House of Commons
Thursday 22 February 2007
The House met at half-past Ten o’clock
Prayers
[Mr. Speaker in the Chair]
Oral Answers to Questions
Trade and Industry
The Secretary of State was asked—
Trade Links (India/China)
The Government promote trade with both countries in a number of ways. I recently visited China and India to promote trade and I was accompanied by a business delegation on both occasions.
But does the Secretary of State agree that we are not doing well enough? The Minister for Trade told the House on 30 January that we sell more to Australia, which has a population of 20 million, than to either India, which has a population of 1.3 billion, or China, which has a population of 1.1 billion. Is it still the case that Belgium is managing to sell more to India than us? We should be doing better than we are. What will the Government do about that?
The answer is that we can always do better. It is worth bearing in mind that the UK is certainly the fourth largest investor in India, and may now be the biggest investor in India as a result of recent investments by Vodafone. The links between both India and China and the United Kingdom are good. We are building up trade in many areas, particularly in financial services and other service sectors. Both China and India are moving away from an interest in heavy manufacturing, in which countries such as Germany have traditionally done well in trade with them, into sectors such as services in which Britain has an outstanding reputation. Of course, in respect of both countries, we need to do better, which is why I visited them. There are good examples of additional investment. We want to encourage that two-way process.
Unlike the hon. Member for South-West Bedfordshire (Andrew Selous), may I praise the Government for their tremendous efforts to build relations with India? In my lifetime, I have known no other Government make such an effort. But does the Secretary of State recall the joint declaration signed by our Prime Minister and Mr. Manmohan Singh, the Indian Prime Minister, on 20 September 2004? The declaration refers to plans to
“establish a Ministerially-led Joint Economic and Trade Committee to further develop a strategic economic relationship between the two countries”.
Can I therefore ask what progress has been—
Order. Secretary of State.
Answer!
If I might deal with the first part of my hon. Friend’s question, praise for the Government is always welcomed and much appreciated. In relation to the second part, while people are sometimes understandably sceptical about the value of committees, especially those set up between Governments, the Indian one has actually been extremely productive. When I was in India in January, we made progress in four areas: Lloyd’s of London will now be able to write reinsurance business in India; the Indian Government are now prepared to consider legislation that would allow Britain’s big accountancy firms to set up and practise there; the Bar Association of India is now engaged in a way that will, I hope, lead to British law firms being able to practise in India; and Premier Oil has been given permission to begin production in the Ratna field. Such examples of engagement by the Government have made a difference.
In the medium and long term, the prospects for good trading relationships between India and Britain are exceptionally good, because both countries have the same outlook. The more that we foster that relationship and encourage investment into India, as well as Indian investment into this country, the better it will be for both our countries.
Given that the global business community is looking for investment wherever it is most effective, will the Secretary of State assure us that he is continuing talks with China and India about the science base and the growth of science and expertise in those two countries? If we cannot prevent companies from moving to those countries and investing in new research laboratories, we must collaborate with those countries in order to gain expertise back into this country.
The hon. Gentleman makes an exceptionally good point. A few moments ago, in reply to the hon. Member for South-West Bedfordshire (Andrew Selous), I said that I thought that both countries were reaching a stage at which they were taking a greater interest in services and in the non-traditional manufacturing industries such as pharmaceuticals, biosciences and so on. On my visit to India, I was particularly struck by the number of firms that want to work jointly with those in Britain. It is not a question of them coming here and taking over our companies; they value our science base and our ability to innovate, for which we have a worldwide reputation, and they want to ensure productive capacity in both the United Kingdom and India, to capitalise on the strength of both countries. We want to encourage that.
China, too, recognises that we have something that it currently does not have, and as huge structural changes take place in economies across the world, we can capitalise on that. That is why we will continue to invest heavily in science: this year we spent about £3.4 billion, which is double the sum invested 10 years ago.
Obviously, as a member of the Select Committee on Trade and Industry, I recognise the importance of the joint economic trade committee agreements with both India and China. Will the Secretary of State ensure that those JETCO agreements will lift the barriers that still exist to British exports to India? I am sure that he can do that. Will he also ensure that Typhoon will be part of the programme for India’s purchases in the future?
I cannot ensure that the Indian Government will do any of those things because, at the end of the day, it is up to the Indian Government. However, they recognise they are reaching a stage at which unless they break down barriers to trade, India will lose out. That is especially important as we approach the conclusion of the world trade talks, at which India’s position is pivotal. In the discussions that I have had with the Indian Trade Minister and those that my right hon. Friend the Chancellor has had with the Indian Prime Minister, we know that it is important to persuade all countries—India included—to do everything they can to break down trade barriers. They need British investment in financial services, the pharmaceutical industry and across the piece, including engineering. We want to encourage that and build on it.
Ten years ago, this country had a balance of trade surplus. Today, we are exporting 20 per cent. fewer goods to India than we were two years ago. Our balance of trade today stands at a whopping £56 billion deficit, the highest since 1697. Will the Minister tell us why that is?
If the hon. Gentleman wants to make comparisons with 10 years ago, he may recall that inflation then was in double figures, at 10 per cent. We have now had the longest period of low inflation since the 1960s. At one point, 3 million people were unemployed. Unemployment is now the lowest that it has been in the time that anyone can remember. National debt doubled under the Conservatives. Today, we have a very strong economic position.
In relation to trade, as I said, our position with India and China is strong and getting stronger. Most of that is built on the fact that we have an extremely strong British economy and, crucially, unlike the Conservatives, we are willing to put money into things like science and innovation, which is critical to our country’s future.
May I join my hon. Friend the Member for Middlesbrough, South and East Cleveland (Dr. Kumar) in congratulating the Secretary of State on his very successful visit to India? May I also say that my right hon. Friend looked stunning with the garland that was placed around him on his arrival?
What practical steps will be developed as a result of the visit in terms of financial services, bearing in mind that both Mumbai and the City of London are key world financial centres?
I said that support for the Government is always welcome, and support for the Secretary of State is even more welcome, so I am grateful to my right hon. Friend for his compliments, if that is what they were. [Laughter.]
My right hon. Friend highlights an important area of future co-operation between Britain and India in relation to Mumbai. The Indian Government want to develop that city as a major financial services centre, not just for India, but for the region as a whole. We want to encourage that. The City of London is now able to open an office in Mumbai, and a lot of British companies are active there. We have been urging on the Indians a more liberal approach, allowing British firms to invest in Mumbai.
Some 23 Indian companies are listed on the London stock exchange and 13 are on the alternative investment market. That shows two things: first, the growing closeness and relationship between India and Britain, and, secondly, that the London stock exchange and the City of London are pre-eminent across the world and recognised as a very good place to do business. It is important that we keep it that way.
Energy White Paper
Ministers have held numerous discussions with other parties and colleagues over the course of the energy review since it was launched in 2005. As I have set out in a written statement today, following last week’s court judgment it is now likely that the White Paper on energy and the new consultation on nuclear energy will be published in early May. If we can do it earlier than that, we will, but that time scale will enable the Government to make a decision on nuclear and on other issues arising from the White Paper in the autumn.
Does the Minister accept Ofgem’s criticism, and that of others, that the Government’s renewables obligations policy is unbalanced in how it treats potential sources of renewable energy? When will he deal with that criticism?
No, I am not convinced by Ofgem’s criticism. It has put forward an alternative means of encouraging renewable energy, but it seems to me to be broadly similar to the system that ran for many years until the late 1990s, which did not result in much in the way of renewable energy.
Two things must be said about the renewables obligation. First, and now for the first time, we are seventh in the world in terms of producing electricity from renewable sources. There are more and more applications to build wind farms as well as more investment in offshore energy generation, as well as wave and tidal power generation. Secondly, the industry needs some certainty. If we keep chopping and changing how we support renewable energies, we will run the risk that the whole thing will fall apart.
At the moment, we are discussing nuclear power generation and there are people who argue that renewables can fill the gap that may be left by a lower number of nuclear power stations. We need more renewable energy, not less, so I am yet to be persuaded by Ofgem’s submission. Of course I will listen to what it has to say, but it is important that we continue to provide some stability to energy policy.
Following last week's High Court ruling that the energy review consultation was “seriously flawed”, the Prime Minister said
“This won't affect the policy at all”.
Today, the Secretary of State has announced a new consultation, but in light of the Prime Minister's pre-emptive comments, surely that consultation is set to be as seriously flawed as the previous one.
Well, the hon. Lady might do worse than to read the judgment. It is perfectly possible—indeed it is highly desirable—that Government take a lead in promoting policy. The Government have to have a view on nuclear. I appreciate that, being a Liberal Democrat, the hon. Lady has never had that problem, because the Lib Dems do not have to have a view on anything. I see that her hon. Friend the Member for Caithness, Sutherland and Easter Ross (John Thurso) is not here, but, as she knows, his view is different from hers.
In relation to nuclear, the Government's position is that, especially at a time when the amount of electricity generated by nuclear will fall from about 20 per cent. to about 7 per cent. of the total market over the next 15 to 20 years, there is a case for replacing that amount of energy generation with new nuclear generation. What the judge found was that the process of consultation was flawed, and I fully accept that. I therefore intend that we will carry out a full and proper consultation, so that people can have their say. One thing is clear: the issue will not go away. We need to have greener sources of electricity generation and to ensure security of supply. That is something that the Liberal Democrats are constitutionally incapable of doing.
I note the Secretary of State's comments and welcome the fact that the White Paper will be published in May, if not before. Conservative Members are obviously disappointed that it has taken so long. Is the Minister aware of my constituents’ concerns about the Government's apparent lack of a coherent and credible energy policy, and their scepticism about the consultation in the light of the decision to approve the waste incinerator in Belvedere, where the consultation with local people and experts was not taken into account? Will this be a real consultation or just another sham?
It is important that there is a full and proper consultation. I used to be deeply sceptical about nuclear power. I changed my mind because the facts changed in two respects. First, the science on climate change is now very clear. Unless we get ourselves into a position where we can produce more electricity from low-carbon sources, we will continue to pump carbon into the atmosphere, and that cannot be justified. Secondly, the amount of oil and gas in the North sea is slowly but surely declining. That means that, if we do not do anything about it, we will import more oil and gas from other parts of the world. That is an especially serious prospect when we consider that that oil and gas will, in many cases, be coming from areas that have huge political problems. I therefore think that nuclear needs to be part of the mix.
That is my view and it is the Government's view, but I have given an undertaking that we will consult on that because people need to engage with the argument. As I said earlier, that argument will not go away and it is essential that we engage with it. If people have better solutions, let us hear them, but for goodness’ sake do not think that, by putting off the decision, we will not be faced with the difficult choices that any Government worth their name have to make.
In the Secretary of State’s discussions with the Chancellor of the Exchequer on the energy White Paper, will he pay specific attention to the needs of industry? There is a fashionable London view that only services count and that every product with metal or steel in it can be imported into this country, and that that is the future. I am not sure that that is the case, and our steel, glass and other industries need a coherent energy-pricing policy, which they have not had in recent years. I know that the Secretary of States has made good efforts in that respect, but please will he, with the Chancellor, focus hard on sending out the right signals for our industry electricity users?
My right hon. Friend is right. Last winter, there was a shock to the system in that we did not get the expected gas supplies. The result was that wholesale prices went up and the prices being paid by steelmakers and other heavy industrial users were far higher than they should have been. This year, because we now have additional gas coming from Norway, the Netherlands and Belgium, and because we now have greater capability in terms of bringing in liquefied natural gas, and have taken other new measures too, wholesales prices have come down by about 60 per cent. and, thankfully, those prices are about to be passed on to domestic consumers as well as industrial consumers. However, my right hon. Friend is right: if we do nothing—if we ignore the problems that we can see arising in the next 10 to 15 years—we will have very severe energy problems. I am prepared to put up with a six or seven-week delay because, frankly, it is better to get right how we deal with the big problems over the next 20 to 30 years.
My right hon. Friend will be aware of the many practical examples of renewable energy measures that have been introduced into the UK, with or without an energy White Paper, over the past 10 years. Will he join me in congratulating npower in Swindon on its plans for a wind turbine on Windmill hill, and will he further tell me what steps he is taking to encourage local councils—
Order. We will go for one supplementary question only.
My hon. Friend is right that wind power is very important. I am just sorry that so many applications are now blocked. [Interruption.] Before the hon. Member for Rutland and Melton (Alan Duncan) stands up to berate me, as a I fully expect him to do, he might like to tell me what steps he will take to persuade Conservative councils not to block applications, as we know we need such renewable energy.
Businesses in my constituency also raise the issue of the fluctuation in energy prices and the effect that that has on their trade and competitiveness. Given that, what is my right hon. Friend doing to bring the energy companies along with him in respect of the energy White Paper and other long-term measures, to ensure that such fluctuations in costs are minimised in order to give local companies more stability to plan ahead?
Again, my hon. Friend is right. What is needed more than anything else is stability, which is why energy companies—everybody, really—ought to be concerned that we have a stable policy framework that will allow generators to choose what form of generation is most appropriate. The two matters that should be concentrating our minds are, first, how to get cleaner, greener sources of energy, and, secondly, how to ensure that we have security of supply in the future. There ought to be cross-party consensus on that at least—although we can, perhaps, argue about how we actually achieve that. Those are the two big issues that face this country, and countries around the world, and I intend to address them fully during the forthcoming consultation period. As I have said, I intend to reach conclusions by the autumn.
Does the Secretary of State agree with the following two recent conclusions of the Select Committee on Trade and Industry: first, that nuclear power is generally a very low-carbon source of electricity, and secondly, that although local energy generation has interesting potential, it is not a short-term panacea for the real problems we face? If he does agree, does he also share my fear that the uncertainty created by the further delay that he has been forced to announce today risks there being investment in new gas-fired power stations—with all the implications of that for climate change and security of supply—rather than in nuclear power stations, which I agree with him are necessary?
I agree with the first part of the hon. Gentleman’s question. Nuclear is, without doubt, a lower carbon form of producing energy—it is not carbon free, but it is much lower. I also believe that although distributed energy—small-scale energy—is an important part of the mix, it can never be an answer despite what Greenpeace and others have suggested from time to time. We could not possibly end up depending on thousands of different producers to make sure that we have enough electricity, for example, to provide for our needs across the entire country. Distributed energy does, however, have a part to play.
On the delay, my soundings are that industry would prefer that we got the consultation right—that we put up with a six or seven-week delay before we publish the White Paper and the associated consultations—as long as we reach decisions in a reasonable time. I think that we will do so before the end of this year—in the autumn. If we can get that right, there is no reason to believe that we cannot make sure that we have an energy policy that is back on track and that can provide for us in the way that I have described.
Does the Secretary of State accept that a key issue for the White Paper is introducing mechanisms to enable carbon to be traded at a high and stable price not just in the UK, but in Europe and, ultimately, globally?
Yes, I do, which is why the Government have spent a great deal of time and effort persuading other European countries that the EU emissions trading scheme ought to be strengthened. If there is no carbon price, it will be very difficult to persuade people to go for the low-carbon options. That issue is very important; indeed, it is equally as important as clean coal—coal was mentioned earlier—and carbon capture. All those things should be part of an approach that will get us secure and greener supplies.
The whole energy review is clearly in a complete mess. It began back in November 2005, and it was two months before the consultation document was published. Six months later, the report came out and said virtually nothing. The High Court now says that the process was flawed. The Government are delaying the White Paper yet again, and we will have no decision on anything until the autumn, which means that this supposedly urgent policy will have taken more than two years. I suspect, Mr. Speaker—
I suspect that I am going to get a question.
I can assure you, Mr. Speaker, that in all respects I am shorter than all other questioners.
I immediately withdraw that assertion, Mr. Speaker.
Is it not clear for all to see that the Government are totally paralysed, and that we Conservatives are better prepared for government than the Government themselves?
I was tempted to ask the hon. Gentleman, if he is so well prepared, whether he has a policy on nuclear yet. As I understand it, his policy is to wait to see whether anything else works and to come to a decision at the last moment. On his general point—if there was one—most people can see the thrust of what the Government are proposing in a broad range of measures. We need to ensure that we have the right sources of electricity and other energy generation, and to concentrate on reducing our demand for energy, which is a key part of any approach. We need to make sure that industry and households have incentives to use less gas and electricity, but we also need to ensure that we get the generation capacity that we will need. We should remember that a third of all our power stations will come out of commission in the next 20 years, so decisions need to be made. However, having spoken to many people in the industry over the past nine months since becoming Secretary of State, my sense is that they are more concerned that we get the consultation process right. Frankly, given that we are establishing policies that will last 20 or 30 years, a six or seven week delay—although we would ideally do without it—is something that we can live with.
Next question. [Laughter.]
Can the Secretary of State tell us what the Chancellor’s view is on nuclear power, and can he explain how his own policy of having nuclear power only as an option to be considered by companies in any way matches the Prime Minister’s assertion that we must and will have nuclear power? How does the Secretary of State’s “it may/will happen” policy tally with the Prime Minister’s “it definitely will happen” rhetoric?
The Chancellor and I are in complete agreement on this and most other matters, so that deals with the hon. Gentleman’s first point. On his second point, the Government are saying to generators that, whereas successive Governments have been very reluctant to sanction additional nuclear capacity, nuclear—subject to consultation—ought to be part of the mix. In other words, generators need be able to consider the option of nuclear alongside others. It is not for the Government to decide that it has got to be nuclear, as opposed to oil or gas.
That is the same as us.
I think that the difference between us and the Conservatives—inasmuch as I can understand their policy—is that they have not got a clue on nuclear.
I welcome the Government’s decision not to appeal Mr. Justice Sullivan’s judgment, which was scathing, to put it mildly. He did not apply the term “misleading” to the economic section, but he did call it “jejune” and an “empty husk”. In the consultation that is to take place, the Secretary of State will be aware that most of the supporting documents for the economic case have not been put into the public arena or have been put in only in much reduced form. Can he give us an assurance that he will provide those documents to this consultation, or can he tell us which aspects of the economic case he is not willing to make public?
As I said to the hon. Member for East Dunbartonshire (Jo Swinson) a few moments ago, we did make a considerable amount of economic data available. I fully accept in retrospect that it probably should have been made available when the consultation was launched back in January 2006. I want to ensure that we can have an informed debate in the House and among the wider public. All I would say to the hon. Member for Richmond Park (Susan Kramer) is that she, too, should perhaps open her mind to all the options, because it is not clear to me that she has a policy to deal with the two pressures of security of supply and achieving greener sources of energy. Until she does, I strongly advise her to reflect further before venturing into the public domain.
Sustainable Development Technologies
The DTI is working with business to encourage the development of sustainable development technologies and sustainable consumption and production practices. This support covers a wide range of activities including support of the UK science base, the technology programme and our joint work with the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs on sustainable consumption and production.
Does my right hon. Friend agree that we are right to focus support increasingly on clusters of manufacturers and their supply chains by sectoral activity? If she does, and bearing in mind our ambitious target for renewable energy, does she agree that there is an urgent need to expand our base of clusters for renewable energy? If she is with me so far, could she bear in mind for the next time we meet that Stafford is an excellent location for such a cluster, because of its 100 years of experience in power and its existing experiences with solar, wind and biomass, and because we have the only factory in the whole of the UK manufacturing transformers, with worldwide experience in transmission and distribution?
I agree with my hon. Friend that clusters are an important way to provide strength and build key capacity in such areas. I congratulate him on the work that he is doing in his own constituency to try to ensure that Stafford develops such a cluster and I have no doubt that in his discussions with the regional development agency and in our considerations through the technology strategy we will bear in mind the strong case that he makes.
Following the excellent question from the hon. Member for Stafford (Mr. Kidney), and the Minister’s reply, with especial reference to sustainable production, I seek her advice and assistance, and that of the Government. Earlier this week, AstraZeneca, the largest employer in my constituency, announced 700 job losses at its manufacturing site in Macclesfield. I am pleased to say that the job losses will be spread over three years, but one of the reasons the company gave for that decision was the cost of energy. Can the Government give any advice or assistance on that question, because the shedding of 700 manufacturing jobs in a high technology industry such as pharmaceuticals is a very dangerous and unfortunate development?
I share the hon. Gentleman’s concern about the loss of jobs in his constituency, although I would draw his attention to the fact that we perform well in the pharmaceutical sector. The Government need to continue to provide the conditions that will enable that to continue into the future. That means providing the right business environment and ensuring that we invest in research and development so that we have the innovation necessary to keep us one step ahead.
The hon. Gentleman is also right to draw attention to the fact that energy prices last year did create difficulties for many sectors of industry. That is why my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State referred to the steps that we have taken to secure energy supply for this winter and beyond and, through the energy White Paper, to bring down energy prices so that we remain internationally competitive in manufacturing, especially in areas such as the pharmaceutical industry.
May I point out to my right hon. Friend that perhaps the most sustainable source of energy actually lies within the earth’s crust, but that historically this country has underdeveloped and under-researched geothermal energy sources? I ask my right hon. Friend to work with the construction industry and other Departments with a view to promoting that source of energy within new construction, which will help not only our carbon footprint, but companies such as Forkers in my constituency that are at the cutting edge of geothermal technology.
My hon. Friend is right to draw attention to this important source of conserving energy and sustainable development. Indeed, I am working with the construction industry to look again into what further steps we can take around sustainability in construction to ensure that we conserve our energy resources. We support, and are in various ways investing in trying to promote, geothermal capacity.
The Minister said that she is encouraging sustainable technologies development, so can she explain why the DTI’s supplemental budget published this week shows that she has cut research council funding by £68 million?
I simply draw the hon. Lady’s attention to the statement, which shows that that is an underspend. It is money that was not spent, which we are drawing back into the remaining overcommitments in the Department’s budget.
One of the ways in which the Minister’s Department supports renewable technology is through the low carbon buildings programme, which is so successful that it runs out of money every month. As a result, people who miss the cut-off date have to apply again the next month. As that does not encourage householders to apply under the scheme and is destructive of industry, will the Minister consider providing more funds for the low carbon buildings programme, so that we do not have that arbitrary cut-off period every month?
I understand that my hon. Friend has tabled a question that may be reached later this morning. Up to 2008, we are providing £12.8 million to meet the issues that he has raised.
Is the Minister aware that the director of the Renewable Energy Association has described the programme as descending into farce? At the beginning of each month when the allocations are opened, they close after shorter and shorter periods. This month, they closed within hours of opening on 1 February. The scheme was set up to encourage the development of renewable technologies in this country, but how can that possibly happen when the scheme stops and starts as it does?
This is a demonstration programme—we have demonstrated its success and will build beyond that into the future.
In answer to the previous question, the Minister mentioned the potential for carbon capture technology. There is an exciting potential development at Peterhead, but it is apparently being put in doubt because of the delay in the Government’s announcement of financial support for this technology. Can she tell us when a decision will be made and announced on support for carbon capture?
I question the hon. Gentleman’s assertion that there has been a delay in our decision making on how we can better promote carbon capture. That is not the case. We are pursuing, with all the vigour that we can, the important issue of conserving our energy resources.
Limited Companies
The number of company insolvencies in England and Wales in 2006 totalled 17,819, while 190,742 companies were struck off the Companies House register.
I am grateful to the Minister for that response. Does he acknowledge that many of those companies were small companies? Given that small companies are the driver of the British economy, does he agree that any new tax on small or medium-sized companies would be a retrograde step? What discussions has he had with his counterparts at the Treasury about the possibility of a new local business tax resulting from the Lyons review? Would he oppose any such tax?
The hon. Gentleman is asking me to anticipate the outcome of the Lyons review and to make pronouncements before it has been completed. We are in close touch with the Treasury on all business matters, and it is certainly the role of the DTI to provide business support. We do that through Business Link, which is attracting a great deal of interest and received more than 700,000 hits last year from businesses, helping them to stay in business and to develop. We have also published our better regulation simplification plan for all businesses, and the small business forum is part of the ministerial challenge panel that I chair, and helps to ensure that small businesses can survive in today’s competitive market.
Does my hon. Friend agree that the figures that he has given to the House provide only a partial picture of what is going on in UK business, because much business formation consists of sole traders and partnerships, rather than limited liability companies? To put the matter in context, will he tell the House how many limited liability companies were registered during that period, to give us an in-and-out measure?
My hon. Friend is describing the positive position of British business, and I can tell him that the three-year survival rate—a key indicator—for businesses registered in 2002 was 71 per cent., and that three-year survival rates have been increasing since 2000. The number of registrations at Companies House has exceeded the number of deregistrations each year between 1995 and 2005. That is a very positive image of British business.
With both individual and corporate insolvencies now on the increase, is it not the case, as my hon. Friend the Member for The Wrekin (Mark Pritchard) said, that the small business man is increasingly feeling the heavy weight of this Government’s regulations and stealth taxes and, in many cases, simply closing up shop?
The hon. Gentleman gives me the opportunity to say a little more about the Government’s priority of better regulation. We are the first Government to quantify administrative burdens and publish the results, and we have committed ourselves to a 25 per cent. reduction by 2010. Business has always identified the administration burden as one of its top priorities. The DTI’s contribution to the £2 billion of savings that we have identified to be achieved by 2010 is £700 million a year, and we are working closely with all levels of business to ensure that we are addressing this issue. If the hon. Gentleman has any suggestions for improvements in better regulation, he can either hit the better regulation website or drop me a line. I will be very happy to hear from him.
Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment Directive
Mr. Speaker, in 10 years of answering questions at this Dispatch Box, this is one that I did not want ever to have to answer. You will see why.
The Department of Trade and Industry has lead responsibility for the regulations that implement the majority of the provisions of the WEEE directive in the United Kingdom. These were laid before Parliament on 12 December 2006 and come fully into force on 1 July 2007. The DTI will shortly be issuing detailed guidance on the regulations and will continue to work with industry, local authorities and other parties to ensure the establishment of—wait for it—an effective WEEE system in the United Kingdom.
I thank the Minister for that response. A recent survey showed that 43 per cent. of large firms were unsure about how to implement the electrical waste directive, and that 70 per cent. of small firms did not even know that it existed. In the light of that, and of the sheer lack of recycling industries in the UK, is not an electronic waste mountain now inevitable? Do we not now need strong cost departments and urgent action?
It is true to say that this is one of the most complex pieces of legislation to come out of Europe. It is not true, however, to say that the Government and industry are not working together on it. All the proposals that have been implemented at local government level and at national and regional level have been implemented after full consultation with the British Retail Consortium. The arrangements and financial resources that have been put in place in local government and the industry itself reflect their requests about the operation of the scheme. Unless we put the scheme in place by July 2007, companies will increasingly be liable to dispose of those electrical goods themselves. That cannot be right. We have to have a comprehensive and effective system. We are taking our time over this matter to ensure that producers, distributors and local authorities are at one and that the scheme will be managed effectively.
I do not think that the Government could have got a more appropriate Minister to answer on the WEEE directive. Some of the electrical items may have been bought from Tiny in the past, but we will not go there. Will the Minister praise local authorities—including Ribble Valley—that have places in their recycling depots where people can bring their electrical waste items? In the implementation of the directive, will he ensure that enough thought is given to the unintended consequences, thinking not only of fridge mountains, which we saw in the past, but fly-tipping, which will take place in a number of areas throughout the country?
I was going to ask Mr. Speaker to stop people taking the Michael out of me on this subject. This is a serious issue. The hon. Gentleman is right in this sense: I will congratulate local authorities. Local authorities and the British Retail Consortium have taken a leadership role on the issue. That is why there is something like an additional £10 million, from the retail sector itself, for local authorities to upgrade their civil amenities sites in advance. Alongside of that, we have changed legislation to give greater powers to local authorities to deal with fly-tipping, which is a serious social problem, as it always has been. The difference between this scheme and the fridges scheme is that this scheme has been well thought out and, from the beginning, there was a buy-in from local authorities and the industry. I believe that we have an effective scheme in place to start operating from July 2007.
China
We are engaging with our Chinese counterparts at the highest level through our annual summits and joint economic trade commissions—JETCs—as well as the Deputy Prime Minister’s China taskforce, which has a substantial trade element. Indeed, the taskforce is meeting as we speak. During my visit to China, I established a rapport with the Chinese Government, which I have used to good effect—pressing China to further open its markets, marketing the United Kingdom’s strengths, lobbying on some of the key company issues, and assisting in the realisation of major contracts, such as the Rolls-Royce £400m engine contract with Air China and Arup’s contract to design Kunming airport.
The UK trade deficit with China in the past five years has been £3.8 billion, £5 billion, £6 billion, £7.3 billion and, finally, £9.4 billion. The Minister mentioned the China taskforce under the Deputy Prime Minister, which has as one of its four priorities the promotion of trade and investment between the UK and China. To what concrete achievements of the China taskforce in promoting trade with China can he point?
It never ceases to amaze me that when we are trying to promote the United Kingdom in one of the world’s growing market, we get no continuity of support for either British business or British investment. It is not just the taskforce that is promoting trade with China—that is also happening at prime ministerial level, between the two Prime Ministers, and at Secretary of State level across the economy. It involves business after business and the City of London. There is now a 19 per cent. increase in UK exports to China. Our exports to China are growing faster than imports from China. That never happened under the Conservative Government. In the service sector, there is a 2:1 balance in favour of trade with the UK. We have the right policies, the right programmes, the right relationship and the right businesses to do business effectively with China.
Asbestos Claims
The day-to-day handling of such claims is undertaken by the solicitors Eversheds. The Department’s internal audit partner, PricewaterhouseCoopers, undertook a high level review and made a number of recommendations, but overall was complimentary about Eversheds’ handling.
I am grateful to my right hon. Friend for that answer, but she will be aware that many of the people who have been exposed to asbestos while working for British Shipbuilders have developed mesothelioma cancer, which means a very short lifespan. Will she therefore ensure that any delays that have been identified are removed so that claims can be settled quickly? She will also be aware that the Department for Work and Pensions has introduced a fast-track system. Will she ensure that her Department works within the framework of that fast-track system to ensure that mesothelioma sufferers are paid the money before they die?
First, I congratulate my hon. Friend on his consistent hard work over a long time in the House on behalf of mesothelioma victims. I will take note of his wise words, and we will ensure that claims are settled quickly. When preparing for this morning, I found that there was some slowness last year because of a lack of proper information regarding the settlement of claims. He is right to draw attention to the fact that mesothelioma victims tend to have the prospect of a short future life, so it is crucial that we act quickly. We will examine the DWP fast-tracking scheme to determine whether we can learn anything from it.
Trade Balance
The deficit on trade in goods and services was £4.9 billion in December 2006, the most recent period for which figures are available from the Office for National Statistics. There was a robust growth in UK exports of goods and services in 2006. The value of exports of goods and services was up 12.7 per cent. on 2005. The value of UK goods exports was up 15.2 per cent. on the previous year. The stock of inward investment in the UK rose to £483 billion at the end of 2005, a rise of £119 billion over the stock at the end of 2004. The UK is the second most popular destination for inward investment in the world today.
Throughout the whole of the last Conservative Government, we used to listen to Labour Members telling us how important it was to have a surplus in goods and services, but we have not had a surplus since January 1998, and we now have the worst deficit ever. Will the Minister tell the House exactly what this wretched Labour Government are doing to promote exports?
When it comes to wretched Governments, the hon. Gentleman should know one—he was a sycophantic supporter of them before he lost his seat. Under his Government, we had inflation at 10 per cent., 3 million on the dole, 1,000 businesses going to the wall every week, national debt doubled and 350,000 young people on the dole. This is now a different country with a world-class economy and a Government who are committed to British business. We are providing 2.5 million new jobs. This is a different country—thank God—with a Labour Government.
Women and Equality
The Minister was asked—
Human Trafficking
I regularly discuss these issues with the inter-ministerial group on trafficking, and I recently wrote to Cabinet colleagues to support our signature to the Council of Europe trafficking convention. At our last meeting, we discussed the progress of the UK human trafficking centre, the first of its kind in Europe.
I thank the Minister for her response and welcome the UK finally signing up to the convention, following Conservative pressure.
The Minister will be aware of last June’s massive and authoritative report by the US State Department on human trafficking in the world. In a mixed review of the UK, it stated:
“There is no specialised immigration status available for trafficking victims, and shelter capacity for victims continues to be limited … The Government should continue and expand specialised training to include screening and referral of potential trafficking victims for all front line responders among law enforcement, immigration, medical, educational and social services.”
Will she tell us the Government’s response to the suggestions from the US State Department?
The Government are doing a great deal on trafficking, which is why cross-government work is going on. We have had successful operations in relation to people coming into this country, such as Operation Pentameter. We are leading Europe on providing for victims and ensuring that people are recognised at ports. This must be an international issue and it needs to be dealt with through international action. We are making great progress, and we are recognised as a leader in Europe.
I agree that we are making progress, but what steps are the Government taking to ensure that schemes that are designed to help victims of trafficking are available outside London?
My hon. Friend asks an enormously important question. The Home Office funding for the Poppy scheme, which is based in London, between 2003 and 2006 totalled £2 million. Last year, we entered into a £2.4 million funding agreement to provide 25 crisis places, 10 resettlement places and the first ever outreach service for UK victims of trafficking. Work is going on to develop places outside London, and we are examining the situation as part of our overall review of support for vulnerable people.
The whole House understands that it is very difficult to take effective measures against this contemporary form of slavery, given the desperate circumstances that many of the women face in their own countries and the ruthlessness of the criminal gangs, but the key point has to be to try to stop those women leaving their country and coming here. Has the Minister had any discussions with the Policing Minister with a view to sending senior police officers, perhaps even retired ones, to some of the countries that are the worst offenders to see what action they can take to try to tackle the problem at source?
The hon. Lady raises an enormously important issue, and indeed such work is ongoing. I am also pleased to say that this week the Department for International Development has produced a booklet called “Breaking the chains - eliminating slavery, ending poverty”, which is designed to recognise that it is poverty and social exclusion that make people vulnerable to trafficking and other forms of contemporary slavery. DFID’s work in supporting long-term programmes to help tackle the underlying causes of poverty, including social exclusion and conflict, are also adding to our work on the issue.
Flexible Working
In April 2003, we introduced the right to request flexible working for parents of young and disabled children. Finding working hours to match caring responsibilities is a crucial issue for many families. Some 3.6 million parents have that right; almost 25 per cent. of them have asked to work flexibly; and about four out of five requests are accepted.
I thank the Minister for that reply. Does she agree with her colleague the Minister for Children and Families that all parents should have the right to request flexible working? Indeed, given that there are so many reasons other than caring responsibilities for people wanting to manage their work-life balance differently, does she agree that there would be benefits for all of society if the right were extended to everyone?
My right hon. Friend the Minister for Children and Families was giving her personal view on how we might build on successful policies to try to make work much more flexible for millions of people. For example, the right to request flexible working has led to 47 per cent. of new mothers working flexi-time, compared with just 17 per cent. in 2002—a massive change. From this April, as the hon. Lady is, I am sure, well aware, we are extending that right to carers. I have sympathy with the view that we should go further, build on that and extend the right to other groups in due course, but we have to try to take the business community with us because the key to our success so far has been culture change and the fact that we have been able to maintain a consensus. We will of course keep the position under review.
I welcome the progress that we have made on flexible working, but would my right hon. Friend take the policy even further and consider a reduction in the number of hours that we work in this country? That would assist not only those who have requested flexible working, but those hundreds of thousands of families who struggle to maintain their work-life balance simply because of the length of working hours and the inflexibility of the working week.
My hon. Friend makes an incredibly important point. This is not just an issue for new mothers or, indeed, new fathers; it is about the number of hours that we all spend at work every week, sometimes as a result of a long hours culture in which one’s presence at one’s desk is seen as a sign of success. There is an important cultural issue there about how employers recognise the contribution that employees make, how they recruit and retain employees, which is desirable for pure business reasons, and how quality of life is valued as part of our social discourse. If we get this right, there are huge potential gains. One thing that we are doing is working with a group of exemplar employers to promote flexible working and quality of life, for sound business reasons.
I welcome what the right hon. Lady says about the extension of flexible working not only to parents but to carers and others with family responsibilities. She has shown some understanding of the business community, but will she confirm also her understanding that businesses, especially small businesses, are very apprehensive about the duties that will be imposed on them and about the problems of flexible working? Will she undertake to publish guidance for business aimed particularly at small businesses, to reassure them that flexible working, properly implemented, is likely to be not a hindrance but a benefit to families and businesses alike?
