Apprenticeships and Skills (Public Procurement Contracts) Bill

David Hamilton Excerpts

Friday 1st November 2013 Commons Chamber

[Mr David Hamilton (Midlothian) (Lab)]

On the question of a paid-for paper, my area has a population of 80,000, but the local paper’s circulation is only 7,000. The jobcentre is the only place that most people can get it.

[Mr Nuttall]

The point remains the same: a jobseeker would look in the paper whether it is delivered to their home or whether they read it at a friend’s house, a jobcentre or a library. The point is that they would still look in a local paper.

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[Lyn Brown]

By not excluding small firms from supply chains, we can set up vehicles that enable them to compete in the same way as larger firms. The apprenticeships requirement that the Bill would enable authorities to deliver will not preclude smaller firms from participating.

The ATA model has allowed the creation and delivery of apprenticeship opportunities that would not otherwise have been created. To date, it has seen a peak of 60 apprenticeships on site, the highest number on a single site in London in 2013. I am sure that we all congratulate them. The project has now moved into its follow-on phase, with the LLDC and REDS10 working closely with prime and subcontractors that have recently commenced work on site to secure opportunities for existing apprentices who are completing initial placements with contractors. By September 2013, 15 apprentices had been successfully moved to new placements and five had been moved into permanent employment. That is something we all want to see.

To deliver on its public commitments and support contractors, the LLDC set up a transformation job and apprenticeship brokerage project. The project is overseen by a construction operations group, chaired by the LLDC and with representation from key employment and skills service providers in east London. Since October 2012 the project has supported contractors, who in many cases exceeded their contractual commitments, because they see the benefit of training people not only in the skills they want them to have, but in the company ethos.

Once employers get engaged in such an organisation and become more au fait with having apprentices and the support of bigger organisations to enable the admin and those bits of the apprenticeship programme that they cannot deliver, they see that there is a genuine benefit for themselves. In order to reach that stage, however, employers need to be convinced that this place has legislated to enable the overall authority to provide such a programme. That is why the Bill is so relevant.

[Mr David Hamilton]

Midlothian council is the second smallest land-locked authority in the UK. It is currently building 1,500 council houses. One of the great things we found was that the contractors want a level playing field, because good companies that take on apprentices do not want to be disadvantaged by others not doing so. That would be supported by the Bill.

[Lyn Brown]

I absolutely agree, and I am grateful to my hon. Friend.

The London Legacy Development Corporation is aware of the transient nature of the work force in sectors such as construction and has asked its contractors to monitor the length of their workers’ residency. When we were building in preparation for the Olympic games, we were keen to make sure that local people, who were being severely disadvantaged by the construction process, were able to take advantage of the opportunities that came their way.

We set up lots of monitoring schemes to find out whether the people getting the jobs and apprenticeships came from the area. Unsurprisingly, people moved into the area to take up the jobs and apprenticeships and then moved out, taking with them their skills and spending power. That, obviously, is not great; we wanted to transform the local area and make sure that local people had the advantages.

Oral Answers to Questions

David Hamilton Excerpts

Tuesday 20th December 2011 Commons Chamber

[Mr Harper]

My hon. Friend makes a good point. Our constituents lobby us every day of the week about legitimate issues, for example. We must be careful to take these matters forward sensibly, which is why we are going to bring forward our proposals for consultation to ensure that we get this right and that we do not inadvertently stop our constituents and others raising important issues with us.

[Mr David Hamilton (Midlothian) (Lab)]

2. What steps he is taking to ensure that armed forces personnel are registered for postal and proxy voting at the next general election as part of his plans for individual electoral registration.

[The Deputy Prime Minister (Mr Nick Clegg)]

We are committed to helping service personnel to register and cast their votes. Service voters who are on the register before the move to individual electoral registration will remain registered until their service declaration expires, up to five years later. We also plan to extend the administrative timetable for UK parliamentary elections, which means that there will be a lot more time for service voters to return postal votes from overseas. We will also make it easier for them to apply for a proxy vote if they are deployed at very short notice before an election.

[Mr Hamilton]

I thank the Deputy Prime Minister for that answer. The number of service personnel serving abroad who were registered to vote increased from about 36% in 2005 to 48% in 2008. At the last general election, in 2010, there were only 294 proxy votes and 240 postal votes from the 9,000 members of the armed forces based in Afghanistan. What is the Deputy Prime Minister going to do to ensure that the speed at which he is moving on this issue does not isolate our armed forces in Afghanistan?

