amendment of the law
John Denham Excerpts(10 years, 1 month ago)
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Mr John Denham (Southampton, Itchen) (Lab)
The right hon. Member for Mid Sussex (Nicholas Soames) spoke of the importance of high skills, so let me consider the Government’s record on higher education. The Government’s approach to funding higher education is scandalously irresponsible. It is bad value for taxpayers, and wilfully makes graduates pay far too much for their degrees. By relying on unsustainable financial mechanisms, the Government threaten the long-term health of our universities.
Under their latest plans, each year the Government will borrow £14.6 billion to fund student loans, and each year they will write off, at taxpayers’ expense, £6.6 billion—a liability of £300 for every household in England, every year, and year after year. On every major judgment the Government have got their figures wrong. They said that fees above £6,000 would be exceptional, but most are at or near the maximum of £9,000. Last year the Government got their projection of student numbers in private colleges so expensively wrong that they had to step in to block recruitment. They said that debt cancellation rates would be 28%; last week they admitted that they are 45%. The public financing of higher education has been out of control since high fees were introduced for purely ideological reasons.
The immediate damage to public finances may be hidden by accounting conventions, but no public accounting convention should be allowed to disguise what is going on. As loans are not repaid in years to come, the cost of today’s higher education is put not just on graduates but on all future taxpayers, and this is from the Chancellor who said:
“We have always understood that the greatest unfairness was loading debts on to our children that our generation did not have the courage to tackle”.—[Official Report, 26 June 2013; Vol. 565, c. 303.]
A high-fee, high-debt cancellation policy forces up everyone’s fees and institutionalises waste. Of today’s public spending on higher education, £7.50 is spent on debt cancellation for every £1 spent on teaching students. If more were spent on teaching, fees would fall, as would the level of loans, the amount the Government had to borrow, the level and rate of debt cancellation, and the liability on the taxpayer. As a result of fees being lower, we would enjoy the virtuous outcome whereby all graduates would pay back less on their loans and more graduates would fully repay what they had borrowed.
There are many ways of modelling such a change. I set one out myself a few weeks ago at the Royal Society of Arts; it includes some wider changes to the delivery of higher education that are desirable. This is just an illustration of the scale of change that is possible. I am grateful to the House of Commons Library for modelling the figures that I am about to share with the House. With a different approach to higher education, whereby we spent money on teaching, not debt cancellation, Government borrowing would fall from £14.6 billion a year to £9.8 billion a year. Public sector net debt—that is, borrowing less the repayments made—would be about £10 billion lower after eight years and £30 billion lower after 20 years. The cost of debt cancellation each year would fall from £6.6 billion to £3.4 billion. The annual fees for a three-year degree could fall to £3,400 a year —pretty much the same as they were in 2010.
Mr Pat McFadden (Wolverhampton South East) (Lab)
I am very interested in the figures that my right hon. Friend is reading out. What does he think the implications are for the Government’s policy to sell the student loan book?
Mr Denham
If I may, I will come to the student loan book in a moment, because that is a serious point.
One final point from the model that I have outlined is that the average amount paid back by each graduate would fall by £5,000 in total. On this model, usable university income would rise by at least £650 million a year.
The current approach is astonishingly wasteful in terms of public money and private graduate contributions —and that is not the end of it. As he said in the autumn statement, the Chancellor wants to encourage an additional 90,000 students, funded by the sale of the income-contingent student loan book. I do not object to the principle of selling the loan book. I tried to do it myself for two years when I was a Minister, but I became convinced that value for money was impossible to achieve. Buyers face such unknown risks on future inflation, earnings and the level of evasion that either the loan book has to be sold at a massive mark-down on face value or the buyer’s income has to be guaranteed through taxpayer subsidies—the so-called synthetic hedge, which is not so much plastic privet as guaranteed private profit. Selling a capital asset to fund hypothecated revenue spending is a short-term fix that exposes higher education to unsustainable costs when the money runs out. The Public Accounts Committee has said that it has no confidence in the ability of the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills to work out what is value for money.