I am delighted to welcome the hon. Lady back to her place. I am sure that she had fun while incurring her injury, but I hope that she is recovering.
The hon. Lady is absolutely right to say that we have to take the needs of the business community into account. I think that there are good, sound business reasons for allowing employees to work flexibly, although of course there may in certain circumstances be very sound business reasons for turning down approaches to work flexibly. That is why we have a right to request, and in the vast majority of cases, those requests are approved. As we go forward, it is important that we maintain that consensus. The Equal Opportunities Commission has done specific work not only on the transformation of work, but on how the small business community can implement and make more possible the take-up of the right to flexible working. We in Government will work closely with the commission as we extend the right to other groups, to ensure that it is done in a sensible and proportionate way.
Female Prisoners
I will be speaking to Baroness Scotland next week to discuss women offenders and the female prison population.
I thank the Minister for that reply. I am sure that she is aware that there is no women’s prison in Wales, and that women offenders are placed outside Wales, with terrible consequences for them and their families, and especially their children. Would she support the development in south Wales of a centre like the Asha centre or the 218 programme, which address the punishment of women offenders for the crimes that they committed, but which also consider the factors related to women’s offending, including domestic abuse, mental illness and drug and alcohol misuse?
My hon. Friend raises an important point. Women tend to be imprisoned further from home than men because there are fewer women’s prisons, and maintenance of important family links is therefore much more difficult. As she will be aware, Baroness Scotland announced in March last year that Baroness Corston had agreed to undertake a review of women in the criminal justice system with particular vulnerabilities. We are looking forward to the production of that report in the near future, when there will be an opportunity to address the issues that my hon. Friend raises, and many others.
Given that 70 per cent. of women in prison suffer from two or more mental disorders, and 37 per cent. of them attempted suicide before going to prison, will the Minister consider introducing a system of court diversion, whereby women are assessed for mental health treatment before they are sent to prison, and not afterwards, as exposure to the prison environment is likely to make their condition much worse?
The hon. Lady again raises an important issue. We know that 55 per cent. of all self-harm incidents in prison are committed by women, even though they comprise only about 6 per cent. of the total prison population, and the fact that there are underlying mental health issues for many women in prison is enormously important. As I said, the review that Baroness Corston has undertaken has looked into a range of issues, and I look forward to having more detailed discussions on the subject when we have the findings of that review.
Business of the House
Will the Leader of the House give us the business for the coming weeks?
The business for next week will be as follows:
Monday 26 February—Opposition Day [7th Allotted Day]. There will be a debate entitled “State of the Royal Navy”, followed by a debate entitled “Integrity of the Electoral System”. Both debates arise on an Opposition motion. That is followed by a motion to approve a money resolution on the Sustainable Communities Bill.
Tuesday 27 February—Remaining stages of the Greater London Authority Bill.
Wednesday 28 February—Remaining stages of the Offender Management Bill.
Thursday 1 March—There will be a debate on Welsh Affairs on St. David’s day, as I said there would be, on a motion for the Adjournment of the House.
Friday 2 March—Private Members’ Bills.
The provisional business for the week commencing 5 March will be:
Monday 5 March—Second Reading of Tribunals, Courts and Enforcement Bill [Lords].
Tuesday 6 March—First day of debate on House of Lords reform.
Wednesday 7 March—Conclusion of debate on House of Lords reform.
Thursday 8 March—A debate entitled “Women, Justice and Gender Equality in the UK” on a motion for the Adjournment of the House.
Friday 9 March—Private Members’ Bills.
It may assist the House if I confirm that my right hon. Friend the Chancellor of the Exchequer today announced that he proposes to deliver his Budget statement on Wednesday 21 March. In addition, as I told the House on Monday, it is my intention to provide as much notice as possible of the various motions in respect of House of Lords reform, and those will be in the Order Paper tomorrow.
For the convenience of the House, that will give Members on both sides an opportunity to look at the motions and decide whether they wish to table amendments. Although the motions appear on the Order Paper, they do so in draft form, and I will take account of amendments and suggestions that are made, in an attempt—hon. Members may query whether I will succeed, given my track record—to arrive at a consensus on the number of motions.
I thank the Leader of the House both for what he said about the motions on House of Lords reform and for giving us the future business. I note, however, that he did not tell us when the Prime Minister will present to the House the petition of 1.8 million signatures that he has received protesting against road user charging.
Yesterday, the Under-Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs revealed that the British taxpayer will pay £305 million in fines to Brussels because the Rural Payments Agency failed to pay farmers in time under the single payment scheme for a second consecutive year. In a written statement today, the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs failed to mention that fact, so may we have a debate on the incompetence displayed by both the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs and the Rural Payments Agency?
That was not the only example of ministerial incompetence yesterday. The Department of Trade and Industry announced that the science research budget would be cut by £68 million because of a departmental overspend, so may we have a general debate on ministerial incompetence?
May we have a statement on the Government’s policy on public consultation? Last week, Mr. Justice Sullivan ruled that the Government’s consultation on nuclear power was “misleading”, “seriously flawed” and “procedurally unfair”—yet more Government incompetence. The Secretary of State for Trade and Industry said:
“I have to accept that we got it wrong.”
The Prime Minister, however, said:
“This won’t affect the policy at all”.
I understand that the Leader of the House thinks that the Prime Minister is
“a master of ambiguity”,
but I would describe the Prime Minister’s response as unambiguous. It is, dare I say, unambiguously arrogant, so will the Leader of the House make a statement on public consultations by the Government?
The Prime Minister says that he wants the five-year mandatory sentence for carrying guns to apply to 17-year-olds. The Leader of the House used to be Home Secretary, so he knows that the Government can do that very easily, as the Criminal Justice Act 2003 allows them to amend firearms legislation by parliamentary order. Yet when the Appeal Court ruled that the five-year jail terms could not apply to anyone under 21 the Home Secretary failed to close the loophole. That ruling was made in March, almost a year ago, so may we have a debate on the gross incompetence displayed on an almost daily basis by the Home Office?
One thing at which the Government are competent, as everyone knows, is spinning and the Chancellor is spinning that he will end the spin. May we have a debate on political appointments in the civil service? The Chancellor claims that he wants to end the culture of spin, but he has just appointed yet another special adviser. The ministerial code says that Cabinet Ministers may each appoint up to two special advisers, but the Chancellor does not have two special advisers; he has 12, at a cost to the taxpayer of more than £1.1 million. The House deserves a debate on the Chancellor’s taxpayer-funded spin doctors; otherwise people will rightly ask what he has to hide.
Let me just run through those items in turn. First, on road pricing, I am discussing—the matter is being examined by the Procedure Committee, too—ways in which the House of Commons might follow the ground-breaking example of my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister to ensure that we, as well as Downing street, are up-to-date in encouraging petitions. It is a long-standing practice for people to deliver petitions to Downing street as well as to Parliament. Indeed, I used to do so myself in another capacity about 40 years ago.
The right hon. Lady would be well advised to read the response that my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister sent to all those 1.6 million petitioners, informing them that there are now 6 million more cars on the road and that it costs £30 million per mile to build a new motorway. If the Conservatives are serious about getting into government, they will have to deal with that issue as well. I note that the Leader of the Opposition, who is a far greater master of ambiguity than my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister, told the Oxford Mail—probably in the hope that no one else would notice; Oxford is rather keen on measures to control motor cars—
“We should also look at road charging. There isn’t an endless pot of money”.
I am glad to see the right hon. Member for Wokingham (Mr. Redwood) nodding in approbation of what I have just said. He knows very well that the Conservative leader is currently making pledges on which he cannot possibly deliver. Indeed, Grant Thornton, a distinguished firm of chartered accountants, says that the total bill for pledges currently being made by the Conservatives amounts to £8.3 billion a year and would require an income tax increase of 4p in the pound.
We have doubled the science budget in the last 10 years. The previous budget was lamentable. The issue of the Rural Payments Agency is not a good story—the right hon. Lady and everyone else knows that, and we do not pretend that it is a good story—but my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs is dealing with it. My right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Trade and Industry dealt with the question of nuclear power during Question Time.
As for the Chancellor’s special advisers, I think that they and his council of economic advisers are brilliant value for money. Let us consider what has been achieved in the last 10 years; we have enjoyed the longest-ever sustained period of economic growth and Britain has risen from the lowest place among the G7 countries to very near the top.
May we have a debate on the unfair charging practices of the major banks, particularly now that Barclays has recorded profits of £7 billion? My constituent Mr. Aranda, a small business man who is gravely ill with stomach cancer, is being charged £80 a month for four medical certificates to release the monthly premiums of the insurance that he has paid for years against his loans. It is bad enough that his GP—his local NHS GP—is making those charges.
I note what my hon. Friend has said and will bear her request in mind. There is widespread concern, not so much about the banks’ profits—we would all be lamenting if big British companies were making losses—as about the way in which they treat their consumers, both in overcharging and in making it difficult for them to move their accounts.
May we have a debate on youth-on-youth crime? In the last fortnight we have seen its tragic consequences in Peckham, Clapham and Streatham, but that is just the tip of the iceberg. What is not reported so much is that last year in London 14,000 11 to 16-year-olds were recorded as having been mugged, including 271 children aged 10 or under. We know that only one in five real muggings ever makes it into the police figures. May we debate the serious problem that faces the country—the fact that our current generation of teenagers simply cannot walk the streets feeling safe?
I should be delighted to arrange a debate on the matter. In fact most crime, particularly street crime, is youth-on-youth: it was ever thus. The difference between now and the time when my children were growing up on the streets of London is that the streets are very much safer than they were and the number of police officers available—including those in Lambeth and Southwark—is much greater, as not just the Mayor but the Metropolitan Police Commissioner will tell everyone.
On 9 January it was revealed that there was a backlog of 27,500 case files of offences committed by British citizens abroad that had not been added to police databases. Of those, 140 were serious offences. The Home Secretary said on 10 January that a full investigation would be completed within six weeks. Those six weeks elapsed yesterday. Will the Home Secretary be reporting back to the House on the investigation to explain the disarray and denial that characterised the response to warnings about this serious failure?
Will the Leader of the House encourage his right hon. Friend the Foreign Secretary to make a statement on the outcome of the Security Council’s deliberations on Iran’s compliance with resolution 1737? Does he still think that it is inconceivable that there will be military action against Iran?
Given that the Mayor of London has already leaked the headline figures of the revised Olympic budget, when will the Government publish the detailed revised budget for the 2012 games? Can the right hon. Gentleman assure the House that there will be a full parliamentary debate on it? Does he agree that the predicted huge cost increases should not fall on the shoulders of hard-pressed London council tax payers?
Finally, may we have a debate entitled “False economies in the national health service”, so that we can explore, among other things, why my local NHS trust, Epsom and St. Helier, has decided to remove one in every three light bulbs across the hospitals in the trust?
On foreign national prisoners, my right hon. Friend the Home Secretary and his colleagues continually update the situation. I accept that six weeks from the date mentioned elapsed yesterday, but my right hon. Friend has given a great deal of information to the House and will continue to do so.
On Iran, yes, of course I will encourage my right hon. Friend the Foreign Secretary to make a statement—it may have to be a written ministerial statement, rather than an oral one—in respect of any conclusions by the Security Council following resolution 1737. My right hon. Friend the Prime Minister spoke this morning in his interview on the “Today” programme about the issue of military action and Iran.
The hon. Gentleman asked about the 2012 Olympics and the budget. I happen to know a great deal about that, as I chair the Cabinet Committee dealing with the Olympics. We are examining very carefully and very rigorously all the possible costs that can arise, and in due course an announcement will be made. As the Liberal Democrats supported the Olympic bid as much as anybody else, this should not be a subject for cheap shots—[Hon. Members: “Expensive shots.”] The sedentary remarks make my point. The preparations for the games are more advanced and more under control than those for any previous games of which I am aware.
The hon. Gentleman’s last point was about false economies. There are many topics that the House should deal with, but a policy on the changing of light bulbs is a matter that should be dealt with at a local level, not in the House.
Will the Leader of the House make time for a debate on gun crime? The media will soon move on from the subject of gun crime until the next particularly frightening occurrence, but for my constituents in Hackney, gun crime and the youth culture from which it flows are an ever-current problem. In a full debate we could discuss not just issues of educational failure and support for families and communities, but the practical problem of offering people proper witness protection. With gun crimes, it is not usually a secret who has committed the crime. The difficulty is finding people brave enough to go to court and give evidence.
I welcome the forthright position that my hon. Friend has taken on the matter. We will consider whether we can provide an opportunity for a debate. I accept entirely what she says about witness intimidation. I can tell her that convictions for witness intimidation have increased by more than 30 per cent. in the past five years, but I accept that it is still a major problem and that that is no comfort to those who are the subject of the most terrible intimidation in circumstances of which, sadly, she is all too well aware.
The Prime Minister is to leave office fairly soon, in effect driven out by his colleagues. Given that, may we have a very early debate on a motion to censure the Prime Minister in respect of his conduct of the war in Iraq? Most of us think that the war was illegal, unwise, unnecessary and profoundly dangerous, and it was justified by an assertion of facts which have proved to be inaccurate. It is surely right, therefore, that the House should have the opportunity to criticise the Prime Minister personally for the evil that he has done.
Order. We are talking about a Member of this House, and I think that the right hon. and learned Gentleman should withdraw the term “evil”.
I should have said, “For the wrong that he has done.”
That is better. Thank you.
The right hon. and learned Gentleman has got the wrong party. It is the Conservative party that drives out its leaders; we have never done so. I know that he disagreed with the war in Iraq, and he has been entirely consistent about that. It was not illegal or unlawful, although we can argue about its merits. As for securing a resolution against the Prime Minister, it is open to the official Opposition at any stage to table a motion of no confidence in the Prime Minister or a motion to reduce his salary. If the right hon. and learned Gentleman wishes to pursue that course, I suggest that he has a conversation with his friends in the shadow Cabinet.
May I ask for a debate about the facilities in this House? Curwen school from my constituency will be visiting tomorrow, and I am sure that all hon. Members will agree that it deserves a quality experience. I understand that the House agreed that we would have a visitor centre back in 2004, and it has yet to be completed. We have all been living with the consequences of that build since I have been in this House. I wonder whether there might be a finish date.
I cannot give my hon. Friend a precise finish date. I can only say, to be frank, that what has happened in respect of the visitor centre has been quite lamentable. It was due to be finished in September, and it is a matter of great concern to you, Mr. Speaker, I know, as well to the House of Commons Commission. [Interruption.] I am told that that is a different building—this is a reception centre. Meanwhile, there are various plans for a visitor reception centre. Some of them were going to be too expensive and went way outside the House. I have been discussing informally with our hon. Friend the Member for Aberdeen, North (Mr. Doran), who chairs the Administration Committee, whether better, quicker and much less expensive arrangements can be made either within the curtilage of the House or using buildings that are already there on the edge of our properties.
As I have this morning received a written assurance from the Prime Minister that the climate change Bill will be subject to pre-legislative scrutiny, which I am sure the whole House will welcome, will the Leader of the House tell us when he expects the Bill to be published and the House to have a first chance to debate it?
I am afraid that I cannot tell the hon. Gentleman offhand, but I shall certainly ensure that he and the House are told.
I am sorry that the hon. Member for Mid-Bedfordshire (Mrs. Dorries) is not in her place, but I should like to say how much I applaud her remarks on her blog:
“South Staffordshire Conservatives should be ashamed of themselves. I am disgusted. Sir Patrick has said that he will stand next time as an independent, and if he does, I would help him canvass for him”
against the selected Conservative candidate
“without hesitation and regardless of what ‘you will never be given a job’ threats will be thrown at me by the whips.”
May I associate myself with the comments that my right hon. Friend just made? The point that I wanted to raise—the Whips are now looking at me, as you may notice, Mr. Speaker—is that, as he will be aware, a minority of unscrupulous employers use the exemptions allowed by agency workers legislation to utilise east European migrant workers to undermine pay and conditions, particularly in my patch, in South Elmsall and South Kirkby. That is leading to disruption of community relations and the growth of extremist parties. Will he indicate what the Government’s position is in relation to the agency workers directive in Europe and, more particularly, will he ensure that enough time is made available for the moderate and reasonable proposals contained in the Temporary Agency Workers (Prevention of Less Favourable Treatment) Bill, a private Member’s Bill that is to be debated next Friday, 2 March?
As my hon. Friend knows, the Bill is coming up a week on Friday. We are giving consideration to the position that we take. We understand what he says about the way in which some agency workers are exploited, and there is a difficult balance between exploitation and not having the whole labour market seize up.
Returning to the matter of the Department of Trade and Industry’s £68 million cut in the research councils budget, may we have a debate specifically on that issue, albeit that I might have to declare an interest as an academic? Earlier this morning, the Minister for Industry and the Regions said that this was simply a matter of clawing back underspend, but the universities understand that it is in fact a £68 million cut across the entire spending review period, and thus an important blow to their finances.
There are plenty of opportunities to debate this matter, but I hope that although the hon. Gentleman belongs to another party, he will acknowledge that one of the finest aspects of this Government’s record in the past 10 years is the fact that we have doubled the budget devoted to science. Any downward adjustment in the budget is obviously to be regretted, but this is a very small adjustment against the totality—[Interruption.] It is. Even by Liberal Democrat standards of confetti money, there has been a significant increase. We have put almost £10 billion into the science budget for the current three-year spending period. My right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Trade and Industry is doing his best to ensure that this necessary adjustment does not impact adversely on universities.
I wonder whether we could have an early debate on the ship-to-ship transfer of crude oil in the firth of Forth, now that new concerns have been reported that SPT, the marine services company involved in the bid, has admitted a previous spillage of 35,000 gallons of oil in 1995 off the gulf of Mexico. Let us just imagine the sheer devastation that a repeat of that event would cause along the coastline of my beautiful constituency.
I understand the great concern of my hon. Friend. As she knows, there are opportunities to raise these matters on Adjournment debates or in Westminster Hall, and I shall do my best to facilitate that.
I wonder whether we can have a statement on apprenticeships in the UK. Far from the picture of eager learners acquiring key competencies at the knee of experienced craftsmen, many apprenticeships have become virtual affairs with little or no workplace element. Indeed, in north-west England, half of apprenticeships have no employer engagement. Such fictional training was highlighted on the wireless programme “File on Four” a few days ago. Will the Leader of the House conjure up a statement so that our apprentices can receive something more than Mickey Mouse training?
I am afraid that Mickey Mouse training is what was practised by the previous Administration, whose record on training was absolutely terrible. I am very happy to have a debate about what we have done for apprenticeships, because we have done a huge amount for them, including, I think, 70,000 more apprentices in manufacturing. I am not suggesting that the situation is perfect, but if the hon. Gentleman has a constituency problem, there are plenty of opportunities to raise it, to ensure that the standards for all apprentice training are up to the best.
The all-party markets group recently sent out a survey seeking information from hon. Members about street markets in their constituencies. There has been a fantastic response, with 170 hon. and right hon. Members expressing an interest in taking part in a national “MPs and their markets” week. Does my right hon. Friend agree that that shows a very high level of support for street markets in this House, and will he make way for a debate?
I congratulate my hon. Friend on that initiative. I am one of those who responded to her questionnaire, and I will look at opportunities to have the matter raised on the Floor of the House.
The Leader of the House is, I know, a football fan, even though he supports Blackburn Rovers. Recently, the Minister for Sport criticised sky-high season ticket prices in the premiership, which are driving working class people away from football matches. Has the Leader of the House seen the campaign in The Sun and early-day motion 888, which criticises premiership clubs for the price of their season tickets?
[That this House recognises the excellent quality of football in the English Premiership and popularity it commands; wishes the growth and success of the Premiership to continue but in a sustainable way; regrets that season tickets to see top football clubs in England are the most expensive in Europe and cost four times more than in Germany, Holland and World-Cup winning Italy; further regrets that individual tickets are also beyond the reach of many fans; welcomes the comments of the Sports Minister criticising ‘sky-high ticket prices'; and urges the Premier League to use at least some of the extra £325 million it has recently obtained in overseas TV rights to reduce ticket prices.]
I wonder whether we can get a Minister here to discuss how we can keep the working class involved in football, instead of being priced out of their game.
I am surprised, Mr. Speaker, that you did not ask the hon. Gentleman to withdraw that terrible insult to my integrity. I do not know which team he supports—
It sounded like Millwall, but I shall still carry on.
On a point of order, Mr. Speaker.
Order. I know what is troubling the hon. Gentleman, but we will take points of order later.
I applaud The Sun and its campaign on this serious issue. I recently had to pay £45 to watch Blackburn Rovers being beaten at Stamford Bridge. The truth is that some clubs, of which Blackburn Rovers is one, are doing their best to ensure that more people are attracted to watch the game, while others are fleecing the ordinary spectator and pricing them out of the market, and making it increasingly difficult to fit in attendance at games with family timetables by shifting around the times of matches. All those issues should be debated.
In his deliberations about a debate on gun crime, will my right hon. Friend consider allowing the House time to debate the merits of a gun amnesty? The last amnesty in 2003 resulted in 66,000 weapons and 1 million rounds of ammunition being handed in. Amnesties are not the only answer, but they are effective in taking guns off the streets.
I accept what my hon. Friend says, and my right hon. Friend the Home Secretary and the Association of Chief Police Officers keep the issue of running gun amnesties under close review.
Surely the House deserves and requires an urgent statement on the financial train wreck that is the London Olympics. My constituents particularly want to hear why their lottery money is being diverted from good causes and grass roots sports in Scotland to pay for regeneration and housing in east London. Surely the House should consider all those issues.
Scotland supported the bid, which will greatly benefit the United Kingdom as a whole. There will be huge opportunities for athletes from Scotland and from the other three nations of the United Kingdom to participate in the Olympics. Our economic record, built by a Scottish Chancellor of the Exchequer, in ensuring that all parts of the United Kingdom—not least and particularly Scotland—have benefited from the increase in prosperity in the past 10 years is second to none.
Will my right hon. Friend say when the Coroners Bill will be introduced? Is he aware that the inquest on Gareth Myatt opened last week in what is, I think, a directors’ box overlooking the pitch at Rushden and Diamonds football ground? It is a fine place, but on the second day the team came out to train, and I could hear more of that than I could of what was going on in the room. Does he agree that we should have a proper, modern coroner service with dedicated premises?
I am not in a position to give a precise date at the moment, but we accept the need for a greatly improved coroner service. As my hon. Friend knows, the matter is under careful scrutiny at the moment.
The House is rightly concerned about the spending of taxpayers’ money. An earlier question drew the House’s attention to the fact that the European Union has fined the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs £300 million-plus because of its incompetence in handling the single farm payment. Is not it outrageous that UK taxpayers’ money should be paid to the European Union? Will not the Leader of the House arrange for a statement in which Members of the House can indicate that the money, far from being paid to the European Union, should be given to the hard-pressed British farmer?
I make no excuses for what happened in respect of the Rural Payments Agency, and neither has my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State, who is on the job, trying to secure a solution. The hon. Gentleman’s reputation on Europe goes before him, but it is a matter of fact that we have been net contributors ever since we joined the European Union. My right hon. Friend the Prime Minister and I worked hard to reduce that as much as possible for the next period. Some people voted no in the referendum in 1975, and some voted yes.
My right hon. Friend will be aware of the YouGov poll published earlier this week showing a strong majority among the British electorate for an elected element in the second Chamber. He will know that his decision not to proceed with a ballot to eliminate the various options for reform has cast into considerable doubt the ability to get reform through the House of Commons, showing once again the failures of Parliament to democratise itself. What additional steps can he take to ensure that that does not happen?
My hon. Friend knows that the option that I preferred, and the one that he preferred, was unfortunately—although it is a matter for the House—not going to gain support, and there was no point pushing it. Of the nine resolutions on the Order Paper, six will relate to a partly or wholly elected second Chamber. I say to my hon. Friend and those of us who wish to see reform that it is crucial that when people cast their votes they do not make the best the enemy of the good. We will have a motion before the House so that we can vote on the resolutions, notwithstanding that one is inconsistent with the other. That will allow us to get a clear picture at the end of the evening of exactly where the House stands. I hope that all Members recognise their responsibility to ensure that the House comes to a decision, even if the decision is for no change.
My right hon. Friend the Member for Maidenhead (Mrs. May) has asked for a debate about the Rural Payments Agency, and my hon. Friend the Member for Macclesfield (Sir Nicholas Winterton) has asked for a statement. Given that the Secretary of State’s handling of the crisis has increased the amount of money—taxpayers’ money—set aside from £131 million to £305 million, does the House have a way of holding the Government to account, or are we just experiencing the legacy of Jo Moore of burying bad news?
No one could accuse my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State of acting in that way. He has been forthcoming in turning up to the House to make oral statements, as he has done in respect of avian flu twice this week. A written ministerial statement on the single payment scheme is on the Order Paper today—[Interruption.] It is not about burying matters; oral statements cannot be made every day of the week. As I have said to many Conservative Members, I am very sorry about the situation. Like the hon. Gentleman, I have farmers in my constituency, and the situation is unacceptable—no one pretends otherwise. My right hon. Friend the Secretary of State is doing his best to put it right.
Has my right hon. Friend had the opportunity to see early-day motion 859 about Dreams plc, which has cut down a load of trees around its plant in my constituency?
[That this House deplores the actions of Dreams plc in cutting down trees around its site in Woolston, Warrington; condemns the company's cavalier attitude to the concerns of local residents who have raised this issue and its failure to engage in constructive discussions about its plans for re-landscaping the site, together with its dismissive comments about the area; notes that many successful companies in the United Kingdom are both profitable and environmentally responsible; and urges Dreams plc to follow their example.]
Is he aware that, following correspondence, the company has not only insulted the residents of the area, but has sent me what I can only describe as a two-page rant intended to intimidate me out of raising the issue? May we therefore have a debate on the rights and responsibilities of Members of the House, so that we can explain to the company’s chief executive that MPs have a duty to raise matters of concern to their constituents and that he ought to take that seriously?
I think that he is taking it very seriously indeed, as he accuses my hon. Friend of acting unfairly and vindictively and pressurising one of the country’s leading and fastest-growing retailers. I congratulate her on doing her duty by her constituents, and I hope that Mr. Mike Clare considers the perils of calling the privilege of Members of Parliament into question.
Will the Leader of the House please find time for a debate on the issue of the UK veterans badge, which can now be awarded to ex-servicemen and women who served in the armed forces before 1969? Does he agree that that will be helpful in assessing the impact of what the Government have done to promote the availability of the award? Does he further agree that it is the least that the House can do to ensure that service veterans are aware of their entitlement to that modest recognition of their immense contribution to our country?
I agree with the hon. Gentleman who, in a Liberal Democrat roundabout manner, was, I think, trying to thank the Government for introducing the medal. I take his gratitude with some surprise, but I accept it none the less.
I agree with much of what my hon. Friends the Members for Hackney, North and Stoke Newington (Ms Abbott) and for West Bromwich, East (Mr. Watson) said about a debate on gun crime. Will my right hon. Friend discuss with the Home Secretary the importation of weapons from eastern Europe and Northern Ireland? That is the real issue. Gangs have been around for a long time. We need to debate how to restrict young people’s access to those guns.
I accept that the problem is both the use of guns and their availability. My hon. Friend raises an important point. I hope that we can, one way or another, arrange for a debate on that.
May I draw the attention of the Leader of the House to the reply that he gave in response to the question asked by my right hon. Friend the Member for Maidenhead (Mrs. May) about the Chancellor of the Exchequer’s special advisers? The ministerial code says that he is supposed to have two; he has in fact got 12, who cost £1.1 million. The council of economic advisers is stuffed full not of senior economics professors, but of special advisers, one of whom recently served as a special adviser to the right hon. Member for North Tyneside (Mr. Byers).
That is not a disqualification. My experience of the advisers and the members of the council of economic advisers in the Treasury is that they are of high quality. I have nothing to add to the answer that I gave earlier, which was that they have contributed their advice to the most successful period of economic activity this country has seen since the war.
I welcome yesterday’s announcement of the Government’s new deal for carers, which includes extra funding for respite care and a national helpline to provide advice and support to carers, for example. Given that the package also includes a review of the Government’s national strategy for carers, will my right hon. Friend find time for a debate on carers in the forthcoming weeks so that hon. Members on both sides of the House, who take carers’ issues seriously, can contribute on the needs of carers in their constituencies, who are one in 10 of the adult population?
I share my hon. Friend’s interest in that matter. I am glad that we have been able to find an extra £25 million for carers. She will know that there are opportunities to raise such issues in Westminster Hall and in Adjournment debates in the main Chamber. We will also look at what can be done.
rose—
Order. We must move on.
On a point of order, Mr. Speaker.
The hon. Gentleman must wait until after the statement.
Occupational Pensions
With permission, Mr. Speaker, I want to make a statement on yesterday’s judgment on the Government’s response to the ombudsman’s report concerning the security of final salary occupational pension schemes. Given the importance of the issue to many right hon. and hon. Members, I want to inform the House of the position that we have reached both in the light of that particular ruling and the decision last month of the European Court of Justice on the implementation of the insolvency directive.
The High Court yesterday made five rulings in its judgment. I want to take each in turn. Its first ruling was that the ombudsman was entitled, on the evidence available to her, to reach the conclusion that official information published on the minimum funding requirement for pension schemes was inaccurate and potentially misleading, and therefore amounted to maladministration. The Court particularly criticised the then Government’s guide to the Pensions Act 1995, which was published in 1996. This, it concluded, gave the clear impression that following enactment of the new law, scheme members could be reassured that their pensions were safe whatever happened.
The Government had, in good faith and acting on proper advice, taken a different view from that of the ombudsman, on the basis that the leaflets concerned were not a full statement of the law and were for general guidance only. However, we clearly now need to study the Court’s ruling very carefully. In particular, we need to consider the possible implications across government of the Court’s significant proposition, on which this ruling was based, that findings of fact made by the ombudsman are binding, unless they are flawed, irrational or peripheral, or unless there is fresh evidence.
The Court’s second ruling related to the important issue of causation. The ombudsman had found that maladministration was a significant contributory factor in the creation of the financial losses suffered by individuals. She went on to argue that everyone who between 1997 and 2004 suffered losses on the winding up of their pension scheme was the victim of injustice because of maladministration. The Government had argued that that was not well founded. The Court found in favour of the Government on this point, describing that aspect of the ombudsman’s report as “logically flawed and unreasonable.”
The Court’s third ruling rejected the ombudsman’s finding that the Government were guilty of maladministration when they made changes to the pension scheme funding rules in 2002. It decided that the ombudsman’s finding was not logically sound. In its fourth ruling, the Court also dismissed the claim that the Government’s refusal fully to restore the pension entitlements of all affected scheme members was in breach of the European convention on human rights. The Court’s fifth and final ruling concluded that I should reconsider the ombudsman’s recommendation that the Government should consider making arrangements to restore fully the pension losses of the people concerned when their employers became insolvent.
In a clear sign of both the complexity and, yes, the importance of these matters, both sides have sought and been granted permission to appeal. We have not yet decided the precise grounds for such an appeal, but it is absolutely right and proper that we take time to study the judgment and consider its implications in detail.
The judgment of the European Court of Justice in January on the implementation of the insolvency directive has an important bearing on the issue of financial redress for those who have lost some or all of their pension entitlement. The decision of the European Court of Justice effectively requires the Government to reconsider whether the present arrangements offer sufficient protection for people’s pensions when their employer becomes insolvent. The European Court of Justice has ruled that the system of protection that was in place before 2004 did not comply with the terms of the directive, even taking account of the subsequent introduction of the financial assistance scheme, albeit before its 2006 extension. We are already reviewing the financial assistance scheme with that finding in mind. It is now for the High Court to be asked to decide whether damages for breach of the directive should be paid, taking account of the steer apparently given by the European Court of Justice that damages may not be payable.
The Government have already acted to provide substantial financial assistance to people who lost pension rights when their employers became insolvent. The financial assistance scheme, supported by £2.3 billion of public money, has been set up precisely for that purpose. Throughout, we have always sought to ensure that those who have suffered the most should receive financial assistance to mitigate their loss. At the same time, we have sought to strike a balance with the interests of taxpayers, who cannot be asked to accept responsibility for effectively underwriting the total value of pension savings.
In considering the right way forward, we are always prepared to consider practical proposals from both sides of the House. I can confirm also that, so as not to add to their financial difficulty, we will meet the costs of the applicants in this case so far, together with the costs associated with our appeal.
People who have lost their pension rights in these circumstances have suffered a great deal. My aim will be to return to the House with our conclusions and our proposals for how we should proceed, and to do that before the conclusion of proceedings on the Pensions Bill.
We welcome the tone at least of the last part of the Secretary of State’s statement. We welcome in particular his announcement on costs. That was a great burden lifted from the shoulders of the claimants in this case and it reflects the public importance of it.
We accept that important issues of principle are involved where an ombudsman’s findings are binding, and that they have implications across government that the Government will want to consider. However, my reading of the situation is that the clear view of the House is that the ombudsman is an Officer of Parliament and that her office is of no functional value if the Government can simply dismiss her findings when they do not like them.
The Government have been criticised for their handling of the crisis by four separate bodies—the ombudsman, the Select Committee, the European Court of Justice and the High Court. From the tone of the Secretary of State’s final remarks, it seems that he might be getting the message at last.
The facts of the case are that 125,000 people who paid into occupational pensions, many of them because they were required to do so by law when they joined, have, following the failure of the schemes, lost their pensions in whole or in part, and that the schemes were not as safe and secure as Governments of both political parties suggested they would be. Therefore, people approaching retirement and, in some cases, people who retired early have found that their retirement plans are in ruins. They have been left high and dry.
The Secretary of State has said that the state cannot guarantee private pensions and he is right about that, but because of the creation of the Pension Protection Fund, the state does not have to. This situation cannot arise in future. It is a finite problem affecting a defined group of people. There is a palpable sense of an injustice being done. That sense is shared, I believe, on both sides of the House, in large sections of the media and in the country at large. The Government simply cannot ignore the view of the House of Commons and the sentiment of public opinion. I hope that I was correct in reading into the Secretary of State's final few paragraphs the indication that he is no longer intending to do that, because we as a society have to find a way forward to solve the problem. It has always been my view that the solution will not come through the courts. It has to be a political decision, based on cross-party consensus, with the Government taking a leadership role in building that consensus.
Let me make it clear that no one is suggesting that the Government should simply write a blank cheque with taxpayers' money. There are many other possibilities to be explored. My right hon. Friend the Member for Witney (Mr. Cameron) invited the Prime Minister yesterday to set aside party politics and to seek to work together on the matter. I was pleased to hear what the Secretary of State said, and we are certainly ready to join him and all others in the House in trying to find a sustainable solution, based on the commitment of public money that has already been made through the financial assistance scheme, but also looking at whether better use may be made of the residual assets within the failed schemes, and whether we can make use of unclaimed assets within the financial sector to support a solution.
Is the Secretary of State prepared to commit his Department to doing some serious analysis of the real net costs of different levels of support to this group of victims, taking into account benefit savings and taxation, so that our debate will be properly informed?
The Government have now been told not once but four times that their response to the crisis is inadequate. There is a clear moral case for accepting a share of responsibility for the problem and for showing the leadership to broker a fair and affordable solution, but there is also a practical case. Pension saving is down and millions of people are making inadequate preparation for retirement. The Government rightly are determined to do something about that, but unless this issue is resolved, confidence in the pension system will not be restored.
We could seek to make political capital by promising that the next Conservative Government will sort the mess out, and we will do so if we have to, but many of the victims cannot afford to wait another two or three years for a change of Government, so if the Secretary of State is telling us today that he is prepared to work with us and others to find a solution that is affordable and sustainable, I welcome that and I assure him that he will find us ready, willing and able to participate in those discussions.
May I give a general welcome to what the hon. Gentleman said in response to my statement? I think that it is worth pointing out one or two things to him and to his hon. Friends.
It is true that previous Governments have rejected previous findings of ombudsmen’s reports. Anyone listening to the hon. Gentleman would probably conclude that this was the first time it had ever happened, and of course that is not true. Nor is it true to say that people have been left high and dry, which was the term that he used. I think that £2.3 billion of public investment in a financial assistance scheme certainly does not mean leaving people high and dry. We always made it clear that we were not in a position to compensate fully all the losses that people had sustained, and that remains our position.
