matter is that not everyone co-operates and not everyone plays by the rules, and so there are times when people have to be taken to one side and told where they are going wrong. However, that is no excuse for what has gone wrong here. Lord Justice Pill stated:
“Claimants must be made aware of their obligations and of the circumstances in which, and the manner in which, sanctions will be applied.”
I am not saying that that has not happened in every case. I am sure there are cases where staff have made it abundantly clear to claimants exactly where they stand. However, when we talk about the best part of 300,000 people, I have some anxiety about how many did not know.
Steve McCabe (Birmingham, Selly Oak) (Lab)
In the case of one of my constituents, it took three months to determine whether he should be sanctioned, as it was not clear whether the responsibility rested with the manager of the placement or the jobcentre. At one stage I wrote to the Minister, and I cannot say that his letter made the matter any clearer. In that case, is it right that the sanction is maintained against my constituent? It is perfectly obvious that not only did he not know the conditions relating to the sanction, but neither did the manager of the placement nor the staff at the jobcentre. Surely the Minister is simply covering up an error, if he is allowed to do that.
Mr Brown
I thank my hon. Friend for that intervention. It is abundantly clear that the system is not robust. I made the point earlier that it is not only those who are out there actively seeking work or training who need to know the rules of the game. Every one of us in this House needs to know the rules, and the wider public need to know what is going on out there in their communities. When they see in their local press half a dozen vacancies and potentially 40, 50, 60 or maybe even 100 people applying for jobs, they need to know that systems are robust. They depend on good government to ensure that the legislation is correct.
Alison McGovern (Wirral South) (Lab)
Does my hon. Friend agree that what this tells us is that we need root and branch reform of how DWP communicates with the public? It is bitter when constituents of mine go to the jobcentre or take part in the Work programme already feeling bad and communication by DWP makes them feel so much worse. That has got to come to an end.
Mr Brown
I agree with my hon. Friend. I also want to come back to the point I made at the beginning. Staff are under so much pressure. I can tell both Ministers here that there will for ever be a question mark over targets. Let me assure them and the Secretary of State that if evidence ever comes my way that clearly indicates that there are targets that have been denied by Ministers, I will make the House fully aware. I hope that hon. Members on both sides would do likewise. If that evidence is to be found, if that is happening, then it is only right that we expose it.
Katy Clark (North Ayrshire and Arran) (Lab)
We all support high quality training and work experience, but the court case to which the Bill relates was about someone working at Poundland for an extended period. Does my hon. Friend agree that most ordinary people watching this debate will feel that it is outrageous that people are being asked to do such jobs without being paid?
Mr Brown
I can only wholeheartedly agree with my hon. Friend. Members of the public expect better from the shops, facilities and services we use. We expect people to be paid, and that point has been made this afternoon. All we are asking is for a real choice of a real job with a real wage. That is the decent thing to do, and there can be no doubt whatever about that.
Mr Jim Cunningham
Some of the newer Members might not realise this, but under the last Conservative Government, people in Coventry were being paid £1 an hour. I remember raising the matter with Ministers at the time. We are going back to those days.
Mr Brown
My hon. Friend and I are of an age to remember when people were being paid pitifully poor wages, but thankfully—I will come to this in a minute—we introduced the national minimum wage when in government.
The hon. Member for Brighton, Pavilion (Caroline Lucas), who has left the Chamber, was absolutely correct to make the point that the sanctions being imposed were wholly unfair, verging on the criminal. A number of us heard yesterday about someone who was asked to report to the jobcentre and sign on as unemployed at 9.30 on a Tuesday morning. At the same time, they were asked to turn up at a new training organisation at 9.30. They went to the jobcentre and said, “Look, I can’t come at 9:30 on Tuesday morning. I’m reporting to a new trainer,” but was told, “No, you need to come here, otherwise you’ll face sanctions. You’ll need to get a letter from your new trainer.” When they went to the trainer and said, “You’ll need to provide me with a letter that allows me to avoid signing on,” they were told, “We don’t provide letters.” So individuals are being trapped and end up being sanctioned. There is no fairness in that sort of system.
I want to touch on the £130 million that my hon. Friend the Member for Wansbeck spoke about. This is the bit that really concerns me. Tomorrow, we will hear more from the Chancellor, and I am sure that Labour’s play will be for growth. As my hon. Friend pointed out, when we give money to the poorest, they go out and spend it, and it flows into and washes about in the local economy.
Andy McDonald (Middlesbrough) (Lab)
Does my hon. Friend agree that the only consequence of this judgment will be to put claimants in the position they would have been in had the Government not broken the law? Is it not deplorable that they now seek to use the House to change history and make their illegal actions legal? The Government broke the law and are now using the House to avoid the consequences.
Mr Brown
My hon. Friend is correct. It is as if time has stood still for all these people. The only thing they have felt all this time is pain and hardship.
I told my hon. Friend the Member for Coventry South (Mr Cunningham) that I would mention the national minimum wage. When we introduced it, the assessment showed that for every £1 million that we gave to poorer people and which went into the economy, we created 40 jobs. Even if every £1 million now created only 10 new jobs, that £130 million would create more than 1,000 jobs.
Mr Brown
In life, when things regrettably go wrong, we have to face the consequences. I firmly believe that the Government should be facing the consequences in respect of this £130 million penalty. Can the Minister tell me exactly how many of these people were, like Reilly and Wilson, innocent? I think that a fair number of those 300,000 should have had their money repaid to them.
I know that other colleagues want to contribute, so I shall finish by saying that this is a tough decision for all of us in opposition. We still believe in sanctions—in government, we recognised that we needed them—but the Government have got it horribly wrong. On behalf of both the Ministers, I am disappointed that, up until now at least, we have not heard any attempt from Government Back Benchers to defend what is happening.
Dr Eilidh Whiteford (Banff and Buchan) (SNP)
It is a pleasure to follow the thoughtful contribution from the hon. Member for Dumfries and Galloway (Mr Brown).
A very simple principle underpins my remarks: if somebody works a shift for an employer, they deserve a fair day’s pay for their time and effort. I cannot think of any circumstances in which it is okay not to pay employees or to pay them a derisory sum below the legal minimum wage for the work they undertake. I am sure that a number of us feel that the Government’s back-to-work schemes have fallen short of that principle, but the critical point is that the courts have found aspects of the regulations and sanctions regime attached to the schemes to be unlawful. At stake here is whether it is acceptable to use retrospective legislation to clean up the mess left in the wake of these court rulings. I do not think it is. Instead, I think the Government should accept that they made mistakes with the original legislation, take responsibility for the consequences and use the opportunity to rethink their approach and find more effective ways of creating job opportunities for people entering or returning to the labour market.
Given that aspects of the existing scheme have been judged unlawful and that penalties have therefore been imposed on some claimants unlawfully, it would be wholly wrong to legislate retrospectively as the Government propose to do. That, frankly, undermines the judicial process and the rule of law. We might as well rename this Bill “Jobseekers (Make It Up As You Go Along Schemes) Bill”. Whether or not we agree with the approach of the schemes in question—I have made it clear that I do not—the key issue is whether backdating legislation is the right approach to deal with this. I do not think it is. One of the main reasons why the courts found against the Government concerned the information provided to claimants and the description of the scheme in regulations. As legislators, we have a duty to scrutinise these regulations, and if we go down this retrospective “policy on the hoof” route, that aspect of our role is compromised, and that gives me great concern not only in a general sense, but in relation to the particulars of this issue, because to my mind the use of unpaid labour by businesses requires careful scrutiny and proper accountability.
I am quite sceptical about the value of such schemes, not just because if the jobs are there, they should be properly paid—at the very least at the minimum wage—but because I have seen very little evidence that they work. I am sure that many jobseekers will welcome every opportunity that comes their way, and some might even be able to use them effectively in the future, but there remain serious questions, mentioned by other hon. Members, about the practical outcomes of these programmes. I want to raise concerns about their long-term sustainability while the wider economy remains stagnant. There are real fears that schemes such as these actually inhibit recovery. Jobseekers might not be getting the skills that they need, but in the meantime they are depriving someone else, or even themselves, of a proper paid job opportunity. Also, while they are working for free, they cannot be out there looking for work that is appropriate to their skills and experience. Many will find themselves stuck in a sector that is wholly inappropriate and unsuitable.
To my mind, the schemes represent a poor use of our human capital. For example, they require graduates to stack shelves, yet we have invested thousands of pounds in those people’s education. They often have the confidence, skills and qualifications to enter the labour market, but if they are compelled to undertake low-paid, low-skilled work instead of looking for more suitable opportunities, what hope will that give to people who do not have high-level qualifications and who are trying to access a competitive labour market?
One question that has been raised today is: where is the money coming from? It is important to point out that that could well be a worst-case scenario. Other Members, particularly the hon. Member for Wansbeck (Ian Lavery), have mentioned section 27 of the Social Security Act 1998, and suggested that only some of those who have been sanctioned under the unlawful sanctions would have a case. Also, claimants would need to appeal, and there is no guarantee that they would all do so.
In regard to the question of where the money would come from, this is only a tiny proportion of the overall welfare budget. I am sure that there are as many ideas about where the funding could come from as there are Members in the Chamber today. There are lots of other places where the money could be found, according to one’s political priorities. My own personal bête noire is tax avoidance, which, even by the most conservative estimates, costs the UK billions in lost revenues every year. Ironically, some of the large corporations that have faced recent allegations of tax avoidance are the same large corporations that are participating in the unpaid labour schemes. So it is not just that they do not pay tax; some of them are now not paying wages either. I suggest that recouping unpaid tax might be one way of meeting the shortfalls in the budget. That might also bring a rather satisfying element of poetic justice to the proceedings.
The UK has a poor track record on cheap labour schemes, and we should learn from the mistakes of the past. As someone who came of age in the 1980s, I remember all too well the failures of the youth training scheme that afflicted many of my own peer group. It was essentially a cheap labour scheme for employers that exploited the hopes and aspirations of young people desperate for work, and it marched far too many of them up the hill, only to abandon them back on to the dole at the end of the scheme. Some were able to use the scheme as a springboard to something better, but for many, the quality of the training was highly questionable and it did nothing to help them to develop skills that employers wanted.
Steve McCabe
Does the hon. Lady think that the small number of Government Back Benchers present in the Chamber is indicative of the fact that they do not share her concerns about the quality of these schemes and about what happens to these people?
Dr Whiteford
It is very disappointing, but what disappoints me even more is that I suspect that we will be very lonely in the No Lobby tonight when we vote on this question. I urge everyone present who cares about this issue not to sit on their hands this evening but to stand up for people who are being asked to undertake unpaid work when they could be working for a wage in a proper job.
The worst aspect of the youth training scheme was that people were paid off from proper jobs in order to make way for YTS trainees on 20-something quid a week. Even in the 1980s, that was a derisory amount of money. It perpetuated dependency, sucked real jobs out of the economy and created huge resentment, not just among trainees who felt that they were being exploited, but from those who had watched their own wages and job opportunities evaporate.
The reality, then and now, was that people started getting jobs in significant numbers when, and only when, the economy started picking up again. Castigating the unemployed for being out of work entirely misses the point, and simply passes the buck away from those of us who have more responsibility for the state of the economy. The point about the state of the economy is as relevant today as it was in the 1980s, and it is particularly relevant with regard to the availability of work for people who do not have much work experience, or who face hurdles because of their health, because they lack skills or because they face other barriers to employment.
For several years now, I have taken an active interest in the programmes run by the Prince’s Trust in my constituency, which help young people who are some distance from the labour market to build the skills, the experience and, above all, the confidence and self-belief to find work and derive the many benefits that come with it. A work experience placement is an integral aspect of the Prince’s Trust programme, but as the economic recession has dragged on, it has become harder for staff to find placements, and significantly harder for the young people taking part to secure employment subsequently.
Alison McGovern
Does the hon. Lady agree that one of the most awful aspects of the Work programme is the way in which some of the really brilliant and committed charitable organisations have been locked out of taking part in it?
Dr Whiteford
I could not agree more. The schemes that are run by experienced voluntary organisations are often the most successful in overcoming the real attitudinal, confidence and self-esteem issues that many young people have when they are finding it difficult to get a job and to find the dignity that comes from work, and when they feel that society is telling them that they do not have a contribution to make.
Almost all the young people in the first Prince’s Trust team I met had secured a job by the end of their programme: either their placement had led to a job offer or they used their experience to get a similar job elsewhere, or they had gone to a positive destination in college or a training programme. Recent teams of young people have struggled; they did well in their placements, but there is not sufficient demand in the economy to generate the entry-level jobs they were working towards. When I say that about Aberdeenshire, one of the most economically buoyant parts of the UK, I am left pondering how much harder it must be in areas of high and persistent unemployment in other parts of these islands.
The only workable solution is to drive growth and create demand in the economy. That is the way to create jobs and get people into work, but it is something that the Government have conspicuously failed to do over the last three years and is one of the reasons why we need the power to make economic and policy decisions in Scotland. When the Government brought in their workfare scheme, they made mistakes. They should acknowledge their mistakes and take this chance to rethink the entire scheme, refocusing their efforts on creating real jobs for those who can work. Above all, the Government should step back from legislating retrospectively to penalise those they unlawfully sanctioned. That was a completely unacceptable move and my colleagues and I will oppose it.
Fiona Mactaggart (Slough) (Lab)
Over recent months, I have asked the Minister of State a number of questions about the sanctions regime. It has proved hard for him to answer questions such as how many people for whom English is a second language have been sanctioned and how many disabled people have been sanctioned. In my view, he does not have the evidence to state in the impact assessment that protected groups will not be disproportionately affected by the Bill. They may or may not be affected, because my efforts to find that information have failed, but I believe they are. When I see constituents who have been sanctioned, they are disproportionately people who are easily confused or who do not have good English.
However, that is not the reason why I shall go into the No Lobby on Second Reading. I oppose the Bill because I do not believe that Parliament should give the Government an alibi for confiscating from more than 200,000 people sums of between £340 and £810. They have illegally kept those sums from them. Let us be clear. That is what we are being asked to do by this retrospective legislation.
The Government have broken the law in a way that impacts on individual citizens. They have disrespected the rights of individual citizens and they are now asking Parliament to say, “Carry on doing it.” I do not believe that Parliament should do that. It is a fundamental issue of civil liberties, human rights and good governance. For that reason, not because of the content, I shall not abstain: I will oppose the legislation.
Ministers say, “Oh, people knew,” but let us be completely clear about what the regulations the Government have been found in breach of say. Regulation 4 says that the notice that people who are sanctioned receive “must specify” that C—the claimant—
“is required to participate in the Scheme…the day on which …participation will start…details of what C is required to do by way of participation in the Scheme…that the requirement to participate in the Scheme will continue until C is given notice by the Secretary of State that C’s participation is no longer required, or C’s award of jobseeker’s allowance terminates, whichever is earlier”
and finally,
“information about the consequences of failing to participate in the Scheme.”
In my view, the Minister has utterly disingenuously—I hope that is not unparliamentary, but I think so—
Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Lindsay Hoyle)
Order. I think it is, and I am going to rule that it is, so I am sure the hon. Lady will not want to use that word.
Fiona Mactaggart
I withdraw that word, Mr Deputy Speaker.
The Minister suggested that claimants knew the consequences. I refer him to the statements of judges on the matter. Judge Foskett said that
“the words…in the letter received by Mr Wilson were that his benefits ‘may be stopped’, perhaps conveying the impression that sanctions are not necessarily automatic.”
He goes on to say that
“the information given concerning sanctions is unclear and opaque.”
I accept that, since then, the Minister has improved the letters. I think that is right, and I do not oppose the possibility of sanctions; I believe that sanctions can work if people know that they are at risk of being sanctioned.
Mr Hoban
May I point out that, actually, sanctions are not automatic? Sanctions may be applied, because actually we disregard sanctions—sanctions do not apply—if there is good cause not to apply them. So “may” sounds right to me. The problem that the courts had was not specifying the graduated approach to sanctions.
Fiona Mactaggart
As I said, the judge said that
“the information given concerning sanctions is unclear and opaque.”
