Oral Answers to Questions
Flick Drummond Excerpts(8 years, 2 months ago)
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Mr Osborne
We have sought to increase consumer protection by introducing a powerful new consumer protection agency in the form of the Financial Conduct Authority, and we have sought to give more financial advice to individuals through, for instance, the Money Advice Service and Pension Wise. However, if the hon. Lady has any specific further ideas that we can consider, I shall be happy to do that.
Mrs Flick Drummond (Portsmouth South) (Con)
T3. The Government are making some of the biggest investments in road and rail in our nation’s history. Is my right hon. Friend aware of any alternative investment policies, and of the impact that they would have on our nation’s economic security and, in particular, the southern powerhouse?
Mr Osborne
My hon. Friend is right to draw attention to the big investment that is being made in our nation’s infrastructure, especially transport infrastructure. We have the biggest rail programme since the Victorian age and the biggest road programme since the 1970s, which the hon. Lady is seeing in the improvements to the A27 and M27 in her area. Of course, an economic policy that destroys all confidence in the British economy would mean no investment.
Budget Resolutions and Economic Situation
Flick Drummond Excerpts(8 years, 10 months ago)
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Mrs Flick Drummond (Portsmouth South) (Con)
May I say what a pleasure it is to speak in this debate on one of the most reforming Budgets we have had for a long time? It balances entitlements against responsibilities, and extends our economic plan even further into the years ahead—years of growth and stability.
In Portsmouth, we naturally all welcome the renewal of this Government’s commitment to spending 2% of GDP on defence. We face evolving threats as a nation, and I hope that when the strategic defence and security review has drawn its conclusions we will enhance our capability in important areas such as maritime patrol aircraft and the full Type 26 order, which we hope will amount to 13 ships.
I want to focus on the long-term impact of this Budget on my constituency. I am sure Members will agree that the infrastructure upgrades are vital for businesses and for boosting productivity. In Portsmouth and along the south coast, we have an opportunity for a “southern powerhouse”, but we have some infrastructure needs if we are to unlock the potential. A number of my hon. Friends, including the Exchequer Secretary, share my belief that we need to upgrade our rail connections on the line between Waterloo and the south coast. In many cases, the journey takes as long as it did in Victorian days. It takes one hour and 40 minutes to travel 70 miles, which is not acceptable in our modern days. I shall campaign on this issue and hope to speak to the Chancellor about building a faster railway down to Portsmouth. It is a challenging route with issues of capacity, but if we are to have investment in areas that already have a good level of service in the north, it is only fair that the real bottlenecks elsewhere are addressed, too. A high-speed train to Portsmouth via Eastleigh would benefit much of the south coast—from Weymouth to Chichester, and it would include the Isle of Wight, too. Portsmouth has been left behind, so we need support and further investment in our education and skills, and, most of all, we need some more aspiration.
I welcome the Budget’s emphasis on partnership working between central Government, local enterprise partnerships and councils. In Hampshire, we have Solent LEP and the promise of working with combined local authorities—probably for the whole of Hampshire—and I want to help drive this progress forward. We have benefited from investment in Portsmouth under this Chancellor. “Bridging the Gap” has helped small and medium-sized enterprises with £3.6 million, creating 600 jobs. It has helped a particular coffee shop in Southsea, which proved to be popular. Another £1.8 million from the Growing Places fund has helped infrastructure projects, including a centre of excellence in engineering and manufacturing advanced skills training. Maritime engineering is one of the centres of excellence in Portsmouth that I am hoping to push forward.
We also have massive investment in our dockyard to support the Navy, but there are still areas where we can and must improve over the coming years. I look forward to campaigning on these issues, making sure that Portsmouth and the south coast is well catered for in much of its infrastructure. I look forward to talking to the Chancellor over the next few years about all the issues that I want to put forward.
Debbie Abrahams
If the hon. Lady had listened to my earlier remarks, she would have heard me talk about small businesses then. I have done a significant amount of work with small businesses.