In relation to how many people have received help, it is worth bearing in mind one important fact. We think that the financial assistance scheme will cover about 40,000 of those who have suffered a loss. Obviously, not all of them have reached retirement age yet, so it is ludicrous and fatuous to say that, because only about 1,000 people have received payment, the whole scheme is failing. That is not an accurate or fair interpretation of events.
On the hon. Gentleman’s wider points about the financial assistance scheme, let me remind him of what I said in my statement about the European Court of Justice ruling. We are already looking at the adequacy or otherwise of the financial assistance scheme as part of our consideration of the implications of that judgment. He repeated the comments of the Leader of the Opposition yesterday. I made it clear in my statement that we are prepared, of course, to discuss these issues with the other political parties in the House. That is the right and sensible way to proceed.
On the hon. Gentleman’s points about unclaimed assets, it is worth all of us keeping our feet firmly on the ground. Initial records searches by banks and building societies suggest that several hundred millions of pounds may currently lie unclaimed. There might be an annual income flow of about £10 million or £20 million, but that is not going to be an income stream on which we can rely to make the pensions commitments that he wants to make. As he must know, there is not a parallel between unclaimed pension assets and unclaimed assets in bank accounts. He must be aware of that.
Nearly five years ago I came to the House to talk about Andrew Parr, who was one of the people in court yesterday for ASW Sheerness. Hon. Members on both sides of the House have tried to have a debate about the matter. I am grateful for the statement. I think that we have accepted the moral argument, but we need to extend the money that matches the moral argument. That is what we are talking about now. Will the Secretary of State reflect on the unclaimed assets? When Ireland had the same problem, it proposed legislation to the Dail. The banks and building societies said that they had only £300 million, but I think £2 billion was found. We must have primary legislation. We will not find £300 million: I guess we will find between £5 billion and £8 billion of unclaimed assets. With the interest on that alone, we can deal with the issue. If there is to be an all-party group or some consensus, I would love to contribute creative ideas on how we can find that money.
Obviously, we will look carefully at all those issues, and we have done so already. That was acknowledged yesterday by the judge in his ruling, but it is important that we all keep our feet on the ground. I know I have made that point, and I do not want to sound like a boring broken record, but I do not believe that there is a pot of gold that we can find to solve these problems. We should bear it in mind that these unclaimed assets belong to other people and the banks and building societies are trying to match the unclaimed assets with their rightful owners. We have to tread very carefully in going down that path. We are prepared, of course—we always have been—to look at those issues, but we need to maintain a common-sense view.
I hope that the Secretary of State would acknowledge that refusing to accept the judgments of umpires is not a very attractive characteristic for sportsmen or for Ministers. Although I have never thought of him as a John McEnroe figure, he is showing a similar determination to ignore the successive decisions of the umpires in relation to pensions matters.
May I ask the Secretary of State about four issues in particular? First, I think that the position that he set out in the statement is that the Government, despite the strength of yesterday's ruling, have decided to appeal, even though they do not yet know the basis on which that appeal will be made. Is he really telling us that, despite the fact that the judge has decided that the Government acted unlawfully, and that the judge said in his ruling that no reasonable Secretary of State could rationally disagree with the view of the ombudsman on the leaflets that were issued before the Government came to power, he is proposing to appeal against that clear decision? That will distress the many people who thought that they had a clear judgment yesterday that the Government would accept.
Secondly, does the Secretary of State accept that, although he is correct to say that the judge indicated that one could not prove that every person who had lost a pension had read the forms that were referred to, we do not know the opposite? The risk is that, if we do not accept the general conclusions of the ombudsman, we will end up with each of the 100,000 individuals having to fight cases, which could take many years. Is that not totally unsatisfactory?
Thirdly, does the Secretary of State agree with the judge’s ruling that the figures that the Government have given for the cost of compensation are not particularly accurate or helpful because they do not include the benefit and tax offsets? Is he willing to ask his colleagues in the Treasury to come up with a reliable estimate of the cost of extending the PPF level of benefits to those individuals? Does he agree that that is what they want, rather than more tinkering with the financial assistance scheme?
Fourthly, the Secretary of State said that his aim—I think he said “aim”—was to return to the House with his proposals before the conclusion of proceedings on the Pensions Bill. Does he accept that what Members want is for him to return with his proposals before Report stage of the Pensions Bill in this House, so that his hon. Friends and Opposition Members have a chance to decide whether the Government have come forward with an adequate response, and if this House is not happy with the Government’s decision it will be possible to propose amendments?
Finally, does the Secretary of State agree that delivering justice sometimes has a price, and is it not high time the Government were prepared to pay that price?
I think that the hon. Gentleman prepared those comments before he had the opportunity to read my statement. I have made it clear today that we are carefully considering all aspects of the ruling in the High Court case. We have been given leave to appeal, but I have made it clear that we have not yet come to a decision on what the grounds for that appeal will be. That is in accordance with perfectly normal legal process in such cases, so the hon. Gentleman should not read anything into that. I am not in a position to give any further details today about what the grounds for the appeal might be, because they are still the subject of consultation between Ministers, and between the parties to the case.
On a more general level, we are considering every aspect of the ruling, but I get the strong sense from the hon. Gentleman that he wishes to pick and choose which aspects of the judgment he wants us to endorse, and which not. We are not in a position to do that.
I cannot promise the hon. Gentleman that I will be able to return to the House with proposals in the time scale that he mentioned. I will do my very best, but there are wider implications that I have to take into account, not least the current and ongoing litigation in relation to the European Court of Justice case.
We have been frank and open about costs. That was recognised by the judge in the Court yesterday—
indicated dissent.
It certainly was. The judge made it clear that the issue was presentational, not substantive, and that it did not affect the substance of the matter in any way, shape or form.
indicated dissent.
If the hon. Gentleman is shaking his head, he needs to go away and look at the judgment, where those points are made in terms, as I have outlined to the House today.
I thank my right hon. Friend for his statement, and particularly for his comments on legal costs; that has all been very helpful. However, will he confirm the following two points: that the insolvency directive came from the Commission in 1980, and also that the European Court of Justice judgment relates to the first financial assistance scheme and the £400 million, not the revised scheme?
I am grateful to my hon. Friend for his initial comments, and I can confirm that he is right in respect of the ECJ case.
I thank the Secretary of State for his statement, and for the Government’s considerations on the money, which will help in respect of the compensation and the court costs. However, in my constituency there are almost 700 Dexion workers—as the Secretary of State knows because he has met a delegation of them—and they will be deeply disappointed that there is to be more delay. They thought that after the Court ruling yesterday the matter would have been settled—that the judgment would be simple and the money would come forward. Will the Secretary of State expedite as fast as possible his thought processes and the conclusions he reaches, because those people are dying, and there are fewer of them now than there were a year ago? It is shameful that they have been left in their current position?
I agree with a great deal of what the hon. Gentleman has said. I can assure him and the House that we will certainly not kick this issue into the long grass, and that I will come back to the House with proposals as soon as is practically possible.
I welcome my right hon. Friend’s statement and the approach that the Opposition spokesman has now adopted. It is very important that we take a long-term view that creates cross-party consensus on this matter. I was one of those who argued in the 1980s that the Lawson Budget, capping surpluses, would create long-term damage, and I was right. Such matters must be looked at in the round. It is great that the courts have dealt with some of the issues as they have, but Members have got to find a long-term solution that avoids our making the same kind of mistakes in the future as Nigel Lawson made in 1986.
I am grateful to my hon. Friend for what he has said, and for his support. I just want to repeat to him and all other Members that we are doing our very best to find a sensible way forward in relation to these issues.
I welcome the tone of the Secretary of State’s statement, but does he agree that there is still a risk that this issue will escalate from a dispute between his Department and the occupational pensions authority into a dispute between Parliament and the Executive, because he has so far refused to accept the recommendations of the ombudsman and those of a Select Committee of this House? In order to avoid such a confrontation, will he give an undertaking that he will put whatever proposals he comes up with before the House for approval?
It is certainly likely that if, and when, proposals are brought forward, there will be an opportunity for the House to vote on them. [Interruption.] The question of when that will happen has been asked from a sedentary position. I understand that amendments to the Pensions Bill dealing with the issues that we are discussing today have already been tabled, so I am confident that the House will have an opportunity to vote on them.
I recognise the difficulties and concerns that the Government must have in respect of how public money is spent, but can I explain to my right hon. Friend one case involving a constituent of mine—although I know that there must be many such cases? My constituent was told in 2001 by the Armstrong Group pension scheme that when he retired he would receive a pension of £10,380. He is due to retire next month, and he is now due to receive just £2,529 a year. I ask my right hon. Friend to imagine what he and his wife must be feeling about having to live in poverty, as opposed to receiving the more substantial amount that they had hoped for. Let us imagine that we, as Ministers and Members of Parliament, were faced with the sort of acute problem that my constituent and many others involved in the failed Armstrong Group pension scheme are facing? How would we feel? I hope that it will be possible for the Government to look very sympathetically on such cases.
We shall certainly try to do so. I do not think that the issue is whether compensation or financial assistance should or should not be paid. We have already put in place a financial assistance scheme. Eventually, the issue that the House will have to consider is whether the scheme needs to be expanded in any way. That will be the focus of our proposals, when we bring them forward. However, the situation is as my hon. Friend has outlined: there are cases of genuine hardship and we have always tried to make sure that those in greatest need got the greatest help.
Does the Secretary of State not agree that the delay that we are now experiencing is as painful as any failure to get matters right in the beginning? Does he not also agree that the signal he is sending—for example, to those waiting for the outcome of the ombudsman’s Equitable Life inquiry—will lead to people thinking that that might be overturned too, which would mean further inordinate delay, even after the many years that they have been waiting? Does the Secretary of State not realise that it is crucial that we now have closure on this issue, on an equitable basis and as fast as we can get it?
I do, and that is what I said in my statement.
I welcome very much what my right hon. Friend has said today, and the way in which he has said it. However, does he not agree that there can no longer be any question but that the ombudsman was right to say that the information that Governments of both parties had produced was misleading, and that that was maladministration? Can we clear that question out of the way now? Secondly, my right hon. Friend said that there had sometimes been disagreements between Governments and the ombudsman in the past, and that is true. However, in every past case this House has insisted that there should be a satisfactory resolution of the difficulty. Is it not unfortunate that it has taken a judge to ensure that that will happen in this case?
I thank my hon. Friend for what he said at the beginning of his question. As I have said, because we are still considering the grounds of appeal, I am simply not in a position today to give him the clarity that he seeks on his first point—nor will I be able to do that if anyone else asks me the same question through another route. The wider issue of compensation will now be the focus in our full and proper consideration of the implications of this judgment. It is clear, however, that this case has generated issues of great legal complexity and, yes, of constitutional significance. It is right and proper in those circumstances, and given that I have been able to share the terms of the judgment with Ministers only since yesterday morning, that they collectively take a proper view of where we should take this case in future.
When I was a Department of Trade and Industry Minister, I had an adverse finding of maladministration regarding Barlow Clowes regulation, and I had no hesitation in paying compensation. How much have this Government so far spent on advice, civil service time and legal fees, how much more are they going to spend on legal fees, and should not that money go to the people who are suffering?
It might be important for the record to say that the right hon. Gentleman actually rejected the ombudsman’s findings in relation to Barlow Clowes.
I welcome my right hon. Friend’s commitment to reconsidering the position of those who have lost pensions because the firm that they worked for has gone into liquidation, but will he also consider a related group of people? I and representatives of the Tinsley Bridge pension scheme recently met the Minister for Pensions Reform. That pension scheme was wound up to avoid forcing the firm into liquidation, but people lost their pensions as a result. The scheme therefore cannot join the Pension Protection Fund, but because the firm is not in liquidation as a result of the action taken by the pension trustees, those potential pensioners are not eligible for help from the financial assistance scheme. However, because of the improved conditions of that scheme, the pension trustees might be under a perverse legal obligation to put the firm into liquidation, thereby causing the loss of hundreds of jobs, in order to get that assistance. Will my right hon. Friend look at that issue when he considers those who have lost their pensions because their firm has gone into liquidation?
I am grateful to my hon. Friend for raising that issue, which has been raised by a number of Members in all parts of the House. These are matters of real complexity and we are trying to find a sensible way forward. The Minister for Pensions Reform, whom my hon. Friend recently met, will write to him shortly in dealing with some of the issues that he has raised.
One problem that we all face is the huge gulf in the figures quoted. Campaigners say that the cost of reimbursement is £4 billion over 60 years, peaking at £100 million a year, but the Government say that the cost is £15 billion. Has the Secretary of State considered the possibility of an independent assessment of the true cost, so that Members can at least know what they are talking about in this regard? Does he not also agree with Joe Harris of the National Pensioners Convention, who said:
“The real issue arising from this case now is the need for a bigger basic state pension to be paid to all in retirement that is guaranteed and secure.”?
Is it not time to think about a citizen’s pension?
No, it is certainly not time to look at a citizen’s pension, because the costs would be completely unsustainable. They would certainly be unsustainable if the hon. Gentleman got his way and imposed such a profligate policy on the poor innocent taxpayers of Scotland, so I would not recommend going down that route. On the figures quoted, I agree that it is important to have a common language in dealing with this issue, and we have tried to present our findings and our view of the cost of the financial assistance scheme in real and genuine terms, and on the same basis as the Government produce their financial accounts generally. It is therefore not true to say that there has been any sleight of hand. The judge makes clear the difference between the £3 billion and £15 billion figures. One figure is net present value and the other is cash—it is all cash—and that is how the Government produce their accounts. The difference is important as a matter of presentation, but it is
“not, in truth, a difference of substance”.
I welcome my right hon. Friend’s statement, particularly his concluding remarks, and I hope that there will soon be an end to the misery that so many of our constituents have experienced. I am thinking in particular of the 800 Allied Steel and Wire workers from Cardiff who lost their jobs, some of whom also lost all their pension. I hope that they can sleep soundly in their beds, confident that the Government are going to come up with something good for them. Is my right hon. Friend aware, however, that there are people in my constituency who have worked for 30 years and paid in dutifully for 30 years, as the Government advised, but who have ended up with absolutely nothing under the present financial assistance scheme arrangements? Will he take them into account when he makes his statement to the House during the passage of the Pensions Bill?
We are looking at all these issues in the context not only of yesterday’s High Court ruling but, most importantly, of last month’s ruling of the European Court of Justice.
I was pleased to hear the Secretary of State recognise earlier that some of these people now face severe financial hardship as a result of the loss of their pension savings. Sadly, a number of my own constituents lost their pension savings in the Kalamazoo and United Engineering Forgings schemes. They will of course be disappointed that today is not the end of the road, but they will be a little relieved to hear that they will not be picking up any further costs. Will the Secretary of State reflect, however, on what my hon. Friend the Member for Runnymede and Weybridge (Mr. Hammond) said earlier? While the high-profile issue of people having lost their private pension savings remains in the public eye, it sends a terrible signal to the many millions of our fellow citizens who are wondering whether the same thing might happen to them.
I agree that that is not good, but the hon. Lady needs to reflect a little more on, for example, the Pension Protection Fund offers for cases going forward. We have taken the right course of action in setting up the PPF, which offers a very high and proper level of protection, so people can have confidence in their pension savings going forward.
I welcome my right hon. Friend’s announcement, particularly what he said about costs, which, as he knows, is an issue that I have raised on a number of occasions; it is very good news that the Government will pay the costs. I am one of those who think that the Government had a genuine motive in introducing the financial assistance scheme to try to ameliorate the losses. However, the problem has been not just one of resourcing, because the scheme does not address the fundamental issues that have been obvious to MPs, that are dealt with in the ombudsman’s report and that underlie the logic of the Pension Protection Fund. Will my right hon. Friend introduce, with some dispatch, proposals that resolve this issue and do not create further uncertainty down the line, so that my constituents who worked for Kalamazoo and others do not have to experience hardship for much longer?
We will certainly try to do that.
The Secretary of State has rejected criticism of the FAS on the basis that a mere 900 payments have been made so far, saying that such criticism rests on unwarranted assumptions. Can he therefore put in the public domain the figures telling us exactly how many of the sample who are eligible for assistance from the FAS have reached retirement age and secured payments?
We have already done that in answer to a question from the hon. Gentleman’s boss, the right hon. Member for Witney (Mr. Cameron).
I thank my right hon. Friend for his statement today, and particularly for its tone. Opposition Members seem to have shifted their tone as we try to find a workable solution for people such as those suffering after the collapse of the British United Shoe Machinery scheme, who are not eligible for the FAS as it stands. Will my right hon. Friend introduce his proposals in such a way that we can get a consensus on cost? That outstanding problem is preventing us from making progress, in that we seem to be unable to guarantee an annual figure. Will he also ensure that the scheme is extended to cover those who are not currently covered? They feel betrayed, in that others are being compensated while they are not. Will he also examine every possibility of generating such income from other sources, not just from the taxpayer?
We will try to do all the things that my hon. Friend has suggested. We will certainly continue to look at other sources of funding, but as I said in my statement and in response to other questions, my own view is that we will find it very difficult to find substantial sums from sources other than general taxation. That discipline should apply to all parts of the House as we—I hope—reach a conclusion on these matters.
May I congratulate my constituent, Richard Nicholl, and other brave members of the Pensions Action Group? Some 5,000 people are members of some 20 schemes run by solvent companies, and that is the difference. As I understand it, from 28 February those people will not be entitled to compensation even if the companies in question become insolvent after that date. Subject to what the Secretary of State has to say, I would have thought that that was grossly unfair to my constituents and to others. In the light of the Court judgment, what will the Government do about that? In any event, I am glad to say that the Minister for Pensions Reform was good enough to see Mr. Nicholl and me recently about the issue.
The hon. Gentleman has raised an important and serious issue about the deadline for FAS applications by the end of this month. We are looking again at that in the light of recent decisions by the Court. We hope to be able to be clear to hon. Members about future arrangements.
I welcome the fact that the Secretary of State appears to have shifted his attitude and policy on this issue. Is he aware that I represent many of the Albert Fisher pensioners? Most of them are in their late 50s and have lost on average 25 years’ worth of occupational pension benefits. When they eventually reach retirement age, the FAS will give them less than 50 per cent. of their expected pension, so obviously they are still very angry. Further to the question asked by the hon. Member for Angus (Mr. Weir) about the overall cost, will the Secretary of State elaborate on his answer? Surely from the £15 billion must be deducted the cost of benefits to constituents such as mine, and, indeed, the tax that they would pay if they received a bigger pension.
It is very difficult to quantify the figures with the degree of precision for which the hon. Gentleman and others have asked. That has been true from the beginning, and we have not tried to hide the fact that these are estimated figures. It is also worth remembering that the judge said that on any view these are large sums of money. We will not find a sensible way forward on this if people keep bandying sums of money around and claiming that they are affordable. We have to find the money, and the only sensible place to find it from is general taxation. That is a very significant issue, which we must all consider as we think about the right way forward.
Like many Members, I welcome the Secretary of State’s tone, but the issue is more one of trust than tone. Our constituents must be wondering if the Government will ever admit that they are wrong. The Secretary of State has said that he has not yet decided on whether to appeal, but the precise wording of his pre-prepared statement reads, “We have not yet decided the precise grounds for such an appeal.” That is the complete sentence, and it suggests to me that despite his contrite tone today, the Government are set on carrying on the misery and suffering of so many people who have simply paid into a pension for security in old age.
I am sorry that the hon. Gentleman has come to that conclusion, because it is a million miles away from the truth. We have sought and been granted leave to appeal, as have the other side, and to take the case to the Appeal Court. What we have not done yet—I hope that I have been clear on this point today—is decided the grounds of that appeal. These issues have to be resolved and we have to take a sensible view, given the complexities involved. It is clear from the hon. Gentleman’s remarks that he does not really understand the complexities of the issues.
Many young people, some of whom will be in the Public Gallery now, will be listening to this exchange and wondering what is the point of starting a pension. Does the Secretary of State agree that the longer-term cost to the economy of young people not setting up pensions will be far greater than the cost of damaging trust by not compensating people who have saved and then lost everything?
Again, it is not true that no financial assistance has been made available to people who have lost out in those circumstances. The hon. Lady is a member of the Work and Pensions Committee and she should know that. Such comments are unlikely to boost confidence for savers in the future. She too has a responsibility in these matters, and I am afraid that today she has failed to discharge it.
Would it not be exceptional for the Government not only to reject the findings of the ombudsman and the Public Administration Committee, but to appeal and reject the findings of irrationality concerning the first recommendation of maladministration by the ombudsman? As welcome as the Court judgment is, is it not a sad day for Parliament that the Government may well be obliged to accept the Court’s judgment of maladministration, rather than having properly respected the role of the ombudsman, and indeed of Parliament?
It is precisely the complexity and constitutional dimensions to the case that have now to be resolved, because it is in a judicial setting. As a lawyer, the hon. Gentleman should know that. There is no easy or fast-track way through this. Nor is it true to say that it is not right and proper for a Government to consider exercising a right of appeal. The hon. Gentleman is a lawyer and he may have acted for Government Departments in the past. He must understand that it is entirely proper for the Government, in some cases, to exercise their right to appeal to a higher court for a ruling.
I welcome the fact that the Secretary of State is looking to review the financial assistance scheme. Some of the most difficult cases include some of my constituents who were involved in the APW scheme. Those under the age of 50, but close to it at the key point, some of whom had transferred substantial sums from other pension schemes into that scheme, are still facing losses of more than 80 per cent. of their previous pension entitlement. Can he assure the House that such cases will be taken into account in the review?
I can give the hon. Gentleman that assurance, because we will consider all aspects of the financial assistance scheme in the light of the recent ruling by the European Court of Justice.
Points of Order
On a point of order, Mr. Deputy Speaker. Yesterday, in response to my Adjournment debate on the voluntary adoption sector, in the closing seconds and in response to the hon. Member for Angus (Mr. Weir), the Under-Secretary of State for Education and Skills, the hon. Member for Gloucester (Mr. Dhanda) made this astonishing assertion:
“I understand that negotiations are taking place between the Executive and the powers that be at Westminster on the question of exemption.”—[Official Report, Westminster Hall, 21 February 2007; Vol. 457, c. 132WH.]
The exemption in question is for the Scottish Catholic Children’s Society. Have you had any notice of a Minister coming to the House to make a statement about why the critical work of that organisation, which deals with some of the most disadvantaged children in our country, is so important in Scotland that it deserves an exemption but is not apparently worthy of consideration for an exemption south of the border?
I have had no notification of any such statement. Clearly it is a very important matter to the hon. Gentleman, and his points are now firmly on the record.
On a point of order, Mr. Deputy Speaker. I asked the Leader of the House about the Rural Payments Agency and the fact that the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs had set aside not £131 million, as it did in October, but £305 million. He told me that the Secretary of State had made a written statement, but I suspect that the Leader of the House was not aware that there was no mention of the £305 million in that statement. I hope that this is a good opportunity to put the record straight, not so much to correct the Leader of the House, but to try to draw attention to the fact that what the House really needs is a statement from the Department.
That is not a point of order for the Chair, but again, the hon. Gentleman has put the point that he wanted to make on the record.
On a point of order, Mr. Deputy Speaker. Mr. Speaker asked me to wait until the end of the statement to raise my point of order, but during business questions, the Leader of the House inadvertently accused me of being a supporter of a certain football club in London whose name starts with “M”. This may be a trivial matter to other hon. Members, but in my house, being accused of being a Millwall supporter is a matter of life and death. Can you advise me how I may inform the House that I am actually a Tottenham Hotspur supporter, and was a season ticket holder until very recently?
I am extremely relieved that it is not the duty of any occupant of the Chair to advise on membership of football clubs.
Prevention and Suppression of Terrorism
I beg to move,
That the draft Prevention of Terrorism Act 2005 (Continuance in force of sections 1 to 9) Order 2007, which was laid before this House on 1st February, be approved.
The Prevention of Terrorism Act 2005 received Royal Assent in March 2005. The Act provides for control orders to address the risk posed to public safety by individuals believed to be involved in terrorism who can neither be prosecuted nor deported.
The purpose of the order before us is simple. Today’s renewal debate is taking place in accordance with section 13 of the 2005 Act. The powers contained in the Act will automatically lapse after one year unless renewed by order subject to affirmative resolution in both Houses. They were renewed last year but without this new order will lapse at the end of 10 March 2007. I believe that a date is already in place for a similar debate in the other place.
The effect of the order will be to continue the power in force until the end of 10 March 2008. That is what the order does and I will now expand on the specific needs for the power.
There is a serious and sustained threat from international terrorism to the UK and UK interests overseas. The current threat level is assessed as severe and an attack is judged to be highly likely. Moreover, since the tragic events of July 2005, the police and security services have had considerable success in disrupting alleged terrorist plots. Let me be clear that prosecution remains our preferred option for tackling individuals involved in terrorism. Indeed, that is why the Government strengthened the ability to prosecute for involvement in terrorism-related activity in the Terrorism Act 2006. That is demonstrated by the fact that, in 2006, 85 individuals were charged after being arrested under the 2006 Act or under other legislation where the investigation was conducted as a terrorist investigation.
Similarly, we seek to deport foreign nationals involved in terrorism, but that will sometimes not be possible, even with a memorandum of understanding and other agreements that are in place with a number of countries to enable us to return individuals safely to their country of origins. Consequently, there will remain a comparatively small number of individuals for whom neither prosecution nor deportation is viable.
The noble Lord Carlile recently suggested, or appeared to suggest, that some cases that are subject to control orders could be pursued to prosecution. When control orders were first discussed, the previous Home Secretary agreed to consider a process by which the Crown Prosecution Service would formally declare that it had reviewed the files on a case that was coming up for a control order and confirm that there was no prosecutable case. Has any further consideration been given to that process, which might provide some reassurance that people would not be pushed down this route when, in fact, there was some sort of prosecutable case?
I thank my right hon. Friend for that intervention. I will be coming on to precisely that point, dealing not only with the relationship between the Home Office, the Crown Prosecution Service and the police, but the processes to which Lord Carlile refers and on which we may be able to improve. If, when I discuss those matters, my right hon. Friend is not satisfied, I will happily allow him to intervene again.
As I was saying, there is a comparatively small number of individuals for whom neither prosecution nor deportation is viable. The Security Service assesses that they are involved in terrorism and that they pose a risk to public safety, but without control orders those individuals would be free to continue to engage in terrorist-related activity. That is clearly a risk that the Government are not prepared to take.
This assessment of the necessity for control orders is shared by the noble Lord Carlile of Berriew, whose annual report on the operation of the Prevention of Terrorism Act 2005 was published on 19 February. In paragraph 7, he states:
“I would prefer it if no control order system was necessary. However, in my view, it remains necessary given the nature of the risk of terrorist attacks and the difficulty of dealing with a small number of cases. Control orders provide a proportional means of dealing with those cases, if administered correctly.”
I would like to place on record the Government’s gratitude to Lord Carlile, who has produced another carefully considered, valuable report, which should—and, I know, will—inform today’s debate. The two other statutory consultees—the director-general of the Security Service and the intelligence services commissioner—are also content with the intention to renew the legislation.
However, some hon. Members may argue that the legislation should not be renewed because control orders are not working. Let me underline to the House that control orders have been successful in preventing, or at least limiting, these individuals’ involvement in terrorist-related activity—a view shared by the Security Service. No one is pretending that control orders are 100 per cent. effective. They are weaker and less effective than we would want, not least because of recent court judgments. As a result, there is inevitably a real risk that individuals on control orders will re-engage in terrorism or abscond. No one, I think, from whatever side of the argument they come, would agree that control orders are entirely satisfactory.
The Minister may know that I sympathise with the Government’s dilemma to a very considerable extent, particularly on the question of court judgments and the application to those judgments of the Human Rights Act 1998, which he has not yet mentioned, and the difficulties to which it gives rise. In the light of what the Lord Chancellor said on 19 February, which did not rule out a change in the Human Rights Act, I ask the Minister whether that is still being contemplated. Will the Government be good enough to get on with ensuring that the application of that Act is removed from control orders, as my Bill originally proposed?
I am not sure that the hon. Gentleman’s last point concurs entirely with what the Lord Chancellor said in his excellent speech at the Royal United Services Institute—
Oh, yes, it does.
Not the hon. Gentleman’s last point. I had the good fortune of making a subsequent speech at RUSI during the same event, but it was more readily on these matters than on the Human Rights Act 1998. My noble Friend the Lord Chancellor said that the Act was a shield in defence of democracy and against the terrorists—a very important point to make. I quite understand why the hon. Gentleman would, from his own perspective, choose to pick out from the Lord Chancellor’s speech that which would accord with his own argument—I fully accept that; it is entirely fair—but the hon. Gentleman should not hold his breath if he thinks that somehow soon the Human Rights Act is going to fall away from the statute book. There are a number of substantial reasons why that should be the case. The issue clearly underpins much of our deliberations today, but you will know, Mr. Deputy Speaker, that this is not a debate on the pros and cons of the Human Rights Act, although it has some bearing on the case.
No one is pretending, as I said, that control orders are 100 per cent. effective. I emphasise the inevitable and real risk, given the unsatisfactory nature of the control order regime, that individuals on control orders will re-engage in terrorism or abscond. Indeed, as the House will know, there have already been three well publicised absconds, but Lord Carlile addresses the point cogently in his report in paragraph 59, where he states that
“the disappearance of a small minority does not necessarily undermine the benefits of the orders in relation to the majority”.
More encouragingly, the police, prosecution authorities and the courts take enforcing control orders seriously. In January, the courts sentenced an individual to five months’ imprisonment for breaching his control order. Charges against other individuals are pending.
Do any of those charges relate to the three people whose control orders have been in place since March 2005 and September 2005 respectively? I am talking of the three long-standing cases that are referred to in the Carlile report.
The short answer is that I do not know specifically. If, during the course of our debate, I receive some inspiration, I will slide it into my remarks at some stage. In general terms, I have deliberately not gone down to that level of detail for a debate of a mere hour and a half. I just want to present the highlights of the arguments for the order rather than get into the specifics. I will gladly let my hon. Friend know the answer in another way, if necessary.
We think that the need for the powers is clear. Parliament can also be reassured that a comprehensive set of safeguards is in place under the Prevention of Terrorism Act 2005 to ensure the appropriate use of the powers. Indeed, we remain firmly of the view that the legislation and the order before us today are fully compliant with the European convention on human rights—if I may say that with the hon. Member for Stone (Mr. Cash) in his place.
The 2005 Act provides full judicial oversight and rights of appeal. The courts must give permission for the Secretary of State to make a non-derogating control order or confirm within seven days an urgent control order made by the Secretary of State—and I should add that that power has not been used at any stage thus far. There is automatic, independent judicial review of the decision to make or renew a control order. Individuals subject to control orders can appeal the Secretary of State’s decision to modify a control order and apply themselves to have one revoked or modified where there is a change in circumstance and the Secretary of State’s decision can be appealed.
In the past, some people have questioned the sufficiency of the safeguards put in place by the 2005 Act, but events over the last year demonstrate the robustness of those safeguards. Hon. Members will be aware that the judiciary has been actively overseeing the Act, which is right and proper.
First, we welcome the Court of Appeal’s conclusion in August 2006 that the judicial review procedure within the Act was compatible with article 6 of the ECHR, which deals with the right to a fair trial. That overturned an earlier High Court ruling against the Government. Secondly, the Court of Appeal upheld an earlier High Court decision that the particular control orders imposed in respect of six individuals breached article 5 of the ECHR on the right to liberty. We have appealed and both those points of law will now be heard before the House of Lords.
Thirdly, there have now been three control order review hearings in which all the substantive evidence has been put before the courts. Previous hearings had dealt only with legal issues. The High Court handed down judgment on the first such case last Friday. We were of course disappointed that the judge chose to quash the order when the judge himself agreed that the individual was reasonably suspected of being a terrorist, and that the decision to keep the individual under a control order on an ongoing basis was necessary. We will appeal against this decision. Meanwhile, to protect the public, we have made a new—but, inevitably, weaker—order against this individual in the light of the judgment.
My hon. Friend has just used the term “reasonably suspected”. He will be aware that the test of reasonable suspicion has caused some concern. Does he propose to revisit the issue of the burden of proof and perhaps to lay down clearer safeguards?
I think that the safeguards are clear. The threshold test involved in establishing reasonable suspicion is very clear. It has been judged and tested on any number of occasions throughout the judicial process and it has not been found wanting. So I am not entirely sure that my hon. Friend’s point is a reasonable one.
I know that the right hon. Member for Haltemprice and Howden (David Davis), the shadow Home Secretary, has spoken to the Home Secretary about the case that has been alluded to. In that judgment—an open judgment, which is why I can talk about it—reference was made to evidence from Belgium in a similar case that pointed to there being sufficient admissible evidence for a prosecution. I can tell the House, however, that the CPS and the police have looked at the evidence in considerable detail—because it was in the judgment—before imposing the second, weaker, control order. They found, however, that the evidence from the Belgian case was insufficient to be considered admissible for a prosecution in the case of that individual.
In view of there being very few Members here, I hope that the Minister will not mind if I refer to certain matters, all of which went through the House of Commons literally overnight only a short time ago. Would not this problem have been avoided if we had legislated here in Westminster on our own terms, excluding the application of the Human Rights Act 1998, to deal with these extremely important matters, as well as providing for the full application of habeas corpus and ensuring a proper right of liberty for the alleged suspects—which I would insist on, as would the courts—instead of leaving ourselves with this extremely expensive and protracted legislation for the sake of an ideology?
With the greatest respect to the hon. Gentleman, that is not the case. It would not be right to suggest, from whatever perspective, that we are having to sort things out in this twilight zone, in which people are sufficiently suspected but there is insufficient evidence, only because of the Human Rights Act and the ECHR. That is not the case. Even if we were operating in a completely ECHR-free zone—as the hon. Gentleman would like—these would remain extremely complex legal difficulties. It is wrong to suggest that we are in this twilight zone of control orders simply because we are working against the backdrop of the ECHR and the Human Rights Act. These are difficult and complex circumstances. Contrary to what many critics suggest, there is only a very small number of these cases. That in itself is not a virtue, but the notion sometimes put about that these provisions have universal application and are somehow a prelude to quasi-internment is simply not the case. We are simply seeking to renew the order, as I have said.
We are constantly seeking to improve the way in which we administer control orders, and Lord Carlile’s new report includes some specific recommendations which we will consider carefully, consulting interested parties as necessary. We will respond to the noble Lord in due course. The recommendations include suggestions of areas for possible legislative amendment, which we will of course examine. In addition, Lord Carlile notes the need for an exit strategy, so that individuals are not subject to control orders indefinitely. Control orders are valid only for a maximum of 12 months at a time.
Indeed, following Lord Carlile’s recommendation last year, we established the control order review group to keep all control orders under quarterly, formal and audited review. This helps to ensure that obligations in control orders remain tailored to the individual, and that they are necessary and proportionate. If the individual is no longer considered to represent a significant risk, the control order would be revoked. As part of the review group’s work, a fresh look is being taken at whatever body of evidence is available in relation to the ability to prosecute. That is part of its work.
Lord Carlile also states his belief that there is a need for thorough, documented consultation in every case as to whether a prosecution could be brought against individuals subject to a control order. That relates to the point raised earlier by my right hon. Friend the Member for Southampton, Itchen (Mr. Denham). Following Lord Carlile’s recommendations, we are looking in some detail at all the administrative and more general processes in relation to establishing a more detailed audit trail between the CPS and the police, in order to make a full assessment of the evidence presented by the police if it is just short of being admissible.
My hon. Friend may or may not share my enthusiasm for some elements of the French system in this context. As he will know, in France there is often a three-way meeting between the police, the investigating magistrate and the justice department, at the stage when the files are looked at. A tactical and strategic decision is then taken whether to proceed to detention, as the French often do, or to allow the investigation to run further—perhaps for two or three months—in the hope of obtaining prosecutable evidence. I hope that the review will allow the British system to evolve in that way. If the proper audit trail showed that a prosecution could not be mounted, but that it might be possible in a few months if extra evidence had been accumulated, it should be possible to take the decision to allow the investigation to run.
