Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Nigel Evans and Matt Hancock

Thursday 26th June 2014 Commons Chamber

[Mr Nigel Evans (Ribble Valley) (Con)]

7. What additional funding for training his Department has provided to support unemployed people and people aged 16 to 24 to get into employment.

[The Minister for Skills and Enterprise (Matthew Hancock)]

We have record numbers participating in apprenticeships, new traineeships, maths and English training, which, with the record number of jobs, have contributed to a 98,000 fall in youth unemployment over the last year. We are simplifying vocational education and today publishing a simple slide showing young people their education options between the ages of 14 and 18.

[Mr Evans]

I have a BAE Systems plant at Samlesbury in my constituency, and my hon. Friend the Member for Fylde (Mark Menzies) has one in Warton. BAE Systems took on a record number of apprentices last year, giving young people an opportunity to learn new skills to use in highly paid jobs when they are later taken on. What are the Government doing to encourage many more smaller firms to understand that apprenticeships can also benefit them?

[Matthew Hancock]

I pay tribute to the work that BAE Systems does with its apprenticeships. It not only has hundreds of apprentices, many of whom I have met, but offers more and more higher apprenticeships, which provide the very best available training on the job. We have to make sure that smaller businesses get the message that apprenticeships can help them too; in fact, the majority of apprentices are in smaller businesses. We have made the apprenticeship grant for employers focused on smaller businesses to help them with the extra costs they have in taking on apprentices.

Enterprise and Regulatory Reform Bill

Debate between Nigel Evans and Matt Hancock

Wednesday 17th October 2012 Commons Chamber

[Matthew Hancock]

I beg to move amendment 23,  page 47, line 17, at end insert—

“( ) But regulations under this section may make only such provision as may be made under subsection (2) of section 2 of the European Communities Act 1972 or such provision as could be made under that subsection if paragraph 1(1)(d) of Schedule 2 to that Act did not apply.’.

[Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Nigel Evans)]

With this it will be convenient to discuss the following:

Government amendment 24.

Amendment 75, in clause 59, page 49, line 19, at end insert—

‘(7) The Secretary of State must have regard to any feasibility study commissioned on the licensing of orphan works in advance of the regulations being laid before Parliament.’.

[Matthew Hancock]

In Committee, a number of questions were asked about the scope of what was then clause 56—now clause 57—on copyright. The hon. Member for North Norfolk (Norman Lamb), who was a Minister in the Department at the time,agreed to reflect on the clause and we have also had further discussions with interested parties.

The Government have considered this point carefully and think that amendments to clause 57 are the best way to address the concerns expressed by Committee members and industry stakeholders. I reassure hon. Members that the policy intent behind the clause remains unchanged. The clause was never intended to give the Government the ability to change copyright exceptions in ways that we cannot already change them and I hope that the amendments now make that abundantly clear.

Changes to copyright exceptions are subject to a tightly prescribed list set out in the EU information society directive. The European Communities Act 1972 provide the mechanism by which EU law is applied at a national level—in this case on copyright exceptions. The clause will permit the Secretary of State to make any changes that remove or narrow an exception without affecting the maximum criminal penalties that Parliament has set. Without the amendment, the criminal penalties might have had to be reduced and I do not think that is the aim of the Bill.

The stakeholders who had raised concerns about the clause, including the British Copyright Council, UK Music, the Publishers Association, the Creators’ Rights Alliance and the Premier League, have written to the Secretary of State confirming their support for the Government’s amendments.

Enterprise and Regulatory Reform Bill

Debate between Nigel Evans and Matt Hancock

Tuesday 16th October 2012 Commons Chamber

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Skills (Matthew Hancock)]

I beg to move, That the clause be read a Second time.

[Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Nigel Evans)]

With this it will be convenient to discuss Government amendment 34.

[Matthew Hancock]

Government new clause 14 relates to civil liability for breaches of health and safety duties. It fulfils our commitment in the Budget to introduce measures to reduce the burden of health and safety, following the recommendations made in the independent Löfstedt report. Professor Löfstedt considered the impact that the perception of a compensation culture has had in driving over-compliance with health and safety at work regulations. The fear of being sued drives businesses to exceed what is required by the criminal law, diverting them from focusing on sensible preventive health and safety management and resulting in unnecessary costs and burdens.

Professor Löfstedt identified the unfairness that can arise when health and safety at work regulations impose a strict duty on employers that makes them liable to pay compensation to employees injured or made ill by their work, despite all reasonable steps having been taken to protect them from harm. Employers can, for example, be held liable for damages when an injury is caused by equipment failure, even when a rigorous examination would not have revealed the defect. The new clause is designed to address that and other unfair consequences of the existing health and safety system.