If the Government want sanctions to work, people need to know the consequences of their actions, and this is a debate about the consequences of actions—the consequences of the Government’s actions in failing to ensure that they complied with regulation 4 of the regulations in every communication with claimants. It seems to me that the Government should bear the consequences, and the consequence in this case is up to £130 million. When the Government do wrong—and let us be clear, the Government have been found to do wrong in this case—it is not just to be overlooked. This is a series of court judgments which say, in respect of individual citizens, that they have been wrongly treated—the Government must give those citizens back their money. It is not the Government’s money; it is their money. The Government have wrongly kept it from them, and it is quite clear that that is what the courts have decided.
If the Government are going to say that a sanctions regime is necessary so that people know the consequences of their actions—an argument that I would support—it seems right to me that the Government themselves should bear the consequences of their wrong actions, and they should not be coming to Parliament to ask us to give them a free pass for breaking the law, because that is what the Bill is doing.
John McDonnell (Hayes and Harlington) (Lab)
I feel proud of a whole range of speeches that have been made. They have been principled and have set out the case very clearly.
The straightforward issue is that the judgment basically said that the Government acted unlawfully. What surprises me is that there has been no word of apology from the Minister—not a single word to say, “We got this wrong, and therefore we apologise to the House.” Let us be clear what the judgment said: that the Secretary of State acted beyond his powers. He failed to provide the details of workfare schemes within the regulations and bypassed Parliament by introducing an umbrella scheme—the employment, skills and enterprise scheme. This is not a technicality. In fact—I quote from the judgment of Lord Justice Stanley Burnton:
“There is a constitutional issue involved. The loss of jobseekers’ allowance may result in considerable personal hardship, and it is not surprising that Parliament should have been careful in making provision for the circumstances in which the sanction may be imposed.”
This is a fundamental constitutional issue. The Government tried to slide through Parliament, without adequate consideration, regulations that would eventually deprive our constituents of significant sums of money. The decision found that the Government have unlawfully required tens of thousands of people to work without pay, and, if they have said no, have stripped them unlawfully of a significant amount of their benefits.
The public interest lawyers who took the case said that there are basic requirements of fairness, and those basic requirements are usually dictated by Parliament. The basic requirements of fairness in relation to anything like these regulations are to provide people with a clear explanation of what they have been asked to do, why they are being asked to do it, and what the consequences are if they fail to do it. That has simply, as a result of this judgment, not been complied with. That is what the debate is all about.
The solicitor who represented the claimants, Tessa Gregory, summed it up very well:
“The case has revealed that the Department for Work and Pensions was going behind Parliament’s back and failing to obtain Parliamentary approval for the various mandatory work schemes that it was introducing.”
There was a lack of transparency and fairness in implementing the scheme, and claimants had no information about what could be required of them under the back-to-work schemes. The Court of Appeal affirmed the basic constitutional principle that everyone has a right to know and understand why sanctions are being threatened and imposed. That is what this is all about.
It is worth referring to the cases that determined the judges’ action, and putting them on the record. It is staggering that the Government even contested them. Jamie Wilson, the lorry driver, said:
“I refused to participate in the Community Action Programme…because I objected to being made to clean furniture for 30 hours a week for 6 months when I knew it wouldn’t help me find employment. I was given next to no information about the programme, I was told simply that I had to do whatever the DWP’s private contractor instructed me to do and that if I didn’t I may lose my benefits. Being without jobseeker’s allowance was very difficult for me but I don’t regret taking a stand”.
The community action programme
“is a poorly thought out and poorly implemented scheme which even according to the DWP’s own statistics is not helping anyone get people back to work.”
He continued—this is enlightening about the nature of the people we are dealing with; they are desperate for work:
“I am now participating in the Work Programme but it doesn’t involve me working for free, I have to meet an advisor every 3 to 4 weeks who helps me look for work. I will continue to attend these sessions with my adviser regardless of whether or not I am required to attend because I want to find a job”.
That is what people want.
In the other case, Cait Reilly said:
“I brought this case because I knew it was wrong when I was prevented from doing my voluntary work in a museum and forced to work in Poundland for free…as part of a scheme known as the sector based work academy. Those two weeks”
I worked at Poundland
“were a complete waste of my time as the experience did not help me get a job, I wasn’t given any training and I was left with no time to do my voluntary work or search for”
a job. That is extraordinary. She continued:
“The only beneficiary was Poundland, a multi-million pound company. Later I found out that I should never have been told the placement was compulsory.”
The Secretary of State has been quoted as saying elsewhere:
“Does Cait Reilly think she is above shelf stacking?”
I hope that is a misquote. If he did say it, he should withdraw it because it is a disgraceful insinuation about someone’s character. Cait Reilly also said:
“I don’t think I am above working in shops like Poundland. I now work part-time in a supermarket. It is just that I expect to get paid for working.”
That is all she asked for. She continued:
“I hope the Government will now take this opportunity to rethink its strategy and do something which actually builds on young unemployed people’s skills and tackles the causes of long-term unemployment. I agree we need to get people back to work but the best way of doing that is by helping them, not punishing them. The Government ought to understand that if they created schemes which actually helped people get back into work then they wouldn’t need to force people to attend.”
That is what the young woman who took the case to court said, and I congratulate her on doing that. If she had not, we would not be in the situation of contesting what the Government are doing.
Let us be clear about the intent of the Bill. The Government have acted unlawfully. They have robbed some of the poorest people in our society of, on average, £500 of benefits, which is a lot to people living on the breadline. Now the Government are using this retrospective device to avoid paying back to those poor people money that they should not have been deprived of in the first place. The argument that paying £130 million back to poor people would damage the economy is derisory and laughable. As my hon. Friend the Member for Wansbeck (Ian Lavery) said, if the £130 million was given to the poor who need to spend the money, it would help to boost the economy. To suggest it is a threat to the economy when the bankers have been bailed out with £1.2 trillion is laughable in any Government logic. The suggestion that if we pay the money back, it must come from other claimants is the Government’s classic strategy of divide and rule in their welfare benefits policy.
As my hon. Friend said, the use of retrospective legislation simply ensures that illegality is made legal and sets an extremely dangerous precedent, but that is nothing to do with the money, taxpayers or the economy. It is about prejudice against the poor, the demonisation of the unemployed and the iron heel of a prejudiced state. It is also about the preservation of a large pool of unpaid labour for large-scale corporations to exploit. It is now estimated that the Government will put through 250,000 people on work experience, 850,000 on work programmes and more than 70,000 on the mandatory work activity. At the last calculation, that is about 60 million hours of free labour to those corporations. That is exploitation; it cannot be termed in any other way.
In the past two decades, we have seen a transformation in how unemployment is considered, discussed and viewed. Governments since the second world war had a commitment to full employment and saw as a responsibility their role to ensure full employment. There have always been sanctions within the system to prevent people from abusing it, but they were about ensuring that people were sanctioned if they refused to go for paid work, never unpaid work. Now, just when unemployment is at its highest and it is the hardest time to find a job, the attitude is that unemployment is not the fault of the system or a failure of Government or of society, but a failure of the individual. The individual is to blame, not the society that has caused the unemployment. Therefore, the logic follows that the individual must be penalised, so what the Government have successfully done in the media and elsewhere by ministerial statements is demonise the unemployed—the unemployed themselves have caused their own poverty, rather than the system that has created the unemployment. The result of that logic is what we see today: the poor and unemployed have to be harassed, pilloried, sanctioned, blamed and made to feel guilty for being unemployed.
Steve Rotheram (Liverpool, Walton) (Lab)
Does my hon. Friend agree not only that the Government have shown no contrition whatever on the issue, which is a mess of their own making, but that they are trying to scapegoat those people who have been sanctioned illegally?
John McDonnell
It is that, but there is also a wider agenda of making people feel guilty just because they are out of work and guilty just because—temporarily, in most instances—they have to depend on some benefits. This is about scapegoating and victimising the poor and people who cannot get a job. It is about harassment and exploitation. At the heart of that is the judgment that Parliament was not properly informed of what those schemes and regulations meant. That is what the judgment said.
I make it clear that I shall vote against the Bill because it is immoral and wrong. Before we vote to render those schemes lawful retrospectively, it is important that Members are aware of what we will be supporting. Boycott Workfare is an organisation that set up— [Interruption.]
Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Lindsay Hoyle)
Order. There seems to be a phone ringing somewhere. Wherever it is, we can certainly hear it.
John McDonnell
Before we vote tonight, it is important we know that we will be voting to support the workfare schemes being introduced by the Government. The Bill will enable the sanctions to be continued and retrospectively made legal, because people refused to go on those schemes—I think justifiably so with regard to many of them. Let us take some examples from the Boycott Workfare website. Tesco is a classic, and one example refers to
“a fifty-six year old man who worked at Tesco for 40 hrs a week for 6 weeks for no pay.”
He was
“given the worst job, constantly filling freezers in the hope he would be taken on. After the 6 weeks were up the manager asked him if he would like to stay on for some extra weeks,”
and the man said,
“‘with pay?’”
The manager said no,
“why would he pay him when he can pick the phone up and get more unemployed people who have to work for nothing”?
That was at Tesco, and the list goes on. Poundland is a classic example of an organisation exploiting unemployed people, time and time again recruiting shelf stackers while laying off other workers. Primark is another example. One young woman who went to Primark said:
“The Jobcentre paid travel money but no lunch. I worked three days a week, 10 am to 4.30 pm or 5 pm with one half-hour break.”
Primark
“don’t pay any money. It was nearly six months, from January to June. When I finished the placement I took my CV and I asked the managers if they had any vacancies. They said, ‘Not yet—we’ll call you when we do.’ I haven’t had a call.”
Jeremy Corbyn (Islington North) (Lab)
Is my hon. Friend aware that there are companies that do the same, but with people who have not come through the jobcentres? People apply for a job, are asked to work for three or four weeks on probation and are then told to go and are replaced by colleagues. There are shops even in the west end using large numbers of totally unpaid staff on a permanent basis.
John McDonnell
The whole point of the exercise, as far as I can see—despite the arguments that it makes people job fit—is the massive exploitation of tens of thousands of people for free labour. I will not go through all the examples, but it is worth looking at the Boycott Workfare website, which gives example after example of people who have been exploited or have worked in unsafe conditions lacking health and safety, have stuck at it to try to get a job and who have never got the job. The job never materialises.
What happens if people say no or drop out? They are sanctioned. Sanctions have increased dramatically in this country. In 2009, 139,000 jobseeker’s allowance claimants were sanctioned. By 2011, the number had nearly tripled to 500,000, and it has risen again this year. Interestingly, it is private companies that recommend sanctions to the Department for Work and Pensions. The worst are Serco, Seetec, A4e and Working Links. If they do not get their pound of flesh—if they do not feel that they are getting value for money from someone who is unpaid—they recommend to the DWP that the person be sanctioned.
The irony is that despite all the pain, anxiety and suffering inflicted on unemployed people, the schemes are proven not to work, as my right hon. Friend the Member for East Ham (Stephen Timms) said. Time and time again, all the evidence—whether from the Social Security Advisory Committee, the DWP peer review, Ben Goldacre or the National Audit Office—demonstrates that not only do the schemes not work but, as others have said, they undermine wages for people in work and prevent others from getting paid jobs.
Large numbers of people are extremely angry at how they have been treated. I believe that many are now willing to stand up and say, “We’re not going to be treated in this way.” That is why the sanctions system is becoming even more rigorous, and why it is important for the Government to pass the Bill: they want to intimidate more people and force more people into work, done for free, that they do not want to undertake.
It is worth stating that this is about exploiting people. It is about ensuring that young people in particular are intimidated into unpaid work. People who were brave enough to say, “I’m not willing to take unpaid work and be exploited in this way, and if necessary, I’ll be sanctioned because of that,” have now been proven right. They were not informed of what they were getting into, but they were bright enough to understand the level of exploitation involved and they stood up against it. The Bill says to them that now they have won in court, we will try to ensure that they do not get justice. That is what it is about.
I urge Members to vote for justice. The Bill is a disgrace. It is a monument to a combination of incompetence by the Government and brutality to the poor. I look forward to hearing the Labour party consider what we are doing here today. I urge Members to vote against the Bill, because I think that people are looking to the Labour party to defend them again—to stand up for what is right and just, for the people in our society who are exploited and for those at the bottom at the moment: those who are unemployed, unable to get a job, dependent on benefits and desperate for work. Those people do not expect to be harassed and exploited by a Government using sanctions to force them into unpaid work. That is why I shall vote against the Bill, and why I urge all Members to vote against the Bill to demonstrate that someone in the House is standing up for those people.
Sheila Gilmore (Edinburgh East) (Lab)
The Bill is not perhaps what some people think it is, nor perhaps what we would like to debate. It will not end various forms of work experience, whether we think that is a good or a bad idea, because the Government have put in place—and have done so very quickly—regulations to overcome mistakes in previous regulations.
We need a lengthy debate, and we need to think hard about what we do to help people find work, if there is work—often there is no work to find, which is the fundamental failure of many of these programmes. Whatever we call the schemes or however we dress them up, if the jobs are not there, no amount of job readiness and training will get people a job. They might make people readier for a job, which might not be a bad thing in itself, but it is an illusion to assume that if we simply introduce a programme and make people do it, suddenly a job will emerge at the end. It will not, unless there are jobs and demand in the economy.
It is the same for many people doing part-time jobs. We have had many debates in the past few weeks about the bedroom tax, and people have said, “Well, people can go out and get extra hours to pay the tax; it will be easy.” In the course of half an hour on Saturday afternoon knocking on doors in my constituency and asking people about this, I met two people who were working part time. They both wanted extra hours and had gone to their employers to ask whether extra hours were available but were told they were not. Ironically, if firms gave extra hours, that work would be taken away from someone else, giving them fewer hours or no job at all. Hours are short because the jobs are not there. Similarly, many job programmes have failed because, to a large extent, the jobs are not there.
Perhaps we should give more time to this debate, because we need to consider whether we are achieving what we should be achieving. Unfortunately—and I say this to people watching our debate—whatever the result of the vote at the end of today’s debate, it will not stop these programmes. Some people say that this is a vote on whether some of these so-called training programmes continue, but sadly it is not. I hope that we have further votes on the issue in future, because the new regulations, which may still be proved to be not as valid as the previous ones, have been introduced. Anyone out there who thinks that how the House votes today will bring an end to all those programmes will find that, sadly, that is not true.
If this were a situation involving parking regulations—my council introduced parking regulations, which were challenged in court and found to be invalid—and we were asking, in effect, for a sanction on sanctions or, in parking regulation terms, retrospectively forcing people to pay parking penalties which were unlawful at the time they were incurred, the Lib Dem and Tory Benches would be packed with Members saying how unfair that was. Even if we correct the regulations, that would not solve the problem. In the example I gave of my council, it corrected the regulations and issued new ones, and achieved the parking restrictions that it wanted, but it did not seek to go back to people and say to them, “Well, we can impose these penalties, because we will make it right retrospectively.” If it were any other subject, we would not see people sitting on their hands, which is what is happening today. Much attention has been focused on what the Labour party is doing, and rightly so; people are right to ask what we are doing. However, they also must ask what the Government parties are doing, because apart from the Minister, no one has come into the Chamber to speak in favour of what the Government are doing, and that speaks for itself.
A number of things have been said today that are simply not accurate. In one intervention, for example, a Government Back Bencher said that half the people going on the Work programme had got jobs. No one could seriously suggest such a figure. The only time I have heard the Government use the word “half”—[Interruption.] The hon. Member did mention the Work programme, but perhaps he did not intend to do so. The only programme that was mentioned where the word “half” was used was the pilot for the work experience programmes that my hon. Friend the Member for Hayes and Harlington (John McDonnell) has described so thoroughly. I am talking about the research on the pilot programme. Half of those on that pilot programme, which was for 1,300 people, were off benefit in 13 weeks, but being “off benefit” is not necessarily the same as being in a job. After the results of that pilot were published, there were no further figures on those schemes. No one has actually said what the success rate of those schemes has been.
The hon. Member for Battersea (Jane Ellison) referred to a visit that she and I and other members of the Select Committee made to a jobcentre today as part of our inquiry into the Work programme. Yes, some people who are providing the programme did feel that their morale had perhaps been undermined by its results and outcomes and the fact that they had been told that it was worse than doing nothing. However, those outcomes were the ones that the Government themselves set for their own programme; it is not something that someone else invented. It is not those individuals who should feel that they are to blame; it is the set-up of the whole programme that is at fault. It is unfortunate that those people felt that they were being criticised.
If the hon. Lady had stayed to make a speech, perhaps she would have told the House about some of the other things that we heard. Although of course the providers speak up for their programmes, all of them made the point that if they had more resources they would be able to do far more and do far better.