I think that that is broadly right, in the sense that much of what my right hon. Friend describes does pertain, albeit not as formally as suggested by Lord Carlile. Lord Carlile referred to cases in which there was a real threat but very little evidence, resulting in the exchange between the CPS and the police being almost perfunctory. Such cases need to be looked at in more detail. Without being privy to the details of every single discussion between the police and the CPS, I am sure that the process will evolve in the way that my right hon. Friend has suggested. This relates to the tactics involved in issuing a control order immediately, and the need to strike a balance between having more time to gather evidence in the hope of being able to prosecute, and the real public safety threat that endures at the same time. This is always a matter of balance. The review will look at all these elements, and we will ensure that the House is kept up to date on our deliberations, either through our regular report on control orders or through some other channel. That is an entirely fair point, as is Lord Carlile’s broader point about an exit strategy and about keeping those elements constantly under review.
The Secretary of State always consults the police, before making an order, on whether there is evidence available that could realistically be used for the purposes of a prosecution of the individual for an offence relating to terrorism. But the Government, with the police and the CPS, will review procedures for consultation in the light of Lord Carlile’s recommendation. The only thing that I am not sure about, in relation to the point raised by my right hon. Friend, is the constitutional point that the Home Office, the CPS and the police would all have to sit down together to consider each and every case. The Home Office is the strategic safeguard of the law, and these cases are certainly a matter for the police and the CPS. I will keep the House informed of any developments.
To sum up, although unsatisfactory, as I have said, it is the Government’s belief that control orders are necessary to address the continuing threat posed by terrorism. That belief is supported by Lord Carlile in his annual report. He explicitly reiterates his conclusion from his previous report, stating:
“I remain of the view that, as a last resort (only), the control order system as operated currently in its non-derogating form is a justifiable and proportional safety valve for the proper protection of civil society.”
The Government’s role, first and foremost, must be to protect the public. Control orders help to achieve that while maintaining the necessary safeguards to protect individuals’ rights. They are focused, almost by definition, on a very small number of individuals, but, none the less, given the seriousness of the conditions imposed, it is right and proper that there are judicial and parliamentary safeguards on the scheme. It is necessary to renew it for a further year and I commend the order to the House.
I am grateful to the Minister for reintroducing this piece of legislation. The most focusing thing that he said was his reminder that the threat level is still at severe; he also reminded us of the successes of our intelligence and security agencies. May I add my congratulations to those agencies? We owe a huge debt of gratitude to the men and women who keep us safe in a hugely under-sung way on a day-to-day basis. I suggest to the Minister that, from time to time, it would be nice to hear officially, as much as we can, about those successes. They are terribly important.
The Minister knows how deeply uneasy I am about the control order regime and I suspect that he shares some of that unease. A lot of his language was revealing. He talked about weaker control orders and the unsatisfactory nature of the control order regime. I understand that he has reservations, like everybody else. My personal views are based on the fact that detention without trial, which the control order regime replaced, was hugely unsatisfactory. He referred to it as perhaps a quasi-internment. I saw the effects of internment. I saw the effects of men and women who were released after months in detention without charge and the damaging influence that they had on the counter-terrorist campaign in Northern Ireland. One of my objections to control orders, among many others, is that they impose a sort of terrorist ASBO status on the individual. Those individuals cannot help but become iconic in the communities to which they return.
Bearing in mind the Minister’s reservations, I think that Lord Carlile’s annual report makes many points that are deeply damaging to the system that we have at the moment. I must remind the Government that, after the collapse of their anti-terrorist measures as a result of their incompetence in dealing with their own Human Rights Act 1998, we gave them the chance to continue and to put in place a system that would work. Clearly, this system does not work and it has to be replaced by something competent. [Interruption.] I hear the Minister saying that it works, but there have been a series of shambles.
First and foremost, there were the three absconders. One escaped from a hospital due to a lack of resources and surveillance. One absconded immediately after the quashing of one order, before the next order could be served. That caused Lord Carlile to say:
“In the future there should be provision for this eventuality—in the sense that there should be minimum delay”.
The third person absconded after being served with orders. He entered a mosque and apparently disappeared, and yet the police did not pursue him. I am open to correction from the Minister on that point.
It strikes me as particularly odd that we thought that those people posed a sufficient threat to the safety of our citizens to warrant putting them on this curious and deeply intrusive form of detention, and yet when they abscond, we get strange comments from the Home Office. For instance, the Home Secretary said:
“The individual is not believed to represent a direct threat to the public in the UK at this time.”
Why was that individual on a control order? Why bother? As my memory serves, the individual had proclaimed the fact that he intended to carry out jihad and to try to make himself into a suicide bomber elsewhere. When the Opposition suggested that the individual should be named and identified, the Home Secretary said—I repeat:
“The individual is not believed to represent a direct threat to the public in the UK at this time.”
What about the British public not in the UK: namely, our soldiers, sailors and airmen serving abroad? It is entirely possible that that individual could have directed his attacks against them. Why was it not possible to identify that man—and others in a similar position—and publish his photograph? I suggest to the Minister that that is shambolic.
The question of anonymity remains the preserve of the police. If the police say clearly that, for operational reasons, they want anonymity to remain in place, it does so. They are free to say to us, for operational reasons, “Please now lift the anonymity order.” As and when that happened, of course that would be granted. That, and nothing else, is the case in terms of anonymity, so adding the issue of anonymity to the shambles is not entirely accurate.
I accept the Minister’s intervention, but comments from the Home Office such as the one that I have quoted are deeply unhelpful. If he, or another Minister, had come forward at the time and elaborated in the way that he now has and articulated the case much more clearly, perhaps that would have been acceptable. But there was a desperate feeling of complacency from the Home Office about this matter: “Yes, okay, they’ve gone absent. It is a problem? Not really. We won’t bother identifying them. They are on a weakened form of control order.”
The matter was brought to my attention and I went on “Newsnight” that night and explained that very point to Mr. Paxman. In relation to the person who entered the mosque, Lord Carlile says clearly that the individual had not been served the order, so he was not in breach of it, and there was no substantive operational reason why the police could enter the mosque. I accept that that needs to be looked at and gone into in more detail, but there are clear reasons in many of these cases. I accept that they are unsatisfactory, but not for many of the reasons that the hon. Gentleman suggests.
I fear that the Minister does not really believe what he is saying. With the greatest respect, he did not convince me on “Newsnight”. We have to move on. I just do not see that this system is ever going to work.
There was a full-ranging debate on Monday on the Human Rights Act. The question of the publication of photographs came up. It is a matter of grave concern that the application of universal principles has a precautionary and inhibiting effect on the police, in that they often simply do not know what to do. It is in those circumstances that we get into the shambles that the Minister has just been talking about.
I am grateful to my hon. Friend for his intervention. I have no doubt that the Minister will pick up on that. Again, we should listen to the language used. The system does not work. It is unconvincing. We allow dangerous people to abscond and to be in the community and our community abroad at our peril.
Based on the comments that the hon. Gentleman just made, will he indicate which way his party intends to vote in the Division?
Yes, I will: we are going to support the motion, with great reluctance, and, if the hon. Gentleman will allow me to proceed, I will conclude by pointing out why.
I am certainly not.
Well, that is fine.
The comments that Lord Carlile makes in his annual report are quite clear. There are still areas in relation to which people might be prosecuted. For instance, in section 58 of his report, he says:
“continuing investigation into the activities of some of the current controlees could provide evidence for criminal prosecution and conviction.”
The Minister will be aware of the court case in Manchester last week, in which Mr. Justice Beatson quashed the control order on suspect E, ruling that the Home Office had evidence that could have been used as a basis for prosecution.
The Minister touched on the question of bringing the regime to an end in the fullness of time, but we had this argument last year. The inception of control orders was deeply contentious in the Commons. I worry very much that we will be rehearsing precisely the same argument this time next year and that nothing will have been resolved. Where are the provisions to end control orders?
How do individuals ever get off a control order? Lord Carlile concludes that the
“orders cannot be continued indefinitely—that was never intended and would not be permitted by the courts. As a matter of urgency, a strategy is needed for the ending of the orders in relation to each controlee”.
The noble Lord, whom the Government have charged with the oversight of the orders, is coming up with precisely the point that they must be urgently sorted out. A much more workable system must be put in place.
The Minister referred to the control order review group. How many times has the group sat to date, and, in his view, how effective has it been?
Surely the whole raison d’être for putting someone under surveillance is that he or she can eventually be charged, brought to court, tried and, if found guilty, sent down. We thus need to address yet again—exactly as we said this time last year—the whole argument about intercept evidence, its admissibility in court and the reason why we seem to continue stalling on this particularly important subject. We must also address the question of interviewing post-charge. There is legislation that allows that to happen, so I cannot understand why it is not applied and why we do not use the measure physically to bring people up in court and take them off control orders by either locking them up or setting them free.
What are the Minister’s views on the efficacy of the control order regime? Only last week we heard that three individuals who had been intercepted on the Kenyan border were brought back to this country under grave suspicion of terrorism, yet released into the community without, as far as we know, any form of supervision—certainly any form of overt supervision. Might it not have been reasonable to use control orders to supervise those three individuals?
Countries such as Singapore, Malaya, Indonesia and the Philippines have rehabilitation programmes for their suspects who are either behind bars or on the equivalent of control orders. What have the Government done about that? What sort of rehabilitation programme do we have to try to bring these individuals round to a more rational, sensible and sane way of thinking? I have never heard anything about such an initiative from the Government at any stage.
In conclusion, and to answer the question asked by the hon. Member for Taunton (Mr. Browne), we will support the extension with great reluctance, but we must put the Government on notice that, in view of Lord Carlile’s latest report, we will not be able to sustain our position this time next year. Will the Minister assure me that there will be a review of all control order cases with the explicit intention of prosecuting when the evidence is available to do so? We have to bring the system to an end and we have to end the injustice. We have to take dangerous and subversive people off our streets, but the system does not allow that to happen.
I was grateful to the Minister for his response to my right hon. Friend the Member for Southampton, Itchen (Mr. Denham), because he dealt with one of the two critical aspects of the Carlile report: that regarding proposals to ensure that prosecution is considered fully in every case. I am also especially grateful that the Minister intends to report to the House about how the process goes forward. That nails one of the critical issues that we should be addressing in the debate, so I will focus on the other: the issue of time.
In many areas of the Home Office’s operations, it fails to understand the impact of time on human beings’ lives. It has a perfectly sensible sets of policies. However, the most obvious example of the problem is the situation regarding immigration. Over time, people grow up, get married and change their lives. A policy that was sensible to apply at one time in a person’s life is thus not necessarily sensible after the five or six years for which the Home Office has been brooding about the right thing to do about that person’s case. I raised that matter on several occasions with the Minister in his previous incarnation as the Minister for Immigration, Citizenship and Nationality.
I am worried that we are at risk of floating down the same river with control orders. I do not believe that that is the Minister’s intention, and I think that we can avoid that risk. I hope that he will be able to assure the House today that there is a clear programme of work in hand to avoid the risk of individuals being subject to control orders that are renewed time after time. That was why I intervened to ask whether the two individuals whose control orders were renewed in March 2006 would have those orders renewed next month, if the order is passed. They have already been under control orders for two years. Will they be under control orders for three years, and what will happen after that?
The control order is an important tool in the Government’s armoury against terrorism and we cannot underestimate its possible value. However, we must stop and think about using a control order constantly over time. I am certain that introducing more robust ways of considering prosecution will be a way of addressing the situation. However, Lord Carlile was very clear that there
“has to be an end of the order at some point, in every case.”
He continued:
“Some of the controlees have already been the subject of their orders for a considerable time. Their orders cannot be continued indefinitely—that was never intended and would not be permitted by the courts. As a matter of urgency, a strategy is needed for the ending of the orders in relation to each controlee: to fail to prepare for this now whether on a case-by-case basis or by legislation (if appropriate) would be short-sighted.”
I hope that the Minister—he is a good Minister and I am confident that he has a plan—will be able to assure us in his winding-up speech that, in respect of the two individuals whom I cited and the situation more generally, he has a proposal that will ensure that we will not allow this moral horror to continue. Although a control order is a necessary tool, it is not sufficient to say, “Well, it’s necessary, so we’ll allow it to keep floating on.” I hope that we will hear about what will be done about the longest-running cases.
The hon. Member for Newark (Patrick Mercer) mentioned control orders on individuals who have signalled their intention to join jihad overseas. We are potentially missing two tricks. First, we should publicise more widely the fact that that could lead to a control order. A number of people—not a very large number, thank goodness—see themselves as future martyrs and think that they can achieve that internationally. If they knew that they were likely to be subject to a control order, their activities would be more circumscribed.
Secondly, what efforts have been made to try to straighten out the perverted thinking of these people? I suspect that it is possible to do that in some cases. Often we are not talking about people who have been directly involved in planning acts of sabotage in the UK. Some of them may not have thought through the full consequences of their actions. The work on the rehabilitation of violent prisoners shows that it is possible to change some thinking. I do not know whether the Minister has the power to make such efforts, but I would be interested to know whether there is any such power, or any prospect of working with people who are subject to control orders to help them confront the possible consequences of their plans. That might help to divert them and it would certainly help to make the rest of us safer.
On the fundamental point, the most important issue in Carlile’s report is time, and I hope that the Minister will be able to reassure the House that he is developing proposals to ensure that control orders are used not as a long-term solution to the problem of terrorism but appropriately as a shorter term solution to enable the state to develop effective prosecutions or take other actions—for example, against breaches of the control order. Unless we can show that we are doing that, we risk breaching international human rights standards—unlike the hon. Member for Stone (Mr. Cash), I am glad that those standards apply to this regime—and bringing ourselves into international disrepute, and I do not think that this country deserves that.
On the day that the Prevention of Terrorism Act 2005 came into force, 11 March 2005, the Prime Minister said that
“there will be every opportunity for people...to put forward amendments to make arguments about the legislation without putting at risk the entirety of that legislation”.
We had hoped that today would provide that opportunity because we believe that the control order regime is, for various reasons that have been explained, imperfect and in need of extensive revision.
In particular, we maintain our serious concerns that the standard of proof required for the Secretary of State to sign non-derogating control orders, which was referred to earlier, is too low; that the power to impose such orders should reside with the court, not the Home Secretary; that they should be strictly time-limited; and that they should be subject to regular and thorough reviews on the possibility of proceeding beyond the orders and towards prosecution.
Those are not flippant reservations. They have been expressed already in the debate today. They have been reinforced by the excellent work of the Joint Committee on Human Rights and others. They cannot simply be ignored from one annual debate to the next. Yet, despite repeating those reservations at every turn of the debate during the last two years since the legislation was introduced, we find ourselves forced into a corner on a vote that provides no opportunity for amendment. It is reasonable to ask whether those long-standing reservations have been strengthened or weakened by the experience of control orders since we last debated them here 12 months ago.
The record is not an encouraging one. As has already been observed, three of the 18 controlees have absconded, escaping the strictures of their control orders altogether. The High Court has ruled against the Home Secretary on no fewer than three occasions. The latest ruling, from Mr. Justice Beatson, made last week, is typical: the control order was quashed on the grounds that it amounted
“to a deprivation of liberty and only the courts, not the Secretary of State, have power to make such orders”—
in other words, the Secretary of State exceeded the powers given to him—and because
“the Secretary of State failed to consider properly and fully whether the controlee could be prosecuted for criminal offences rather than being made subject to a control order”.
The latter observation, as others have pointed out, is crucial, and it is echoed in the second report of the independent reviewer of control orders, my noble and learned Friend Lord Carlile of Berriew, released two days ago, in which he states that
“continuing investigation into the activities of some of the current controlees could provide evidence for criminal prosecution and conviction”.
That builds on his telling observation in his first report, published a full 12 months ago—this is not new—in which he said:
“I have seen letters from chief officers of police in relation to each controlee certifying that there was no realistic prospect of prosecution. Little is given by way of reasons.”
That is compelling evidence, and our fears that control orders would remove the pressure on the police and others to bring charges and pursue prosecutions have considerably increased, rather than diminished, with time.
We should be devoting more time to working out how to bring more terror suspects to court rather than simply renewing an increasingly flawed control order regime, which even the current Home Secretary has agreed is “full of holes”. More could be done, for example, to clarify the so-called threshold test used by the Crown Prosecution Service in terror cases so that charges can be brought even in cases where all the necessary evidence is not yet fully available, for instance because of the complexity of computer-based evidential trails, but there is a good prospect that it will become available.
As the Attorney-General has tentatively suggested, we should re-examine the circumstances in which the police can question suspects after charge. If we relax the rules to allow more extensive questioning, with clear safeguards against abuse in place, we would make it far easier for the police to continue investigations after formal charges had been laid.
We must find a way to introduce phone-tap evidence in court, with protections for the security services so that agents and surveillance methods are not compromised. As the Government have accepted, intercept evidence could be vital in delivering terrorist suspects to trial.
Does my hon. Friend share my concern that the reason for the delay in dealing with the question of intercept communication may be not concerns from the intelligence service but objections from the commercial elements of the providers of mobile phones and telecoms in this country?
My hon. Friend makes an interesting and intriguing observation. I was not aware that that might be the case. Frankly, I am in the dark about precisely what the objections are. The Government seem to be not entirely of one mind. The Attorney-General has said in public, for example on a recent visit to the United States to see the use of intercept evidence there, that it could be a powerful tool in our common struggle against the contemporary terror threat. I hope that the Government will follow up their attempts to emulate the practices of France, the US and others, who find our reticence on this point very difficult to comprehend.
Finally, we could use plea bargaining more actively to encourage so-called super-grasses—lower order suspects on the periphery of plots—to give evidence against more serious criminals. The Government have already passed plea-bargaining legislation to tackle organised crime. Why not use it also to thwart terror plots? Combined with essential efforts to build trust in our Muslim communities, that could help encourage individuals to testify and help us bring terrorist masterminds to court.
It is not unreasonable then to conclude that the persistence of the current control order regime is proving increasingly difficult to sustain in the courts and increasingly flawed in practice. It removes, or appears to remove, the pressure to charge and prosecute the criminals whom we all want to see apprehended. It diverts energy and attention away from other important innovations that we should be examining to strengthen our criminal justice system, and it infringes the most fundamental principles of due process and human rights.
We understood the exceptional circumstances facing the Government when these powers were rushed on to the statute book. We enthusiastically supported the then Home Secretary’s promises that the control orders would be comprehensively reviewed in a wider review of anti-terror legislation. We acknowledged that the 7 July bombings required a further delay in that review. Yet today we find ourselves, yet again, as we did 12 months ago, without any detailed answers to our reservations of principle and practice, without any concrete sign that control orders will be reviewed or revised in a sufficiently meaningful way.
On the question of human rights, as the hon. Gentleman will remember, there was an understanding between my Front-Bench colleagues and his party that there would be ring-fencing of the Human Rights Act 1998 with respect to control orders, so I hope that he understands that if I go into the No Lobby to vote against the continuance of the measures, which are huge, it is entirely because I am against the proposition that the Human Rights Act should be ring-fenced in relation to the provisions.
indicated dissent.
The hon. Gentleman is clarifying his position, and obviously he is free to do so, but I do not agree with the supposition, and judging by the way in which my hon. Friend the Member for Winchester (Mr. Oaten) shakes his head—he would have been party to the understanding to which the hon. Gentleman alludes—it is not an event that he can recall.
Surely in the circumstances it would be irresponsible not to signal that we should today pause and reflect on the changes that are necessary to the flawed control order system. Surely it is the role of the House to scrutinise the effect of control orders, and to draw a line in the sand when it is abundantly obvious to all that they need to be reviewed and replaced. I hope that the Minister will respond to our objections and reservations, accepting the seriousness with which they have been held and developed over a prolonged period. Those objections are sincere and have been confirmed by experience.
I listened to the hon. Gentleman’s concerns, many of which are valid, and to the concerns of the respected hon. Member for Newark (Patrick Mercer), who in a sense has put the Government on one year’s notice. If the hon. Member for Sheffield, Hallam (Mr. Clegg) intends to lead his party in opposing the renewal order today, will he tell the House what he thinks the effect of failing to renew the provisions will be on people who are subject to control orders, and what will that do for public confidence in our security services?
If control orders were no longer a tool that could be used on the 18 individuals in question, I hope that two things would happen. First, I hope that those for whom there is evidence would be charged and prosecuted. We have learned in Lord Carlile’s report that it appears that that would be the case in at least some of the 18 cases, but I do not know in how many of them. Secondly, as to the others, of course I hope that the police and other authorities would be able to subject them to surveillance, as happens in many other cases, so that they can gather evidence and bring charges that lead to full prosecutions.
If I may, I shall conclude, because there is not much time in this short debate. We have reservations; the Minister shakes his head, but we have been here before. There was the original debate two years ago, when the legislation was first passed, and our reservations were repeated 12 months ago, too. I have at least attempted to demonstrate that the experience of the courts, and the practical difficulties in implementing the control orders, have made those reservations more, rather than less, acute. On that basis, we will seek to divide the House today and will vote against another annual renewal of the control orders.
My first point is that I am extremely glad that Lord Carlile has produced yet another report. We are fortunate to have him to provide insights into the way in which the Prevention of Terrorism Act 2005 operates. I have to say that I was anything but convinced on the subject. The Minister will understand that I have taken a position of principle on the matter, with regard to the former Home Secretary, the right hon. Member for Norwich, South (Mr. Clarke). I have the gravest reservations about the way in which the Act was passed, after an all-night sitting, and about the construction of the Act.
We are not talking about merely technical matters; questions of liberty are raised, and I am deeply worried about the fact that people are not necessarily being given the full opportunity to have their cases adequately considered in the courts in the right manner. I was so concerned about the Prevention of Terrorism Bill when it was before the House that I produced my own Bill, called the Prevention of Terrorism (No.2) Bill, the essence of which was to provide, in a couple of clauses, that we would not ring-fence the Human Rights Act 1998. However, my Front-Bench colleagues insisted on doing so through an amendment to the Government’s Bill. It is essential that it is understood that my Bill would have provided for due process, a fair trial and habeas corpus for alleged suspects.
As I say, a question of liberty arises, but unfortunately, the 2005 Act has a convoluted construction because of the problems of entirely avoiding having to deal with the unfortunate implications of the Human Rights Act. There was the whole concept of non-derogating control orders to consider, as well as the Act’s convoluted language, and the struggle within it. As one reads the Act, one can picture the draftsman desperately trying to achieve the objectives, which are to provide for proper public security, and to keep under proper control people who are, or who are alleged to be, a serious danger to the public. By the way, given that three of the people subject to control orders have absconded, it does not seem to have worked. One can sense from the very wording of the statute the desperate struggle of parliamentary counsel, who were trying to keep themselves within the framework of the Human Rights Act as far as possible, and that became the object of the exercise. It is a simple fact that if we had legislated without reference to the Human Rights Act, we could have come up with solutions that would have enabled us to achieve all the objectives, namely public security, giving a fair trial to the people against whom there are allegations, providing them with due process, and ensuring that there was habeas corpus.
A red judge, as we call them, can be made available at any time, and as Lord Justice Steyn has said, the most sacred duty of any judge is to support the notion and the practicality of habeas corpus. However, as I put it to the former Home Secretary, who was in such a muddle when answering questions that I asked during proceedings on the Government’s Bill and before then, what has been created is a mish-mash—an inadequate, unstructured Act of Parliament that simply does not serve the purpose of maintaining public security on the one hand, or of ensuring fair trial, due process and habeas corpus on the other. Those are my intrinsic objections, and they cannot get more lethal than that.
I understand entirely why my hon. Friend, and good friend, the Member for Newark (Patrick Mercer) said that the Opposition will, with great reluctance, support the Government today. In all fairness, I appreciate that there are complications, but the Minister himself admits that the current situation is not a satisfactory way of dealing with things. Surely this is not the basis on which Parliament should be legislating. Today, the Front-Bench spokesmen on both sides of the House are agreeing, in a virtually empty House, to continue an order that is of huge importance, not only because of the noble Lord Carlile’s report, but because of the intrinsic questions that it raises about the relationship of the state to the individual, the liberty of the subject and public security. The measures are to be put to the House on a Thursday afternoon, in a continuation order, after one and a half hours of debate. The issue is of great importance, and we were kept up all night to discuss these incredibly important matters on an emergency basis, but everybody knows that the legislation is not working properly.
I will not carp and be disrespectful, but with the greatest respect to my hon. Friends and Government Members, I point out that we are faced with legislation that is inadequate, hopeless and convoluted. It aims to deal with the central problem of how to balance the needs of public security in relation to terrorism with the issue of liberty, but I regret that we could not come up with a better solution, and that we will continue in limbo for another year. That is extraordinary, which is why I intend to vote against the order, and I have informed the Whips accordingly. It is a matter of concern that we have not had a long enough debate to deal with these serious issues.
There has not been a single mention of the 28-day period. Although it was agreed in the House that 28 days would be the maximum, I have always expressed grave doubts about whether that period would be sufficient. We have only one and a half hours to deal with a matter that led a Home Secretary to resign and provoked enormous debate and, given the Prime Minister’s insistence on 90 days, revolt in the Cabinet. So far, however, that period has not even been mentioned. Two former Attorneys-General in the House of Lords said that the minimum period ought to be 45 days. No doubt, they talked to Lord Carlile about the implications of his report and the issues that arose from it. I accept that at this stage it has not been necessary to take up the full 28 days, but that is not the issue, as we must consider whether or not it is necessary to increase that period in the coming year.
I do not know the answer, but we have an arbitrary cut-off date. I am not wedded to 90 days, and would probably settle for 60 or even 45. When the matter was first debated, I believe that Conservative Front-Bench spokesmen did not even want to change the limit to 14 days, although I may be wrong about that. The limit gradually increased until the 28-day period was accepted. However, whether it is 28 or 14 days, that will not necessarily solve the problem at a given time. If we provide proper, fair trials—even the worst terrorists are entitled to a fair trial—and if there is due process, with habeas corpus and proper safeguards from a red judge to ensure that suspects are not ill-treated, alleged suspects can be held for a reasonable length of time. Given modern communication methods and the difficulties highlighted in reports by the Metropolitan police and others, it may be necessary to extend the period beyond 28 days.
Is not the alternative approach to the matters in the order to allow questioning post-charge and wire-tap evidence? If both of those were adopted, there would not be any need for the hon. Gentleman’s proposals.
As ever, I listen carefully to the hon. Gentleman, who is a distinguished lawyer. Often, we nearly agree on things to the point of voting together, but he will accept that my decision to vote against the order is not based by any means on the Liberals’ position. It is based on my own position, which I have maintained over a period of time. I accept, however, what he said, and the business of wire taps and evidence adduced in court is important in these exceptional circumstances. Recent reports on phone tapping strongly suggest that the practice takes place on a massive scale.
indicated dissent.
I am glad that the Minister is shaking is head, because I am not trying to make a cheap point, and would never do so. There are substantial grounds for believing that there are many cases in which a lesser degree of evidence is required than in the cases that we are discussing. I take very seriously the point about intercepts made by the hon. Member for Cambridge (David Howarth). We must consider the matter carefully, as it leads to a fundamental question that arises again and again. At the heart of my concern about the legislation, as with identity cards, is the balance between the application of the Human Rights Act 1998 and the protection of the public. I have frequently written about that in national newspapers in the past few years. We face enormous terrorist threats and, as the Minister conceded, the danger from terrorism is still severe. He knows that better than me, as he is in possession of facts that are not available to the public at large—I accept entirely the reasons for that. Given the severe danger facing the public and the necessity of maintaining a proper system of liberty for alleged suspects it is essential that we think more carefully—a one-and-a-half hour debate is not sufficient—about the continuation of an Act that spokesmen on both Front Benches believe is wholly unsatisfactory. I have never in my life been more convinced that a piece of legislation has led to a wholly unsatisfactory state of affairs. The Government, the official Opposition and the Liberal party all agree, to adapt the famous words of Thomas Becket in “Murder in the Cathedral”, that this is bad legislation for all the best reasons. That is the crucial question that faces us:
“Now is my way clear, now is the meaning plain:
Temptation shall not come in this kind again.
The last temptation is the greatest treason:
To do the right deed for the wrong reason.”
I have no intention of voting for the control order.
I wish to make a couple of points about the report by the Joint Committee on Human Rights on the renewal of the order last year. The Committee expressed a number of concerns to which the Government have responded.
It is unfortunate that we should have to debate renewal without the benefit of a further report from the Joint Committee. Lord Carlile’s report was published on 19 February, and we are debating the order on 22 February, so the House should accept that it is difficult for a Select Committee, however assiduous, to produce a report within that period. I hope, however, that a report will be produced in time for the debate in the House of Lords on 5 March. I would be grateful if the Minister confirmed that Lord Carlile’s report was published as soon as he received it. Is it possible to ensure that the scrutiny provisions in the House work? Do we need to hold the debate on 22 February instead of giving time to the Committee that is most closely associated with the matter—clearly, however, it is not the only one—to do its valuable work? Indeed, the Government themselves have acknowledged the value of that work, and responded in the 24th report of the last Session to the 12th report, which dealt with the renewal of control orders.
The Joint Committee has produced a further report, “Counter-Terrorism Policy and Human Rights: Prosecution and Pre-Charge Detention”, which identifies how we can overcome obstacles to prosecution and provides alternatives to non-jail detention. It supports the points made by my hon. Friend the Member for Sheffield, Hallam (Mr. Clegg) about the use of intercept evidence and overcoming other obstacles to prosecution, and it strengthens arguments against the renewal of control orders in the Joint Committee’s previous report. Alternatives have been canvassed and examined in detail, and important judicial decisions have been made.
However unsatisfactory the control orders might be—obviously, there will be a Division—does the hon. Gentleman agree that the solution advocated by the hon. Member for Stone (Mr. Cash), if it was a solution—extending the period of 28 days—would be far worse?
Yes. There are a number of wrong ways of going about this, and we have heard several of them. I believe that control orders in their current form are a wrong way, and that we need an alternative to all detention that breaches civil liberties and, in my view, that of the Joint Committee and that of some judges, breaches the Human Rights Act because of a lack of derogation. The same could well apply to lengthy pre-charge detention of the kind described by the hon. Member for Stone (Mr. Cash), against which the hon. Member for Walsall, North (Mr. Winnick) has campaigned so assiduously.
In its 24th report on the renewal order, published last year, the Joint Committee argued that the case for a consolidating Act was “potentially quite strong”, and that
“the effect of the Home Secretary exercising his power to renew the Prevention of Terrorism Act, rather than to bring forward a Bill, is significantly to reduce the opportunity for parliamentary scrutiny and debate of the control orders regime”.
I realise that there was a renewal last year without that opportunity because of exigencies that had arisen in the meantime and the need to introduce further legislation to deal with that. But now we are discussing a second renewal without a clear prospect that any consolidating legislation will be in time for the next renewal, and that both Houses will have an opportunity to debate and amend the provisions that we are currently debating, in an unamendable form, for one and a half hours. Will the Minister assure us that before the next renewal there will be an opportunity for substantive amendment?
The Government’s response to our recommendation stated that the Home Secretary was
“grateful to the Committee for its support of consolidating counter-terrorism legislation”,
and that the Government intended
“to put forward a further terrorism Bill, which will be subject to pre-legislative scrutiny, in 2007.”
It is not clear whether those two sentences amount to agreement with the point that we had made.
I also want to say something about the question of compliance with our treaty obligations under the European convention on human rights. We said we were concerned about the fact that non-derogating control orders were
“being operated in practice in a way which amounts to a deprivation of liberty, and therefore require derogation from Article 5(1) ECHR.”
Since then judicial decisions have upheld that view in a number of cases, and disagreed with the Government’s view. I hope the Minister will explain why he feels that he has received judicial support for his disagreement with our statement that there is a clear danger that without derogation there will be a breach of the Human Rights Act, and the courts will be able to quash orders.
I would be the first to defend the right of judges to make their decisions according to the rule of law, but the question is which law. That is where the problem lies. Far too much discretion is given to judges, as is clear from the judgment by Mr. Justice Sullivan mentioned in Lord Carlile’s report. The degree of deference is now being qualified. I am concerned about the degree of judicial activism that is taking us further and further down the road of entrenching the whole concept of the human rights legislation.
The hon. Gentleman’s intervention gave him a good opportunity to set out his very clear view.
The conclusion of the Joint Committee’s report deals with the House’s right properly to debate whether there should be derogation:
“We… conclude at this stage that we cannot endorse a renewal without a derogation and believe that Parliament should therefore be given an opportunity to debate and decide that question.”
We have not been given that opportunity, which is another reason—in addition to those given by my hon. Friend the Member for Sheffield, Hallam and, although without the vote to go along with them, by the hon. Member for Newark (Patrick Mercer)—why I, and others, will vote against the renewal. We recognise, as does the Joint Committee, the need to tackle terrorism, but we believe that without adequate parliamentary scrutiny we risk making matters worse and providing for bad law that will be counter-productive in the long run.
I value the work of the Joint Committee, as I have said before. Its reports are extremely useful.
Lord Carlile’s report was published for Parliament at the earliest opportunity, given the recess, namely on Monday.
I shall try to deal with many of the points that have been raised, and correct one, if not two, of my own comments. I recognise the furrow that the hon. Member for Stone (Mr. Cash) is ploughing, but I cannot let him get away with the assertion, for it is no more than that, that if the Human Rights Act is taken away, the need for control orders will disappear entirely. Nor do I accept the assertion that it will disappear, as if by magic, if we introduce intercept as evidence and post-charge questioning. It is simply that: an assertion.
I want to make some progress before I give way. As the hon. Gentleman has made very clear, our time is limited.
It was interesting to note that the hon. Gentleman had no answer to the intervention from my hon. Friend the Member for West Bromwich, East (Mr. Watson), other than to express the plaintive hope that somehow evidence would be found against the 18 people currently under control orders and that public safety would prevail.
I clearly stipulated the four areas in which we wanted revisions to the control order regime, a process that is not available to us. I did not claim that flanking legislative measures might serve as a wholesale replacement for control orders; they are necessary in addition to a thorough review and revision of the control orders.
My hon. Friend asked a clear question: what would happen if the control orders governing those 18 were struck down tomorrow. The hon. Gentleman responded that hopefully there would be a bit more surveillance, and hopefully some evidence would come out of the woodwork so that they could be prosecuted. That is not sufficient. [Interruption.] These are not the politics of terror. This is not a little schoolboys’ club; we need to be very serious. [Interruption.] I was merely responding to the words of the hon. Gentleman.
The hon. Member for Newark (Patrick Mercer) mentioned a gentleman who entered a mosque. I said that he had not been served with a control order. That was an error: he had been served with an order, but paragraph 26 of the Carlile report makes it clear that he had not breached it. Given that entrance to the mosque was permissible under the control order, there was no obvious reason for the police to pursue the matter.
Will the Minister give way?
Not at the moment.
The issue of control orders will not go away. Lord Carlile has expressed the hope—which I share—that the advances we made in the 2006 Act might obviate the need for more and more of them. I think everyone broadly agrees with what has been said about Acts preparatory and other legislation, but Members are wrong if they think there is some legalistic nirvana in which there will be no individuals who remain the gravest of threats to the public but against whom there is not sufficient admissible evidence for a prosecution. To say otherwise is not correct.
Anybody who has dealt with intercept evidence in practice, as I have, knows that it is no magic wand. It might—it will, probably—assist, but it cannot be the be-all and end-all of producing evidence in these cases. I asked the Government to explain why there continues to be a delay in making it admissible in court.
Simply put—the matter is incredibly complex, as I know the hon. Gentleman will understand—the reason is that there needs to be the appropriate legal framework within which that can happen. The Attorney-General and others are considering that and will report in due course.
My hon. Friend has said that aspects of the Prevention of Terrorism Act worry him, and that he has heard recommendations for revisions to the Act. Will he confirm that in 12 months, when we renew the powers, we will be dealing with a revised Act? Will he also answer in more detail the question that I put to the Liberal Democrat Front-Bench spokesman? What would be the effect on British security if the House rejected the renewal order today?
On my hon. Friend’s initial point, which was also raised by the hon. Member for Oxford, West and Abingdon (Dr. Harris), who is a member of the Joint Committee on Human Rights, I cannot give an absolute assurance that within a year we will be looking at revised legislation, rather than a renewal.
