Draft Nuclear Industries Security (Amendment) Regulations 2016

Debate between Graham Allen and Andrea Leadsom

Tuesday 12th July 2016 General Committees

[Andrea Leadsom]

As I have already mentioned a couple of times, for security reasons we cannot comment or speculate on different methods of transport, other than to say that the Office for Nuclear Regulation is entirely responsible for the transport plans. As I have already made clear, we do not believe that any commercial transportation group is capable of transferring civil nuclear material, but it is for the Office for Nuclear Regulation to determine all those plans, including the regulation of those who are authorised to carry out the transportation. That includes the vetting of the individuals, the security of the personnel, the security of the vehicles used and the training regimes that are in place.

[Mr Allen]

I thank the Minister for her answers to my questions. Of course, right now there will not be a civil aviation market for transporting this material, because this has not been going on very much. If air traffic increases, not least because of these regulations, it may start to be an attractive proposition to some people in the civil aviation market. My question becomes relevant at that point. Are we absolutely confident that those people will be held to account and regulated in such a way that in the worst possible case they will as far as possible be terrorist-proof against people who might want to explode one of these things? That is why we have not done this before; it is an enormous risk. Are we absolutely certain that the risk will be minimised as much as humanly possible if civil airlines undertake this traffic?

[Andrea Leadsom]

Again, I absolutely respect the hon. Gentleman’s concern and I absolutely share it. First, this is not something that would happen every day. Having looked as a Minister at some of these transportations, I know that the amount of planning is vast, as can be imagined. It is extremely carefully and rigorously carried out by the Office for Nuclear Regulation, which exists to regulate nuclear matters—nothing else. I can absolutely assure him that the safety of the public, the transportation, the staff involved and so on would be completely uppermost in its thoughts.

The hon. Member for North Durham asked exactly what categories of material would be transported. The regulations will apply to a broad range of nuclear materials, as set out in regulation 3 of the 2003 regulations and the schedule to it. Quite a broad range of possible waste is being transported.

Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Graham Allen and Andrea Leadsom

Thursday 19th November 2015 Commons Chamber

[Mr Graham Allen (Nottingham North) (Lab)]

12. What steps her Department has taken to encourage schools to invest in solar energy; what discussions she has had with the Chancellor of the Exchequer and the Secretary of State for Education on the effect of borrowing restrictions on investment by schools in solar energy; and if she will make a statement.

[The Minister of State, Department of Energy and Climate Change (Andrea Leadsom)]

In April 2014, my Department published a leaflet encouraging schools to invest in solar PV, which was followed up with a letter to local authorities in November 2014. We encourage deployment through the financial incentive of the feed-in tariff, but discussions are always ongoing with other Departments on what more can be done to help schools invest in solar.

[Mr Allen]

Thousands of schools cannot make their contribution on renewables and save thousands of pounds each year because of the Chancellor’s rules on borrowing to install solar. One school, Wilmslow High, wants to do this, and its local MP, a Mr George Osborne, has said:

“I am happy to support you wherever I can”,

but he is awaiting a reply from the Department of Energy and Climate Change. Will the Department reply to the local MP so that he can make representations to himself as Chancellor and end these ridiculous rules?

[Andrea Leadsom]

I would like to apologise publicly to the local MP. I shall look into the matter today. Restrictions on school borrowing are necessary, however, to protect public sector accounts. School borrowing contributes to public sector net debt and borrowing—two important fiscal measurements that we must control in order to bring down the national deficit and retain economic confidence—which is why we have no plans to lift restrictions on borrowing.

Scotland Bill

Debate between Graham Allen and Andrea Leadsom

Monday 6th July 2015 Commons Chamber

[Andrea Leadsom]

Let me reassure the hon. Gentleman that we are talking about consultation with the Scottish Parliament on the design of renewable incentive schemes. The point I am making is that where there are minor, technical changes, the need to consult would be too time-consuming and burdensome on both sets of Ministers. That is why we urge him not to press amendment 154.

Amendment 155 concerns the Competition and Markets Authority. A market investigation is a significant undertaking by the CMA, and the impact of business uncertainty and potential remedies may spread across the whole UK. Let us not forget that the CMA is funded by the UK Government, so it is only fair that, just like UK Ministers, Scottish Ministers should be required to involve the Secretary of State in any decision to require the CMA to undertake an investigation. I therefore urge hon. Members not to press amendment 155.

