House of Commons
Thursday 15 May 2008
The House met at half-past Ten o’clock
Prayers
[Mr. Speaker in the Chair]
private business
Bournemouth Borough Council Bill [Lords](By Order)
Canterbury City Council Bill (By Order)
Leeds City Council Bill (By Order)
London Local Authorities (Shopping Bags) Bill (By Order)
Manchester City Council Bill [Lords] (By Order)
Nottingham City Council Bill (By Order)
Reading Borough Council Bill (By Order)
Orders for Second Reading read.
To be read a Second time on Thursday 22 May.
Oral Answers to Questions
Innovation, Universities and Skills
The Secretary of State was asked—
New University Towns
We want to give everyone who has the talent the chance to go to university whether they are about to leave school or already in work. Students should have access to local provision offering flexible courses to suit their needs. Our new university challenge initiative gives the chance for 20 towns or areas to develop new university centres or campuses by 2014. We are delighted by the interest that exciting initiative has generated.
I thank the Secretary of State for that reply. I understand that the Higher Education Funding Council will lead debate on the initiative. Through the Secretary of State, may I suggest that the council considers the Alsager campus? It was formerly part of Manchester Metropolitan university, and is one of the foremost sports science and physical education colleges and is right next to Alsager school, which is a business and enterprise college. Bearing in mind the difficulties that may arise in the economy it makes sense to me—does it to the right hon. Gentleman?—that an existing facility should be used for one of those splendid new universities.
The hon. Lady is perfectly correct. The Higher Education Funding Council, rather than Ministers, will both set out the details about how the new university challenge will work and, ultimately, take decisions about where developments take place. I am sure that the council will note the hon. Lady’s remarks. Because the area is very close to her, I am sure, too, that she will welcome the £70 million investment by Manchester Metropolitan university in the university development in Crewe.
I agree with the Secretary of State about the importance of more people going into higher education. I admired the commitment of my hon. Friend the Member for Congleton (Ann Winterton) in pressing for a proposal that has much to commend it. We want better links between further and higher education, and more higher education across the country.
Will the Secretary of State clear up the widespread confusion about what the Government are actually proposing? His Department recently briefed one paper that he was committed to 20 new universities and the Prime Minister was so carried away on the “Andrew Marr Show” the other day that he promised
“a university…in every town and city”,
but the £150 million that the Secretary of State has set aside for his programme is not enough to pay for even one new university. What is it? Is it a university in every town? Is it 20 universities? How many new universities does he want to see?
First, I welcome the hon. Gentleman to his place. He features so regularly in the list of shadow Cabinet members most likely to be sacked that those of us who are his admirers are always delighted to see him on the Front Bench again.
In February, we said that over the next six years—the current comprehensive spending review and the next—we wished to be in a position either to open or to commit to open 20 new centres. As we made perfectly clear in the document, most of them are likely—often but not always—to be developed on the basis of existing college investment, such as further education colleges, in association with an existing university. For example, at the universities of Medway, where three existing universities have come together to develop a campus of 10,000 student places, such a development can bring university education to people who otherwise would not have it. That is the whole point of the policy.
Higher Education (Employers)
I recently launched our high level skills consultation document, which sets out our proposals to increase employer engagement in higher education. We have announced new funding rising to at least £50 million by the end of the decade for courses funded with employers. Already, more than 30 universities are developing co-funding proposals with employers, and I expect the consultation to stimulate further interest.
The Government are rightly widening access to higher education for young people, but what about people like me who left school and did not have the privilege of going to university? Many people already in the work force would benefit from higher education, so does my hon. Friend agree that we should encourage them to widen and broaden their education and skills?
I very much agree with my hon. Friend. Seventy-four per cent. of the 2020 work force are already in work at present, and unless universities can work with those people to take them to the highest level of skills and education we will not compete internationally. Substantial numbers of people are prepared to take up those opportunities; 6 million adults in the work force have A-level equivalent qualifications, but are not yet at degree level. I remind those who say that such initiatives will not succeed that although 31 per cent. of our adult work force are currently educated to degree level, in countries such as Japan, the United States and Canada the figure is already 40 per cent. We need to take things forward with real alacrity.
I suspect that many employers reckon that they pay quite enough in their taxes for full-time education for 13, and increasingly for 15 years. Will the Minister therefore ensure that insofar as there are any co-funding arrangements along the lines suggested by the hon. Member for Gateshead, East and Washington, West (Mrs. Hodgson), they co-fund vocational and further educational courses that would perhaps be of direct relevance to employers in developing their businesses in the decades to come?
The key point is that we need people to be educated and trained in those kinds of courses not only at further education but higher education levels. The hon. Gentleman can take cheap shots at employer commitment, but if we are to achieve the required skills levels in the adult work force, we can do so only on the basis of a significant contribution from the Government—we are committing to that—together with contributions made not only by individuals but by employers stepping up to the plate. Only by that combination of efforts will we succeed.
My hon. Friend will know that some of the biggest employers in the country are supermarkets such as Tesco, which currently put very little into higher education. Could not steps be taken about that? These are the people who suck the wealth out of our towns and cities and take it out of communities—is it not about time that they were made to put something back through higher education and lifelong learning?
I have no particular brief for Tesco, but it is a big supporter of the apprenticeship programme. Indeed, it has recently been taking a lead on the development of the retail foundation degree, which it and other retailers are adopting as part of their commitment to upskilling people within their work force. I absolutely agree with my hon. Friend that employers need to work with us across the board to meet that high-level skills challenge.
I note what the Minister has said. It is obviously good to encourage employers to invest in higher education, but how will he ensure that the plans announced in the consultation do not blur the distinction between education and training and lose sight of the purpose of a university?
This is an age-old debate that centres on a rather artificial distinction. When we talk about the distinction between vocational and purely academic studies, we need to remember that some of the most highly reputed degree courses in the country, such as law and medicine, are directly vocational. We need to ensure that people are properly educated and trained to increase not only their intellectual capability but their skills capacity.
Many publicly funded regeneration projects are taking place across the country. In London alone, we have Crossrail, the Thames Gateway, 2012, and the Kidbrooke regeneration in my part of London. Many companies are making a great deal of money out of that investment of public funds, but they need people with vocational skills in engineering, construction and so on. May I urge my hon. Friend to enter into discussions with the companies involved in those projects with a view to supporting not only higher education but further education courses?
I can certainly give that commitment because it is what we are doing already. For example, we are looking to use the procurement process to ensure that there is an increasing commitment to apprenticeships and high-level skills contributions on the part of employers who gain contracts.
I am sure that my colleagues on the Front Bench strongly support the principles that the Minister has laid out. However, the reality is that the skills sets that are desperately needed in industry require STEM—science, technology, engineering and mathematics—subjects. Will the Minister consider new learning and teaching styles, particularly using the games industry? We are world-beaters in that industry, particularly at the university of Abertay in Dundee. Those skills could enable young people at schools, colleges and universities to be taught STEM subjects, to which they currently do not get access because we do not have the teaching force to be able to deliver them.
Significant improvements are taking place in the STEM teaching work force. I agree with the hon. Gentleman that it is important to use the games industry as a means to engage young people and adults in STEM subjects. I take heart from the fact that, although we undoubtedly need to do more, recent applications to study STEM subjects at university are increasing.
Basford Hall
The Learning and Skills Council has been working with the college to develop plans to rebuild the Basford hall site. The rebuilding will ensure an enhanced service and the extension of the provision of further and higher education in Nottingham.
My constituency sends the fewest people to further and higher education of any constituency in the United Kingdom. Last year, our local community, with the Minister for Lifelong Learning, Further and Higher Education, worked hard to retain our only further education college. Will the Under-Secretary now examine how fast the proposal to retain and revamp that site has progressed? Will he agree to meet me to ensure that no machinery of government changes, no problems about land swaps and mergers will stand in the way of one of the most educationally deprived communities in the UK retaining and enhancing its further education college?
My hon. Friend knows, because we have had such discussions in the past, that my constituency is just beneath his in terms of the number of young people who make their way to university. There are plans in his constituency for a merger, especially across the FE sector. Of course, I or my hon. Friend the Minister for Lifelong Learning, Further and Higher Education will be happy to meet him to ensure adequate and appropriate provision for some of the most vulnerable young people in the country.
I am delighted that the Under-Secretary is aware of the possible merger of New college with two other colleges in the Greater Nottingham conurbation to create a super-college. Will he take steps to ensure that small campuses such as Basford and neighbouring Hucknall, where there is genuine disadvantage, are maintained and receive further investment?
The intention is to revamp and rebuild Basford precisely because it is in such a deprived neighbourhood and such work is necessary. I was pleased when I learned from the Learning and Skills Council that that would happen. Such decisions will come to Ministers in due course, but I hope that he senses sympathy from the Dispatch Box to the issues that Nottingham Members of Parliament continue to raise about the need for adequate provision for their constituents.
Adult Learners
In 2006-07, around 3.2 million learners aged 19 plus were on Learning and Skills Council-funded further education, Train to Gain, work-based learning courses and former adult and community learning courses. Since 1997, our investment in the further education skills sector has increased by 52 per cent. in real terms. That means that, since 2001, more than 1.75 million adults have gained a literacy and numeracy qualification and, in the last full year, the number of adults participating in skills for life courses increased by nearly 50,000 to more than 350,000. Those participating in level 2 courses increased by nearly 40,000 to 470,000.
I thank the Secretary of State for that response. He knows that the National Institute of Adult Continuing Education published a survey that revealed that the number of adults participating in education is falling. My local college, Sutton College of Liberal Arts—SCOLA—has experienced a 10 per cent. drop in the past 12 months. Adult learners week, which starts on Saturday, will reveal the wide range of exciting and interesting courses that are available in the UK. Does the Secretary of State accept that Government policies for getting adults to participate in education are not working? Is not it time for a rethink?
No, I do not accept that. For the reasons that I have given, there has been a massive expansion in the number of adults doing the things that transform people’s lives—learning to read, being able to handle basic numeracy, having the qualifications that enable them to get a job and progress in their work. We have been right to concentrate our efforts on that.
However, we also acknowledge that there is clearly an intrinsic value in learning for its own sake. Part of that is funded through our budget and the ring-fenced budget for adult and community learning. Much of it is funded through other Departments, such as free access to museums, galleries and archives. Much of it is developed informally and in the voluntary sector, with major organisations such as the National Trust or Government bodies such as English Nature being big providers of adult education.
In the consultation on informal adult learning, we are looking at the range of activities that, during the past 10 or 15 years, have transformed the ways in which adults learn. We will introduce proposals to strengthen that process in the future, not weaken it, and to engage not just my Department, but the whole of government in promoting that type of learning.
Will my right hon. Friend look at the anomaly whereby the non-European Union spouse of a UK citizen who settles in the UK has to wait one year before being eligible for home tuition fees when enrolling on a college course to learn English? That runs counter to the Government’s commendable encouragement of new immigrants to learn our language.
I think that I take a different view from my hon. Friend on that subject. People should be free to marry whom they wish to marry, but I believe that someone who brings a spouse to this country who does not speak English has a responsibility to their partner and the rest of the community to assist in their learning of English. I do not take my hon. Friend’s view that that is a matter for the state to subsidise. We should say to people, “Bring your spouse here, but you should ensure that they have adequate English to participate fully before they come, and from the day they arrive.”
Cutting through the Secretary of State’s verbiage, he must be aware that the number of publicly funded places in adult education has fallen by a staggering 1.4 million in two years. He says that that is because money is being spent on Train to Gain and skills for life, but he must know that those cuts are disproportionately affecting the very people those programmes are designed to help. Participation in adult education by skilled manual workers has fallen by 7 per cent. in a single year, wiping out the progress of the previous decade. Can the Secretary of State tell us why, if his policies are such a success, the total number of people on Government-funded programmes, including Train to Gain, actually fell last year?
To measure the total number of courses is a very poor indicator of success in this respect. It is quite ridiculous to say that a one or two-year course, leading to a vocational qualification at level 2 or level 3, should be given the same weighting as a four or six-week short course, undertaken with great satisfaction but purely for the joy of learning. We have done exactly the right thing by emphasising spending on those parts of education that equip people with the basics to get on in society and the skills in order to participate in work. To take the total figure of funded, short, informal adult education courses, and to ignore all the other education funded by the Government, and the progress on work-based learning, is wrong.
In Stockport, many older students returning to further education find the financial support provided by the adult learning grant very valuable. Can the Secretary of State tell me what more his Department is doing to advertise that grant so that more older people are aware that they will get financial support if they return to further education?
I am grateful to my hon. Friend for bringing the adult learning grant to the attention of the House. It was developed in pilot form in previous years, and extended nationally from September, and it is now making a huge difference to people’s ability to study. We are at the stage in the year where we have just over two terms’ experience of the promotion of the grant, and I can assure my hon. Friend that I and the Under-Secretary of State for Innovation, Universities and Skills, my hon. Friend the Member for Tottenham (Mr. Lammy), will be looking at the lessons learned to ensure that we achieve the maximum possible take-up of that grant.
Higher Education (Funding)
We are not cutting funding to higher education. The amount of ELQ funding being redirected between institutions from this September is just 0.1 per cent. of the total income, and after three years, no institution will have lost out from its 2007-08 baseline. Our ELQ policy puts learners first and it helps deliver an even greater expansion of the number of first degree entrants, which I believe to be the right priority.
The Minister may call that redirection; others might call it cuts. Has he spoken to the people who run Birkbeck college here in London, which, as many colleagues in the House will know, has educated adults from London, and from throughout the UK and overseas for nearly 200 years? I can testify to the success of what Birkbeck has done for many of my constituents, but the college feels that it is suffering hugely from the Government’s policy on ELQ funding. Can he talk to those at Birkbeck and report back, and if the college persuades him or has an argument that is justified, will he review the policy?
I always have an open mind. I have consistently discussed such matters with Birkbeck college, but I utterly refute his claim that we are cutting the higher education budget. Over the past 11 years, we have increased it in real terms by 23 per cent. In respect of ELQs, Birkbeck college’s budget for next September has increased by 5 per cent. That is not a cut in any shape or form.
All Prime Ministers, particularly Labour Prime Ministers, look to their legacy at some point. One of the finest achievements of the third Labour Prime Minister, Harold Wilson, was the creation of the Open university, which is now in its fifth decade. Could my hon. Friend reassure me about the future of that institution, in which I was a student and for which I worked at one time? The changes being made to ELQs seem to be having a damaging effect on the medium-term prospects of what has been a wonderful British institution with an international reputation.
I agree with my hon. Friend’s sentiments about the Open university. Indeed, a couple of weeks ago I spoke at the annual conference of the Open university students association—much to my surprise, I got two rounds of applause. Even with the changes, it is important to make it clear that the Open university’s budget for next year is increasing, by £4 million more than this year. The real challenge is getting institutions with a fine track record, such as the Open university, Birkbeck college and others, to go out into the workplace and tackle the skills needs of the 6 million people who are educated to A-level, but who have not yet gone on to degree level education.
What representations has the Department received on confusion about funding, particularly in the 16-to-18 group, following the split of the Department for Education and Skills?
We are currently in the midst of the consultation on the machinery of government changes. I have spoken at two consultation events in the past week. The representations that I have received at those events have of course been about detail, but it has not been suggested that there is confusion. We are rightly putting the commissioning process into the hands of local authorities for pre-19 provision. We will be establishing a skills funding agency to drive adult skills needs post-19.
Reference has already been made this morning to adult learners week, which starts next week. Universities and colleges throughout the country already make a great contribution to adult learning, through the provision of short courses and evening classes, on everything from vulcanology to foreign languages and local history. Such courses offer a great social mix, bringing together people who have already been in higher education with those who are tasting it for the first time. However, the financial viability of such courses will be completely undermined if the state funding for people who already have higher education is withdrawn as a result of the ELQ changes that have been mentioned. Ahead of adult learners week, will the Minister undertake to promise the higher education sector that the important work of engaging with communities—part of the core mission of universities—will be protected?
It is certainly part of the mission of universities to do that. However, now that the funding allocations are public and, for instance, Birkbeck college’s budget has increased by 5 per cent. and the Open university’s budget has increased by £4 million, it is critical that those people who have criticised the Government’s policy in this area—some are sitting on the Opposition Benches—should justify their claims about decimation of provision. Those claims are simply not borne out by the reality.
Apprenticeships
My right hon. Friend has not met Martin Broughton, the president of the CBI, recently, but, on two occasions last month, he met other leaders and officials of the CBI such as Richard Lambert, the director general.
During those meetings, did the CBI express the view that I firmly hold that whether a business is large or small, there is a big gulf between the Government, and what they are trying to do, and the businesses that are trying to offer apprenticeships? What is his Department doing to bring the two sides together to enable the best possible use to be made of the apprenticeships being offered?
The answer is, no it did not. It welcomed the Government’s review of apprenticeships and our commitment to asking big employers to overtrain. It also welcomed our commitment to direct payments for some employers and to establishing group training associations for smaller small and medium-sized enterprises. It is trying to work with the Government to increase employer engagement so that more apprentices come forward. I am pleased that, in the hon. Lady’s area, where 2,300 young people have started apprenticeships, there will be an increase of 500 next year.
But, in practice, even in an area such as Slough, which is one of the most productive towns in the country, young people starting apprenticeships find it hard to get the employment placements that they require. They do the college-based parts of their courses, but I regularly get desperate letters from mums and young people saying, “Although I’ve written hundreds of letters to employers, I can’t get a placement.” What more can the Government do to ensure that ambitious young people get the chance to train?
My hon. Friend is right to identify those profound issues. I was pleased to be in her constituency with young apprentices a few weeks ago. I hope that she and other hon. Members on both sides of the House will be pleased that, for the first time, the cohort of young people going into apprenticeships will have a matching service. Before then, there was a matching service for young people who wanted to go university, but there was no service to connect vacancies and employers with young people who wanted apprenticeships. That will make a big difference in my hon. Friend’s constituency.
It is important to do as much as we can to help smaller businesses to offer apprenticeships, particularly by helping with the training framework and fostering the required relationship between those businesses and further education providers. That means that we must do all we can to encourage group training associations along a hub and spoke model, with providers and bigger employers acting as a spoke into smaller employers that can provide more apprenticeships. We have had a good response to our consultation, and I hope that that will make a big difference in her constituency in coming months.
I am a member of the Select Committee on Scottish Affairs, which is investigating the impact of shipbuilding in Scotland. I am delighted to report to the House that record numbers of apprentices have been employed in Fife and Glasgow since the days when the Conservatives were in power. Will the Minister assure me and those apprentices that we will do all we can to ensure that, when they complete their training, jobs will be available to them?
I will continue to do all that I can by working with our colleagues across the border to ensure that we maximise potential for young people. However, Labour Members are disappointed that our colleagues in the Scottish National party continue to ration apprenticeships, and that they seem to be looking to downgrade them in Scotland.
It is common to think of apprentices as young school leavers, but, last Friday, when Stafford college and I jointly hosted a Train to Gain seminar for local businesses, manufacturing employers expressed a desire to engage people of different ages as apprentices. Will my hon. Friend confirm that the help that is available to young apprentices is also available to older workers who want to be apprentices?
My hon. Friend is absolutely right to draw the House’s attention to the fact that we are also talking about adult apprentices over the age of 25, and we are committed to seeing their numbers grow. This will particularly help women returners, who often want to come into non-traditional areas and to be productive in the wider economy. I am really pleased to hear that my hon. Friend held that seminar for employers in his constituency, and I hope that other hon. Members will take up that initiative. Train to Gain is a programme with more than £1 billion in funding up to 2010-11. That money is there for employers to subsidise training, and, alongside that, the growth of adult apprenticeships is key.
Further and Higher Education
Increasing participation and the nation’s skills is key to unlocking individual talent and to long-term economic and social well-being. We are increasing learning opportunities and strengthening demand from young people and adults, through measures including better information, advice and guidance; skills accounts; an improved level of higher education student support; new courses co-funded with employers; the new university challenge; and increased capital investment in the further and higher education sectors.
I thank my hon. Friend for that answer, but will he tell me what he is doing to improve the provision of information for young people who want to become students?
This is a critically important area. We have made huge progress educationally in the past 11 years, but I acknowledge that one of the areas in which we have the most to do is advice and guidance. An initiative that we announced recently, the Aimhigher Associates programme, is critically important in this regard. It will involve 5,500 undergraduates going into schools, working alongside young people and helping them with their UCAS applications. We still hear too often of instances of young people in schools not getting the appropriate advice and guidance. We need to look at providing incentives to schools to make this more of a priority, and I am discussing that matter with my colleagues in the Department for Children, Schools and Families.
The Minister will know that Jodrell Bank is in my constituency and partly in that of my hon. Friend the Member for Congleton (Ann Winterton). Its important and innovative e-Merlin project is under threat because its funding is likely to be removed. Is this the way to encourage young people who are interested in science and technology to go forward into higher education? Will the Minister or the Secretary of State meet me to discuss this concern?
From a sedentary position, my right hon. Friend has just assured me that he will meet the hon. Gentleman. The Government are committed to astronomy, but this matter is rightly being taken forward by the Science and Technology Facilities Council, and a consultation is taking place. I have to say that, if the Government had stepped in and established this project from the beginning, we would have been criticised for intervening in matters that were properly matters for the funding council.
Can the Minister explain the finding in the latest report from the Learning and Skills Council on further education that safeguarded provision, far from being safeguarded, has collapsed by 42 per cent., affecting 185,000 adults over the past three years?
I do not recognise the figure that the hon. Gentleman has mentioned. We are certainly committed to maintaining the level of funding to informal adult education, for example. We have also maintained as a priority learning for learners with learning difficulties and disabilities. We need to ensure that this central direction is implemented on the ground, and I am happy to meet the hon. Gentleman to discuss the matter.
Last week, I met the principal of the excellent Leicester college and was again reminded of the work that the Government have done to make available allowances and grants to enable students to participate in further and higher education. However, I was disturbed to hear that, in some sections, there was still a low level of awareness of the availability of such grants. Will the Minister assure me that steps will be taken to ensure that all students who could benefit from such allowances and grants are made aware of their availability and enabled to take them up?
In both further and higher education, we are committing a significant amount of resource and effort to getting that message across. There is radio, TV and online advertising, and we have gone out of our way to do this not only from a Government perspective but through working with the Association of Colleges, with universities and with the National Union of Students to get the message across. If there is one person who is unaware of the provision, that is a challenge for us, but we will keep on trying to get the facts across.
Despite the Government’s huge spending to encourage the participation rates of people from lower socio-economic backgrounds in higher education, those rates remain little changed since 1999. Government policy and numerous initiatives have failed, so what does the Minister think went wrong and what does he plan to do differently in the two years he has left?
The hon. Gentleman really does need to check the figures on this matter. If we look at university applications—[Interruption.] The hon. Gentleman will find this if he looks carefully. University applications for last year were up by more than 6 per cent. and they are up again by more than 6 per cent. this year. Among students from lower socio-economic groups, the proportions are increasing, albeit not at the rate that I would wish. That is why we are committing significant resources as a Government to make further improvement.
To continue on the theme of widening participation, the Minister will know that only three out of the 20 Russell group of universities are actually meeting their benchmark figure for recruiting students from low-participation neighbourhoods. What more can he do to push the Russell group to widen participation rates further?
I know that my hon. Friend takes a real interest in these issues. If he looks at the Russell group figures on state school entrants and young people from lower socio-economic backgrounds and lower-participation neighbourhoods, he will find that the proportions have gone up since 1997-98, but every vice-chancellor I speak to acknowledges that we need to do more. That is why we strongly pushed for greater structural links between schools, colleges and universities and also why we need better advice and guidance in schools to encourage young people to gain access to the most appropriate institution that best suits their talents. Sometimes that advice is not forthcoming; we need to ensure that it is.
Can I give my hon. Friend some advice about what went wrong? I will tell him what went wrong when they shut the pits. Higher education used to be sponsored in every area of the National Union of Mineworkers, in collaboration with the National Coal Board, enabling miners at every single pit to engage in higher education if they wanted to. Some went on to university, Ruskin college and all the rest. But the Government of that lot opposite smashed all that at a stroke when they closed all the pits in those dark, dismal years of the ‘80s and ‘90s. The electorate out there should never forget it.
May I say that I absolutely agree with my hon. Friend? It may be 11 years since we came to office, but people can and should have long memories about what the last Conservative Government did. My hon. Friend also highlights the commitment within the mining industry to pushing people up to the highest skill levels, which provides an example for every business.
Innovation
We have just entered the period covered by the new public service agreement. Past trends indicate that good progress is being made. For instance, the latest UK innovation survey reports that 64 per cent. of UK businesses were active in innovation over the period between 2004 and 2006 and that there was a 19 percentage point like for like improvement over the six years before that. University interaction with business and other users has been increasing across a range of indicators, with support from Government programmes such as the Higher Education Innovation Fund. Our White Paper, “Innovation Nation”, sets out further policy commitments to help innovation flourish right across our economy and public services.