We spent the summer, not least because of activities over the summer, examining carefully not only the Government structures, but the legislative framework for dealing with terrorism. As hon. Members know, the report has been sent to the Prime Minister and there will be a response in due course. There may be an additional counter-terrorism Bill, as indicated in the Queen’s Speech, before the next renewal is due. I hope that the House would agree that consolidation would be foolish if we were about to introduce a subsequent Bill, given the timing of the Bill if it were introduced—I emphasise the word “if”. If there were further changes to our terrorism legislation, that would move consolidation down the line a little, which means that I cannot guarantee that the annual review will not be on renewal, rather than otherwise.
I shall give way to the hon. Member for Newark first. If I have time, I will indulge the hon. Member for Stone.
The point about intercept is similar to the excellent point from the hon. Member for West Bromwich, East (Mr. Watson). The Minister and I have been talking about intercept for at least two years. I fully understand the complexities, the sensitivities and the delicacies of the issue. Will he give me some assurance that we will not be having this same debate next year and that he will not be giving the same excuses?
I fervently hope so. I want to move to a stage where we can determine, one way or the other, whether the legal framework, the technology and so on are in place to allay the fears of many about intercept evidence. I cannot give the hon. Gentleman the assurance that he seeks because others far mightier and more expert than me will determine those matters, but I fervently hope so. I agree that getting to a stage where there is a definitive collective view in the body politic about intercept evidence is a goal that we all want to achieve. I accept that.
Now that we have covered all those points, I shall make a few more comments; I promise to give way to the hon. Gentleman with at least 20 seconds to spare.
On the point made by my hon. Friend the Member for Slough (Fiona Mactaggart), we have an elaborate preventive strategy that tries to engage communities, work in all the areas that she suggests to counter radicalisation, and work with those who have been radicalised and are trying to come back from that. On her other point, as far as I am aware, and in the light of all the inspiration that I have had since, the two original and lengthiest control orders do not relate to individuals who are subject to any criminal proceedings for breach. These matters are kept under constant review, but I understand and will consider her point about time and its impact on individuals.
The hon. Member for Newark asked about the control order review group, which has met quarterly since May 2006 and reviews each case. I will explore further whether that is sufficient and whether the review should cover welfare and other aspects identified by my hon. Friend the Member for Slough. Part of the review process deals with exit strategies for individuals coming off control orders and cases where there are not sufficient reasons for a control order to remain in force—a matter to which I have alluded, but which I may not have covered sufficiently.
I give way to the hon. Gentleman because I have to cough.
I hope my comments will not make the Minister’s cough worse. I hope he will accept that I am not against controlling alleged terrorists—quite the opposite. My concern and my reason for voting against the order is that control orders will not achieve the objectives that he sets. There are intrinsic contradictions within them between human rights, which should be safeguarded by Westminster, not the Human Rights Act, and public protection, which is the first duty of any Government.
That is absolutely the first duty. I will not go over the arguments with which we began the debate.
I end by responding to the four points from the hon. Member for Sheffield, Hallam. Whatever one’s position, it is not right to suggest or imply that control orders, as he said, remove the pressure on the police to prosecute, rather like Lord Carlile’s remark in passing—no more—that control orders are used as a feeble excuse by those who cannot be bothered to undertake a full prosecution or, in his colourful terms, as a prophylactic. I do not think that that is fair on the police. It is entirely unreasonable.
The notion of a threshold test has been thrashed around. We are confident that the present test for prosecution or control orders is about right. Clearly, it will always need to be reviewed. The hon. Gentleman knows that the threshold is far higher for derogation orders. We think that that is about right, but it is not necessarily a panacea.
We have told the Joint Committee on Human Rights, among others, that we will seriously consider the issue of post-charge detention. That was alluded to in previous debates as well. I can assure the House that we will do so. If we think there is some merit in that, we may introduce such proposals in a Bill, if there is a Bill between now and the next chance for renewal.
As I said, a substantive debate is needed on intercept evidence, and that will take place. The hon. Gentleman is right that we should reach a conclusion sooner rather than later, but in an informed fashion. He is right to suggest that the legislative basis exists for dealing with supergrasses and people in lower positions involved in conspiracies against those higher up. So in at least two of the four aspects that he identified, provisions are in place, although I admit that they should perhaps be utilised more by the authorities—
It being one and a half hours after the commencement of proceedings on the motion, Mr. Deputy Speaker put forthwith the Question already proposed from the Chair, pursuant to Standing Order No. 16(1).
Resolved,
That the draft Prevention of Terrorism Act 2005 (Continuance in force of sections 1 to 9) Order 2007, which was laid before this House on 1st February, be approved.
Public Health (England)
[Relevant document: the progress report, “Health Challenge England—next steps for Choosing Health”, published by the Department of Health in October 2006.]
Motion made, and Question proposed, That this House do now adjourn.—[Caroline Flint.]
It is a mark of the progress that this Government have made in safeguarding the nation’s health that possibly for the first time, public health has the opportunity to take its rightful place as one of the cornerstones of our health policy, moving the national health service towards being a prevention as well as treatment service. The programme of investment and health reform has transformed the NHS from a crisis service to one that is on the point of being able to deliver the health and well-being of every citizen, treating people as individuals, rather than as numbers on a waiting list. Clearly, in 2007 our NHS is more local than ever before. The service has been devolved. It is more transparent in its financial dealings, and its public health initiatives draw in partners across the public, private and voluntary sectors.
This Government established public health as one of the six key objectives in the NHS plan. In the past few years we have published a groundbreaking public health White Paper “Choosing Health: Making health choices easier”, completed 116 of the 210 commitments set out in it, and mapped the need and extent of the public health challenge in “Health Challenge England—next steps for Choosing Health”. In doing so, we have equipped those at the most local level to understand better the complex needs of their communities and neighbourhoods so that they can provide the best possible health service. In the face of the advice from the Conservative party not to legislate at all, this Government introduced comprehensive legislation for workplaces and enclosed public places to become smoke free by 1 July 2007—more extensive smoke-free provisions than any other country.
More than 100 years ago, enlightened reformers like John Snow did not look at the fashions of the affluent minority, with their love of spas, gyms and country retreats to convalesce after illness. Instead, Snow examined the conditions of the majority—the slums, the open sewers, the poor air and the dusty factories. He saw the connection between a lack of clean water and the spread of cholera. The modern sewerage systems and the fresh water that resulted from them were instrumental in reducing the impact of communicable diseases. After world war two, the mass vaccination programmes all but eliminated diseases such as polio. Today, our vaccination programmes are more far-reaching than ever and public information is more extensive than ever. However, although those are good things, they are insufficient. Life in the 21st century demands new approaches to public health. I hope that that will inform our debate.
I am grateful to the hon. Lady for giving way at this early stage. She referred to our apparent opposition to the “smoking” clauses in the Health Bill. Can she perhaps clarify that, because we have always made it clear that it would be our intention to have legislation covering smoking in enclosed public places? I would like her to clarify the misleading impression that she has given.
For 18 years, the Conservative party had the opportunity to bring legislation in. It failed to do so. We wrote in our manifesto that we intended to legislate. I do not recall the Conservative party manifesto saying that it intended to legislate.
Will the hon. Lady give way?
I will make a little more progress. I will be happy to give way at a later opportunity.
Today, individuals have greater choice and greater sources of information. Crucially, in many respects, much of the public are wealthier, better educated and living longer, with greater expectations of life and higher expectations of public services than ever before.
In relation to the intervention by the hon. Member for Westbury (Dr. Murrison), perhaps we should judge the Conservatives’ attitude to smoking in public places on the basis of the amendments that they tabled to the Health Bill, which were not for the comprehensive smoking ban that we will have on 1 July.
I agree totally with my right hon. Friend. In a number of areas—tobacco control, the ban on advertising, the world-class services in the NHS to support people to give up smoking, and the legislation that will come into force in England on 1 July—we need take no lessons from the Conservative party.
I am listening intently to the hon. Lady. Before she gets too rhapsodic in her oratory, perhaps she could answer two points. If the Government’s record is so good, why is it that the number of health service professionals working in public and community medicine focused on public health has been cut by a fifth since 2001, and why has there been a cumulative reduction of £300 million in expenditure on infectious diseases under her Government?
We have seen a growth in the number of people working in health improvement. That is not to say that there should not be more. As I develop my contribution, I hope that I will engage the hon. Gentleman in looking beyond what have sometimes been stifling demarcation lines between public health and other areas of the health service, and in looking at the opportunity for every health professional to be a public health advocate. Beyond the health service, in local government and in the public, private and voluntary sectors, we can put public health at the heart of many organisations. They should see it as an opportunity to deliver on their agenda, whether it is regeneration, educational attainment or, importantly, providing people with the health and well-being to get the most out of life.
I am grateful to my hon. Friend for giving way at this early stage. She has been generous with her time. Does she agree that one of the biggest public health problems is health inequality and that the Government are doing an enormous amount to reduce poverty and to ensure that people get back to work? Those things in themselves will make an enormous difference to the health of the nation. Therefore, they are very good public health measures in themselves.
I agree. We are the first Government to say plainly that health inequalities are a real problem and to set challenging targets. That is not to say that we have completed our journey, but one has to acknowledge the problem and set the targets to make a start in the right direction.
Will the Minister give way?
I will shortly. I have given way quite considerably in the last few minutes.
Today individuals have greater choice, but they want more. They demand access to services locally, at times that suit them, not at the convenience of the system. They want to walk in. They want easy access to information via the internet or advice via NHS Direct. They expect quick appointments. All of those were impossible in the Tory Britain of 10 years ago. Today, with a Labour NHS, they are almost taken for granted.
Placing public health at the centre of a modern health policy is essential. Government policy has to provide a comprehensive response to the vast changes in lifestyles and attitudes that, far from being unique to Britain, are features of many modern western societies. International travel and migration, affluence, over-consumption, sedentary lifestyles, shift working and convenience food are all aspects of modern, western society, but all contribute to new health challenges. Other changes, such as binge drinking and poor sexual health clearly have serious long-term consequences. A failure to face those challenges is not an option.
The maintenance of good public health involves a change in the relationship between Government and individual. It involves every adult, every parent, safeguarding their own health and that of their dependants—individuals becoming the guardians of their own health and well-being.
On that crucial issue, the public agree with Government. Recent surveys by the King’s Fund reveal that 89 per cent. of people agree that individuals are responsible for their own health. They also reveal that 93 per cent. of people agree that parents are more responsible than anyone else for their children’s health, and that 86 per cent. believe that the Government’s role is to prevent illness and to provide information and advice.
Does my hon. Friend the Minister recall a recent visit she made to Crawley, during which she looked at, among other things, public health measures, and specifically at a cooking class delivered through Sure Start to help parents to cook decent food for their children and thereby improve their health and performance at school? Is that not an example of the way in which we can truly get through to parents and help them look after their children better?
I agree wholeheartedly with my hon. Friend; not all parents need such classes, but some do. That is why there is not a one-size-fits-all approach to this issue. I also saw in Crawley the sport and leisure centre providing services for GPs to refer people with long-term conditions to exercise classes, and Crawley hospital being transformed in terms of supporting urgent care, and also physiotherapy for people with long-term conditions. I congratulate all the health professionals in Crawley—GPs, nurses and others—who are thinking about how they can make their hospital truly a community hospital, and a hub for the primary services not of today or yesterday, but of the future. I congratulate my hon. Friend on the part that she has played and for being brave enough to enter into that debate.
I thank the Minister for giving way; she is being generous in taking interventions. In answer to the question posed by the hon. Member for Dartford (Dr. Stoate) about the importance of health inequalities, can she explain why all the evidence—including the Government’s answers to certain questions—shows that health inequalities have widened under this Government?
I will attend to that issue later in my contribution, and I shall be happy to take an intervention from the hon. Gentleman at that point if he is not satisfied with what I say.
People have the freedom to make choices, but the Government have a role to play in helping them make more informed choices about their health, and it is important to understand that some people, families and communities might need more support than others. For example, 50 per cent. of adults say that they are trying to eat well, and the Government can help in that by encouraging simple front-of-pack labelling to assist people in judging whether food is high in salt, sugar and fat. By engaging with Netmums, an online forum for mothers—250,000 mothers are registered on it—we are involved in discussions about front-of-pack labelling, and also about advertisements aimed at children for high-fat, high-salt, high-sugar products. That is an example of how we are looking beyond the traditional ways of engaging with communities and the public, and how we are exploring how we might better listen to the current concerns of mothers.
By leading the debate, the Government can influence the actions of the private sector. Credit should go to the Sainsbury’s wheel of health initiative, the first simple food labelling device, which was informed by both Government and the Food Standards Agency advice, but which was devised by Sainsbury’s. Six million customers a week see its wheel of health labels. Independent research will determine exactly which labelling system is developed, and I acknowledge that other systems are being used by different retailers and food producers. What is clear—I think that this has been accepted by those from the food retailing and production sector who are involved in this debate—is that we will adopt whatever the consensus among consumers supports. I hope that that will happen.
Anyone who doubts the willingness of the private sector to promote the public interest should look at another project that we have engaged it with: Project Neptune, the food manufacturers’ commitment to reduce salt levels in food by 30 per cent. over a three-year period. I again congratulate the food producers who have engaged constructively in reducing the levels of salt, and also in promoting awareness of the dangers of salt in our diet if that exceeds the 6 g a day that the FSA recommends.
I know that there are good health reasons for the changes that are taking place within our food producing and retail sector. I also know that, realistically, for many companies in that sector it makes good business sense, too. I am pleased that in the last few years we have seen health become no longer a fad, but a trend. Those businesses that want to be associated with good health, and therefore to encourage consumers to choose their products, understand that business and health can come together, and the Government have a leading role to play in the debate on that.
The Minister highlighted consensus, and that is the most important thing. There must be consensus in the food industry, consensus in the voluntary sector and consensus across this House, because we are all involved in the debate to improve the health of our constituents and the entire country. [Interruption.] I do not want to take interventions from a sedentary position on my intervention. I am supporting what the Minister said about consensus, but that needs to go much wider than just the industry and the Government.
That is clearly so, and I can give the hon. Gentleman many examples of such consensus. I have not even begun to talk about the changes in our relationship with local authorities. From 1 April, for example, there will be a mandatory target regarding health inequalities. Legislation going through the House at the moment is forming the basis for statutory health and well-being partnerships, which will result in closer collaboration such as the joint commissioning of health services by local government and the health service. I could go on. There are plenty of such opportunities, and we are the Government who are seizing the moment and helping to make that happen.
Research also shows that 79 per cent. of parents accept responsibility for the quality of their own children’s diets. It is not the role of Government or of any other organisation to unseat the primary role of parents in influencing their children; they are rightly the most important influence on their children’s lives. However, where the Government have to be the parent by proxy—during school hours, for example—we can help not only the children but the families. We can help by guaranteeing the quality of school meals and bringing in nutritional standards that can make a real change to the food that our children eat in school every day; by providing fruit in school for 2 million children; by supporting breakfast clubs; and by discouraging fizzy drink vending machines and promoting water in schools. Not one of those four initiatives to support healthier diets for children was undertaken by the Conservatives during nearly two decades in power; all of them were undertaken in less than one decade by Labour. [Interruption.] As my right hon. Friend the Member for Redditch (Jacqui Smith) says from a sedentary position, the Conservative Government did away with nutritional standards.
I thank the Minister for giving way; she is being very generous in taking interventions. Conservatives would not disagree with anything that she has said, and we congratulate the Government in that respect. However, does she consider it the job of a responsible Government to ameliorate the impact of the abuse of alcohol, which it is said costs the Exchequer £20 billion a year—and is that assisted by introducing a 24-hour drinking regime?
Very few establishments have 24-hour drinking licences. It is interesting to note that Opposition Members are very partial in quoting aspects of the reform of drinking legislation. Before we introduced our legislation, it was very difficult for local authorities working with the police to revoke licensees’ licences. We had an archaic bureaucratic system involving magistrates, and trying to make any changes at all was like walking through treacle. Now, we have the powers to enable communities to be more involved, and to have a say when licences are issued. Where licences are provided, the ability exists to close down an establishment if it operates in such a way as to cause problems in the community. We have also increased the offences for disorderly behaviour and selling drink to under-age people, for example. Let us have a grown-up debate and acknowledge that, be it alcohol or food, the problems that are impacting today have developed over a number of generations. We must address the issue in a rounded, thoughtful and sustainable way.
In my area we have not 24-hour drinking but flexible hours, which have reduced town centre disorder by allowing clubs and pubs to close in a phased manner, thereby giving people a chance to leave the high street in an orderly fashion. However, the real problem with alcohol is that it has become cheaper in real terms in the past 20 years and more readily available, particularly through outlets that are open for many hours during the day. Some supermarkets use alcohol as a loss leader, selling it for as little as 40p a litre, for example, to entice young people in. That is one of the main problems associated with binge drinking. Will my hon. Friend look at that issue, which we need to examine?
My hon. Friend makes some pertinent points. Better management of, and timing of the hours of, licensed establishments can be a positive aspect of community management, particularly, but not exclusively, in our town centres. We have also engaged with the alcohol industry on the labelling of products, for example, and I hope that there will be an outcome to those discussions shortly.
We will also discuss the issue of promotions, not only in licensed establishments such as pubs and clubs, but in retail outlets. Indeed, more retail outlets have 24-hour licences than other establishments. At least, that is my perception of the situation from what I see in my local community.
Another issue is the education of our children and young people, and that is why the Department of Health is working with colleagues in the Department for Education and Skills to improve it. Some 80 per cent. of schools are now participating in our voluntary healthy schools programme—nobody is forcing them to take part—which covers the primary and secondary sectors. In order to be a healthy school, schools have to address not only eating, physical activity and emotional development, but substance misuse, sexual health and alcohol and cigarette use. I am encouraged by that programme. Schools have asked for it and we are trying to provide it. I hope that it will provide greater consistency in the information, advice and support that children and young people need to make informed choices. Parents also need to be engaged and we will do whatever we can to support parents to take that personal responsibility for themselves and their children.
Research tells us that the overwhelming majority of smokers accept that the habit is bad for their health, but reveals that they need support to kick it, which is why our world-leading NHS stop smoking services were established in 1999. Some 1.6 million fewer people smoke today compared with 1998 and I hope that the new smoking legislation coming into effect in July will see a further reduction in the numbers who smoke. We still face some challenges in that area.
I very much welcome the smoking ban, but does my hon. Friend share my concern that we will end up with lots of people standing outside buildings smoking and creating piles of cigarette ends on the pavement, which will be a public health risk? Will she work with local authorities to ensure that they take the appropriate action through the litter control tools that they possess so that we are not wading through dog-ends outside offices and other establishments?
I understand the point that my hon. Friend makes and, together with local authorities and environmental health officers, it is an issue that we are considering. We want to try to streamline the implementation of the legislation as much as possible. It is the biggest exercise of its kind anywhere in the world. I sometimes find that quite scary, but it is also very exciting and a real opportunity. The implementation is not the end of the story and we have to ensure that we engage people so that they do not just smoke outside instead, but seek to give up smoking full stop. Ideally, people should not start smoking in the first place. We certainly do not want to turn our communities into ashtrays because everyone is smoking outside.
From 1 October, we will raise to 18 the age at which people may purchase cigarettes, and I commend the campaign by my hon. Friend the Member for Barnsley, East and Mexborough (Jeff Ennis) on that issue.
Many young people understand the need to protect their sexual health, but they are often reluctant to visit specialist clinics. Those who do used to have long waits. We have more to do, but I am pleased to tell the House that today, two thirds of those attending such clinics are seen within 48 hours. Two years ago, that figure was only 38 per cent. Through an active partnership with Boots the Chemist, the Government can promote services to 20 million customers each week. Chlamydia testing kits have been issued to 31,000 customers, with 15,000 returned to date. In association with the Co-op’s 740 pharmacies, we were able to supplement the Government’s messages on condom use in the run up to Valentine’s day and I was pleased to be at the Co-op in Rossington to support its endeavours to encourage safe sex and condom use. I was asked a question on this issue at the last Health questions and it worried me then, as it should also worry Opposition Front-Bench Members, how many Conservative Back Benchers seemed to dissolve into laughter at the mention of the word “condoms”. I am not sure how that will help us to have a grown-up and less embarrassed debate about these issues.
Teenage pregnancies are at the lowest rate for 20 years. They have fallen by 11 per cent. for under-18s and 15 per cent. for under-16s since 1998. Along with my colleague in the Department for Education and Skills, the Minister for Children and Families, my right hon. Friend the Member for Stretford and Urmston (Beverley Hughes), we are working particularly to identify some of the areas that could do better and learn from best practice in some other parts of the country, where the success rate in reducing the number of pregnancies among young women in this age group is very good.
Will my hon. Friend join me in congratulating health authorities in Slough where teenage pregnancies have dropped from 121 in 1998 to 77 in 2005 and will she welcome the narrowing of health inequalities experienced between Slough, one of the poorest areas in Berkshire, and the constituencies around us? We now have fewer deaths from the big killers of heart disease and stroke.
I very much congratulate Slough on those efforts and I congratulate my hon. Friend on her championing of tackling health inequalities and dealing with some of these challenges so realistically. It is not easy. What I have been trying to do as public health Minister is to make the connections between strategies to tackle teenage pregnancy and strategies to tackle infant mortality. Statistics on infant mortality show that some 60 per cent. are related to teenage pregnancy, which is partly to do with issues about smoking in pregnancy, low-weight births and so forth. Again, we have to be smarter about connecting these different issues together in order to understand how best to tackle teenage pregnancy and, in doing so, how best to tackle infant mortality as well.
On sexual health, we know that Chlamydia is a major reason for infertility, which is one of the reasons why the Department is funding Infertility Network UK to survey primary care trusts on access to in vitro fertilisation treatment and also to ask questions about Chlamydia screening. If we had more Chlamydia screening and greater awareness of the need for it—not tomorrow or next year, but down the road—we could make a difference to the numbers of people presenting with infertility problems as a result of contracting Chlamydia at an early age.
I thank the Minister for giving way, but she has already spoken for 25 minutes. In further response to the question put by the hon. Member for Slough (Fiona Mactaggart), will she please explain why health inequalities have actually widened under this Government?
To be fair, I have taken a good number of interventions and I will come on to that issue shortly. I have already touched on some the issues around health inequalities.
I would like to draw attention to some of the issues often raised about the funding of public health. There are some, including Conservative Members, who have suggested, and continue to argue for, a strict ring-fencing of moneys for public health. I understand where they are coming from, but I think that it is misguided and short-sighted. We have moved from a situation whereby Whitehall prescribed everything from the centre to thinking much more about how to devolve resources and decision-making to the front line. That is not to say that we should not have resources at national level for the different aspects of public health, but we should be wary of the broader danger of ring-fencing, which could lead to public health being compartmentalised. It may provoke a narrowing of the public health effort.
Let me provide the House with an example. Either at the last Health questions or the one before that, I was pleased to point out that Plymouth took some “Choosing Health” money, but also some other money relating to “healthy communities”, which it packaged with other resources available for the regeneration of communities. Plymouth set a priority for healthier communities. When all that money was brought together, it far exceeded the “Choosing Health” money that was part of the formula allocation. Public health is important, and we have to have resources to make it happen. We also have to think more widely and in a more sophisticated way about how we can align different budgets to make better sense of the money that can be provided.
Having produced the “Health Profile of England”, and a profile for every local authority of the health outcomes for its community, we need to determine how we can better identify what is spent on prevention, so that accountability can be built in for the health outcomes and the money that is spent on dealing with them. In some areas, we might find that money is being spent but not delivering the outcomes that we want, while another area with less money might be adopting a different approach and forming different partnerships that might be proving more successful.
This is an important point of debate. Given the argument that the Minister is pursuing, why is the National Treatment Agency effectively ring-fencing money for one particular aspect of health care, namely, substance abuse of a particular kind? If money can be ring-fenced for that—and successfully so—should it not be ring-fenced in the wider public health arena?
As a Minister in the Home Office, I was responsible for the national drugs strategy. Now, at the Department of Health, I am responsible for drug treatment, and I am pleased that the hon. Gentleman acknowledges how successful our strategy has been in that regard. We are way beyond the target that we set ourselves for the number of drug misusers in treatment, and we have now set an even more effective challenge for retention in treatment. There is no point in people dipping in and out of treatment without achieving any success.
I have thought about this matter in a considered way. For the most part, we are talking about people who are addicted to heroin and other illegal substances. Let us face it, that is not the most popular area when it comes to providing resources. That is why, in this instance, we felt that we had to ring-fence the money. Comparisons may be drawn with public health, but I am trying to demonstrate that public health is a much wider area for engagement than drug treatment. People may disagree with that, but it is a view that I have come to. The bigger game in this area is that we should not compartmentalise public health. Every health professional—the cancer surgeon, the GP, the district nurse—must be an advocate for prevention and for good public health.
Public health goes beyond the health service and beyond the Government. It must be based firmly in the real world and address the circumstances in which people adopt particular habits or lifestyle choices. It must also encourage them to make changes. Fundamentally, public health must view people as individuals. It must look holistically at where they live, what kind of education they are getting, what kind of work they have access to, and how they will be able to continue to work if they suffer ill health. It needs to consider whether their community is safe. Is it an environment in which people will go out and walk and cycle and use the outdoor amenities? Or is it a community in which it is unsafe to do those things, and in which demotivation is likely to set in?
Public health is about viewing people not merely as Mrs. Patel the diabetic, Mr. Brown the coeliac or Ms Jones the breast cancer patient. It is about identifying people’s lifestyles and preferences, so as to reach the right people with the appropriate messages. The Department of Health is leading the way in utilising the tools of social marketing, in which we have been greatly assisted by the National Consumer Council and other organisations. This will help us better to understand what gets in the way of people improving their health, to identify how to get round the problem, and to provide the resources nationally that can be picked up by local government, employers, the local health service and community organisations to provide smarter, more targeted messages, rather than indiscriminate mass communication. It will also help us to support stronger commissioning to provide the right services—rather than a one-size-fits-all model—to reach into a community or an individual’s sense of well being to get some really different results.
The hon. Member for Billericay (Mr. Baron) raised the issue of health inequalities. I hope that everything that I have said so far is interwoven in some way with the challenge of health inequalities. One of the difficulties is that there is a moving target. The reality is that everybody is living longer. People might say that, in some respects, we have never been better off. However, people who are more affluent, more educated, live in better surroundings and have access to the internet—that probably includes many people in the House—are running forward faster than people who live in poorer communities, where housing is poorer, where the environment outside people’s front doors is hostile, where, through the generations, a style of eating or a habit of inactivity has set in, and where people do not feel that they have got the most out of the education system. Those challenges are daunting, but not insurmountable.
I have to tell Members on the Opposition Front Bench that we are credited throughout the European Union with being at the forefront of tackling the problem. We are looked to by other European Union countries, which, in many ways, are only just starting to tackle this difficult area. We are seeing some progress, although we want more. Three fifths of the spearhead areas—the local authority areas in our most deprived neighbourhoods—are on track to narrow the life expectancy gap for men or women, or both. The reduction in the average death rate from cardiovascular disease among the under-75s in spearhead areas has exceeded the national average reduction since the mid-1990s.
On infant mortality, we have seen a widening, and now a stabilisation. I am not complacent about that. One year’s figure is not good enough as a basis for a theory about how we are doing. However, in the last year and a bit, we have undertaken some national in-depth analysis of why some communities seem to be doing better than others on the target areas of life expectancy and infant mortality. That has allowed us to have far greater insight into the ways in which the partnerships at a local level should identify both the people most at risk and the options to effect change and close that gap faster than ever before. We know that, for infant mortality, the 43 highest rates are in 43 particular local authority areas. I know that there is the will and the commitment from those working in our health service, and in our local authorities and beyond, to bear down on this issue and make a difference.
We cannot do everything from the centre, but the Department of Health has a right to be able to do the things that cannot be done at local level: providing an overview and also national support, based on sharing best practice, to effect the quickest change. As I said before, one has to start by acknowledging health inequalities. Difficult though it may be, setting a target is one of the ways in which we can focus our attention. Clearly, we will be answerable in that respect in a way that the Conservative Governments of previous years were never answerable.
Although I agree with some of the points that the Minister makes, the simple fact is that the Government set themselves a target to reduce health inequalities and they have singularly failed to achieve that target—not by a narrow margin, but by quite a wide one. Does that not suggest to her that there have been failures in the Government’s public health policies?
It would be nice if every time there were a general election, we could start with a blank piece of paper and a situation in which what had gone before had no effect on the people of today. The fact is that, when we came to power in 1997, there were more children living in poverty and we did not have the sort of programmes that address health inequalities. I make no bones about the challenge of shifting the effects of not just 18 years of the Tories, but hundreds of years of health inequalities. We take responsibility for setting in motion the ways in which we can address that problem and we are making progress in a number of areas. That is not to say that there is not more to be done, but one has to start by understanding the problem and then trying to change society. That is what the Government are about. We are making progress and we will continue to do so.
My hon. Friend is right to recognise that some things can be done nationally, while others can be done locally. I can cite an example from Slough, where the Department of Health has sponsored a project on diabetes identification involving the Dr. Foster unit. The project has improved people’s awareness of diabetes, which is an important contributory factor to coronary heart disease. When I was first elected, I was shocked to discover that my constituency was in the top 10 towns in the country for early deaths from heart disease among males. As a result of that, we have a locally-determined clinic that 98 per cent. of diabetes patients are attending. The attendance was 50 per cent. at the old clinic, which just happened to be in Windsor, which does not have as much diabetes as Slough, but is better at arguing for facilities.
I commend Slough for its approach. That adds to what I have been saying. We know that there are often fewer GPs in our poorer neighbourhoods than in our most affluent neighbourhoods. We have thus had to take legislation through Parliament not only to free up opportunities for pharmacists, but to allow nurses to do some of the jobs that could previously be carried out only by doctors. Such a process cannot happen quickly—legislation does not happen quickly. However, it is necessary to identify problems, find solutions and take action to change the way in which health services are delivered. That is the path that we are on, and although the Conservative party has opposed it, we will ignore that and continue to do what is right and effective.
I am sure that my hon. Friend agrees that we need a grown-up debate on this issue, instead of just slinging statistics at each other across the House. One of the biggest problems involving health inequalities is the rising tide of obesity in this country. I know that my hon. Friend is doing a good deal of work on that extremely difficult and intractable problem. However, the fact remains that the population of this country is getting rapidly obese. We have to understand the causes of that and we will have do something fairly major to tackle the problem if we are to narrow the gap on health inequalities.
I absolutely agree. The situation has developed over at least the past 50 years. The problem cannot be resolved per se through political dogma. We need to identify the problem and do something about it. That is why awareness of five a day is important. The latest figures show that the consumption of fruit and vegetables increased by 7.7 per cent. in one year. The increase was something like 2 per cent. in the year before that, but the trend was in the opposite direction in the previous year. I was cheered by one of the biggest increases that we have seen in fruit and vegetable consumption in any one year. Although I am not against a bar of chocolate every now and again, I am pleased that confectionary sales are going in the opposite direction.
We are examining the way in which are weighing and measuring at children’s schools so that we can have the most comprehensive database in the world to allow us to plan better, to be more effective in helping parents to support their children and to identify where the problems really exist. Again, we must look beyond the here and now, which is why the foresight project is not only examining obesity now, but considering the situation five, 10 and 20 years down the road to determine what might be possible to tackle obesity, which is a problem not just in the UK, but worldwide. I read in the paper this week that the Italians are worried about obesity, even in the communities in which the Mediterranean diet is most dominant.
Research that came out yesterday suggested that we had the most obese women in Europe and almost the most obese men—we were beaten only by Malta. I am not saying that the Government are in any way to blame for the variation throughout Europe, but does the Minister have an explanation for it?
As I said, the Mediterranean diet that people have in certain parts of Europe, which is probably considerably healthier on the whole than the usual diet in our country, has perhaps protected people in many ways. We live in a society in which car use is perhaps greater than in others and in which some of the more physical jobs no longer exist—there is no reason to go back to those jobs because some of them were associated with health problems.
We are not on our own in having the problem either in Europe, or worldwide. When I attended the World Health Organisation Europe conference on obesity in Istanbul last year, I was reassured by how many countries were looking to us because we were ahead of them on trying to tackle the problem. Today, I have made it clear that the Government must arm the ordinary citizen to better look after their own health; to empower the parent to better maintain their child’s health; and to complement this with the services, often community based, to help people overcome barriers to good health. That gives people individual responsibility, but with the Government on their side.
There is no complacency from the Government about the challenges ahead and the cultural change that will be involved. New approaches to public health require a reformed NHS, with new partners and new ways of working—reforms that place more services in the community, closer to home, and reforms that improve transparency, such as providing insight into the pattern of services provided by GPs.
The new emphasis on public health is a policy direction whose time has come. The smoking ban has been widely welcomed; food labelling is now widely accepted; reducing salt, sugar and fat in food is not contested; five-a-day is part of the conversation with consumers; and building exercise into daily routines is regarded as common sense. All that illustrates that public health messages are becoming part of the nation’s vocabulary.
Public health is the forward looking, preventive face of the NHS, and Britain today is among the world leaders, treating people as individuals, meeting complex needs, addressing personal choices and tackling real inequalities. Public health will continue to be central to the work of a reformed, smarter, 21st-century health service. Public health demonstrates the Government’s ambitions for the nation’s health, ambitions shared by the British people. Only by working together can we make the difference, and that is what we will continue to do.
I wonder what our constituents will make of the complacency that is evident in the Minister’s remarks. The press today correctly reflects public anxiety over soaring obesity rates and reports that nearly a quarter of adults are now classed as clinically obese.
This morning, Ofcom announced its proposals on the advertising of HFSS foods—those high in fat, sugar and salt—to children, yet the Minister did not refer to that once. We broadly welcome those recommendations and we are particularly pleased that a decision has now been made. We are delighted that it will be reviewed in autumn 2008. Clearly that is an important announcement, and I should have thought that the Minister would start her remarks by referring to it , but on that subject she was silent.
If the hon. Gentleman reads Hansard he will see that I referred to the restriction on advertising to children. I am pleased to say that we made it clear in our manifesto that we would seek to restrict the advertising of HFSS foods to children. I wonder why it was not the subject of the Conservative party manifesto.
I am grateful to the Minister for her intervention. She has at least put that on the record, but I think that she will find, when she checks Hansard tomorrow, that she did not mention Ofcom, and I believe that she should have done so.
In “Health Challenge England”, we find that the Deputy Prime Minister has a key role in the fight for the national waistline. Apparently he leads a cross-cutting Cabinet Sub-Committee on health improvement. Indeed, obesity requires an interdepartmental response. However, last month the Public Accounts Committee took a look at that pillar of the “Choosing Health” White Paper and found that any cross-cutting on obesity has been characterised by “dither”, “confusion” and a lack of co-ordination.
The Minister has come here today, brazenly and despite all the evidence, to convince us of the brilliance of her Government’s stewardship of public health. Back on planet Earth, the Government’s own chief medical officer is a dissenting voice. He says:
“There is strong anecdotal evidence from within the NHS which tells a consistent story for public health of poor morale, declining numbers, inadequate recruitment and budgets being raided to solve financial deficits in the acute sector.”
Even the Government’s erstwhile health guru, Derek Wanless, is saying disobliging things about the Government’s approach to public health. However, we heard nothing about the crisis in the specialty of public health, or the raiding of public health budgets, from the Minister today.
The hon. Gentleman mentions anecdotal evidence, but I know that the factual evidence from my constituency is that mortality rates for cancer and heart disease have improved in the past 10 years. Why does he think that that has happened?
I am not sure about anecdotal evidence. I will discuss evidence-based public health shortly, so if the hon. Lady will wait, perhaps we will talk a bit more about anecdote versus evidence, and I hope that my remarks will address her concerns. I understand that she has experience from her constituency, and the hon. Member for Slough (Fiona Mactaggart) mentioned evidence from her constituency, too. However, we have to consider public health across the country, and the evidence on that is clear.
The hon. Gentleman is generous in giving way, and I genuinely wish to have a grown-up debate on the issues. He raised the important subject of obesity; I chair the all-party group on obesity, and we spend a lot of time and effort working in a cross-party way to try to sort out the issue. Will he explain what he thinks the Government should do on obesity that they are not currently doing, as I am sure that that would inform our debate?