We all have different reasons for coming into politics. When I was growing up, I had one of the experiences that brought me to this place, concerning the over-burdensome intervention of health and safety officers. I worked in a family computer software company when an over-long health and safety investigation took place, which took up huge amounts time for the officers and senior management. The only result at the end of it was the recommendation that some bleach in a cupboard must be labelled correctly. After a sign was put up saying, “There is bleach in the cupboard. Please do not drink it,” the company was passed under the health and safety regulations.

These changes will ensure that there is a reasonableness defence in the consideration of some health and safety cases.

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[Matthew Hancock]

If businesses behave unreasonably and are negligent, they will be caught by the system. That proves the point about why we have to strike a good balance between a health and safety system that everybody supports and under which employers—and others—have to behave reasonably and take reasonable precautions, and a system in which the test of having acted reasonably is not a defence in civil law. That is the change being made; it will help to free up business, and I commend the new clause to the House.

[Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Nigel Evans)]

I call the Minister [Interruption.] I meant the shadow Minister.

Bank of England (Appointment of Governor) Bill

Debate between Nigel Evans and Matt Hancock

Friday 6th July 2012 Commons Chamber

[Matthew Hancock]

I supported yesterday’s decision, because one thing we are dealing with now is the consequence of money being too loose, which is the deleveraging in the banking system, which is causing a huge drag on the economy. Therefore, the mitigation of that deleveraging, through loose monetary policy—low interest rates and in a quantitative sense—is something that I support. However, more strongly than I support the Bank’s decision, I support its ability to make it in a way that is unconstrained by political considerations.

[Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Nigel Evans)]

Order. Any chance of mentioning the Bill from time to time?

[Matthew Hancock]

Absolutely; this argument is vital to the Bill. It is a question of whether the Governor’s appointment should be in the gift of the Government or should be capable of being vetoed by people who are not necessarily the Government’s appointees. I apologise if I did not make it clear why this is precisely and closely related to the Bill.

In considering the Bill’s impact, it is important to remember that the Governor is only one member of the Monetary Policy Committee and of the Financial Policy Committee. As we saw last month, the Governor voted in favour of quantitative easing a month before the Committee had a majority for it. In that light, it is slightly odd that the Bill considers only the Governor when the body that determines our monetary policy is the whole membership of the Monetary Policy Committee. There are nine members, five of whom are executives of the Bank of England and four are so-called external members. While the Treasury Committee has oversight of, and the ability to scrutinise, all the others, there is no proposal for the other eight Committee members or the other members of the Financial Policy Committee to be subject to a veto by the Treasury Committee. In that sense, those who support the arguments in this Bill—I do not—should support a veto over the appointment of the other members of the Committee.

The Bill makes it clear from line 20 onwards that the deputy governors are not subject to the oversight of the Treasury Committee. Given that the deputy governors have one vote each and the Governor has only one vote, too, although he does by convention vote last, the argument does not change with respect to the deputy governors and the Governor. There is thus a confusion at the heart of the Bill.

The proposed appointment process by the Treasury Committee ignores the measures in the Financial Services Bill, which I think removes the motivation for bringing this Bill forward now. The structure of the Bank of England will change from having an imperial Governor to having one who is the head of a committee—the Financial Policy Committee—on the financial stability side of the Bank.

The need for a common strategy between the Bank and the Government is more important now than it has been for a long time. The financial crisis laid bare the importance of co-ordinating monetary and fiscal policy. For a while, it was wrongly believed in this country that those two policies could be separate. Indeed, financial policy was separated again, so we had a tripartite system, with financial policy vested in the Financial Services Authority, monetary policy in the Bank of England and fiscal policy in the Treasury. It is not the case that they were separable. It is clear from how the world is having to manage the current difficult situation that these are not discrete entities, but aspects of one another.

The banks themselves are part of the transmission mechanism, too. I like to say that they stand in relation to the Monetary Policy Committee as the Higgs boson particle stands to matter: they give substance to the Committee’s decisions because they transmit interest rates and monetary policy into the real economy. Similarly, the level of debt in the economy is symbiotically connected to banking regulation because regulation of the leverage of banks has a direct impact on the amount of debt, and the removal of the regulation over leverage and the amount of debt in the economy was one of the main drivers of the over-leverage and vast expansion of the money supply that led to the grave difficulties we face in managing the current economy. That explains why it is so important for the broad strategy of the Government of the day to be supported by the Governor of the Bank of England.