There must have been some reason why the Department started out being called the “Department for Innovation” apart from the fact that a Department called “DUS”—Department for Universities and Skills—would have sounded a bit dismal. I suppose “DIUS” has pretensions to sounding like a Greek god-like Department. I remain intrigued to know what Ministers are doing in practical terms to encourage inventiveness, ingenuity and innovation in constituencies like mine? What difference do the people of Banbury and Bicester see as a result of this Department being called one for “Innovation”?
We are indeed the Department for Innovation, and Dius is a minor Roman god for oaths—or, as someone once said, for swearing! As a Government Department, we are doing a great deal to encourage innovation across our economy. If the hon. Gentleman looked at “Innovation Nation”, our White Paper launched in March, he would see that, in addition to our new policy commitments, a range of activities are already under way. There is funding for the Technology Strategy Board, which will spend £1 billion over the next three years in collaboration with industry to stimulate innovation. We are doubling the number of knowledge transfer partnerships, enabling university researchers to work with companies on practical projects. There are new commitments in “Innovation Nation” to annual innovation procurement plans that every Department will produce, so that we can harness some of the £150 billion that we spend every year on encouraging innovation and developing more growth-oriented small businesses.
The Sainsbury review is a stinging indictment of Government failure when it comes to innovation. It contains about 100 criticisms. I am sure that the Minister has read it. As for the Government’s response—the White Paper “Innovation Nation”—it appears to me to be an admission of guilt.
After talking for 10 years about public procurement innovation, the Minister said last week that we haven’t cracked it yet. On page 3 of the Sainsbury review, Lord Sainsbury says:
“Demand-side factors, such as procurement and regulation, which can play a role in encouraging innovation, have received too little Government focus”.
Does the Minister agree with his well-respected predecessor?
When I met David Sainsbury yesterday, he was very satisfied indeed with the progress that we are making in implementing the review’s recommendations. One of the things that we have done as a Government is establish a science and innovation framework from 2004 to 2014. We have made a policy commitment to funding the science budget at least in relation to the level of growth of the economy, which is why it will grow by 2.7 per cent. in real terms over the next three years.
The hon. Gentleman’s policy, as I understand it from the shadow Chancellor, is to share the benefits of growth. When the shadow Secretary of State, the hon. Member for Havant (Mr. Willetts), rises to ask his question, perhaps he will tell us either that he agrees with the shadow Chancellor, or by how much he wants to cut the science budget.
Topical Questions
Despite all the progress that we have made in the past decade, too many adults struggle with low or out-of-date skills. A third of employers do not train their staff, and 8 million workers go without training each year. We must tackle those skills challenges to secure a prosperous and fair Britain. Yesterday we signalled our intention to consult on a statutory new right to request time to train, which will allow millions of employees to start a conversation with their employers about how they can become more productive members of staff and enjoy better career prospects. We also believe that that will encourage employers to take up the increasing Government support for training programmes that is available to them.
The Secretary of State will know that for decades Cumbrian Labour Members have sought to establish a higher education institution in the county. Thanks to the Government, we now have the university of Cumbria, Britain’s newest university, which is being funded with more than £100 million. How can the Secretary of State help me to ensure that it meets the needs of local employers?
I am grateful to my hon. Friend for drawing the attention of the House to yet another example of the Government’s commitment to investment in higher education. We have all been delighted with the establishment of the university of Cumbria. I suggest that my hon. Friend sit down with university staff to examine the document on higher-level skills that was produced a few weeks ago by my hon. Friend the Minister for Lifelong Learning, Further and Higher Education. It sets out all the different ways in which universities can work with local employers to develop foundation degrees, short courses and many other ways of working—full-time and part-time—which can ensure both that the university meets the needs of employers and, equally important, that my hon. Friend’s constituents who want to go to university have the chance to do so close to home, and to study a course that will make a real difference to their lives.
I take those allegations very seriously. The evidence—such as it is—is that this is an isolated example of students apparently being encouraged to rate their institution more highly than they might have done unprompted, and I utterly condemn it. I know that the Higher Education Funding Council will take this matter very seriously. It is very important, not least to universities and students, that people can have full confidence in the national student survey, and I assure the hon. Gentleman that Ministers will want to make sure that action is taken should there be any breaches of the protocol.
Of course we will keep the level of those fees under review and look at what happens. It is important to say, however, that the ESOL budget has trebled since 2001, and we expect it to rise in real terms over the course of the comprehensive spending review. This whole exercise is about making sure that ESOL reaches those who need it most. A further consultation is currently under way on the suggested principle that, where areas have to set priorities, they should prioritise long-term residents with a commitment to this country who make the biggest impact on community cohesion, rather than transitory migrant workers who may not be here in a year or two.
I am sure that the Secretary of State will be aware of the recent Foreign Office decision to cut massively the support that it offers students from other countries through Chevening and Commonwealth scholarships. Was the Secretary of State consulted in advance on that Foreign Office proposal, does he accept that it has caused widespread concern among our universities, and will he urge the Foreign Office to reopen this decision, which is harming the international links of our universities?
We are discussing this matter with the Foreign Office. It is part of the Foreign Office’s process of focusing on its key strategic priorities, such as climate change, security and counter-terrorism. Notwithstanding that, the Foreign and Commonwealth Office is maintaining a global programme with a particular focus on countries such as China and India that are of real long-term importance to the UK, and the FCO expects more than 900 Chevening scholarships by 2008-09, so this is still a substantial programme. Nevertheless, I am talking to the Foreign Office about this matter.
My hon. Friend is right to raise this issue. The Government are doing a number of things already. We have reformed the training system through Train to Gain, so it should be easier for employers to influence the provision in local colleges to meet the needs of these industries. We have developed a national skills academy with the process industries, to make sure that we have the right infrastructure of training. Also, as we have discussed, it is now much easier for companies to work with universities to develop appropriate courses and degrees. Having said all that, we recognise that there are industries that are vital to the future of this country and that can project a clear need for skills in the future, and we must look at those key sectors and make sure that the training system is organised to meet their needs. I will be coming to Teesside in, from memory, early June, and perhaps I will have an opportunity to discuss some of these issues locally with the industry and my hon. Friend.
The Secretary of State welcomed the establishment of the university of Cumbria, which means that the administrative county of Somerset is the last in the country not to have a university. Somerset has some university courses, which are administered by Yeovil college and others, but no university. In the light of what he said to the hon. Member for Copeland (Mr. Reed), does he believe that there is a strong case for a university in Somerset?
There may well be, but I would encourage the hon. Gentleman to take a leading role in responding to the new university challenge because the new university centres will go to the places that can put the best case locally to show that they have the capacity to deliver higher education, that it will contribute to the local economy and that it will open up opportunities for participation in higher education that would not otherwise exist. Ultimately, it will not be for me to say that Somerset should have a university, but I encourage people such as him, who think that the potential is there, to get working with partners at local level and be ready to put the case forward when the Higher Education Funding Council opens the process later this year.
My hon. Friend is absolutely right, and I shall point out three things. The further education capital programme of £2.3 billion, which I announced a few weeks ago, will be for new projects. They will all have to meet the new higher green standards that will be published in July, which will give us as high a standard of sustainability as any part of the public sector building programme. HEFC, too, is agreeing to ensure that its capital programme contributes to meeting the reduction in its carbon footprint necessary for the Government to meet their expected carbon budgets.
We are actively discussing with the Association of Colleges, Universities UK and others how we can work with them and with students to ensure that we achieve the reduction in carbon emissions right across the further and higher education estate that will be needed. My hon. Friend is right to raise the issue, but we are very active on it and I look forward to his support.
May I reinforce the point made by my hon. Friend the Member for Macclesfield (Sir Nicholas Winterton) about the e-Merlin project at Jodrell Bank in our respective constituencies? While accepting the point about the funding councils, will the Government acknowledge that this is not only a national but an international centre of excellence for astrophysics? It is vital that its valuable work, which greatly benefits the science and technology base in this country, is encouraged to continue and to expand.
The hon. Lady is right to highlight the internationally recognised experience at the university of Manchester, which owns Jodrell Bank. As has been said, decisions on the e-Merlin project are very much a matter for the Science and Technology Facilities Council. In accordance with the Haldane principles, it would be wrong for Ministers to interfere with that process. That body will probably be making decisions in early July. It has already indicated that the e-Merlin project is part of its future strategy for radio astronomy, which involves exciting projects such as the square kilometre array and, potentially, the extremely large telescope. Radio astronomy has a very bright future in the United Kingdom, and the Government are committed to continuing to support it.
Tomorrow, the Bishop of London will celebrate 100 years of the Bishop Creighton House settlement in Fulham, which was founded by his distinguished predecessor. Bishop Creighton House, which is led by Rory Gillert, and Hammersmith and Fulham volunteer centre, led by Marion Schumann, are two of the most successful volunteer agencies in London, but volunteering requires money for infrastructure, training and development. Given the appalling cuts in voluntary sector funding by Tory-run Hammersmith and Fulham council, what more can the Government do to support these outstanding institutions?
I think that all in London are disappointed and astounded by some of the cuts that are being made in my hon. Friend’s constituency, but I am pleased that my Department has been able to extend the Train to Gain programme, which is £1 billion-worth of investment, to volunteers. We have done so to ensure that volunteers with the right skills are able to play an active role in their communities, and I hope that those who wish to do so will be able to move on to jobs. I am also pleased that the Learning and Skills Council supports programmes for volunteers in his constituency, including the Torch project at the Lyric theatre. We will continue to do all we can against the backdrop of cuts that he describes.
The Government are completely opposed to such a boycott, which will harm rather than help moves towards peace and reconciliation in the middle east. It is significant that the motion before this year’s University and College Union falls well short of calls for an outright boycott. I think that that is because the proposers of the motion know that there is no widespread support for that among UCU members. Both Israel and the occupied territories contain both progressives and reactionaries, and the problem with boycotts is that they make the job of progressives much more difficult and entrench the position of the reactionaries.
Yes, we do. I was delighted to go to Swindon and meet the young apprentices. There are remarkable success stories around the country of young people who have started an apprenticeship programme at 14 or 15 before they leave school, doing three days a week at school, a day in the workplace and a day at college. If such schemes are well run, they are hugely motivating for the young people. We want to see that provision expanded, and a significant expansion in apprenticeship starts for those over 16 and older workers. Our aspiration is that in a few years’ time, one in five young people—far more than today—will have a chance to do an apprenticeship. I hope that many of those will have the chance to get their first exposure to a young apprenticeship—as my hon. Friend’s constituents do in Swindon—as it is highly motivating.
I am delighted to offer my congratulations to everybody at the college who has been involved in the building programme and in achieving such excellent educational outcomes. There are some fantastic things going on in further education. My hon. Friend’s college has benefited by £60 million, but 10 years ago the national budget for FE college capital programmes was zero. Earlier this week I was able to visit another part of the country, Crewe and Nantwich—[Hon. Members: “Oh.”]—where an FE college is being built, at the expense of £60 million, so that area too will benefit.
My hon. Friend is right. In 1997, there were only 75,000 apprenticeships on this side of the border, and many of us looked to Scotland, which still had an apprenticeship base. It is deeply worrying to see SNP colleagues now rationing and downgrading apprenticeships and, potentially, jeopardising the prospects of young people in Scotland. This is a devolved matter, but we take apprenticeships very seriously—
Order. I think that we had better finish.
Business of the House
May I ask the Leader of the House to give us the forthcoming business?
The business for next week will be as follows:
Monday 19 May—Consideration in Committee of the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill [Lords].
Tuesday 20 May—Conclusion of consideration in Committee of the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill [Lords].
Wednesday 21 May—Second Reading of the Regulatory Enforcement and Sanctions Bill [Lords].
Thursday 22 May—Motion on the Whitsun recess Adjournment.
The provisional business for the week commencing 2 June will include:
Monday 2 June—Remaining stages of the Planning Bill—day 1.
Tuesday 3 June—Conclusion of Lords amendments to the Child Maintenance and Other Payments Bill, followed by a motion to approve a European document relating to the promotion of energy from renewable resources, followed by a motion to approve a European document relating to maritime policy.
Wednesday 4 June—Opposition day [13th Allotted Day]. There will be a debate on an Opposition motion, subject to be announced.
Thursday 5 June—Topical debate, subject to be announced, followed by a general debate, subject to be announced.
Friday 6 June—Private Members’ Bills.
I thank the right hon. and learned Lady for giving us the business of the House.
As the Leader of the House will be aware, it is normal practice to give the House advance notice of statements by the Prime Minister. Last week, I asked the right hon. and learned Lady when the Government would announce their draft legislative programme. She would not give a date to the House. Yet, at the weekend, the date was given to the media. Why were the media given advance notice but not Members of this House?
Yesterday, the Prime Minister told the House that the Chancellor had to announce his taxation proposals on Tuesday, during a by-election campaign, if they were to go into the Finance Bill. Will the right hon. and learned Lady confirm that that was incorrect and that, for example, the proposals could have been introduced simply as a new clause on Report after 22 May? Was that not just a blatant attempt at an election bribe?
Yesterday, the Governor of the Bank of England warned the country to brace itself for a recession. Every day, the cost of living is creeping up, and earlier this week, the Minister for Housing inadvertently revealed that there is a real danger of a housing market crash. The Governor reaffirmed that in his statement and said that interest rates should not be cut for at least two years, which will deeply worry those who are struggling with their mortgages. So will next week’s topical debate be on the decline in the housing market?
In the international women’s day debate on 6 March, the right hon. and learned Lady said that the Walsh review on flexible working was
“not into whether we should increase the age of children whose parents can have flexible working, but into how we will go about doing it.”—[Official Report, 6 March 2008; Vol. 472, c. 1934.]
Yesterday, the Prime Minister announced that the Government will take forward the review’s recommendations but said that they will now consult on implementation—another consultation on top of a review. Is that not just a delaying tactic that will create more uncertainty for business? May we have a statement from the right hon. and learned Lady, as the Minister for Women and Equality, to clarify the Government’s position?
We learned this week that a High Court judge has allowed a disabled women to seek a judicial review of the Government’s decision to shut thousands of post offices on the grounds that it discriminates against disabled people. That comes on the back of reports that 3,000 further post offices are threatened with closure on top of the 2,500 previously announced. It has also been revealed that the Saturday delivery service is under threat and that Postcomm has called for parts of Royal Mail to be privatised. Post offices are a lifeline for both urban and rural communities. We are committed to the universal service, but the Government are presiding over a reduction in services. So may we have an urgent statement from the Secretary of State for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform on the Government’s position on the future of the Post Office and Royal Mail?
The Government are dithering over flexible working and presiding over the decline in our post offices, and their economic policy is a shambles. They have backed down on capital gains tax, the taxation of non-doms and the 10p tax rate, and we learned this week that they are backing down on changes to the corporate tax regime. Policy is set to grab the headlines, with no thought for the consequences. Speaking of which, will the right hon. and learned Lady now tell the House the impact of the Chancellor’s commitment to change income tax thresholds in the National Insurance Contributions Bill, which is currently going through the House of Lords?
The right hon. Lady mentioned the Prime Minister’s statement on the draft legislative programme. I have made it clear to the House before that my view is that there is a distinction to be made. If a statement has new content, it is important that it be made to the House first. On the timing of statements, the most important thing is that everybody in the House understands that a statement is to be made, and that that information gets to all Members. I do not think that the House should be so jealous of its right to hear when a statement will be made, but it should be jealous of its right to hear the content of the statement.
On the timing of the changes that will be made to the Finance Bill as a result of the adjustments made after the abolition of the 10p rate of tax, the right hon. Lady will note that the changes will indeed be made to the Bill before the Crewe by-election, but after the local council elections. The fact is that the Chancellor agreed that the adjustments should be made; the issue of how to go about making them has been considered, and he has come to the House with his proposals.
The right hon. Lady mentioned the housing market. The Chancellor and Prime Minister have made it clear that we are concerned about what is happening in the housing market, especially with so many people coming to the end of the fixed-rate part of their mortgage. Uncertainty in the banking system is causing what is being described as the credit crunch. That is why there has been a considerable number of proposals on how to put liquidity into the banking system to enable greater availability of mortgages. For that reason, we have come forward with proposals to help first-time buyers and broaden the opportunity for shared equity schemes. If the right hon. Lady wants a debate on the subject, I will take her remarks as a proposal for a topical debate, but she can of course make the issue the subject of an Opposition day debate, if she sees fit.
The right hon. Lady mentioned the Walsh review, published this morning. My right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform has tabled a written ministerial statement on the report by Imelda Walsh, who conducted her review at the Government’s request. I thank her warmly for the work that she has done, and for her report. The Government accept the proposals in the report, but it is right that people be given time to read it. The Prime Minister has said that we expect to introduce her proposals early next year.
I think that the right hon. Lady would agree that we were correct to introduce a right to request flexible working for parents with children aged up to six. Many parents have made such a request and have had it granted by employers, but we need to make sure that more people are aware of their rights. We recognise that the difficulty in balancing working life with bringing up children does not end when the child reaches its sixth birthday, and that is why we agree with Imelda Walsh’s proposals to raise that age to 16.
Adopting Conservative policy.
Okay; the reality is that a lot of changes have come forward. Maternity pay and leave have been extended and paternity leave has been introduced for the first time. Sure Start children’s centres, nurseries, tax credits—a great many measures have been introduced to help working mothers, and working parents in general. The truth is that they were brought forward by a Labour Government against the dragged anchor of Tory opposition. We are planning to build on those measures, and if the Conservative Opposition now intend to support that, we welcome it. However, to say that the suggested measures are Conservative proposals is an attempt to rewrite history, and the Conservatives really should not treat the public as fools.
The right hon. Lady also mentioned the Post Office and Royal Mail. She said that she is committed to universal post offices. Against a background of falling revenue for the Post Office and falling numbers of people at post offices, perhaps she will say how she would fund keeping all the post offices open. She knows that there has been a review of the Royal Mail, evidence has been taken and interim findings have been reported, but the full report will be presented to the Secretary of State for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform next year.
In this age of greater freedom of information and transparency, will my right hon. and learned Friend consider having a debate on the Short money that flows to Opposition parties? It is many millions of pounds, and parliamentarians find it impossible to discover who gets the money, how it is used and how it is balanced between Ashcroft money and other money. Greater transparency should work for one and for all. It is about time that we lifted the lid on that money, who gets it and for what purposes.
That is a very good proposal from my hon. Friend. I will take it up and report back to him and the House, if necessary. As he says, the Short money is millions of pounds. It is available to enable Opposition parties to develop policy, not for party political campaigning. It should be subject to greater transparency and I will report back on the matter.
First, can the Leader of the House tell us when she was first told that the Chancellor of the Exchequer wanted to make an additional Budget statement on Tuesday? Secondly, the Chancellor and the Prime Minister keep on telling us that the announcement on Tuesday was nothing at all to do with the Crewe and Nantwich by-election, but the people of Crewe and Nantwich, like everyone else, might have some concerns about the matters that affect the pockets, homes and livelihoods of our people. Given that fact, and that this week we have heard that unemployment has risen for the third month in a row, food prices have gone up more than 6 per cent. in the past year, and we face probably the greatest uncertainty in the housing market, which everybody knew but the Minister for Housing inadvertently confirmed on Tuesday, could we move next Wednesday’s business so that that day—the day before the by-election—there could be a debate on the economy in Britain, possibly entitled, “Are the Government still on the people’s side?”
Out there in the real world, everybody realises that the Government are scrambling to undo all the things that they have done. In the Chamber there appears to be a state of total denial among those on the Government Benches. Housing, which featured in the draft legislative programme, is clearly important. May we have an early debate on how many affordable houses have been provided so far, how many will be provided under the Government’s current spending plans, and how many additional houses will be available after the announcements made by the Prime Minister yesterday? All the analysis suggests that it is a matter of hundreds or a thousand or two, rather than tens of thousands, and that there has been a lot of hype and very little delivery.
I join the plea for another debate on post offices. It is bad enough that most of the proposed closures in London have just been confirmed, that many other closures are proposed around the country and that Crown post offices are facing franchising, as is the one in the borough that the right hon. and learned Lady and I represent, but hearing that we are to lose our Saturday delivery as well suggests that something is pretty rotten in the state of the Post Office. The Government take responsibility. They have been in power for 11 years. Will the Secretary of State for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform come to the House and explain whether that, too, will be Government policy, just as all the closures have been Government policy or supported by the Government?
Lastly, the Leader of the House has said, to her credit, that she is keen to get the processes of the House reformed so that we do things logically. She knows that on Tuesday night, we at last debated the “Statement of Changes in the Immigration Rules”. The only trouble was that the rules came into force at the end of February and we could not have the debate until the middle of May.
It happens a lot.
As the hon. Gentleman says, it happens a lot—
For many years.
And it has done so for many years. May we please bring to an end the nonsensical system whereby secondary legislation comes into force before either House has had a chance to debate it and decide whether it agrees with it, and whether or not there has been consultation? The Minister for Borders and Immigration, to his credit, had to make a major concession because he accepted the arguments put in opposition to some of the rules, and the rules will now effectively have to be redrawn.
Please may we have a proper, timetabled sequence for secondary legislation so that we see, debate and decide a draft, and the measure comes into force some time later?
The hon. Gentleman asked when I was first told that the Chancellor had reached a conclusion about the proposals that he was to put before the House on the 10p rate of tax and when he asked to make an oral statement on them. I do not like not answering questions, but this might be one of those issues on which there is not supposed to be complete, utter transparency and openness. So I will not answer the question at this point, but I will take advice on whether the issue is one of those Government things that remain as part of internal discussions between Ministers.
The hon. Gentleman’s second point was about the economy of Britain. I remind him that although in the last quarter unemployment figures showed an increase, unemployment is lower now than it was this time last year. There is a continuous increase in employment, and that is very important. That is one of the reasons why the Chancellor and the Prime Minister set a great deal of store on ensuring that liquidity remains in the banking system, so that continuous finance is available for small businesses and they can continue to employ people. The economy remains on track. The international situation is difficult, of course, and people are concerned. However, we are doing all that we can to keep the economy stable and growing.
The hon. Gentleman mentioned housing. He will know that a great deal has been done on housing in the past 10 years. In his constituency and mine, more or less every flat on every council estate has had new windows, doors, roofing and lifts. There has been massive investment in housing. He will also know that more social housing—flats and houses—has been built. Furthermore, there are 1 million more homeowners than when we came into government, and we are planning for there to be 1 million more still. Of course, there are difficulties in the housing market at the moment because of the credit crunch, which started with the sub-prime mortgage problems in America. However, we intend to do all that we can as a Government, and we are working to ensure that the housing market is as stable and protected as possible.
The hon. Gentleman also raised the question of the Royal Mail. It is right that there should be a review because of changes in how people are communicating, particularly in respect of electronic communications. I thank Richard Hooper, formerly of Ofcom, who has undertaken the review on behalf of the Government. What is important is that we have a fair deal for Royal Mail users and employees and for taxpayers.
The hon. Gentleman mentioned the question of this House having debated secondary legislation after it had come into effect. It certainly seems odd that we should debate something that has already gone into law. However, I am sure that there is a perfectly good reason for it; I just cannot remember what it is at the moment. I am sure that I will be reminded by my colleagues before the end of oral questions about why something that seems rather illogical is in fact entirely logical. If I am not, I shall write to the hon. Gentleman on the issue.
The Government rightly keep banging on about cutting vehicle emissions. Outside your official residence, Mr. Speaker, is where Ministers’ cars sit. In inclement weather, the drivers sit there with the motors running, presumably to keep warm. When it is hot, they also sit there with the motors running, presumably to keep the air conditioning on. Yet there are serried ranks of Toyota Prius hybrids out there, run by Ministers to cut emissions. Will my right hon. and learned Friend liaise with her colleagues and perhaps provide suitable facilities so that the drivers can have a room adjacent to that parking area and stay warm in winter and cool in summer without unnecessarily polluting the atmosphere?
I thank my hon. Friend for his question, which I shall raise with my ministerial colleagues at the Department for Transport.
When does the right hon. and learned Lady expect to receive the Baker report on MPs’ pay, and when does she expect a debate on it?
On 24 January, the House agreed that Sir John Baker would look into the question of MPs’ pay in respect of pegging it to a rate that would obviate the need for Members of the House to decide on our own pay. It was agreed that Sir John would report, and that we would have an opportunity to debate and decide on the report’s conclusions, before the House rose for the summer recess. I reassure the hon. Gentleman that Sir John is proceeding with his work and is on track. There will be enough time for hon. Members to look at his report before it is debated, which will be well before the House rises in the summer.
Will my right hon. and learned Friend find time for the House to look at the level of support provided by our consular services to business men abroad? I am speaking of my constituent Norman Mark, among others. He sunk his life savings into a café in Turkey, only to find it occupied by local villagers. He has had little meaningful support from our consular services overseas and Turkish services here.
