Budget Resolutions and Economic Situation

Debate between Rachael Maskell and Rachel Reeves

Tuesday 22nd March 2016 Commons Chamber

[Rachel Reeves]

I wonder whether the hon. Gentleman still thinks we should go ahead with the cuts to personal independence payments. It certainly sounds like it from those remarks.

Let me deal with the specific issues surrounding personal independence payments and the impact that this Government have had on disabled people. While the fiasco is unfolding around us, let us remember the broader points. This is a Government—the Chancellor, the Prime Minister, the former Secretary of State for Work and Pensions and the current Secretary of State for Work and Pensions—who forced through the bedroom tax, affecting 500,000 people, the majority of them disabled, by about £700 a year. This is the Government who forced through the closure of the independent living fund. This is the Government who forced through cuts to employment and support allowance only last summer, affecting 500,000 people and worth about £30 a week or £1,500 a year. The U-turn on personal independence payments, although welcome, deals with only a fraction of the damage and the pain that the Government have caused to disabled people in all our constituencies.

Let us be clear what this U-turn means. The new Secretary of State for Work and Pensions came to the Chamber yesterday and said that the Government are not going back to the welfare bill and to disabled people for further cuts. But in the course of yesterday’s statement, that was watered down a little. The Government now have “no plans” to come back to the welfare budget and disability benefits. That is reminiscent of when they had no plans to increase VAT and all the other things they had no plans to do, until they did them and until they hurt the people who least need to be hurt.

When the Chief Secretary winds up the debate this evening, I would like to hear whether there are no plans, or whether the Government can guarantee that there will be no further cuts to the welfare budget or to the benefits of disabled people. We know that there is a black hole of £4.4 billion in the public finances. If it is not the wealthy and not disabled people, who is going to pay the price? Are there going to be further cuts to education, health, defence and our police? Will there be further increases in taxes—on VAT and taxes for ordinary working people? Something has to give and we need some answers about the black hole in the Budget that we are voting on, although we do not know what it means. What does it mean for all those different groups of people?

As the Chair of the Office for Budget Responsibility told us at the Treasury Committee meeting this morning, the issue is not just that there is a £4.4 billion black hole in the social security budget, but that the Government have failed to meet their welfare cap. They are going to fail in every year of this Parliament, by a staggering £20 billion—£20 billion more on social security spending in this Parliament than the Government set out, a further black hole in their public finances. Why did they get into this mess in the first place? It is because they wanted to cut taxes for the wealthiest in society. They wanted to cut capital gains tax, increase the threshold before people started paying the 40p rate of tax, and increase the ISA limit from £15,000 to £20,000 so that we can all save the full £20,000 a year tax free. That is great for those who have the money, but most of our constituents are lucky to earn £20,000 a year, let alone put it away in savings. That is why the Government raided the social security budget yet again to give tax cuts to their friends, the wealthiest and the most privileged in our society.

Last week’s Budget could have been different. For example, the Government could have put more money into infrastructure investment. In my constituency, we are paying a heavy price for the floods on 26 December. The Chancellor said earlier that I should have welcomed the money for flood defences, but in 2011 the Government cancelled a flood defence scheme in Leeds worth £135 million. Last week, they announced £35 million for Leeds. Well, I am sorry for not thanking the Chancellor, but an offer of £35 million rather than £135 million is not really worth the thanks, and the businesses in my constituency will pay a heavy price if the rains come again.

[Rachael Maskell (York Central) (Lab/Co-op)]

I was with the Environment Agency just last night, and it told me it will not have sufficient funds to put in place measures—particularly catchment management measures —to prevent future flooding.

[Rachel Reeves]

Last week, the Government announced £150 million for York, Calder Valley, Leeds and Cumbria. However, as I said, the scheme that was cancelled in Leeds was worth £135 million, and that £150 million is for flood defences, flood resilience and flood maintenance. Yet again, the Government are short-changing people who need them to step up to the mark, as our volunteers in York and Leeds and across the north of England did when the rains fell, the rivers rose and buildings—houses and businesses—were flooded.

Last week’s Budget could have been different. It could have been a different Budget for disabled people. It could have been a Budget that helped ordinary working people and the most vulnerable in our society. It could have been a Budget that put money into the northern powerhouse and the infrastructure that we need. However, it was a different Budget, because this Government have different priorities. That is why we need a Labour Government on the side of ordinary working people and the most vulnerable in our society.

Flood Defences (Leeds)

Debate between Rachael Maskell and Rachel Reeves

Wednesday 27th January 2016 Commons Chamber

[Rachel Reeves]

I entirely agree with my hon. Friend.