This cannot go on. Universities are pressing for higher fees, and Ministers have refused to rule out an increase, but the financial futility of that is now clear. Every time fees go up, the cost and rate of debt cancellation will increase. Graduate repayments will rise, yet fewer and fewer graduates will repay their debts. The Prime Minister’s former head of policy, Paul Kirby, recently suggested closing 25% to 40% of all university courses—all those where graduate incomes are not enough to repay fees. Higher education is not simply a private benefit; it is a public benefit and a private benefit. It is now clear that we can reset the system so that there is a fair partnership between the state and the student. As my modelling has shown, we could have lower fees, lower borrowing and lower debt cancellation, with higher usable incomes for universities, within the current envelope of public spending. Only the ideological dogma and blinkered embarrassment of this Government stands in the way of doing just what is needed.
Financial Services (Banking Reform) Bill
John Denham Excerpts(10 years, 5 months ago)
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Mr John Denham (Southampton, Itchen) (Lab)
On a point of order, Madam Deputy Speaker. Earlier this afternoon I was alerted to a tweet from the Under-Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, the hon. Member for Great Yarmouth (Brandon Lewis), which referred to his parliamentary written answer to me on parking charges. It states:
“when the right hon. Member for Southampton, Itchen (Mr Denham) was Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government…he noted that it was…Government policy to encourage councils to “creatively” and “extensively” make use of parking charges”.—[Official Report, 10 December 2013; Vol. 572, c. 161W.]
That is a gross distortion of the evidence given at the time. As the submission makes clear, the word “extensively” was not used as a description of Government policy, but as a description of fact about the activities of local councils. The word “creatively” was not used in relation to parking charges, but as an approach to improving accountability and responsiveness in service delivery. I have a fairly thick skin, but such a deliberate and cynical misrepresentation is surely out of order. Will you, Madam Deputy Speaker, advise me what steps I can take to have it put right?
Autumn Statement
John Denham Excerpts(11 years, 5 months ago)
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Mr Osborne
My hon. Friend is absolutely right: jobs are being created. Of course the economic situation is tough—it is tough in every western economy at the moment—but we are rebalancing our economy. One of the things I have sought to do in today’s statement—it is not the bit that will attract all the newspaper headlines—is expand our export promotion effort and ensure that UK Trade & Investment is better at encouraging exports and investment and ensuring that British overseas chambers of commerce are better equipped in the emerging economies. All these things are so important, because one of the big strategic mistakes we made as a country over the last 15 years was not to expand our market share—in the way that Germany did, for example—in those emerging economies, which have become so important.
Mr John Denham (Southampton, Itchen) (Lab)
I have heard the Chancellor make a number of statements to this House. Is it a fair summary to say that every time he has done so, he has told us that the economy has not grown since the last time he was here, that he is planning to borrow more than the last time he was here, that spending on public services will be cut more than the last time he was here, and that future growth will be less than the last time he was here? In view of that record, should he be looking quite so pleased with himself?
Mr Osborne
This Government came in in May 2010, picking up the pieces of an incredibly difficult economic inheritance. We were recovering from the deepest recession since the second world war—which, as I pointed out in my statement, was a contraction of over 6% in the economy, which puts today’s numbers into some context—and we were dealing with the problems in the banking system, and we have been hit with the problems in the eurozone. Despite all that, we have made progress. We have got credibility in the bond markets, as my hon. Friend the Member for Lichfield (Michael Fabricant) said, the deficit has come down, and jobs are being created. It is a difficult situation, but we are on the right track. Going back, as the right hon. Gentleman would suggest, would be a complete disaster.