My hon. Friend has reinforced the importance of the role of consular services. I will bring her constituent’s case to the attention of my right hon. Friend the Foreign Secretary.
May I take the Leader of the House back to the question asked by my right hon. Friend the Member for Maidenhead (Mrs. May) about the National Insurance Contributions Bill? After the panic Budget statement on Tuesday, there may be implications for the Bill—although there may not; I do not know—before it starts to pass through the House of Lords. After all, the whole idea was to put national insurance contributions and income tax into line. Will we need another panic statement on that issue?
As I understand it, making changes to the National Insurance Contributions Bill [Lords] in respect of the 10p tax rate would be out of scope. Matters of taxation are taken through the Finance Bill.
My right hon. and learned Friend may be aware of the untimely death of Scottish football legend Tommy Burns, who died earlier today. Tommy was a well-respected figure, not only in Scottish football, but throughout the UK. He was recognised for his contribution to the Scottish national football team and his beloved Celtic football club. Will my right hon. and learned Friend join the all-party Scottish football group and others in sending the House’s condolences to Tommy’s wife Rosemary and his four daughters? He will be sadly missed.
I thank my hon. Friend for his question. I am sure that the whole House will join him in paying tribute to Tommy Burns and in sending our condolences to Tommy’s wife Rosemary and his four children. Tommy was a highly respected figure in the football community, both as player and coach. Like his close friend and team mate Phil O’Donnell, he was a family man. Both of them will be sadly missed.
Will the right hon. and learned Lady consider allowing a topical debate on dentistry? Clearly, I have a declared interest in the subject; because of that, I get considerable pressure from outside the House. The debate should be broad and cover not only the national health service, although the Select Committee on Health has a report coming out soon, and to be fair, national health service dentistry is in a shambolic state. Could the debate be very broad, and cover prevention and education? It should also consider the General Dental Council, which is a very expensive, authoritarian, invasive and unpleasant organisation in many ways. For example, I cannot understand why it asks dentists and dental nurses about their sexual interests in a questionnaire. The GDC is asking whether—
Order. The hon. Gentleman can put his case when the debate comes.
Dentistry, as the hon. Gentleman says, is an important public health issue. He will have an opportunity to raise it in the pre-recess Adjournment debate, if he so chooses. I shall consider his suggestion as a proposal for a topical debate.
I warmly welcome the Government’s proposals to extend the opportunity to request flexible working to the parents of older children. The Labour Government have a great record on helping parents to balance family life and work. Is my right hon. and learned Friend aware that since 1997 the number of women in work in Wales has risen by nearly 13 per cent.? Does she agree that our proposals will be of great help to those women? When may we have a debate on the subject of family balance and work?
I thank my hon. Friend for her comments and I shall bring them to the attention of my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform. The fact that the stay-at-home mother now goes out to work has been a huge social revolution. We must ensure that women who go out to work can help the family finances and contribute to our economy and our services and can be the sort of parents that they want to be as they bring up their children. It is important that work is flexible around family needs, rather than the other way around. Some people have said in the past that such provisions are a burden on business, but we think that it is important for the whole of society that children are well brought up.
The next frontier in the question of flexible work is the care of older people. Just as the stay-at-home mother now goes out to work and is not available for the full-time care of her children, the stay-at-home daughter who used to care for elderly relatives goes out to work, too. We need to ensure that work is flexible not only for parents but for people who care for older relatives. I hope that the Opposition, as well as the whole House, will back us when we move forward on that.
May we have a debate on the online filing system? A recent Public Accounts Committee report showed that 3 million people filled the forms in wrongly, and understated their situation by £3 billion. The problem is that the online filing system was thought up by committee. It is complicated and difficult. I defy almost anybody to fill it in correctly. In America, which has many more taxpayers, the Internal Revenue Service administers the system through the public sector. That is highly successful and has worked well for years. Why can we not go down that route?
Perhaps the hon. Gentleman would like to raise that subject during the debate on the Public Accounts Committee motion this afternoon. I think that that would be an appropriate issue on which he could seek to catch the Speaker’s eye.
Yesterday, I had the opportunity to attend a ceremony with local children to celebrate the complete rebuilding of Washington school in my constituency, which is part of a £120 million investment in secondary education in the city of Sunderland. Will the Leader of the House try to make time available for a debate on the benefits of that level of investment for young people in our constituencies, and the impact it has in transforming their lives and life chances?
I am sure that the parents, teachers and pupils of Washington school will be glad that my hon. Friend has had the opportunity to raise the issue in the House today. We think that investment in schools is investment for the future. An investment in education for the next generation has sometimes been characterised as spending—there have been complaints that we have not mended the roof while the sun is shining—but investment in children’s education is the best foundation for the future economy.
May I make a plea that the right hon. and learned Lady use the weekly business questions to respond to Members’ requests for debates rather than indulge in long party political statements?
I am consistent, and my question concerns the fact that Zimbabwe is dropping out of the picture, despite the fact its people continue to suffer. An election has been held and no proper results have been declared. Is it not time that the House held a debate on Zimbabwe, for which we are responsible as we put Mr. Mugabe in power in the first place? May we have a debate on the Floor of the House, in Government time, so that we can urge action and try to bring some peace and stability to that part of the world and to its long-suffering people?
I will try to refrain from making party political points in business questions. The problem is that I am severely provoked by the Opposition. I will try to heed the hon. Gentleman’s words because he, at least, is consistent in raising business issues in business questions. Indeed, he is consistent in expressing concern about Zimbabwe.
In Zimbabwe, torture seems to be on the increase, more people are being killed and there is displacement. The electoral commission has said that there should elections in August, but torture, killing and displacement are not a background for free and fair elections. There was an Adjournment debate two weeks ago on Zimbabwe, but the hon. Gentleman is right and, although we do not want to provide Mugabe with an opportunity to say that everybody should rally around him because it is all the fault of the British Government, we need to have a debate on the subject soon.
Following today’s publication of the report by the Select Committee on Standards and Privileges, may we have a debate as soon as possible on openness in party political donations so that this House and the country can be fully aware of the systematic deception in the funding of individual shadow cabinet Members’ offices, and the way in which donations have been made to individual Members that have not been registered as they ought to have been in the Register of Members’ Interests?
Order. We cannot accuse the shadow Cabinet or any other hon. Member of deception. [Interruption.] I have seen the report and I know what the hon. Gentleman is talking about. Perhaps he should withdraw the statement about deception. That would be the best thing to do.
I withdraw the suggestion of deception, but I would like an opportunity to expand on my comments as soon as possible.
The hon. Gentleman will not get an opportunity at this stage, because I am going to move on.
The Prime Minister made his statement on the pre-legislative programme yesterday. It included £200 million to fund the purchase of properties for rent or for use in shared equity schemes. However, The Press and Journal reports today that that £200 million is already with the Housing Corporation and is intended to help those who are unable to buy homes of their own. Will the Leader of the House arrange for the Prime Minister to make another emergency relaunch statement to explain that the money is being recycled and that it applies to England only and to explain which of the spending programmes are to be slashed to fund yesterday’s headline?
The draft legislative programme, which we published yesterday, is, I believe, an important opportunity to set out the key points of the Government’s forthcoming legislative programme, which will form the basis of the Queen’s Speech, together with other important issues that run alongside that programme. It is an opportunity for the public to see work that was previously undertaken behind closed doors. There will also be an opportunity to debate the draft legislative programme, with a full-day debate before the House rises in the summer.
Will the Leader of the House look at early-day motion 1567?
[That this House welcomes the launch of the Fair Tips Charter Campaign by the Daily Mirror and Unite the UNION, while recognising there are honourable owners of hotels, restaurants, and other hospitality outlets who ensure that all gratuities are paid to their staff in addition to at least the minimum wage without deductions; is also aware that HM Revenue and Customs class service charges, cover charges, gratuities and tips all as gratuities for national insurance contributions purposes yet many hospitality establishments still treat these as extra payments to the proprietors and do not pass them on to their staff in addition to at least the minimum wage; understands that this practice is legally allowed at the moment because of regulation 31 subsection 1(e) governing the Minimum Wage Act 1998; and calls on all other trades unions and media to support the Fair Tips Charter, all hospitality outlets and their trade associations to sign up to and operate the four pledges in the Charter and the Government to introduce an amendment in the Queen’s Speech that will ensure that all tips will be paid to staff in addition to the minimum wage.]
The motion is tabled in my name and has been signed by 42 Members from across the Benches. It welcomes the launch of the fair tips charter campaign by Unite the Union and the Daily Mirror. As many as 1.5 million people are not getting their tips on top of their minimum wage. The Leader of the House might recall that the Secretary of State for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform promised on 3 April that he would meet my hon. Friend the Member for Paisley and Renfrewshire, North (Jim Sheridan). Will he extend that meeting to the Unite group in Parliament, which is backing the campaign? May we have a statement from the Secretary of State about how he will bring about the change? It does not require legislation, merely a change to the regulations, and I assume that it was left out of the promises for the Queen’s Speech on that basis.
I congratulate the Unite group of MPs and Unite on their work on the fair tips charter. Obviously, it makes good sense for tips to be in cash. However, even when tips are given in cash, there is a question about whether they reach those who have provided the service for which the tip is meant. I know that the subject is being reviewed by the regulatory reform department in the Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform, and no doubt its representatives will meet hon. Members, Unite and employers to discuss it further.
May we have a topical debate on whether anything could or should be done to stem the flow of increasingly tacky political memoirs? Does the Leader of the House agree that authors who do not meet a certain quality threshold should perhaps be required to donate the proceeds to charity?
That is not a question about the business of the House, and I will therefore quickly pass over it.
This morning, I have become aware that there has been another problem on the west coast main line to the south of Milton Keynes. This time it appears to be a massive signal failure; last week, it was blamed on a power failure. Will the Leader of the House consider holding a debate in this House on the reliability of the west coast main line and transparency on the part of Network Rail about why problems occur and when it is going to put them right?
My hon. Friend brings to the House a matter that is obviously of great importance to her constituents. I will bring it to the attention of Ministers in the Department for Transport, but she might also seek an opportunity to raise it in the pre-recess Adjournment debate.
May we have an urgent debate on standards in education? Yesterday, the chief inspector of schools told the Children, Schools and Families Committee that improvements in standards had stalled. After the Prime Minister’s lamentable performance yesterday, is it not clear that not only our children’s education but this Government are irrevocably stalled?
I think that that is one of those provocative questions. The hon. Member for Macclesfield (Sir Nicholas Winterton), who was sitting next to the hon. Gentleman a moment ago—[Interruption.] Well, I thought that the question was party political point scoring, but I will answer it in any event.
I thank the Select Committee for its work on testing and on standards across the piece. This Government have given great priority to investing in education and to ensuring that there is a fair and open system of testing that is helpful for parents, pupils and teachers, and that there is individual personal tuition for each child. We want more people to get education further on in their lives. That is why we are introducing an apprenticeship programme and increasing to 18 the age at which some education should still be going on. If the Opposition are as concerned as we are not only that every individual should achieve their potential but that the economy should have the supply of skilled and qualified workers it needs, I hope that they will back us in these proposals.
May I encourage the Leader of the House to respond more positively to suggestions by the Conservatives that we discuss interest rates in this House? It would offer an opportunity to remind people who are anxious about interest rates that, for five years under the Conservative party, interest rates were over 10 per cent., and that although they are creating worry for people, they will not reach those levels because of this Government’s good stewardship of the economy.
My hon. Friend will have heard the Chancellor earlier this week, and the Prime Minister yesterday, express the Government’s commitment to doing all we can to keep inflation low so that the Bank of England can keep interest rates low. Over the past 10 years, the Government have ensured that the economy has been run in such a way that we keep interest rates low. That has been the most important thing, alongside people having jobs and being secure in them, in ensuring that the housing market remains stable. I thank my hon. Friend for raising that point.
May we have a debate on the Highways Agency’s investment in trunk roads in the south-west? I have often drawn attention to the safety improvements that are necessary on the A303, but may I also highlight the A36, particularly the stretch that runs through Standerwick, climbs over Black Dog hill, and straddles the Somerset and Wiltshire border? That road has a proven accident record. Standerwick has no protection at all as regards the speed limit, and it is time that something was done. The Highways Agency seems to be dragging its feet.
That can be raised with Ministers in the Department for Transport; no doubt the hon. Gentleman has done so. Highways, particularly the ones that he mentioned, are a huge issue in the south-west. That is partly why it is important that we come forward with our proposals for regional committees of this House. If the Highways Agency, regional development agencies, the Learning and Skills Council and regional organisations are making decisions that are hugely important to a region, we must have proper accountability to this House. I hope that in future south-west regional MPs will be able to hold the Highways Agency properly to account for what it does in their region as well as ensuring that Transport Ministers hold the Highways Agency to account nationally.
Yesterday, there was a very good debate in Westminster Hall on the Royal Mail and the Post Office. If we had known then what we know today about the views of Mr. Stapleton from Postcomm, there would have been universal condemnation from Labour Members, at least. Will my right hon. and learned Friend consider having a debate on the role of regulators and whether they should initiate policy, particularly in such a sensitive area as the Post Office, and is not this so important that we should have it as a matter of urgency?
I will refer my hon. Friend’s point to the Secretary of State for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform, who will no doubt have seen and taken seriously the points made in that debate.
May we have an early debate next week entitled, “Consideration of Bills in Public Bill Committees”? The right hon. and learned Lady will know that I am serving on the Committee that is considering the Counter-Terrorism Bill. Does she agree that parliamentary scrutiny of Bills is essential? In that context, is it not profoundly wrong that Government Whips should confine membership of the Committee to those who agree with them? Furthermore, is it not wrong that they dissuade Labour Back Benchers from participating in the debate and instead ask them merely to attend to their private correspondence? That surely undermines the highly important process of parliamentary scrutiny.
We want the process of parliamentary scrutiny to be improved. That is why we are publishing the draft legislative programme, why more Bills are published in draft, and why we have the Public Bill Committee process. The question of who serves on a Committee is for the Committee of Selection, and the proceedings of that Committee are a matter for its Chair.
Will my right hon. and learned Friend bring to the House details of the funding of the parliamentary research unit in order that we may have a proper debate on state funding of political parties and add to the information that will be coming out in the next four weeks, as required, on shadow Cabinet members, who now have to reveal the full details of the private, hidden funding that has been secretly funding their offices over the past year?
I think that my hon. Friend refers, as did my hon. Friend the Member for Wrexham (Ian Lucas), to the report of the Committee on Standards and Privileges, “Conduct of Mr George Osborne”. I thank the Committee for its report, in which it accepts the conclusions of the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards. There is no further action for this House if the commissioner’s conclusions, as endorsed by the Committee, are accepted.
rose—
Order. I am going to ask again that we should talk about the business for next week. We have to be careful about how we are abusing business questions.
I want to return to the National Insurance Contributions Bill, which rightly seeks to align the level of national insurance contributions with the level of taxation that people pay. Does not the Leader of the House understand the implications of the previous questions? There is likely to be a black hole as a result of the Chancellor’s statement on the 10p tax rate and raising the threshold at which some people pay tax. He has bungled again, and we need to have him back at the Dispatch Box to explain himself. There is a genuine problem, and I urge her to look at it much more carefully than the cavalier approach she has taken so far.
I am certain that the Treasury would have taken those issues into account in their decision. Notwithstanding that, I shall raise with my right hon. Friend the Chancellor the points that the shadow Leader of the House and the right hon. Gentleman made.
May I draw my right hon. and learned Friend’s attention to early-day motion 1576?
[That this House notes that 16th to 17th May marks the 65th anniversary of the raid on the Ruhr dams by 617 Squadron RAF (The Dambusters); pays tribute to the extraordinary heroism and skill of the crews, led by Wing Commander Guy Gibson VC DSO DFC, and to the ingenuity of Dr Barnes Wallis who designed the bomb; regrets that of the 133 men who took part in the raid, 53 gave their lives on that mission; and supports the Bomber Command Association in its campaign for the erection of a suitable memorial to commemorate those who served in Bomber Command and their contribution to the eventual liberation of Europe.]
It reminds hon. Members that tomorrow is the 65th anniversary of the Dambusters’ raid, undertaken by Squadron 617, which flew out of Lincolnshire. As one of 11 Lincolnshire Members of Parliament and a born and bred yellow belly, I urge all hon. Members to sign the early-day motion. Will my right hon. and learned Friend arrange for the Ministry of Defence to make a statement about when a memorial will be erected to commemorate the actions of those brave and heroic men?
I will bring my hon. Friend’s forceful points to the attention of my hon. Friends in the Ministry of Defence.
If there is no conflict of interest, will the Leader of the House arrange for a statement or debate next week on the Prime Minister’s intention to remove ministerial severance pay?
The hon. Gentleman knows that, before the debate in the House on 24 January, the Senior Salaries Review Body made some proposals about withdrawing severance pay if a Minister got another job before the period for which it was to be paid had elapsed. The House agreed, and we said that we planned to implement the proposals, which would claw back severance pay. We intend to do that.
First, I concur entirely and sincerely with the tributes to Tommy Burns, who sadly passed away earlier today.
May we have a debate on ring-fencing for local government funding? I am sure that all hon. Members welcomed the recent announcement of more than £4.5 million of extra funding to allow pupils from every school in the UK to visit the former concentration camp at Auschwitz in Poland. Unfortunately, the Scottish Executive have refused to ring-fence those moneys, which would guarantee that pupils from every Scottish school could participate in those visits. Such a debate would allow us to expose the Scottish National party’s lack of support for life-changing visits.
Several hon. Members have just returned from visiting Auschwitz, and they felt that it was important. Given that it is so important to understand the international lessons of history, several hon. Members have been incredulous that the Scottish National party should take such a narrow-minded, introverted view and prevent young people from having those opportunities, especially when the money has already been made available.
Given that there will be even more post office closures, is not it time we had an urgent statement from the Secretary of State for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform on plans for the post office network? It has been announced that two more post offices in Putney will close, ignoring my constituents’ concerns. After the local election results, the Government said that they would start listening. Is not it time for the Secretary of State to come to the Chamber and start listening to representatives who reflect the views of millions of Londoners and millions of people throughout the country, who are devastated by post office closures in their communities?
All hon. Members are concerned about the post office network and, since 1997, we have invested hundreds of millions of pounds in it. Under the Conservative Government, there was no public subsidy to the network, but we have made the investment. The hon. Lady should say where she believes that the money would come from—what taxes would increase or services would be cut—to finance the investment in the post office network for which she calls.
May we have an opportunity to question the Information Commissioner in person about his determination—insane in the current security environment—to make Members of Parliament disclose their private home addresses?
While we wait for that, may we have a debate on early-day motion 1476?
[That this House deplores the transfer by Zimbabwe to Equatorial Guinea of Mr Simon Mann after nearly five years in gaol, in contravention of assurances given to the UK Government that this would not occur while his appeal process was still underway; is appalled that he has been held in shackles in Black Beach Prison ever since; condemns the continuing refusal to grant United Kingdom consular access to him since a single visit in March; and urges the Government to seek the support of the United States and other influential countries to safeguard Mr Mann's human rights in this perilous situation.]
More than 100 hon. Members have signed it and some of the most senior Back Benchers from all parties, including a former Labour party chairman, have sponsored it. It is about the fate of my constituent, Mr. Simon Mann, to whom consular access has been denied since his enforced appearance in a television interview on Channel 4, in which he was obliged to incriminate himself before a trial, which appears to have been put off sine die.
The hon. Gentleman and several of his hon. Friends have raised the matter of Simon Mann, which is of concern to the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. I will bring the hon. Gentleman’s concern to its attention again and, if any more information is available, I shall ensure that he gets it. I hope that he will let either me or the Foreign and Commonwealth Office know about any further proposals, and action can be taken on them.
The hon. Gentleman mentioned the Information Commissioner. Hon. Members know that requests have been made under the Freedom of Information Act 2000 for the home addresses of Members who have homes in London, where they stay when they are away from their constituencies. They must have a home in London for when the House is sitting. Journalists have made freedom of information requests for the publication of hon. Members’ addresses in London, where they are often far away from their families, living on their own. There are security considerations and the hon. Gentleman will know that the information has been refused. The information tribunal’s decision that the addresses should be made available has been appealed against and is now before the High Court. I will not therefore say anything further except that the High Court is considering the matter because an appeal was made on the basis that the decisions would breach hon. Members’ security. The point is that, when we come to the House, we need to be able to speak about all sorts of controversial matters, for example, animal rights extremism—
Order. I reminded an hon. Gentleman earlier when the High Court case was mentioned that, for the purposes of the House, the matter is sub judice until their lordships report back to us.
Will the Leader of the House ensure that Departments answer ordinary written questions in a reasonable time? Some time ago, I tabled two questions to the Department for Communities and Local Government. One simply asked whether it would place in the Library the transcript of the conference call between the Minister for Housing and 16 hon. Members about future proposals on eco-towns. It was a straightforward question. My second question asked what proportion of the Western Otmoor proposed eco-town was in the green belt. I have not received an answer to either question yet. It may be that the Minister for Housing undertook in the conference call that no eco-town would be built in the green belt, and 25 per cent. of Western Otmoor is clearly in the Oxford green belt. However, the fact that answers are inconvenient to Ministers is not a reason for not providing timely answers to written questions.
I will chase up the answer to the hon. Gentleman’s written questions. It is important that Ministers answer questions promptly, fully and factually.
May we have an urgent debate on poverty? Despite the Government’s handbrake U-turn on the 10p tax rate, the lowest paid and poorest in society will remain worse off as a result of the changes. Will not 2008 go down as the year that Labour abandoned the poor?
I believe that the Opposition had scheduled a debate on pensioner poverty for Wednesday and it was replaced by a debate on Burma, which was important. I will bear the hon. Gentleman’s points in mind. He knows that the Government have kept tackling poverty at the forefront of our agenda. That is why we want everybody to be able to be in work, and believe that there should be a minimum wage, tax credits and targets for ending child poverty and pensioner poverty. We have made progress on all those aims. Given that the Opposition opposed us on all those issues, it is good that, instead of being a drag anchor of opposition, they are now belatedly backing our objectives.
The Leader of the House mentioned the importance of history. May we, therefore, have a debate on the world heritage site at Saltaire in my constituency? The Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government recently said that the Saltaire village was built by Sir Titus Salt as an act of self-aggrandisement. Many people in my area found that rather offensive, and are very proud of what Sir Titus Salt built in Saltaire. Perhaps a debate would allow the Secretary of State to understand what a fine man he was.
The hon. Gentleman could raise that matter in the pre-recess Adjournment debate, but I shall bring it to the attention of my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government.
May I take the Leader of the House back to the glorious years of Prime Minister Blair? She will recall that he said that nobody would have to wait more than six months for an NHS operation. Yesterday, the Healthcare Commission published its annual report on the health of the nation. In my local hospital, more than 25 per cent. of patients reported that they have to wait more than six months for an operation. May we have a debate on the difference between what the Government say and the reality in the health service?
The Healthcare Commission has produced its findings, and I would like to thank the commission for its important work. The findings show that more than 90 per cent. of patients report that their care in NHS hospitals was either good or excellent. Perhaps the hon. Gentleman does not remember what I certainly do: in my constituency advice surgery, people used to come in and literally break down in tears because they were waiting for a hip replacement. Sometimes they would have to wait for one or two years. I also remember the consultant in the local hospital pointing out the number of people who died while waiting for cardiac surgery. We have targets to reduce waiting lists; the Opposition said that they would abolish all central targets. We want to make more progress, and with the extra investment we have put into the NHS that progress is possible. It certainly would not be possible with the public service cuts that would come about under the Opposition’s proposals.
Points of Order
On a point of order, Mr. Speaker. Two reports have been made available to the House this week from the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards. If the Leader of the House is going to refer to them in obviously pre-planted questions from Labour Members, it is right that she should fairly reflect what the report says. I would like to draw your attention to paragraph 79, where the commissioner says:
“I do not believe it would be fair or reasonable to criticise Mr. Osborne as a result.”
My hon. Friend the Member for Tatton (Mr. Osborne) acted on advice from me and my office. The commissioner goes on to say in paragraph 80:
“The Opposition Chief Whip’s office took the right action in consulting the registrar and acted in good faith in interpreting the guidance which they believed they had received.”
When dealing with such matters, it is important that the Leader of the House reflects accurately, not selectively, what is in the report.
I am going to give a ruling on the matter. The Chief Whip has put the matter correctly, and I am going to close this matter down. The statement of the Leader of the House should be about the business for the next week, and perhaps the following week. I do give leeway at times because hon. Members may want to raise important issues, but it looks as though I shall have to make things tighter because such matters should not be brought before the House at business questions. There are other opportunities to do so.
Further to that point of order, Mr. Speaker. My recollection is that when an hon. Member wishes to criticise another hon. Member, it is the practice to inform the hon. Member that a criticism is about to be made. That is my understanding of the practice. If I am right, Mr. Speaker, would it be possible for you to reaffirm that rule?