I want to turn now to the economic effects on Leeds of the floods. The workforce in Leeds total 470,000 people, with a huge number travelling into the city from the surrounding areas every day. If the flood had happened on a working day, thousands of people would have been unable either to get to work or to get out of the city, resulting in huge amounts of congestion and countless working days being lost. The disruption to mobile telecoms infrastructure was bad on Boxing day, but it could have been worse. Significant risks have been identified at key infrastructure sites, including the Vodafone site off Kirkstall Road, which provides important communications to the council, the police and the national health service, and the power substation on Redcote Lane in Kirkstall, which powers 50,000 properties. Both were disrupted on Boxing day and for days afterwards. Leeds is also the regional centre for emergency and specialist healthcare, hosting the largest teaching hospital in Europe, and it relies on that infrastructure on a daily basis. For that reason as well, the city needs to be accessible by road and by rail.

[Rachael Maskell (York Central) (Lab/Co-op)]

In York, 50,000 phone lines went down and vital emergency infrastructure was impacted, including the lifeline that 700 elderly residents depend on. Is it not right that telecoms should now be part of the gold command and silver command operations, to ensure that we have full support for our communications?

[Rachel Reeves]

I absolutely agree with my hon. Friend, whose constituency has also been devastated by the floods.

The point is that important infrastructure sites such as the Vodafone site off Kirkstall Road and the power substation on Redcote Lane were not protected and were badly damaged on Boxing day. In Kirkstall, in my constituency, the consequences for the local economy of having no investment in flood defences is devastating. Businesses will leave, and new businesses will not come. We risk creating ghost towns if we take no action.

Last week, I and my fellow Leeds MPs—all eight of us—along with Leeds City Council leader Judith Blake and the council chief executive Tom Riordan, met the Secretary of State to ask for the reinstatement of the flood defence scheme in Leeds. We welcomed her saying that further flood protection for Leeds was a priority for the Government, but we were disappointed that no firm commitment was made to provide funding—not even the £3 million required to commence urgent design and preparatory work for flood defences over and above phase 1. We need that money for flood defences if we are to turn her commitment into a reality. I fully appreciate the budgetary challenges relating to flood defences, but we must all acknowledge the significance of the flooding arising from Storm Eva and the significant economic risk that the city of Leeds, and thus the UK economy, will therefore face without adequate investment in flood defences.

Storm Eva: Local Authority Support

Debate between Rachael Maskell and Rachel Reeves

Wednesday 20th January 2016 Westminster Hall

[Rachael Maskell (York Central) (Lab/Co-op)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Alan. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Halifax (Holly Lynch) for securing today’s debate. There have been different experiences, but we are hearing very much from Yorkshire today. Many aspects of the operations in York are to be highly praised—the mountain rescue team, the Army, the public sector workers who gave up their Christmases, and the awesome response from volunteers across the city, mainly co-ordinated through one person, Chelle Holmes, and her Facebook page, “York Floods 2015: Help for the affected”, with its 14,000 members, which put together the operation. That, together with BBC Radio York, became the mainstay of communications.

Other parts of the operation have been heavily criticised by people on the ground. Much of this has boiled down to communication and co-ordination during the flood period. It has now become clear from a meeting in the city last Friday that the local authority had no plan for the Foss catchment should flooding occur, despite the council’s strategic flood risk assessment highlighting a greater than one-in-10-year risk of the capacity of the River Foss exceeding the capacity of the pumps at the barrier. To give some context, the River Foss is protected from the far larger river, the Ouse, by a sixteen-and-a-half-tonne steel barrier. When flows of the Ouse rise, the barrier is closed to protect the Foss catchment, and eight pumps are switched on to pump up to 30.4 tonnes a second.

The capacity of the water was 35 tonnes a second over Christmas. The pumps could not cope, and water surged up into the pump house, where the power for the pumps and operations for the barrier were. The decision was therefore to switch off the power supply and lift the barrier in the belief that this was the least worst option and could save 1,000 homes. Reports from the Environment Agency going back to 2004 show that there was a risk of this happening. In the 30 years of the barrier, there has been no attempt to raise the level of the electrics, which are at a low level. There was a plan to lift them higher, but planning permission was denied to the agency at the time.

The revelation that there was no plan should the barrier fail and not be able to cope is quite astounding, and it has left people in York angered, upset and certainly with a host of questions that still need answers. I have been inundated with correspondence. I have been going door to door, and I have held a series of community meetings with residents and with business to ensure that we drill down on the issues and raise them, as we now are, with the various agencies.

I want to raise various points about action for the future. The first and perhaps most vital is that I want to see all local authorities having flood plans externally audited. This will ensure that we will have the right support in place at the right time and that local authorities are not left with the burden of marking their own homework. We know that there were certainly some serious flaws in York during the flooding. Vulnerable people, particularly those in an elderly residential complex and an area where Travellers live, saw no one at all from the council. People self-evacuated when the waters rose. There were also difficulties with the sandbag operation—not only were there problems filling them, not enough shovels and not enough personnel to fill them, but there was no distribution plan. That must be addressed.

