DWP: Performance
Debate between Baroness Primarolo and Michael Connarty(9 years, 11 months ago)
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Michael Connarty (Linlithgow and East Falkirk) (Lab)
The fact that we know about the work capability assessment is that 700,000 people are still waiting to be assessed.
We have heard a lot of talk about DLA. Disability benefits, including DLA, were basically Margaret Thatcher’s Government’s dumping ground for people she did not want to put on the unemployment register.
Employment and support allowance and PIP are a problem because people are not getting assessed. The problem is not about the delivery company. It is not about whether it is Atos or someone else. It is about the basis of the assessment. I had two recent cases. I had a letter in January from a woman who said, “Thank you for believing in my husband. He got his benefit back. Sadly, he died over the Christmas holidays.” He clearly was not fit to work.
I met another lady who said that the DWP had killed her husband. He had a Co-op book. Perhaps people who do not know about working-class communities do not know what a Co-op book is. It is where people pay their insurance to somebody who comes round every Friday night. He was told that he was fit to work. He got no benefit, so he took a book back. He literally dropped down dead going round the village with his book on a Friday.
The contract had no penalties. Even though 158,000 cases were overturned by the DWP and the benefit appeals system cost £40 million, the contract had no penalties for Atos or anyone else. I hope that the Government will not let a similar contract in the future.
The system must be based on medical assessments. That has gone under this Government. People relied on the assessment of a consultant. That would be taken really seriously and people would keep their benefits. It would be realised that they were not capable of work. That has all gone. Now someone is partly trained to sit at a computer and tap away, without even looking at the person who is asking for the appeal or for the benefits. That has got to stop; we have to go back to medically based assessments.
We are told that there are fewer people on the claimant count—people are in employment—but the fact is, as I said to the Secretary of State, that £13.5 billion more had to be borrowed because of the fall in income tax receipts. He said that that is because the personal allowance has now been raised to £10,000—that is £200 a week; that is 20 hours maximum. People are still getting tax credits to top that up, which is why we still have basically the working poor claiming benefits while they are working.
On jobseeker’s allowance, everyone I talk to about the Universal Jobmatch says, “Oh, it’s out of date. The jobs have gone by the time you apply.” People are searching the world for jobs when they are looking for a job locally, and they may not have the skills or education to take the things that are on offer. Telephones have been removed by the DWP from jobcentres. People cannot phone in to make their claims so they have to go and find some other way of doing it.
The Government refuse to believe diligent jobseekers. I know someone who made 20 job applications a day and was told, “We do not believe you”—sanctioned. Another person was sent for a training or work interview on the same day as they were signing on, so they did not turn up for their interview—sanctioned. Another was told at their job interview, “14 hours at a basic minimum wage”, so they would therefore lose all of their benefit to keep their home, which was a private rent—sanctioned. Those are the case-by-case facts. It is quite clear that the Secretary of State lives in a parallel universe, and so do most of the people who have been defending him.
Pathways to Work worked, and I remember the pleasure of people being trained back into work capability. Finally, we must have some concerns with DWP and jobcentre staff. I opened a telephone bank, and I said at the time, “You need counsellors to support people because they are stressed; they are missing work because they are ill, and that is caused by this Government.”
Justice and Home Affairs Opt-out
Debate between Baroness Primarolo and Michael Connarty(10 years, 1 month ago)
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Michael Connarty
I am sure that we will debate the charter of fundamental rights report, which divided the European Scrutiny Committee when it was finally read. To return to a question I asked earlier: why are the Government still in the situation where a UK court can decide that a European arrest warrant is not valid and that the person does not have to return to the country demanding their return—in the case I am interested in, that country is Poland—but when they leave the UK to go on holiday elsewhere in Europe, it appears that the Government have not put in place the ability to have that judgment recognised in other countries. I have a constituent whose father is very ill, and who is now in Poland, having been arrested in the Netherlands—
Madam Deputy Speaker (Dawn Primarolo)
Order. We have got the point. Let us not make these interventions too long.