Turning to the amendments from the hon. Member for Nottingham North (Mr Allen), I fully recognise the position that he is trying to convey. He and I have had many conversations on wellbeing, and he will know that I am a big fan of devolution—I am a fan of devolution to local government and a fan of this devolution Bill. The Bill proposes fundamental changes that will give unique new powers to the Scottish Parliament that it has not had before. It will mean that, overall, this devolution settlement is one of the strongest anywhere in the world. The Bill will give significant new powers to Scotland, and it is important that all Members get the opportunity to do justice to those.

Equally, the hon. Gentleman will recognise that we do not want to be telling the Scottish Parliament whether it should be setting up its own commission on wellbeing or, indeed, what sort of commission it should establish. It will be for Scottish Ministers, with the support of their Scottish MPs, to decide when and if they want to establish their own commission for wellbeing and, of course, what sort of powers they want to devolve to their local government, local enterprise partnerships and so on.

[Mr Graham Allen]

I agree with what the hon. Lady is saying, but will she also touch on the rights of local government, so that it, too, can have responsibilities and clarity about its role? At the moment, that is unfortunately not the case in Scotland—or, indeed, any other part of the Union—but we now have an opportunity to give local government in Scotland that freedom.

[Andrea Leadsom]

The hon. Gentleman makes an interesting point. As my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State has said, he will be looking carefully at the debate and at all the feedback right across the House, giving consideration to all those proposals to see whether there is anything more we need to do to improve the settlement for Scotland. A lot of valuable contributions have been made and there is a long way to go with this devolution Bill. I am sure my right hon. Friend will listen to what the hon. Gentleman has to say, but at this point there is nothing further I can add to his comments, other than to say that I would of course entirely support any work done on wellbeing for any of the countries that make up the United Kingdom.

I think it is an incredibly important subject, and I certainly pay tribute to the hon. Gentleman for the work he has done. We have worked in close co-ordination on giving every child the best start in life and on the importance of wellbeing. I pay tribute to the Scottish Parliament, too, because I am aware of the enormous strides made in Scotland on supporting wellbeing and the best possible start in life for every child. I commend that Parliament for its foresightedness. I sincerely believe that other parts of the United Kingdom have something to learn from its actions.

To conclude, the discussion of all the amendments has been important. Today has been a bit of a wash-up, in that we have discussed everything ranging from the new powers for Scottish Members and appointing new members to the Northern Lighthouse Board to Scottish television stations and taking parliamentary submissions from Ofcom and Ofgem. We have also talked about new powers for the Scottish Parliament to be able to decide on the measures it wants to make to deal with fuel poverty and about incentives for new supplier obligations in Scotland to deal with those struggling to pay their bills.

I think that this set of measures represents an enormous transfer of powers from the UK to Scotland. All right hon. and hon. Members should be very pleased about that. We have heard a number of views on all the issues raised today, but for the reasons I outlined, I believe that the Bill’s clauses are in keeping with the Smith commission agreement, so I urge hon. Members not to press their amendments.

Clause 46 ordered to stand part of the Bill.

Clauses 47 to 52 ordered to stand part of the Bill.

Clause 53

Renewable electricity incentive schemes

Amendment proposed: 154, page 60, leave out lines 9 to 17.—(Calum McCaig.)

Question put, That the amendment be made.

Early Intervention

Debate between Graham Allen and Andrea Leadsom

Thursday 14th July 2011 Commons Chamber

[Mr Graham Allen (Nottingham North) (Lab)]

Early intervention not only requires no new net public expenditure, it is also the biggest deficit reduction programme that we have. If we implement it properly, it will produce results beyond the Chancellor’s wildest dreams. We need to change our default public expenditure culture, which is one of late intervention, to one of early intervention. Late intervention is expensive and not very effective. Early intervention, by contrast, is inexpensive and highly effective.

I shall give the House an example. Delivering the intensive health visiting service of the family nurse partnership to 115 teen mums and their babies in my constituency costs about the same as putting three 16-year-olds in a secure unit for a year—an average of two of whom, incidentally, will reoffend. Family nurse partnership services delivered in the first years of life can reduce the number of arrests at the age of 15 by 80%. So dealing with several hundred individuals and doing so effectively costs roughly the same amount as failing to deal effectively with three young people, 16-year-olds, later on in life.

[Andrea Leadsom (South Northamptonshire) (Con)]

The hon. Gentleman and I are in huge agreement on this subject. Does he agree that more than 80% of long-term prison inmates suffer from problems that stem back to early infant attachment?

[Mr Allen]

Indeed, and the costs are absolutely enormous and continuing. They continue through the generations, whereas one effective early intervention costs only for the one occasion, does not need to be repeated and proves to be very effective.