[The Deputy Prime Minister]

First, let me pay tribute to the previous Government for the very good work done to help servicemen and women in Afghanistan to make sure that they can participate fully. There was a real step change there, and we have continued with that for the elections of May this year. Registration levels seem to be improving. A survey conducted last year by the Defence Analytical Services Agency indicates that 75% of service personnel are registered to vote, which is well up on the figures of a few years before. We are moving in the right direction, but we will, of course, continue—not least by taking the measures I mentioned—to improve it further.

Industrial Action

David Hamilton Excerpts

Wednesday 30th November 2011 Commons Chamber

[Mr Maude]

I do not think that on any basis today’s action is justified. First of all, there are negotiations going on almost on a daily basis, as I said. Secondly, certainly in the biggest trade unions, a very low proportion of the members who were balloted voted. In Unison, for example, only a little over a quarter of the members balloted voted. In all the large unions, it was somewhere between a quarter and a third. That does not amount to very much of a mandate for strike action. I think it was irresponsible and I wish it had not happened.

[Mr David Hamilton (Midlothian) (Lab)]

Some on the Government Benches, when they are baying against the unions, should understand the history. It was the Thatcher Government who gave us the political levy, and that decision allows individual trade unionists to pay the levy to the Labour party. I want to try to be helpful. The reason that we are having the dispute today, apart from all the obvious arguments about the cut taking place by the Government, is that when a union holds a ballot, it has a finite amount of time before it has to take industrial action. If the Government did away with that stupid rule, which was brought in by the Thatcher Government, we would have been able to continue negotiations. Is that not correct?

[Mr Maude]

I start by saying that we are in continuing negotiations. There will be negotiations tomorrow, the day after, next week and the week after, so negotiations are continuing. I agree with the hon. Gentleman that the way the law works at present creates a perverse incentive for unions to take action. We suggested a number of ways in which the mandate could be kept open. For example, in order to keep a mandate open but not inconvenience the public, the National Union of Rail, Maritime and Transport Workers has called a two-hour strike in the middle of the night. In the Royal Mail, the Communication Workers Union has occasionally called five-minute strikes in order to keep a mandate open. It was not necessary, in order to keep this mandate open, for the unions to call a full strike. I am happy to say that most of their members have ignored the call.

Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill

David Hamilton Excerpts

Tuesday 2nd November 2010 Commons Chamber

[Chris Bryant]

I cannot give any explanation for that. All I know in relation to the Secretary of State for Wales is that, with regard to another matter, I asked on the Floor of the House in June for a meeting with her on a cross-party basis and she said she was quite happy to have one as soon as possible. The first date that was provided was this afternoon. The Secretary of State did not turn up and her officials had booked the wrong room. It is therefore quite possible that if any consultation on the matter under discussion had been planned, it would not have actually taken place.

[Mr David Hamilton (Midlothian) (Lab)]

Does my hon. Friend agree that nowhere will he find a requirement that a discussion should be held if the boundaries in Scotland have to change—yet again? There should also have been a discussion with MSPs about the Scottish boundaries, and about local authority areas. That would have made more sense in terms of our working together and coming up with a solution that is not a patchwork quilt.

[Chris Bryant]

Or, indeed, just a muddle. One of the things that Welsh Members have been trying to say during the discussion of this Bill is that on the combination of polls, lessons need to be learned from the situation in Scotland, where the boundaries for MSPs are no longer coterminous with those of Members of Parliament. In addition, in Scotland but not in England or in Wales, wards are being split between constituencies because of the local government arrangements that have been made as a result of large single transferable vote wards.

Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill

David Hamilton Excerpts

Monday 25th October 2010 Commons Chamber

[Chris Bryant]

Well, my point remains. Neither in 1815 nor in 1850 were miners able to vote, because they did not qualify under the franchise. In 1885, they were allowed to, but women were not. One can make significant changes to the system, although I think the hon. Gentleman holds a different view from me about reform of the House of Lords. That is where I agree more with the Government Front-Bench team. I do not know whether the hon. Gentleman had any particular tadpoles or nincompoops in mind—I can see some images flitting across his mind now, which suggests he had some specific people in mind.

The hon. Member for Broxbourne referred directly to the argument that the Deputy Prime Minister made in January in favour of cutting the House of Commons to 500 Members and the number of Ministers to 73, but of course that is not at all the proposal before us. The right hon. Gentleman has adopted neither measure. It might be that having picked one tune on “Desert Island Discs” on Sunday, he changes his tune entirely when it is replayed on Thursday. That is clearly the situation we have at the moment.

Our system has changed over the generations because it has not been considered right and proper that Ministers thought of their salary or pension as just a tiny part of their remuneration for being in hock to the Crown and that all the other monopolies and benefits accruing by virtue of how they operated their ministerial office brought in far more money. It was Edmund Burke who, in 1782, first introduced changes that meant that Ministers of the Crown had to rely on the properly arrived at financial provisions, rather than on the previous system which was completely and utterly corrupt. As Macaulay said of the 18th century:

“From the noblemen who held the white staff and the great seal, down to the humblest tidewaiter and gauger, what would now be called gross corruption was practiced without disguise and without reproach.”