Jobs and Growth
Debate between Baroness Primarolo and Michael Connarty(12 years ago)
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Michael Connarty (Linlithgow and East Falkirk) (Lab)
This Queen’s Speech can be summed up by the Prime Minister wandering around the country saying that he is not for turning. I remind him and his party that the last person who said that—Lady Thatcher—was tossed out by the country when people found out that they were getting uncaring Conservatism once again. [Interruption.] Yes, she was, of course, tossed out by her own party.
This is a Government who continue to attack, with ingrained unfairness, the personal income of all apart from those in the super-rich bracket. They boast of attacking citizens’ and workers’ rights. With 100,000 public sector job cuts, it is good to see the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions in his place. How many of the present employees of Remploy will, to his shame, end up on the unemployment list? Only 50% of the jobs have been replaced by the private sector, and many of them are part-time and temporary jobs. Of 16 to 24-year-olds, 21% are in part-time jobs, while analysis suggests that 40% are on temporary contracts.
The national debt is higher, not lower, and the UK is in a double-dip recession for the first time in 30 years. Of course I welcome investment in car manufacturing from US companies. Their choosing a UK work force in a flexible trade union environment and our being near the EU market has nothing to do with the Government, and it follows the investment of Japanese and other international companies that invested under the Labour Government.
I am an economics graduate, so I know that economic growth is based on confidence in business and in consumers. The Chancellor is a one-trick pony, with low interest rates. His stated aim is that interest rates are being held low for the sake of the Government’s bond sales, but this has the effect, for example, of attacking the disposable income of pension funds and investment funds, thus hitting the mainly frugal elderly. Quantitative easing has also hit their income and made them poorer. This signals to UK businesses that the Government believe that the economy has to be held in check, as it is fundamentally too fragile to grow without creating threatening levels of inflation. This is caused by a failure to expand the resource base of the economy so that growth can be inflation-proofed for the future.
I looked at the “Prospects for inflation” chapter of the inflation report of May 2012, which states:
“Output has barely grown since the middle of 2010, and is estimated to have contracted slightly in each of the past two quarters.”
That is what this Government have delivered through their policies. Human resource expansion is required to deal, for example, with training and skills shortages. The ageing population needs to be replaced in industries with which I am involved. There is OPITO—the Offshore Petroleum Industry Training Organisation, which deals with offshore oil, and the subsea employers association—talk about 44% of its vacancies being in non-graduate technical jobs, with an additional 20% in technical graduate jobs. The Chemical Industries Association says that it fishes in the same pond for staff, and it demands science education in schools to provide a base of people who can be skilled up for growth. Mike Mack, the world president of Syngenta, says that he fears he cannot sustain his investment in this country because of the shortage of skilled labour. He steals from other companies, and they steal from him. We need technical apprenticeships. Forget the boasts about the number of apprenticeships that have been started; how many have been concluded? How many newly qualified technicians have we got? The SNP Government falsify the statistics. They say that there are 25,000, and write to companies asking them to include people who are doing part-time work as apprentices in order to supplement the figure.
Business investment is 6% lower than the target set by the Chancellor. There is £950 billion in company accounts that is not being invested. Companies are holding on to it: they are afraid to invest, because the signals are all wrong. The Chancellor has gone for corporation tax reductions, but they are a blunt instrument. VAT increases hit the supply chain for customers, for business and for personal consumption, whereas VAT reductions—a targeted programme such as the one that the French use, reducing VAT—
Council of Europe (UK Chairmanship)
Debate between Baroness Primarolo and Michael Connarty(12 years, 7 months ago)
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Madam Deputy Speaker (Dawn Primarolo)
Order. We are not conducting a conversation; this is a debate.
Postal Services Bill
Debate between Baroness Primarolo and Michael Connarty
Madam Deputy Speaker (Dawn Primarolo)
Order. We are not discussing the entire Bill. We are having a time-limited debate about specific amendments. The Minister knows that as well as every other Member of this House, so I am sure that he does not want to tempt the hon. Member for Linlithgow and East Falkirk (Michael Connarty) down that path. Perhaps the hon. Gentleman can focus specifically on these amendments so that the Minister will not be troubled.
