Oral Answers to Questions
Debbie Abrahams Excerpts(10 years, 4 months ago)
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Debbie Abrahams (Oldham East and Saddleworth) (Lab)
T2. If he will make a statement on his departmental responsibilities.
The Deputy Prime Minister (Mr Nick Clegg)
As Deputy Prime Minister, I support the Prime Minister on the full range of Government policies and initiatives. [Hon. Members: “Oh no you don’t!”] Oh yes I do. I say to Opposition Members that the pantomime season is over. I take special responsibility for the Government’s programme of political and constitutional reform.
Debbie Abrahams
A and E departments across the country are in crisis, despite the valiant efforts of NHS staff, including staff at Royal Oldham hospital in my area. The cuts to social care mean that there is often insufficient support in the community to allow patients to be discharged from hospital safely, and beds are blocked as a result. Why did the Deputy Prime Minister support his coalition partners in the £3 billion top-down reorganisation and the £1.8 million cuts to social care when these things were predicted?
The Deputy Prime Minister
I wish that the Labour party would stop talking down the NHS. The fact is that A and E is performing better than it did under Labour. We have 300 more A and E doctors than there were under Labour; 2,000 more patients are seen every day within the four-hour limit than when Labour was in control; 1.2 million more people are now using A and E; and there is a new £3.8 billion fund to promote the integration of social care and health care that the hon. Lady advocates. Is it not time to support, rather than denigrate, the NHS?
Tributes to Nelson Mandela
Debbie Abrahams Excerpts(10 years, 5 months ago)
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Debbie Abrahams (Oldham East and Saddleworth) (Lab)
Thank you for calling me to speak, Mr Speaker. I reiterate what other Members have said: this has been an exceptional debate and I am really grateful to be able to take part in it.
My husband John was born in Cape Town, South Africa in 1952, during the apartheid era. He is a man of mixed-race and under the apartheid racial classification system he was defined as a Cape coloured. The daily indignities that he, his family and countless millions of other South Africans had to face had a profound effect on him: where he lived, the school he went to—not only were schools segregated; he was not allowed to start until he was seven years old—and the buses and trains on which he was allowed to travel all had a tremendous impact on him. He talked very movingly recently at an Oldham school that he visited with me. He recounted the time when a young black man was involved in a road traffic accident. An ambulance came, but it was a white-only ambulance. They refused to treat him, went away and the young man died.
Relationships were, of course, monitored. People were not allowed to marry outside their racial group. We were not able to go back to South Africa until after the elections when Mandela came to power.
The great love of my husband’s life was cricket. Obviously, he had not met me at that time, although I think he would probably still say that cricket is the great love of his life! Sport was used to undermine people. John and his family, including his mum and dad, played in the street with sticks. There were no cricket clubs; they were segregated. In spite of that, John’s dad, Cec, along with Basil D’Oliveira, was selected to play for South Africa, but for a non-white South Africa. These dehumanising experiences had a profound effect on John and millions of others.
John felt much guilt at escaping from the horrors of apartheid when he came to live in this country in 1962, leaving others, including family members, to continue the struggle. His cousin was imprisoned during the regime, and that bore heavily on her life and that of the family.
For John and countless others Nelson Mandela stood as a beacon of hope. His drive for democracy and equality for all races was unrelenting, but what made him one of the most exceptional human beings of all time was that, in spite of all that he had been deprived of, the physical and emotional trauma that he was put through, he embraced that without bitterness or recrimination. It would have been so easy and understandable to have responded to that in a different way. I have no doubt that the relatively smooth transition from white minority rule to democratic South Africa was down to him.
Many people have said that Mandela made them want to do better and be better, and that is absolutely right. As much as he saw the goodness in others, we recognised the goodness in him. He was an archetypal leader, living the values he espoused with dignity, humility and honour, trying to make South Africa, and in turn the world, a better place.
The world is a better place as a result of Nelson Mandela. We have much to be grateful to him for and to learn from him. But it is far from perfect. Britain is still a very unequal country. Hon. Members on both sides of the House have been sincere in recognising his strengths and values, but words ring hollow if they are not followed up by action. I urge all hon. Members to consider that. It is unacceptable in this country in this day and age that one in four young black men is unemployed, and one in 14 young white men is unemployed. We must do something about such inequalities. They persist even across groups with the same educational attainment levels. We must redouble our efforts to build a fairer, more just society. It would be an insult to Mandela’s memory not to do so. Madiba, with love and gratitude, rest well.
Oral Answers to Questions
Debbie Abrahams Excerpts(10 years, 5 months ago)
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Debbie Abrahams (Oldham East and Saddleworth) (Lab)
T1. If he will make a statement on his departmental responsibilities.
The Deputy Prime Minister (Mr Nick Clegg)
As Deputy Prime Minister, I support the Prime Minister on a full range of Government policy and initiatives. Within Government I take special responsibility for this Government’s programme of political and constitutional reform.