Many in previous generations exercised their ministerial functions solely on the basis of financial corruption. Ministers accumulated enormous fortunes by virtue of being Ministers. It is right and proper that we do not have that system today, and if anybody in the British political system does accumulate, by virtue of their political office, an enormous fortune, there is something going wrong—IPSA must have allocated everything that we have all claimed to just one individual Member.

There was substantial change in 1831 through the Select Committee on the Reduction of Salaries. It suggested a completely different structure, which ended up with William Pitt the Younger, when he was First Lord of the Treasury, earning just £5,000 by virtue of that post, although he had other posts that earned him some £4,300. Today, that would be a considerable amount of money for ministerial office, but at the time MPs were not paid at all.

Today’s system relies on two pieces of legislation from 1975, the Ministerial and other Salaries Act, and the House of Commons Disqualification Act, to which the new clause in the name of the hon. Member for Broxbourne refers. Both specify that the number of Ministers shall be 95. The Ministerial and other Salaries Act also lays out how many Cabinet Ministers, Ministers of State, Whips and so on there can be, and it is my simple contention that if one wants to limit the number of Members and ensure that the proper legislative scrutiny function of this House is performed, one has to cut the number of Ministers.

[Mr David Hamilton (Midlothian) (Lab)]

When the hon. Member for Broxbourne (Mr Walker) spoke to his new clause, he made the very good point that, at a time when we are talking about reducing not the number of councillors throughout the UK, but the administrative costs, the chief executives, the directors and so on, it is incumbent on us to talk about changing the Executive and reducing the Executive’s power.

[Chris Bryant]

That is right. If we really are to have new politics—that rather amorphous term to which the coalition agreement alludes—it must accept something that we the Opposition were too reluctant to accept when we sat on the Government Benches: that Parliament, when it is free to do its job, does its job better than when it is constrained.

The constraints are multiplying. The number of parliamentary secretaries is not quite growing daily, as the hon. Member for Louth and Horncastle suggested. He made it sound as if they were breeding and reproducing. The number is not growing daily. However, it is certainly true—

Fixed-term Parliaments Bill

David Hamilton Excerpts

Monday 13th September 2010 Commons Chamber

[The Deputy Prime Minister]

I do of course recollect what my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister said during the general election campaign. What he said has been improved upon and superseded by this Bill. [Laughter.] Hon. Members may laugh, but it has been improved upon because it gives the House the right to decide whether it wants to dissolve Parliament for any reason that it wishes. If the House decides that it does not want to continue to express confidence in a Government when a Prime Minister has changed, the Bill will give it the right to dissolve Parliament and trigger a general election.

[Mr David Hamilton (Midlothian) (Lab)]

Will the right hon. Gentleman give way?

[The Deputy Prime Minister]

Let me make a little more progress.

Although I understand that some hon. Members have expressed unease at the speed with which we are advancing, let us remember that we are not starting from square one. People have been debating the length of Parliaments since the 17th century and all the parties now agree on the principle of fixed terms.

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[The Deputy Prime Minister]

I will not compete with Herbert Asquith as well as with the right hon. Gentleman. The wording, as I said, makes it clear that he was pointing out something that we all know: that politics becomes consumed by electioneering in the run-up to a general election, and that therefore, if we have a five-year fixed term, as we are advocating in the Bill, in reality the Government of the day have at least four years to govern for the benefit of the country.

[Mr David Hamilton]

I will go back not 100 years, but 10 years. Have the Government considered the other three nations of this country, which have decided on a four-year period? Surely four years fits, so that there will not be a conflict in the future. The current term should be either four years, or six years, moving back to a four-year cycle, otherwise there will be a conflict that is insurmountable.

[The Deputy Prime Minister]

As I said earlier, I recognise that there is an issue there, as the hon. Gentleman says. That coincidence of UK elections to the House and devolved elections will occur every 20 years. If he will allow me, I will return to the issue in greater detail in a while.

The date of the next election specifically—

Superannuation Bill

David Hamilton Excerpts

Tuesday 7th September 2010 Commons Chamber

[Mr Maude]

I can reassure my hon. Friend that that is exactly our aim. It is one of the great myths—I have sometimes heard this expounded even in this august House—that all civil servants are highly paid. That is simply not the case. As he says, the average pay of the civil servant is, I believe, around £23,000, and half of civil servants are paid £21,000 or less. In the pecking order, as it were, of the different sectors, average pay is highest in the wider public sector, private sector pay is next, and civil service pay is the lowest. So my concern for lower-paid civil servants is real and genuine, and it is based on a proper understanding of the concerns that exist.