Beer Duty Escalator
John Denham Excerpts(11 years, 6 months ago)
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Mr John Denham (Southampton, Itchen) (Lab)
I am very pleased to have an opportunity to speak in this debate, and I commend the Backbench Business Committee on securing it. When I was briefly Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government at the end of the last Labour Government, we appointed my right hon. Friend the Member for Wentworth and Dearne (John Healey) as the first pubs Minister. His 12-point plan has been mentioned today, and it still sets the agenda on issues such as the community right to buy, the need to change the planning rules, and the relationship between pub companies and pubs. I am very pleased to have a chance to return to this issue today, prompted by not only the wider concerns, but the fate of one pub in my constituency that illustrates some of the wider problems.
The Castle pub in Midanbury in Southampton has been sold by Enterprise Inns to Tesco, which has just put in a planning application for the minor changes needed to develop a convenience store. That is deeply unpopular with the 600 people in the area who signed a petition against the move, partly because they did not want to lose the pub and partly because they do not want a Tesco. They have been utterly powerless to influence the decision, however.
Similar situations have been described by other Members. The latest figures I have from CAMRA show that its members have identified 189 conversions of pubs to supermarkets since the start of 2010, with a further 41 pubs under serious threat. Of those 189, Tesco has done 124 conversions, while Sainsbury has done 21.
In my constituency, in addition to the Castle pub, the Bulls Eye in Sholing and the Woodman were also owned by Enterprise Inns and are being converted by Tesco. Other pubs have been sold to the Co-op, the Best-one convenience stores, the Alfresco group and the One Stop group.
Beer duty is one of the factors contributing to this trend. Because it impacts on the profitability of pubs, for the big pub companies considering what to do about a pub it is one of the factors that tips the balance away from investing in it and strengthening the management and towards simply seeing selling the pub as a property deal, which is often what those capital-hungry companies are after. The bigger picture is of communities such as mine being left without any say when two giant companies —Enterprise Inns and Tesco in this case—have commercial strategies that they work on together and which suit them, but that give local people no voice and no say at all in the future of their pub and community.
Greg Mulholland
I congratulate the right hon. Gentleman on raising this serious problem. It is a tragedy to see our local pubs being turned into supermarkets. What is happening is predatory purchasing. I will send the right hon. Gentleman the Save the Pub group planning charter, which addresses this issue. I ask all Members to urge the community pubs Minister to make simple planning law changes to give communities the right to have a say, and to stop the nonsense of no planning permission being required for supermarket conversions. That would stop the collusion the right hon. Gentleman mentions between the giant indebted pub companies and the giant supermarkets. What is currently happening is certainly not an example of the big society.
Mr Denham
I commend the hon. Gentleman on his work on this issue. What he says is right. In the case I have mentioned—and, I suspect, in many others—there was never even an open disposal. There was never an opportunity for somebody else to come in and start up a microbrewery for instance. The whole thing takes place behind the scenes, and the deal is done. The first thing the community ever knows is that the property has already changed hands and is on the way to being converted.
Greg Mulholland
There are huge growth opportunities in the pub sector. Many pubs are being taken on by small pub companies, and their figures show they are doing well. The managed pubs sector is doing perfectly well. Lots of small breweries around the country are also buying pubs, but they are often prevented from doing so because of the situation the right hon. Gentleman describes. This can be solved through the planning system, and it must be, or else growth in the sector will be hampered.
Mr Denham
The hon. Gentleman again makes a fair point. I say to the Treasury Minister on the Front Bench, the hon. Member for Bromsgrove (Sajid Javid), that in addition to reviewing beer duty and changing the planning laws, the way in which these big companies operate needs to be looked at.
The hon. Member for Bristol North West (Charlotte Leslie) talked about the big society. We cannot have a big society if two big companies shut the community out. Labour Members talk about responsible capitalism; it is not responsible capitalism if big companies collude to stop small entrepreneurs starting up businesses of the sort we want to see in our communities.