I do reaffirm it. Normally, when an hon. Gentleman is mentioned by name, I usually ask whether the Member concerned has raised the matter with the hon. Gentleman to allow him to be in the Chamber. I thank the right hon. and learned Gentleman; I reaffirm that.
Of course, this matter was slipped in by way of a report, and I might have to be tighter about business questions. The danger of being tighter is that legitimate matters that hon. Members might want to bring before the House, such as the bereavement of a famous football star, might not be allowed. I ask hon. Members to bear in mind what business questions are about.
On a separate point of order, Mr. Speaker. Again, I seek your guidance about ensuring that the record in Hansard is correct. Yesterday, the Prime Minister said that Her Majesty’s Opposition had opposed the introduction of flexible working. That is not correct; we did not vote against it, and I seek your advice on how we can ensure that the statements in the record are correct.
The best advice that I can give is, “Don’t bring that up in a point of order”, because it is not a point of order.
On a separate point of order, Mr. Speaker. You will recall the Opposition day debate on Burma yesterday. Because of the number of speakers, the Minister replying had only 10 minutes in which to try to respond to the whole debate. In the course of those 10 minutes, two hon. Members, whom I will not name, intervened and used up valuable time. Neither of those two Members had been present for any substantial part of the debate; they had come in a few minutes before the end of the debate and intervened. I am not sure whether that is a matter of order, but it is certainly a matter of convention in the House that Members do not behave in that way. I would appreciate it if you reasserted that convention.
In the situation that the hon. Gentleman describes, there is no breach of the rules. A Member coming into the Chamber late can seek to intervene. It is up to the Member addressing the House to decide whether they accept that intervention; it is not a matter for the Chair.
Anti-Semitism
I beg to move,
That this House has considered the matter of anti-Semitism.
I thank my right hon. and learned Friend the Leader of the House for calling this debate on anti-Semitism. It comes at an appropriate time, as it has been a year since the all-party parliamentary group against anti-Semitism reported on its inquiry. On Monday I laid a Command Paper before the House. It gave an opportunity to reflect on the all-party group’s work, and today’s debate is a good opportunity to congratulate all Members of this House—Back Benchers from all parties—on the contributions that they have made, and to congratulate our stakeholders.
More than 100 people were present on Monday, including spokespersons from Front-Bench teams from all the political parties, Members of the House of Lords and stakeholders from the Jewish community, including Jon Benjamin, Jeremy Newmark and Richard Benson from the Board of Deputies of British Jews, the Community Security Trust and the Jewish Leadership Council. Just as importantly, there were many people of other faiths, and as the chair of the Faith Communities Consultative Council I was particularly pleased about that. The name of our consultation document that has been sent to faith communities is “Face to Face, Side by Side”, a phrase coined by the Chief Rabbi himself. I was also pleased that he was present on Monday to contribute to our celebration of the work of the all-party group, the Command Paper and the work that has been done, one year on.
I am going to talk about the measures in the document, the work of the all-party group and other measures as well. It is a good time to state our gratitude to the all-party group and the team of officials who have been working incredibly hard to bring 10 Departments together, while working in harness with the Jewish community to bring about a cogent set of proposals.
I will talk in a moment about the proposals made by the Department for Children, Schools and Families on school linking, the proposals to allow devolved capital to be used to provide security for school buildings for the Jewish community, better data collection involving the police and the Crown Prosecution Service, which is important, and the role of the inter-faith strategy and how it ties in with that work, as well as my Department’s work with other Departments supporting the European Institute for the Study of Contemporary Anti-Semitism.
Although a great deal of work has been done, I am sure that hon. Members will talk about the great deal of work that remains to be done. I am the first to accept that a great deal remains to be done about hate crime on campuses, for example. I will talk a little about that, as well as about our recent debates in the Chamber about Holocaust memorial day. I received a number of representations after Holocaust memorial day calling for additional funding for the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust. I am pleased to say that we have enhanced its funding from £500,000 to £750,000.
While the Minister is on that subject, I am sure he will agree that the trust deserves admiration for and congratulations on its tremendous work. It is very important to increase education about the history of the past 70 years, to help to minimise for a new generation the chance of a repetition of that history.
I wholeheartedly agree with the hon. Gentleman on that point. Although this debate is about anti-Semitism, one of the most encouraging aspects of this week, and of Monday in particular, is that other faith communities and groups that face prejudice are set to benefit from the outcomes of the inquiry. The valuable lessons to be learned from the work, which is supported by some funding from my Department, are now being learned in other parts of Europe and around the world. We should all be pleased about that.
That work must be underpinned by policies and strategies to increase racial equality and build community cohesion, particularly through education. More generally, I am pleased to say that my Department has made some £50 million available throughout the country to fund community cohesion projects. We have made significant progress on many of the commitments that we made in response to the inquiry, which made 35 detailed recommendations. However, we recognise that there is no room for complacency.
The number of anti-Semitic incidents in the UK remains far too high. The Community Security Trust recorded 547 incidents in 2007. Although that represents an 8 per cent. fall over the previous year, it is still the second worst figure on record. We must therefore continue to work with all our stakeholders to bear down on the problem.
Since the publication of the inquiry’s report, my hon. Friend the Member for Bassetlaw (John Mann) and his colleagues have worked to encourage parliamentarians in other countries to conduct similar inquiries. The Government greatly appreciate the group’s work and have offered it support, including financial support. My Department has provided funding, which has helped the inquiry to go across Europe and beyond, to the United States and Canada. The Foreign and Commonwealth Office and our embassies and high commissions have worked with the all-party group to make its overseas visits a success, offering practical support and local advice on parliamentary structures and suitable contacts.
A key development has been the establishment of the inter-departmental working group, which consists of representatives from across Whitehall, the parliamentary committee against anti-Semitism, representatives from the Board of Deputies of British Jews, the Jewish Leadership Council and the Community Security Trust, and other Departments, including the FCO, the Home Office, the Ministry of Justice, the Attorney-General’s office, the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, the Department for Children, Schools and Families, the Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills and my Department, as well as the police, who have worked closely with us.
The working group is unique in that it brings together the Jewish community and Departments to ensure that commitments made in our original response are taken forward. The working group has been hailed across Europe and in the United States as a model of best practice. However, we cannot leave the matter there. We will review the work again in 2010 and there will be regular meetings of the inter-departmental group at least twice a year.
We have ensured that by April 2009 all police forces will collect data on all hate crime, including anti-Semitism. We recognise that anti-Semitic discourse continues to be a concern, and to this end we have funded the European Institute for the Study of Contemporary Anti-Semitism to research the impact of anti-Semitic discourse on the atmosphere of acceptance of anti-Semitism.
The inquiry also focused on the importance of school linking. The Government acknowledge that and are providing £2 million in funding over the next three years, which is supported by a £1 million donation from the Pears Foundation. I should like to put on record my personal gratitude to Trevor Pears for his support for the project. That funding will provide a national website and resources to help to support schools in forming effective links.
Members who were present for our debate earlier this year on Holocaust memorial day will recall the support expressed in all parts of the House for the scheme that the DCFS is funding, with some £1.5 million, for two sixth-formers from every sixth-form college to have the opportunity to travel to Auschwitz. I was fortunate to meet a couple of sixth-formers from the Crypt school in my constituency who had been. I know that the scheme is welcomed throughout the House.
I had the good fortune on Tuesday to travel to Auschwitz with the Holocaust Educational Trust and students from my constituency. Everybody who was there—the Members of Parliament and all the students—found the day a deeply moving experience. Will my hon. Friend the Minister assure me that support for such visits will continue?
I can, for the very reasons that my hon. Friend has stated. Those visits have received support from across the House. I know from conversations that I have had with young people who have been that the visits have made a difference to their lives, and I am sure that that has been her experience, too.
Time is short and it is important to give other hon. Members the chance to contribute to the debate. Ongoing work is being done on anti-Semitism and the internet, which I shall happily discuss when I wind up the debate. I have already mentioned the importance of targeting anti-Semitism on our campuses, on which my Department and the inter-departmental group is doing sustained work with the Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills. Through our work with the police and the CPS, we will continue to work to ensure a greater number of prosecutions, which is incredibly important.
The Minister is touching on an important issue, which is the what is happening on campuses. I should like to highlight the excellent work of the Holocaust Educational Trust, which means that students arrive on campus much more aware of the dangers. However, is there not a considerable responsibility on university authorities to take more action? The issue is not just about crime, but about that telling phrase, which I remember from my Northern Ireland days, “the chill factor”—that is, not necessarily crime, but making people feel that they are unwanted. Do university authorities not have a greater role to play in making their campuses welcoming to people, so that we can have genuine academic freedom?
My right hon. Friend is absolutely right. The powers are already there, in legislation, but it must be incumbent on individual universities to take this issue and those powers seriously. That is part of the reason why my hon. Friend the Minister for Lifelong Learning, Further and Higher Education brought out guidance earlier this year. He has also met Jewish students to see how that work can be taken further.
I conclude by saying that although a great deal of work has been done, I appreciate that there is much more to do.
The official Opposition welcome unreservedly this topical debate, which is the first such debate we have had, although I remember debating the issue in Westminster Hall about a year ago. We would welcome topical debates on other aspects of racial and religious hatred, such as Islamophobia.
The debate allows the House to consider the Government’s progress report on combating anti-Semitism, which followed last year’s Command Paper, as the Minister said. The Command Paper followed the all-party parliamentary inquiry into anti-Semitism, which was chaired by the right hon. Member for Rotherham (Mr. MacShane). We honour the work of the all-party group against anti-Semitism, and I try to stay in close touch with its chairman, the hon. Member for Bassetlaw (John Mann), who is present. I am especially mindful of the presence of my hon. Friend the Member for Daventry (Mr. Boswell), who is a vice-chairman of the all-party group and who might seek to catch your eye today, Madam Deputy Speaker.
Before turning to the progress report and issues that arise from it, I want to consider briefly the context in which the report was set—namely, the level of anti-Semitism in Britain today and its impact on the country generally and on the Jewish community in particular. I have mentioned racial and religious hatred. All forms of hatred against people on the basis of their race, religion, sexuality or condition—indeed, all forms of hatred against people—are an unqualified and unmitigated evil. However, there is a special horror for those of us who are Europeans, in the widest sense of the word, in and about anti-Semitism. The reason for that is almost too obvious to state: the holocaust.
As the Minister has reminded us, the Government recently marked Holocaust memorial day with a debate. Looking around the Chamber, I see that many hon. Members who attended that debate are present. There was a powerful and unmistakable consensus in that debate that the legacy of the holocaust—itself the consequence of more than 2,000 years of anti-Semitism in Europe—is still with us. Let me give a striking example. Many places of worship in Britain today have been subject to violence, including churches, mosques and gurdwaras. There have been atrocious incidents, but only one religious institution in Britain is under threat to such a degree that those who attend it are advised not to linger outside after worship: the synagogue.
We all commend the outstanding work of the Community Security Trust, which is involved in dialogue with the Government at a deep level. The Minister spoke about the multi-faith dimension of work on this issue. It is characteristic of the CST that it offers to other religious institutions and faith groups its expertise in protecting congregations and synagogues. Like a virus, anti-Semitism is peculiarly mutative, adaptable and resilient. It is multifaceted and, as was observed in the Holocaust memorial day debate, a light sleeper.
When I was growing up, anti-Semitism was largely confined, in the context of extremist ideology, to neo-Nazi groups, but that has changed. It is now also championed by some who claim—mistakenly, as my Muslim constituents would point out—to speak in the name of Islam. It is in that context especially that contemporary anti-Semitism, in general, and the Government’s progress report in particular, must be considered. I shall concentrate on four issues: the internet, anti-Semitic incidents, universities and the responsibilities of institutions more widely.
As I have said, anti-Semitism is peculiarly adaptable. It adapts to technology, and anti-Semitic hatred is now available online at the click of a mouse. The Government’s report says that the Minister of State, Department for Culture, Media and Sport, will
“host a ministerial seminar to find ways of improving action and impact on internet hate”.
The Minister said that he would touch on those matters when he responds to the debate. It would help if he told the House whether the Government had any objections to signing the additional protocol to the Council of Europe’s convention on cybercrime, and how the recommendations of the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe conference on the same subject have been followed up.
The Government have committed to introducing national police monitoring of anti-Semitic incidents and offences by 2009. Again, it would be useful if the Minister confirmed that that deadline will be met and if he described what the Government will do to encourage the reporting of anti-Semitic incidents and offences. Picking up on a point that he made, I know he will agree that we must not be deceived by the fall in number that he reported into thinking that the problem is necessarily easing, because one could argue that the figures from the previous year were artificially boosted by what happened in Lebanon at that time, about which there were many reports.
As for universities, as the right hon. Member for Warley (Mr. Spellar) said, the menace of anti-Semitism is particularly acute in higher education. That menace does not express itself only in the visible activity of anti-Semitic groups, such as Hizb ut-Tahrir. Jewish students also report anti-Semitism on campus as a mood, an atmosphere and a mode of discourse. The right hon. Gentleman described it as a chill in the atmosphere. That leaks out especially, perhaps, from debates on the middle east, and can prevent Jewish students from enjoying a normal university experience. It can even deter young Jewish people from attending certain institutions altogether.
It is significant that the Board of Deputies of British Jews, the CST and the Jewish Leadership Council support the Union of Jewish Students in the view that much work remains to be done. I note that the all-party group is disappointed that the DIUS is still only considering the CST’s proposal that it should set up a sub-group on anti-Semitism in higher education. When will Ministers take a decision on that?
Finally, I want to address the responsibilities of institutions and of local and national Government. We believe that it is wrong for institutions to participate in events that are hosted by anti-Semitic parties such as the British National party. It therefore follows that it is also wrong for them to participate in events hosted by other anti-Semitic organisations, such as Hizb ut-Tahrir. I make that point because it was reported this week that John Holmwood, a sociology professor at Birmingham university, which is an excellent institution, spoke at a local debate that was organised by Hizb ut-Tahrir. It should also be unacceptable for local authorities to support groups that are willing to engage actively with Hizb ut-Tahrir, such as the Cordoba Foundation; we understand that that is the case in Tower Hamlets. The Cordoba Foundation appears to be involved in Campusalam—a Government-sponsored programme to tackle extremism on campus—so we would welcome clarification from the Minister on that.
I repeat that we welcome the debate. We honour the contribution that the Jewish community makes to Britain and has made for many years. We stand united, in this House, against anti-Semitism. There are huge challenges and there has been some progress, but there is a great deal more work to do.
I, too, start by welcoming the debate as well as the efforts of the all-party group against anti-Semitism and the Government to eradicate anti-Semitism. There is a sensible consensus on this issue in the House.
I have no criticism of the Minister, but I will make one helpful suggestion for future debates. In his press release, the Minister honestly outlined the areas in which the Government believe that further action needs to be taken—addressing the number of cases brought to prosecution, tackling anti-Semitism on university campuses, and challenging hate crime and extremism on the internet. The Minister has very helpfully said that he will update us on progress when he responds to the debate. Perhaps, in future, he might be willing to do that at the beginning of a debate, as that would give us the opportunity to ask further questions on the back of the information that we have received, rather than simply hearing the Minister’s response at the end, when there is no opportunity for us to ask more questions.
I recognise that the Government are doing a good job, and it is clear that progress is being made in a number of areas. However, the Minister, who has responsibility for community cohesion, has also said that there is no room for complacency, and that is quite right, because there is no reason or justification for complacency. I am sure that other hon. Members will have been sent the figures for violent assaults on members of the Jewish community in the UK last year, when they reached record levels. Even in what is portrayed as leafy, trouble-free Surrey, there have been incidents recently of swastikas being daubed on vehicles, pavements and signposts. Just as worrying—if not more so—are the allegations involving teachers in certain schools being anti-Semitic, because there would clearly be a long-term impact on the pupils if any indoctrination were taking place. There is no room for complacency.
The Government have made some welcome proposals in relation to increased funding for the Holocaust Educational Trust, which we fully support. Like many, if not all, the hon. Members here today, I have been on a visit to Auschwitz organised by the trust, and I think that we all came away with a permanent impression. The evidence of the industrial scale of killing there certainly left an indelible impression on me. That is something that we cannot, and never should, forget.
There are areas in which the Government are making progress, but some additional questions need to be asked. The Minister has said that by April 2009 police forces will collect data on hate crime, including anti-Semitism. Will he update us on how many police authorities are already in a position to do that, so that we can get a feel for whether that is a realistic target? If he tells us that only three or five are ready, clearly we are not on track. If he responds by saying that only 10 per cent. are in a position to do it, we might need to examine the matter more carefully.
The Minister has also highlighted the fact that local authorities can use their devolved capital funding for investment in security in schools, which is welcome. Will he clarify what will happen where there is no devolved capital funding available? Is there any scope for additional funding from a central pot to be made available if the local authorities cannot access funding for themselves?
Good progress is being made, but, as the Minister highlighted, there are also areas in which further progress is needed. He mentioned the prosecution of hate crimes, and it would be useful to know whether research shows that there is a greater inclination not to pursue hate crimes involving anti-Semitism—as opposed to other hate crimes— through to prosecution. It would be useful to know whether there is any difference or whether the problems are consistent across all hate crimes, in which case any proposals would be beneficial in tackling all kinds of hate crimes and ensuring that they are taken through to prosecution.
The spokesman for the official Opposition, the hon. Member for Wycombe (Mr. Goodman), asked specific questions about the action that is to be taken in universities, and I hope that the Minister will respond to them. The hon. Gentleman also mentioned hate crime and extremism on the internet. The Government clearly need to take action in that regard, but also to acknowledge that in some cases it will be difficult for the service providers to know precisely what is going on. This relates not only to anti-Semitism; I understand that there are issues relating to the way in which some of the political websites report on women MPs in the House of Commons. Some very aggressive things have been said. The Minister needs to look at those issues.
I should like to conclude by saying that there is all-party agreement on this matter. There is a consensus and a desire on the part of all Members of Parliament to ensure that anti-Semitism is consigned to the dustbin of history, where it belongs, and that firm action is taken as and when anti-Semitism rears its ugly head in any corner of the country. The Minister is guaranteed our support on this matter, and we welcome all the efforts that he is making to tackle the problem.
I thank the Leader of the House for very appropriately allocating Government time to debate this issue today. Only yesterday, in Stamford Hill, yet more serious anti-Semitic graffiti appeared. I have left a photograph of an example for the Minister. The stencilled graffiti are clearly part of a concerted campaign calling for jihad in an area with a significant Jewish population.
Is it not even more sinister that it chillingly describes jihad as the only solution for Israel?
Indeed. Worryingly, reports are also coming in that the problem has spread to other parts of north London in the past 24 hours. This highlights the necessity not only for vigilance but for ongoing action. I encourage all Members on both sides of the House to join and actively participate in the all-party group against anti-Semitism.
One thing that has characterised this issue perhaps more than most others in my brief six or seven years in the House is the fact that we have managed to achieve a coalition, not only intellectually but in relation to activity and working practice. Perhaps even more remarkably, the Government have managed, cross-departmentally, to bring every single one of the eight Government Departments into active participation, and allowed us, the ordinary Members of Parliament, to be vigilant in regard to those who do not place this matter high on their priority list, with a view to ensuring that all eight Departments participate fully.
On the point about collaboration that the hon. Gentleman has rightly made, does he think that it might be helpful, when the Government draw up their statement of British values, to include a history of Jews in the United Kingdom and an observation about tolerance? Any new citizen signing a citizenship contract should be aware of the history of tolerance in this country.
I am sure that the Minister will take that consideration back to those making the decisions.
I want to highlight a couple of the positives in relation to Government action. In my view, the Home Office has been the most decisive in taking action. An example is its agreeing to change the hate crime reporting system in every police authority in England and Wales, which will have benefits not only for the Jewish community but for all communities affected by hate crime. That is a significant step forward. Only two weeks ago, the Crown Prosecution Service produced a report, which I have described as meticulous in its detail, outlining the service’s action plan for the future. The plan has been timetabled, and it has clear outputs. It is extremely encouraging to see that development taking place.
Of course, there are issues on which we need more action. These include devolved capital funding, because a significant amount of that funding has gone to local authorities for school buildings. Objectively, a large increase in the amount of money has come through this year, and it is a permanent increase. If one looks at the authorities with Jewish schools that have capital security needs, one can identify the authorities in Manchester, Barnet, Stockport and Leeds. The more discerning local election result analysts will immediately grasp that that covers all the parties present for this debate and also coalitions between some parties. I urge politicians of all those parties to squeeze our own authorities, individually as well as collectively, somewhat harder to ensure that they deliver on meeting those needs given that the Government have provided them with the capital to do so.
Perhaps the issue that the Jewish community is most concerned about, and on which we seek more progress, is anti-Semitism in higher education. About 80 per cent.—an extraordinarily high percentage—of young Jewish people go to university, but that necessarily means that any problems on campus will have a disproportionate impact on that community. However small the issues on any one campus may be perceived to be, they are of great significance. Unfortunately, on some campuses, “small” is not a term that one could use. The problem is often not physical attacks, although they do occur; it is more often a problem of what I would call antisocial behaviour created by a hostile atmosphere on campus.
An extremely successful seminar with young Jewish students and others was recently hosted by Baroness Morgan. It gave me greater confidence that the Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills is going to take action on this issue. It will be most welcome when the Department states that it is going to establish its own working group to work in partnership with the community to deliver real results. It is possible to make real progress in the universities. We saw that with the action of the National Union of Students, which is now one of the leading bodies in being intolerant of intolerance; it has directly tackled anti-Semitism. Its action helped to build confidence, to end discrimination in university timetabling and to provide institutional university leadership that is minded to take swift action on the basis of clear written policies on what should be done. I believe that, over the next year, we will see even faster and more positive change in the universities, which is vital.
In my estimation, most universities have an egalitarian approach and most students are incredibly egalitarian in every regard. Clearly, however, where incidents of hate crime occur, they should be stamped on immediately. There is a duty on the vice-chancellor of every university to ensure that proper protocols are in place and that all students know exactly what they are so that these hate crimes can be stamped out from the start.
The hon. Gentleman is absolutely right, and I am increasingly confident, following the meeting convened by Baroness Morgan—I believe she is going to convene a second one—that detailed progress will be made. The all-party group and—I hope and I am sure—the Government will be honest in their assessment of whether progress has been made. No one wants a tick-box approach; we want real tangible progress, so that a Jewish student on campus feels that it is a pleasure and a privilege, rather than a hassle, to be at any university in the country.
As well as an announcement from DIUS, I hope that we will hear a swift announcement on the mooted “UK-Israeli academic collaboration fund”. Another important issue is the boycott of academia from Israel by an increasingly irrelevant University and College Union, which has rather clouded our reputation abroad and the respect accorded to British universities. If that union wants to regain proper status and standing in the universities, I strongly recommend that it concentrate on the real issues that university lecturers and others need addressing rather than on the frivolities brought in at the extremes of politics to fill a vacuum that has clearly occurred. An announcement from DIUS would be equally welcome; swiftness is important.
Not all achievements are domestic. I see that that the hon. Member for Daventry (Mr. Boswell) is in his place and he doubtless wants to contribute. With me and others, he has visited other Parliaments. The German Bundestag is carrying out its own inquiry, which is modelled on ours, and Canada’s Parliament is contemplating doing the same. The US Congressional anti-Semitism task force is now back up and running. Increasingly important work is going on in Latvia and the Baltic countries on the back of pioneering work over the last few years by Lord Janner. The work that we parliamentarians have done is important and we will continue to do it. At this point, I would blatantly advertise the joint all-party group and Holocaust Educational Trust visit to Poland, which is taking place in July—a significant number of Members have already signed up to it—in order to engage the Polish Parliament in these issues.
My hon. Friend raises an important point about cross-national co-operation. I know of a case in which senior officials of a mainstream political party in a particular country were expelled for making the most appalling anti-Semitic comments. Politicians, along with everybody else, have to take responsibility for ensuring that their own parties do not entertain anti-Semitic views.
I absolutely endorse the spirit and the detail of what my hon. Friend says. He is totally right and what he said applies to this country as much as to any other.
Professor Irwin Cotler of Canada, who is a former Justice Minister, I and others have formed an international parliamentary coalition for dealing with anti-Semitism over recent months. I am pleased to announce that we will be hosting the coalition’s first international conference on anti-Semitism—it is aimed specifically at parliamentarians—in London in February 2009. I am delighted that the Foreign Office will fully support this vital conference; I am working with it to ensure success. Members will be invited fully to participate in that conference.
My final point is that our cross-party work and the effective response to it from the Government are having an impact on civil society. In a Westminster Hall debate last year, I highlighted good practice in the world of football. I am pleased to report that, following a conference on tackling anti-Semitism and Islamophobia in the football world, a significant initiative has been made that will bring about further progress. It involves the Football Association, which has taken the lead, the premier league and the Football League. Practical action is a real possibility in the next year or two and it may well provide a moral example to others in sport and beyond it. In other words, community and social institutions, along with Parliament, the political parties and the Government, are taking a lead in tackling the dangers of anti-Semitism. I highly commend that work and activity to all hon. Members.