One provider we heard from was putting considerable additional resources into individuals to get them job-ready and hopefully to find them jobs. They were putting some people through programmes that cost £900 a head out of their own resources. If those people get jobs as a result of being part of that Work provider’s programme, no doubt the Government will say, “We managed to do that through the Work programme, and it was the cheapest Work programme ever.” The truth is that it would not be cheap, because those programme providers are supplementing the cost by a considerable amount. They all said that if it were not in fact the cheapest Work programme, it could be doing a lot better. Cheap is not always good; cheap is sometimes extremely shoddy and of poor quality. As we all know, a cheap pair of shoes will not last very long.
Much of what has been said about the quality of the programmes is poor. I want to have the debate about sanctions, because the experience of my constituents is that the sanctions regime has not only been increased in extent but has lost discretion. Discretion has flown out of it all together, so that many people are finding that they are sanctioned for things that they hardly understand. Many people who are deemed to be job-ready are actually suffering from mental illness or a learning disability and they are the people who may be sanctioned. I therefore welcome the new clause that provides for a report on sanctions. The sooner that comes through, the better.
I ask the Government yet again, as I have before, to look at individual cases. I raised one with the Minister at DWP questions. A young man was on the Work programme for a year and a quarter, but there was no real progress. He sourced a training course—a very good training course—to learn construction skills. That would have involved eight weeks of unpaid work, which he was quite prepared to do, as part of a structured scheme, followed by 13 weeks of paid work and the prospect of a job at the end. When I raised that case with the Minister, he simply said, “The reason he is not getting to do that is the Scottish Government’s funding.” I will come back to the Minister on that case because that is not so. The underlying issue is that the Work programme provider could not provide anything like that quality. In a year and a quarter, the provider had never offered that young person that sort of training. That should be the significant point; it should not be a blame-game—“Oh, it’s the fault of the Scottish Government, Jobcentre Plus, or the Work programme provider.” That is the merry-go-round that that person is on; as far as I am aware, unless something has come in today, he is still on it.
I am not against good schemes, good work experience, or sanctions, but I am against poor-quality schemes. The Government are so gung-ho, saying that it does not matter that this measure is retrospective, that they have made mistakes and will go back over it. That is not acceptable, and we must stand up and say that clearly. I am sorry that the Government have not been prepared at any stage to say, “We did get it wrong and we are going not only to alter that bit of regulation but put real effort into improving our employability schemes.”
Grahame M. Morris (Easington) (Lab)
It is not often that, when I rise to oppose a Government Bill, as I do again on this occasion—for the avoidance of doubt, I will be going through the No Lobby—I follow six hon. Members in succession with whom I agree. Perhaps that is an indication that no Government Back Bencher is prepared to stand on their convictions and argue the point. Therefore, this is quite a rare occasion.
I am proud to represent the Easington constituency. This is a matter of social justice for me and I have a number of concerns about the Bill. The issue of retrospection is an important and fundamental one. I suspect that the Government are opening a Pandora’s box here. In the debates on last year's Finance Bill, I heard the same Minister warning of the dangers of retrospective measures to deal with tax avoidance and loopholes, so using this route will have consequences. If he was so confident about the quality and strength of his argument, why did he not challenge the decision in the Supreme Court, rather than using primary legislation? Perhaps he might answer that question in his response.
It is not just an issue of retrospection—the Government's arguments are wrong. They are trying to justify this measure, but they have made the mistake. It is an issue of wording. Nevertheless, the Government have made the mistake and they are seeking to sell their argument to hon. Members on both sides of the House by saying that, if the funds are not recovered from those who were incorrectly sanctioned, they will have to be recovered from elsewhere in the welfare budget. That is outrageous blackmail; I am sorry if that is not parliamentary language, but I find that deeply offensive. It goes against every grain of fairness in Members on both sides of the House. The view I am expressing is the view that has been unanimously expressed to me. I have received numerous e-mails and messages from my constituents over the past 48 hours, all of them asking me to vote against this Bill as it is unfair and unjust.
The Government, and especially Government Back Benchers, have characterised jobseekers who have been sanctioned as workshy and feckless—the sentiment expressed was “Are you really suggesting these people shouldn’t be sanctioned?” Let us have a look at the Work programme, however. It has gone from chaos to farce. We talk about “workshy”, but what about wage-shy employers who exploit the unemployed, with the connivance, approval and funding of the Government?
Many commentators have severely criticised the Work programme as not representing value for money, and so, too, I believe, has the Public Accounts Committee—I am sure the Minister will correct me if I am wrong about that. Indeed, it has been suggested that the programme is worse than doing nothing, and I am certainly aware that major retailers have exploited free labour from the Work programme to meet seasonal demand, rather than, as would otherwise have happened, employing temporary staff or, even, giving existing employees additional hours. The programme has therefore had the perverse effect of blocking real jobs, and I agree with other Opposition Members who feel it should be subjected to a root-and-branch review.
What we have is a £3-million black hole, and it seems to me that the only people profiting from it are the privately contracted organisations—some of whom were mentioned by my hon. Friend the Member for Hayes and Harlington (John McDonnell—who have done well out of the programme. I am therefore surprised that one of the Government’s principal arguments here is about the protection of the national economy, when they are seeking to introduce primary legislation to rewrite history and withhold social security payments that were denied because of unlawful sanctions. We must not beat about the bush. The judgment is clear and specific; my hon. Friend the Member for Slough (Fiona Mactaggart) read it out in her passionate and excellent speech. The Government are at fault here, in how they have implemented things.
I oppose the concept of two nations, as does my party, but what will the consequences of these measures be? The Government are creating two nations. They are seeking to penalise and punish the poor for the mistakes of the rich and powerful, in part of a continuing series of policies that are badged as “austerity”. Those policies are pushing the poorest in society further into poverty.
As my hon. Friend the Member for Liverpool, Walton (Steve Rotheram) said, one of the most galling things is that Ministers have shown absolutely no contrition or understanding of the consequences of their actions. That might be because they do not understand the consequences, because they do not live in the real world where they would rub shoulders with some of the poorest people in society who are suffering hardship. People in my constituency in east Durham ask me, “Why are we suffering for the consequences of this crisis? Was it created in Horden, Shotton, Haswell, Blackhall or even Murton?” No, of course not; the crisis was caused by the mistakes of the banking sector and City speculators. I raise that point not only because I despise the casino bankers for the state they have reduced the economy to, but because there is another avenue that Ministers could pursue to recover the £130 million, which I will return to shortly. In fact, we touched on this issue last year in the Finance Bill Committee. Why on earth do the Government not legislate for a general principle of tax avoidance? Instead of robbing people who have been inappropriately sanctioned, the Government should consider the huge reservoir of unpaid tax that individuals could well afford to contribute to. To my mind, there was a failure by Governments.
Kelvin Hopkins (Luton North) (Lab)
My hon. Friend is making an excellent speech and a very good point about where money could be found. He mentioned the tax gap, which, according to Richard Murphy and others, is some £120 billion a year. We are talking today about £130 million, which is roughly one thousandth of that amount.
Grahame M. Morris
My hon. Friend, who is very knowledgeable and has a background as an economist, has hit the nail on the head. The general public, my constituents and many Opposition Members do not understand why the Government do not address this problem. There is a relatively straightforward way to do so: by legislating for a general principle of tax avoidance. The Government are quite happy to use primary legislation retrospectively to deprive people who have been illegally sanctioned of £130 million, but they will not use the same route to recover moneys properly due to the Exchequer.
There is a contradiction here. Although the Government have been highly critical of what has happened, they continue to push the case for further deregulation. Just yesterday, in a Delegated Legislation Committee the statutory period of notice for compulsory redundancies for employers employing more than 100 people was reduced from 90 days to 45. This Government are still very much pursuing the Beecroft agenda.
John McDonnell
It is worth noting that, according to the Government’s impact assessment of that delegated legislation, employers will gain £290 million and employees will lose £250 million.
Grahame M. Morris
That just goes to show that we are all in this together—or rather, we are not.
I have seen the graphs and the charts showing that the poorest are being hardest hit. We should consider the effect of a 5% cut in their weekly income. Other Members have spoken about the sort of cuts that individuals are going to experience. I do not know whether the Minister, other Front Benchers or even Conservative Back Benchers know what it is like to exist on £71 a week, but it is a real struggle. Taking up to £25 a week from the poorest families, most of whom are in social housing, can mean a choice between eating or having proper heating. How can this be fair, when the Government’s priority is to make millionaires richer, to the tune of £2,000 a week? Such a tax cut is unimaginable for someone who would be sanctioned under the Work programme. In fact, the £2,000 a week tax cut for millionaires that we anticipate tomorrow equates to 28 weeks’ income for somebody on jobseeker’s allowance.
Mr John Redwood (Wokingham) (Con)
Will the hon. Gentleman just remind the House why Labour always had a lower rate of tax for rich people than this Government?
Grahame M. Morris
We need to look at the situation we are in now. This is the wrong thing to do: it is unjust and unfair to give millionaires a £2,000 a week tax cut, at the same time as the right hon. Gentleman’s Government propose to deprive some of the poorest people, who have been illegally sanctioned, of large chunks of their income. It is outrageous, and it is rank hypocrisy for anyone to talk about rights with the emphasis on responsibility when it comes to workfare. If they are willing to undermine the judiciary and the rule of law, and vote for retrospective legislation to cover up the mistakes and failings of the Minister, who is asking that we legislate to place him above the law, that is a dangerous precedent to establish.
I cannot, in all conscience, support this desperate Bill, put forward by a desperate Government who have broken their own laws and now wish to forgo their legal obligations and withhold social security payments of £130 million to some of the poorest people in the country. Why do we not apply that method across the board? If the national emergency is such that it is right to deny access to social security to those who are entitled to it in order to safeguard the national economy, why do we not chase the tax exiles—those powerful individuals who own newspapers and luxury hotels, who pay no corporation tax and who have laid siege to a small Channel Island? I understand that Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs has already paid out more than £200 million to two such individuals who are now seeking a £1 billion VAT windfall at the taxpayer’s expense. Government Members are silent about such things. As we know, there is one rule for the rich and one rule for the poor, including those who have been illegally sanctioned through the Work programme.
We are in the sorry situation of the Minister blackmailing hon. Members by threatening a collective punishment for all those in receipt of social security and welfare benefits if these changes do not go through, because the Department might have to find the money through further reductions elsewhere in its budget. I thought that it was the Secretary of State for Education and his advisers who were the bullies. It is now obvious that the Department for Work and Pensions has decided to sink to those standards by threatening Members of the House in this way, which is below what we would expect of a responsible Government and a responsible Minister.
I did not come into Parliament to penalise and punish the vulnerable and the poor for the mistakes of the Government. The Department for Work and Pensions seems to be in a state of chaos. It is trying to save money by issuing unlawful sanctions for a Work programme that is not fit for purpose. It is making arbitrary cuts to disability living allowance and employment and support allowance, and is seeking to reduce the case load by 20%. Through the bedroom tax, it is cutting the incomes of disabled people and families with children. The welfare state under this coalition Government in 2013 is failing at every turn.
What we are seeing today is an abuse of power. This is an appalling Bill. I urge the Minister to take responsibility for his actions, even at this late stage, to put a stop to the Bill and to pay those who were unlawfully sanctioned because of his failings. I will vote against the Bill and I urge other hon. Members to do the same.
Simon Hughes (Bermondsey and Old Southwark) (LD)
Thank you very much for calling me, Mr Deputy Speaker. I apologise to you, the House and the Minister that I was not hear for the earlier part of the debate. I was in a Select Committee upstairs and then in a meeting. I wanted to contribute to the debate because the Bill troubles me.
I will start by expressing concern about a couple of matters raised by the hon. Member for Easington (Grahame M. Morris), which are relevant because they are about how we treat the rich as well as the poor. I am not party to what is going to be said tomorrow, but I hope that the Government will go ahead with having a tax system that requires a minimum amount of tax to be paid by everybody. It is planned that that will be in the Finance Bill for the coming year. I share his view that we need a system that does not allow people to escape their tax obligations and that that should be a general principle.
I also share the view of the hon. Member for Easington on who should pay more into the system in times of austerity: it should be those who are better off. As it happens, we disagree about whether the better-off now pay more or less. My right hon. Friend the Member for Wokingham (Mr Redwood) intervened on him to point out the hard truth for a Labour MP that during the whole of the Labour Government, the top rate of tax was lower than it is now and lower than it will be after the change this year. There is no backing away from that. I think that that was regrettable, whatever the explanation. However, I want mainly to talk about the Bill.
I understand why the Government read the judgment from the Court of Appeal and have come to the House. The Court did not overturn the principle that people should do some mandatory work while on benefits, but it found—to put it bluntly—that there was a flaw in the paperwork sent to people requiring them to do that. I would have preferred the Government to go to the Supreme Court and wait for that judgment before seeking parliamentary approval to change the law in relation to a large number of cases. I understand the financing and the logic, but I am always nervous when we do not wait for the courts to adjudicate.
I have not talked about this with the Minister but I assume that the Government are nervous that they will not win in the Supreme Court, which is why they have come before the House now. I am nervous about that, but it is not my principal concern about the Bill. My principal concern is about the system that the Bill will continue, which is—to put it bluntly—bigger than the Bill itself. I am sure that will have been the subject of a speech from those on the Labour Front-Bench, just as I have heard that point in speeches from Labour Members who have already spoken.
Despite difficult economic times, I am happy that over the past few months my constituency, which, as colleagues know, is just over the river, has begun to see a reduction in unemployment, both generally and among young people. It is not a huge reduction—I am not naive about that—and when I checked a minute ago it was still ranked 214th in the country in terms of the percentage of those who are unemployed. We are still in the top half of the table, and 5.9% of the population are still not in work although they would like to be. Nevertheless, the figure has come down from its peak of 6.2% in September and October 2011.
I am concerned that we are still running a system—I would be happy to continue this conversation with colleagues from the Department—that does not work or achieve what the Government wish it to achieve, and I will illustrate that point with four constituency cases from recent months. The first concerns a constituent called Mr RE—I will use initials in all cases because I do not have permission to share the details—who wrote to me in autumn last year. I then wrote to the Jobcentre Plus manager for my constituency, with whom I have a good professional working relationship. Mr RE told me that he wished to dispute a sanction on his JSA claim. He said he had received a letter from Seetec, the providers of mandatory work activity in my constituency, asking him to attend a mandatory work placement in June 2012 at the British Heart Foundation and a charity shop quite near to where I live on the Old Kent road.
On 21 June, the day before Mr RE was due to start, he received a letter from a voluntary organisation for vulnerable adults inviting him for an interview the following Monday—25 June. He told me that he intended to train as a social worker and that a work placement such as the one offered by Sova, the voluntary body, included a requirement to apply for an MA course in social work. He therefore needed to make that interview a priority. He had only a day’s notice, which he needed to spend in preparation and buying appropriate clothing. He telephoned Seetec as soon as possible to advise that he would not be able to start his work placement on 22 June, but said he would be available from 26 June onwards.
Simon Hughes
Let me just finish this example. Mr RE told me that Seetec was unwilling to discuss the matter and that nothing was resolved. He found the telephone staff rude, abrupt and unwilling to hold a sensible discussion. He went for his interview with the voluntary organisation for vulnerable adults and—as he said he would—he attended the mandatory work activity the following day. Three days later he received a letter advising him that as he had not started his placement on the date originally requested—22 June—he was no longer required to attend. He then received a letter informing him that his JSA claim, and that of his partner, would be suspended from 1 August until 30 October last year. I protested that that was a completely inappropriate penalty because it seemed to me that he had good reasons for not attending his placement on 22 June that were directly related to finding work. Furthermore, he had telephoned the provider to explain the reasons, and he attended the work placement as soon as he was able. I stated my view that the system was clearly failing. As it happened, in the end, a review found in his favour. Jobcentre Plus said originally that he did not tell it of the work placement, but it gave in when he queried that. Jobcentre Plus has cancelled the sanction.
That was a satisfactory outcome, but it is not the only complaint that has come my way. The second case is of D.P., who contacted me on 25 January. He told me that three sanctions had been applied to his JSA claim for failure to attend appointments at the jobcentre. For the first two sanctions, he had failed to attend because he had not received the letter in the post. His representative had written to the jobcentre but it did not agree to lift the sanction. He does not understand the reason for the third sanction, which applies from 10 November 2012 to 10 May 2013, and feels he has done all he can to comply with jobcentre requirements but is still being punished. He has received such severe sanctions that, effectively, he is no longer receiving JSA. I have not yet received an answer to my letter.