In every one of the cases I have raised where a Southampton pub has been turned into a convenience store, that pub offered a safe, social environment for the responsible consumption of alcohol, and it was replaced by an off-licence that trades on cheap booze. I am not saying nothing ever goes wrong in a pub, but there are social constraints on how much people drink and how they behave. If the outcome of public policy is that we lose the places where alcohol is consumed responsibly and replace them with outlets for cut-price booze that encourage people to drink too much at home, where those constraints might not exist, there is something wrong with public policy. The message from Members on both sides of the House is that the Government need to look at beer duty and the wider context.
The Minister on the Front Bench and other current Treasury Ministers, along with previous Treasury Ministers over many years, have all said—because this is in the word processor in the Treasury—that it is difficult to untangle the impact of beer duty from the other factors affecting pubs. Of course that is true, but that is no reason for not looking at beer duty and all the other factors affecting pubs.
Dr Julian Lewis (New Forest East) (Con)
I thank the right hon. Gentleman, my near neighbour, for giving way. To encourage him in his line of argument, may I say that when my party was in opposition we had a standard letter to send to people who inquired about beer duty, saying we were launching a campaign entitled “save the great British pub” and urging them to sign the online petition? I am sure, therefore, that the Minister will want to give a positive response to the right hon. Gentleman’s excellent speech.
Amendment of the Law
John Denham Excerpts(12 years, 1 month ago)
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Stephen Williams
I shall come to how the Budget will affect the most well off in society shortly.
Our second objective in the Budget was to rebalance the tax system, so that taxes would fall lightly on work and enterprise and more heavily and effectively on wealth. Already, this coalition Government have raised capital gains tax from the historically low rates that we inherited from the last Labour Government, and there have been no changes to inheritance tax. Some people might have wanted to drop the 50p tax rate altogether. However, we all know that 2012 is going be a difficult year for families up and down the country, and Liberal Democrats have been clear that now would not have been the right time to reduce the top rate of tax. I am pleased that the Chancellor has agreed with our position.
By April 2013, our top rate of tax will be in line with that of our competitor states in the European Union and the United States of America, but we will also have effective taxes on wealth in place by then. Stamp duty will be 7% on house sales of more than £2 million. We might not have got a mansion tax in this Budget, but we have certainly got a mansion duty. That mansion duty alone—just that one measure—will raise three times the amount lost through the lowering of the 50p tax rate by 5p.
The third objective that we set in this Budget was to take action on tax avoidance, and I am therefore pleased by the introduction of a 15% charge on personal property that is under corporate ownership. I am pleased that tycoons will have the reliefs that they claim restricted to 25% of their income, and I am particularly pleased that the general anti-avoidance rule for which I have argued for so long is to be introduced by this Government. I see that rule as a kind of electric fence across the tax system: a clear warning to every taxpayer that this is a line that they must not cross.
The Budget makes further changes to rebalance the economy, to restore green growth to the economy and to build on Britain’s strengths in engineering and the creative industries. In 2012, we shall see the launch of the green deal, which was spearheaded by my right hon. Friend the Member for Eastleigh (Chris Huhne), when he was Secretary of State, and which is now being taken forward by the Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change, my right hon. Friend the Member for Kingston and Surbiton (Mr Davey). Last weekend, I witnessed the demonstration projects that are already taking place in my constituency under the Bristol Green Doors initiative, which are showing what every householder can do to take advantage of the green deal. Also in 2012, the green investment bank will be making its first investments.
The creative industries are incredibly important to our national economy, and I was pleased that video games were given recognition in the Budget. As a Bristol and west country MP, I was particularly pleased to see the extension of film tax credits to the television industry. The Chancellor mentioned Wallace and Gromit. Despite Wallace’s Lancashire accent, their home is of course Bristol. The films are made in my constituency by Aardman Animations, Europe’s largest animation company. It is incredibly important to the economy of Bristol and is a great British brand that sells millions of pounds of exports all over the world.