I make many recommendations in my recent report for Her Majesty’s Government, “Early intervention: Smart Investment, Massive Savings”. The ones I would particularly like to talk about tonight involve the Treasury. I ask the Minister for her first thoughts on these recommendations. I am very grateful for the assistance I received from the Chancellor, the whole Treasury team and, indeed, Treasury officials—and, above all, from the Minister herself. She helped me in various ways—although the faults in the report are entirely my own—to make the second report a practical and pragmatic programme of work rather than a flight of fancy.

There are no magic bullets. This is all about a practical, long-running and consistent effort to try to bring social and emotional capability to our babies, children and young people, which will repay us over and over again throughout the life cycle, as we avoid the costs associated with drink and drug abuse, teenage pregnancy, a lifetime on welfare benefits, educational underachievement, and so on and so forth. That benefit can come from just a little bit of early investment.

The key relevant recommendations to the Treasury concern the comprehensive spending review; rebalancing central Government spending from late to early intervention; a Whitehall task and finish group, which I shall talk about; a serious proposal for departmental payments, introducing a payment-by-results system effectively across Whitehall; liberating our local authorities so that they can be our partners in pursuing early intervention policies; and using the 2012 Budget to incentivise early intervention investment. I propose to look at each of those in turn.

First, I have suggested that the Treasury consider theming the next CSR around early intervention. The usual cross-departmental effort that goes in ahead of every CSR should be directed at early intervention across all Departments. That includes the research programme and the evaluation, which should be used to assess what is being spent on early intervention by Departments, thus providing a baseline from which we can judge the costs, benefits and potential savings to taxpayers from early intervention policies and programmes.

This CSR preparation should also include commissioning long-range surveys, studies and longitudinal programmes so that we can add daily to the evidence base for early intervention and its role in saving massive amounts of taxpayers’ money from being captured by the long-term costs of failure. Above all, doing this in the CSR will symbolise the Government’s approach and the switch in philosophy to give strong signals to Departments throughout Whitehall and indeed in local areas. We will thus be demonstrating that we are moving from talking the talk to walking the walk.

I want to put on the record that it is evident from the discussions I have had with all parties and with all party leaders, including the Prime Minister, that there is a very strong desire to move—incrementally, admittedly—across this divide between our typical, traditional late intervention policies and early intervention. This is not just to save money; it will also help to make good many of the social failures that arise because we do not tackle problems early enough and let them get rooted before we start to invest money in them—often too little, too late.

The second issue is the rebalancing of funding in Departments. It is easy to demand big switches of financing from one place to another, but that is a pipe dream that we did not entertain in the report. What we did consider was the fact that we have spent billions of pounds, decade after decade, often with only marginal impacts on, in particular, the social and emotional capabilities of babies, children and young people, especially those in poorer areas and constituencies such as mine. We discussed how we might push back the spending and personnel juggernaut of late intervention, and start to invest, gently and incrementally, in early intervention.

A great deal of evidence was given to my inquiry. One of our proposals is a gentle shift—within departmental budgets, and involving no extra money—from late to early intervention. Following discussions with Departments, I propose—modestly, I hope—not a top-slicing of budgets to a pooled early intervention fund run by one Department or another, but a slow, incremental migration of funding, within existing budgets, from late to early intervention. I proposed that it should amount to just 1% a year, which is incredibly modest. It would be possible to move such spending slowly and relatively easily, and no additional spending by Departments would be required.

In education, for instance, an obvious way of using an existing function, organisation or budget head would be through the early intervention grant itself, which currently amounts to £2.2 billion. That would be a good home for the start of a transition from late to early intervention. Similarly, £55 billion is spent on children and children’s services in the United Kingdom. A minor adjustment, in percentage terms, made incrementally on an annual basis could begin to shift us from the costs of failure to investment in the success of our babies, children and young people.

The Department of Health, the Home Department and the Ministry of Justice already have machinery for such an incremental change. They run prevention programmes of various sorts, all of which could be steadily and progressively geared up. Such a reorientation of internal spending could also provide some of the resources needed to pay investors for the outcome-based contracts to which I referred in my report, and about which I shall say more later. It could be described as payment by results.

I also propose the establishment of a task and finish group. This may sound an internal, dry subject, but in preparing my report I discovered that although tremendous work is going on throughout Whitehall in different Departments, it is not always joined up; it does not always connect. People do not always know what the next Department is doing, for one reason or another. That is not a criticism of anyone working in those Departments or on those programmes—on the contrary, I was very impressed by the way in which all Departments set about their work—but it is a criticism of the fact that no Governments have co-ordinated such action to the level that I would like to see, a level that would add value if people all worked together.