Michael Connarty
I was talking about the amendments; the new requirement in Lords amendment 1 is that the report must include the
“objective intended to be achieved”
by the disposal of shares. That is a specific Lords amendment and I am questioning what will be put before the House as a result. Will it be a report on the progress of fragmentation and of these parts in trying to achieve the Minister’s stated aim for his sale of these shares?
The Minister has spoken repeatedly about finding some way of saving the post office network. I know that great steps have been made on the Bill through the amendments won by the diligent efforts of Labour Members and Cross Benchers in the Lords. There will be some sort of inter-business agreement and it will be extended. I know that the Minister is not trying to pull the wool over our eyes, because he is telling us about his aspirations. However, when I hear him talk, I am unsure what his benchmarks for achievement under these amendments will be if it turns out that his idea of having a full network of post offices and post office “locals” does not work, the “locals” fade away and—I believe this will happen—we begin to lose post offices at a faster rate than would have happened under the previous Government’s plans to stop the flood by taking out a number of post offices and hoping to leave enough business for those that remained.
I did not agree with that approach, but I recognised what the previous Government were trying to do. I do not understand how the Secretary of State will report on these matters as a result of these amendments. If the report were honest, it might suggest that we have to do something different. I want the Minister to tell us what he feels his duties now are as a result of these amendments or what he feels the duties will be of whoever succeeds him, should there ever be a change of Minister. I do not wish such a change upon him, because he deserves to come back to apologise for everything he is now bringing about.
Is this about return to the Exchequer? Let us look at the attempts of previous Governments to sell shares and at the way in which they sold those shares. The sale of the first tranche of British Telecom shares achieved a 90% profit in one day for those who bought them, because it was an attempt to get quick money into the Exchequer—or was it just to get British Telecom into the private sector? If it was to get money into the Exchequer, the then Government appear to have greatly short-changed themselves and the country. A better example, also in telecoms, is provided by the sale of level 3 broadband, in which we made a substantial profit for the Exchequer because of the way in which we auctioned it off, although that did not please people in the industry.
I would like the Minister to tell us how these things are going to work. Will the judgment be based on return to the Exchequer? I know that the Government will, if they get their way, want to balance that against their willingness to take on any deficit in the pension fund that comes with taking on the pension assets. These matters have to be clearly spelt out by the Secretary of State so that people can judge what he is going to do in the Bill. That is what is accepted in the amendment. People want more clarity because we have not been given a clear understanding of the benchmarks and targets that the Government hope to achieve. We have had warm words and aspirations, but given the backdrop—the person who has given those assurances has previously given assurances that they were against full privatisation of the Post Office—we would like to see something a bit more solid on the ground. Perhaps the Minister could say something about what the intentions are.
The amendment also asks for more information about the purpose and structure of the mutualisation. It has been suggested to the Government that it might be useful to set up a task force immediately, but I do not think they have taken that idea up. The idea is to give share options to the members of a work force who have seen 55,000 of their members thrown out the door already and who have heard from the chief executive in the past few days that another 40,000 are about to go behind them, so there is hardly going to be an atmosphere in which anything can be done mutually unless a lot of hard work is done.
I agree with the points made my hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Erdington (Jack Dromey) about the hard work and dedication of long-term Post Office employees. We know that people go and work there in the short term and realise that it is a difficult job with unbelievably hard hours and that they often have to work in the most inclement weather to get the mail through. However, many of the people who have been there for a long time want the company to succeed and want its work force to be secured and modernised. A task force would be useful, and it would be useful if the Minister would spell out exactly what will be the benchmark for mutualisation so that the amendments have some value when they are in the Bill.
European Union Bill
Debate between Baroness Primarolo and Michael Connarty(13 years, 4 months ago)
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The Second Deputy Chairman of Ways and Means (Dawn Primarolo)
Order. Before I call the next speaker, let me remind the Committee that the debate will end at 10 pm. I want to ensure that the Minister has sufficient time in which to answer all the questions that have been put to him, and that the mover of the amendment has time to reply. May I ask the remaining speakers to bear that in mind?
Michael Connarty
As you see, Ms Primarolo, I am surrounded by a large number of papers. I have asked many questions during my time as a member of the European Scrutiny Committee, and I hope that I shall not need to rehearse much of the evidence that we received. I hope that Members have taken the trouble to read that evidence rather than merely bringing their prejudices to the Chamber, warmed up for the day.