The Government are trying to persuade the public, and to justify what they are doing to working people. We know that, on the whole, it is working people who will be affected. Half the 13 million people who are living in poverty are in work, and two thirds of children in poverty are in working families. The Government are trying to construct a narrative to justify the tack that they have taken—the “divide and rule” narrative about people being feckless—but it is the working people who will be affected most.
Another thing that the Government regularly do is a source of immense frustration. Although I have consulted the Ministers’ code of conduct and many other sources, I have been unable to identify a responsible use of statistics on their part. The Chancellor, for example, tried to suggest in his Budget speech that we were one of the most generous welfare-spending countries in the world. That is simply not true. It is absolute rubbish. If we compare the UK’s spending as a percentage of GDP with that of developed countries in the European Union —as my hon. Friend the Member for Islington South and Finsbury (Emily Thornberry) tried to do earlier—we find that it is ranked 17th out of 32.
Mrs Drummond
We are the fastest-growing economy in Europe. We are securing more jobs, we have higher employment, and our businesses are doing well. How can that be squared with what the hon. Lady is saying about the welfare state?
Debbie Abrahams
I dealt with that earlier in my speech.
In my constituency, more than 20,000 working families with nearly 30,000 children are claiming tax credits. That is two in three families, and three in four children. For them, tax credits mean keeping their heads above water. The changes in tax credits will be devastating for them and will undoubtedly result in an increase in child poverty, with a knock-on effect on those children’s educational attainment, health and life chances. The worsening inequalities are set to become intergenerational.
I must also mention the impact of the £30-a-week cut in additional support for people in the employment and support allowance work-related activity group, which is another punitive measure affecting extremely vulnerable people. The Disability Benefits Consortium believes that the 300,000 disabled people who are already living in poverty will be pushed further into that condition.
Finally, let me say something about housing policy, the inheritance measures and wealth inequalities, especially in the context of land and property. In 2002, it was estimated that 69% of land in the United Kingdom was owned by 0.6% of the population. In the six years to 2011, the number of landholdings had been reduced by 10%, but the size of those holdings had increased by 12%, so even fewer people owned even more land. The inheritance tax measure is but a drop in the ocean when it comes to addressing the concentration of wealth that is held by a tiny elite. Many people who are involved in housing policy emphasise that if we are to solve the housing crisis as well as building more homes, we must tackle the cost and availability of land and the volatility in the market. Given that the average house price in the United Kingdom is more than £180,000, it has been estimated that it will take 22 years for people with low and middle incomes to save up a deposit.
Mark Pawsey
Absolutely, and I am pleased that the urban conurbations are coming together in combined authorities across the country.
I am also pleased that the Government have received combined authority proposals from two local authority groups in the east midlands. The Derbyshire consortium has 10 councils including the county council and city council, and the same process is under way in Nottinghamshire.
As part of that process, the Government are right to insist on a directly elected mayor for each combined authority so that there is a figurehead for the body being created. I have tried to put myself in the position of an overseas investor who arrives in Manchester or Birmingham wishing to invest in the region. I would want to understand who is the titular head of the body and who is ultimately responsible. A directly elected mayor goes some way to addressing that.
Mrs Drummond
Does my hon. Friend agree that the decision in the last Parliament to create single pots for infrastructure projects such as those determined by the local enterprise partnerships has shifted power, which has been crucial to places such as my area of Portsmouth and his of Rugby?
Mark Pawsey
Absolutely. The shift of power from the centre out to the regions is massively important and I will talk about the importance of local enterprise partnerships shortly, but first I want to talk about the impact of combined authorities in my part of the country.
Even though Rugby is right in the middle of the country, under the old regional development agency model we were placed in the west midlands because Warwickshire was put in the west midlands. However, my town’s economic links are much closer to places such as Lutterworth and Leicester in Leicestershire and Daventry and Northampton in Northamptonshire. In so many instances we in Rugby look east rather than west. That is one reason why I have some concerns about the developments in the west midlands. It is entirely right that the urban area of the west midlands—Birmingham, Solihull, Walsall, Dudley, Sandwell and Wolverhampton—comes together. I ran a business in Rugby, and we looked at that block of authorities as one big market. In fact we did not know where one authority ended and the other started because to us it was one big market.