Mr John Denham (Southampton, Itchen) (Lab)
Will the hon. Gentleman tell me what the difference is between the tax breaks introduced by the Chancellor in today’s Budget and the tax breaks introduced by Labour that the same Chancellor scrapped in 2010?
Stephen Williams
The difference, as I understand it, is that these tax breaks are going to be focused on high-end television production, so that we no longer find ourselves in a situation in which “Coronation Street” can claim tax credits, as it did under the last Government. I do not think that there will ever be a risk of “Coronation Street” moving to China, but there was a serious risk that Britain would lose its animation industry to the rest of the world. These measures are right if we are to maintain British talent and innovation in this country, but it is also culturally right that children should watch programmes that have been made with the right regional accents and made around Great Britain.
For Liberal Democrats in this coalition, the headline of this Budget is that we have delivered a tax cut for millions of Britons and effective taxes on the wealth of millionaires. It is a Budget that maintains the confidence that Britain is back on track. It is a Budget that delivers the biggest tax break in a generation for millions of hard-working families. As a Liberal Democrat in this coalition, I am proud of the role my party has played in making Britain a fairer country.
Mr John Denham (Southampton, Itchen) (Lab)
My morning newspaper today said that the coalition parties were inviting me to regard this as a Robin Hood Budget. I enjoyed the stories of Robin Hood when I was younger, but I must have missed the bit where Robin goes back to Nottingham castle and says to the sheriff, “You look a bit hard up. Would you like some of your taxes back?” I must have missed the bit, too, where Robin went to the front door of the cottage, cash in hand, while the rest of the merry men went round the back and made off with the tax credits, the child benefit, the VAT and all the rest of it.
This Budget does not deliver what the Liberal Democrats or the Conservatives say it will deliver. The Government will fail on each of the three main tests that they have to meet today. Of course, just a few minutes after the Budget statement, it is impossible to make a comprehensive assessment of it, but I suspect that the detail of the pensioner tax changes will come as a deeply unpleasant surprise to Government Members who were waving their Order Papers so cheerfully earlier on.
Teresa Pearce
It came as a surprise to me to read through the detail of the impact assessment, which says that in 2013-14, 4.41 million people over 65 will be worse off because of the age allowance, and that 230,000 people will be brought into income tax. I wonder whether the Liberal Democrats will be proud of that.
Mr Denham
I am grateful to my hon. Friend: 4.41 people—4.41 million older people—[Interruption.] Government Members may laugh, but they have just cheered a Budget that is going to make more than 4 million pensioners worse off, because they did not understand what they were cheering.
The Budget has three tests. The first is the immediate action needed to create growth and jobs in the economy, to bring in taxes and to reduce the deficit. The second challenge—even if the Government get the first right, painful times cannot be avoided—is to ensure that the burden of the challenges is shared fairly; in other words, whether we get fairness in tough times. Does the Budget really say, “We’re all in it together,” or does it look after those already better placed to get through the next few years more generously than those who struggle hardest?
There is a third challenge for this Budget. The Institute for Fiscal Studies made presentations to MPs this week. It said that the slowing of growth since this Government were elected meant that even by 2016 the economy would be 3.5% lower than it would otherwise have been and perhaps 12% smaller in comparison with the growth rates of 2008. The Resolution Foundation, also drawing on the Office for Budget of Responsibility, calculates that disposable income for low and middle-income households will fall by 8% between 2008 and 2015. What that means is that our economy will have fallen behind, our incomes will be lower and our capacity to fund public services and social security will have been reduced. I hazard a guess that nothing that has happened today will change that grim picture by any significant degree.
The third question, then, that the public will be asking is how, after all this pain, we will pay our way in an increasingly competitive world? If we cannot compete and cannot create wealth by succeeding in global markets, we will never offer new opportunities and hope to those young people whom The Financial Times described on Saturday as “the jinxed generation”. The world economy will have moved on massively and the challenge of building British companies into those that can succeed in ever-tougher global markets will be harder than ever. If we do not lay the foundations for that success now, it will be harder to start later.