I wrote about the third case on 4 March. C. McC. says she is currently claiming JSA and has been required to attend a work placement at Divine Rescue in Walworth. However, she tells me there is no work for her to do there; that she spends the day from 10 am to 5 pm unoccupied; that no training is provided; and that there are no computer facilities to allow her to work independently.
The fourth case is of a friend of a constituent. A.S. has an accounting qualification and has worked in finance. He has just finished three months’ work experience as an intern in the financial department of a local company, which was appropriate to his career plan. He is a graduate and has a relevant background. He got the placement not through the jobcentre, but separately. He was asked to attend a CV workshop while doing his internship. With the help of my office, we managed to postpone the workshop so he could complete his internship. He was told he was to do mandatory work activities—he was told he had to go and work in a Red Cross shop elsewhere in south London—with no discussion of his qualifications or experience.
Mr Howarth
The right hon. Gentleman said earlier in his speech—I tried to intervene at the time—that the problem was with the paperwork. To some extent, I accept that he is right, in that the regulations did not conform with the provisions of the Jobseekers Act 1995. However, is he aware that the Court of Appeal went beyond that by stating
“the Regulations conflict with article 4(2) of the European Convention on Human Rights which provides, subject to exceptions, that…‘No one shall be required to perform forced or compulsory labour’”?
That is slightly more than a departure from the right paperwork.
Simon Hughes
I apologise to the right hon. Gentleman for delaying his intervention. My understanding—the Minister could be helpful in this respect in her winding-up speech—is that the Court upheld the general policy principle of the employment programmes and ruled that the general principle of such employment programmes did not breach article 4(2) of the convention. The failures to be specific and to get the paperwork right meant that programmes could breach the convention. I am not disputing what the right hon. Gentleman says, but I understand that mandatory work activity is not illegal under the European convention. We need to be clear about that. Labour Front Benchers accept the principle of mandatory work activity, provided that it is decent, and accept sanctions in the benefits system.
John McDonnell
Lord Justice Burnton made it clear—I think I quoted him before the right hon. Gentleman arrived—that this is a constitutional issue. It is not just a matter of not informing claimants, but of not informing this House.
Simon Hughes
I did hear the hon. Gentleman and I accept what he said.
My fourth constituent was sent to a charity shop. He was required to carry out mundane manual lifting work. He said that he had a problem with a back injury, which meant that the work was inappropriate. He has asthma, and therefore work in a dusty environment was not great. There was a failure to provide sufficient work for people to do, including for other people who had been sent there. There was a clear breach of the rules that state that people are meant to work four weeks for five days a week from Monday to Friday. The person at the work placement said, “You have to work on a Saturday if I say so.” Clearly, that was not in the paperwork. The crude point for the Minister is that I am not sure that a graduate seeking work in finance should be sent to a charity shop to dust shelves and move boxes. This seems to be regular and routine in the current system. The Government are spending taxpayers’ money on providing schemes that should help people back to work. I am not sure, however, that there is any intelligent management of the schemes being offered.
It is entirely reasonable for somebody who has been out of work, and has extremely low qualifications, to do a relatively low-skilled mandatory work activity. It is not reasonable if they are seeking to do something else. The Secretary of State is in his place, and he has always been very courteous and helpful in responding to such issues. I ask him and his team to consider how we can significantly improve the quality of mandatory work activity, monitor it better and ensure that we do not send people to do work that, bluntly, will be of no use to them in enhancing their job prospects. Almost nobody wants to be on benefits all the time. People on benefits struggle to make ends meet and we need to do better.
Mr Russell Brown
Is the right hon. Gentleman saying that to impose a sanction over a menial task on a highly qualified individual who may never use those skills again would be wrong?
Simon Hughes
We could have a complicated and long debate. Should people in this House, if they find themselves later in life to be unemployed and it is deemed appropriate that they are sent on mandatory work activity, be sent to work in a charity shop moving boxes and dusting shelves? One could argue that it would be good for us, and good for everybody—
Mr Duncan Smith
I am listening carefully to what my right hon. Friend has to say. As the Minister of State, Department for Work and Pensions, my hon. Friend the Member for Fareham (Mr Hoban), has made clear and my hon. Friend the Under-Secretary of State will make clear, all of these things are kept constantly under review. We want to improve them and that is what jobcentre staff do. They are brilliant at that, by the way, and they get better and better. My point on mandatory work activity is that it is not just work experience. It is also about changing culture: finding out whether someone is working and not declaring it; and getting people used to the idea of getting out of bed in the morning and attending somewhere where they do what they have been asked to do, because they have so got out of the habit of doing that, that even attending an interview has become a problem for them. This is not just about training; it is about getting people culturally back in line so that they can then be dealt with by advisers.
Simon Hughes
I absolutely understand and agree with that point. That is fine for all people of that type. In the case of my last example, the individual had been doing an internship and getting up, always being on time and being there all the time. If anybody had checked, they would have known that he had had a 100% successful record in the previous three months. There was no history of shirking, not getting up or lying in bed. Therefore, it would have been appropriate for an interview to find out about that work history, and assess and discuss what might have been appropriate.
Another constituent—a friend of mine living in Waterloo—had been out of work and claiming jobseeker’s allowance. He went to the jobcentre and was invited for an interview with Seetec, which he attended. It was about to send him to Tesco to stack shelves, but he persuaded it that there was an opportunity of mandatory work activity in a photography shop in the west end. He has photographic skills, and he persuaded Seetec, once it had spoken to the employer, that it would be a better place for him to go. I am not disputing the Secretary of State’s view that some people need to get into the culture of work, but the system fails those who are competent at work, have worked and are willing to do their bit, but get thrown into the wrong place, often to do highly inappropriate activities.
I hope that I have made it clear that I think there are underlying serious issues. I am grateful that the Secretary of State has tabled amendments and new clauses to ensure that this matter does not disappear, but comes back to us through regular reporting. My message to the House and the Government is that we need a better system, because a lot of people who are on low incomes or not working are not being well served by the system at the moment.
Mr Byrne
With the leave of the House, Mr Deputy Speaker, I shall respond to the debate.
We have heard powerful speeches this afternoon from my hon. Friends the Members for Wansbeck (Ian Lavery), for Dumfries and Galloway (Mr Brown), for Slough (Fiona Mactaggart), for Hayes and Harlington (John McDonnell), for Edinburgh East (Sheila Gilmore) and for Easington (Grahame M. Morris) and good speeches from the hon. Member for Banff and Buchan (Dr Whiteford) and the right hon. Member for Bermondsey and Old Southwark (Simon Hughes). This is a day of acute embarrassment for the Government. They have bodged their regulations so badly that they have been struck down by the Court of Appeal, yet not once this afternoon have we heard a word of apology from the Minister for bringing forward retrospective legislation of this type on a timetable so fast that proper scrutiny is constrained. As my hon. Friend the Member for Easington said, not once have we heard even a word of contrition for the position they have put the House in.
Today’s debate has clarified one important point. The core of the Bill concerns the long-standing foundational power of the Department to issue sanctions. We think that the Department should, indeed, be equipped with such a power, but that is not to say for a moment that we subscribe to, or agree with, the programmes that it has built on those foundations. We heard from the right hon. Member for Bermondsey and Old Southwark that the programmes now in place, not least the mandatory work activity, are seriously flawed, are malfunctioning and are not getting people back to work, especially in those communities where unemployment is at its worst.
We will continue to argue that the Government’s back to work programmes need to be improved. Young people should not simply be confronted with the option of mandatory work activity and very little else. We do not believe that the Work programme is delivering. We believe that a better choice would be a jobs guarantee for young people and the long-term unemployed, and that the country could afford it if the Government had the bottle to introduce a tax on bankers’ bonuses and change the pension perks for the very richest. That would go a long way to delivering the kinds of changes that the right hon. Member for Bermondsey and Old Southwark spoke about.
It is important that on the foundations with which we equip the DWP we build good, strong back to work programmes that get young people and the long-term unemployed back to work. We have heard today from my hon. Friend the Member for Dumfries and Galloway, the right hon. Member for Bermondsey and Old Southwark and other of my hon. Friends, including in interventions from my hon. Friends the Members for Birmingham, Selly Oak (Steve McCabe) and for Wirral South (Alison McGovern), about the clear evidence that the sanctioning regime is malfunctioning. That is why the commitment to an independent review of the regime is so important. As the right hon. Member for Bermondsey and Old Southwark said, the system is clearly failing.
We will continue to argue that the review should be put in place, and when it is up and running, we will be leading the evidence gathering to ensure that the House is fully aware of what is going on. We will ensure that there is a clear and loud argument that the back to work programmes in this country should be better and properly financed, and that those who have the latitude to take part in them should be asked to contribute. We want to ensure that more people get back into jobs; that is why we are in the Labour party. That is the argument that we will take to the Government over the course of the next few days.
As my hon. Friend the Member for Hayes and Harlington said, we will not stand by and watch the demonisation of the poor in this country. We will stand up for vulnerable people and for the things they need, and we will stand against the attacks now being perpetrated against them by this Government.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Work and Pensions (Esther McVey)
I want to thank all Members who have taken part in the debate today, and I will answer in turn all the points that have been raised. I also want to thank the Opposition for taking a measured approach in supporting and expediting this important Bill, which will ensure that we are able to give jobseekers the best possible chance to find employment, as well as holding them to account when they refuse to hold up their side of the bargain. By ensuring that the Government do not have to repay previous benefit sanctions to claimants who have failed to participate in employment programmes, and that we can properly impose sanctions for such failures, the Bill will protect the public purse as well as the fundamental principle that jobseekers have responsibilities as well as rights.
I want to clarify the Court of Appeal judgment, on which many points have been made, not all of them correct. Our main point is that the Court supports the principle and policy of our employment schemes. The hon. Member for Wansbeck (Ian Lavery) asked whether they constituted slavery under article 4 of the European convention on human rights. We are pleased to say that the Court of Appeal agreed that there was no breach of the convention.
Esther McVey
I will make some progress, as I have many questions to get through.
I want to offer clarification to the hon. Member for Easington (Grahame M. Morris). The Court of Appeal ruled against the Government on a technical point and we are seeking permission to appeal to the Supreme Court on that point. Contrary to what the Opposition have suggested, a great deal of thought went into drafting regulations that would be flexible enough to encompass a wide range of programmes to support jobseekers. That is key; this is about flexibility for the individual and for the businesses that are taking people on. We want to get more people into jobs than ever before, and that is what we are doing.
Mr Donohoe
The problem in my constituency is that there are no jobs. People can have all the training they want, but they cannot get a job. That is the problem, and it is down to this Government.
Esther McVey
Obviously, the hon. Gentleman will be pleased to hear that the past 11 consecutive months have seen a rise in the number of people in jobs. Of course education, training and work experience are key, and we are doing all we can to help his constituents.
I want to talk about the scrutiny that the regulations went through. They went through the Joint Committee on Statutory Instruments, the secondary legislation scrutiny Committee, and there have been various opportunities for Members to raise objections. That did not happen, however, and the regulations went through. We are seeking permission to appeal against the judgment by the Court of Appeal. This is about communications with claimants, and our view is that it was clear that the claimant received information not only through communication via letter but through meeting and speaking to their jobcentre adviser.
Esther McVey
I want to progress a little further.
There is one voice that we have not heard here today. The right hon. Member for Birmingham, Hodge Hill (Mr Byrne) talked about a failing system, but I want to hear the voice of the people who have been on the mandatory scheme. What have they said about it? It is interesting to note that 75% of them said that they believed they were more attractive to potential employers, and that their personal confidence had been increased by attending the programmes. Some 76% said that their ability to work as part of a team had improved; 89% spoke of the benefits of getting into a working routine; and 81% said that they enjoyed their work placement. We should all be listening to those voices, rather than making political points that are not what those people said.
How about the businesses that take people on? What do they say? Many said that the aim was to help people to get a job. That is key. What has come out goes to the nub of the argument. For some, it might have been their first experience of a work environment. We know that is true, because 1.9 million children live in homes where nobody works, so it is vital that they have the scheme.
Mr Howarth
Could the Minister explain how amendment 1 to clause 1, in the name of her right hon. Friend the Secretary of State, takes us any further than where we are today?
Esther McVey
It is to clarify the right to appeal—I did not actually hear the full question.
Mr Howarth
Can the Minister explain how amendment 1 to clause 1, which is in the name of her right hon. Friend, takes us any further than where we are today?
Esther McVey
The right to appeal remains. That is the answer.
Companies said that the mandatory scheme helped not just them but the local community. The hon. Member for Wansbeck said we did not need a Bill. Actually the Bill is required. Slave labour was mentioned, but that is not an issue. Targets were mentioned. There are no targets whatsoever.
We know that jobseekers should have responsibility to take all reasonable steps to increase their chances of finding work. We therefore cannot be in the position where we have to repay benefit sanctions to jobseekers who fail to take all reasonable steps. For that reason, I commend the Bill to the House.
Question put, That the Bill be now read a Second time.
Jobseekers (Back to Work Schemes) Bill
(11 years, 1 month ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
18:43 - The House divided: - Ayes: 263 / Noes: 52 - Question accordingly agreed to.
Mr Hoban
I beg to move amendment 1, page 3, line 11, at end insert—
‘() Subsection (12) does not affect a person’s ability to apply for a revision or supersession of, or to appeal against, a decision to impose a penalty by reference to other grounds.’.
We tabled the amendment as a result of discussions we had with the right hon. Members for Birmingham, Hodge Hill (Mr Byrne) and for East Ham (Stephen Timms), who expressed concern that existing appeal rights might be brought into doubt. The Bill as introduced to the House is clear in its intent. Its provisions refer solely to the consequences of the Court of Appeal and High Court judgments. The amendment, therefore, will have no effect on the overall purpose or intent of the Bill. However, after constructive discussions with the right hon. Gentlemen, we decided to include something in the Bill to put it beyond doubt that a claimant’s appeal rights against a decision to sanction their benefit will remain unchanged in all other matters.
The clause sets out that any decision to sanction a claimant for failure to comply with the employment support allowance regulations or the mandatory work activity regulations cannot be challenged on the ground that the regulations are invalid or that the notices given under them are inadequate, notwithstanding the Court of Appeal’s judgment. In practice, claimants will retain full appeal rights on matters where a sanction has been imposed but they feel that they had good reason not to comply with the requirements of the scheme—for example, if they failed to attend training because of illness of a family member or one of the other standard reasons set out in either regulation or guidance around good cause. However, claimants will not be able to appeal against a sanction decision on the ground of the High Court or Court of Appeal judgment.
I hope that the amendment meets the concerns of the right hon. Member for East Ham and that there is support for it on both sides of the Committee.
Stephen Timms (East Ham) (Lab)
The Government have got themselves into a terrible mess. As we heard, they ignored the advice of the Social Security Advisory Committee—that appears to be a significant part of what went wrong—but I welcome the amendment, because a straightforward reading of the Bill might, and indeed does, suggest that if one is hit, perhaps in particular by one of those stockpiled sanctions, that will be it.
I am grateful to the Minister and the Secretary of State for tabling the amendment, which helpfully clarifies—puts in the Bill—the fact that normal opportunities for reconsideration and appeal apply, but I want to ask the Minister about two points. I would be grateful for his comments on them during his winding-up speech for what I imagine will be a brief debate.
Some of the stockpiled sanctions, which we read about in the impact assessment, relate to events of quite a long time ago—up to eight months, which could be the beginning of August. I would like to know, because it is not entirely clear to us, whether all the 63,000 people affected by stockpiled sanctions already know that they have a sanction on the way. If, for example, they enter work straight after receiving a sanction that is in the stockpile, and so receive little benefit after the sanction is imposed, presumably the amount to be reclaimed from them will be very small. I ask for clarity. Is the intention, in taking the sanction out of the stockpile and applying it, that people’s benefits will be stopped for the appropriate period, or is it— [Interruption.]
The Temporary Chair (Mr Jim Hood)
Order. I hear ringing. It has now stopped. Carry on, Mr Timms.