The debate is timely and appropriate and I begin by paying tribute to the chair of the all-party group, the hon. Member for Bassetlaw (John Mann), for taking the lead on this important matter. There may be grounds for satisfaction, but no room for complacency or self-satisfaction, in respect of what has happened so far. That applies in two respects. First, the House will know that I was involved in the all-party study that took place under the auspices of the all-party group. It was a group of tolerant, well-meaning people and democrats coming together to ask whether there were any problems in this area and, if so, to confront them openly, discuss them and submit them for mitigation and solution rather than pretend that they did not exist.
That was important, but, although I do not often pay tribute to the Government, it is equally important to acknowledge their role. I have no material complaint to make about the response that they published this week. It was a considerable achievement to form a departmental coalition involving 10 Departments and to create Whitehall machinery to take the agenda forward. The first fruits of that have been seen mainly in the Home Office, policing and the Crown Prosecution Service, in the shape of decisions that have already been mentioned this afternoon. It all looks very promising, although, as the Minister has conceded, there is much more work to be done. The difficulty lies in moving the focus from overt expressions of anti-Semitic hatred such as those referred to, sadly, only this week in the Chamber, and attacks on individuals—those being the most horrible but also the most salient examples, and thus the easiest to deal with—to the much more complicated area of diffuse anti-Semitism, which involves cultural factors. Nothing is necessarily scored or even said in public, but the effects can be just as corrosive, or even more damaging.
I join others in commending the work done on the British agenda and I advise the Minister to work with the Minister for Lifelong Learning, Further and Higher Education to ensure that that Department—in which I used to serve—takes seriously the issue of discrimination in higher education. That period of people’s lives, which is of interest to us all, should be a delight and an ornament, and it is extremely distressing if it is turned into corrupted goods.
I recall that at an early meeting with Universities UK—partly because the evidence is diffuse, anecdotal and difficult to tie down to specific instances, and partly because the academic world looks for certainty and clarity—there were some reservations about what was going on, but I think everyone understands now that there is something of a problem, and is prepared to tackle it. I pay tribute to the vice-chancellors for responding. They do have codes; the question is whether they are sufficiently sensitive to pick up what is going on beneath the surface.
The second issue that I want to raise, in a measured way, is the rise of the British National party. I do not suggest for a moment that everything the BNP says is anti-Semitic—its members are rather careful to avoid that—or that it should be proscribed. As a general rule, I do not like the proscription of democratic parties: I think it better to allow the public expression of views. However, it concerns me that, whatever may have happened historically, we are now seeing a dispersal of that effort into different parts of the world. If the BNP can reach small towns in the middle of Northamptonshire like Daventry, stand in wards with relatively high deprivation and, while not defeating the sitting Conservative councillor—of whom, incidentally, I am very proud—succeed in coming second and pushing the Labour party into third place, that should concern all of us, and we should work with Searchlight and others to ensure that we are briefed and alert.
I do not want to suggest that the home picture is negative. During my visit to the Netherlands last month, I became aware of the work of the Anne Frank Trust prison project in the United Kingdom. I wrote to the governors of all three of the penal establishments in my constituency following my return, and was encouraged by the fact that they all responded positively. That is an example of the work that we ourselves must do beneath the surface to change attitudes.
I visited the Netherlands on behalf of the all-party parliamentary group against anti-Semitism, but with funding from the Minister’s Department, for which I was grateful because I felt that the visit was entirely worth while. I went to Amsterdam and The Hague. It was fascinating and, I hope, educational to observe the subtle differences between close neighbours and friends, which are always worth picking up. The first thing that I noticed about the Netherlands was that, because of its history of occupation and the holocaust and the specific circumstances of Anne Frank, it functions as a kind of national trustee for the memory of Anne Frank and of what happened on that dreadful occasion. No one who has ever visited that house, as I did, is likely to be left unchanged.
The population of Netherlands is roughly a quarter of the size of the population of the United Kingdom. As a direct consequence of the holocaust, it has a very small Jewish population: 30,000, compared with a conventional estimate of 300,000 in the United Kingdom Conversely—this relates to concern in the country about inter-community tensions, which extend beyond anti-Semitism—it has a Muslim population of 1 million, half the size of the British Muslim population. A danger arises from those two factors. Although there is a degree of restraint in public debate, some tensions may be suppressed, and the result may be a release of pressure through violence. There have been two notorious political assassinations in the Netherlands, which is extremely disturbing.
I want to say something about the good work that I saw being done by the founders of the Anne Frank House in relation to education and school resources. The house—the museum—speaks for itself, but there is a particularly good room where a set of moral choices are put to children and other visitors. That is quite demanding, and something that I think we could emulate. I also visited the Centre for Information and Documentation on Israel. I suppose that the nearest equivalent here is the Community Security Trust. We studied not only what the centre was saying about the security situation, but the inter-faith co-operation that it was actively promoting in cities such as Rotterdam, which has a large Islamic population and where there is a clear potential for tension. I also commend to the Minister the material produced—helpfully, in English—by the Dutch counterpart of his Department on its community cohesion plan. It is excellent and very readable, and I hope that officials here will study it.
All those tensions, and the need to resolve them, will become more critical in the event of a systematic slowing of the world economy. Deprivation and setbacks lead to a sense of victimisation and a wish to take it out on others.
Like some other European systems, the Dutch system does not have a structure involving all-party groups to which we could relate directly, so we may not be able to set up quite the same kind of inquiry, although when Dutch parliamentarians visited the House this morning we talked to them about what we have been doing. That is why the international initiative led by the hon. Member for Bassetlaw is so important: it can involve all Parliaments.
I believe that we should be less worried by those who admit to their problems than by those who push them under the carpet. Some time ago I visited the European Parliament, again with the hon. Member for Bassetlaw, and I remember vividly a conversation with a legislator from one of the Baltic states. When I asked “What is the position with anti-Semitism in your country?”, the answer was “It is not a problem for us.” I do not know whether that was naivety or disingenuousness, and in a sense I do not care, for both are equally concerning.
Many things that we do in this place are one-offs. We produce a report, a press release is issued, and we all move on to the next business. The business of anti-Semitism, however, is a process. It involves many partners as well as the Government, and many interests over and above those of Jewish organisations. We ought to remember the wise words of the Chief Rabbi, who pointed out on Monday that anti-Semitism never stops with the Jews, but always proceeds to other kinds of intolerance. While in no sense denying the uniqueness of the holocaust as an historical event and while also being absolutely supportive of all the efforts the Government, the Holocaust Educational Trust and others are making to keep its memory and the lessons to be learned from it alive, we need to remember collectively that intolerance and hatred are indivisible evils—and we, as democrats, should fight them, because, for us, tolerance is indivisible as well.
I am very pleased to be called to speak in this important topical debate.
The publication of the Government’s “One year on progress report” gives us the chance to reflect on how far we have come, and also on what still needs to be done. The report shows a commitment to making genuine progress in tackling anti-Semitism, particularly in the areas of hate crime prosecutions, universities and internet hate. It also highlights that the Government are taking this subject seriously and tackling anti-Semitism head-on; I also think their cross-departmental working is particularly important.
I spoke from a regional perspective when Parliament last debated this subject in July last year, and I shall do so again today, as Greater Manchester was a geographically important part of the initial inquiry because it has the second largest Jewish population in the country—about 30,000. About a quarter of that population live in Salford, the local authority for my constituency.
In last year’s debate, I touched on figures compiled by the Community Security Trust on anti-Semitic incidents in 2006. The number of anti-Semitic incidents reported in Greater Manchester seemed disproportionately high compared with those for the rest of the country: Greater Manchester has 10 per cent. of the total UK Jewish population, but its 144 reported anti-Semitic incidents was 24 per cent. of the total. The 2007 figures released earlier this year show a small increase on the 2006 figures: 147 incidents, which was 27 per cent. of the total incidents in the UK. As in the previous year, some incidents reported by the Community Security Trust in Manchester were shocking. A man in north Manchester was verbally abused and had bricks thrown at his head simply because he was leaving a synagogue after his religious observance. Such incidents are deplorable.
The Greater Manchester figures could be seen as bad news when compared with the figures for the rest of the country, and in 2006 there was, in fact, a fall in anti-Semitic incidents across the rest of the country of 8 per cent. As I said in last year’s debate, however, the opposite is the case: Greater Manchester police are exemplary in recording and monitoring anti-Semitic incidents and in co-operating with the Community Security Trust. Therefore, the high figure of incidents from the first year of 2006 and the slight increase in 2007 should be seen not as a sign that things are getting worse in Greater Manchester, but that more incidents are being reported. That is to be welcomed, because understanding the problem through accurate data is an important step forward.
I agree that the accurate reporting of these crimes is important—and not only in the UK, but in the rest of the world. The Council of Europe, on which I sit, produced a report last year which seemed to show that things were a lot worse in the UK than in other parts of Europe. Clearly, that is not the case. We are far more assiduous in recording these hate crimes than other European countries. Perhaps one good thing that could come out of the international conference is that we might get across to other MPs that their police forces and legal systems ought to be taking anti-Semitism far more seriously in their own countries.
I agree with the hon. Gentleman. Not only have we in Greater Manchester got better reporting of such crimes, but, happily, we also have more prosecutions. A Jewish man was walking down a road in north Manchester when he was verbally abused—we heard of many similar verbal abuse incidents, such as of young people going to school or of people going to and leaving their synagogue. The perpetrator was traced by the police, admitted the offence and then sentenced to rehabilitation work with the local youth offending team. I hope the example Greater Manchester police have set in working with the Jewish community and co-operating with the Community Security Trust is followed through.
In last year’s debate, I also touched on school security. My right hon. Friend the Member for Rotherham (Mr. MacShane) and I visited the King David school in Manchester, which educates 1,000 pupils, many of whom we met. I reported in the earlier debate that the security measures we saw on our visit to that school were surprisingly complex, and all of it had been done on the expert advice of the Community Security Trust. Closed circuit television and fencing are, perhaps, normal in schools, but anti-shatter glass was also being used and reinforced walls were required, as well as security guards and a security rota of parents. There were regular bomb drills, too, as well as the usual fire drills. These security measures were, at the time of our visit, being funded by the parents. My right hon. Friend and I thought it shocking that such security measures were necessary just because of the religious faith of the pupils. The move forward on support for the security of Jewish schools is very important; that is one of the key recommendations of the inquiry, and it is great that progress has been made.
I am pleased that my hon. Friend the Minister for Schools and Learners made it clear that schools and authorities can use their devolved capital funding for investment in security equipment of the sort that we saw at King David school. That pledge is crucial because many schools, such as King David, require them. It is a comfort to parents to know that they have them, but the funding question is key. It is important to follow-up on that. It has been a good move to say that schools can fund such equipment. I know that my hon. Friend the Member for Bassetlaw (John Mann) has written to every local authority with Jewish state schools, but I also know that he has not received responses from many of them. I suggest that the Department for Children, Schools and Families should take further action. It should now request that local authorities make formal responses on the action taken as a result of the letter. We need to make sure that across the country appropriate levels of funding are both available and being used to meet school security needs. The Department, the all-party group against anti-Semitism and the Community Security Trust need to look at that from time to time to ensure proper delivery. I hope that the progress made so far can be continued, and that Ministers working on this will periodically report back to us.
The original inquiry also concluded that there were other ways for schools to tackle anti-Semitism more generally. I seem to be the only Member who has spoken who has not managed to go on one of the Lessons From Auschwitz programme trips with the Holocaust Educational Trust, but I intend to do so, and it is clear from talking to colleagues that that is a life-changing experience. Pupils at Bridgewater school in my constituency benefited from the programme in November. It is very important that we continue to educate young people about the holocaust, and I welcome the Government’s commitment to the programme.
The inquiry also identified that community cohesion and understanding can be further nurtured by forming strong links between schools of all faiths; that is key, too. The year-on report commits the Government to extending the work of the Schools Linking Network, with the provision of funding for that; that is also key. I hope that that and other programmes can be further extended, along with continued commitment to the Lessons From Auschwitz programme.
These commitments must be combined with cross-government measures to tackle anti-Semitism in universities. I hope that much more progress on that can be made over the next 12 months. It is fine tackling these issues at school, but it is equally problematic if things are difficult for large numbers of Jewish students when they move on to university.
Although there has been real progress in terms of the Government’s response to the inquiry, as Members have said, we can never be complacent about this subject. The work of the inquiry and the all-party group provides a solid platform in the UK for tackling anti-Semitism. We reaffirm through this work the kind of society we all believe in—one that is just, democratic and tolerant. Regardless of race or religion, we are tolerant of everyone and everyone has the same worth. That is why this debate is important, and that is why the Government must continue to keep their strong focus and to build on the progress made over the past 12 months.
May I begin by paying tribute to Britain’s Jewish community, which has contributed to British life over many centuries? Its contribution has been immense, on many occasions setting Britain at the forefront of science, the arts, music and medicine. Be it in the 16th, 17th, 18th, 19th, 20th or 21st century, the Jewish community in the United Kingdom has made a huge contribution to our way of life and to the advancement of the social condition. Indeed, this place has a history of very distinguished Jewish parliamentarians, from Prime Minister to Back Bencher. The Jewish contribution to British parliamentary democracy and the British parliamentary system has been significant indeed.
I should like to pay my own tribute to the Holocaust Educational Trust and in particular to Karen Pollock, its chief executive, and her excellent staff—Nancy Tenenbaum and the others who work so hard. They do a vital job, and I am grateful that the Government have put in additional funding for the trust. I hope that they will keep that funding under review and if they feel that more is required, given the rising anti-Semitism in the United Kingdom, that funding will increase. The number of incidents decreased slightly last year, but as the Minister rightly mentioned, the previous figure was the highest since figures started to be recorded in 1984. There is no room for complacency, as colleagues have pointed out.
It is right that we are all reminded about anti-Semitism and the atrocities of the holocaust not only as adults, but as children in schools and as students in higher and further education facilities. However, I hope that the Government will not be tempted to legislate in respect of holocaust denial. I know that there is some debate about that, and I hope that the Minister will comment on that. Although I find it abhorrent that people should take that position, at least if people deny the holocaust in the open, that position can be countered and refuted, rather than driven underground for the lies to be peddled from a secret location. The importance of education will continue as other influences, such as the internet, which has no borders, peddle myths about the holocaust into people’s homes up and down this country. The Holocaust Education Trust’s work is important not only for those reasons and for education, but because it is the right thing to do.
This issue is not just about physical attacks on individuals—reference has been made to recent attacks in north London and Manchester, where the largest Jewish community in this country live; it is also about attacks on property, verbal abuse, offensive literature and, as I have said, neo-fascist and neo-Nazi websites.
I shall discuss the media, but first I wish to ask a question: can someone be anti-Israel, but not anti-Semitic? Yes, I think so. Can someone be anti-Semitic, but pro-Israel? Probably not, and that is why the media’s role is so important; they have to be neutral and non-partisan. Unfortunately, we still do not have the internal report that the BBC collated on the claims that it was biased against Israel. One might ask what Israel has got to do with anti-Semitism, but that is very relevant, because the messages that broadcast and print journalists put out about Israel have a direct impact on anti-Semitism on campuses and on the streets of London and Manchester.
My concern is that in some, but not all, parts, the BBC is still institutionally biased against Israel. If it is not, as a public corporation that is funded by British taxpayers through the licence fee and also directly through Government funding, it should make available to full public scrutiny—perhaps before the Select Committee on Culture, Media and Sport—the internal report that it commissioned. I have written to the report’s author on several occasions asking for the release of that information, yet it has not been forthcoming. What has the BBC got to hide? If it has nothing to hide, it should let Parliament and the people who pay for the BBC see the report.
The music industry also has an important part to play. Over recent years, much research has been done on rap music and on hate lyrics concerning all parts of the community—for example, homophobic lyrics and violent and abusive lyrics against women in some rap music. However, very little research has been done—perhaps the Government might want to consider conducting some research in this area, in partnership with the music industry—on skinhead and neo-Nazi music, which peddles anti-Semitic messages and racist music.
Other faiths have a key part to play in curbing anti-Semitism. The Muslim Council of Britain should speak out far more. I welcome the comments that Pope Benedict made in his Cologne speech. I think that the Church of England should do more; it should speak out against anti-Semitism. Locally, I should like to praise the work of Reverend Rous, who runs Donnington Baptist church in my constituency and who does a lot of work in this area to educate young people, in particular.
In conclusion, I congratulate the state of Israel on its 60th birthday. May Israel live in peace and may British Jews live in peace. We must all fight anti-Semitism. If we do not, we are betraying the fundamental British values of freedom of speech and freedom of religion—values that we abandon at our peril.
I have the honour of representing the constituency that has the highest proportion of Jewish people in the country; one in every five of my constituents is Jewish. I think that my constituency has more synagogues than any other, and they represent every strand of Jewish faith. There is none to which I cannot go, not being a Jew myself, which means that I can get a full flavour of the different parts and ceremonies of the different faiths. More importantly, I get the opportunity to speak to many different people from the Jewish community.
My constituency has more Jewish schools than any other—it has five primaries, one big secondary school on a split site and a number of private schools—and dozens of charities, non-governmental organisations, societies, care homes and businesses. The uniting factor is that none has name plates, signs or boards outside advertising what or who it is, and we must ask why that is. It surprised me when I was first elected and I was going round trying to find those places to visit them. It slowly dawned on me that the real problem was the fear in which the Jewish community lives. Things that we take for granted as non-Jews, they can never do.
In the past 10 days, I have attended six major functions organised for the Jewish community, all of which opened their doors an hour early. Why did they do that? They did so in order that people could trail through the enormous security measures that have to be taken. Luckily, I can usually jump the queue, although that was not the case at one of the functions. Such measures include X-ray searches and bag inspections, the locations not being announced in advance for fear of what might happen and secrecy about who may be turning up, particularly if the guest is high-profile. The exception to that occurred last week, when the Prime Minister proudly announced to the House, in response to my question on the subject, that he was going to finish what he was doing and go on that night to the 60th anniversary of Israel event. I understand that he sent his security people into a bit of a spin.
The threat and reality of anti-Semitism is with us. We are talking not only about Islamic extremists, but about the far right, as has been mentioned, and sometimes about plain nutcases. Jewish people are the only community in our country who live in a permanent state of siege and underlying fear. Looking at it from the outside, I really started to appreciate the mentality of people who are permanently worried and looking over their shoulder. The Chief Rabbi tells a story, which he repeated earlier this week, about the telegram that is sent to a Jewish family from a relative from afar stating, “Start worrying. Details to follow.” That may be a joke, but unfortunately it represents the fear that some people experience.
I have learnt about that myself, because although I am not Jewish, I am targeted because I am seen as someone who stands up for the Jewish community. I have had hate mail and death threats. I have been on the receiving end of action by the Muslim Public Affairs Committee, which has campaigned against me in my constituency because of my support for Jewish people. So I sympathise with what Jewish people experience, although I can never directly experience it myself.
The local police are effective in dealing with the problem. They work closely with the safer neighbourhood teams, which align their patrols in Jewish wards with Shabbat, and with the Community Security Trust. They also have third-party reporting initiatives. In 2006-07, 57 hate crimes were reported in my borough, and 50 were reported last year. So far this year, the number appears to be slightly up. I hope that when hate crimes are recorded nationally from next year, we will have separate recording of anti-Semitic incidents. I suspect that the hate crimes in my constituency were mainly anti-Semitic, but we cannot be sure without the statistics being broken down into greater detail. I hope that my hon. Friend the Minister will be able to tell us about that when he replies to the debate.
The Community Security Trust is based in my constituency and I am a member of its advisory board. I was pleased that the Home Secretary accepted my invitation to visit it recently to congratulate it on its performance of its enormous task and to hear more about its work. It supports 1,000 events a year with 1,000 trained, unpaid volunteers and 55 full-time staff. It monitors anti-Semitic groups and organisations, and advises the Government and the police, and more importantly, it provides training courses and is there when it is needed. It also carries out statistical analysis, as we have heard.
I wish to focus on school security. The Government have said that capital expenditure allocations can be used for security, but I have real doubts about whether that is happening, because the money is not ring-fenced and can be allocated only within the existing devolved budgets. I spoke to the acting education officer in my borough and he told me that no money had been directly allocated for security by Barnet so far. The fact remains that in north London, the CST has recorded many examples of hostile reconnaissance at school sites, including the photographing and filming of schools, note-taking on the perimeters, and examples of trespassing and other attempts to get on to the sites. Schools are sent anti-Semitic literature and subjected to abusive phone calls, stones thrown through windows and anti-Semitic graffiti. At a primary school in my constituency, a suitcase was found chained to a lamppost outside. The building had to be evacuated and a controlled explosion carried out. I visit schools all the time, and the students—from the little kids to sixth formers—tell me time and again about the anti-Semitic incidents that they experience, whether on the 240 bus or on the way to school.
The money allocated for capital is welcome. The bursar of the Menorah foundation school wrote to me to say:
“I was delighted to hear that the government has announced that help will be available to Jewish schools”.
However, she made it clear that the real problem was the revenue funding for day-to-day security. Last year, Menorah spent more than £20,000 on the employment of security guards. I phoned Rosh Pinah this morning, and it spent £15,000 on new alarms and a similar sum on security guards. Mathilda Marks Kennedy school reports similar figures. The Independent Jewish day school spends £18,000 a year on guards and Hasmonean junior school spends £19,500. This is a serious problem. We had a debate a while ago about school admissions and schools charging parents to allow their children to attend. It is a voluntary contribution, but Jewish parents are expected to pay towards the cost of ensuring that their children are secure at school. At Menorah, the security element is £300 a year; for Rosh Pinar it is £200, for Mathilda Marks Kennedy £240 and for Hasmonean £105. It is not fair that parents are expected to pay for what every other parent takes for granted—the security and safety of their children when they go to school.
The secondary school in my constituency, Hasmonean, has to spend £90,000 on security guards every year. The head teacher wrote to me saying:
“The school has been given clear guidelines that we cannot allow students on site without comprehensive security measures.”
He sets out a list of precautions that, for obvious reasons, I shall not detail. The letter continues:
“Given that these measures are an absolute requirement in order to be able to ensure the safety of our students it is the view of the school that it is unacceptable that the financial burden is borne by the school. Surely in today’s society the students have a right to be educated in safety and it is incumbent on the government to be responsible for ensuring this basic need.”
I very much agree. The capital has been made available in theory, but in practice it has not been filtering through. We need to do far more and ensure that we address the issue of revenue spending, which is the lion’s share and takes tens of thousands of pounds out of the schools’ budgets, supported by voluntary contributions from the parents. I hope that my hon. Friend the Minister can give us some reassurances on that point.
Reference has been made to the Holocaust Educational Trust. There has been some confusion in the debate, with people praising the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust for work that the HET does and vice versa, but the two do very different jobs. The Holocaust Memorial Day Trust is very important, and indeed, Holocaust memorial day came into existence partly because of the campaign I ran in the House after a visit to Auschwitz with the HET, so there is a link. Both organisations do extremely important work, and I hope that my hon. Friend will recognise that when he replies to the debate.
The issue of universities has been mentioned. The students and sixth formers in my constituency who go to university have started to select where they should go by how frightened they might be when they get there. Some campuses—I shall not name names—have a reputation for active anti-Semitism that the university authorities do nothing about. Indeed, I have had complaints from students at some universities that they are required to sit their exams on Shabbat because the university will not make special arrangements for them to do otherwise. I take such complaints up with the vice-chancellor or principal concerned and sometimes we can get that changed. It is not fair and it discriminates against students, and is therefore a form of anti-Semitism.
Finally, I wish to highlight my concerns about the activities of the Muslim Public Affairs Committee, which I mentioned earlier. One of its purposes, to persuade young British Muslims to vote, is laudable. However, that message hides a vehemently anti-Semitic organisation with extremist views. It has no offices or fixed premises, and exists as a website. It is not a charitable organisation, listed company or political party, and it should perhaps be registered by the Electoral Commission.
The MPAC continually vilifies those whom it believes to be supporters of Zionism. In the last general election, it mounted a vitriolic campaign against my right hon. Friend the Lord Chancellor. It also targeted Lorna Fitzsimons and claims credit for de-seating her, having described her in leaflets as
“a Jewish member of the Labour Friends of Israel”.
She is not Jewish, but it libelled—if that is the right word—her in that way. Personally, I would not take it as a libel to be called Jewish, but MPAC claims it had an effect on her electoral prospects. My hon. Friend the Member for Ilford, South (Mike Gapes) has been described in MPAC literature as a
“fat, smug and gloating racist…vile racist child killer…filthy blood-soaked criminal”.
That type of language conjures up images of the anti-Semitic myth of the blood libel.