[Mr David Hamilton (Midlothian) (Lab)]

Is it not the case that many of the low-paid workers have accepted those low wages because of the conditions of employment, which included a pension scheme and superannuation scheme that meant something? To take that away from them takes away the very essence of why they are there.

[Mr Maude]

I hear what the hon. Gentleman says, and the fact is that in any employment the terms that apply are those that apply when an event happens. People get sick pay when they are sick; they get redundancy pay when they are made redundant. The statutory redundancy scheme, which has the force of law—as indeed this scheme does, as it is a statutory compensation scheme for loss of office—and the compensation to which people are entitled when they lose their office is that which is in force at the time. That is the view that the previous Government took, robustly, having considered—I presume—all the issues as carefully as we have done. So there is a strong view on both sides of the House that this scheme is unsustainable and unaffordable. Even in good circumstances it would be unaffordable, but in today’s tragically difficult financial position—with the budget deficit that we inherited so out of control and high—it would be indefensible to allow it to remain unreformed, as a matter of fairness.

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[Tessa Jowell]

No, I am going to make some progress—and I think that the hon. Gentleman has already made an intervention.

The very fact that the Bill is designed to expire within 12 months makes its own case for its unworkability as a long-term solution. Instead the Bill is being deliberately used to force the trade unions into compliance. As such it should be seen as a very unusual use of parliamentary procedure to ask Parliament to pass legislation that—as the Minister has made clear—it is hoped will not be implemented.

The Deputy Prime Minister has stated—presumably on behalf of the Government—that fairness will be at the heart of everything the Government do. However, as with so much that the coalition does, the terms put forward under the Bill do not meet the first basic test: they are not fair because some of our longest-serving, and often lowest-paid, civil servants receive no protection under the proposals.

[Mr David Hamilton]

Did the Minister not give it away when he made the point in his opening remarks that it is more expensive to get rid of those at the top of the tree, and therefore there would be an encouragement to get rid of those at the bottom of the tree? Will not low-paid civil servants be really concerned by the attitude now being taken?

[Tessa Jowell]

I think that those at the higher earnings end and those at the lower earnings end are equally entitled to be apprehensive about the proposals.

Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill

David Hamilton Excerpts

Monday 6th September 2010 Commons Chamber

[The Deputy Prime Minister]

I want to make some progress so that others can have their say later.

Some hon. Members from Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland have also raised concerns about the likely impact in those nations of the cut in MP numbers. Of course I understand those anxieties, but our priority must be to ensure that a person’s vote is of equal worth—wherever they live in the UK. If the current rules distort that, they surely need to change.

[Mr David Hamilton (Midlothian) (Lab)]

Many in the House believe that geographical layout is as important as numerical. As cohesion is important, what discussions has the Deputy Prime Minister had with the commission about talking to the Scottish, Welsh and Northern Irish commissions? We should ensure that the change stands the test of time, and that we do not move into another cabal when we come to Scottish, Welsh and Northern Irish elections.

[The Deputy Prime Minister]

I agree that the change should stand the test of time. That is why the Electoral Commission, with our active support, has established a group of all the boundary commissions, with officials from the Cabinet Office and the territorial offices to ensure consistent application. As the hon. Gentleman knows, we have blended two things: a maximum geographical size of 13,000 sq km, to avoid constituencies of excessive geographical size; and the principle of equality in relation to the number of constituents.

Political and Constitutional Reform

David Hamilton Excerpts

Monday 5th July 2010 Commons Chamber

[The Deputy Prime Minister]

This is 20 questions by a historian. The last Government—the hon. Gentleman’s party in government—governed for five years. We are merely legislating—[Interruption.] Instead of setting history questions, why does he not think about why his party, which was once a party of political reform, now seems to be backing off from that long-standing political tradition? It is a great shame that that is happening.

[Mr David Hamilton (Midlothian) (Lab)]

No matter how much gerrymandering the Deputy Prime Minister does, it will not make one bit of difference in Scotland, because there will not be another Tory who gets elected up there. The biggest issue I face every year is the number and complexity of elections taking place, and the type of elections taking place. Surely the logic is to have a referendum with a multitude of choices, so that people decide once and for all which electoral system to adopt, ending the current plethora of electoral systems.

[The Deputy Prime Minister]

I agree that the development of different electoral systems for different bodies creates complexities of its own. However, we should not make the best the enemy of the good. We are aiming not for excessive neatness, but simply asking people whether they want to change the system of election to this House to the alternative vote—yes or no. As our political system evolves, the longer-term question, which the hon. Gentleman poses, is whether we should seek greater consistency across different elected bodies’ electoral systems.