The truth is that on each of those three tests—the immediate future, fairness and laying the foundations for the future—the Chancellor’s speech gave little ground for optimism.
Caroline Lucas (Brighton, Pavilion) (Green)
Would the right hon. Gentleman add a fourth test to the three that he has set out, which is whether or not this Budget takes us in a more sustainable direction? On that measure, the Chancellor started by saying that oil prices are of great concern, but what he has now done is to give a huge tax break for more oil drilling.
Mr Denham
I am happy to include that test. One of the missed opportunities will turn out to be in the low-carbon economy that will dominate the global economy in the 21st century.
Things have turned out so much worse than in the heady days of the new Chancellor’s optimism when he told us in his first speech that the economy was set to grow steadily; that unemployment would fall year on year; that the deficit would drop like a stone, yet front-line services would be protected; that the private sector would expand magically, more than filling the space left by public services; that the banks would lend; and that the whole tiresome infrastructure of regional investment, job guarantees for young people and a coherent planning system could simply be swept away. Well, the Chancellor, the Deputy Prime Minister, the Prime Minister and the whole coalition were wrong.
The spending cuts, drawing billions out of the economy, were too far and too fast. The Government’s gloomy talk first unnerved and depressed consumers; then the VAT hike took money from them when we needed them to spend. Now the cuts are really beginning to bite. The Government were so cocksure and complacent that they strung together, purely for cynical political purposes, a series of half-baked, ineffective measures that were more or less abandoned as soon as the last press release had been issued: the national insurance holiday; the regional growth fund that does not pay out any money for months or years; the business growth fund with few investments; the special support for exporters with a handful of users; the Work programme that does not work; Project Merlin; and the youth contract that has not even started two years after the future jobs fund was scrapped. Any right hon. or hon. Member who gets excited by any measures announced in a press release for this Budget should remember what happened to the last lot.
Opportunities were missed—to tax bank bonuses, to fund real jobs for young people, to cut VAT for families, to cut national insurance contributions for small businesses taking on staff, to bring forward infrastructure spending. But what did we get? Just a feasibility study on Monday of this week, two years after the need was first identified. No, the short-term measures have failed, and we have seen no change.
Fairness has been well debated today. Let us remember one point—in April, families with children, taking into account the personal allowances and all the other changes, will be £530 worse off on average. When we look at next year’s personal allowances, I am sure it will also be clear, when the dust has settled and the IFS has done the figures that take into account all the other changes, that those families will still be worse off. Hon. Members should look at the Red Book and see which families are going to pay a higher proportion of their income, and it is those on low incomes.
This Government have been mired in unfairness from the beginning. We should remember that one of their first actions was to cancel changes to pension tax relief, which would have brought in £1.6 billion from the very highest earners in this country. We did not hear the Chancellor reminding us of the things he has already done to tilt the system to those best able to get through the next few years. I believe that the Government will pay the price for that.
The truth is that it is not a matter of whether stamp duty brings in more money or whether the anti-avoidance measures—the Government should tackle avoidance in any case—bring in more money. The challenge for this Government and this Budget was to devote every single available penny to raising the incomes of hard-pressed low and middle-income families and to get the economy growing. There was no justification for singling out the highest rate of income tax on earnings over £150,000 a year. The average person in work in my constituency will have to work for seven and a half years to earn £150,000. To single out that higher-earning group and to cut their tax was wrong.
This was not the fairness in tough times that the country needed, but the other failure in the Budget was the failure to lay the foundations for the economy that we need in the future. The truth is that despite the pressure on the public finances, there is no shortage of money to rebuild the economy. UK companies are cash-rich. Sovereign wealth funds are out there. There are pension funds, closer to home, with money to invest.