If the hon. Gentleman will allow me, I will come on to that. What he says about obesity is quite right. We have rightly spent a lot of time debating obesity this afternoon, and that is particularly timely, given today’s announcement from Ofcom. If he will bear with me, I will address his point in due course.
On 26 October, in a rare moment of candour, the Minister admitted that the gap in life expectancy and infant mortality has continued to widen since the target baseline was set. The life expectancy gap has increased by 1 per cent. for males and by 8 per cent. for females. The gap in infant mortality has increased from 13 to 19 per cent. In 1997, the Government pledged to vanquish social class health inequalities, but the fact is that they have got worse. Health inequalities are now the widest that they have been since the 19th century. They are positively Dickensian, and they are of the sort that Prime Minister Disraeli reflected on in his description of London’s rich and poor.
I feel for the Minister, because public health is a challenging brief, and there are few quick fixes, as the hon. Member for Crawley (Laura Moffatt), who is no longer in the Chamber, knows full well, as do the hon. Member for Dartford (Dr. Stoate) and I, as practitioners. We know how difficult it is to procure change, particularly when it comes to harmful life styles. Nevertheless, that challenge must be faced.
I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for giving way a second time. The Government have changed the funding formula and the way in which they allocate money within the NHS to include an element based on health inequality. Why does the Conservative campaign pack describe that as unfair?
We would like funding to follow the burden of disease, because that is what the NHS is for—sorting out the burden of disease. I will come on to describe how we think public health funding should be ring-fenced, but the hon. Lady needs to know that, at present, money earmarked for public health is being siphoned off to pay for service elements. If we are serious about improving public health, which needs long-term investment, not quick fixes, the only way to do so is to protect it in some way. That is why I believe that the Minister, who was thoughtful on that point, will come round to the necessity of ring-fencing funding, if she is to achieve what she says that she wants to achieve.
We are genuinely having a good debate, and that is welcome. The problem with public health is that it goes far wider than one Department. It involves housing, poverty, unemployment, education, the pensions system, transport, and planning. Public health covers literally every Department, without exception. Will the hon. Gentleman tell me how it is possible to ring-fence a budget that covers every single Department?
We could perhaps start with smoking—we talked a bit about smoking, and we will talk about it more—and how that budget has been affected by deficits and the removal of money from the quit smoking campaign in order to sort out parts of the NHS deficit. I will talk about that and will give one or two other examples in my speech, so if the hon. Gentleman will be a little more patient, I might give him some examples that will support the case that I am trying to make.
I accept—the Minister was fairly candid on this point—that there is a judgment to be made on whether we continue to fund public health as we have done, or whether we protect it and ring-fence it in some way, just as the National Treatment Agency for Substance Misuse is protected. The Minister showed that she is under a slight misapprehension about what the agency does, which is a little alarming; it is not simply a Home Office responsibility, but covers a raft of health issues. A large part of that funding is for the treatment and prevention of substance abuse. It would be surprising if the Minister did not understand that.
Of course, I pretty much know what the National Treatment Agency does. It is responsible for supporting the development of drug treatment services, for improving the professionalism of drugs staff, and for prevention. I was trying to draw the hon. Gentleman’s attention to the fact that substance misuse occupies a different position in the NHS from public health. As I said, in future we may think differently about the treatment of drug misuse, but it is wrong to make a simple comparison between the work of the national treatment agency and that of drug action teams in the area of public health.
I am grateful to the Minister, and I shall come on to discuss the agency’s work on alcohol.
I should like to ask the Minister, who has some experience as public health Minister, whether she thinks that responsibility is correctly pegged at the level of Minister of State? A Conservative Secretary of State for Health would have responsibility for public health, too, because public health in all its ramifications has not been given the exposure or priority that it deserves. The fact that we are debating shortfalls—
I am not going to give way to the hon. Lady for a little while, although I promise to do so if I have time.
Given the great complexity of public health, it is a pity that the Government have sought to balkanise it and set responsibility for it at a relatively junior level. In December, the Minister rightly pointed out that the Black report of 1980 did not receive the attention it deserved, but she did not admit that in 1999 her Government ignored the Acheson report, which covered almost the same ground. That omission was not corrected today. This is the first time that we have debated public health in Government time for more than four years, although the Opposition have been extremely generous in using much of their own time to do so—we did so as recently as December—because we think that it is an important subject.
The Government, however, have been busy. They appointed a public health Minister and have proceeded to churn out publications of breathtaking vapidity, culminating in last October’s “Health Challenge England”. They launched their “Small change, big difference” public health campaign in April. Small change indeed! Will the Minister confirm that expenditure on that extravaganza totals £13,360?
I am reminded of that campaign only because “Small change, big difference” has been recycled as a catchy soundbite on the front of the document that we are discussing. “Health Challenge England” is big on anecdote disguised as case study, but two and a half years after the “Choosing Health” White Paper, we are entitled to expect an update with a clearer sense of direction. Indeed, the document is evidently so inconsequential that the Minister did not even bother to mention it in her 30-minute rant the last time that we debated public health on 5 December. Ministers cite reductions since 1997 in mortality from cancer and cardiovascular disease, but are we seriously expected to believe that they are responsible for those reductions? Deaths from those causes are happily in long-term decline, and current trends are simply extrapolations from the 1970s and 1980s.
The hon. Gentleman did not attend a meeting earlier this week at which Professor Mike Richards said that in his opinion the reduction in cancer deaths is accelerating faster than predicted by the long-term downward trend.
I was not at the meeting, but a friend who was there tells me that Cancer Research UK disputes that. Clearly the issue needs to be looked into a little further, but I think it is generally accepted that the trends were established in the 1970s and 1980s and have continued pretty much in a straight line since then. We should celebrate that. It is excellent, and a tribute to the hard-working professionals in the field and the international research effort. However, it is extremely unedifying for Ministers to come here and quote figures, saying that their policies and their efforts have made all the difference. I do not believe that that is the case, and it is counter-intuitive.
I must make progress.
The Department of Health likes to cite 150,000 lives saved from coronary heart disease since 1996, but in November it was forced to admit that between 1978 and 1996 the equivalent figure was more than 500,000. Spurious claims from Ministers are simply not on. No wonder two thirds of doctors now trust the Opposition more than they trust the Government.
We know that over the past 10 years obesity, sexually transmitted disease, alcohol-related disease, teenage pregnancy, antique infections such as tuberculosis and syphilis, hepatitis and the consequences of drug abuse have become markedly worse in England, but how do we compare with our European neighbours? When we turn to the World Health Organisation for the information, we find that Britons are the fattest Europeans. Our children are getting fatter faster than children anywhere else in Europe, and the Office for National Statistics notes that they are becoming less active.
Will the hon. Gentleman give way?
He has only just come into the Chamber.
I am sorry, but I will not give way to the hon. Gentleman.
The rate of HIV infection here is 1.6 times the European average. Alcohol consumption has been flat-lining in the United Kingdom, but falling elsewhere. British people can expect more years of unhealthy life than people in most European countries. Our abortion and teenage pregnancy rates top the European league table. TB per head of population a stone’s throw from here exceeds the level found in several developing countries identified as TB hotspots.
The Minister likes to speak of encouraging best practice, but she has given no indication of what lessons she has learnt from our neighbours who are doing rather better than us. We have heard from the chief medical officer about the poor state of the specialty of public health. England has haemorrhaged directors of public health posts, and the reconfiguration of primary care trusts is leading to further reductions; yet on 3 October 2005, strategic health authority finance directors were told:
“the Department of Health is working to ensure that the overall numbers of public health posts are not reduced.”
Clearly it is not working hard enough, as the number of posts has fallen from 300 to 152.
In the local government reorganisation of 1974, public health doctors ceased to be medical officers of health employed by councils and they retreated to the NHS. I am delighted that the Government are now encouraging joint NHS-local government appointments, but what assessment has the Minister made of the catastrophic fall in the number of public health doctors, and what measures will she take to repair that broken specialty?
Yesterday I met representatives of Alcohol Concern. The organisation has received reports of significant cuts in alcohol services, which it ascribes to deficits. Eighteen months ago, £15 million was announced for alcohol services, but Alcohol Concern reckons that it has disappeared. I wonder whether the Minister can account for it. Alcohol Concern contrasts alcohol services with services related to other forms of substance abuse. Those are funded and regulated through the National Treatment Agency for Substance Misuse, which means that the money is ring-fenced. Three times as many people die from alcohol as succumb to the effects of drugs, and in public health terms the evidence would lead us to prioritise alcohol. So much for evidence-based policy-making.
The Minister rightly talks about smoking. It is captain of the men of death, but she did not compare the fall of 10 per cent. in smoking rates between 1980 and 1990 with the 3 per cent. fall on Labour’s watch. I hope the Health Act 2006 may save the 600 lives a year that are said to be lost to passive smoking. Indeed, I look forward to debating on Monday a raft of statutory instruments supplementary to the anti-smoking clauses of the 2006 Act, and I look forward to supporting, for example, a proposal to raise the age for sale of tobacco from 16 to 18. But what a horlicks the Government’s stewardship of those smoking clauses was. The Secretary of State campaigned for an exemption for private clubs in the morning, experienced a damascene conversion over lunch, and voted against the exemption in the afternoon.
Another, far less amusing U-turn was the withdrawal of the highly effective national quit smoking campaign last year to save cash. What was the result? Calls to the national helpline plummeted by 30 per cent. over the relevant quarter and there was a 10 per cent. fall in quitters after five successive years of increases. So much for evidence-based policy making, and a strong argument for ring-fenced public health funding.
An even stronger argument is the strange disappearance of funds destined for sexual health campaigns. In January last year we learned that £50 million was going on safe sex campaigns; £4 million materialised. When my noble Friend Earl Howe asked in November what had happened to the balance, Lord Warner replied:
“My Lords, it is stored carefully in the coffers of the NHS.”—[Official Report, House of Lords, 21 November 2006; Vol. 687, c. 236.]
A fat lot of good it will do in the coffers of the NHS. What is the money doing there? It is there as part of a slush fund to offset the Government’s NHS deficit and, of course, to shore up the job of the Secretary of State for Health, which depends upon it.
The problem with politicians is that they hold in insufficient esteem the evidence base that underpins evidence-based policy making. Celebrity-based policy making is an entirely different matter. Call me an old cynic, but I wonder whether Anita Roddick’s brave announcement—and it was a brave announcement—about her having hepatitis C has energised the Department of Health into launching what we understand will be a welcome publicity campaign for hepatitis. The Hepatitis C Trust, which I met on Tuesday, is understandably extremely miffed that it has not been consulted by the Minister. It points out that “Health Challenge England” ignores hepatitis C completely, as evidently do most PCTs, which have left the hepatitis C action plan, such as it is, on the shelf gathering dust.
Given the alarming increase in hepatitis C, the trust is understandably alarmed. I ask the Minister to speak to the trust, which feels upset about the way it has been treated. It is upset about what appears to be a knee-jerk reaction by the Department in response to recent media events. It is interesting that guru Wanless himself says:
“What we do not need is simply a list of frenetic and uncoordinated short-term activity, which can be stopped as easily and quickly as it began”,
by which he means—[Interruption.] The Minister says rubbish, but that is what her guru said.
The rubbish that I was referring to was the idea that we have just thought of our campaign on hepatitis C. We have been holding regional road shows throughout the country over the past year at least, in which we have looked at how we can deliver at local level, involving people who can raise awareness and those who provide services. I get feedback about how the road shows have been received. I understand that they have been very successful and more are planned.
We look forward to those that are planned. I am sure that Anita Roddick, who, as I say, has been extremely brave in her remarks to the press recently, will play a full and active part. It is a pity that it requires a celebrity to highlight such an issue for the Government—the Jamie Oliver effect. [Interruption.] I have to say to the Minister that it is all very well saying that things are rubbish and that I should move on, but I suspect that Wanless himself will continue to make disobliging comments about what she is doing in public health. He is quite clear that she is engaging in frenetic and unco-ordinated short-term activity—the sort of thing that can be stopped and started just like turning a tap on and off. Wanless is referring to the sort of activities that the Minister mentioned in her interventions regarding plans for hepatitis C.
I have had exchanges with the Minister through a number of parliamentary questions and answers. I asked about what she has done to anticipate the burden of disease that will arise as a result of hepatitis C infection. I have to say that what I have had back is a big “I don’t know.” The Government clearly have no idea about what this time bomb involves and have made no preparations to manage it. In public health terms, that is deeply and profoundly worrying.
Developing his characterisation of a Government thrashing about in public health, Wanless attacks what he calls
“loose proposals for personal trainers which do not seem well rooted in evidence or particularly clearly thought through”.
He goes on to suggest that these appendages of the “Choosing Health” White Paper are
“gimmicks that will discredit the public health function”.
For the price of eye-catching but unproven health trainers, we could have, for example, a national programme for screening abdominal aortic aneurysm. We know that that will save thousands of lives, because the pilots have been done and the evidence base is very strong. Every month the Minister delays, however, 200 elderly men die unnecessarily. Screening does not appear at all in the 34 pages of “Health Challenge England”. So much for evidence-based policy making.
I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for giving way again. He knows that I share his worry about AAA; it is a very important issue on which I have done a fair amount of work. The problem is not the screening for abdominal aneurysm, which is a very simple ultrasound test, but putting in place the services that are needed—the vascular surgeons, follow-on care and intensive care beds. He is absolutely right that we could probably save 3,000 lives a year if we screened every man at the age of 60, but the problem is that it will take some time to train the vascular surgeons and put the facilities in place. I am fairly pleased that the Government are at least on the case, and I hope that they will introduce such an arrangement as soon as possible.
I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for his intervention. He will be aware that a few days ago the surgeons who were involved in the pilot visited the Palace of Westminster, and we managed to screen about 30 parliamentarians from all parties, from the Lords and the Commons. The exercise was a huge success, and I know that the Minister received some parliamentary questions as a result of it. I am not sure whether the hon. Gentleman was one of those tested; perhaps not, as he is certainly too young to be in the target population. If he had attended the exercise, however, it would have been explained to him that the resources are in place. We are not talking about large resources in terms of surgeon or theatre time.
Indeed, all that work has been done, and the national screening committee has looked at it. I have been in correspondence with the Minister on the matter, however, and there appears for some reason to be a reluctance to get the process started. I am sure that she will eventually get it started, but, as I said, it is a pity that there is such a delay. The hon. Gentleman said that 3,000 lives a year could be saved, which is perhaps a bit optimistic, but a conservative estimate of 200 people a month is reasonable. It is a pity that we are losing those people unnecessarily when the evidence suggests that we should be using such an arrangement. That is the important point: the evidence suggests that we should be doing this, and it perhaps does not suggest that we should be engaging in some of the other interventions about which the Minister seems so enthusiastic.
On evidence-based policy making, I would like to refer to a parliamentary answer that my hon. Friend the Member for South Cambridgeshire (Mr. Lansley) has received from the Minister of State, Department of Health, the right hon. Member for Doncaster, Central (Ms Winterton), who has recently arrived. The question was:
“To ask the Secretary of State for Health what the evidential basis is for the statement on page 10 of the National Director For Heart Disease and Stroke’s report entitled “Mending Hearts and Brains”, published on 5 December 2006, that 5 per cent. of patients used to die while waiting up to two years for heart operations.”
The answer was:
“‘Mending hearts and brains’”, the document in which the figure of 5 per cent. features, is a personal report from the National Clinical Director for Heart Disease and Stroke. This figure of 5 per cent. reflects a judgement based on expert professional knowledge and experience rather than research evidence, of which there is little”.
The Minister was therefore being sold anecdote as evidence until my scrupulously evidence-based hon. Friend prompted her to be more inquisitive.
It is extremely important that we are clear that public health should be rigorously evidence based. My hon. Friend, at any rate, would be very much an evidence-based Secretary of State for Health. We would not engage in some of the more dubious interventions of this Government, who have been going down rabbit holes left, right and centre. That simply is not helpful, and it brings public health into a degree of disrepute.
A pattern is emerging characterised by loose adherence to the concept of evidence-based policy making and a willingness to sort out the deficits of the acute service by siphoning funds from more elective areas: notably, training and public health. Let us be clear: all politicians have a horizon that rarely extends beyond four or five years. That is the problem for public health: for as long as funds are not protected, it will always be first in line to be tapped when times are tough. To succeed, as Derek Wanless has said, we need a long-term commitment to public health. Given the raid on funding identified by the CMO, that means ring-fencing; there is simply no other way. I am sure that the Minister will come to realise that in the fullness of time.
Will the hon. Gentleman give way?
No, I will not give way to the hon. Gentleman; he arrived late, and he did not hear the Minister’s opening remarks.
The Government have at least set up the Public Health Interventions Advisory Committee. We thank the Minister, as we will certainly use the new structure to generate public health policy that is rooted more firmly in the evidence.
Let me finish with the wise words of the chief medical officer. In last year’s annual report, Sir Liam said that the lack of progress on public health is more compatible
“with the Wanless ‘slow uptake’ scenario than with the ‘fully engaged’ scenario”.
How does that candid admission of failure square with the Minister’s upbeat assessment today?
In answer to the hon. Member for Westbury (Dr. Murrison), I hope that his Front-Bench colleagues will be a bit more responsible in their comments about Anita Roddick’s celebrity launch earlier this week for hepatitis C than they were about Jamie Oliver’s celebrity launch in relation to healthier eating choices in schools. At a school quite close to my constituency, a group of parents tried to defeat the introduction of healthier meals, and the hon. Member for Henley (Mr. Johnson) said that there was nothing wrong with them pushing pies through school railings—probably a habit that he picked up in the Bullingdon club when he was up at Oxford.
With regard to public health, the issue of smoking has been mentioned, and the hon. Member for Westbury referred to some European countries. I do not know whether other Members saw in The Sunday Times this week the extraordinary article, which I assume was accurate—perhaps I am naïve—under the headline “MEPs’ cigarette ban goes up in smoke”. By all accounts, it appears that the European Parliament had decided to introduce a smoking ban within its confines on 1 January this year, but withdrew it after a few days.
The article went on to say:
“A 12-member committee of MEPs, which included some smokers, decided that the ban, which had been in place in the parliament’s premises in Brussels and Strasbourg since the start of last month, was ‘unenforceable’”
and had been withdrawn. According to the article, a UK Independence party member, Nigel Farage, said:
“‘I have been ignoring it since January 1…and I have smoked in more places than before.’”
[Interruption.] The hon. Member for Hemel Hempstead (Mike Penning) says that it is no business of the EU where people smoke. I hope that we get a more responsible approach from 1 July when it comes to smoking in public places.
I do not know whether the right hon. Gentleman noticed that when we voted on the smoking ban—and I joined him in the Lobby—the Conservatives had a free vote, instead of being whipped like Labour. Decisions were made by individuals.
Labour MPs had a free vote. Indeed, the hon. Gentleman and other Opposition Members put their names to an amendment that I tabled against the Government motion. There were free votes all round, and a sensible decision came from that. Hopefully, we will see a more responsible attitude here on 1 July than we are seeing from legislators in the European Parliament.
I welcome the opportunity to debate the events that have moved us on from the “Choosing Health” White Paper. Irrespective of what is said about which Government have been good or bad over the years in public health terms, such a White Paper has not been introduced by any Government before, and it took a while for this Government to do it.
I want to consider some of the major issues. It is not so much a case of how far we have come, but what public health challenges all of us face in the 21st century. The basis of the White Paper is that in 2004 one in five people were obese, and as a result, in less than 20 years there is likely to be a 5 per cent. rise in strokes, an 18 per cent. rise in heart attacks and a 54 per cent. rise in type 2 diabetes. It is hardly surprising that the World Health Organisation estimates that if we could eliminate the major risk factors—smoking, obesity and physical inactivity—the great majority of cases of heart disease, stroke and type 2 diabetes would be prevented. Worldwide, that would be an extraordinary achievement and one of the biggest moves we could ever make towards improving the health not just of the British public, but of the public throughout the world.
We all have to recognise that the threats to public health in this century are different from those in centuries past. Public health is no longer about clean drinking water, better housing and better sanitation, but about individual lifestyles and habits. It is not easy to deal with those. We cannot increase physical activity simply by building new infrastructure, welcome as that is. Two major sports and swimming centres are being built in the next few years in my constituency, and they will be a landmark in terms of giving people the opportunity to take part in physical activity.
We cannot stop people smoking either. A great effort has been made to deal with that, and that effort continues. Smoking cessation has been targeted by the Government for the first time, and a major improvement in public health will come of it in years to come. Nor can we stop people binge drinking or taking part in risky sexual behaviour just by passing laws. We must accept that it is not as easy for legislators to have an effect on the health of the public as it was in centuries gone by. We cannot end obesity with a vaccination programme—although I have no doubt that the pharmaceutical industry is looking into that. Indeed, some quacks advertise now, normally on the web, saying that if people buy their pills and take just a couple a day, they will lose weight. That is quackery, and weight loss does not work like that. We shall have to wait and see whether the pharmaceutical industry finds a cure in the years to come, but it has not done yet, so other factors need to interact.
The right hon. Gentleman says that it is difficult for Government to bring about behavioural change. However, does he agree that in one area, sexual health, Government action and campaigning have made a difference? Therefore, does he share the disappointment of Conservative Members and people throughout the country involved in that area that funding for sexual health campaigns has been cut from £50 million to just £4 million?
I do not know about sexual health campaigns, but more investment certainly needs to be put into sexual health clinics. My own PCT has not been able to bring in chlamydia screening. It would have done had it not been for the top-slicing this year because of the irresponsibility and overspending in other parts of the national health service. I do not blame that so much on the Government. The PCT’s intention was to bring in better sexual health services. The inappropriate and irresponsible actions of other people working elsewhere in the health service meant that we were unable to do that this year. I wait with great interest to see if we will do it when we get back the money that has been top-sliced. I will be on my feet if we do not; let me put it no more strongly than that at this stage.
In every case, Government action must be designed to enable people to make healthier choices for themselves and for their families. We know that individual choices play an increasingly important role in determining health outcomes, and that it is far harder for people to make healthier choices if they are struggling with unemployment or disability, trying to bring up a family on low income, live in a damp and overcrowded home or in a neighbourhood blighted by crime and antisocial behaviour. We know that for far too many people, the cards are stacked against them before they are even born.
I say that despite the fact that this Government have greatly improved many of the factors behind the existence of greater health inequalities in some communities than in others. I say that despite the fact unemployment in my constituency has reduced dramatically, and employment has increased dramatically, under this Labour Government. That does not mean that everything is rosy in terms of health inequalities. It is not, and the Government recognise that. I am pleased that they do.
We also know that things do not have to be like this. That is why, after decades, the Government have decided to do something about health inequality. To use the phrase that the hon. Member for Westbury (Dr. Murrison) used to describe health inequalities is nonsense. I will go on to the issue of widening health inequality; I will not duck it, but to say that it is Dickensian is nonsense.
It is 19th century.
Well, let us look not at Dickens but—the hon. Gentleman will love this—at Frederick Engels, who looked at the condition of the working classes in Manchester in the 1850s. What was the average age at which males in Manchester in the 1850s died? It was 47. The idea that statistically we can compare public health, or the health of the public, now to what was happening in Victorian times is nonsense. I say that honestly to the hon. Gentleman. Next time we have a debate on public health—I hope that the Opposition will use a bit of their time for that—we will look in greater detail at how public health and the health of the public have improved not just since 1850, but even in the past 10 years. That is well documented.
The Government want and are working towards a fairer society. That has meant that there has been fairer funding in the NHS, and more funding per head has been allocated to constituencies such as mine, because of health inequalities. The disease burden is quite high. The formula bandied about by Opposition Front Benchers a few months ago would mean that we got even more money. I would be more than happy if we were to move on to a “disease burden” system of funding health need, but other issues need to be taken into account.
Over the past 10 years, the Government have been making health services better in communities that have more health inequalities. Twelve years ago now, my constituency—or Rotherham metropolitan borough council I should say, as that was the geographical area on which this was measured—had the highest ratio of patients to general practitioners in England and Wales. We do not have that now. That is not down to doctors. The vast majority of them are private, independent business people, and although they work for the national health service they set up their own businesses according to where they want to live and raise their families. Clearly, under the system that has been in place, Rotherham has for 40 years or more been one of the places where they would not want to set up in business and raise their families. One of the reasons for that might be health inequalities—the disease burden that exists there, and therefore the high work loads in constituencies such as mine.
I have nothing but praise for GPs, but those ratios have for years and years been far too high—they have been the highest in England and Wales. The national health service is an organisation that I support, but it did, or could do, nothing about that until this Government landed on the Government Front Bench. They changed the local contracts so that primary care trusts themselves could employ doctors to work in such areas—so it was not up to doctors to think that they wanted to set up in business there. Instead, the PCT could put doctors into single-handed practices; they still had high patient ratios and work loads, but it could help and assist them. Those matters should have been on the national health service agenda decades ago, but they never were. However, under this Government they are. This Government have been able to do that, and over time that will improve the situation in this country.
The hon. Member for Billericay (Mr. Baron) made several interventions about what has been happening in the past few years. The White Paper “Choosing Health: Making healthy choices easier” clearly outlined a fundamental strategic shift towards public health, health prevention and moving care closer to people in their own communities. Other White Papers have followed it in terms of moving care and taking pressure off the acute sector by moving treatment out into the primary sector. The danger—it has always existed, and could have happily been solved—is that the new emphasis on health promotion and healthier choices leads to an increase, rather than a decrease, in health inequalities. They have not returned to the levels of Dickensian days or Victorian days, but when more choice is made available to people, the better off—the people who have always made better choices, such as the better educated—swiftly take on board messages about diet, smoking, drinking and exercise. Historically, that is what they have done; the more such choices are put into the public domain, the more of them will act on such messages, so it appears that there is a widening of health inequalities.
I am not saying that the position at the bottom end is perfect. However, although inequalities might be widening—the middle classes and the better educated might nowadays be taking better decisions than they have done—that does not mean that the health of the people at the bottom is not also increasing; on the contrary, it is. Therefore, when we address the question of widening health inequalities, let us get it into perspective. There is a widening of health inequalities, but the health of the people at the bottom, who have always been disadvantaged for whatever reason, is improving. Their lifestyles are improving as well; they are not Dickensian, Victorian, Edwardian or anything else. That is an important issue, and if the Opposition have not thought it through, they ought to.
I am grateful to my right hon. Friend for giving way, and I am glad that he is not quite as anxious as the hon. Member for Westbury (Dr. Murrison) about my intervening on him. Does not the point that my right hon. Friend is making about health inequalities powerfully reinforce the case for integrating all public services at local level? That is happening in Swindon, in terms of the local area agreement and the integration of the PCT, social services and the borough council. Will not such steps help to tackle the kind of inequalities that my right hon. Friend is talking about?
That is the very point that I was about to move on to; I was going to end my remarks by discussing it. However, before I do so, I shall give way to the hon. Member for Billericay, if he wishes to speak.
I thank the right hon. Gentleman for giving way. He is talking in absolutes. From what he is saying, he must at least recognise that the public health policy of this Government has, in relative terms, failed the lower paid.
In health terms, the low paid and the public in general have been better off in the past decade than they were in the previous one. [Interruption.] Opposition Members can mess about all they like, but I am telling them the hard realities. These issues existed under Conservative Governments, who did not even debate them. They never wanted to do anything about health inequalities.
They were not as wide then as they are now.
They are widening now because there are greater opportunities. Those who are able, and have always have been able, to make better choices for themselves and their families are doing so more frequently because they have the opportunity. That does not mean, however, that the health of everybody is not improving. I do not deny that we need to look at what is happening to the less well-off, and this Government are doing so. I am not saying that we do not need to do anything more.
Does my right hon. Friend not agree that it is very difficult to have a grown-up debate on these issues when we hear nothing but complaints from Opposition Members about how bad things are? I have yet to hear from them a single suggestion—apart from screening for double aneurisms—on how to put right any part of the huge cacophony of disaster that they have been describing.
My hon. Friend, sadly, is absolutely right; however, he needs to take that issue up with the Opposition later in the debate.
My hon. Friend the Member for North Swindon (Mr. Wills) is absolutely right—this is not just a national health service issue. The health service should be, and is being, required to work more closely with local government not just on adult social services, but on education, the environment, leisure and transport. That is happening in my constituency and in many others. We must use local area agreements to bring together all the partners who can transform people’s lives—not just local government and the NHS, but local residents themselves, the police, public agencies, the voluntary sector, faith groups and the social enterprise sector. There are now three area assemblies in my constituency, based on eight local authority wards. People from the local chambers of commerce, the health sector and the various community groups meet monthly to discuss their communities’ lifestyles and the help that they need to improve public health. These are the actions that we need to take.
I say—the Opposition will like my saying this—that it is crucial to have more joint appointments of directors of public health. I am not saying that public health should go back to being wholly the responsibility of local government. Not that long ago—certainly in my lifetime—local government had that responsibility. We took our eye off the ball decades ago, and I am pleased that the Government are addressing that issue.
Is my right hon. Friend aware that following the primary care trust reorganisation, more than 70 per cent. of public health directors are jointly appointed? Indeed, in Yorkshire the figure is 100 per cent.
Yes, my hon. Friend is absolutely right. Before the latest—let me call it the last—reorganisation of PCTs, 48 per cent. of PCTs and local government bodies had directly coterminous responsibility for social services; now, the figure is indeed 70 per cent. Getting that shape is important if we are to invest in the future. I discovered from a recent press release that the head of social services for Rotherham borough council, John Gomersall, had recently been appointed as a non-executive director of the PCT. I wish him well. We will see more such examples, which will enable us to continue to improve the health of the public.
All parts of the House need to be a lot more responsible than the European Parliament on the question of smoking inside buildings, for example. We need to find and build consensus where we can. This issue matters in everybody’s constituency. The disease burden and health inequality are high in my constituency for all sorts of reasons, but every hon. Member has constituents with health problems that have been going on for years. Those people need our attention and we must ensure that no matter who forms the Government, we work to get rid of the health inequalities that have been around for far too long.
rose—
Order. Hon. Members do not seem to have taken any account of the fact that there is very little time left in this debate. We have had only three contributions so far, and I am about to call the Liberal Democrat Front-Bench spokesman. Seven hon. Members have been in their places from the start hoping to make a speech in this debate. I hope that a sense of proportion will prevail so that that can be accomplished.
I shall be relatively brief and I also hope to be a little more reflective and consensual than some of the other contributions have been so far.
Good public health is the holy grail of modern politics. It has massive implications, and it could be argued that this is the most important debate that we will have this week. Parliament has a track record of underplaying the issue. In the 19th century our predecessors only took seriously the harm and diseases caused by the drains of London and the befouled Thames when the smell actually reached this Chamber. Now we face a different pressure. Longevity is increasing, thanks to better medicine, therapies and drugs, but we have not seen the same increase in the period of good health enjoyed by people in their lifetime, which is increasing more slowly. The period of decline and dependency is growing. There is more immobility, dementia and bone and muscle wastage. As a result, there has been an increase in the chronic diseases of old age, which is coupled with a falling birth rate and huge medical costs. Those factors have been well illustrated by the Wanless report and the King’s Fund. It is a serious problem and there is no realistic way at present that we can continue to fund it.
The only acceptable solution for a civilised society is to aim for a longer, but healthier old age. The ideal scenario for health economists would be a world in which people lived happily and healthily to 90 and then fell off their bicycle or died while out jogging. One change alone could transform matters and our calculations, and that is a successful means of preventing the onset and development of dementia and Alzheimer’s. Research in that area is crucial, because if predictions in that area change, the public health scenario also changes.
It is clear that something must be done, and it is also clear that something can be done. If we consider the variations in health outcomes between inner cities and the suburbs—the fact that somebody born in Blackpool lives eight years less than somebody born in Kensington—we see a serious problem that needs addressing. We must be clear that more chronic diseases are the result of the use and abuse of the body during a lifetime. Over time, a bad lifestyle has deleterious effects. Obesity, for example, plays a part in the development of diabetes, heart disease and some cancers. That is a drab picture, but we must acknowledge that some significant progress has been made by several Governments. First, progress has been made in addressing occupational diseases. We no longer get the dreadful litany of asbestos, coal and chemical related complaints that we used to have. They are still around, but they have a date stamp on them. We have also had serious improvements in health and safety at work and elsewhere, although too many people still die in accidents on building sites and too many are run over on our roads. We have been extraordinarily successful in counteracting infant mortality and the diseases of childhood, through better antenatal and post-natal care and programmes of education and immunisation. Those also have their place in the adult world, and we look forward to better screening for diseases such as bowel cancer, better immunisation and greater awareness.
Enormous gains are to be had in public health. Recently a vote was held on the most successful public health breakthrough in the past 200 years. The winner was not penicillin or any other therapy or medical technology, but Chadwick’s institution of drains. Second on the list was the invention of the contraceptive pill, so neither of those were medical technologies as such.
There are appreciable problems in public health, which I want briefly to deal with. Gains that are made in public health are generally long term and not immediately evident. If we do something about childhood obesity, its effects will not be immediate. We will not see better health outcomes straight away: we may see the difference in the children, but the long-term effects will kick in much later.
Will the hon. Gentleman therefore comment on a proposal in my constituency of Hull? To deal with childhood obesity, we introduced free healthy school meals in all our primary and special schools, which is having a dramatic effect on educational achievement. I think that it will also have an effect on the long-term health of those children. After a very successful three-year pilot, the Lib Dem council is now going to scrap it, so how does that fit in with the hon. Gentleman’s proposals on obesity?
I cannot comment as I have no direct knowledge of that, but I will deal with the issue of school meals later.
Progress in public health is actually quite hard to monitor. If a drugs education programme works or if there are benefits from healthy eating or physical exercise, it is not easy to see them in a straightforward way—unlike with the administration of a medicine to a patient. Another factor is that much of what can be done turns out to be totemic and slightly cosmetic. I have certainly sat in school dining rooms where there are pictures of big green apples—and watched the children tuck into pizza and chips.
Progress is also complicated because it requires a fair degree of partnership. In order for it work, we have to work with leisure services, schools and the adult world of the workplace. A realistic problem touched on here is that funding can be quite erratic and intermittent in the world of public health. I warm to some extent to the Conservative suggestion that we need clearly earmarked funds, but I also respond positively to the Minister’s suggestion that we need to target funds very effectively. I agree that what we do in public health is not simply a matter of health spending.
Another problem in public health—we have to be fair and acknowledge it—is that we are sometimes working against other very strong and powerful social forces: commercial advertising, for example, and media influences. Young people pay more attention to Heat magazine than to directives from the Department of Health, and we should acknowledge that there can be a positive side to that. A lot of very good health messages come out via the media. There are both good and bad aspects of the media, but one of the principal and most basic problems is that all the Government can do in connection with public health is advise, facilitate, enable and encourage. They cannot actually coerce or proscribe. Essentially, the Government are trying to carry out the very difficult job of influencing lifestyle. They can present the public with an idea of the good life or the healthy life, but in a pluralistic society, that will always be debatable. That is relevant to debates on drugs, sexual behaviour and alcohol use, where some of the unhealthy options are seen as a legitimate choice.
The Government can be accused, if they weigh in heavily, of being bossy or of being a nanny state. Even if they do not insist on a Korean-type national exercise scheme, they still come in for a certain amount of criticism. Plato, for example, favoured a very Spartan regime, coupled with no medical care whatever, but that is not the sort of approach that any Government these days—or for the foreseeable future—could recommend.
I have no problem with the suggestion that good health is a precondition of a good life, and everybody knows broadly what good health amounts to. That is a fairly evident conclusion that the whole House would share. I have absolutely no problem either with the state removing hindrances to good health. I firmly supported the smoking ban in public places, not simply because it got rid of—or will get rid of—passive smoking, but because it removes hindrances in the way of people who want to give up smoking. It helps to minimise the social occasions when people light up, although they are trying very hard to give up a habit that is doing them no good. We should be fairly unrepentant about that.
My mother is a twin. Her sister died 20 years ago, whereas my mother is alive, well and not troubling the NHS to any great extent. What is the difference between the two? One smoked; the other did not. Given that stark fact, one would think that there was every incentive for a Government to persuade people not to smoke at all, as well as not to blow smoke in other directions.