Debbie Abrahams
The Government have been rebuked by the UK Statistics Authority, the Office for Budget Responsibility and others for misleading statements by Ministers on welfare, economic, health and education policy. Given that this, unfortunately, slips between the ministerial and Members’ codes, what does the Deputy Prime Minister believe the punishment should be for Ministers who deliberately mislead the House and, more importantly, the public?
The Deputy Prime Minister
It is incumbent on everybody on both sides of the House to make sure that the statistics we use, much as we might challenge them, are based in objective fact. However, on the day that the Labour party is literally making it up about child care costs and has been shown overnight to be using misleading statistics, and on the day when it claims that it will pay for new child care policies with a bank bonus tax that it has already spent 10 times over, I suggest that the hon. Lady’s colleagues think more carefully about the statistics they use.
Oral Answers to Questions
Debbie Abrahams Excerpts(10 years, 6 months ago)
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The Deputy Prime Minister
I do not, and as we made clear at the time the £50,000 figure does not represent any policy of my party. However, I will not be shy about parading the fact that it is because of Liberal Democrats in government that we are giving a huge tax cut to over 20 million basic rate taxpayers, a policy that I was warned by the hon. Gentleman’s party leader at the time of the last general election was not deliverable. It has been delivered because of Liberal Democrats in government.
Debbie Abrahams (Oldham East and Saddleworth) (Lab)
T3. According to the Papworth Trust, nine out of 10 disabled people are having to cut back on food or heating because of the bedroom tax. The discretionary housing payments are derisory: they give £2.09 to disabled people, compared with the £14 that they are losing through the bedroom tax. How do the Government and the Deputy Prime Minister justify that? Is that the mark of a civilised society? Since it is not in the coalition agreement, will he call for it to be scrapped?
The Deputy Prime Minister
I read in the Sunday papers that the Labour party was going to get even tougher on welfare than the coalition, yet it has opposed £83 billion-worth of welfare savings. We have to bring the housing benefits bill down somehow. I assume that our rationale for the change is exactly the reason why, in government for 13 years, Labour maintained the same rules for households receiving housing benefit in the private rented sector.
Oral Answers to Questions
Debbie Abrahams Excerpts(10 years, 10 months ago)
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Miss Smith
My hon. Friend makes a helpful point. Many opportunities to achieve the ends that he sets out are afforded by having more public services online. We are introducing digital registration in 2014, which will be very helpful in achieving that shared aim.
Debbie Abrahams (Oldham East and Saddleworth) (Lab)
T1. If he will make a statement on his departmental responsibilities.
The Deputy Prime Minister (Mr Nick Clegg)
As Deputy Prime Minister, I support the Prime Minister on the full range of Government policy initiatives and I have responsibility for the Government’s programme of political and constitutional reform.
Debbie Abrahams
In this flatlining economy, nearly 1 million young people are unemployed. In my constituency there has been a 10% increase in youth unemployment. Most worryingly, there is a disproportionate impact on young people from black, Asian and minority communities. One in two young black men is unemployed, compared with one in four young men in the white community. Why are the Government not addressing that appalling inequality?
The Deputy Prime Minister
I am sure that all Members from all parts of the House will agree that it is important that we give young people more opportunities to get into work. That is why we have massively expanded the number of apprenticeships that are available to young people, on a scale that dwarfs anything the previous Government had planned, and why we have made available £1 billion for the Youth Contract. I urge the hon. Lady, if she has not done so—[Interruption.] She says that it is not working. It offers funding for 250,000 new work experience places, which is a great way of getting young people into work. If she worked with us, she could explain to employers in her constituency that wage subsidies are available under the Youth Contract so that if a local employer takes on a young person, they get paid for doing so by the Government.
G8
Debbie Abrahams Excerpts(10 years, 10 months ago)
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The Prime Minister
There were no specific discussions at the G8. Obviously I had a series of conversations with Barack Obama about all the things that we should be doing to put pressure on President Assad, but we do not have any plans to take those steps.
Debbie Abrahams (Oldham East and Saddleworth) (Lab)
Will the Prime Minister confirm that the NHS is exempt from the EU-US trade negotiations?
The Prime Minister
I am not aware of a specific exemption for any particular area, but I think that the health service would be treated in the same way in relation to EU-US negotiations as it is in relation to EU rules. If that is in any way inaccurate, I will write to the hon. Lady and put it right.
EU Council and Woolwich
Debbie Abrahams Excerpts(10 years, 11 months ago)
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The Prime Minister
I will ask the Ministry of Defence to look carefully at that. MOD police do important work, but as a House of Commons and a country we should be frank about the fact that our communities positively welcome having military bases and barracks at their heart. That is what I found in Woolwich and what I find in my own constituency with RAF Brize Norton. We should recognise that we do not protect our services by surrounding them with some ring of steel; we protect our services because we love and revere what they do.