Stephen Timms
Is it the Government’s intention to reclaim cash? Clearly, we are in a rather different situation from the one that obtains when somebody is sanctioned in the normal course of events, because the events to which the stockpile sanctions relate could have taken place a considerable time ago. How will the Department explain to those affected what is happening and what the effects will be in cases where a lengthy period has elapsed between the events that gave rise to the sanction and the application of the sanction, following the enactment of the Bill?
Will the Minister give us a little more explanation about one of the points raised on Second Reading, for example by my hon. Friend the Member for Oldham East and Saddleworth (Debbie Abrahams)? The advice that we all received from the Child Poverty Action Group made this point:
“Contrary to Government claims, it is not obvious that DWP would have to repay sanctioned benefits to all claimants, so the £130 million potential loss stated is inaccurate: the Government already has anti-test case law rules which would prevent it having to repay anything for sanctions served prior to 6 August 2012.”
Will the Minister clarify the advice that he has received, which I have no doubt is different? If that view had been taken, the Bill would not be necessary.
I can well understand why the Child Poverty Action Group has reached its view. Section 27(3) of the Social Security Act 1998 relates to court decisions like the one reached in the case that gave rise to the Bill, and it reads as follows:
“In so far as the decision relates to a person’s entitlement to a benefit in respect of a period before the date of the relevant determination”—
in this case, the Appeal Court’s determination—
“it shall be made as if the adjudicating authority’s decision had been found by the Commissioner or court not to have been erroneous in point of law.”
A natural and straightforward reading of that paragraph could well lead to the conclusion reached by the Child Poverty Action Group, which is that anti-test case law rules prevent the Department from having to repay anything for sanctions scored before the court determination. I presume, as I said, that the Minister has received contrary advice on that measure, and it would be helpful if he explained what the advice was and therefore why the Bill is before the House.
Mr David Anderson (Blaydon) (Lab)
If the CPAG advice is correct, does my right hon. Friend have any idea by how much the £130 million could be reduced?
Stephen Timms
My hon. Friend asks a good question, and the answer is in the impact assessment that the Government have produced, which distinguishes between the amount that would be incurred because of people who were sanctioned before 6 August 2012 and the amount incurred in respect of people sanctioned since the court case, because those sanctions have been stockpiled.
The part of the impact assessment that contains those figures says that, by the look of it—to take the upper valuation—£24 million out of £130 million relates to sanctions that have been stockpiled. The CPAG view would be that of the £130 million, £106 million or £107 million would not apply, because of the Social Security Act 1998, whereas £24 million—the stockpiled sanctions—would. As I said, I am sure that the Department’s advice is different from the advice given to us by the CPAG, but it would be helpful if the Minister provided clarification so that we know the basis on which the measure has been introduced.
I would say again to the Minister that this is a helpful amendment. I do not think that it changes the position substantively, but it helps to clarify it, and to make it clear that anyone who will be presented with a stockpiled sanction will, as usual, have the opportunity to ask for a reconsideration and perhaps subsequently to appeal. That is a welcome clarification, and I am grateful to the Minister for providing it, but I would be grateful, too, if he commented on the two specific matters that I have raised.
Mr Hoban
The right hon. Gentleman has made a couple of points. In respect of payments where decisions have been stockpiled, when we received the High Court judgment, we did not proceed to make any further sanctions decisions, but claimants who were subject to a stockpiled decision are aware of that: we made it clear at the time, so they know what to expect. However, he asked whether we would recover sanctions from those who are in work now. The answer is no, we would not. That is a policy that we adopt elsewhere. We want to encourage people to do the right thing, and doing the right thing in this case is getting back into work.
The right hon. Gentleman then raised the note circulated to Members of Parliament by the CPAG. I touched on that point in opening the debate. Section 27 of the Social Security Act 1998 applies only when a challenge is brought by way of an appeal to a court or tribunal. The Wilson/Reilly case began with an application for judicial review, and on that basis, section 27 does not apply. With that, I hope that the Committee will approve the amendment.
Amendment 1 agreed to.
Clause 1, as amended, ordered to stand part of the Bill.
Clause 2 ordered to stand part of the Bill.
New Clause 1
Report
‘(1) The Secretary of State must appoint an independent person to prepare a report on the operation of the provisions relating to the imposition of a penalty during the period of a year beginning with the day on which this Act comes into force, so far as that operation relates to relevant penalties.
(2) The person must complete the preparation of the report and send it to the Secretary of State as soon as reasonably practicable after the end of the period mentioned in subsection (1).
(3) On receiving the report, the Secretary of State must lay a copy of it before Parliament.
(4) In this section—
“penalty” means a penalty that may be imposed for—
(a) failing to participate in a scheme within section 17A(1) of the Jobseekers Act 1995, or
(b) failing to comply with regulations under section 17 A of that Act;
“relevant penalty” means a penalty that, but for section 1 of this Act, would not be or would not have been lawfully imposed on a person.'.—(Mr Hoban.)
Brought up, and read the First time.
The Temporary Chair (Mr Jim Hood)
With this it will be convenient to consider the following:
Amendment (a), in subsection (1), leave out 'a year' and insert 'six months'.
Amendment (b), in subsection (2), leave out
‘as soon as reasonably practicable'
and insert 'within three months'.
Mr Hoban
The new clause provides for a report on the operation of benefit sanctions affected by the provisions of the Bill. Again, I thank the right hon. Members for East Ham (Stephen Timms) and for Birmingham, Hodge Hill (Mr Byrne) for their constructive approach to the Bill. We discussed this topic with them as we drew up the Bill. After our discussions, we decided to bring forward the new clause to satisfy the concerns of the right hon. Member for East Ham to provide for an independent report on the operation of benefit sanctions subject to the provisions in the Bill.
The new clause requires the Secretary of State to appoint an independent person to prepare a report on the operation of the provisions relating to benefit sanctions during the first year after the Bill has come into force. The report must be prepared as soon as reasonably practicable after the end of that period.
Subsection (3) requires the Secretary of State to lay a copy of the resulting report before Parliament, which meets the right hon. Gentleman’s requests. It is important to say that as a Department, we keep the functioning of sanctions under review. A number of comments on that were made on Second Reading. It is important to ensure that sanctions are applied fairly and consistently across Jobcentre Plus. It is an important part of the regime, so the sanction should be credible, and something that we keep under review.
Let me pre-empt the arguments made by the right hon. Member for Wythenshawe and Sale East (Paul Goggins). I understand the purpose of his two amendments. He is keen to ensure that the review is expedited, and we will try to complete it as quickly as possible. The time period for someone to launch an appeal against the sanction is 13 months. By imposing a six-month deadline, we might miss appeals that are made at a later point. He then requires a report to be laid within three months of the end of the six-month period, so that is nine months. There is a risk that we will miss out on three months’ worth of appeals, so we would not necessarily get a full view of how the sanctions under the Bill have operated. Although I understand his arguments for haste, may I suggest, as a counter argument, that we take things at a slightly more leisurely pace, which will ensure that we get a full year? None the less, I share his view that once we get to the end of that year, we should be moving as quickly as possible to complete the review and to lay the report before Parliament. It is not in any of our interests unduly to delay a measure such as this. I commend new clause 1 to the Committee.
Stephen Timms
I warmly welcome the new clause which, as the Minister has said, was proposed and suggested in the discussions between him and the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, and me and my right hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Hodge Hill (Mr Byrne). It is something genuinely valuable to emerge from this debacle, which has been entirely of the Government’s own making. We do need to know what is going on with sanctions. The independent review, which is required by the new clause to be conducted over the coming year—I will comment in a moment on the further amendments proposed by my right hon. Friend the Member for Wythenshawe and Sale East (Paul Goggins)—could be crucial in getting to the bottom of what is going on. From the standpoint of anyone who is concerned about what is going on in our social security system, as very many people are, this is a valuable initiative.
The scale of the sanctions that are being imposed at the moment is extraordinary. My hon. Friend the Member for Hayes and Harlington (John McDonnell) made that point in the earlier debate. He correctly suggested to the House that the number of sanctions being issued trebled in the two years between the period just before the general election and subsequently to more than half a million per year, and that number is still going up. The impact assessment tells us that the number of sanctions that has been issued under the defective—as we now know them to be—employment, skills and enterprise regulations is “between 221,000 and 259,000”; that those sanctions involved between 136,000 and 159,000 people and that their cumulative value is between £80 million and £99 million.
Bob Stewart (Beckenham) (Con)
I am slightly confused. The right hon. Gentleman said that when people get sanctioned, they have no idea why, but I would have thought the first thing they would do, if they did not get a letter or a warning about this, would be to go straight to Jobcentre Plus and ask, “Why is this happening to me?” Why does that not happen?
Stephen Timms
The hon. Gentleman raises an interesting and telling point. Why, indeed, do people not go to jobcentres to get an explanation? The reason is that it is very difficult for them to get through on the telephone, and if they do go and speak to somebody, they probably do not get a clear explanation.
The Minister said in one of our recent statutory instrument Committees that Jobcentre Plus will now inform people in writing of the reason for their sanction. When the Minister responds, he will, perhaps, give us a little more information. I am not sure whether that has already started or whether it is still due to happen, but it will certainly be a welcome step. The hon. Member for Beckenham (Bob Stewart) will be very familiar with the experience that I have often come across, however, which is that people do receive a letter from Jobcentre Plus, but, frankly, making sense of it is very difficult. I hope that the written explanations people receive will make more sense than some of the other communications they bring to our surgeries, sent to them by jobcentres and the Department.
I want to set out 10 questions that I think the independent review should answer. Other Members may have other questions, of course, but I consider these 10 to be important, and putting them on the record will serve to give some terms of reference from the House for the independent reviewer.
First, we need to know the precise figures. It is not good enough for us to be told that the Department has issued between 221,000 and 259,000 sanctions. We need to know precisely how many have been imposed. We also need to know what exactly they are for. Is it that people are failing to turn up to appointments, or that they are failing to do the work-related activity they are required to do? We need to be given some clear categories of the grounds for sanction, and then to be told how many of the sanctions imposed fall into each of those categories. How tough are those sanctions? How many maximum three-year sanctions for the basic element of jobseeker’s allowance have been imposed so far? In the recent debate on JSA regulations, a colleague rightly reaffirmed our opposition to the three-year sanction introduced by the Government. It would be useful to know how many people have so far been denied benefit for a full three years, which the Government’s legislative change now makes possible.
Secondly, we need to know how many people on whom the sanctions are imposed request reconsiderations —the kind of people who, as the hon. Member for Beckenham suggests, might go along to the jobcentre and ask what the sanction arises from. How many people have asked for reconsideration, and when it has been refused, how many subsequently appealed? What are the outcomes when reconsiderations are requested and appeals made?
Thirdly, we need the independent reviewer’s opinion on whether the reconsideration and appeal process is working correctly and properly. When people have a sanction imposed on them, do they know that they can apply for reconsideration and, if they are not happy with the outcome, submit an appeal? Is that whole process working correctly?
Fourthly, how many of those being sanctioned are on employment and support allowance—and perhaps other benefits as well—rather than JSA? Ministers have given commitments during debates in this House and the other place that they will not normally issue sanctions to somebody on ESA—somebody who is out of work on health grounds, for example—other than after a face-to-face discussion with the applicant and, if necessary, a home visit. We need to know from the independent reviewer whether those assurances are being honoured in practice. It does not require much imagination on the part of Members to realise that it may well be wholly inappropriate to impose a sanction on someone who is on ESA as a result of a serious mental health problem or a fluctuating health problem of the kind we have often debated in the past couple of years, thereby removing their benefit for the potentially very long periods that are now permissible, unless they have had a proper face-to-face discussion with an appropriate Jobcentre Plus official. It would be helpful if the independent reviewer answered that question.
Fifthly, it would be useful to know how many of the large number of sanctions being imposed are being initiated by a Work programme provider rather than Jobcentre Plus. As I understand it, the initial step can be taken by either, or by another kind of provider on one of the other schemes. It would be useful to know what the split is.
I appreciate that it is not going to be easy for the independent reviewer to find the answer to my sixth question—it relates to the point the hon. Member for Beckenham made a few minutes ago—but we need to know it. To what extent do people understand the reasons for the sanctions being imposed on them? As I mentioned earlier, food banks are reporting that people who turn up, having been sanctioned—who therefore do not have any money and cannot buy food for themselves and their families—commonly do not know why the sanction has been imposed. I hope that the independent reviewer can establish how widespread a problem that is. If it is widespread, as anecdotal evidence suggests it may well be, that is a serious difficulty with the system.
The seventh question concerns the extent to which managers are promoting sanctions. In answering an intervention from my right hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Hodge Hill on Second Reading, the Minister gave a very clear assurance that there are no targets for sanctions and that Ministers and managers do not require specific targets to be fulfilled.
Paul Goggins
It is a pleasure to follow my right hon. Friend the Member for East Ham (Stephen Timms), and I say to him and other right hon. Friends on the Front Bench that if new clause 1 has emerged from their discussions with DWP Ministers, the Bill has provided at least one bit of good news. I commend them for their efforts.
In listing 10 questions, my right hon. Friend has done the Committee a great service because one thing missing from new clause 1 is any mention of terms of reference—if I had been a bit quicker this afternoon, I might have included that in the amendments standing in my name and those of my hon. Friends. My right hon. Friend’s questions give the work of the independent reviewer a good starting point, and I say to my Front-Bench colleagues and the Minister that I know time is pressing, but if it were possible—perhaps even before deliberations in the other place—to draw up draft terms of reference based on my right hon. Friend’s 10 questions for the other place to consult on when debating the Bill, that would be helpful.
I will not go through each of my right hon. Friend’s 10 points because he spoke eloquently about them, but, of course, the numbers and quality of decisions are important. His question—I think this was point No. 7—about how people are surviving when they have been sanctioned and have no income is relevant and an issue on which Members of Parliament from all sides of the House will increasingly have to focus in the weeks and months ahead.
Let me say at the outset of my short contribution that I am in favour of, and not opposed to, sanctions. If we offer something to young people and others who are out of work, we need effective sanctions to back that up. Unfortunately, however, at the moment we do not have a proper offer for young people and others who are out of work, and that is part of the problem. It is important for sanctions to be fair and lawful, yet we heard in earlier debates this afternoon that the Court found the regulations and notice to be unlawful, which is why the Government have introduced this Bill.
My right hon. Friend mentioned the large numbers of people who are being sanctioned. All hon. Members know from their work in their constituencies of the increasing number of sanctions cases. We take a view on how fair or unfair those sanctions are, but I increasingly question the quality of decisions. A number of my hon. Friends have referred specifically to representations they have made to the Department for Work and Pensions on looking at decisions again because they were plainly unfair. In many cases, the decision is overturned, because any common-sense look at them would tell us that the decision was wrong. There are serious questions to be asked about both the quantity and the quality of sanctions. It is important that the review takes place—it is a welcome concession in the discussions between those on the Front Benches.
Bob Stewart
I have dealt with lots of soldiers in my life, some of whom are not very literate. One thing that always frightened them was letters. I have a feeling that people get sanctioned because they ignore the letter that comes through their letterbox and are frightened to open it because of the consequences of doing so. In one or two cases even in my constituency, which is relatively wealthy, people have ignored letters, and are therefore sanctioned because they are fearful of opening the envelope. When they have nothing, they need to try to get money. Sadly, people might try to get money by turning to crime.
Paul Goggins
Once again, the hon. Gentleman, for all his seniority in his earlier career, demonstrates great sensitivity to his constituents and others and he has done so before in debates in which I have been involved. I put it to him that people will increasingly have to apply for their benefits online, which could involve them utilising skills with which they are unfamiliar. There are difficulties with that. The hon. Gentleman speaks eloquently.
In pre-empting some of my remarks, the Minister was correct that I should like to inject some urgency—I reassure my right hon. Friend that I seek not a slapdash, hasty report, but urgency. I will listen carefully to the Minister when he responds to the debate in deciding whether to press the amendments to a Division. I want urgency from him—he gave one or two encouraging signs but I should like him to go further.
Amendment (a) calls for “six months” rather than “a year”. The Minister pointed out that the number of cases in six months might be limited, but there would be a number of cases of public interest, and they ought to be evaluated. My right hon. Friend suggested an interim report after six months, which might be a reasonable compromise—there would be a full report in a year but an interim report after six months, so that Parliament and the public can see how the inquiry is going, the kind of evidence that comes out and the quality of decisions. The report could then be completed within a year. I am thinking about that, because if we have a compromise, the measure would be urgent but allow sufficient time for the quality of investigation required.