We have to expose the activities of those people, who are trying to target Members of Parliament for standing up for Jewish constituents. That cannot be right. I have also been on the receiving end of such stuff. MPAC talks about the “Zionist cabal” instead of the “Jewish cabal” to try to pretend that it is not anti-Semitic, but the message is clear. They want people who stand up for Jewish people not to be Members of this House. I hope that we will stand united against their activities and that the Government will take action in that regard.
I am proud to represent the wonderful and vibrant Jewish community in my constituency, but it has this serious problem. Anti-Semitism has been a light sleeper and it is starting to awaken. We have had attacks on cemeteries and schoolchildren, which generate fear. We have to recognise that something has to be done. The all-party group report is a good start, but a lot more must follow.
I do not intend to detain the House for long, but I should like to make the point that there is something deeply depressing about the fact that, in the 21st century, there is still unwarranted prejudice and hatred across our society that affects a variety of lifestyles, religions and genders. We have seen some considerable improvements in recent years. However, as many hon. Members who have spoken in the debate have made clear, the depth of anti-Semitism within certain parts of our society is unacceptable and unforgivable.
I believe that the important way forward is through education. There is now a generation of children for whom the second world war and the atrocities of the Nazi regime are but a very distant footnote in history. Only by bringing to their attention the sheer scale and horror of what went on between 1933 and 1945 can we remind people and educate some people from birth of those horrors and take action to seek to minimise the opportunity for such hatred to continue to be perpetuated. In that respect, I pay tremendous tribute to the Holocaust Educational Trust.
Like many other hon. Members, I have been fortunate enough to visit Auschwitz-Birkenau with the trust and three of the schools in my constituency—Bosworth school, New Hall and Chelmer Valley—and I have to say as an adult that I found it one of the most harrowing and moving days of my life. For the young people whom I accompanied, it was even more distressing and harrowing because of their age, and it brought home to them the sheer horror of mankind’s cruelty to man, woman and child. That is the most effective way to make the case for doing all that we can to remove, reduce and minimise anti-Semitism and the hatred of the Jewish faith and race.
It is just inconceivable that one group of human beings could treat another in such a disgusting way. So I am pleased about the funding and the efforts that the trust receives from the Government, so that it can continue its vital work. Its work must continue to ensure for our generation of children and the next generation of children that the sheer horror of anti-Semitism at its rawest and most disgraceful is brought home to everyone.
I have been somewhat sacrificed for the sake of Back Benchers in today’s debate, but perhaps in some ways that is not such a bad thing, bearing in mind that so much of the work that we have talked about is a consequence of the all-party group’s work on anti-Semitism.
I will try to respond to a few of the questions that I was asked and some of the comments that were made during the debate. First, the hon. Member for Wycombe (Mr. Goodman) said that he would like a debate on Islamophobia to be held in the Chamber. Personally, I would welcome such a debate; there is a synergy in the discussions. He also mentioned Hizb ut-Tahrir. I had one of those dubious pleasures that come up in life when I received a phone call saying, “The Department would like you to do a piece for ‘Panorama’ on Hizb ut-Tahrir”—something that is quite a frightening experience, to say the least. It gave me the opportunity to study the issue in depth. Although I find that group’s views abhorrent, the Association of Chief Police Officers has a point when it says that we must tread very carefully when we proscribe groups. Let us face it: we must keep these things under review, and if the evidence exists to proscribe them, we should do so. However, if there is a danger that we might fail to do so or if such things went to judicial review, we would give those groups a recruiting sergeant, which is the last thing that we would wish to do. Very many ex-members of those groups are now saying that those groups are abhorrent but that we can beat them by the power of argument. I agree with that.
The hon. Member for Carshalton and Wallington (Tom Brake) said that, unfortunately, anti-Semitism issues are alive and well in the leafy suburbs of Surrey, as much as anywhere else.
My hon. Friend the Member for Bassetlaw (John Mann) handed me a copy of abhorrent graffiti that he has seen in London—we have seen it elsewhere—but I know that he will agree that, when it talks about jihad and the Jewish community, it is not representative of the views of the vast majority of Muslim people in this country who are equally appalled by such graffiti. He also made an interesting point about the role of the premier league and the Football League and the possibilities of role models doing far more to help us to tackle anti-Semitism. That is certainly something that he is on to, and the Football Foundation has approached me about it as well, because it would like to do much more about it.
The hon. Member for Daventry (Mr. Boswell) made a considered and cogent speech in which he talked about the experience of our colleagues in the Netherlands. I have been fortunate enough to meet our counterparts in Holland and Sweden, where some great work is going on. We can learn from that work, a lot of which focuses on talking to their different community groups, whether they are Jewish or Muslim, and wherever they are from, and saying, “Actually, you’re Dutch” or “You’re Swedish.” In the same way, we must make the point that the people who live here are British and that they should be proud to be British.
As the Minister with responsibility for community cohesion, I sometimes ask myself whether I am the right person to be doing this job, bearing in mind that my parents are from India, that I was born in the west midlands, that I represent Gloucester and support Liverpool football club in the north-west and that I unashamedly failed the Norman Tebbit cricket test by supporting India against England at cricket—but perhaps that is representative of what it means to be British in the here and now.
My hon. Friend the Member for Worsley (Barbara Keeley) made a very good point about youth offending teams. This is not just about finding people who do bad things and prosecuting them, although that is important, but about making them aware of the error of their ways.
The hon. Member for The Wrekin (Mark Pritchard) made the point about holocaust denial—a very fair point as well.
It being one and a half hours after the commencement of the proceedings, the motion lapsed, without Question put, pursuant to the Temporary Standing Order (Topical debates).
On a point of order, Madam Deputy Speaker. In an earlier exchange, the Opposition Chief Whip stated that two questions during business questions were planted. Normally, I would regard that as political tittle-tattle. However, planting the questions, one of which was from me, would have entailed a major breach of parliamentary privilege, because the report that was referred to was available to Members only from 11 o’clock. Therefore, the right hon. Member for West Derbyshire (Mr. McLoughlin) made an allegation of a major breach of parliamentary privilege. The allegation in relation to me is entirely untrue, and I seek your advice about a Member alleging a major breach of privilege in that way, which is untrue, and what should be done about it.
Mr. Speaker dealt earlier with a point of order from the Opposition Chief Whip, as the hon. Gentleman says, and I will therefore refer the matter to Mr. Speaker for his consideration.
On a point of order, Madam Deputy Speaker. In an earlier ruling, Mr. Speaker reminded the House of the importance in the majority of cases of giving notice and advising Members when they are going to be mentioned in the Chamber. I understand that the hon. Member for Bassetlaw (John Mann) was present in the Chamber when Mr. Speaker gave that ruling, so I am rather surprised that he has forgotten so quickly Mr. Speaker’s clear ruling on the matter.
The hon. Gentleman’s comments are on the record, and they will be part and parcel of the matter placed before Mr. Speaker for his consideration.
Public Accounts
I beg to move,
That this House takes note of the 41st and the 42nd and the 46th to the 65th Reports of the Committee of Public Accounts of Session 2006-07, and of the Treasury Minutes on these Reports (Cm 7275, 7276 and 7322); and of the 1st to the 4th, the 6th and the 9th to the 13th Reports of the Committee of Session 2007-08, and of the Treasury Minutes on these Reports (Cm 7323 and 7364).
It is a pleasure to open this debate. I will never tire of extolling to Members the importance of these bi-annual opportunities to address the issues raised by the Public Accounts Committee’s scrutiny of the spending of more than £800 billion-worth of public money. As the Committee’s 45th Chairman, I was proud to mark the Committee’s 150th anniversary last autumn. At the event, I noted that two former Chairmen had fallen prey to the assassin’s knife; I hope that my speech today does not give the Exchequer Secretary to the Treasury any wayward thoughts.
May I reassure the hon. Gentleman that thoughts of assassin’s knives have never been further from my mind? He has absolutely no worries on that score.
That is very reassuring. On these occasions, it is tempting to recite from our canon of reports a litany of Government failures, sugaring the medicine with the occasional acknowledgement of hard-won success. I want to focus on three themes arising from the reports referred to in the motion—themes that reach the core of not just the Committee’s work, but its very purpose.
I hope that hon. Members will recognise that the Committee seeks to protect the public’s interests in public spending—that is what we are there for—but the public are not just providers of ready money to Her Majesty’s Government: their interest goes beyond the question of how efficiently taxes are collected and spent, important though that question is. The Committee seeks to represent the taxpayers’ interests in the efficiency and productivity of public services, but we recognise that taxpayers are also patients, parents and pensioners. Many of those “consumers” are those with the least voice and yet the greatest vulnerability. Alone, they are small citizens faced with a large state.
Obviously, the public—whether as taxpayer or consumer—benefit most from the Committee’s activities when we have most impact. There is power in our bark, hard and even horrible though it may be to some witnesses at our hearings. There is power in our bite, too—the power of our recommendations to lead to savings for the taxpayer and better services for the consumer. I want to use this opportunity to highlight several such bites.
Recent reports have shown both light and shadow in the way in which vulnerable consumers are treated by public services. There is a clear need for the Government to design services around the needs of citizens, not the convenience of those who deliver them. For instance, our 12th report examined the compensation scheme for former miners suffering from work-related lung disease and hand injuries. The early stages of the implementation of the two schemes were seriously mismanaged. Many of those claiming were elderly and ill, and in no position to wait 10 years or more for compensation, as some did. Some claimants died while they were waiting.
I welcome the fact that money has now come through to many claimants, but the scheme’s failings offer a clear example of the human suffering that was a consequence of poor planning at the start of a project. The taxpayer, too, has taken a big hit. The cost merely of administering the schemes is expected to total nearly £2.3 billion, not least because the relevant Department’s negotiation of solicitors’ fees was weak. I do not hesitate to say that some solicitors engaged in what I can only term profiteering.
Solicitors also featured not too creditably in our report on legal aid and mediation for people involved in family breakdown. In one third of cases, solicitors did not advise their clients that professional mediation was an option, yet mediation is often a swifter, less acrimonious path—and it is, of course, cheaper. That is not to ignore the wider social problems that family breakdown creates, but we should never forget that it is children who are the most vulnerable party, and they warrant special consideration. Even when the mediation path is taken, children are not routinely consulted.
Our work also illuminates neglected or unfashionable issues. To my great pride, we have raised greatly the profile of hospital-acquired infection and stroke care. The Committee has played an important role in bringing those issues way up the political agenda. This year, we want to do the same for dementia, one of the last great taboo subjects. We tackled it in a report this year. It affects more than half a million people in England and costs some £14 billion a year. The number of cases is predicted to soar by more than 30 per cent. in the next 30 years, yet dementia remains relatively neglected by health and social care services.
If the NHS is to discharge its duty of care to the vulnerable and those without a voice, awareness is key. Too often both the public and professionals believe that little can be done to help sufferers. Many general practitioners lack the knowledge to make a formal diagnosis of dementia. Often a diagnosis is not early enough and specialist care is not available. As a result, carers—usually family members—bear a heavy burden and play a vital role, saving the taxpayer many millions of pounds by caring for relatives with dementia at home. They need and deserve better support. In my view, dementia must be given the same priority that is accorded to cancer and coronary heart disease. Like those conditions, it should be given a single leader within the Department of Health with the power to drive through improvements in diagnosis, treatment and care.
Such reports have highlighted how Government can better serve the citizen as consumer. We have also championed the needs of the citizen as taxpayer. Spring may finally have arrived—well, not today, perhaps—but the economic climate has become distinctly chilly since our last debate. In the Budget, the Government said that they had exceeded their target of more than £21 billion in efficiency savings, and announced an even more ambitious savings target of £30 billion by 2010-11. That is all very interesting. The issue is now at the centre of political debate. Undoubtedly, as the major political parties have come closer together in ideology, ever more focus is put on efficiency savings and how much benefit they can deliver for the taxpayer. In that sense, our Committee is at the heart of political debate.
The Government say that they want to save £30 billion by 2010-11: just think what we could deliver with that amount. But how solid are any of the savings made? Our 48th report cast doubt on the reliability of nearly three quarters of the efficiency savings achieved. Smoke and mirrors are the last things that we need. Efficiency savings are nothing if they do not free up hard cash or improve delivery. We made a number of recommendations on the subject in our 48th report. For instance, we noted that
“There is evidence that some efficiency projects may be having an adverse impact on service quality. The Department of Health, for example, claims efficiencies through patients spending less time in hospital despite the rate of readmissions rising.
We pointed out that
“Improvements in efficiency may not be sustainable. Some projects, such as the Ministry of Defence's early decommissioning of some of its fast jets have achieved one-off financial savings rather than improving efficiency for the long term.”
I suppose that that very detailed work might be considered anorak territory, but it is vital that we have well-informed debate in the Chamber about what is going on, and I think that we can illuminate the debate.
Some efficiency savings are hard to calculate. For instance, the closure of some of our embassies or high commissions across the world may, on paper, seem to save us money, but we could lose trade and investment in the United Kingdom as a result.
Yes. We all have a personal view on our embassies and high commissions. I often think that those historical buildings, right in the centre of town, achieve so much more for this country, in terms of trade, prestige and contacts, than would be achieved by closing them. Often, as with the Dublin embassy—an issue on which our Committee reported—nothing is achieved by getting rid of the building, anyway.
We have some important things to say. I am pleased to say that the Treasury has listened and sought to improve measurements of savings. We have achieved something—
I hesitate to intervene on the subject of the UK ambassador’s residence in Dublin, but as a member of the Foreign Affairs Committee I am frustrated about a monumental screw-up by senior officials who then are preferred in the honours system—one of them made the House of Lords. It seems that the biggest screw-ups get the biggest rewards in this country. Why do we not sack people who are responsible for malfeasance and irresponsibility? I shall answer my own question: it is because there is a cosy carve-up—
Order. Interventions are to be brief, and we are discussing the Public Accounts Committee’s reports.
That was a good intervention. There is a tradition in our civil service. We never interview Ministers. Our witnesses are only senior civil servants, particularly Permanent Secretaries, and we often make the point that nobody is ever sacked. But things are changing a little. In the case of one or two people whose appearances in front of the Public Accounts Committee were poor—without going into detail; I do not want to become personal about it—their careers have been seriously compromised. The culture is changing and we are making progress.
I was saying that the Treasury has made some progress in the measurements of savings, and I give credit to it. All this sounds basic, but savings claims are now required to take account of costs incurred, which they did not originally—a fairly obvious point. I also firmly support the proposal for the National Audit Office to review value for money savings Department by Department. I note that the Government intend to look at all major areas of public spending to identify scope to improve value for money. All this is good stuff. A good start would be to examine the back catalogue of the Committee. We spend years looking into such matters, and we have a real contribution to make.
Spending taxpayers’ money is what Government do, but we know that spending money is the easiest thing in the world: getting something for it is harder. Government spending on the NHS has nearly trebled over the past 10 years—we want to give them credit for that—and is set to grow still further. Where there has been such an increase in Government spending, it is important to look carefully at productivity.
It is not for me to question the level of spending, but I am entitled to voice my suspicion, based on several of our reports, that we are not getting enough bangs for that barrage of bucks. It is lazy thinking to increase spending rapidly on a service, point to more doctors, nurses and operations—I agree that there are more doctors, nurses and operations—and not to insist at the same time on maintaining improvements in productivity and efficiency, so that we pay back to the taxpayer who has contributed so much more to the service real, identifiable improvements in productivity on the front line.
Let us take one example—the pay deal for NHS consultants. The aims of the consultants’ deal were commendable, but so far generous pay settlements have been awarded without any increases in productivity being achieved. Consultants’ pay has, on average, increased by 27 per cent., working hours have actually decreased and, as yet, measurable improvements in productivity have been notable by their absence. With GP contracts, on which we will report shortly, we found a similar picture. Pay increases of up to 56 per cent. have been accompanied by a 2.5 per cent. decrease in productivity, plus £1.7 billion worth of extra costs. We all agree that those who work in the NHS deserve to be paid a decent wage, but those one-sided deals have produced little in return for an enormous amount of investment by the taxpayer.
Is there enough focus on making economies? In our second report on prescription drugs, we found that the NHS could save more than £200 million a year, without affecting patient care, by GPs prescribing lower cost but equally effective medicines. A further £100 million a year could be saved by reducing the amount of unused and wasted drugs. To give the NHS due credit, these are paths that it has already begun to tread, but there is still a long walk ahead.
It is not just in the NHS that money could be saved. Our examination of sustainable employment showed that some £520 million a year could be saved if the Department could only break the debilitating cycle of insecurity faced by too many unskilled jobseekers bouncing back and forth between short-term jobs and welfare.
I regret to say that our most recent look at the sorry saga of tax credits shows little sign of improvement for recipients or for taxpayers. The amount of tax credit being lost to fraud and error is still running at some £1 billion each year. The Department has accepted our recommendations on the need to set targets to reduce this, yet still no targets are in place. The system has also generated massive overpayment to claimants, £6 billion in three years, and £2.3 billion has been written off or is unlikely to be returned.
I make no criticism of the concept of tax credits, and it may indeed be the right thing to do, but we are entitled to look at how efficiently the scheme is being carried out. About 2 million families a year have been placed in debt to the Government as HMRC seeks to recover overpayments. The vulnerable ones face a future of trying to repay the money they owe, with all the hardship that that involves. The taxpayer, in all guises, has been let down.
The Government’s response on tax credits is the one glaring omission from the Treasury minutes before us. I understand that the response will appear in June, which is more than four months since our report appeared. I am sure that the Minister, twice a member of our Committee, will recognise that that is not good enough, and I ask her to see that the delay grows no longer. If the Treasury cannot provide its own responses on time, it is hardly setting an example for the rest of Whitehall to follow. I trust that the eight-week deadline will be adhered to from now on. I thought we had an agreement with the Treasury that in order to make our reports and its response reasonably topical, there would be an eight-week deadline for the Government to reply.
Let us turn aside from that sorry tale. I am proud to be able to say that our previous recommendations are now bearing fruit. In 2007, we identified potential annual savings of £500 million from better use across the public sector of external consultants. The Office of Government Commerce has launched a new programme to improve the value for money of spending on consultants. Several Committee and NAO reports on HMRC issues such as fraud, self-assessment and debt management led to savings last year of £200 million. Already, our report on prescription drugs is having an impact. I welcome the recent announcement by the Department of Health, in response to our recommendation, that it will commission research into the scale of medicines wastage and why people do not take their medicines.
Our criticism is intended to be constructive. Government action is always necessary to deliver our recommendations. We rely completely on the Government. In that respect, as in others, our Committee is truly non-partisan. Change could be accelerated and spread more swiftly across Government, but what we have already achieved is testament to the positive value of public accountability. Money is saved and services are improved by our activities, and by our working in tandem with the Treasury, which we view not as our enemies but as our allies.
We have the advantage of hindsight, of course, but hindsight also brings the foresight to do things better in the future. To paraphrase Confucius, a man who has committed a mistake and does not correct it is committing another mistake. Like Arnold Schwarzenegger in “The Terminator”, Departments should know that we will be back, and not just on tax credits. We have looked on a number of occasions at the dome and at the 2012 Olympics. We are about to revisit the perplexing project that is the NHS programme for IT. That is the strength of the Committee. When the Government, through the Treasury, accept our recommendations, we increasingly ask, as the Committee for the National Audit Office, to look at that acceptance and see what has happened 12 and 24 months later.
Furthermore, we are trying to get involved and have a genuine look at fashionable projects such as the academy programme. We have issued hard-hitting reports based not on ideology or whether we like academies—I know that the issue is controversial—but on what is happening on the ground. For instance, we found that literacy and numeracy levels are still too low among academy pupils and that the Department should ask successful academies to identify and disseminate good practice. We looked at cost overruns, which have been common because cost control is not robust enough and found that the Department should disseminate the lessons learned about project management and so on.
We operate from the sound base provided by the staff and skills of the National Audit Office. Everybody knows that the Committee could not do its work alone and that it works so well because 400 civil servants work for it. We do not claim much of the credit; we are simply the voice of the National Audit Office, although it also relies on us to give our own parliamentary experience of what goes on.
In that context, I must express our gratitude to Sir John Bourn, who retired as Comptroller and Auditor General in January after nearly 20 years of unstinting support for the Committee. Every member of the Committee shares that view. I also thank Sir John’s successor, Tim Burr, under whose stewardship the NAO’s independence and authority continue to be secure.
I am also a member of the Public Accounts Commission, the body that oversees the National Audit Office. We have welcomed John Tyner’s review of the NAO’s corporate governance arrangements and have set out our own proposals for strengthening them. We agree with John Tyner and I think that the Government agree with us; there is no controversy about that. I thank the Government for promising to incorporate the necessary legislative changes into the draft Constitutional Renewal Bill.
However, Mr. Burr’s appointment is an interim arrangement; a permanent successor still needs to be found. Progress is not being made at the pace that I would want. I urge the Government to make a bit more haste; surely it is not good to have an acting Comptroller and Auditor General. The process of appointing a new CAG should not be unduly delayed.
In conclusion, I should say that we are not only one of the busiest Committees of the House; I also like to think that we are one of the most effective. I pay tribute to the Committee’s members, who continue to work hard to hold the Government to account. I thank the hon. Member for Mid-Dorset and North Poole (Annette Brooke), who has left the Committee. I welcome the galaxy of stars who have joined: the right hon. Member for Streatham (Keith Hill) and the hon. Members for Sutton and Cheam (Mr. Burstow), for Edinburgh, South (Nigel Griffiths), for Sedgefield (Phil Wilson) and for Morecambe and Lunesdale (Geraldine Smith). As ever, we thank our Clerk, Mark Etherton, and his team for their support and help.
Finally, I should say that the Public Accounts Committee helps to give a voice to Parliament—and, through us, to the citizen—on the delivery of public services. When services fail those in greatest need, we provide a voice for the vulnerable. When inefficient spending fails those who contribute most in taxes, we provide a voice for the taxpayer. Furthermore, we serve the citizen in all guises by putting our bark and our bite into the pursuit of real change. I commend the motion to the House.
I welcome this debate because it is right that the House should have the opportunity to consider the reports of the Public Accounts Committee, although very few colleagues have availed themselves of that privilege today; there are probably more Members of Parliament in Crewe and Nantwich at the moment than there are in the House of Commons.
In the previous debate on a PAC report, my hon. Friend the Member for Great Grimsby (Mr. Mitchell) referred to the Committee’s work as a blood sport in which members chase civil servants and attack them, spurred on by a sort of lust to kill. He is certainly right that when Departments are found to have made significant mistakes or to have misspent taxpayers’ money, we are not known for our gentleness or docility. My hon. Friend has discovered the one blood sport of which I am an enthusiastic devotee.
Nevertheless, we on the Committee had an enjoyable sitting on 30 April when, much to our astonishment, we found ourselves praising the chief executive of Jobcentre Plus, Lesley Strathie, for achieving the roll-out of the organisation’s office network successfully, largely on time and under budget. Such success should be seen as an example of best practice across Government, and I hope that other Departments will learn from it.
This afternoon I am going to focus my comments on one particular report among those under consideration: the sixth report of this Session. It addresses the issue of services and support for people with dementia, a matter to which our Chairman has already referred.
When health care is debated in the House, in the media and in the public arena at large, dementia services are often the elephant in the room. It is an astonishing fact that as a nation we spend more on dementia care than we do on cancer, heart disease and strokes combined, yet the national consciousness of problems associated with dementia can appear worryingly low when compared with the scale of the problem. In our Committee’s sixth report, we state that dementia affects 560,000 people in England, a figure that is set to rise to 728,000 in the next 15 years. In Wales, the Alzheimer’s Society estimates that the figure is 36,500, which is expected to rise to 50,000 over the same period. Faced with that problem, it is time that we as a country woke up to the urgent need to improve our dementia services.
The Committee has also raised the immensely difficult situation faced by carers. The National Audit Office, in its report on dementia services, said that some 476,000 people act as unpaid carers for people with dementia. It costs each one about £25,000 a year to provide that care. The Government have accepted that nowhere near enough of those carers receive their carer’s assessment and the help to which that entitles them. I welcome the Government’s response that the NHS will now address that problem through the Prime Minister’s carers strategy.
The NHS has also promised a carers’ helpline and specific guidelines to support carers. I hope that those measures will be in place as soon as possible. When our report was published in January, our Chairman expressed the hope that the Committee would move dementia up the NHS agenda. I join him wholeheartedly in that aspiration.
The challenge must be thrown down to the NHS—let us see it respond promptly and effectively. I am encouraged by the news that the development of the national dementia strategy is under way, with public consultation beginning in June, and that it will be published in October. There must be no delays and no slippage, and a full consultation must be completed within the given time frame.
We need to keep the National Dementia Strategy firmly in our minds over the coming months, maintaining a watchful eye to ensure that it remains a priority. It must not be allowed to disappear into the long grass, as many well-intentioned strategies are wont to do if we in the House take our eye off the ball.