Mr Denham
I will not give way, because I have only a few minutes left. The problem is that those bodies are not investing, or at least not investing in Britain. The reasons are clear: in the short term, Government mistakes have caused the economy to stagnate, and there is also no certainty—no “compelling vision”, as the Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills rightly put it. Some of us thought it was his job to come up with a compelling vision, but he is right that it is not there. There is no predictability.
Goodness knows it took my Government long enough to take a decision on Heathrow. That decision was then cancelled, and then ruled out. Today in the Budget, we find that Heathrow is back on the agenda. Billions of pounds of business investment cannot take place because of the failure of Governments to take that decision, one way or another. That uncertainty and unpredictability runs through the Government’s business failures. Low-carbon energy manufacturing and services will dominate the 21st-century global economy, but the Chancellor says that he does not like the environmental policies, while the Deputy Prime Minister says that he does. We had illegal flip-flops on feed-in tariffs, which means that a whole group of investors will never come back and invest in green energy again. Those on the Government Benches have no idea that business needs certainty and predictability, not short-term changes.
We have today heard all that stuff about the oil industry. In last year’s Budget, the Government massively increased the risk penalties for investing in the North sea by means of a last-minute political gimmick that changed the tax regime that applied there; again, that meant uncertainty and unpredictability. Despite the Chancellor’s words, there is no serious attempt to identify the technologies and capabilities that will give us the ability to compete in future. The odd speech here and the odd announcement and press release there does not match up to the job—not when we look at what our competitors are doing.
Today, we again heard about broadband, but what did the former chief operating officer of BT say about the Government’s broadband strategy in another place just a couple of days ago? He said that it was so weak that this country will be
“frozen out of the next industrial revolution”.
Just because there is a mention in the Red Book about the broadband strategy does not mean that there is one, or that it is good enough, so it is a no on that third test, which is probably the most crucial.
The next few weeks, months and years will be hard for everybody. People in this country are stoic. They will tolerate a lot if they think that the right things are being done to build a future for their children and families, and to give us long-term security. The Government do not have a clue how to create the conditions in which investment will take place, business will grow, and we pay our way and have the jobs and wealth that the people of this country desire. The Budget is unfair, has missed opportunities, and will fail the country.
Finance Bill
John Denham Excerpts(13 years, 10 months ago)
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Mr John Denham (Southampton, Itchen) (Lab)
On a point of order, Mr Speaker. At about 4pm today I was rung by a reporter from The Daily Telegraph, Mr Christopher Hope, and asked to comment on the reply to a written question that he said would be answered tomorrow. I assumed that the question had been answered and would be reported in Hansard tomorrow. However, when I checked with the Library, it confirmed that no answer had been received. I have also checked with the hon. Member for Perth and North Perthshire (Pete Wishart), who tabled the question. He had checked his pigeon hole at about 4pm, and at that time he had not received a reply. At 7pm, the Library told me that the question had still not been answered.
Is it in order for the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government or his agents to give a parliamentary answer to the press before making it available to the hon. Member who asked the question or, indeed, to the whole House? What remedies can we have for those Ministers who have such low regard for this House and its Members?
Mr Speaker
I am grateful to the right hon. Gentleman for his point of order and for advance notice of it. It is, of course, essential that answers are given, first, to the Member concerned, although it sometimes happens that answers go innocently astray. Ministers on the Treasury Bench and the Government Whip have heard the point of order and will no doubt ensure that the Department discovers what took place. When that is ascertained, and it should not take long to do so, I would like to be informed. I am grateful to the right hon. Gentleman for putting a serious matter on the record.
Just before I call Mr Andrew George, I simply point out to the House that a very large number of Members are still seeking to catch my eye, and I know that Members will regard it as most helpful, with no reference to any particular speech that the House has heard, if I remind it that the Finance Bill is a relatively narrow Bill of, I think, 11 clauses and five schedules. It is approximately 30 pages, and the thrust of it depends upon, and is relevant to, I think, seven resolutions of the House. I thought that that might give it a bit of context and reference.