I have a difficulty with new clause 1, which I am seeking to correct in amendment (b). New clause 1 states that the report should be sent
“to the Secretary of State as soon as reasonably practicable”.
All hon. Members have experience both in Parliament and elsewhere of how soon “reasonably practicable” is. With the support of my right hon. Friend the Member for Knowsley (Mr Howarth) and my hon. Friend the Member for Halton (Derek Twigg), I am trying to put a time limit on “reasonably practicable”. I am not saying that the time limit must be three months, but suggesting that it ought to be “within three months”. This is an urgent matter, because decisions are being made that are questionable in many cases and unlawful in others. The Minister has to indicate clearly what
“as soon as reasonably practicable”
means. We have to have a clear end point to this process.
Derek Twigg
New clause 1 presents an opportunity. I congratulate my right hon. Friends on the Opposition Front Bench on getting it agreed with the Government, but of course there are weaknesses and flaws that my right hon. Friend the Member for Wythenshawe and Sale East (Paul Goggins) has outlined.
There are genuine concerns, based on constituency surgeries, telephone calls and e-mails, about people being wrongly or unfairly sanctioned. I quoted a case in which the benefits of a constituent who attended the funeral of a brother were stopped. I contacted the DWP and got that changed, but it should never have happened. There are other cases that cause great concern. People who can work should work, and should be helped to do so. Clearly, it would help if there were more jobs around for people to get into work in the first place. That is an issue in areas such as mine and elsewhere, but if someone persistently, and for no good reason, refuses to take a job or look for one, sanctions should apply. However, in a number of instances sanctions are being operated unfairly.
Mental health is a matter of particular importance. We say a lot on the Floor of the House about how we want to support better those who suffer from mental health problems, and how the system should take the issue more seriously. From the evidence that is presented to me in the surgeries in my constituency, this is one area where the decisions taken to sanction people are particularly hard. Mental health affects a range of people, but particularly young single men. I have concerns about how the system works, and how those with mental health issues are sanctioned and given penalties. It is important that the review process takes this serious matter into consideration, and the Government need to provide some impetus to that.
I visited a food bank in my constituency recently. There are a growing number of single men using the food bank—they are struggling to survive. There are referrals from jobcentre plus for people who need food to be able to continue. It is a concern that people who have no money are receiving penalties. What do the Government think should happen then, particularly for those who have mental health, family or social problems? The hon. Member for Beckenham (Bob Stewart) made a point about illiteracy. In the poorer areas of the country, in constituencies such as mine, there are still significant problems relating to illiteracy, because people have poor reading or writing skills, or perhaps cannot read. That impacts on people’s ability to interact with the system and unfairly works against them. Whether they are former soldiers or other people, it is a problem that has not been properly addressed. I hope that the review will consider that as well.
I am concerned about the time scale, which is why I put my name to the amendments tabled by my right hon. Friend the Member for Wythenshawe and Sale East. I accept what the Minister said—that this has to be done properly—but I see no reason why an interim review could not be carried out. We need to get to the bottom of this, because every day people are being unfairly penalised. We need to look at the system and get it changed as quickly as possible. The terms of reference of the review are also crucial, so I hope that the Minister will bear it in mind, when the Bill goes to the Lords or on another occasion, that we need to see, and have some input into, the terms of reference. I feel strongly that the review will be an important part of our consideration of the whole system.
I hope that the Minister will consider those problems. We are here because the Government got the legislation wrong, as they have got it wrong elsewhere on welfare—for example, we know of disabled children whose families are affected by the bedroom tax, on which the Court of Appeal ruled. The Government are getting these things wrong, and the most vulnerable people in our society are suffering as a result of the mistakes in the Government’s welfare policy. I hope that they will reconsider some of these issues and how they want to proceed.
Andrew Miller (Ellesmere Port and Neston) (Lab)
I want to begin by commenting on the remarks made by my right hon. Friend the Member for Wythenshawe and Sale East (Paul Goggins) to the hon. Member for Beckenham (Bob Stewart), whom I have known for 20 years, since he returned from Bosnia with the Cheshire Regiment. People whom he and I know personally are among those described today. The soldiers damaged by the dreadful events that he recorded in his well-known book are real people, and some of them live in my constituency. They are the kinds of people on whom we should try to focus our humanity.
We must admit that there is an enormous lack of clarity in the regulations governing the system. That is the fault of successive Governments and has built up over many years, as things have got more and more complex. Faced with that complexity, someone with a learning difficulty or who is mentally scarred might respond illogically—I think, for example, of the person who leaves the envelope behind the clock in the hope that it will go away. We have to deal with this matter seriously, therefore, and separate those people from the people the Minister is rightly targeting—there is no dispute between the parties on that.
Bob Stewart
I thank the hon. Gentleman, who has been a friend of mine for a long time, for giving way. One problem is that people who are hurt, mentally scarred or not as bright as they might be need a friend to go with them to Jobcentre Plus. They need a neutral umpire to help them. I just wish we could get that a bit better.
Andrew Miller
If we developed this too far, Mr Hood, I would be outwith the scope of the amendment, but the hon. Gentleman is very perceptive and makes the point about people not understanding the documents or conversations they have had.
To move this forward we need to inject a degree of urgency. I understand the points about the time frame, but I nevertheless think we ought to look at this matter carefully.
My right hon. Friend the Member for East Ham (Stephen Timms) has outlined the framework for a set of terms of reference, and I hope we can agree on that and invite the Department to start gathering the necessary statistics and information to respond to some of the basic questions, so that the independent reviewer can be well equipped with solid information when he or she starts the job. That could provide a practical way of producing a review sooner than after the envisaged 12 months.
Having recognised that that might be difficult to achieve, however, we ought to consider a fallback position that gives the framework of the terms of reference an extra dimension, to enable the reviewer to start reporting on the information as and when it becomes clear. If we approach the matter in that way, we will inject some urgency into the situation and get people to realise that there is acceptance across the House that we are trying to separate the genuine cases from those that are less solidly based. Let us ensure that we target the benefits on the people who ought to get them.
I urge the Minister, in considering the amendment tabled by my right hon. Friend the Member for Wythenshawe and Sale East (Paul Goggins)—to which I have belatedly put my name—to think about the arguments that have been presented and to agree to an early set of terms of reference before coming forward with a sensible time frame that will enable us to achieve the goals that Members on both sides of the House want to achieve.
Fiona Mactaggart
I want to follow up on some of the issues that have been raised. I recently asked the Minister how many people had had sanctions imposed on them. He revealed that 540,610 sanctions relating to jobseeker’s allowance had been applied last year. In the same answer, he told me:
“Statistics on how many such people speak English as a second language; and how many such claimants had moved to jobseeker’s allowance from income support or disability-related benefits are not readily available and could be provided only at disproportionate cost.”—[Official Report, 11 March 2013; Vol. 560, c. 103W.]
Those are examples of the vulnerable groups that Members on both sides of the House have been talking about.
I want to support the amendment tabled by my right hon. Friend the Member for Wythenshawe and Sale East (Paul Goggins) on the speed of the proceedings, but I also want to add another question for the reviewer to consider. Shortly after I had tabled that question, I asked the Minister about assaults on jobcentre staff. If we compare the period from October 2012 to January 2013 with the period a year earlier from October 2011 to January 2012, we see that the number of assaults on jobcentre staff increased from 76 to 98. The seriousness of the assaults increased as well. In the first period, there were three that resulted in cuts and bruises, and three that resulted in more than cuts and bruises. A year later, 13 had resulted in cuts and bruises, with eight resulting in more.
I fear—although I do not know for certain—that those increases in assaults on jobcentre staff are a product of frustrated claimants who have been sanctioned. It has been pointed out that they do not always know why they have been sanctioned. If the sanctions regime is resulting in this kind of behaviour—as I have said, I do not know whether that is the case—it would be appropriate for a reviewer to consider whether the regime has consequences for the safety of jobcentre staff. If there are consequences for the safety of the people responsible for giving claimants explanations, their explanations might become less clear and they might retreat behind letters rather than actually talking to people.
I should be grateful if the Minister assured the House that such issues will be included in the review. I fear that if they are not, vulnerable claimants will not get the service they need.
Mr Hoban
We have had a helpful debate on the review. I note the comments of the right hon. Member for East Ham (Stephen Timms)—I think he actually asked 11 questions, but I will allow him an extra one. The scope of the review is set out in the new clause. I take the point about the terms of reference, but we have set out the area that the review will cover.
My memory is not bad, and I recollect that the right hon. Member for Wythenshawe and Sale East (Paul Goggins) was a Minister in the previous Government so he should know what “reasonably practicable” might mean; I am sure he has probably used the phrase.
Paul Goggins
It was precisely some of the experience I was reflecting on that caused me to make the comment.
Mr Hoban
The sinner has repented on this occasion.
Let me be clear. I want the review to proceed as quickly as possible. It is in all our interests for it to do so. I am keen that we improve the quality of decision making on sanctions and that we ensure that they are applied consistently. The right hon. Member for East Ham was right to highlight the fact that my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State made it clear that there should be no targets, and that if there was evidence of targets being used at any jobcentre, we would stamp them out. We do not want targets; we want good quality decisions made consistently from jobcentre to jobcentre. I do not think targets have a role to play in that regime. [Interruption.] The right hon. Member for Birmingham, Hodge Hill (Mr Byrne) laughs. Is he saying we should have targets? I suspect not.
Mr Hoban
Given that my right hon. Friend said that he would stop the practice, we would stop it again if it reappeared. We do not want to see it happening.
I want to pick up on some of the points raised in the 10 or 11 questions put by the right hon. Member for East Ham. We have published, and will publish annually, tables setting out the number of sanctions. The data for 2011-12 were published online on 15 August 2012, and we gave a breakdown of sanctions, so it is not correct to say that there is no information. There were 108,000 variable length sanctions for employment-related failures; 378,000 sanctions were of fixed length, which included 58,000 that were for not attending ESE—employment, skills and enterprise—regulation schemes, 55,000 for not complying with training requirements or for not carrying out a jobcentre’s direction or for a failure to participate in mandatory work activity.
The reason there is a range in the impact assessment is that we were trying to be helpful to the Committee. We used a combination of official statistics and an estimate based on management information to give Members an up to date figure of the numbers involved. The final numbers will be available when we publish the next official statistics. Having been a DWP Minister, the right hon. Gentleman will appreciate that we take the validation and verification of statistics seriously. These are official national statistics and they need to be published to appropriate quality. That is the basis for the numbers in the impact assessment.
Communication is really important, and we need to ensure that we get it right. We talked about some of the measures that we set out in the recent regulations to ensure clarity in universal credit. There is a challenge here. We want to ensure that communications between the Department and jobseekers are clear, whether they are oral communications between a personal adviser and a claimant, or items of correspondence. But I think there is a tension here. The hon. Member for Slough (Fiona Mactaggart) said in her Second Reading speech that she felt that the notice we sent out was defective, and the courts said the letter should have contained more detail about the sanctions regime.
Mr Hoban
Absolutely, but the hon. Lady repeated that, and by virtue of the quote I think she was supporting their view. Another hon. Member said that people “may be” sanctioned. I think there is a tension here between clarity and disclosure. The more detail there is in the letter—maybe to comply with what is in the law—the harder it can be for people to understand what is in the letter. It is possible to go into lists, as the right hon. Member for Birmingham, Hodge Hill did—to list a whole set of “good cause” reasons in a letter. One could put in a letter every detail of the graduated sanctions regime. We need to ensure that our communications are very clear and legal; sometimes the two do not go as easily together as we would like them to, but we do need to ensure that there is clarity.
The right hon. Member for East Ham talked about what happens if people are sanctioned, and then immediately answered his question by referring to hardship schemes. He and I have debated the revised sanctions regime and discussed hardship at length, as we did on a previous occasion with the right hon. Member for Stirling (Mrs McGuire). There is a hardship scheme in place for people, and it is right that it is there. We do ask people to look to see whether there are any other ways in which they could find financial resources to live off, and that is very carefully set out in the Bill, but those hardship schemes are available. It would be wrong to give anyone the suggestion that there is no hardship scheme in place, but the rules on access are very tight indeed.
Stephen Timms
I take entirely the Minister’s point about the hardship schemes, but I wonder what he thinks has driven the huge increase in the number of people referred to food banks over the past three years—a tenfold increase between the year just before the general election and the current financial year. I wonder whether he can understand why many of us think that the growth of sanctions must have been a big part of the driver.
Mr Hoban
The practice of the Government the right hon. Gentleman was a part of when he was a Minister in this Department differed from that of the present Government. When the Labour party was in power, it refused to have any material in jobcentres about food banks, to try to deny their existence. It did not refer people to food banks. We decided, when we came into office, to reverse that policy—to ensure that people were aware that food banks were in place.
People do go to food banks. They go for a variety of reasons. It is right for there to be a hardship regime in place for sanctions. If people do not choose to apply for that hardship regime, that is their choice, but people know it is there.
Stephen Timms
The Minister is right about the hardship regime, but he is surely not trying to tell us that the number has gone up from 30,000 to 300,000 because there are some leaflets in jobcentres, is he?
Mr Hoban
Well, actually it is not about leaflets. It is about signposting people to food banks. The right hon. Gentleman and his Opposition colleagues forget the way in which they tried to airbrush food banks out of history when they were in government, and to use them now as political pawns is beneath them.
I hope that the Committee will accept new clause 1. As I said in response to amendments (a) and (b) tabled by the right hon. Member for Wythenshawe and Sale East and his colleagues, we want to ensure that the Bill proceeds as quickly as possible; I do not think there is any interest in spinning it out. But we do need to ensure, as the right hon. Member for East Ham said, that it is properly and thoroughly considered. As a consequence of a measure introduced by the previous Government, we have an independent reviewer of work capability assessments. That is a very thorough process and no corners are cut, neither would we want them to be. It is helpful that there is clarity.
Paul Goggins
I know from other dealings with the Minister that if he says he wants something to happen urgently, he will get on with it—I accept his word in good faith. However, one matter he has not dealt with is the clear commitment to get on with it as a matter of urgency. My amendment proposes six months and my right hon. Friend the Member for East Ham (Mr Timms) suggested an interim report. There seems to be a coalition of ideas, and I press the Minister to indicate that he is prepared at least to consider that seriously.
Mr Hoban
I do not want to end up getting stuck in a laborious process of issuing interim reports when I would much rather let the reviewer get on with the job. As a former Minister, the right hon. Gentleman will know that just getting interim reports out of the door can be time consuming. I would rather let the reviewer focus on good recommendations and good analysis instead of bogging him down in a bureaucratic process that will not benefit any of us. I take on board the right hon. Gentleman’s comments, but in the interests of expedition and speed an interim report would slow the process rather than accelerate it.
The Temporary Chair (Mr Jim Hood)
Mr Goggins, you did not inform the House whether you wanted to move your amendment formally, or withdraw it.
Paul Goggins
I hope that the Minister will continue to give my amendment careful consideration, but I do not want to press it to a vote.
Question put and agreed to.
New clause 1 accordingly read a Second time, and added to the Bill.
The Deputy Speaker resumed the Chair.
Bill, as amended, reported.
Bill, as amended in the Committee, considered.
Third Reading
Mr Hoban
I beg to move, That the Bill be now read the Third time.
We have had short but helpful debates on Second Reading and in Committee. I want to reiterate briefly and in a workman-like way that the Bill is vital to protect the proper functioning of the benefits system and to safeguard the public purse. I thank Opposition Front-Bench Members for the constructive way in which they have engaged with us on the Bill, and I hope that they believe that our amendment and new clause reflect their concern. I commend the Bill to the House.
Stephen Timms
This Bill has been an extraordinary fiasco. It is here because the Government made basic errors in drafting regulations. The danger was highlighted by their own Social Security Advisory Committee, which Ministers ignored. They were wrong to do so, and the consequence is the necessity for this unseemly piece of legislation. The question facing the House this evening is: what do we do? The alternatives to the Government’s proposals are pretty unappealing.