Notwithstanding the enormous benefits that will come with the smoking ban, the reality is that we still have to take the public with us. Public health works if we take the public with us. Messages therefore have to be attractive as well as cautionary. Healthy eating programmes in schools have sometimes led to a dip in school meal consumption, with children simply getting their food elsewhere. It is possible, however, to over-stress the contribution of school meals to childhood obesity. I cannot recall a time when school meals were anything other than pretty fattening, from an adult point of view.
Taking people with us is especially important in recognising that good public health requires good mental health. That means combating over-stressed lifestyles and unnecessary emotional trauma. Good mental health supports good physical health, and vice versa, but it is far harder for any Government to create the conditions for the latter, or to find agreement on what the latter actually amounts to. It is often said that the national health service should live up to its name rather than being a national sickness service, but there is more to it than simply putting up posters about eating oranges. That simplifies the objectives of public health, which include full physical and mental well-being.
Public health needs all the friends that it can get. It needs a whole-Government approach, a local government approach, a local community approach and a family approach. It also needs a commitment to a good, sustainable and wisely structured society.
I was really disappointed in the comments made by the hon. Member for Westbury (Dr. Murrison). They struck me as very old-fashioned in their approach to public health, and demonstrated a narrowness of approach and a failure to acknowledge that public health embraces most of what goes on in our society. We need to take a much more holistic approach to public health, rather than concentrating on narrow clinical indicators, which many of today’s contributions seem to have done. The hon. Gentleman also failed to deal with some of the underlying issues affecting public health in the United Kingdom today, including school food. I shall talk in a moment about some of the good work being done in Hull from which the rest of the country could learn.
I was pleased to hear the contribution of my right hon. Friend the Member for Rother Valley (Mr. Barron), who took a much broader approach to the public health debate, which is the proper and most sensible approach. I was also intrigued to hear the comments of the hon. Member for Southport (Dr. Pugh), who talked about public health needing all the friends that it could get. In my experience, the Lib Dems are certainly not the friends of public health in my constituency.
I should like to add to the broader comments of my right hon. Friend. Enormous strides have been made in recent years, and we should congratulate the Government on making public health a key target for the well-being of the United Kingdom, as well as its economic well-being. Having healthy citizens will be key to our success.
Public health is a broad issue, and all public sector bodies and authorities should include improving the public health of their communities among their key targets. I was a local authority councillor for eight years, and I have been a non-executive director on a primary care trust and on an acute district general hospital trust. I have seen that we can really make a different when the NHS, local government and the voluntary and community sectors work together. Leaving public health to the NHS alone, however, is not going to solve the problem.
Investing in and improving public health has enormous implications for the regeneration of areas such as my constituency. Communities that are blighted by poor health often have low educational achievement, poor housing and poverty of ambition. Those communities are often fractured. As a country, we cannot afford to waste the talents and abilities of people living in our communities. We, as elected politicians, cannot stand by and refuse to accept our responsibility to improve public health.
I want to make a couple of comments about yesterday’s debate on the acute sector and the reconfiguration in the NHS. The acute sector swallows up huge amounts of the NHS budget. I was interested in the comments made yesterday by my hon. Friend the Member for Dartford (Dr. Stoate), who said that the vast majority of hospital admissions should be seen as a failure of health policy. I agree wholeheartedly with that analysis. We need to front-load the public health budget in the NHS now to reap the reward in the years to come. If we do so, we will see a reduction in admissions to hospitals and a reduction in the number of people with conditions such as diabetes, coronary heart disease and strokes, and we will improve the life chances and opportunities of people all around the country, who will live longer, in better health. The acute sector has always been the focus of the NHS, but that focus is now shifting—rightly—to improving community facilities and investing in the wider preventive public health agenda.
I wonder whether the hon. Lady could lend her support to the campaign of people in the East Riding against the closure of all NHS beds at Withernsea cottage hospital and at Hornsea and Beverley. Those closures will have an impact on the services provided in Hull and public health throughout the area, and her support would be welcome.
With the greatest respect, the hon. Gentleman misunderstands my point. Also, I am concerned that my primary care trust, which was in balance in the last financial year, had to bail out his PCT in the East Riding, which massively overspent. There are higher health inequalities among my constituents than among those in the East Riding, so I am not going to take any lectures from the hon. Gentleman. I am concerned that yesterday a lot of Opposition Members spoke about wanting additional funding for their constituencies and constituents. They failed to grasp the bigger picture in relation to public health. All that Conservative Members seem to be interested in is keeping money going into the acute sector. They do not seem to be able to grasp that, if we put money into the preventive public health agenda now, that will save money in the long run. It is a shame that there still seems to be a disappointing, old-fashioned view among Opposition Members.
I want to turn to a few of the interesting and exciting initiatives that are happening in Hull, which, as I have said, has poor health standards. We have high levels of coronary heart disease and teenage pregnancy, but we are starting to address and turn around some of those issues. That does not happen overnight. A generational commitment has to be made. We already have a joint director of public health, Dr. Wendy Richardson, who is jointly appointed with the PCT and the local authority. She is doing an excellent job.
That leads me on to a piece of work that has been jointly commissioned. The local authority and the PCT are on board. The scheme is about free healthy school meals in all our primary and special schools in the city and it is the only initiative of its type in the United Kingdom. It focuses on the nutritional and educational benefits of getting children to eat well while they are at school. It is called the eat well, do well scheme and the children all get a free breakfast, free fruit throughout primary school, and free lunches and after-school refreshments, all of which are healthy.
I point out to the hon. Member for Southport, in particular, that take-up has increased. In some of our schools in the city centre, take-up of free healthy school meals is more than 90 per cent. The pilot, which has been going on for about two and a half years, is being evaluated by Hull university. Professor Colquhoun is providing interim reports, which all show that the policy is having a dramatic effect on the well-being of children in our primary schools. We might not see the savings from the scheme for 20, 30 or 40 years, when the children will have grown up and might otherwise have developed problems such as coronary heart disease, cancer and diabetes. However, we are making the investment now, and that fits in well with investing now to save for the future.
The scheme is making a real difference to educational achievement in the city, but the public health angle is the key reason why it should continue. It is disappointing that the Liberal Democrat council has an old-fashioned view—a silo mentality—of what local authorities should provide and what health services should provide. I am keen on examining ways of pooling budgets so that joint work can be carried out, given that such projects can provide positive outcomes.
I am not suggesting for one moment that such a scheme should be implemented throughout the whole country. I am interested in what works locally. We have talked a lot about local initiatives for local problems. The scheme seems to be working in Kingston upon Hull, but I am not sure that it is needed somewhere like Kingston upon Thames. There is great public support for the scheme. A poll that was held between 27 and 31 January by the Hull Daily Mail, my local paper, showed that 76.6 per cent. of respondents supported continuing the scheme as free for all children in primary and special schools. That shows that there is a real commitment to the scheme in the local community. It is depressing that there is such an old-fashioned silo mentality about what local authorities should and should not provide. We all have a duty to improve the public health of our communities. I will take up what the hon. Gentleman said about public health needing all the friends that it can get. He is absolutely right; it is just a great shame that the Lib Dems are not friends of public health.
Teenage pregnancy has been an ongoing problem for the city of Hull for many years, but the Labour Government have put resources into trying to tackle it. They have given resources to provide education about the means to avoid teenage pregnancy. They are tackling the underlying circumstances that motivate young people to get pregnant, and they are supporting young parents to get back into education and training and to access health services so that they can make positive choices about future conceptions. The latest figures show that the trend is going down again, which is welcome, but there is still some way to go.
I want to focus on two projects that show best practice involving boys and young men. There is a sexual health project in Hull for those people that is run by Cornerhouse, which undertakes one-to-one support and group work and trains staff working with young people around the city. Additionally, work that is going on with young fathers has been highlighted as a model of best practice. However, there is still a funding problem with that. Unfortunately, the Lib Dem council seems to fail to understand that it has a duty to this mainstream scheme. The primary care trust is providing 50 per cent. of the funding and the local authority should be providing 50 per cent. There seems to have been a problem involving the Liberal Democrat council accepting its responsibility. It is a great shame that the council is not a friend of public health.
The doula project in Hull is unique to the city because it is the only project in the country that uses volunteer doulas who are trained to get alongside and befriend pregnant women and to provide extra support to mothers in the early weeks and months after birth. The excellent project helps to provide a focus on public health by working with young families, especially mothers. It is funded through Newland and Avenues Sure Start, which highlights the commitment to improving public health across the piece.
We need to consider pooling budgets and to examine local area agreements and strengthening the role of local strategic partnerships. We need to make sure that public health is at the centre of local policies and the decisions that are taken locally. At the moment, we are still acting as if we are in silos and do not all have a responsibility for public health, but we all do.
I suppose that any debate on public health will be wide-ranging, and this one certainly has been. Increasingly, debates on health follow a familiar pattern: the Government claim that the health service is performing splendidly and are very critical of how it was under Conservative Governments. Indeed, the Government say that life in Britain is wonderful and that it was awful under Conservative Governments. Listening to the Prime Minister being interviewed by John Humphrys this morning, I realised that he is suffering from a health problem—he is deluded—and the problem is catching. I listened very carefully to what the Minister with responsibility for public health had to say. I have always said that I think her very genuine in her commitment to public health, but I was concerned about her overall strategy. We have these debates—I do not suppose that we listen to each other—and nothing changes. However, I want to touch on three subjects, hoping, in an optimistic frame of mind, to make an impact.
Health outcomes have improved dramatically; 150 years ago men lived, on average, to age 40 and women to 41, but today men live to 77 and women to 81. More extraordinary is the infant death rate, because it has fallen from more than 100 deaths for every 1,000 births in 1905 to five deaths for every 1,000 in 2004. Those results are wonderful, and the Minister is right to nod. Throughout the world all those outcomes are improving. The worry that my colleagues and I have is that on those two points our outcomes are not as good as those of any number of other countries. In a debate on public health the House might consider why that is.
My hon. Friend the Member for Westbury (Dr. Murrison) was entirely right to refer to the chief medical officer’s report. I would not describe the chief medical officer as a Conservative party lackey. In his annual report on public health, he devoted a whole chapter to public health budgets, which he entitled, “Raiding public health budgets can kill”. He went on to state that he had talked extensively to public health professionals throughout the NHS over the past two years and the following points consistently emerged from their accounts.
The first was that an
“Expressed commitment to public health by many health bodies is not matched by concerted action.”
That must be a worry for the Government. The second point was that
“Public health budgets are regularly raided to find funding to reduce hospital financial deficits or to meet productivity targets in clinical services…losing funding and the skills that had been acquired over time.”
Those are two points that have been made by the chief medical officer, not Conservative Members, and I ask the Minister, who I dare say will not have a great deal of time to wind up the debate, if she will comment on them.
The second issue that I want to raise is the Health Committee’s report on obesity, which was ground-breaking and has had enormous effect. I know that the Minister with responsibility for public health took it very seriously. In praising industry and enterprise, I want to praise Sainsbury’s—I do not have shares in Sainsbury’s, but I might be offered some—which this week launched the most comprehensive alcohol labelling system to date. It is an excellent strategy and it is certainly what the Health Committee asked for.
I cannot believe that the Minister is content with the childhood obesity situation. In 1999 the Government abandoned the targets in the Conservative Government’s first ever public health White Paper, which aimed to reduce rates of obesity in the general population to 6 per cent. among men and 8 per cent. among women. Current projections are that by 2010 the figures will have risen, and 33 per cent. of men and 28 per cent. of women will be obese. In addition, the National Audit Office has criticised the Government’s progress towards meeting the obesity public service agreement targets.
As for childhood obesity, in 1995, 9.9 per cent. of children aged between two and 10 were obese, and that figure has steadily risen to 13.4 per cent. The Minister is only too well aware of the arguments on why that is, but what we would welcome are solutions. I welcome Ofcom’s decision to ban advertisements for unhealthy food. I remember when three Ministers gave evidence to the Health Committee on the subject—in fact, I think that the Under-Secretary of State for Health, the hon. Member for Bury, South (Mr. Lewis) was on the Committee—and there was an argument about the banning of advertisements for unhealthy food, so it is good that a ban has been introduced.
I am concerned about the Public Accounts Committee report. It made eight recommendations that any hon. Member may read, and its conclusions were very worrying. For instance, it says:
“Important messages on diet and lifestyle have yet to get through to parents and children as clearly or as effectively as required.
To date, there has been little comprehensive, published research on the effectiveness of prevention and treatment strategies for child obesity and, consequently, the Departments have…done little to intervene directly with individual children who are obese or at risk of becoming so or their parents.”
I have two other, quick points to mention; I know that four other colleagues wish to speak, and I do not believe in being greedy with the time.
My hon. Friend mentioned hepatitis C, and I happen to be the chairman of the all-party hepatology group. This week, Dame Anita Roddick attended our reception, and I am delighted to say that I awarded her an Oscar, ahead of Sunday’s Oscars, in which I hope Dame Helen Mirren, a Leigh-on-Sea girl who went to St. Bernard’s high school in my constituency, will get an award. I was delighted to give Dame Anita Roddick an Oscar because she has been brave in putting her head above the parapet; I understand what my hon. Friend was getting at when he mentioned the subject. She spoke to us in a direct fashion, and although she was not overtly critical of the Government, I pass on to the Minister the fact that the grant of £70,000 to the Hepatitis C Trust is not overly generous. These days, we all have so little time to listen to each other, but the Hepatitis C Trust does listen to people. It tries to reassure them and deal with their anxieties, so when budgets are being considered, it would be nice if the trust were given more money.
The other concern that I wanted to raise was about the advertising campaign. I know that the Minister and my hon. Friend the Member for Westbury locked horns on the issue, and I will not get too involved in that, but I point out that the Hepatitis C Trust is concerned about the groups targeted. Let us consider all the dangers that we face today, what with the number of people getting tattoos. Groups felt concern about the way in which the advertising campaign was run. Dare I suggest that the Government would do well to turn to Saatchi & Saatchi, and other advertising agencies?
I was going to say that I will end with sex, but instead I shall say that I will end with a point about sexual health. The Minister is probably fed up with my endless questions about abortion, but I will not shut up about the matter. Only this week, a little baby whom one could hold in the palm of one’s hand—she weighed 10 oz, and measured 9 in—survived when she was born at under 23 weeks, so the issue is not going to go away. Before the general election, the three party leaders were firm in their belief that something had to be done because of advances in medical science, but nothing has happened. Every year in Britain, 300 babies are born aged between 22 and 23 weeks—babies born at 23 weeks have a 17 per cent. chance of survival—so the House must do something about the issue.
The Health Committee produced a report on the sexual health of the nation. The facilities we saw were pretty awful, and are not at all good compared with those overseas. Will the Minister say something about Chlamydia? The annual screening target is 945,000 16 to 24-year-olds, but so far we have screened 63,000 people, which is 6.7 per cent. of the target. As a result of that failure, many 16 to 24-year-olds will suffer and become infertile.
I am delighted that we have had this debate. If we are honest—and we are probably not entirely honest with one other in the Chamber at the moment—we know what the problems are, but it is the solutions that are the challenge. Until the British people are given the opportunity to decide at an election whether or not the Government are, as I mentioned earlier, suffering from delusions, we must work with the Labour Government, so I urge the Minister to see whether she can come up with some solutions.
I am grateful for the opportunity to speak. I will keep my comments brief, as I know other colleagues wish to contribute.
I am grateful to the hon. Member for Southend, West (Mr. Amess) for saying that there will be an opportunity for the country to decide at the next election what kind of Government they want. I have waited all afternoon to hear what the Conservative policy is on public health. I intervened on the hon. Member for Westbury (Dr. Murrison) to ask what it is, and he wants to introduce screening for abdominal aneurisms. I entirely agree, and I hope that he is successful in persuading the Minister to introduce that screening. He wants ring fencing, too, for the public health budget, but, as I tried to explain in another intervention, that is almost impossible, as public health is the responsibility of all Government Departments. It would therefore be difficult to ring-fence that budget. Personally, I would very much like a Cabinet-level public health Minister who could range across all Departments.
My hon. Friend the Member for Westbury (Dr. Murrison) made that point.
It is interesting that it should be me who draws out Tory policy, because Opposition Members did not mention it in their speeches. [Interruption.] Perhaps I did not hear the hon. Member for Westbury say so.
The hon. Gentleman said that it was a pity that the Black report did not receive wider coverage. As I recall, it was suppressed by Baroness Thatcher because it was far too inflammatory, and it was almost impossible to obtain a copy. It was not until Peter Townsend published it in a Penguin book that the public were allowed to see it, and it was hardly looked at by the Conservative Government.
I covered that in my speech. Can the hon. Gentleman tell me what happened to the Acheson report of 1999, which, as he should know full well, covered pretty much the same ground?
That is a point for debate. As I recall, there was no public health Minister in the Conservative Government at that time.
As time is short, I do not wish to make too many points, as some of them have been touched on by colleagues. However, there are one or two things that I would like to raise. I chair the all-party pharmacy group, and I believe that pharmacists have an enormous role to play in promoting public health. They could do much more, and more public health measures could become an essential part of the pharmacy contract, so that they become universally available at all pharmacies and thus make an enormous contribution to public health. Will the Minister look at the GP contract and the way in which QOF—quality and outcomes framework—points work? We could achieve far more improvements in primary care if public health became an essential part of QOF. In particular, if a significant number of points were attached to the management of obesity, I am sure GPs would devote more time and effort to tackling that serious issue. The problem of advertising for kids has already been mentioned, and I am glad that that is now to be dealt with.
I am very concerned about the traffic light food labelling scheme, which certain retailers, for reasons of their own, refuse to accept. I fear that that will cause enormous confusion among consumers. The scheme will only work if all retailers adopt an accepted norm. The Food Standards Agency has done important work on the scheme, and I deeply regret that the largest retailer in the land refuses to accept it. I am pleased that the Minister has reported reductions in the salt content of processed foods, but we need to go a great deal further, because salt is a major issue.
I will not detain the House further, as many other Members wish to speak. I shall merely say that if we dealt with some of the issues that I have raised, we could make significant further improvements in public health that would benefit us all.
I am pleased to follow my neighbour, the hon. Member for Dartford (Dr. Stoate). Although I do not often agree with him, he made several important points today. However, I was disappointed that he had not listened to the speech of my hon. Friend the Member for Westbury (Dr. Murrison), who said that he wanted to ring-fence funds and that there should be a Cabinet Minister to deal with public health. Both are policies that we should consider for the future, with—I hope—increasing support from Labour Members.
I am pleased to be able to speak in this debate. Health debates tend to be about hospitals, primary care, cuts and so forth, rather than about public health.
I am sorry that the Minister finds everything so amusing, but I am afraid that cuts are being made in primary care trusts. It is a problem that we are experiencing in Bexley. But we must not go down that path; today we are discussing public health, not primary care trusts.
Preventive health care, health education and making healthy choices are important issues. For my constituents, they are vital issues. I was disappointed by the Minister of State’s speech, because I have a good deal of time for her—unfortunately, she is not in the Chamber at the moment—but today she was combative, aggressive and very party-political. I do not think that that helps when we are discussing an issue such as this. The hon. Member for Kingston upon Hull, North (Ms Johnson) was also party-political when commenting on the Liberal Democrats, but I shall not go down that path either.
We ought to be working together to establish how we can improve public health. To listen to the Minister, one would think that there were no problems for the public health of our country, but I cannot agree that that is the case. The issues that I want briefly to discuss are smoking, alcohol, obesity and healthy eating. In my part of south-east London, problems are increasing in respect of all those issues.
I fundamentally opposed the extension of licensing hours to allow more drinking time. My neighbour, the hon. Member for Dartford, said that everything in Dartford was fine, but in our borough the extension has increased binge drinking and the consequences of antisocial behaviour. I was appalled to learn that about one in 26 NHS bed days could be ascribed to alcohol-related diseases, and that 40 per cent. of accident and emergency admissions were alcohol related. Those are real problems in today’s society. The increase in the rate of deaths from alcoholism among women and in the number of women drinking to excess is worrying. We should be thinking about how we can stop binge drinking and the increase in alcohol abuse. The Government made a mistake in increasing licensing hours and opening times, and the figures that we are seeing are cause for concern.
In my patch, I have been involved with Welling Alcohol Service Provision, or WASP, a voluntary organisation based in Welling. Working on the ancient principle that actions speak louder than words, a small group of former alcoholics arranged a meeting and subsequently set up an organisation at a drop-in centre—a pop-in service that would be available 365 days a year for ex-alcoholics who needed a place to meet and socialise. They are doing a wonderful job and I pay tribute to them. Regrettably, funding is a problem. The Government should consider making more funding available for such organisations so that they can do good work in the community to help people who have problems overcoming their alcoholism.
The second aspect that concerns me greatly is the problem of obesity and healthy eating issues. I was appalled to see that in my borough, Bexley, 11 per cent. of children are obese when they enter primary school, according to the children and young people’s plan for our borough for 2006-09. That is an extremely worrying trend. I welcome the efforts by Sainsbury to improve food labelling, the efforts by Jamie Oliver to encourage healthy eating and so on, but that is not enough to improve the health of our young people. Too many of them are still going for fast food and still eating all the wrong things, which will have long-term consequences for their health.
Education is of course the key—education at home, with the family, and education at school. More publicity and more media attention are vital, or we are storing up public health problems for the future. I am not convinced that the Government have got it right. They cannot do it alone. As I tried to suggest to the Minister in an intervention, it is no good her saying that the Government are doing this or that. There must be a broader-brush approach, with all of us involved, including voluntary and community organisations and parents groups. The Government should take the lead, but that is not enough. It is a matter that we should discuss constructively across the Chamber. That is why I was a little disappointed with the brush-off that I got from the Minister, which was party political.
The Government have taken positive steps—on smoking, for example. I voted for the smoking ban. I think it is a good thing—[Interruption.] I am sorry that my hon. Friend the Member for Beverley and Holderness (Mr. Stuart) does not agree. I have never smoked and I am worried about the youngsters in my borough who smoke. They are ruining their lives and potentially causing damage for the future. We are grateful that the House had the opportunity to vote as it did, and we look forward to the summer, when the ban will be introduced and people will no longer be subjected to passive smoking.
I am concerned by the lack of physical activity among our young people. The Olympics will be a tremendous opportunity, which we welcome, although there are other associated issues, such as the problems that we will have in Bexley as a result of paying for the Olympics, and whether the facilities will be completed on time. However, the principle is good and we should be extolling the virtues of sport and physical activity.
According to the Office for National Statistics time use survey in 2005, the three main activities of people in Britain were sleeping, working in their main job, and watching TV and videos or listening to music. Although all those are important, one would like to think that, if we aim to encourage people to pursue a healthier lifestyle and if public health is at the top of our agenda, people would also engage in physical activity and sport.
The percentage of time spent on sport and outdoor activities has fallen during the Government’s time in office, from 15 per cent. in 2000 to only 10 per cent. in 2005. If we are serious about improving public health, the Government must get people to do more physical activity, especially youngsters, so that their lifestyle includes sport and recreation.
This has been a very good debate, albeit that it has been too partisan for those of us who believe that public health is a bigger issue than one for party political knockabout. Education has to be the key target to change people’s lifestyles and ensure that they learn about the consequences of their actions. The Government can do much, but it is limited.
Finance is always the key, so what my hon. Friend the Member for Westbury said about ring-fencing needs to be looked at again. I know that primary care trusts in south London are raiding the budgets of the public health sector to meet their shortfalls. In the long term, the consequences will be disastrous. If we had ring-fencing, it would help to keep the public health sector afloat. I hope that the Minister will agree to look again at the proposition made from the Opposition Benches.
We need a more co-ordinated approach under local directors of public health, with the local authorities and PCTs working much more closely together. It is a joined-up approach that we need if we are to tackle this growing problem. There is a great opportunity, and I hope that the Government will take that on board.
It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Bexleyheath and Crayford (Mr. Evennett). Many years ago, I spent 10 years teaching in his constituency. When I go back now, I can see that people there are much healthier today than they were back then.
We know that throughout history the greatest advances in human health have occurred not because of doctors, hospitals or even medicines, but because of improvements in public health, including clean drinking water, improved sanitation, better shelter and housing, enabling people in countries such as this to keep warm, and proper nutrition. There was a point in the second half of the 20th century in this country at which, with poverty falling and all the factors that I have just mentioned moving in the right direction, along with the onset of medicines for the epidemic diseases and increasing longevity, we looked forward to a time when we would have almost perfect health. Something else was happening at that time, however. With that increasing prosperity and consequent lifestyle changes, we were getting fatter. We are still getting fatter, and our children are getting fatter than ever. It is on that problem—obesity—that I wish to focus today.
In 1976, in a consultation document on public health produced by the then Department of Health and Social Security, obesity was barely mentioned. It was considered a minor risk factor for coronary heart disease. By 2004, however, the Wanless report, “Securing good health for the whole population”, said that obesity
“has the potential to be of equal importance to smoking as a determinant of future health.”
Since then, we have seen even greater changes regarding obesity. The key facts are that obesity reduces life expectancy by an average of nine years and is responsible for 9,000 premature deaths a year. The prevalence of obesity has trebled since the 1980s. Some 22 per cent. of men and 23.5 per cent. of women are now obese, and well over half all adults are either overweight or obese; that is 24 million people.
Overweightness and obesity are also increasing among children. Almost 28 per cent. of children under 11 are overweight or obese, and 14 per cent. are obese. If we do not do anything about that, the number of affected children will continue to rise, and they will have a shorter life expectancy than their parents. If current trends continue, at least one third of adults, one fifth of boys and one third of girls will be obese by 2020.
I declare two interests in this debate. First, my wife works in public health for the Great Yarmouth and Waveney primary care trust. Secondly, a few years ago, I lost a lot of weight. I therefore feel that I can speak with some personal authority this evening, not because of the former—my wife’s job—but because of the latter. Some hon. Members will remember how I used to heave myself around the place, and one of our friends in the Press Gallery once wrote in a diary column that when I stood up I looked as if I had just eaten somebody for breakfast. I do not know how heavy I was back then, because bathroom scales stop at 20 stone—I was probably closer to 21 than 20 stone.
By 2001, after I had got myself re-elected, I had had enough—I was fed up of spilling food at mealtimes on my tie, fed up of the difficulty of threading my way through crowded receptions. People have asked me how I lost the weight. The lesson is very simple. First, one should eat less. Secondly, one should think about what one eats, avoid fat and sugar—if one does not want to be fat, one should not eat fat, or not a lot of it—and try not to eat between meals. People have said to me, “Why don’t you write a book called, ‘The Politician’s Diet’. It might sell a few copies among the others.” It is no good going on a diet: if one does, when one comes off it, the weight goes back on. The point is to change one’s approach to food.
As someone who has lost 2½ stone over the past three months, I know that the hon. Gentleman is right. One must change one’s life; a diet is useless. One must change one’s whole outlook and one’s relationship with food.
I congratulate the hon. Gentleman on his achievement. It is nice to know that we agree on that anyway.
I wonder what the reaction of other people has been to the hon. Gentleman’s weight loss. People did not come up to me and say, “Well done. Great.” They gave me a funny look and said, “Are you all right?” They thought I was ill with a wasting disease or something. Everyone wants to lose weight, but when somebody does, people think that the person is ill. It is strange. I have shown that I was not ill, and I am not ill now. I am so much more active, and I hope that the hon. Gentleman feels the same. I am fitter, and I do not have the tiredness and aches and pains that I used to have. I have been able to pursue my hobby of walking up mountains and managed to reach the highest peak in north Africa. In the summer, I finally achieved my goal of getting to a 20,000 ft peak in the Andes. I put the picture of myself standing on Mount Toubkal on my last election address to show my electorate that I was fit and not dying.
People talk about exercise, but I just walk. I always walk up escalators. If we want to see the problem in the country, we need only look at the people who stand on escalators when they could walk up them, or who use lifts instead of stairs. Exercise is good, but I am told that to burn off a cheeseburger, fries and a shake one must walk 9 miles. I was lucky: I had someone who helped me to focus on my aim to lose weight; not everyone is that lucky.
Today, I want to focus on the food that we eat. We need to change the food that we eat and the amount that we eat. The food industry and retailers have a huge role to play. They are not doing enough, and I question the commitment of some of them to helping us solve the obesity problem. Why do I say that? Every year, for many years, I have gone along to Tesco’s computers for schools presentations. Last year, it occurred to me that collecting computers for schools tokens was an incentive to buy more food, so I suggested to Tesco that perhaps it should build in an additional incentive by giving extra vouchers if people bought fruit and vegetables. I also put the idea to the Minister of State, Department of Health, my hon. Friend the Member for Don Valley (Caroline Flint) in a parliamentary question.
There was a little publicity, and Tesco’s initial response was that it did not believe in straitjacketing its customers, which was not very helpful. When I eventually received Sir Terry Leahy’s response in a letter, it was full of what I call healthy food-speak waffle; it did not say anything at all. Tesco refused to take up that sensible and reasonable idea. In the meantime, I received a letter from Sainsbury’s saying that it operated precisely such a scheme for its sports equipment vouchers. I therefore congratulate Sainsbury’s, and say, “Shame on Tesco” in that respect.
I began to suspect whether some companies were serious about tackling obesity. My suspicions have increased since the recent debacle over food labelling. It is important to be able to see the label on food. I used to look at the percentage of fat per 100 g. That helped me, but the information is not prominent; it is in small print and not easy to follow. I was delighted when the Food Standards Agency brought out the traffic light system. It sends a simple, clear and strong message because it gives fat, sugar and salt the red light, and we need to do that if we are to change what we eat, which we must do. One can go into small convenience stores on the way home in the evening and find that all they have are things such as crisps and Munchies. There is no fresh food. The people in them say, “That’s what our customers want,” but customers will react to the red traffic lights and want different things.
On the same day as the traffic light system was launched, the Food and Drink Federation launched its guideline daily amounts. It is a recipe for confusion. Sadly, I think that it was deliberately planned by certain food companies and food retailers as an attempt to undermine the Food Standards Agency scheme. The GDA boxes require quite a high level of intelligence to understand. Having been a teacher, I have a good idea of what can generally be understood and it takes very good mental arithmetic to keep a tally of all the percentages of fat, salt and sugar. It probably needs a calculator and one would have to write it down in a book. That will not achieve anything. In addition, there are different guideline daily amounts for men and women and different types of people.
When people from the Food and Drink Federation came to the House, they made a slick and hard-selling presentation. They held up a bottle of ketchup and said that the problem with the red traffic light system is that it is all based on percentage per 100 g, but people never put 100 g of ketchup on their food, so it is rubbish. But people do eventually eat 100 g of ketchup; it does not matter whether they put it on all at once or over a week. That is where the federation is wrong. It brought its range of produce along with it. We need to change that produce. If people see red traffic lights and change what they ask for, customers will give food manufacturers a different message and we will end up with better food in our shops.
Thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker, for calling me to wrap up the Back-Bench contributions in this extremely good debate. I have very much enjoyed sitting through it.
The press lobby called me amiable and chubby. I cannot do much about being amiable, but I decided to do something about being chubby. I went on a diet and now hope that I can keep the weight off. However, I shall not bore the House with my eating habits. I want to stay within the boundaries of a public health debate. If I do not, Madam Deputy Speaker, I am sure that you will rule me out of order. I want to link my comments to the cuts in the Hertfordshire health economy. The £50 million savings that we are being asked to make over the next two years will have a fundamental impact on public health provision across the county and in my constituency.
We cannot fail to mention per head funding. In Hertfordshire it is £900 per head; in the constituency of the Secretary of State for Health it is £1,300 per head, and in parts of Scotland it can be as high as £1,800 per head. There may be very good reasons for those discrepancies, and this is not the place to argue the pros and cons. However, at a time when our acute services and public health services are being cut, the discrepancies are causing my constituents and the residents of Hertfordshire a great deal of concern.
I am grateful to my hon. Friend, who has a short allowance of time, for giving way. Those cuts in local primary care in Hertfordshire are devastating. A recent letter leaked to me from the PCT indicated that £1 million of extra savings had to be made locally in primary care, which means that district nurses are going to be made redundant, as well as the acute nurses whom we will lose.
My hon. Friend makes a good point.
A paper published this month, entitled “The future of health visiting in Bedfordshire and Hertfordshire”, by the Bedfordshire and Hertfordshire Local Medical Committee Ltd quotes a report by Amicus, which is a fantastic union, as I am a member of it. The Amicus “Who cares?” campaign reported that the number of whole-time equivalent health visitor jobs slumped to a 12-year low for England in 2005. That seems to conflict with the Minister’s comment in her opening speech that they were at an all-time high.
The report was written jointly with health visitors. It went on:
“The meeting recognised that it is now necessary for Health Visitors to concentrate their sparse resources on the under 5s; Health Visitors reluctantly feeling that they have no alternative but to reduce their input into older children and the rest of the family, unless absolutely necessary, and the elderly. GPs are already aware of the loss of specific health promotion activities formerly carried out by Health Visitors since the move to a geographical basis rather than being practice allocated, naming specifically the loss of obesity clinics and smoking cessation activities.”
The current funding crisis within our PCT is causing a lot of concern to our general practitioners and to health visitors. The impact of those cuts is being felt by local service users.
We have been told that reductions in acute services will be offset by placing more services within local communities. That in itself may not be a bad thing. However, the experience of the Hertfordshire Partnership NHS Trust, our mental health trust, was that it lost beds while at the same time having to reduce services within the community. Specific services reduced include alcohol-related services. The issue of alcohol abuse, and treating those who are prone to such abuse, are as important, if not more important, than drug addiction, bearing in mind that alcohol is far more widely used and more widely abused.
Among the other services that have been cut within local communities are some that I would regard as public health services, including helping people suffering from depression or early-stage mental health illnesses. Often if we catch these illnesses at the beginning, when people start to be troubled by them, we can avoid significant costs and treatments further downstream.
Those are all areas of concern. Of course if we are not treating early-stage depression in the community, we eventually get greater pressure on GP services—GPs are already stressed and dealing with a large number of people—and then we get over-prescription of expensive medicines. Funding in our PCT is of huge concern, and paying back the deficit over the next two years is having an impact on local services.
I wonder whether I may, through my hon. Friend, put a point to the Minister. There are large, increasing numbers of people living in holiday homes and static caravans for much of the year—10 or 11 months of the year. A 65-year-old man living in a static caravan in a coastal area such as mine will bring only one 20th of the health funding of a permanent resident. That is an increasing issue in coastal and rural areas. I wonder whether he would like to comment. I hope that the Minister might touch on it later.
I do not represent a rural community, but I imagine that that would be of huge concern to those communities where it happens, because they bear the majority of the cost of looking after that person, although they are not in receipt of 95 per cent. of the normal funding.
May I talk briefly to Ministers about drugs? We have a number of excellent local support service providers within Hertfordshire. They are very small niche providers, but they understand the communities that they serve perfectly, and they provide a variety of services. One of the great joys of being a Member of Parliament is meeting truly fantastic people who for no financial reward, and with very little recognition beyond their peer group, work immensely long hours with extremely difficult and troubled people.
I am concerned that local groups such as those that I have referred to might be squeezed out by the imposition, or the promotion, of national or large regional contracts—admittedly the large organisations to which they are awarded are charities, but charities that operate on a far wider scale, and do not have many of the attributes of locally based organisations. I would urge the Minister to take my concerns seriously—but I shall not do so, because I know that she will indeed take them seriously. I also urge my own council to listen to the concerns of local service users about the type of services that they are accessing, because small and local solutions are often best suited to address the problems that we as a community are trying to resolve.
We in Broxbourne have all the problems that are prevalent in other constituencies. Broxbourne has a Conservative Member of Parliament, but in Waltham Cross, for example, there are many of the problems associated with inner cities. It is not a particularly wealthy town; it has a high incidence of sexually transmitted diseases, high levels of addiction, and high levels of mental health problems.
I congratulate the Government on the Sure Start programme. It has been hugely welcome and successful, but recently we had to fight hard to ensure that we could get continued funding. I hope that that is the last time that we have to fight for that, because the service provided is of such outstanding quality and excellence, and its benefit to the community is so high, that I hope that in future it will be taken as a given that people in Waltham Cross will be able to access that high quality of service.
Public health is a massively important issue, and I am glad that we have had such a sensible debate. I am also glad that there is such a committed slimmer on the Labour Benches as the hon. Member for Waveney (Mr. Blizzard). I have not quite reached his degree of thinness, but I will work on that over the next few months.
