Northern Ireland (Executive Formation) Bill
Debate between Sammy Wilson and Mhairi BlackTuesday 9th July 2019
(4 years, 9 months ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts Amendment Paper: Committee of the whole House Amendments as at 9 July 2019 - (9 Jul 2019)
Sammy Wilson
And indeed, it is significant that some of those who are saying that they do not wish to see steps being taken to deal with those issues are not even prepared to accept that what has stopped those issues being discussed in Northern Ireland is the attitude of Sinn Féin and the refusal of Sinn Féin to get back into government. There is an inconsistency there.
Mhairi Black (Paisley and Renfrewshire South) (SNP)
Will the right hon. Gentleman give way?
Sammy Wilson
Well, the hon. Lady has just wandered into the Chamber, so I am not going to give way.
The second inconsistency is that many of those who are saying that these limited and very specific powers should be taken by this House are the same people who, during the debate on Brexit legislation, complain time and again that we should not interfere with the powers of devolved Administrations. Indeed, when the Government were suggesting that some of the powers that currently reside with Brussels might be brought back and held at the centre—or at least, that they would wait to discuss whether those powers should be devolved—there was an outcry in this House: “You’re interfering with the devolution settlement and the powers of devolved Assemblies.” Yet the very same people who made those arguments are now saying, “But it’s okay to take away the powers of the Northern Ireland Assembly on these sensitive issues.”
Look at the inconsistency of SNP Members; they cannot even be consistent for 24 hours. Yesterday evening, the SNP spokesman, the hon. Member for Paisley and Renfrewshire North (Gavin Newlands), said that
“the SNP Benches do not vote on matters devolved to other parts of the UK…We are not blind to the circumstances in Northern Ireland, but we intend to stick to that principle.”—[Official Report, 8 July 2019; Vol. 663, c. 75.]
Well, the Gorilla Glue they used did not work very well because they are not sticking to that principle at all. They have changed their minds on this issue within 24 hours.
Sammy Wilson
No. I have told the hon. Lady that I am not giving way. Despite the fact that SNP Members have railed against this House when it comes to devolved issues for Scotland, they seem to believe that it does not matter when it comes to Northern Ireland.
There is also an inconsistency regarding the way these issues would be dealt with—that is, through regulations introduced by the Secretary of State, which we will never debate in this House and which will not be scrutinised. I can remember many hours of debate in this House about how the power-grabbing and power-snatching desire of the Government must be opposed by those of us who are democrats and who want to stop these Henry VIII powers being taken by a dictatorial Government. But the Members who tabled these amendments today are quite happy to say to the Minister, “Go ahead. Take the powers. Make the regulations. We don’t care whether they are scrutinised. Make sure they are in place for 31 October.” When people look at the way these issues are being dealt with, they will ask, “Where is the consistency?” That is an issue that people in Northern Ireland will be asking questions about, but it is one that this House ought to be asking questions about.
Either we respect devolution and we do not want to see powers granted to Ministers that are unscrutinised, or we do, and if we do in these particular instances, we have to ask ourselves the question, “In what other circumstances will that happen?” If this House decides that government is not going to function in Northern Ireland, as might well be the case, and decides to take these powers back, I, as a democrat, even if this House votes for things that I do not want, will fiercely argue for that.
If this House is a decision-making body, I will have to live with that, as will many of my constituents who might take a different view from people in this House, but at the minute we cannot have it both ways, such that these issues are devolved and the Assembly should decide them, but that the House will take part when individuals in this House decide, “Here is an issue that I’m not keen on.”
Concentrix
Debate between Sammy Wilson and Mhairi Black(7 years, 6 months ago)
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Sammy Wilson
Does the hon. Lady also accept that, although 1.5 million cases were referred to Concentrix, it whittled them down to less than a fifth of the cases sent by HMRC? Therefore, had it been in HMRC’s control, a lot more people might have been affected than were actually affected.
Mhairi Black
Another interesting point is that, when the Work and Pensions Committee looked into the matter, we discovered that Concentrix had subcontractors —three, I believe—but it was not allowed to go into any detail about who they were or what their methods were. I hope that, at some point, the Government will answer those questions.
Like the constituents of many other Members here, all the constituents I dealt with did not discover that their tax credits had been stopped until they went to collect them from the bank and discovered that there was nothing. When I started to look into the matter, I realised that this is truly the most ridiculous level of incompetence that I have ever heard of. People were accused of being in relationships with dead tenants 70 years their senior. They were accused of being in relationships with some of their own children. In my constituency, Scottish flat numbers seemed to be a major issue for Concentrix because it could not get its head around the fact that flat 1/1 and 1/2 were across the landing from each other and were not the same house.
The best one, though, has to be the case of RS McColl. To provide a bit of perspective, RS McColl is a corner shop that is as common in Scotland as WH Smith is in England, yet people were being accused of living with this mysterious Mr McColl because their flat was above an RS McColl shop. At no point did anyone in Concentrix or HMRC think, “Wait a minute. This Casanova is getting about a bit.” This would be funny—until we remember that we are talking about people’s livelihoods and their survival.
As a member of the Work and Pensions Committee, I took part in the evidence session where we heard from claimants who had had their tax credits stopped. This is where we have to remember the human costs. We first heard from a woman called Marie, a mother of two who went six weeks with no support. She did not discover that her benefits had been stopped until she went to the bank. She said that she genuinely could not fill her cupboards with any food and she spoke of the shame of having to take her kids to a food bank and having to rely on the charity of others to be able to eat.
A woman called Sarah had no hand and suffered chronic pain every day of her life. She had two young kids, who were both under the age of five. She spent a combined total of 19 hours on the phone waiting for someone from Concentrix to answer. When she finally did get through to someone, the person at the other end of the phone just kept saying, “I don’t know; sorry about that. You need to phone back and try to get someone else.” She was asked to write a letter. She explained she could not write due to her disability, only to be told, “Well, sorry, you’ll just need to find someone else to write it”. At that point, that woman broke down in tears in front of the Committee. She was overwhelmed with emotion when she spoke about the fact that she had to look at her kids knowing that she did not know where the next meal was coming from.