The danger of having to take £130 million from another part of the Department’s budget is that the cost will fall on people whose income is already very low. I was very grateful for what the Minister said a few moments ago to explain the necessity for the Bill and why the so-called test case rules do not apply in this case. The alternative is unappealing for that reason. In addition, if the correction were not made, there would be quite a fundamental breach of the jobseeking system, which was used so effectively by the previous Government to achieve—before the global crisis—the highest rate of employment in the UK since the 1970s. That is a rate of employment we are still some way short of today. That system involves sanctions. As my right hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Hodge Hill (Mr Byrne) pointed out, the system has done so since 1911, and it is right that it should continue to do so.
I shall certainly not urge my hon. Friends to oppose the Bill, but we have argued for a fundamentally different approach to supporting people into employment from that taken by the Government—one based on job guarantees—but it requires an effective system, which not passing the Bill would put at risk. We think that the guarantees approach is the right one, and the recent evaluation of the future jobs fund has strengthened our convictions in that respect, but we need a proper system in place to be able to introduce that arrangement quickly. Following a general election, it is our intention very quickly so to do, and for that reason I shall not urge my hon. Friends to oppose Third Reading.
Dr Whiteford
I do not intend to detain the House for long, but it is worth reiterating the point I made on Second Reading, which is that people deserve a fair day’s pay for a fair day’s work. Throughout the afternoon, we have heard from a number of hon. Members the shortcomings of the Government’s Work programme and the failings of the rather blunt instrument that is the sanctions regime, but I have consciously refrained from going down the route of discussing those in detail, because the key issue is those sanctions that have already been found by the courts to be unlawful and whether it is right retrospectively to shift the legislative goalposts to penalise people who have been unlawfully sanctioned. I do not think that that is in any way justifiable, and nothing I have heard today has reassured me on that point.
The Government have had an opportunity today to hear concerns from Members on both sides of the House about the problems with unpaid labour in the sanctions regime. Even at this late stage, I urge Ministers to think again and take responsibility for the mistakes that have been made and to step back from a scheme that relies on unpaid labour. It is not helping people to find real jobs, it is actively preventing real job creation and it is undermining efforts from people in the voluntary sector and elsewhere, which are more likely to be effective in helping people who are a long way from the labour market to move into paid employment.
It is never reasonable to insist that people work for no pay. That is not sustainable and it just is not working. Although the debate has been heavily undersubscribed, with fewer than half the Members of the House turning up to vote on Second Reading, it has certainly received a lot of attention out there, and I am sure that I am not the only Member who has received lots of correspondence from constituents who are concerned about the underlying principles and who can see the inherent injustice of the proposition.
I hope that Members who share my conviction that these measures are unworkable, unfair, profoundly regrettable and retrospective will join me and my colleagues in opposing them.
Mr Frank Field (Birkenhead) (Lab)
I would like to congratulate the Government on their incompetence with the Bill. I would like to say that these are measures that a future Labour Government would support, but differently. We would have a human face to our approach, unlike this Administration.
First, let me deal with the point about incompetence. These are fairly simple regulations compared with what the Secretary of State is preparing for the nation with his universal credit. If the Department cannot get these regulations right, what hope for universal credit?
The Secretary of State for Work and Pensions (Mr Iain Duncan Smith)
I am listening to what the right hon. Gentleman has to say, but it sounds a little rich coming from him. From his time in government, he and others well know that sometimes the view of judges is very different from a lot of other legal advice. The reality is that by saying that this is incompetence he must be claiming that his own Government were deeply incompetent throughout their time in office.
Mr Field
Well, if that is true, this Government have learnt nothing from our experience, so it is doubly worrying. Universal credit, which the Government are going to deliver, is an immensely complicated reform and if they feel that— [Interruption.] The Secretary of State says not true. Should the day ever arrive when universal credit began to be delivered, we would all be in a position to judge. However, these are arguments for another day. Let us congratulate the Government on their incompetence and their need to come here and seek out support to rectify the errors made in the Department.
The second issue is important. We are dealing with an attitude of mind whereby there is a feeling that, even without ever making a contribution, a person has a right to benefits and to a pension from other taxpayers. That attitude is now deeply ingrained in our culture, and the Secretary of State’s welfare reforms and universal credit will encourage it. Under his scheme, more people will think they have a right to benefits than do now. Many of us, even those in areas with high unemployment, know that there are people, particularly young people, who feel that unless they will be offered jobs at three times their benefit level, it is not in their interest to work. That is why it is so important to change—[Interruption.] The Secretary of State is making faces, but I am trying to support him in the case that he is making.
We are trying to move from unconditional welfare to welfare that attaches conditions to drawing benefits. The last Government started those important reforms, and we continue to support them. The big divide has been between a welfare state based on contributions, in which people are eligible for benefit only if they have paid the requisite number of contributions, and one in which people think that they should get benefits because they are citizens. The Secretary of State may continue his conversation, but he knows full well that as he tries to limit the entry of Bulgarians and Romanians into our welfare system, the weakness of his hand is that they will be able to claim benefit here, because large numbers of other people do, and we will be discriminating unless we give them benefit on the same terms.
The lesson that I hope we will draw is that the Opposition will go into the election with a clear mandate to move from a means-tested welfare system, in which people think that they have a right to benefits, to one in which people gain entrance to welfare because they have paid contributions. The difference is in job offers and job guarantees. The most crucial welfare reform that the last Labour Government made was the future jobs fund, which was destroyed by this Government when they came into office. If we are to build up a medley of worthwhile alternatives for people who cannot find jobs, we the Opposition and the Government must play some part in creating those opportunities.
There is debate on both sides of the House about the best routes back to full employment, but no certainty about what they are. In the immediate future, therefore, we will have to rely on an even more severely tightened future jobs fund than the Labour Government did. We know from our constituencies that the real test of whether people want to work is to have jobs to offer them. Without those, we are in difficulties. That is not to say that we would not sanction without them. London, for example, has the second highest youth unemployment, but in 10 years of Labour government, 1 million immigrants came to London to work. There is clearly some problem in people’s thinking about what is suitable for them to do versus what is suitable for immigrants.
In my short contribution, first, I congratulate the Government on their incompetence and on having to rely on the House to rescue them from it. Secondly, like them, we are moving away from an unconditional welfare state to one that attaches conditions, but unlike them, we believe firmly that they need to engage actively in trying to build up something like the future jobs fund, so our constituents are offered real opportunities to work. I hope that those of us who have Labour authorities or even decent Tory or Liberal authorities, despite their current budget difficulties, will seek to implement that approach so that over the years, we will be able to offer more people proper, dignified alternatives to sitting on their backsides on the dole.
Katy Clark (North Ayrshire and Arran) (Lab)
Yet again, the Government have clearly shown whose side they are on. Yesterday, a great deal of sympathy was expressed by Members from all parts of the House for Cypriots who may have more than 5%—perhaps up to 10%—taken off their bank savings. I have a huge amount of sympathy for those people, but today, Conservative and Liberal Democrat MPs do not seem to have any sympathy for some people on the lowest incomes in this country.
Those people are entitled to that money—the Court of Appeal has made that clear—but the Government have made it clear today that their political priority is to make sure that they get that money back from those individuals. All of us have constituents who will be affected, and over the coming months they will come to see us. I hope that those who support the legislation can look them in the eye. We know from the court cases that have been described today that many of those people are hard-working individuals who want to work. They genuinely want that opportunity, but they have not been offered the kind of work experience by the Government, whether we call it training or work experience—whatever we call it—that they need. They have not been given the opportunities that will give them what they need if they are to be offered real employment.
In constituencies such as mine, there has been an increase in the number of people suffering long-term unemployment, but there is also a generational problem, as we have not recovered from the industrial decline that took place over many decades. In surgery after surgery in areas such as mine, more and more people are coming to talk about the sanctions imposed on them by the Department for Work and Pensions. That is not just in relation to workfare but in relation to all aspects of benefits. The Department has clearly been given a political lead by Ministers to do everything that it can to make it hard as possible for people to get the benefits to which they are entitled.
In my constituency, and in the constituencies of many hon. Members up and down the country, there are thousands and thousands of people who genuinely want to work. They want opportunities for education, training and work experience that will enable them to improve their lot. What we should be discussing today is what kind of work experience and training will give our country the skills that enable us to compete internationally. It is an absolute disgrace that the Government have introduced this legislation, and are trying to do everything that they can to take money away from some of the poorest communities and individuals in the country.
John McDonnell
I want the last words of the debate to be a thank you to two young people, because if they had not taken the Government to court, we would not have had this debate. I want to thank them for having the courage to say no when they were forced into unpaid work. I want to thank them for their courage in pursuing it through the courts, and I also want to thank them for allowing us at least to have some debate today to expose the regime that the Government have introduced.
I also want to thank the two organisations that have launched a week of action: Boycott Workfare and the Right to Work campaign. They are campaigning around the country to expose what companies are doing to exploit unpaid labour; the threats to benefits; and the harassment that people have endured. They are also coming out with a simple demand on behalf of young people across the country: they just want a job, but they want one with decent pay. I do not think that that is too much to ask in the seventh richest country in the world in 2013. I want to thank all those organisations for enabling us at least to have some form of debate on this issue today.
Question put, That the Bill be now read the Third time.
Parliamentary Standards Act
(11 years, 1 month ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
The Leader of the House of Commons (Mr Andrew Lansley)
I beg to move,
That—
(1) Subject to paragraphs (2) and (3), the following offices of positions are specified for the purposes of section 4A(2) of the Parliamentary Standards Act 2009, with effect from 1 April 2013—
(a) the Chair of a select committee appointed under Standing Order No. 152 (Select Committees related to government departments), the Administration Committee, the Backbench Business Committee, the Environmental Audit Committee, the European Scrutiny Committee, the Finance and Services Committee, the Liaison Committee, the Political and Constitutional Reform Committee, the Select Committee on Procedure, the Committee of Public Accounts, the Select Committee on Public Administration, the Regulatory Reform Committee, the Committee of Selection, the Committee on Standards, the Joint Committee on Human Rights or the Joint Committee on Statutory Instruments; and
(b) a member of the Panel of Chairs appointed under Standing Order No. 4 (Panel of Chairs), other than a member who is the Chair of a committee specified in sub-paragraph (a) or a member who is entitled to an additional salary by virtue of any provision of the Ministerial and other Salaries Act 1975.
(2) If a Member already holds an office or position referred to in paragraph (1)(a), then any other office or position referred to in paragraph (1)(a) is not specified for the purposes of section 4A(2) of the Parliamentary Standards Act 2009 in respect of any period for which that other post or position is held by that Member.
(3) Any office or position referred to in paragraph (1)(a) for the purposes of section 4A(2) of the Parliamentary Standards Act 2009 is not specified for the purposes of that section in respect of any period in which it is held by a Member who is also entitled to an additional salary by virtue of any provision of the Ministerial and other Salaries Act 1975.
(4) Any reference to any committee in paragraph (1)(a) shall, if the name of the committee is changed, be taken to be a reference to the committee by its new name.
This is essentially a technical motion to meet the requirements of the Parliamentary Standards Act 2009. It enables specified Select Committee Chairs and members of the Panel of Chairs to continue to be paid an additional salary when the first determination by the Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority of MPs’ salaries comes into effect on 1 April 2013, and when there are any future determinations thereafter, as set out in the Act.
As Members may recall, under section 4 of the Parliamentary Standards Act 2009, as amended by the Constitutional Reform and Governance Act 2010, IPSA was given responsibility for paying the salaries of Members of the House of Commons. Sections 4 and 4A give IPSA responsibility for determining the amount of Members’ salaries and provide that it may determine higher salaries to be payable to Members holding offices or positions that are specified in a resolution of the House of Commons.
Under the new arrangements from 1 April, the House retains responsibility for determining those offices or positions eligible for the additional salary, but does not, of course, set the level of this additional salary. The motion specifies those positions, but importantly, the House should recognise that it makes no changes to the list of positions already eligible under existing resolutions of the House. Members can see for themselves on the Order Paper the list that the House has agreed to previously. It ensures that the—
Mr Lansley
The motion ensures that the pay settlement that takes effect from 1 April 2013 will apply to the positions listed for the purposes of the payment of additional salaries. The first determination of salaries for Members by IPSA will take effect from 1 April 2013. That determination by IPSA provides for a 1% increase in the salary of Members in April 2013 and a further 1% increase in April 2014. IPSA further determined that the additional salary payable to specified holders will also receive a 1% increase. The motion will ensure that this increase is payable to the specified office holders to whom an additional salary is paid. It will also allow IPSA to make further determinations, without the need for any intervention of the House, although IPSA is required by statute to consult and then to publish its determination.
The motion also makes it clear that no Member may receive two additional salaries for any period of time, whether by virtue of holding two specified positions or because they are paid a ministerial or other salary by virtue of the Ministerial and other Salaries Act 1975.
I hope that explains the purpose of the motion, which I commend to the House.
Ms Angela Eagle (Wallasey) (Lab)
I thank the Leader of the House for explaining the motion before us. As he said, it allows the Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority to continue paying the Panel of Chairs and Chairs of Select Committees an additional amount, on top of their parliamentary salary, on 1 April 2013. Although IPSA has the power to set MPs’ pay, the House retains responsibility for determining which offices or positions are eligible for the higher salary. The motion sets out the positions that will qualify for the extra salary payment. As the Leader of the House noted, it makes no changes from the list of positions already eligible under existing resolutions of the House.
IPSA was given the power to determine MPs’ pay in May 2011 and has recently concluded a consultation on pay rates for the next two years. It concluded, as the Leader of the House said, that MPs’ pay should rise by 1% in 2013 and by a further 1% in 2014. The motion allows that 1% increase to be added to the additional pay given to the members of the Panel of Chairs and the Chairs of Select Committees.
The Opposition agree with the Government that this is a necessary motion, which need not detain the House for long, and we therefore give it our support.
Question put and agreed to.
petition
Ms Gisela Stuart (Birmingham, Edgbaston) (Lab)
I have a petition signed by many people in the west midlands and across the country, who ask the House of Commons to urge the Government to appeal to India to take immediate action to stop the human rights abuses facing minorities in India; that India should sign and ratify the Rome statute of the International Criminal Court and the UN charter against torture and other cruel, inhumane or degrading treatment or punishment, which encompasses the death penalty; and thus India should abolish the death penalty.
And the Petitioners remain, etc.
Following is the full text of the petition:
[The Petition of residents of the United Kingdom,
Declares that the Petitioners believe that the UK Government, together with the UN and EU, should encourage the Indian Union to take immediate action to stop human rights abuses facing minorities in India and that India should sign and ratify the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court and the UN Charter against torture and other cruel, inhumane or degrading treatment or punishment which encompasses the death penalty and thus India should abolish the death penalty as it is a cruel, inhumane or degrading form of punishment; further declares that the UK Government should campaign to stop Balwant Singh Rajoana's death sentence and have him released from jail as he has served 17 years in custody and that the Indian Union should release all prisoners facing the same situation and those who have been imprisoned without trial.
The Petitioners therefore request that the House of Commons urges the Government to appeal to India for the above actions to be taken, and request that the Government bring these issues to light in the European Union and United Nations.
And the Petitioners remain, etc.]
[P001164]
Claims Management Companies
(11 years, 1 month ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Nic Dakin (Scunthorpe) (Lab)
The claims management industry has grown dramatically in recent years. In 2007, it was estimated that there were 400 claims management companies. There are now more than 3,000. The value of the industry in terms of annual turnover continues to grow and is now estimated to be £774 million, which is up 33% on last year.
Unfortunately, not all claims management companies behave responsibly. Consumer research conducted by the Association of British Insurers found that about four out of five adults in the UK had received unsolicited texts encouraging them to pursue claims for accidents or mis-sold financial products. In just 8% of cases, the individual who was contacted had had an accident or held a policy against which there might be a claim.
A Which? mystery shopping exercise found widespread rule breaches, misleading statements and unfair contract terms by a significant number of claims management companies. If you have received a text message or seen a TV advert telling you that you have thousands of pounds of unclaimed payment protection insurance, Mr Deputy Speaker, you are not alone. The research by Which? shows that 93% of people have.
In 2011-12, the claims management regulator received 10,000 complaints about claims management companies from consumers and firms. The cold calls, high-pressure tactics and misinformation that are used mean that the behaviour of some CMCs is extremely damaging to members of the public, particularly elderly and vulnerable people. Furthermore, the damage to businesses from the tenacity and dishonesty of some CMCs is very concerning. As the Motor Accident Solicitors Society points out, problems with the regulatory structure have allowed such bad practices to flourish. That is why that organisation and others have called consistently for better regulation.