I have suggested that the existing Cabinet Social Justice Committee should be given more teeth, and that it should have a task and finish group—perhaps with an independent chair, but that is a matter for Government to decide—which could offer an independent eye, and promote Government change via the Committee. Through consistency, long-termism and progress-chasing, it could achieve, through Whitehall, some of the important objectives and milestones that the Government may choose to set in the early intervention strategy that I proposed in my report.

Such a group should, as a matter of course, report to all party leaders to maintain what I hope is the helpful benchmark that has been set of establishing this as a non-party issue. I am delighted to pay tribute to those Members of all parties who have taken this issue so seriously, and the fact that the three main party leaders have kindly said good things about both the first and second reports underlines my belief that this is a non-party issue. Indeed, they have supplied quotes, expressing embarrassingly kind sentiments about the philosophy of early intervention, for the back page of each of the reports. What we now need to do is make a practical proposition, and I hope we can put into effect my recommendation of establishing an effective task and finish group.

Another Treasury-oriented recommendation is our proposal about the Treasury, Departments and local areas introducing a proper payments-by-results system, so that benefits can accrue to central and local government for investing in the right package of policies and getting external investors interested in this field. Central Government need to play a role in co-commissioning, or co-paying for, the outcomes set by local areas. Her Majesty’s Treasury and other Departments would therefore need to work at putting in place methods of accounting to ensure that future payments based on successful local outcomes are honoured. It is obviously a matter of great concern that local authorities feel, rightly or wrongly, that if they are successful they will be penalised by the withdrawal of other grants or financial assistance. When drawing up the contracts and talking to local authorities about this issue, we need to make it clear that their payments will be honoured when they reach the endgame of the payment-by-results exercise.

In my report I have outlined a number of areas where local authorities have an important role to play. I do not have time to go into them now, but one that would bear examination is the possibility of looking again at issuing a capitalisation directive to councils that will perhaps allow up to £500 million of early intervention spending to be capitalised, provided that it is funded through the local bond market. If one accepts, as the Government and the main political parties now seem to, that early intervention represents an essential investment in human capital for future generations, there is a strong case for allowing local authorities to finance that by using money in the same way as they would to finance a bridge or a building.

The final recommendation that the Treasury may want to think about now that my report is in the public domain is to do with the 2012 Budget and whether the Treasury can assess properly the possibilities of incentivising early intervention investment. It was clear from my review that tax incentives would be a popular and effective way of incentivising early intervention and social investment more generally. The possibility of creating a market in social investment and social finance is a prize indeed, and if we manage to create a social finance market within, perhaps, 10 years, that will be a measure of our success.

Of course everyone would like to have an incentive. I did not see it as my role to provide a set of demands to which Government had to say yes or no. However, I would like there to be a serious exercise before the Budget, so that the Government examine all possible ways of sucking into early intervention investment philanthropic, ethical business and retail investors and wholesale investors. That would be extremely helpful. I will say no more than let us learn from the creativity in other countries, such as tax credits in the Netherlands and Australia, and money to contribute to social impact bond payments in the USA. The US President has introduced rule changes so that money can be committed over longer periods than is commonplace in public contracts.

In conclusion, the Treasury often says, rightly, that having less money can drive us all to be more creative and to challenge the old ways and the old rules. One of the threads in the report is that this should apply equally to Government thinking, and to Treasury thinking in particular. Money is scarce, so ideas on how better to spend existing public funds should be encouraged and new sources of funding should be incentivised. Due diligence, which is commonplace in the private sector, should now be used at all levels of government to question the comparative costs of wasteful, late intervention versus early intervention alternatives. Levels of savings to be achieved should be an integral part of all public investment calculations. Short-term cuts that jeopardise massive long-term returns should, of course, be avoided. Rules and methods of working established in a different era, in a different public expenditure environment, need to be reviewed.

If we can do that, and if our friends in the Treasury can take some of these proposals seriously—as I know they would, as they made a strong contribution to my review—we will be on the verge of changing the spending culture in our country, moving from wasteful, expensive spending when problems are deep-seated to pre-emptive and preventive spending to help babies, children and young people develop the social and emotional capability that will see them realising their potential in the same way as we want to see our children realising theirs. This is an important field. In many ways, it is a slow burner, not one that heralds dramatic change. This is a field in which there must be a serious commitment to change public policy on behalf of all parties. If we do that, not only will the benefits to those children be immense, but the repayments to the taxpayer will be massive.