In the meantime, it is imperative that, as the Committee has recommended, a single individual should be appointed to lead dementia services in the NHS as soon as possible. That has been done for cancer and coronary heart disease, and I welcome the Government’s response that they are considering appointing a national clinical director to that role based on the model used for cancer services. That appointment should be made now, so that the national dementia strategy can be driven forward by the same team who led its development. It is a constant frustration to those of us who serve on the Committee that a strategy that is begun by one civil servant frequently has to be dropped and picked up by another, who has a vast job to do to learn the ropes before they can implement what their predecessor developed. Consistency of leadership enabled Jobcentre Plus to be successful and that is, again, a lesson that can be learned across government.
Clear leadership and accumulation of experience from the strategy’s inception will ensure that this vital but long-neglected area of health care is rapidly improved. Obviously our first priority must be the care of those affected by dementia, but the speedy improvement of dementia services should also be a matter of great economic interest to the Treasury. Dementia already costs the economy more than £14 billion each year, and the figure is set to rise as the number of dementia sufferers also increases.
Making dementia a high priority in the Government’s approach to health care is not simply about the state providing care for those who need it—a principle to which I am passionately committed. It is also an economic necessity. If dementia is diagnosed early, more can be done for the patient and the cost of the services is much lower. If time is wasted, it becomes much harder to help the patient and the cost of treatment soars. I hope that my hon. Friends on the Treasury Bench will keep up pressure on the national health service to deliver early diagnosis of dementia, both for the sake of the patient and because of the money it will save.
The most shocking fact the Committee heard on the matter is that between half and two thirds of people with dementia never receive a formal diagnosis at all, let alone an early diagnosis. Absurdly, many dementia sufferers are not diagnosed unless they go into hospital with another illness or an injury. That is a disgrace. Reversing that situation should be a high priority for the NHS.
The main obstacle preventing correct and early diagnosis is GPs’ poor knowledge of dementia and lack of the training necessary to recognise it. Currently, GPs can go through their entire career without learning about dementia at all. At undergraduate level there is no compulsory medical component on dementia or older people’s mental health, and little general coverage of the condition. Once qualified, there is no requirement for GPs to spend any of their continuing professional development on older people’s mental health.
The situation is hardly any better for nurses. The Royal College of Nursing told the NAO that most student nurses receive between only two and five hours of teaching on older people’s mental health. That is completely baffling when we are faced with a problem that is the greatest health care challenge the country will encounter now or in the coming decades. The NHS should insist on dementia training for health care professionals. Let us see that absurdity remedied as soon as possible, with a clear requirement on the NHS that all trainee doctors and nurses learn about dementia. My hon. Friend the Exchequer Secretary has a direct interest in that happening: the saving to the economy of achieving early diagnosis of dementia will benefit the whole country significantly.
The final point from the report that I want to highlight is the lack of dementia awareness in care homes. It is a sad fact that although 62 per cent. of people in care homes are thought to have dementia, only 28 per cent. of care places are registered specialist dementia places. The shortage of specialist dementia care places is a scandal, and it is a matter of which we as a country should be thoroughly ashamed. It is tantamount to neglect of some of the most vulnerable people in our society. It is a wrong that we have to put right, and I look to my Government to take the lead in that just cause.
Furthermore, two in 10 care homes do not meet the medicines management standards required of them. Neuroleptic drugs such as haloperidol and risperidone are over-used to sedate difficult patients in far too many cases, even though those drugs are known to make dementia worse—a point well made by my hon. Friend the Member for North-West Leicestershire (David Taylor) in his ten-minute rule debate only yesterday. Professor Sube Bannerjee, an adviser to the NHS on dementia, told the Committee that those caring for dementia sufferers should resort to neuroleptic drugs only after other methods of managing difficult patients had failed. The guidelines for care homes are clear, yet the Committee found that they were being disregarded in too many cases. It is time for the Government to ensure that such unacceptable and counter-productive abuse of dementia sufferers is brought to an end.
The Committee has brought the massive issue of dementia before Parliament, and I hope that the changes advocated in the report will be introduced as speedily as possible. I cannot over-emphasise the impact of dementia on our national life. It must become a priority for the national health service, and it is up to Members of the House to ensure that the Government and the NHS make it a priority.
I rise as a bit-part player in our Treasury team and also as a member of the PAC. In preparing for the debate I thumbed through the whole back catalogue of PAC reports, and was struck by the analogy between the Committee and an ageing pop supergroup. As with many groups that show longevity and staying power, the membership changes although certain key core figures remain—rather like the Drifters. The distinctive sound and character of the group survive despite the departure of some and the arrival of others who are usually destined to play minor, supportive and not so well recognised roles. The PAC even has its own fan base. We invariably fill Committee Room 15 with our groupies, and we feature in Private Eye.
Like any other supergroup, we require extensive back-up staff to put the show on the road, in the shape of the National Audit Office, the clerking team, the press officer and the excellent Mark Etherton, who plays the Brian Epstein impresario role. We have our own front man in the shape of the hon. Member for Gainsborough (Mr. Leigh), known for his forthright, punchy delivery and wild, flowing locks; the incisive tones of the hon. Member for South Norfolk (Mr. Bacon); the accusatory Welsh lilt of the right hon. Member for Islwyn (Mr. Touhig); and the uncompromising sound of working-class Glasgow from the hon. Member for Glasgow, South-West (Mr. Davidson)—plus lyrical inventiveness and flights of fancy from the hon. Member for Great Grimsby (Mr. Mitchell). None of us has yet been destroyed by excess, despite the constant heady infusions of bottled water at every meeting. As a result, a quality product emerges that is genuinely appreciated, although it has to be recognised that our following among senior civil servants and Cabinet Ministers is not what it could be.
It would be ludicrous in a brief review to try to do justice to our entire back catalogue, or even to the 33 reports under review, so I will concentrate on some of my favourite and more impactful reports—our greatest hits, I guess. To be fair, not all our reports are of equal quality. It is dangerous and tedious on occasions such as this to engage in an orgy of mutual back-slapping—such behaviour is more appropriate to their lordships in another place. We have to be self-critical at times and acknowledge that we have not got to the bottom of every issue. Largely for procedural reasons, we have not been able to follow up some fairly critical issues. Our programme of work depends on cherry-picking of the NAO, which genuinely tests the polymath abilities of elected Members and cannot be guaranteed, within the time scales, to leave no stone unturned. Important issues escape scrutiny because of a lack of time or timely information. Vehicle excise duty is a good example of that. Other long-standing issues such as BBC expenses and salaries and Saudi arms deals escape our attention because of indefensible legal inhibitions.
I will concentrate my remarks on areas that I understand reasonably well, leaving Icelandic trawlermen for other Members to fulminate on. The first of those areas is health. We have reported on clinical governance of primary care trusts, the consultants contract and prescribing costs in primary care—all areas that have been victims of the Government’s reform programme. Unsurprisingly, we found that the Maoist permanent revolution in NHS structures fomented by the cultural revolutionaries in the Department of Health left PCTs ill equipped to commission effectively, to manage the private sector—although they are encouraged to take it on—or properly to understand what was expected of them. It is no wonder that we have problems with the delivery of out-of-hours services. We identified the prevalence of a “commission and go” philosophy—not an unexpected finding. Nor was it surprising to find that consultants negotiating a new contract had successfully outwitted hospital trusts and got more money without increasing productivity.
Vested interests were in play when we examined the prescription drugs market, where useful potential savings were identified and there were clear disparities between one PCT and another as regards how capable they were of getting at those savings, which could be engineered only if the driver was the interests of patients, not those of the pharmacy industry. The report contained remarkable evidence of sheer waste and over-prescription. That was not particularly to do with the behaviour of PCTs but more with the fact that people retained drugs that they no longer needed or got them when they did not need them. The crude moral that one might draw from this is that vested interests must be challenged—in one respect, the Government are endeavouring to do so—but that Maoist permanent revolution might not be the best way of doing so. Interestingly, that conclusion was arrived at in China some time ago.
On education, I shall deal with the academies programme. The NAO report slightly sold the pass on that, because it did not examine the effects on surrounding schools of the arrival of a bright, shiny, well financed academy. The evaluation was therefore skewed from the start in favour of the academy programme. None the less, it found that academies indisputably delivered no better results than the previous excellence in cities programme. Given the obvious point that children always work better in shiny, new, well financed schools, the report genuinely calls into question whether the structural upheaval that academies represent is justified by any gains in performance. It is clear that they are not the answer to every educational ill.
Expanding our scientific base might be a smarter move, and that brings me to our report on big science. It is genuinely difficult to establish value for money in science. We concluded:
“There is a risk of leaving decisions to a small group of scientists without input from the wider community.”
As a north-west Member of Parliament, I want to underline that vigorously. At Daresbury, the diamond synchrotron eluded our grasp for reasons that appeared to have more to do with the interests of the Wellcome Foundation than those of anyone else, unless it was due to the anxiety of key members of the Oxbridge and London research community about a possible dangerous move to the badlands of the Cheshire tundra.
Daresbury was offered the fourth generation light source, which, to be fair, was a reasonable consolation prize because it kept cutting-edge science at Daresbury and has strong relevance to commercial applications in the area. It has the potential to generate the highly skilled jobs that we need in the north-west. However, we now find that that is in doubt, and I should like us to return to the topic in future.
We identified no fit between science policy, regional policy and industrial policy. I hope that future PAC work will examine in depth regional disparities and the huge amount of money inexpertly spent on urban regeneration.
This happy band of interrogators has recently unearthed so much that it is worth reflecting on several conclusions. Some universities clearly do not know why their students drop out. We overspend on roads as much, if not more, than on rail. The lottery, post-Olympics, is in a fix, and that will have an adverse effect on lottery funding in the regions.
We discovered, from an extraordinarily interesting and oddly positive report, that the costs to society of dementia can be allayed by the distribution of good practice and early diagnosis. I agree with hon. Members who have already spoken that that report was one of the most important and useful that we considered.
I want to conclude with two big ticket issues. As the hon. Member for Gainsborough said, the jury is out on the Government’s efficiency programme because all and sundry are unsure about the distinction between front-line and back-office staff. Everybody wants to get rid of the back-office staff; nobody wants to get rid of the front-line staff, but nobody knows the exact difference between them. There is also confusion about the difference between sustainable and unsustainable savings. There is some debate about what might constitute a sustainable saving. There is also uncertainty about the distinction between an efficiency and a service reduction. We must agree with the Treasury’s somewhat philosophical conclusion:
“This can present a complex and difficult measurement challenge”.
We also discovered that the Government’s preferred capital investment vehicle—the private finance initiative—is in as much trouble as ever. It is the second major subject on which we should dwell at least a little more. We found inadequate benchmarking, sloppy contracts and rising unit costs. To be fair, we found evidence of a learning curve, but little evidence for elevating the PFI above traditional models of procurement and capital finance. All that simply whets our appetite for future sessions.
Although our relationship with witnesses can often appear adversarial—and, at times, confrontational, even bordering on the unnecessarily macho—our relationship with Government is not necessarily adversarial. No one in any party or position wants one pound of taxpayers’ money to be ill spent. I hope that our Committee has made a small contribution to that.
On a personal note, since becoming a Member of Parliament, I have found working on the Committee one of the most useful things that I do. I am proud to be a member of the band.
I was very keen to participate in this debate, particularly as our friend the Chairman of the Committee, the hon. Member for Gainsborough (Mr. Leigh), was so heavy in persuading us to take part. The debate is a useful and interesting opportunity to get some sort of summation of the work we have done during the year. Reports come to us so quickly that it is often difficult to fit them into a framework or to keep pace with them. The schedule of reports up for debate today makes fascinating reading.
We have had a very successful year with some big subjects and some small, but all of them gave an insight into Government procedures that is not available to any other Committee. This has certainly been the most fascinating Select Committee that I have ever been on. If I may transfer my useful sycophancy from the leader of our party to the Chairman of the Committee, I must say that the Committee has been extremely well led. I very much admire the staccato series of bullets that he fires at officials, which gives us headings under which we do our own rifle work later in the debate. That gives an important lead to the Committee, and he has been an effective Chairman. He is effective in giving a lot of diverse characters—we are a high-powered Committee, and the Committee members here today, including former members, are particularly high powered—our heads and allowing us to do our own thing. I deprecate the kind of wry expression that he sometimes assumes as I launch into another insane attack on some institution—he should keep his feelings to himself—but he has the important skill of leadership.
The interesting thing about the Committee is that it is the one I have served on that is most relevant to the needs and interests of ordinary people. After all, it is their money that we are talking about. We produce reports on things that affect their lives, such as the cost of medicine, which hits home to many people, or the state of accommodation for servicemen, and who is responsible for the myriad failures in that area. As part of our inquiries, we have looked at whether people’s doctors provide a good service, and we have helped in that area. We have considered the cost and state of our roads as we examined the Highways Agency and the effectiveness of the vehicle licensing agency in Wales.
Highlighting the failures to report and deal accurately with evasion by motorcyclists was quite an achievement. I did not realise that it is impossible to photograph on an electronic device the registration plates of motorcyclists. Having seen how easily motorcyclists can evade the speed cameras, I am considering the purchase of a high-powered motorbike for my wife, who is accumulating points in a dangerous fashion. A motorbike might be the only way out.
We had an insight into the sort of problems that ordinary people face and we have had a direct impact. People pay taxes and tax will become an increasingly important issue as the election approaches and it becomes a battleground for the parties, and more so, as the economy moves into recession. It will then be essential to see that money is well spent. Tax will become a more important issue, and we are the main agency for seeing that taxes are well and effectively spent, and that people get value for money.
The infuriating thing is that our work is, to an extent, post-mortem work. The people we get to grill are usually not the perpetrators—they are not, as the US Securities and Exchange Commission would say, in its examinations of financial fraud in the United States, the people responsible for the decisions and the deficiencies being examined, but their successors. The people who made the mistakes have usually moved on and been rewarded with some kind of honour, as my hon. Friend the Member for Thurrock (Andrew Mackinlay) has pointed out. We deal with the accounting officers and it is appropriate that we should do so. However, it would be nice occasionally to be able to call the perpetrators of the failures and problems that we deal with.
We did just that in the case of the Rural Payments Agency and the failure of the European payments, when we examined, after some delay and with some difficulty, the role of the agency’s chief executive. We were able to show, essentially, that the failure was not only his, but a failure all round. It was a failure by the civil service—by departmental officials, and those right at the top, too—to stand up to Ministers when asked to do the impossible and say, “This can’t be done, especially not with the staff resources that we have available.” It is the responsibility of the civil service not only to be a “can do” service, but to be a “can’t do” service when it sees that its work is impossible and when it sees the damage that will be done to the Department and itself. The civil service must have more confidence and speak out.
We should call the perpetrators. As my hon. Friend has said, all too often they are rewarded with an honour, just as people in business who fail are rewarded with high monetary compensation—the case of Adam Applegarth at Northern Rock comes to mind. Unfortunately, the civil service has its equivalents. There should be penalties for failure and they should be made clear.
I fear that we are occasionally bamboozled. I instance a recent inquiry into Postcomm, which seems to be dedicated to ruining the Royal Mail as a service. The other regulators seem to be concerned to give special concessions and advantages to those with power and money, who can get better prices, the costs of which are then imposed on the vulnerable, who pay more for the services that they receive. Postcomm says that it is protecting a universal service, but that service is deteriorating. We do not get Sunday deliveries now and Saturday deliveries are under threat, and there is only one delivery a day, when there used to be two.
However, after Postcomm had appeared before us and defended its procedures, it made an announcement saying not only that it continued to be dedicated to promoting competition and liberalisation, because they were providing a
“far better customer focus and strong incentives for all mail operators”
to serve larger companies, but that it wanted a part-privatisation, which was not mentioned at our hearing. Quite out of the blue, Postcomm admitted a major financial problem, with the pension funds in particular, which it had denied at the hearing. Having admitted that it had reduced the profitability of the Royal Mail, Postcomm went on to advocate making Royal Mail’s activities subject to the same rate of VAT as the private operators.
None of that was mentioned at our hearing, but it all appeared subsequently. We should have known that that would happen, because it is unreasonable to take one position at a hearing and then announce something totally different the next day. That makes me think.
The Chairman justifiably paid credit to Sir John Bourn and to the devoted work of his staff, which I heartily second, but is there not a case for the Committee having a small research staff of its own for the immediate preparation of briefings for Committee members before meetings? It is impossible for us to keep up with commercial developments, consultants, companies’ successes and failures and what is happening across Departments.
My hon. Friend the Member for South Norfolk (Mr. Bacon)—I shall call him my hon. Friend for Committee purposes—assiduously keeps up with such matters and must have an enormous machine behind him. I hope that all those people have not been transferred to work for Boris in the cucumber. My hon. Friend’s sources of information are myriad and enthusiastic. He sits there with a pile of information that I do not have, and I try to peer at his notes so that I can ask some telling questions. The rest of us do not have that capability or support—or, indeed, the passionate enthusiasm that he shows. It would benefit our procedures to have a research staff to bring us up to date on the clippings, at least, and on the latest developments, between the publication of the National Audit Office’s report and our examination of it.
I should like briefly to follow the Chairman’s example—this is another example of my growing sycophantic tendencies—by following certain themes. One thing that emerges from the reports is the constant tendency to overreach, or to try to do too much. That is a political problem that comes from Ministers, who are subject to the temptation of promising certain things. They use tripartite phrases, saying that something will not only satisfy world peace and build up British defence, but will do good for Mrs. Bloggs of 13 Columbus way, Grimsby. We try to do too much, and in many cases Ministers try to impose too much on Departments that are not capable of carrying the load.
The RPA has been a disaster. There are now cuts in the British Waterways budget and proposals to sell lock-keepers’ houses as a consequence of the failure of the payments scheme. That disaster and the fines from Europe for being naughty stem from the tendency to overreach. Ministers committed themselves to the most complex payment system available on the ground that it was the best way of proceeding. It was a much more complex system than anyone else used, and the results were disastrous.
The agency simply was not capable of responding, particularly because it was faced with efficiency requirements that led to the redundancies of large numbers of staff. Its was firing staff and then was suddenly faced with the need to introduce and implement the most complex system of rural payments of any nation in the European Union. That was barmy, and the agency could not cope. Interestingly, civil servants and the agency tried to cope, and did not effectively warn Ministers that things were not going to happen. Ministers continued to get reports that programmes were rolling ahead and that everything was okay until a week before the payments were due, when they were suddenly faced with disaster. That was partly due to the civil servants being too diffident, but it was largely due to Ministers taking on a commitment and overreaching in the way that I have described. A ministerial head rolled: Lord Bach lost his job, although he was personally told by Tony Blair that that was not because of the disaster with rural payments, which makes me absolutely certain that it was.
That is just one example. We see the same kind of overstretch, and a tendency to try to do too much, in defence. Our major projects report showed that the budgets were being maintained largely because commitments were being shuffled on to other budgets, and therefore effectively concealed. This has led me to believe that we have too many major projects, and that they are too expensive and too technical for the system to bear. Added to all that is the commitment to update our nuclear deterrent, which is a very expensive project that has been heaped on top of other projects. All these projects are overstretching the Department’s resources, and the ability of the taxpayer to finance them. This is incredible.
We do not need the nuclear deterrent. The world has changed, and we are no longer in a cold war. We can never use our nuclear deterrent. Who would we use it on? Would we ever use it without the authorisation of the Americans? It is extremely expensive, yet, because of the system of political overreach, we are now placing an obligation on the Ministry of Defence at a time when it is already stretched because we are fighting two wars, in Iraq and Afghanistan, and putting in more effort than any of our NATO allies except the United States. There is already equipment strain, and problems with coping with those who have been wounded and damaged in the war. This is another example of overstretch that emerged in our report. It is a warning to us as politicians, and certainly to Ministers, to think through the commitments before they are made.
Another example involves efficiency savings. They are now part of the magic of government. There is a pretence that we can go on making efficiency savings of 2, 3, 4 or 5 per cent. every year, but this amounts to a process of continuous anorexia. My own figure does not testify to this, but I understand that anorexia is eventually fatal, which is why I have managed to avoid it through my own personal eating habits. When it comes to efficiency savings in Government Departments, it is also a myth.
Our report on this subject states:
“The Government’s Efficiency Programme is designed to achieve ongoing efficiency gains across the public sector of £21.5 billion”.
Whenever politicians are told that the tax burden is too heavy, they always say, “We’re going to make efficiency savings, and we’ll cut out waste.” But that never happens. Only two thirds of the £21.5 billion target was expected to release resources for other projects. The efficiency savings involved were often mythical. Our report also rightly pointed out:
“There is evidence that some efficiency projects may be having an adverse impact on service quality.”
It gives an example in the Department of Health, where there has clearly been an impact on service quality. The report goes on to state:
“Improvements in efficiency might not be sustainable.”
For example, the Ministry of Defence’s early decommissioning of some of its fast jets gave a one-off financial saving but reduced the capability of the Royal Air Force to deal with certain situations. So I believe that there is a good deal of myth involved in these efficiency savings. A large proportion of them are phoney.
Jobcentre Plus made efficiency savings, but as I pointed out in Committee, they are often made by shifting costs on to the clients, who now have to be dealt with by telephone. If they do not have a telephone, too bad; they then have to sponge on the citizens advice bureau or my office in Grimsby or a centre for the homeless and use their telephones to get through to fix up an appointment. It has to be done and dealt with by telephone and personal bonding between the Department and the recipient is damaged. That is one example and, as I have pointed out at some length, the Rural Payment Agency provides another.
Another example of overreach applies to consultants. There have been fewer examples this year of overpayments and excessive use of consultants, but whenever a problem arises, there is still a tendency to say “Bring in the consultants”. The assumption is that the civil service cannot deal with the problem, but that consultants have access to some form of higher wisdom; they are the way, the truth and the light, as far as the Government are concerned, so they bring them in at inordinate expense.
What we need is an audit of the efficiency of consultants. Some are bad, some are good, some are brilliant and some are bums. I think the hon. Member for Gainsborough mentioned the role of the Office of Government Commerce. It is not providing effective advice on who to use and it is not auditing performance on a continuous basis so that it can make serious recommendations. It acts as a sort of agency for the employment of consultants rather than providing a critique of their employment.
There are certainly problems with the competence of Departments in some areas. I would cite the issue of Icelandic compensation in the fisheries industry as an example. The Department of Trade and Industry, as it was, did not have enough expertise or knowledge of the industry to provide a foolproof system. Some of the mistakes it made were laughable, and I engaged in a long correspondence over this matter. The DTI seemed to think that the Icelandic limits were 200 terrestrial miles rather than 200 nautical miles, which is much more. Indeed, the area extending to 200 nautical miles included large chunks of Faroese waters, so many people should have had compensation accordingly. Because the Department did not understand, it took ages to convince it that this was the case. It did not know the practice of the industry, decreeing that a 12-week break in service precluded people from compensation.
In Grimsby, when the fisherman who used to fish in Icelandic waters could no longer do so, he was forced to fish in the North sea. That was deemed as being a break in service, although it was part of the structure of the industry and a Government necessity. A ludicrous situation developed: some fishermen got compensation because although they had had a 12-week break, they had served it in prison and had not been paid; while others who had spent that time on the North sea and consequently had been paid were not entitled to the compensation.
Clearly, some Departments make mistakes by not listening enough to the voice of the industry, while other Departments listen too much. I was very worried by the tendency of Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs to schmooze with the big taxpayers in its dealings with big companies. I find it difficult to believe that these companies, some of which are chiselling crooks like the rest of us, comprise honest and honourable people who always rush to pay their taxes. That attitude—of rushing enthusiastically to pay taxes—is associated with no company that I have ever known on the market, yet that is what HMRC appears to believe. I was a bit concerned about that, and also by the small number of staff employed to deal with big-company tax evasion and avoidance in comparison with the number employed to deal with social security fraud, who bring home much smaller sums than are available to those dealing with companies properly.
I do not want to go on for much longer, as I have already exceeded my welcome. I sense that from the growing indifference to my jokes as the debate proceeds. However, I want to issue a few more congratulations. We have produced some excellent reports. We have speeded up the dilatory progress of the Thames Gateway scheme, which was plodding along far too slowly.
It still is.
Is it? We suggested that it needed a driving central authority, and our recommendation was accepted. I certainly feared that it was proceeding too slowly, but I think we achieved something.
When we examined the academies programme, despite all the new techniques, solutions and approaches that were supposed to be on offer—after all, the academies had been given 20 million quid of Government money to go away and play with—we found that although there had been an improvement it was no greater than the Hawthorne effect, in which change means improvement, which then fades away.
The Chairman may not know of one brilliant achievement of mine while the Committee was examining the use of Government buildings and space in London, as opposed to the rest of the country. As I passed the Treasury each day and looked down into the basement, I saw endless equipment, particularly coffee-making equipment, but no sign of human life. I took that as an indication that the Treasury was wasting space. However, I did achieve something. The following week when I walked past the Treasury the blinds were down, so I could not see what was going on in the basement. I am sorry to have to produce that as my one success of the whole programme.