There were problems with phones even before 45,000 phones went down—an issue that is the subject of a different inquiry. If someone whose home was being flooded called the number that the Environment Agency gave to the council, they got an answer machine message saying that the council was returning to work on the Tuesday morning. That is not good enough. When the phones at the council came back into operation, just four people were answering calls. We need proper plans in place.

[Rachel Reeves (Leeds West) (Lab)]

I am listening with interest to what my hon. Friend is saying about the response of her local council. In my city, Leeds, the council responded to the floods amazingly. Nevertheless, the council is worried about the future and what the additional cuts to its budgets will mean, not only for its day-to-day capacity for things such as keeping gullies clean, but for how it will respond in emergency situations. Does my hon. Friend share those concerns?

[Rachael Maskell]

Absolutely. Part of the inquiry I am carrying out is about how much cuts to date have affected the resources available to the plethora of agencies involved and how that will be addressed in future, what with further cuts planned, including to the fire and rescue service, which was overstretched over the Christmas period.

People gave up their Christmases, but there was no one to direct them to where they should volunteer. Again, that was a serious problem. I could discuss other issues, such as electrics being switched on in residential council accommodation without sockets being checked and people being denied their £500 despite their properties being flooded. The list is enormous—it is six pages long—but the Minister probably gets the gist: things must be improved. The council has said that it will carry out its own independent investigation. It is incredibly important that it truly is independent, that all questions are asked and that no stone is left unturned.

I want to share some of the other questions and issues that people have raised. We must recognise that the agencies came together and ensured that nobody died, but important questions have been raised. First, the suggestion from my hon. Friend the Member for Halifax that we hold a conference to try to share best practice was excellent. We are learning a lot at the moment, so it is important that we share best practice in a structured way to ensure that local authorities draw on it to respond to communities.

Secondly, I ask the Government to hold an inquiry into the communications failure. Elderly residents who depend on their Lifeline personal alarms were left without any communications at all. I explained earlier the situation with the phones. When phones go down in an emergency, we should be able to switch systems. Even the ambulance service did not have a system to call on. We should be able to switch call centres to enable a continuous response. We must even look at the basics on the ground. Someone with a loud hailer or a siren could have made such a difference to people’s lives.

Thirdly, I very much support the point made by the hon. Member for Calder Valley (Craig Whittaker) about expediency in responding. We have a local barracks, but we had to wait for a process to be gone through before soldiers were mobilised. It could have been done a lot quicker. I am going to meet Brigadier Strickland to discuss future military involvement.

Fourthly, we have heard about the success of the flood wardens on the ground who were able to bring things together. There is now a real appetite among the community to ensure that flood wardens are part of the future strategy. It is really important to draw on that experience.

Fifthly, there is concern about drainage, which relates back to the point about local authority resourcing. Gullies, drains and ditches must be cleared. Surface water was a factor in the flooding in parts of the city, so we need to ensure that the right resources are in place to address it. We must also ensure that drainage and sewage are dealt with appropriately, because Yorkshire Water suffered a breach when its pumps failed and sewage went into the mainstream water supply.

Sixthly, we must ensure that there is better flood literacy. There is an assumption that people know how to address issues appertaining to floods and how to build resilience for the future. We cannot make assumptions in these situations, so it is vital that we ensure that there is proper education around floods—what people need to do, how they should respond and how they can protect themselves for the future.

[Rachael Maskell]

My hon. Friend makes a very valid point that is true not only for during the flooding, when people are trying to save lives and protect the public, but for the clean-up operation. Clearly, when people are dealing with sewage, they are also dealing with risk. People need to be made aware of the risks and how best to protect themselves.

Seventhly, we have heard very clearly that businesses really do require support. Last Friday I brought together the local chamber of commerce, the Federation of Small Businesses and the local enterprise partnership to discuss how we can support business better at times of flood. It is clear that our city centre, like so many towns and cities, is experiencing a downturn in trade, so it is important that we get more support to local authorities to help with plans to build capacity back into the city.

[Rachel Reeves]

My hon. Friend mentions the impact on businesses. In my constituency, around 250 small businesses have been affected by the floods, but those businesses employ 2,500 people, most of whom have not been working since Boxing day. That is a real worry. As well as talking about the businesses, we should be mindful of the people who work for them and think about the support we can provide to them, both to regenerate the places where they work and to support them in the interim.

[Rachael Maskell]

I totally agree.

Finally, I want to raise the issue of personal finances. So many people in my constituency who were flooded could not afford any insurance at all. They just do not have the resources to pay for insurance, and £500 does not stretch far. All I have been told is that they need to draw on charitable sources. We need a more structured approach to support people who, in their poverty, have lost even more.

There are so many things that I could raise; this is just the start. I hope that there will be an opportunity for MPs to gather together to share their intelligence and concerns and to raise issues that they believe could help future operations. As we gather that intelligence, between us we could ensure that sufficient plans are in place to address the need, should such floods occur again. With climate change on its way, there is a high possibility that that could be the case.