Debbie Abrahams (Oldham East and Saddleworth) (Lab)
On Syria, like many Members and many people across the country I am increasingly uneasy about the potential escalation of the conflict with the lifting of the EU arms trade embargo. It seems a bit like cat and mouse tactics. I urge the Prime Minister to focus—I am sure that he is doing so—on the peace conference and a negotiated peace settlement. What plans are there, and what discussions have taken place, concerning support for Syria’s post-conflict position? We must learn the lessons from history, as other Members have said.
The Prime Minister
The hon. Lady is absolutely right. Any peace process worth its name has to start with a peace conference, getting the parties around the table and trying to work out the elements of the Syrian opposition and the Syrian Government that could form a transitional Government, but then we have to plan what the Syrian Government and a Syrian political settlement will look like afterwards. One of the lessons from history is that we do not want to see the institutions of the state destroyed. We want to see them properly serving the people.
Oral Answers to Questions
Debbie Abrahams Excerpts(11 years, 1 month ago)
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Debbie Abrahams (Oldham East and Saddleworth) (Lab)
T5. Perhaps I can think of one. Ministers have said that the second set of NHS privatisation regulations due to come into effect on 1 April will not force clinical commissioning groups to put health services out to competitive tender—in spite of legal analysis showing that they are just as bad as the first such regulations. Since the warnings about the Health and Social Care Bill have turned out to be true, if NHS services are privatised, will the Deputy Prime Minister resign?
The Deputy Prime Minister
This is typical scaremongering from the Labour party. It was the hon. Lady’s party that wasted £250 million of taxpayers’ money subsidising the private sector in a deliberate act to undermine the NHS. It is the Government who have made it illegal, directly in the Health and Social Care Act 2012, to have competition based on price rather than on quality. The hon. Lady would know, if she looked in detail at the new regulations—the so-called section 75 regulations—that they make it quite clear that clinical commissioning groups are not forced to open services to competition unless they think it is clinically justified in the interests of patients to do so.
Oral Answers to Questions
Debbie Abrahams Excerpts(11 years, 1 month ago)
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Mr Hurd
I recognise that there are all kinds of challenges for small organisations and, in particular, for small voluntary groups and charities in competing for public service contracts. We are opening up many more opportunities for them than there were under the previous Administration. We are working actively through things like the commissioning academy and new master classes around the country to tool up small organisations so that they can compete more effectively for such contracts.
Debbie Abrahams (Oldham East and Saddleworth) (Lab)
11. What steps his Department is taking to reduce the level of late payment by public sector contractors to small and medium-sized enterprises.
The Parliamentary Secretary, Cabinet Office (Miss Chloe Smith)
As I have noted, Government policy is to pay undisputed invoices within five days and to pass 30-day payment terms down supply chains. The Crown representative team in the Cabinet Office is encouraging prime contractors to do that more quickly on a voluntary basis. We have tasked Departments to manage their contracts to ensure that prime contractors pay sub-contractors within 30 days.
Debbie Abrahams
I am glad that the Government are now taking seriously late payments to small and medium-sized enterprises, after I received such a dismal response on the issue in 2011. When are the Government going to ensure that public sector contractors have the need to pay SMEs in their supply chain promptly in their contracts?
Miss Smith
I congratulate the hon. Lady on the award that she has won in connection with her work on this matter. My previous answer covered what the Government are doing. We are extremely keen to see good practice pushed throughout the supply chain. We are ensuring that more business goes to SMEs, which is good for growth. All told, that is a good thing and something of which the Government can be proud.
Oral Answers to Questions
Debbie Abrahams Excerpts(11 years, 2 months ago)
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The Prime Minister
I note what my hon. Friend has said, and I will look carefully at the issue she raises. The whole point about the Francis report is that we should use this as an opportunity to say, “Yes, of course we support the NHS and its founding principles, but not everything in the NHS is right.” Where there is bad practice and where things are going wrong, we need to shine a very bright light on it and make sure not only that we deal with it but that we hold people to account.
Debbie Abrahams (Oldham East and Saddleworth) (Lab)
Q7. Further to the question asked by the hon. Member for Torbay (Mr Sanders) on the new regulations laid on 13 February, the Government gave categorical assurances that GP commissioners would not be forced to put health services out to competitive tendering, but the regulations go completely against that. What is the Prime Minister’s excuse for this?
The Prime Minister
GP commissioners are not forced to put services out to competitive tender. We have GP commissioners, and the point is that it is going to be doctors making the decisions about whether they want to expand choice and diversity in the NHS. What is the hon. Lady worried about? What is the Labour party worried about? Is it not the case that lots of voluntary bodies, charities, the hospice movement, organisations like Mind and Whizz-Kidz in Tower Hamlets, which provides an amazing service for children with wheelchairs, are already involved? What are we frightened of in allowing doctors to say, “Let us have some diversity, let us have some choice and let us make sure we are on the side of patients”?