The debate has been interesting, although perhaps a little too party political in certain respects. However, there have been some worthwhile contributions.
The speech of the right hon. Member for Rother Valley (Mr. Barron) was passionately felt, although perhaps a little partisan for a Health Committee Chairman. He criticised our talk of widening health inequalities. Our central point, which seemed to escape him, is that health inequalities have widened under this Government. There is no point in talking about absolutes when it can be very well argued—certainly the evidence supports this—that in relative terms, the Government’s public health policy has not helped the lower-paid; in fact, it has failed them. That cannot be denied if we look at the figures, or the Government’s own target.
The hon. Member for Southport (Dr. Pugh) rightly stressed the importance of recognising how health policy affects the elderly, and I agree with him. It is important to recognise that Government targets sometimes focus too much on acute services, to the neglect of those suffering from long-term medical conditions, even to the point where those with such conditions often consider themselves to be second-class citizens in the NHS. That is a valid point, and the balance needs to be addressed.
The hon. Member for Kingston upon Hull, North (Ms Johnson) criticised our approach to public health but failed to mention, or recognise, any of the failures of the Government. That was a shame, because it did not make for much balance in her speech.
My hon. Friend the Member for Southend, West (Mr. Amess) rightly talked about the Government being deluded in believing that their health policy was working, and he expressed the concern that all the evidence suggests that public health budgets are being raided, and he referred to the chief medical officer’s most recent report.
The hon. Member for Dartford (Dr. Stoate) did not listen to my hon. Friend the Member for Westbury (Dr. Murrison) when he said that public health should be a Cabinet responsibility; that was clearly stated by my hon. Friend. My hon. Friend the Member for Bexleyheath and Crayford (Mr. Evennett) rightly pointed out that 24-hour drinking has increased the level of binge drinking in his constituency, and he expressed great concern about that. He reminded the House that according to the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence, alcohol-related disease accounts for some one in 26 NHS bed days, and more than one third of all accident and emergency attendance. He also rightly stressed the importance of the all-embracing approach to public health that is required—it cannot be left just to the Government—and the important role of education.
May I congratulate the hon. Member for Waveney (Mr. Blizzard) on being probably one of few examples of the success of the Government’s public health policy? He rightly stressed the importance of a healthy diet, and I congratulate him on that, too. My hon. Friend the Member for Broxbourne (Mr. Walker) rightly mentioned his concern about cuts in Hertfordshire’s public health budget, and he linked them to cuts that are taking place elsewhere in the local health service because of deficits. That is bound to impact on local patients.
To remain viable in the long run and for the good of our health, the NHS must change its emphasis from being a national sickness service that treats disease to a national health service that focuses on preventing it. By not addressing public health with a concerted effort now and in recent years, we are storing up problems that will have to be addressed through secondary care in future, resulting in worse outcomes for patients—a point that was made in all parts of the House. Indeed, the chief medical officer has argued that we are in what Derek Wanless called the “slow uptake” scenario in public health. That could mean extra costs in real terms to the NHS of £30 billion by 2022-23, and a difference in life expectancy of some three years for men and two and a half years for women.
Despite all the claims by Ministers, there is a worsening picture of public health across the country. Sexually transmitted infections are rising. For example, cases of syphilis have increased by 1,600 per cent. since 1997. Cases of gonorrhoea have increased by 44 per cent, cases of chlamydia by 150 per cent., and cases of HIV have more than doubled—all since 1997. Meanwhile, the number of alcohol-related deaths has more than doubled during the last 10 years, and cases of tuberculosis have gone up by 10 per cent. in the last year alone.
Moving on—if further evidence of failure is required—according to a report published by the Health Protection Agency in December 2006, the number of people newly diagnosed with hepatitis went up nearly fourfold between 1996 and 2005. As for obesity and diabetes, according to the Department of Health’s own figures, on current trends the proportion of girls who are overweight or obese is predicted to be 40 per cent. higher by 2010 than in 1997, and three in every four men and three in every five women will be overweight or obese. These are worrying figures—and they are the Department of Health’s own.
Those figures clearly show a worsening public health situation across the country, and that, whatever Ministers may say or claim by way of success, the results prove otherwise. Indeed, the results are so bad that if they applied to an organisation outside politics, those responsible would probably be fired. I suppose that we have had the equivalent of that with the civil servants’ own survey within the Department of Health, which clearly demonstrated a lack of confidence in the Secretary of State. There comes a time when the Government must take responsibility for their actions, and after 10 years in government, that time is now. These growing public health problems are home-grown; they are of the Government’s own making.
I suggest that to find the reasons for this poor public health record, we need look no further than the chief medical officer’s latest annual report, published last July. He points to the fact that the Government’s constant reorganisation of the NHS has hit public health particularly hard. He claims that reorganisation after reorganisation has caused considerable disruption to the provision of public health services and undermined staff morale. He has been very clear about that. The CMO also shares the concerns of many others that not only has public health been neglected, but the number of senior public health staff in England—including directors, consultants and specialists, but excluding academics—has been almost static since 1997.
Perhaps most importantly, as hon. Members have pointed out—especially my hon. Friend the Member for Southend, West—Professor Sir Liam Donaldson devotes a whole chapter in his latest report to public health budgets. It is entitled “Raiding public health budgets can kill”: his point could not be clearer. In that chapter, the CMO makes the point that in talking extensively to public health professionals throughout the NHS over the past two years—something that I would recommend Ministers to start doing—it emerges that public health budgets are regularly raided to find funding to reduce hospital financial deficits or to meet productivity targets in clinical services, losing funding and skills that have been acquired over time.
As my hon. Friend has described, there has been an explosion in sexual infections across the country, including in the East Riding of Yorkshire, my local area. Does he agree that one positive outcome of today’s debate may be that the Minister of State with responsibility for public health will reinstate the expenditure on sexual health campaigning, so that we can send the message out and reverse the deplorable increase in those conditions under this Labour Government?
I agree with my hon. Friend. I hope that we shall hear some positive noises from the Minister about expenditure on sexual health education, because it has been deplorable. The figures speak for themselves.
Many criticisms have been made suggesting that we have not produced any policies in this area, which is totally untrue. Our point is that if we are trying to plan for public health in the longer term—and if we are serious about getting to grips with this growing problem, nothing but a long-term strategy will do—ring-fenced funds are essential.
The CMO concludes his report with the comment:
“There is strong anecdotal information from within the NHS which tells a consistent story for public health of poor morale, declining numbers and inadequate recruitment, and budgets being raided to solve financial deficits in the acute sector.”
That has got to be the wrong way to go about things. How can we get to grips with worsening trends if budgets are continually raided to correct short-term financial difficulties at PCT level? I appreciate the Minister’s honesty in saying that she has given the issue serious thought, but I ask her to reconsider her position. Without ring-fenced budgets, things can only get worse.
On the issue of funding for sexual health, in November 2004 the then Secretary of State for Health announced £300 million of funding for sexual health services. However, in August 2006 the Department’s independent advisory group on sexual health and HIV reported that too little of the extra money had reached front-line services. It said that funds were not getting through because local health care providers were using the money in other areas. That is not Conservative Front Benchers speaking, but the Department’s own independent advisory group.
In 2004, the then Secretary of State also announced £50 million for a sexual health campaign, but that shrank to £4 million when it was announced by the present Minister. Where is the remaining £46 million, and why has it not been used? According to an answer given in the other place, it is simply sitting in NHS coffers. It will not do much good there. The low priority accorded to sexual health is again reflected in the fact that the hon. Lady had to admit last year that the Government do not even collect data on the number of tests for sexually transmitted infections, rendering meaningless their promise in the 2001 sexual health strategy that by the end of 2007, 60 per cent. of genito-urinary medicine clinic attendees would have an HIV test.
Of course, in the case of cancer and other conditions, early identification of signs and symptoms is a vital weapon in our armoury against disease. That is why screening programmes are so essential to the future health of the nation, and to the NHS. Once again, the Government’s record is poor. Despite furious lobbying by the relevant charities, they were three months late in launching the new bowel cancer screening programme. The scheme had the potential to screen 500,000 by the end of its first year, but by November the number of people screened had reached only 100,000.
Meanwhile, recently published research by the cancer screening programme shows that the number of young women who attended for cervical screening last year was down to 69 per cent., compared with 79 per cent. 10 years ago. Charities such as Breakthrough Breast Cancer continue to express their concerns about the accessibility of breast screening. The Government failed last year to meet their own target for 80 per cent. of people with diabetes to receive retinopathy screening.
On abdominal aortic aneurysms, we support the introduction of AAA screening for men aged 65 and over, which is predicted to save perhaps 2,000 to 3,000 lives a year at a cost of around £25 million. The Government have been dragging their heels on this issue for far too long, and should now establish a number of centres around the country where understanding of the programme can be dispersed.
Finally, on obesity—another area where the Department of Health has proved unfit for purpose—the Treasury set a public service agreement target in July 2004 to halt the year-on-year rise in obesity among children under 11 by 2010. However, up to 15 per cent. of children in the UK are currently overweight or obese. It is estimated that by 2010 there will be more than a million obese children.
Of course, the Government have failed to give a clear and straightforward lead on the question of food labelling, investing £2 million in the traffic light system, while the food industry is developing an alternative model. We have consistently argued that traffic lights on their own are too simplistic and do not help consumers and parents to plan healthy living for themselves and their families.
Meanwhile in just five years from 2000, the proportion of adults spending some of their time on sport and outdoor activities dropped from 15 per cent. of the population to only 10 per cent. in 2005. That may cause little surprise when one considers the fact that the share of national lottery funding going to sport has fallen from 20 per cent. in 1998 to only 16 per cent. now.
Where has that left public health in this country? We come back, I am afraid—much as the right hon. Member for Rother Valley will not like it—to the fact that health inequalities have widened under this Government. They have missed their public service agreement target of reducing inequalities in health outcomes by 10 per cent. by 2010, and health inequalities are now at their widest for a very long time indeed.
The goal of our public health policy must be to deliver messages about healthy lifestyles in a way that engages with the public and changes attitudes, but there is also a vital second level of public health—secondary prevention, awareness of symptoms and early diagnosis. In each of those key areas, Labour’s record has been very poor. I now look forward to hearing from the Minister exactly what the Government are going to do to put it right.
We have had a wide-ranging debate, which demonstrates the breadth and scale of the challenges we face—new challenges that I suggest need new solutions. If we do the same old things in the same old ways, we will get the same old results. As I have made clear and as the public knows, it is not all down to the Government to meet the public health challenges of lifestyle. There are things that we can and must do—smoking legislation, for example—when people cannot do it for themselves. There are things that we can support people in doing and things that only they can do for themselves and their families. It is a complex area. All that is not about me passing the buck, but about having a realistic debate on the challenges that we face at the beginning of this new century.
It has been a good debate, in which I took 17 interventions in my opening remarks and we have heard seven Back-Bench speeches as well. I hope that everyone who has taken part feels that they had a good opportunity to air their concerns.
In the time that remains, I shall try to deal with some of the points that have been raised. The hon. Member for Westbury (Dr. Murrison) argued that the reductions in mortality rates were simply due to trends during the 1970s and 1980s. Other hon. Members made the point, however, that we cannot assume that such reductions will continue even at the same rate, let alone at an accelerated rate, without additional measures and policies. This is true in a number of areas. I do not deny that smoking rates have gone down during Administrations other than Labour Administrations. However, when we consider some of the core, hard-to-reach communities, the task becomes more challenging, and that is where we are today. That is why the issue of health inequalities is so important. They raise particular challenges that would be left unchecked without Government intervention and support.
The hon. Gentleman and others asked what we were doing to replace the specialists in public health who had gone. Department of Health data do not verify the suggestion that there has been a significant reduction in capacity in public health. There were 718 specialists in 2000, 634 in 2002, and 788 in 2004. The data for 2005 have yet to be established. We are working with various public health organisations to track what has happened post-PCT reorganisation. The welcome development of more jointly appointed public health directors is a sign of how we can sustain the public health role in a way that is different from the approach that we have adopted in the past, which involved a purely health perspective.
There have been Government debates on public health in the past four years. We had a Government debate on health inequalities just a year ago, and there have been other opportunities as well. I am always open to participating in Adjournment debates; in fact, if anyone is interested, I shall be here for the one that is taking place after this debate.
The question of our sexual health campaign and the £50 million was raised. We have not spent only £4 million on the campaign; that was what we spent on our “Condom essential wear” campaign. In the run-up to Valentine’s day, we targeted our campaign through the radio stations that young people listen to, and the magazines that they read. We have been looking at more targeted ways than simply using big adverts to reach into those communities.
It is also important to recognise, whether in regard to sexual health, smoking or obesity, the way in which we have engaged other organisations to be the front face of some of our communication campaigns. That is an important part of the way in which the Government are making a difference. Sometimes, with the best will in the world, when the Government say something, they do not get listened to. That is why getting the British Heart Foundation, Cancer Research UK and other organisations to help us with these campaigns has been very positive. We fund those organisations in numerous different ways.
We should be proud of our record on tobacco cessation services. Tobacco Atlas, which is run by the World Health Organisation, says that the UK will see the greatest decline in tobacco use in the world between 1998 and 2008. We were second only to New Zealand in April 2006. Over a period of three years we have had more than 800,000 remaining as quitters. So, yes, there is more to be done, but I think that we can be pretty proud of the Government’s record on this.
Several hon. Members have mentioned the Public Accounts Committee report, to which we will respond shortly. I suggest that some of the evidence on which the Committee based its case has been attended to in the interim, since it first started on its report. I acknowledge, however, that tackling obesity is a complex issue that requires commitment across government and outside government in a more joined-up way. Part of that involves putting in the foundations to make a difference, and our weighing and measuring exercise will establish the largest database of its kind in the world. It is important that we get that right. An excellent example can be seen in Westminster, where parents have been engaged and best practice has been applied. I am looking forward to the roll-out of that exercise later this year.
I am very pleased about the Ofcom announcement. We said in our last general election manifesto that we would seek to restrict the advertising of high-salt, high-fat and high-sugar foods to children. Ofcom has announced its intentions on that today, which is welcome. We shall monitor the impact of those measures closely, to determine whether we need to look at giving the Government a further role in changing the balance of the promotion and nature of food advertising, particularly to children.
On food labelling, our leadership—without the heavy hand of regulation—has made an impact. My hon. Friend the Member for Waveney (Mr. Blizzard) and others have raised the question of which system works best. I think that the colour-coded, or traffic lights, system seems to be working well. That certainly seems to be the case from what I have seen and heard from the public. An important aspect of the labelling system is whether it leads to food manufacturers reformulating their foods to get more of them into the amber and green categories. My focus was particularly on foods that were used as meals, such as sandwiches and soups. If the industry wants to label tomato ketchup, that is fine, but we were conscious of the meal replacements or products that are used as meals, such as cereals and so forth. They cause the most problems for mums and dads shopping for their families. That was our approach. If the industry wants to widen that further, that is its choice. It is not something that I pressed on the industry.
When it comes to public health being evidence-based, we are trying to achieve a more robust attitude. That is why the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence produces guidance on the promotion of good health and the prevention of ill health. However, we need to look at achieving a balance, so that we can try to improve the evidence base without allowing certain ways in which we work to paralyse us when it comes to doing anything. We were conscious of the good GP referrals scheme in relation to physical activity, which has flourished in the last 10 years. We did not want that to be stopped inadvertently because people felt that there had to be a huge clinical trial to justify its existence. However, it is in the interests of public health to try as much as possible to make sure that we can have the same sort of authority as other parts of the health service.
The Government have done a lot to improve screening. I understand that the national screening committee has advised that screening for men aged 65 can be recommended in principle. It did not recommend screening for women. That is in relation to abdominal aortic aneurysms, which were mentioned earlier. We have noted that and asked for further detail. Issues such as screening and vaccinations come up all the time. The new pneumococcal meningitis vaccine for children has been introduced in the last six months and I understand that that has gone well.
All these issues raise important points for the Government in terms of what we can afford and provide for, and their impact. There has been a lot of talk this afternoon about what we should be doing. There is a price tag attached to everything. The Opposition refused to vote for the increase in funding for the NHS and—in relation to some of the other points that have been made—are refusing to change the NHS in a way that will make it fit for the future and allow space for public health to flourish.
The hon. Member for Southport (Dr. Pugh) seemed to have a reasonable approach. I did not hear much about what the Liberal Democrats would do that would be different from what the Government are doing, but we welcome him on board.
My right hon. Friend the Member for Rother Valley (Mr. Barron) talked about the challenges of the 21st century. Physical activity is not just about facilities; it is about engaging people so that they use those facilities. We cannot just say that we will build facilities and people should come to them. We have to think about what sort of activities young people want to be involved in. For example, what gets in the way of Muslim women using swimming pools? The issue is usually that they want to be able to swim without the presence of male lifeguards. Some areas, such as Brent, have tackled that and the rate of women and girls from the Muslim community who go swimming has gone up enormously. The issue is about listening to people when it comes to the ways in which we can break down barriers. My hon. Friend also made an important point about GPs. When it comes to health inequalities, some of our poorest communities have not had the services that they deserve. Giving PCTs the power to challenge that is important.
On the speech made by my hon. Friend the Member for Kingston upon Hull, North (Ms Johnson), I have visited Hull and seen the importance of the school meal programme. I attended an international conference where that was leading the way. The people of Hull will have to judge for themselves whether the Liberal Democrats in Hull have got their best interests at heart.
The issue of hepatitis C is vital. I am pleased to say that the European Liver Patients Association has recently commented:
“The UK, often portrayed as lagging behind the rest of Europe in terms of hepatitis C management, has dramatically increased the number of new cases identified in 2004 and 2005 compared with previous years.”
So, we are making some progress. As the hon. Member for Southend, West (Mr. Amess) knows, I am always willing to listen to members of the all-party hepatology group.
Regarding the budgets of the NHS, there will not be the space for public health, and the point raised quite rightly by the chief medical officer about the raiding of public health budgets is not new. We need a better balance in the NHS to ensure that hospitals and secondary care have their place and that, rightly, public health and primary care in communities have a fair slice of the cake. That is why I am looking at—[Interruption.] No, not ring-fencing, because that does not offer a solution—
It being Six o’clock, the motion for the Adjournment of the House lapsed, without Question put.
Hospitals (West Kent)
Motion made, and Question proposed, That this House do now adjourn.—[Liz Blackman.]
During the summer recess Adjournment debate that was held on 25 July last year, I raised the key issue for virtually all my constituents of the dire consequences of the Secretary of State for Health’s policies for both the acute hospital trust in my constituency, the Maidstone and Tunbridge Wells NHS Trust, and my constituency’s two community hospitals at Tonbridge and Edenbridge. I make no apology for returning to the same subject just six months later.
I want to raise two key issues about the acute hospital trust. The Department of Health’s treatment of the trust’s £16.9 million-worth of so-called accumulated debt is frankly indefensible. The trust has already paid off the debt once, yet the Department is insisting that it is paid off a second time by means of the creation of a surplus, which, in my book, means making a profit out of the needs of patients. The situation is simply unacceptable.
I appreciate that the process is being carried out under the resource accounting and budgeting Government accounting system. However, as the Minister and her Secretary of State know, the Audit Commission has made a categorical recommendation about applying RAB to NHS trusts. The recommendation, as it was stated by the then Health Minister, Lord Warner, in his letter to me dated 26 July, said that the Department
“should moderate the future application of the RAB regime, in particular by no longer applying the RAB carry-forward rules to NHS Trusts”.
That is a quite categorical, unqualified recommendation.
Last year, my three colleagues from west Kent—my right hon. Friend the Member for Maidstone and The Weald (Miss Widdecombe) and my hon. Friends the Members for Sevenoaks (Mr. Fallon) and for Tunbridge Wells (Greg Clark), both of whom are in the Chamber—and I wrote twice to urge the Secretary of State for Health to accept the Audit Commission’s recommendations. So far, she has stubbornly refused to do so, so we wrote a third time on 31 January. We are earnestly hoping that our persistence will be rewarded. If it is not, and if the trust is forced once again to find £16.9 million, there can be only one absolutely certain consequence: a diminution in patient services and a loss of jobs for health service workers. It is wholly unreasonable that that should be the consequence of frankly ridiculous accounting rules.
The second issue relating to the acute hospital trust is the future of the proposed private finance initiative hospital at Pembury. The hospital, on a PFI basis, was conceived and taken forward substantially by the previous Conservative Government. The present Government have been in office for 10 years, but during that period, there has been a huge amount of delay on the hospital. Indeed, I have to say to the Minister that some of my constituents are even doubting that the Government are committed to the hospital and think that they may at the last moment rat on constructing the hospital at all.
It was for that reason that I recently tabled a question in very clear terms to the Secretary of State. I asked her:
“whether there is a firm Government commitment to have a new private finance initiative-funded hospital at Pembury; and if she will make a statement.”
The reply that I received from the Minister of State, Department of Health, the hon. Member for Leigh (Andy Burnham), on 5 February read:
“The Department has reviewed the proposed private finance initiative scheme for Maidstone and Tunbridge Wells National Health Service Trust on value for money and affordability grounds. An announcement is expected shortly.”—[Official Report, 5 February 2007; Vol. 456, c. 724W.]
That was the end of the answer. There was no commitment and no timetable, so we are left up in the air.
I must say to the hon. Lady that this is having an extremely debilitating impact on the whole of the NHS in our area, particularly in the Maidstone hospital, where there is great uncertainty about the future of services such as accident and emergency. It really is high time that the Government made it clear that they are—hopefully—firmly committed to allowing the new Pembury hospital to go ahead.
Will my right hon. Friend give way?
I assure my hon. Friend that if he will allow me to make some more progress, I will give way before I finish.
I turn now to the equally important two community hospitals in my constituency, at Tonbridge and at Edenbridge, where again we have a very sorry state of affairs which is essentially of the Secretary of State’s making. At both hospitals, half the beds, which were supposedly closed temporarily in January 2006 in order to reduce the primary care trust’s deficit, are still closed over a year later. As the Minister knows, because she gave the answers, I recently tabled two further parliamentary questions to the Secretary of State. I shall read to the House the questions that I tabled and the answers that I received from the Minister.
I asked the Secretary of State if she would take steps to ensure that the closed beds at Tonbridge hospital and Edenbridge War Memorial hospital were reopened, and if she would make a statement. I shall read in full the reply that I received:
“This is a matter for West Kent primary care trust…NHS South East Coast has advised that the West Kent PCT is currently undertaking a review of all its community hospitals to ensure that they offer high clinical care as well as value for money. Until the review is completed, which is likely to be in the spring, all beds that are temporarily closed will remain closed. If there are any proposed changes to services in this area there will be a formal consultation with the public.”—[Official Report, 5 February 2007; Vol. 000, c. 723-4W.]
I have to say to the Minister that that answer, which was supposedly an explanation of why the beds have been closed, is—I am bound by the conventions of parliamentary language, Madam Deputy Speaker—factually an absolute travesty of the reality.
I offer the Minister my answer to my question. This is what the answer should have read: “The West Kent primary care trust has been thrown into deficit by the Secretary of State for Health’s decision to make a massive transfer of funds from community hospitals to acute hospitals in order to achieve the Government’s politically driven target of 18 weeks for admission to acute hospitals by the time of the next election. The West Kent PCT’s deficit has been substantially increased further by the Secretary of State for Health’s wholly unnecessary and financially wasteful primary care trust reorganisation of last September. However, notwithstanding her two financially calamitous decisions for the West Kent PCT, the Secretary of State agrees with the right hon. Member for Tonbridge and Malling that both Tonbridge and Edenbridge hospitals provide high standards of clinical care and excellent value for money and has instructed that the beds closed at both hospitals should be opened forthwith.” Frankly, to be silent about the real causes of the deficit in the West Kent primary care trust is outrageous. It is equally outrageous to cast doubt on the standards of care at Edenbridge War Memorial hospital and Tonbridge Cottage hospital.
I would like to give the Minister the opportunity of dispelling any doubt that she has about the standard of care at the two hospitals. In all seriousness, I extend an invitation to her. I will scrub my diary, and I invite her to come to my constituency tomorrow, or if that is not convenient, on another date. I will meet her at Tonbridge station, and we will walk together up and down the High street, and ask the good people of Tonbridge what they think about the standard of care in Tonbridge hospital. Then I will drive her to Edenbridge, where we will walk together down the High street and ask the good people of Edenbridge what they think about the standard of care at Edenbridge War Memorial hospital.
I tell the Minister what the response will be: my constituents will be flabbergasted that that question should even be asked. They are in no doubt whatever about the excellent standard of care at both hospitals, because they know what the reality is from their own experience, and from the experience of their families. They know from the experience of their grannies and granddads, mums and dads, husbands or wives, and children. They know that when they go to the Tonbridge or Edenbridge hospital, they receive outstanding care. It is a wholly fictional justification to suggest that the review has anything to do with the standard of care at the two hospitals.
I must say to the Minister that I am appalled by a sentence in her answer. I quote it again:
“Until the review is completed…all beds that are temporarily closed will remain closed.”
What an appalling position to take. They will remain closed come hell or high water, regardless of patients’ needs for the beds in question. Do not the needs of patient rate, as far as the Department of Health is concerned? They should do, and they should be at the top of the Department’s priorities.
I will tell the Minister what is happening in terms of patients’ needs. As a result of the bed closures at those two hospitals, there is, predictably, intolerable bed blocking in the acute hospital, and I will give her an example. My constituent, Mr. Thomas Page, has given me consent to quote a letter that he has just written. He says:
“My wife has been in the hospital”—
that is, Kent and Sussex hospital—
“for the past 6+ weeks and has reached the stage that she requires additional treatment for mobility and recuperative purposes. A request was made on Monday 29 January for transfer to Tonbridge Cottage hospital, but no beds are/were available for at least two to three weeks.”
He goes on to say:
“The Surgeons and Doctors at Kent and Sussex Hospital saved my wife’s life; The nursing staff in Intensive Care, High dependency and the surgical ward has successfully and carefully over the past 6 weeks brought her to a state of health that is a credit to their skill and ability. What a tragedy and pity that the last part of the care cannot be provided by the PCT in a Community Hospital that was built for that very purpose.”
Bed blocking is happening not just in the acute hospital sector, but in hospices. Last Friday, I visited Hospice in the Weald, where I had a discussion with the chief executive, Mr. John Ashelford. He wrote to me:
“In January, we had a period with all our 12 beds full, and the need to admit four more patients. At least two of our patients could have been transferred to Tonbridge hospital, but beds were not available at the time. This resulted in us not being able to accommodate a cancer patient from Maidstone oncology centre, a patient from the cancer unit at the Kent and Sussex, and a patient at home who desperately wanted to be at the hospice. Sadly, that patient died at home, and the family were very upset about the circumstances.”
Indeed, Mr. Ashelford told me that, because of bed blocking following the closure of beds in Tonbridge and Edenbridge hospitals, he has had to refuse admission to the hospice to patients vomiting blood in the terminal stages of illness. Does the Minister not agree that that is a truly shocking reflection on Government policy?
My right hon. Friend makes a powerful speech. In extending his invitation to the Minister to visit those cottage hospitals, will he ask her to visit Pembury hospital so that she can see for herself the wooden huts in which patients are treated and in which staff have to work? Will he invite her, too, to visit the Kent and Sussex hospital, where it is almost impossible to achieve the highest standards of infection control, because the building is out of date and needs to be replaced with a modern hospital at Pembury? Hopefully, the Minister will impress on her right hon. Friend the Secretary of State the need to make an immediate decision.
I am grateful to my hon. Friend who, like the rest of us, has been a valiant and tenacious protagonist for the new hospital at Pembury.
I am sure that my right hon. Friend is aware that the same number of beds have been closed at Sevenoaks hospital. While the standard of care has not changed, staff morale has been affected by the elongated review, which will not report until the summer. Is it not time that we were given a decision, to make sure that the future of our hospitals is safe and secure once and for all?
I entirely agree with my hon. Friend.
I apologise to the Minister, because we have eaten into a few minutes of her time. In reality, she can make a short reply. She can make a one-minute contribution, in which she accepts that the Maidstone and Tunbridge Wells NHS Trust will not have to pay off the £16.9 million deficit a second time. She can say that yes, the Government are committed to the new hospital at Pembury, and construction will start this year. She can say that the beds in Tonbridge and Edenbridge hospitals, and in the hospital of my hon. Friend the Member for Sevenoaks, will be reopened forthwith, and will remain open.
I congratulate the right hon. Member for Tonbridge and Malling (Sir John Stanley) on securing this debate on hospitals in west Kent. He is joined by his hon. Friends the Members for Sevenoaks (Mr. Fallon) and for Tunbridge Wells (Greg Clark), and I wish to welcome, too, my hon. Friend the Member for Chatham and Aylesford (Jonathan Shaw).
I wish to take the opportunity to congratulate NHS staff in Kent on the hard work that they have put into improving services and performance, as it is right to do so. Millions of people receive high-quality and safe services every day in Kent, as in other parts of England. The best of the NHS is among the best health care in the world, and we should all be proud of its achievements. We are halfway through the 10-year NHS plan and the achievements are tremendous. The waiting time for in-patient treatment has fallen to 26 weeks, compared with 18 months or more in 1997; the maximum waiting time for an out-patient appointment with a consultant has been halved to only 13 weeks; and 98.5 per cent. of patients are seen, diagnosed and treated within four hours of arriving at an accident and emergency department. Those of us with longer memories can see the difference, but others may not recognise the advances that have been made in our national health service.
The right hon. Gentleman’s local NHS organisations, West Kent primary care trust and Maidstone and Tunbridge Wells NHS Trust, helped to meet those targets, but the quality of service delivered by the NHS does not just mean meeting targets; it also means thinking about the future, and about how we can provide services in the right locations, in buildings fit for the 21st century. We have embarked on a major hospital rebuilding programme over the past 10 years, because development was abandoned under previous Administrations. I believe that it is the largest hospital building programme that there has ever been. In 1997 at least 50 per cent. of NHS buildings predated the formation of the national health service, and dealing with that takes time, money and commitment.
The White Paper “Our health, our care, our say” committed the NHS to shifting more care into community settings because that is what people said they wanted. In June 2006, we announced that up to £750 million would be available over the next five years to develop a range of different models. In some cases, that could mean new community hospitals; in others, it could mean refurbishment, enhancement of services or community-based services, delivered in a person’s home or through a general practice. The aim was to recognise the important elements of delivering a health service that would meet the needs of our communities.
West Kent PCT has been reviewing its community hospitals, as the right hon. Gentleman and his colleagues know only too well. It intends to deliver not just a cost-effective service but a more diverse range of services. I appreciate the right hon. Gentleman’s concern about the reduction in bed numbers at community hospitals, but the PCT is focusing on how it can treat more patients in community hospitals—for example, day-case surgery patients—while reducing the number of in-patients who are admitted.
For some people the provision of services enabling them to be looked after at home, or simply to be at home, is an important part of what they want from the NHS; others may need to recuperate in a community hospital after being in an acute hospital. Many more people can now be treated in their homes for long-term conditions such as chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, heart disease and diabetes by, for instance, community matrons. I shadowed two community matrons in my constituency last year, and observed the impact of the service both in preventing too many admissions through accident and emergency units and in ensuring that those who were admitted could subsequently be cared for at home, perhaps by district nurses or with the support of social services departments.
The Livingstone hospital rehabilitation unit in Dartford has only 38 beds serving a population of about 250,000, but problems involving delayed transfers of care are minimal. West Kent PCT remains committed to community-based services, and aims to use the commended model at Livingstone hospital as a basis for the most effective, efficient and patient-focused delivery of services.
I understand that the reduction in services at Sevenoaks, Edenbridge, Tonbridge and Hawkhurst hospitals was decided in consultation with the permanent nursing staff. The number of beds was reduced in a phased approach, as patients were discharged from the community hospitals. No patients in need of care at any of the community hospitals were moved to another hospital as a result of the reduction.
The right hon. Gentleman raised the case of someone being kept in an acute hospital and not being able either to move to a community hospital or to receive support at home. I noted what he said, and will pass it on.
Does the Minister not agree that when patients are clearly in clinical need and beds are available in community hospitals such as Tonbridge and Edenbridge, it is indefensible to say that those beds must be closed, come hell or high water, until some review finishes?
It was indefensible for such people to wait 18 months for an operation—a situation that we tackled and stopped. It is difficult for me to comment from the Dispatch Box. These are issues that must be decided locally. Patient safety and clinical need must be the priority. I do not know the details of the cases that the right hon. Gentleman mentioned, but if he wants to provide further details of the particular case I will bring it to the attention of the local PCT so that it can be looked into.
A number of other points were raised, including the proposed Pembury PFI scheme, which would provide a full range of services, including planned and emergency surgery, orthopaedics and outpatient services, in a state of the art setting. I appreciate the concerns that have been expressed locally about delays to the project. We must ensure, though, that every PFI scheme offers value for money and is sustainable. That is why we asked strategic health authorities to reassess their major schemes, and submit their conclusions to the Department for ratification. I want to reassure the right hon. Gentleman and his hon. Friends that decisions from the review will be announced shortly. In the meantime, the trust has continued to develop the scheme and is working with a preferred bidder on the business case process.
That word “shortly” has appeared again. The word “shortly” was used by the Prime Minister in response to my question to him in July about when we might expect a decision. A period running from July until February is a strange use of the word “shortly”. Will the Minister define what she means by “shortly”?
I understand that the proposal had to be resubmitted to be checked and re-evaluated. I cannot define precisely what “shortly” means, but the hon. Gentleman should accept that we are trying to expedite the matter, because we recognise the concerns locally.
The NHS as a whole is in receipt of record resources because of our policy of funding the NHS. In the earlier debate I was accused of being too political, but the fact is that the Conservatives—possibly not one of the newer Members present—voted against the Government’s increase in funding for the NHS. Nationally, the latest round of allocations covering the period 2006-07 to 2007-08 represents an investment of £135 billion in the NHS, with £64 billion allocated to primary care trusts in 2006-07 and £70 billion in 2007-08.
The current financial situation at Maidstone and Tunbridge Wells NHS Trust cannot be attributed to lack of funding. In fact, West Kent primary care trust received an allocation of £740.5 million for this financial year. However, I note the concerns that have been expressed today and in correspondence from the right hon. Gentleman regarding debts accumulated by the trust under the resource accounting and budgeting system known as RAB.
In the NHS operating framework for 2007-08, the Department set out the initial response to the Audit Commission’s review of the NHS financial management and accounting regime. The issues are being reviewed and a decision will be announced once our considerations are complete. So we are actively looking into the matter and recognise some of the problems that have arisen from the RAB system. However, until the review is completed, all NHS organisations must comply with all current statutory and financial duties, and ensure that they achieve financial balance.
Maidstone hospital was mentioned in the debate. I understand that concern has been expressed locally that the recent consultation on orthopaedic and surgical services at the planned PFI hospital at Pembury represents a lack of commitment to Maidstone hospital. The bulk of improvements made by the trust in recent years have taken place at Maidstone, with £70 million spent since 2003 on improvements. The trust wants to ensure that Maidstone hospital is capable of meeting the state of the art services that the new Pembury hospital will provide.
New facilities at Maidstone hospital include a day surgery, an endoscopy unit, a digital radiology unit and a breast screening and outpatient department—another example of innovation and new and better services being provided for local communities. The additional investment and development of services has been supported by the creation of 29 new consultant posts at Maidstone hospital since 2000. That accounts for 76 per cent. of the total new consultant posts created at the trust in the past six years. I hope that that indicates that there is no attempt to run down services at Maidstone hospital, and that they are being built up.
As the right hon. Gentleman is aware, NHS South East Coast is reviewing how its services are delivered across the region. The “creating an NHS fit for the future” review aims to ensure that modern health care services that are of high quality and safe, as well as being clinically and financially sustainable, are delivered to patients. In west Kent, the review led by the local PCT and the NHS is engaging in an extensive programme of discussion with stakeholders, clinicians and the public. The current review of community hospitals, the recent consultation on surgical and orthopaedic services at Maidstone hospital—
The motion having been made at Six o'clock, and the debate having continued for half an hour, Mr. Deputy Speaker adjourned the House without Question put, pursuant to the Standing Order.
Adjourned at half-past Six o'clock.