What we do not want to see are more asset bubbles, and we might see those if we had a Governor who did not agree with the strategy of the day. Fiscal policy could work against monetary policy, rather than the two broadly working together both to deal with an over-indebted economy and to enable the decisive action that is necessary to stimulate the economy and prevent a banking crisis from turning into a slump. This is not, as some of my hon. Friends have suggested, a matter that has no impact on our postbags. Although few people write to me about the appointment process of the Bank of England, an error in that process could have a profound impact on our economy, and would doubtless hit our postbags very hard.

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[Matthew Hancock]

That would be an example of where monetary policy and the wider economic policies of the Government were not working in tandem. The Minister explained the procedures for the removal of a Governor, and they require the proposal of the court—I think the strengthening of the court is important. There are procedures in place, therefore. It might be thought that a wider discussion of this point would not be in order, but the Bill is about getting rid of the Governor as well as the appointment of the Governor. My hon. Friend might therefore want to touch on that point in more detail later. I had not considered it, but it is important and it should be scrutinised properly and at length by somebody who has considered it more closely than I have.

As for the counter-factual, or what happens when the views of the central bank are at variance with those of the Government, the problem in the years running up to the crisis was not that the leadership of the Bank was too close to the Government, but that the voice of the Bank was being ignored by the Government for political reasons, hence the fact that the growth of the money supply was too fast and the subsequent difficulties in handling the crisis. This was pointed out by the Bank, and Sir Andrew Large made a speech making clear the problems of over-rapid growth of the money supply in 2004. He pointed to the dangers of supposedly benevolent innovations such as the rise of securitisation, and he asked whether that was causing problems that our Government should be addressing. There was no response from the Government of the day.

In May 2006, the current Governor warned that

“a potentially large social problem, with many households getting into difficulty with their debts, is materialising.”

He was in a position to know, because he had received in the post a piece of junk mail—a credit card application from a bank—and the literature said:

“We have the solution, Mervyn, for your bankruptcy.”

The bank in question did not realise that Sir Mervyn King was not bankrupt—and I certainly hope he would never be bankrupt. Indeed, there was a worse problem: one bank—RBS—sent a credit card to a—

[Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Nigel Evans)]

Order. What has this got to do with the Bill?

[Matthew Hancock]

It is important that the Governor of the day has the same broad strategy as the Government—but I will move on, Mr Deputy Speaker.

We have one further, and chilling, example.

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[Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Nigel Evans)]

I think that it is up to any hon. Member to use whatever communicating devices are at their disposal, quite frankly. The House is clearly here for the hon. Member for Clacton (Mr Carswell) to come to and speak, if he so wishes; if he does not wish to do so, it is up to him.

[Matthew Hancock]

Hear, hear, I say. I think that all sorts of communication are very useful in this modern age. I respect my hon. Friend the Member for Clacton (Mr Carswell) a great deal—and the hon. Member for Blaenau Gwent (Nick Smith)—but I have a very simple response. As I said at the start of my speech, I think that this proposal would mark a significant constitutional departure. It is about the distinction between the legislature and the Executive and about blurring that distinction. The idea that we should pass the Bill after only five hours of debate on a Friday lunchtime, compared with the 10 days of debate in Committee of the whole House proposed by the Government on House of Lords reform, which merely changes the architecture within that legislative branch, is absurd. If we want to make a change of such importance, we should be able to debate it fully and frankly. Going through some of the historical and international comparisons is vital to a significant change.

Finance Bill

Debate between Nigel Evans and Matt Hancock

Tuesday 20th July 2010 Commons Chamber

[Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Nigel Evans)]

Order. Before the hon. Member for West Suffolk (Matthew Hancock) resumes his speech, let me say that we allow some latitude on Third Reading of the Finance Bill, but that it would be useful if Members made reference to the Bill from time to time.

[Matthew Hancock]

The reductions in corporation tax that are outlined in this Bill have been welcomed by the CBI, the British Chambers of Commerce, the Institute of Directors and the Federation of Small Businesses. Indeed, a multitude of business organisations have welcomed it. Even the Engineering Employers Federation said that this was a path in the right direction. That shows the support from business organisations.

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[Matthew Hancock]

On a point of order, Mr Deputy Speaker. I am new to the House. Could you possibly advise me whether it is appropriate for a Member to make an entire speech having stated in advance that he or she will take no interventions whatever?

[Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Nigel Evans)]

It is very much up to hon. Members whether to take any interventions or a number of interventions, but what I have heard from the hon. Lady tells me that she is going to take no interventions during her speech.