This is a joke Bill, and clause 18 is the biggest joke in it. It is a silly Bill. As we have already heard, it gives us no ability to change anything. My hon. Friend the Member for Dunfermline and West Fife (Thomas Docherty) quoted a Member who said today that at least the clause did no harm. In fact, it does nothing positive at all.
I respect the hon. Member for Aldridge-Brownhills (Mr Shepherd), who has often spoken very emotionally about sovereignty and our Parliament’s ability to hold back the tide of European power. He emphasised that repeatedly during our debate on the Lisbon treaty, and he spoke very well tonight about many principles that we all hold dear. The joke lies in the suggestion that those principles—of self-government, the will of the people, and the things that we wish to do—have been filtered through clause 18 to give it some force, for it is clear that the clause makes no difference to what went before or what will come afterwards. Section 2(1) of the European Communities Act 1972 gave primacy to EU law by the will of this Parliament. That will continue, regardless of whether we pass the Bill—and in particular, regardless of clause 18.
The joke is also being played on the Eurosceptics on the Back Benches, and I think that they know it. The joke is being played on them by the Government, who are suggesting that the clause somehow constitutes a response to the promises that they gave to their constituents. They are saying, “This Conservative-led Government will give you back some kind of sovereignty.” As was pointed out by the hon. Member for Daventry (Chris Heaton-Harris), if we pass clause 18, these matters may be judged in court. Professor Tomkins said in his evidence that this was a dangerous clause because it put down a written constitutional principle, and any principle that is written down can then be challenged in court. The measure may therefore tempt Back Benchers to go to court when they feel they are not getting a hearing from Front Benchers.
If the Eurosceptics did not put their careers, and maybe their finances, before their principles, the true solution for them would be to leave the Conservative party, which is clearly not a Eurosceptic party—it is not going to challenge European sovereignty—and to join the UK Independence party instead. They could then try to build up UKIP into a force that people might vote for. It would be a party that wished to change things fundamentally by opposing and overturning the 1972 Act—perhaps by making laws in this place that challenge and ignore current EU law, as the hon. Member for Harwich and North Essex (Mr Jenkin) suggested—and thereby causing that to be judged in a court of law. Would a judge strike it down or not? Would the European Court of Justice try to strike it down by some other means?
That would come about only if UKIP Members were in the majority here in Parliament. It will not come about under this Government. The terrible thing is that this is a joke being played on the British people—on the people who voted for a Conservative party that cloaked itself in Euroscepticism without ever meaning to deliver any change in the relationship between the EU and this Parliament.
When the Lisbon treaty went through I said that it marked a tipping point, in that it was tipping power to Europe in a way that could not be changed unless we changed the 1972 Act, because we cannot get out of the deals that have been done. I was Chair of the European Scrutiny Committee at the time, and I think the rest of the Committee agreed with me.
I happen to like the progress that has been made, however, as I am a Europhile. I think that Europe is our saviour, rather than our enemy. I think that as part of Europe we will go forward as a stronger community and with a better culture than we would have if we broke away from Europe. I have no wish to see my world shrunk politically or culturally, or for the people’s rights, defended by Europe, to be taken away by our going back into partisan fights between right-wing capitalists and left-wing statists.
The Second Deputy Chairman
Order. Hon. Members are fully aware that only one Member should be on their feet at any one time, rather than everyone standing up and shouting together. Mr Connarty has the Floor. Perhaps Members will bear that in mind, and perhaps they will also bear in mind the clock, in order to ensure that the final Member to be called gets a chance to speak.
Michael Connarty
I certainly will bear that in mind. I am very aware of the clock, and I think—
The Second Deputy Chairman
That is enough. Mr Connarty has the Floor. I ask the hon. Member for Na h-Eileanan an Iar (Mr MacNeil) to be quiet and to listen to the debate.
Michael Connarty
I am grateful, but I really do not need protection from the bullies on the Scottish nationalist Benches.
I believe that this joke is very serious and dangerous. The Front-Bench team can be very persuasive, and it has to convince people that this Bill, and in particular this clause, changes things—but it does not.