The mis-selling of payment protection insurance by banks was one of the biggest mis-selling scandals ever. The courts have rightly said that those who were mis-sold PPI must be compensated. However, when claims management companies enter into the fray, further injustices occur, as a scandal of mis-selling begets a scandal of misclaiming. The claims management companies wilfully exploit the structures that are in place to protect consumers by submitting countless claims that have little or no merit, with no fear of a financial penalty. They have nothing to lose and everything to gain.
Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)
Every one of us as elected representatives has had complaints from our constituents on this matter. One of my concerns is that when people who are vulnerable financially receive information about such claims, they think that there is nothing to lose and that they will get the money. Does the hon. Gentleman think it is time that these companies were regulated so that they do not raise people’s expectations so that they think they will get the money, when at the end of the day they will not and, indeed, will be out of pocket?
Nic Dakin
The hon. Gentleman makes a good point. A constituent of mine who works for a company told me recently that a member of the public, on the advice of a claims management company, had rung it up and given it the spiel. My constituent said to her, “I’m sorry, but we haven’t been selling PPI for the last 15 years.” The lady on the other end of the phone said, “Oh, I’m really disappointed. I thought I was going to get some money.” The hon. Gentleman is exactly right that such companies raise expectations and exploit vulnerable people at a difficult time. That really should be stopped.
Based on their cold-calling fishing expeditions, claims management companies write numerous letters to businesses simply because a client recalls that they may have had a financial transaction with a company, even though no evidence is provided. The CMC-generated letters always accuse the businesses of mis-selling, citing a stock list of reasons, despite the fact that in many instances no PPI was ever sold. CMCs also buy leads, many of which have been generated by companies that follow up accident whiplash claims and then try to instigate other claims where no client discontent exists.
Ironically, members of the public do not need to use any kind of intermediary to submit a PPI claim. The consumer will be charged about 30% of their compensation if they use a claims management company, but nothing if they submit the claim themselves. The consumer group Which? estimates the average PPI claim to be £2,750, costing the consumer around £835 in CMC fees.
Claims management companies are not just unnecessary, they can be damaging to both consumers and businesses, and an example from my constituency shows how serious that can be. Ian Broadbent’s company, Blue Sky Mortgages, has to respond to a continuous stream of vexatious claims from claims management companies on behalf of clients who have never been sold PPI by his business. In some cases, his business has had no dealings with the claimants whatsoever.
That is more than a mere annoyance. When a company disputes a PPI claim, the Financial Ombudsman Service steps in. However, there are clear problems with the way in which disputed claims are handled. Businesses are charged up to £850 per case, whatever its merits, and although no fees are charged for the first three claims against a company—soon to be extended to the first 25 claims—the rate at which CMCs generate claims, often with the most scant client information, means it is not long before a business has to pay out large sums of money for doing absolutely nothing wrong.
FOS investigations further damage businesses by dragging claims on, and it can take several years for a dispute to be resolved. That can be extremely damaging for businesses, with the uncertainty and unpredictability of FOS investigations adding further pressure to businesses struggling to survive in these austere times. Businesses have no right of appeal against FOS decisions—a right that consumers and claims management companies retain—and that is at odds with some fundamental principles. Claims management companies can file claims with absolute impunity. There are no charges for false claims, and if a claim succeeds, they know the decision is final.
Jackie Doyle-Price (Thurrock) (Con)
I congratulate the hon. Gentleman on securing this important debate on an issue that has concerned our constituents for some time. Does he agree that it is perhaps time that this became a less risk-free business for claims management companies, particularly in the field of PPI where, frankly, reckless profiteering is being carried out by companies with absolutely no risk to them?
Nic Dakin
The hon. Lady makes an excellent point. We have a situation in which claims management companies can never lose, however vexatious the claims they pursue, while businesses targeted by those companies always lose. She is right: it is time to balance the risk in a different way.
Kate Green (Stretford and Urmston) (Lab)
I am glad that my hon. Friend has initiated this debate. Does he agree that some of the Government’s policies that will mean people are no longer able to access lawyers—the fast-track small claims procedure, for example—will mean that claims management companies are able to expand their businesses? People will not be able to go it alone, but neither will they be able to access proper legal advice?
Nic Dakin
My hon. Friend draws attention to a very real danger in the current changes.
In his letter to me, Mr Broadbent drew attention to the following unsatisfactory way in which the FOS acted. After downloading the FOS standard PPI claim form, a client completed it. He answered the questions honestly in the form of tick boxes, and stated that he did not recall the sale process. The claim was declined, yet nine months later a CMC made the same complaint on behalf of the same client. In this case all the boxes were ticked, stating that the client had a clear recollection of the sales process and how the product was mis-sold. That was not considered a vexatious complaint and it is being considered by the FOS. It says that it must ignore the original complaint and review it on the basis of the claim submitted by the CMC. That will not strike anyone as a sensible, fair or efficient way to proceed.
The FOS does good work resolving disputes in many areas, but its ability to deal appropriately with PPI disputes is compromised by the sheer volume of complaints it receives. Last year, complaints about PPI made up 60% of all complaints dealt with by the FOS, yet CMCs made no contribution to the running costs of the FOS. Greater control over CMCs, and a system where they will be charged for making unsuccessful claims, would help free up the FOS to deal more effectively with other matters in its inbox.
The Ministry of Justice is to be applauded for making some headway in its control of CMCs, but there is more to do. The ban on referrals in personal injury cases, which is due to come into force in April, will hopefully reduce harassment of members of the public who have been involved in accidents. The flipside of that is that claims management companies may focus more on PPI claims and look to diversify into new areas of vexatious claiming. Indeed, there is already some evidence that they are turning their attention to mortgages.
The Financial Services Authority acknowledges that there has been no wholesale mis-selling of mortgages, yet some claims management companies are already sending template letters to businesses, claiming that mortgages were mis-sold. The letters are easily produced but take a lot of time to answer—sometimes as long as 10 or 12 hours—because of the complexity of the mortgages.
The claims management regulator set up by the Ministry of Justice regularly shuts down CMCs that deliberately submit vexatious claims, but the number of claims companies is too high for the regulator to keep up. The number of companies is rising—it has doubled in the past two years to more than 3,000. The competition between them results in more vexatious claims and ever more aggressive tactics. In the years 2011-12, the regulator undertook only 150 visits and audits of firms, which is fewer than 5% of authorised CMCs.
I would be grateful if the Minister responded to a number of questions in her reply. Does she support the call of Which? for improved regulation of CMCs? Will she take steps to ban cold calling and cold texting? Will she take action to ensure that, in any advertisement, CMCs make clear to the client the benefit of their taking their claim directly, without intermediary, to the FOS? Will she place a duty on CMCs to ensure that the claims they submit contain accurate information? Claims companies should be required to exercise due diligence and must reasonably believe that there is a possibility of a valid claim. They must not be allowed to continue to fish for claims with very little consequence.
CMCs play an influential role in the UK’s compensation and redress regimes. They are responsible for almost half the complaints sent to the FOS, but make no financial contribution to its operating costs of around £107 million. In the light of that, will the Minister explore how CMCs can make a financial contribution to FOS running costs? For example, CMCs could be required to pay the £500 FOS case fee when they have not undertaken adequate checks to ensure there is a policy in place. The FOS dismisses charging for CMCS in “Charging for our work: modernising our case fee arrangements”, saying that charges will be passed on to customers. A simple solution would be to ban the collection of up-front fees and cap the percentage of a claim that a CMC can take. That would prevent their passing on to customers the reasonable charges that I argue should be levied on the industry.
Will the Minister take steps to ensure that CMCs accept leads only from organisations that are also regulated by the claims management regulator, organisations that are exempt introducers, or organisations that are regulated by another body, such as solicitors? There is concern that the FOS is insufficiently independent of the regulator, which is currently the FSA. Can that be scrutinised? Can appropriate action be taken to ensure a clear separation of powers and responsibilities? It seems unreasonable that a business must adhere to the adjudicator’s findings without a right of appeal and with no knowledge of the adjudicator’s qualification for making a decision. Can that be looked at with a view to equalising the playing field?
Finally, can steps be taken to ensure that the Ministry of Justice and the CMR have sufficient powers and capacity properly to regulate the business in a way that is fair to consumers and businesses? After all, we should support businesses such as Mr Broadbent’s. His business lends to other businesses and helps them to expand, fuelling the growth of the economy.
Claims companies are making huge amounts of money and filing huge numbers of claims against whatever businesses they can, regardless of whether they have mis-sold or even sold a PPI. At their worst, CMCs do not help the consumer, and damage businesses and clog up the regulators. Their proliferation must be stopped.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Justice (Mrs Helen Grant)
I congratulate the hon. Member for Scunthorpe (Nic Dakin) on securing this debate on claims management companies, which remain topical. Clearly, there are serious conduct problems among a minority of CMCs, but it is worth remembering that some provide a useful service in identifying consumers who have suffered loss and supporting them in obtaining redress when they would otherwise receive nothing. While we have made good progress since the start of regulation, I acknowledge that there is more that can be done and should be done to improve the conduct of CMCs, and to strengthen consumer protection across the claims management industry. To that end, the Ministry of Justice claims management regulation unit remains committed to providing a stable and robust regulatory system that the public can trust. I am glad that the hon. Gentleman acknowledged the good work that the CMR unit is doing. It is stepping up its approach to improving CMC compliance and strengthening enforcement action through a range of measures.
The CMR unit has established a specialist compliance team to deal with poor practices used by some CMCs when handling claims for mis-sold payment protection insurance. In the past year, the compliance team has conducted more than 100 audits of CMCs assessed as high risk, issued warnings, and taken other forms of enforcement action where problems have been found. This work continues and includes targeting CMCs that are submitting poorly prepared or spurious claims, charging up-front fees and operating call centres, to ensure that sales calls are compliant.
On the problem of nuisance calls and text messages, we fully support the work of the Information Commissioner’s Office in enforcing the legislation that protects individuals from this form of direct marketing. We also recognise the benefits of a joint approach to tackling the problem. Before I go further, however, it is important to point out that spam texts that market claims services are generally not sent by CMCs, but by other organisations that generate leads for other businesses, including CMCs. The CMR unit is working with the ICO to investigate and take enforcement action against CMCs accepting leads or claims from this type of marketing.
Within the personal injury claims sector, most of the issues relate to businesses or organised groups attempting to defraud the insurance industry. The CMR unit contributes valuable intelligence and expertise, and has worked with a range of organisations and agencies to tackle fraud, including the Insurance Fraud Bureau, and police forces on a number of operations throughout the year. Those operations have resulted in arrests, charges and convictions. Much has therefore been achieved at a time when resources are limited. Since regulation began in 2007, the CMR unit has removed the licences of more than 900 CMCs across the sector. More recently, a major crackdown resulted in more than 400 CMCs being warned, suspended or having their licences cancelled. That has been done with no impact on the public purse, as regulation is self-financing.
So far, I have covered the good work that the CMR unit is doing to drive out malpractice. What I want to do now is to look further ahead to the programme of reforms we are introducing this year. Our reform plans give us all huge opportunities to do things better and to ensure that the regulatory framework continues to deliver effectively. This year’s reform agenda includes four main measures. Following a consultation exercise, we are proposing to tighten the conduct rules for CMCs. Most critically, we are proposing that contractual agreements between CMCs and consumers must be signed by clients before any fees can be taken. CMCs will only be permitted to refer to being regulated by the claims management regulator, rather than by the Ministry of Justice. CMCs will have to inform their contracted client of any variation or suspension of their authorisation. We intend to publish our response to the consultation shortly and, subject to the relevant Government clearance processes that can take some time, we expect implementation of the proposed changes to follow this summer.
Last year, we ran a public consultation on imposing a ban on CMCs offering financial rewards, or similar benefits, to potential claimants as an inducement to make a claim. The ban will come into effect from 1 April. Also from 1 April, we are implementing the primary recommendations contained in Lord Justice Jackson’s review of civil litigation costs, including in particular a ban on the payment and receipt of referral fees in personal injury cases and fundamental reform to the no win, no fee conditional fee agreements. That will include, in particular, a ban on the payment and receipt of referral fees in personal injury cases and fundamental reform to the no win, no fee conditional fee agreement.
Kate Green
I am aware of the changes being made to referral fees, but is the Minister aware of the concern that, because they will be brought within the ambit of the conditional free arrangements, CMCs will be able to use those CFAs as a means simply of replacing referral fees?
Mrs Grant
I think that our reforms have looked into these issues carefully and we have anticipated many of the issues to which the hon. Lady is alluding. I was going to touch on this in my speech anyway. We feel that our reforms have been carefully considered and are proportionate, appropriate and balanced, and that we now have to start to attack our compensation culture, which has been building up for many years. Obviously, the reforms will be reviewed within three to four years, and if further changes need to be made in order to create further balance and fairness, of course that can be considered.
Nic Dakin
The Minister is spelling out some of the good work being done through the Ministry of Justice and the CMR, but may I pick up on the point made by the hon. Member for Thurrock (Jackie Doyle-Price) about the balance of risk? The Financial Ombudsman Service places all the risk with businesses, which means that CMCs can act with impunity and without risk. Is the Minister talking to her colleagues across government to ensure that the excellent work being done by the MOJ is met in parallel by the other Departments and so can be reinforced?
Mrs Grant
Again, I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for acknowledging the good work of the CMR unit in the MOJ. Of course, we are working across government to try to get this right. I hear exactly what he says, but we need to take a balanced approach and to accept that not all CMCs are bad. We want targeted, appropriate and proportionate action against the bad companies, but we also want the good ones to continue.
Lastly, this year we intend to commence powers under the Legal Services Act 2007 to extend the Legal Ombudsman’s restriction in order to provide an independent complaints and redress scheme for clients dissatisfied with the service provided to them by the CMC they have contracted with. Consumers will benefit, because the Legal Ombudsman has wider powers of redress, including the ability to order compensation.
I want to pick up on some of the issues raised by hon. Members. I believe that I have already touched on my attitude to balance and our civil reforms to funding and the costs. I would like to reassure the hon. Member for Scunthorpe that I firmly believe that, notwithstanding the reforms, meritorious claims will still be permitted. It is avoidable and spurious claims that we want to stop.
On the issue of banning cold calling and texting, I should say that nuisance calls and text messaging are a serious problem that can cause considerable annoyance, as clearly it has done in the case of the company in the hon. Gentleman’s constituency. The Information Commissioner’s Office can take enforcement action and has lead responsibility in this area, but we of course work very closely with it, and will continue to do so. The commissioner can impose penalties of up to £500,000 for serious breaches of privacy. Indeed, I was informed a few days ago that for the first time it recently issued fines totally £440,000 to two illegal marketers responsible for distributing millions of spam e-mails.
In our opinion, a blanket ban on cold calling would be disproportionate. Other businesses operating in similar industries such as debt management are not subject to a blanket ban. Next year, CMCs will have to have a signed contract before they can take any up-front fees from an individual, and that will tackle the main detriment resulting from cold calling.
On the issue of charging CMCs, we fear that that could penalise consumers who find the services of CMCs helpful in making complaints. We worry, too, that any fee would be likely to be passed on to the consumer. Also, we do not believe that charging a fee is the correct approach to protecting consumers. Protection will ultimately be achieved by effective regulation.
Jackie Doyle-Price
I hear what the Minister is saying, but I draw her attention to PPI claims, for which the banks have well-established processes that involve only the filling in of a form. The presence of an up-front fee might make consumers think twice about giving their business to a company, and about doing the work themselves instead.
Mrs Grant
I hear what my hon. Friend is saying, but I am afraid that I fundamentally disagree with her on this point.
The hon. Member for Scunthorpe asked who might be the best regulator for these purposes. I believe that the MOJ is in a good position to continue in that role. We can act now, and we are doing so. The CMR unit has a good track record of making a difference using relatively limited resources, and we have had a good response from stakeholders, who are supporting the regulation remaining with us. I also believe that it is not a good idea to transfer responsibility at a time of substantial change.
In conclusion, the CMR unit will step up its approach, and resources will be devoted to tackling the underlying problems that exist in the conduct of some CMCs. I do not believe that institutional reform is necessarily the answer, especially at a time when the industry is undergoing such fundamental change. The industry will of course have its role to play in driving up standards. CMCs must give consumers and defendants more confidence in the system by ensuring that they comply properly, fairly and adequately with the rules.
Question put and agreed to.