It has been a challenging year, and the programme has been very successful. I think that a little self-congratulation is very much in order for the entire Committee, its backing by the National Audit Office, its staff and its members.
It is a great pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Great Grimsby (Mr. Mitchell). He is a colourful member of the Committee, and he certainly enlivens our proceedings. It was also interesting for me personally to hear him confirm what I had long suspected—that he cranes over to look at my notes in order to steal my best questions. I am glad that he has finally “fessed up” to that.
I too pay tribute to Sir John Bourn, the recently retired Comptroller and Auditor General. He has rendered the country an extraordinary service in the way in which he has led the National Audit Office over the past 20 years, and the way in which he has built it up. He has done nothing less than create a world leader among supreme audit institutions. We need only speak to people in those institutions to understand that that is their view of the NAO. Having visited the Bundesrechnungshof in Germany, the Cour des Comptes in Paris, the Tribunal de Cuentas in Madrid, the Government Accountability Office in Washington and the Kyrgyzstani national audit institution in Bishkek—I will not try to pronounce its name—I can confirm, on the basis of worldwide experience, that the NAO is held in very high regard. I also pay tribute to Sir John Bourn’s successor, Tim Burr, and to the entire staff of the NAO. As our Chairman said, we could not possibly do our work without them.
Before I deal with the reports that are the subject of the motion, let me briefly discuss the terms of the motion itself, which require the debate to be confined to the reports from our Committee—named and numbered on the Order Paper—to which the Treasury has issued a minute in reply. There are good reasons for that, in particular that it ensures that the Treasury Minister—in this case, our distinguished colleague the Exchequer Secretary—can be properly briefed and give informed answers. It might also be argued that it prevents the debate from drifting off in too many different directions—although I think that our friend the hon. Member for Great Grimsby has proved that wrong. However, we are in any case discussing 32 different reports, whose subjects vary from the coal health compensation scheme to the Icelandic trawler compensation scheme; from costs in primary care to use of the Heritage Lottery Fund; and from the recovery of the ill-gotten assets of criminals to the management of sickness absence in the Department for Transport, so the argument that the motion as constructed stops the debate going off in lots of different directions is a non-starter, as that is in the nature of what we do.
The key question for me is whether the terms of the motion restrict the topicality of our debate in a way that is unhelpful to the public interest and to effective scrutiny by Parliament of what the Government do. I think that they do, and although I do not want to make too much of this point, I shall give two brief examples of why that is the case before I move on to discuss the reports listed in the motion.
The national programme for IT in the health service is an ongoing concern of the Public Accounts Committee, the NAO and commentators on health IT. It is the world’s largest health technology programme, and it is not unfair to say that it is in serious trouble. A report will be published on the subject tomorrow. It is a curious fact that in the last of these PAC debates we could, and did, refer to the NHS IT project, whereas we could not do so in the one before that. If your eye, Mr. Deputy Speaker, was sufficiently acute in attending to the 32 reports on our list for today, you will be aware that we cannot refer to it. It seems rather arbitrary that in some debates we can and in some we cannot, when this concern is both long running and ongoing. There have been developments since our last debate. Ministers have made statements about the timetable for the deployment of systems into acute hospital trusts, and there have been problems with slippage on those timetables. It would be appropriate and topical to be able to talk about that, but it is not technically in order to do so.
My second example involves Postcomm and the regulatory framework that Royal Mail works under. We have frequently looked at regulators, including Postcomm; we did so most recently yesterday. This is an important issue for our constituents. In particular, the maintenance of the universal service obligation, which has been referred to, is a matter of great importance in rural areas such as my constituency, and it has also been a matter of some controversy in the press recently, as Postcomm has commissioned an economic consultancy firm to study the costs underlying the universal service obligation—or, to be accurate, some of those costs, because it failed to include the international component. It would be good to be able to raise this matter, and to hear the Treasury’s thoughts on it. Once again, however, it is outside the terms of the motion. That seems a little odd given that yesterday we could discuss it in Committee, and that this morning the chairman of Postcomm went on Radio 4 and said that a universal service obligation that is viable for the future is most likely to be achieved through a radical transformation of the governance and structure of the Royal Mail, including the introduction of private capital to safeguard the universal service obligation. The best adjective to describe that remark might be “startling”, and it at least seems worthy of debate—and debate now. However, we cannot discuss that.
For future debates, I propose the slight change—I would be interested to know what the Exchequer Secretary thinks of this—that we add that the House takes note not only of the numbered reports and the Treasury minutes, but of “the work of the National Audit Office and of the Public Accounts Committee in general.” This is not an attempt to catch the Treasury out. It will plainly be the case that the Minister who appears before us will want to talk about our most recent reports, and the Treasury employs some very bright civil servants—it attracts some of our brightest university graduates—and I think they are more than capable of briefing Ministers on the work of the NAO and the Committee in general.
I must say to the Exchequer Secretary that we miss her on the Committee. She is still a member of it ex officio, but when she was a full-blown member she was a very incisive questioner, and I have no doubt that were we to have a more wide-ranging debate, technically speaking, she would have no difficulty at all in coping with it, and I doubt whether any of her Treasury colleagues would either.
With those preliminary remarks, may I turn to some of the reports detailed in the motion? The first one that I wish to discuss is “Building for the future: Sustainable construction and refurbishment on the government estate”. The NAO’s trend of increasingly examining real estate issues in Government is a welcome one. We examined the national health service estate a while ago, and we have examined property issues across different Departments. There are huge potential benefits for the Government in managing those estates more efficiently.
I wish to raise one particular recommendation with the Exchequer Secretary. Recommendation 4 states:
“Departments are failing to implement Treasury guidance and assess costs and benefits of sustainable design options”.
What I want to ask her touches not so much on sustainable design options but on the generic question of Treasury guidance. The Treasury issues guidance on a range of subjects, and I am interested in understanding what the Treasury does to ensure that that is followed.
The theme that one finds repeatedly across Departments—we examine £600 billion or £700 billion of income and expenditure across virtually every public sector activity—is that guidance, advice and clear instruction was given as to what ought to happen, but that it just did not happen. Does the Treasury just rely on the NAO, which, after all, in its earlier incarnation was the Exchequer and Audit Department, to check that its guidance is being followed? Alternatively, do the responsible policy desk officers in the Treasury covering different Departments have an ongoing responsibility to check that what they say should be done is being done. I have had a deep suspicion for a long time that perhaps it is not that, as people often say, the Treasury is too powerful, but that it is not powerful and big enough, and that we need a stronger centre.
The second report that I wish to discuss dealt with maintaining river and coastal flood defences. Recommendation 2 stated:
“There are significant shortcomings in the Agency’s”
—the Environment Agency—
“ ability to prioritise expenditure on the highest risk areas and assets.”
Prioritising expenditure is an absolute basic for any Department or Government agency, so why does a significant and important agency, such as the Environment Agency, have such difficulty doing something as basic as prioritising expenditure? Once again, what is the Treasury doing about the situation—I hope that someone is doing something—to ensure that that lesson is being learnt elsewhere and that people are capable of prioritising expenditure in the way that they should?
I commend the right hon. Member for Islwyn (Mr. Touhig) on confining his speech to the issue of dementia. I thought that our hearing on dementia was one of our most important in that Session. Professor Bannerjee, one of the chief witnesses, was an exceptional witness. The right hon. Gentleman made the point that is covered in recommendation 2, which states:
“Unlike cancer and coronary heart disease there is no single individual with responsibility or accountability for improving dementia services.”
The Treasury’s minutes of reply state that it is considering
“as part of the strategy work whether there is a compelling case for a national clinical director.”
That reply was published at the end of March, but our hearing took place in October, so six months had passed in between. I distinctly recall the officials before us saying at the time that they would not regard any bureaucratic hurdles spoken of as a reason for delay or as preventing them from acting, and that if there were a case for a national clinical director for dementia, they would get on with it. I think that Professor Mike Richards has proved a success as national clinical director for cancer and that that system has proved a success. I urge the Treasury to apply as much pressure as possible to the Department of Health to get this matter moving along, because there does not seem to be any obvious or easily explicable reason for further delay.
The next report that I want to examine is entitled “Helping people from workless households into work”. I think there is agreement across the political parties that something needs to be done in this area. Much more needs to be done than has been done hitherto in terms of welfare reform and helping the hard core of people who live in workless families. They have not experienced people going out to work, because they do not have that around them in their own households.
In recommendation 9, we say that the Department for Work and Pensions could not tell us how many of the 2.9 million people who had started a new deal programme were still participating in it, nor what proportion of workless households chose not to work rather than being out of work because of personal circumstances. That suggests that there is still a lot to do. How can we assess objectively the success of the new deal programme, which we would all like to do—there is much party political banter about the new deal, but I would like a reliable, objective assessment of its successes and failures—if the Department cannot even tell us how many of the people who started a new deal programme are still on it or what proportion choose not to work?
The coal health compensation scheme was an extraordinary subject—I know that the right hon. Member for Islwyn has a personal constituency interest in it. The scheme provided compensation for miners afflicted by various industrial diseases and was very worth while. What was extraordinary about it was that the then Department for Trade and Industry—now the Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform—managed to make several solicitors multimillionaires. A small firm in Doncaster called Beresfords had a senior partner, Mr. Beresford, who had a personal salary of £16.7 million. I asked the permanent under-secretary, Sir Brian Bender, about that:
“Now under any view, the purpose of this scheme wasn’t to make individual solicitors in Doncaster multi-millionaires, was it?”
He agreed that that was not the purpose of the scheme. Notwithstanding the difficulties about people’s common-law rights, it was extraordinary that a way could not have been found—statutorily if necessary—to get the money that Parliament had voted for the purpose to the people who needed it and to contain and control the risk of people such as Mr. Beresford clawing it up for their own purposes. To me, that was unacceptable and obscene—
He’s good for a knighthood.
I hope not.
The next report I wish to consider is on the efficiency programme. We have had much discussion about the extent to which efficiency savings can be relied on and whether they are cashable or non-cashable. We accept that there are technical difficulties in that area, but I hope that the Minister will accept that we all have an interest in having efficiency numbers that we can rely on so that we know that real efficiency is delivered, not measures that cut into the bone of Departments. Real efficiency will help to deliver better public services while providing more taxpayers’ money for other areas. That is especially important in the light of the article in The Guardian that I read the other day, which said that the Government are now embarking on Gershon 2, a second round to identify savings in addition to the £21.5 billion to which the hon. Member for Great Grimsby referred.
I do not know what the second round will be called yet, although I suggest that it should be called Eagle. Then when the efficiency savings have been delivered, the Treasury can tell the Prime Minister that the Eagle has landed.
I was seven years old when the eagle landed before, and the hon. Gentleman may also remember that occasion.
I do remember that occasion, and it is time for a reprise. Harrison Ford has made a comeback, so I do not see why the eagle should not do so.
My alternative suggestion would be “Gershon and on”, because that is what it will do.
I thank my hon. Friend for that intervention.
The Assets Recovery Agency has recovered only £23 million against expenditure of £65 million. Most of us are at a loss to explain how £65 million can be spent to recover only £23 million by an agency that has the law on its side. The only thing to do with the people who were responsible for the agency—I think that they have now moved on—is plant them in the institutions of this country’s enemies to find out whether they can destroy the economic and financial viability of those countries as well as they have managed the Assets Recovery Agency.
I turn to the delays in administering the 2005 single farm payment scheme in England, which is a good example of my earlier point about the unnecessary restrictions in the motion. On the Rural Payments Agency and the single farm payment scheme, the permanent secretary to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, Helen Ghosh, told our Committee:
“Ministers were being told it was possible when it was not in fact possible”.
I am glad to have got that on the record, Mr. Deputy Speaker, but it was out of order for me to do so, because that was said in a hearing that we had with the permanent under-secretary to the same Department on the same subject this January, and the report has not yet been published and is not part of report HC 893, which comes within the motion. I hope that that makes my point for me.
Order. To some extent, it does, and I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for pointing out that he was out of order. He made some valuable points earlier, but it is now important that he stay within our guidelines.
Not only will I do so, but I am nearly finished. I have the reports with me to try to ensure that I stay strictly on the rails.
The Thames Gateway report was also interesting for the wider issues that it raised. I quote very briefly from paragraph 13, where we said:
“The Department’s overall management of the programme has been weak. It is yet to establish arrangements for controlling the programme such as a budget, implementation plan, joint risk management, appropriate financial incentives, a performance management framework for delivery partners, public reporting on progress, and measurable performance indicators.”
Those are among the most basic things that we would expect anyone who manages a large Department, agency or project to have taken on board from the start, but to have managed to spend £670 million without doing any of them takes some doing. I hope that the Treasury is not only on the case, but involved in allied areas where similar management failings may have arisen.
I want briefly to turn to the private finance initiative, because the figures published in the appendix of our report on tendering and benchmarking show that, when the whole stream of payments going forward is added up, the total liability that now faces the public purse is £170 billion. Of course, the Treasury was anxious to point out—Mr. John Kingman wrote to the Committee to make this clear—that, in doing so, one is adding future and non-comparable figures to present figures without applying any appropriate adjustment and that aggregating the stream of future payments gives a net present value of £91 billion. In complaining that he did not like giving us the £170 billion figure, Mr. Kingman said:
“It is rather as if we were adding a figure in £ to one in $, without converting the currencies, and ending up with one that is not denominated in any currency at all. I am obviously uncomfortable providing the Committee with a figure which is meaningless”.
That takes the prize for being unnecessarily complicated and almost guilty of sophistry, because £170 billion is a fairly easily understandable number. It is fairly obviously true that £170 billion in 35 years’ time will not be the same as £170 billion today—we can all understand that—and that the two factors that must be taken into account to get from one number to the other are time and interest rates; quite where foreign currencies come into it I do not know. I can only assume that Mr. Kingman, whom I know to be a very bright man, is guilty of having a trait to which many bright civil servants sometimes fall prey: an attraction to complexity. The hon. Member for Great Grimsby said that the Rural Payments Agency chose the most complex scheme available, the dynamic hybrid. Quite why it had to choose that scheme I do not know. The Germans chose the dynamic hybrid, too, but they managed to make it work. We did not.
I fear—this is probably a subject for a book—that one of the problems facing our public sector, and affecting the way in which our senior civil service conducts itself and advises Ministers, is that senior civil servants are attracted to complexity like moths to a bright light. We need a bit of simplicity. We need to concentrate on basics, including having a budget for a project, making sure that there is an implementation plan, and ensuring that the delivery partners know what on earth the project is supposed to do. If we get back to that, we will have a greater chance of ensuring decent taxpayer value for the expenditure for which Parliament votes.
I think that I can claim to be the only hon. Member qualified unreservedly to congratulate the Chairman of the Public Accounts Committee and his colleagues on their work, their diligence in their studies, the breadth of their work, and the speed with which they have made some very important, cogent reports. I say that because I think that I am the only Back Bencher present who is not a member of the Committee. Clearly, the Government and Opposition Front Benchers can and will congratulate the Committee on its work, but their role and functions are different. The Opposition Front Bencher, the hon. Member for Putney (Justine Greening), is charged with prosecuting the case, as it were, against the Government’s stewardship of many projects. The Exchequer Secretary to the Treasury will defend arrangements and explain why no blame can be apportioned to the Government.
I feel privileged to be able to say that I have come to the Chamber this afternoon because I believe that the job that the Committee does of monitoring Government expenditure and performance is profoundly important. Its work goes to the heart of the constitution and the role of Parliament. A distinguished and very senior Whip looked into the Chamber earlier, and when he saw me sitting here, he raised his eyebrows to heaven. I try to interpret body language; he thought that I was either barking mad to be here when there will be no vote, or malevolent. Far too often, members of the Government confuse Government Back Benchers’ scrutiny with malevolence and criticism. If a Government Back Bencher scrutinises a measure, the Government see them as mad or bad, or perhaps mad and bad, which is even more worrying.
I hope that I am not included in my hon. Friend’s characterisation. I know that he is not mad or bad, but I think that he might be dangerous to know.
I do not want to delay the House on this subject, but I think that it does go to the heart of the issue of scrutiny, which is what the volumes that we are considering are about. Without disclosing any private or personal information relating to my political party, I can say that I owe a debt to the Minister, because I know that she had a hand in ensuring that I stayed on the Foreign Affairs Committee when others wanted to take me off it, for reasons that I have mentioned.
Order. Foreign affairs is the last subject that we ought to stray into this afternoon.
Anyway, having got that off my chest, let me say that the reports that we are considering are extremely worth while. I want to refer to a few of them, some of which relate to my constituency.
First, I shall deal with the report on the Assets Recovery Agency. The appalling failure to recover substantial assets from criminals to offset the agency’s costs is a big disappointment. Clearly, the legislation was somewhat flawed, and the stewardship of the agency left an awful lot to be desired. I am not sure that merging it with the Serious Organised Crime Agency will prove to be sensible. Parliament should have done better. It should have worked harder and revisited the matter with new legislation, and the Government should have seen that the administration and management of the agency improved. It is a matter of powers and of stewardship, and the agency could have been much more successful.
I take an interest in Northern Ireland. Abandoning the Assets Recovery Agency, merging it with the Serious Organised Crime Agency, doing away with the Assets Recovery Agency in Northern Ireland and merging it in the blancmange of the new agency will prove to be a big mistake. Even if the Government had decided to merge the two agencies, they should have introduced a new statute that hived off the function in Northern Ireland. A designated Northern Ireland agency could have complemented and worked much more closely with the very successful assets recovery agency in the Irish Republic, which to some extent pioneered our legislation. It was a mistake not to ring-fence the function in Northern Ireland. There is an ongoing need to tackle organised crime and to recover the profits of crime in that part of the United Kingdom.
I commend the Committee for its work on reducing the reliance on landfill in England. I feel particularly strongly about that because my constituency, Thurrock, has been scarred by more than 100 years of landfill. It is unjust, unfair, appalling in its effect on the environment, and it is still going on. Successive Governments have not been energetic enough or enthusiastic enough in reducing the amount of waste put in landfill. Parliament has not taken seriously its moral obligations to reduce the amount of packaging and waste that is produced.
We feel strongly about the matter in Thurrock because landfill has altered the topography of Thurrock and continues to do so, with unnatural bunds in and around the Thames estuary. It is highly inappropriate. The Government should take on board urgently the recommendations of the Public Accounts Committee and other organisations. Many local authorities are not doing nearly enough to encourage recycling and the sorting of waste. I notice that the Committee drew attention to the fact that the food and restaurant sector is finding cheaper ways of disposing of the waste that they generate, but it still ends up in landfill and it still ends up in my constituency.
I unashamedly say to the House that that is unacceptable. I see it every day. The little bit of river traffic that passes this building, the tugs pulling the long craft, is heading for Thurrock. It is London’s waste going to Thurrock. Each day there is an increment in pollution in my part of Essex. It is unacceptable, it is distorting the topography, and I make no apology for commending the report to the House and asking the Government to take the issue much more seriously and tackle it as a matter of urgency.
The Committee has done some important work on the Environment Agency, which is charged by Parliament with maintaining river and coastal defences in England. It troubles me that again we are fiddling while Rome burns. If one reads the report, one sees that very little has been done—that is not fair. I withdraw that. I should say that the energy and enthusiasm of the Environment Agency, and the stewardship that Parliament charges the agency with, have been seen to be deficient. It has to deal with things immediately, but it also has to have a long-term view. Clearly, the agency is not beginning to address the causes of what could be cataclysmic consequences—probably within your and my lifetimes, Mr. Deputy Speaker, and certainly within those of our children and grandchildren—if the problem in and around our coast is not seriously addressed.
As I said, I represent part of the Thames estuary, but not part that is covered by the Thames barrier. It is, however, part of the estuary that is the subject of another report—the Thames Gateway development, which clearly has ramifications for and raises issues about flooding. I do not think that there is joined-up government on the issue. I have some sympathy for the Environment Agency, in that it appears that it does not have the resources or responsibilities that it should. Furthermore, Ministers are transient and there are always reorganisations of Government Departments, which seem to merge and disappear and get new titles and so on. There does not seem to be a coherent, long-term strategy on how and to what extent we should defend the Thames estuary in particular.
Speaking personally, I am amazed that nothing is under way to put an additional barrier across the Thames in the wider estuary. Such a project could be self-financing and include a road and/or rail crossing, which is much needed for the United Kingdom economy. That is the kind of ambitious engineering that should be advanced. It cannot be advanced entirely by the Environment Agency, which does not have the resources for a major engineering construction; it should be advanced by Her Majesty’s Government. If we ignore that need, there will almost inevitably be dreadful consequences. They might not come next week or in the next decade—but in the next century they will. People will look back at this Parliament and recent Parliaments, which have not really done anything to address the problem. I hope that the Public Accounts Committee report’s criticism of some of the Environment Agency’s stewardship will be taken on board, and I implore the Government to take on more.
I have referred to the Government’s Thames Gateway strategy, on which the Public Accounts Committee produced an important and powerful report. I was much encouraged that, for the first time, some colleagues were addressing the flaws and failings of a Government initiative and strategy that was well meant but was not being achieved. I intervened from a sedentary position on my hon. Friend the Member for Great Grimsby (Mr. Mitchell) when he referred to that report, the contents of which he is justifiably proud. He demonstrated some dismay when I intervened rather rudely and said that it is still the case that nothing is changing. Perhaps that was an exaggeration, but I want to share with the House something that illustrates that despite the Committee’s forensic, detailed report on the failings and problems arising from the Thames Gateway project, the Government are still in denial this afternoon.
I buttress my case by saying that this very week, the Government office for the east of England produced the regional spatial strategy for the eastern region—that is parlance for a regional development plan. Almost two years ago, before the Public Accounts Committee hearings, I implored the Government, in both speech and writing, to address the fact that the bureaucrats in that Government office had decided, for some reason, that Thurrock Lakeside retail park was not or should not be designated a regional shopping centre. I do not know whether anyone knows my bailiwick, but that shopping centre is demonstrably a regional shopping centre. That decision is like suggesting that these green Benches are red. It is a barmy, crackpot view expressed by bureaucrats. Not only is it mad, but it has some consequences.
The fact that Lakeside is not designated as a regional shopping centre has an impact on the Thurrock urban development corporation, which is a creature of statute and a baby of this Labour Government. It frustrates the corporation in fulfilling its job of creating new training opportunities and ensuring that the right skills are in the right place in Thurrock and along the Thames Gateway. It needs to be able to develop the land around the Lakeside basin—I call it the Lakeside shopping centre, but basin is the technical term for the area—and for it to do that Lakeside has to be designated a regional shopping centre.
I have complained about that fact in this Chamber a number of times. I think that it hurt the Government when I said that the process was the opposite of joined-up government. People moved nervously and, of course, the Ministers were transient, because one of the great problems with the whole strategy is the turnover of Ministers charged with it. It is the opposite of joined-up government because in the Department that deals with the matter, one Minister is in charge of spatial strategy while another, to the best of his or her ability, enthusiastically tries to push the Thames Gateway strategy forward.
I have drawn attention to that problem time and again. This week, the spatial strategy came out. I agreed with a lot of it, but it had one caveat—that the Lakeside basin at Thurrock would be the subject of further consultation. The East of England regional assembly and the Government office will report in December 2009 about the category that should cover Lakeside. Ministers should not take my word for it. They should go back to their Departments and ask, “Is what the hon. Member for Thurrock said true?” They will then see that the process is the opposite of joined-up government.
Order. I am conscious of the fact that the hon. Gentleman feels strongly about the matters that he is putting before the House, but he must be careful to distinguish between a debate on the Public Accounts Committee and subjects that might be more suitable for Adjournment debates. He has not yet been sufficiently out of order for me to stop him, but I am simply giving him some advice.
I am grateful, Mr. Deputy Speaker, and I accept your advice, but everything that I have said is referred to in the Public Accounts Committee’s report and its deliberations. The full and thorough report was one of the Committee’s bigger reports. As you have mentioned the subject, I want specifically to mention a part of the 62nd report, which is about the Thames Gateway. It states specifically:
“Local MPs do not feel sufficiently engaged with the Thames Gateway programme.”
It goes on to show the lack of involvement and consultation. The Treasury’s reply, which I think that we are debating, states:
“The Department has used several techniques to engage MPs in the Thames Gateway, including a standing group of Thames Gateway MPs meeting on a quarterly basis”—
I want to emphasise the next words—
“at more informal evening briefings”.
By that, it means junkets and dinners. I do not do business over dinner. I will not go to that sort of thing, and I have made that quite clear. There is far too much of that in general, let alone in relation to the Thames Gateway. There is a lot of bonhomie at those dinners, and lots of chat around the table about the problems of the Thames Gateway scheme. I made it quite clear that I would not go along with that in any circumstances.
The chief executive of Thames Gateway appeared before the PAC. I tabled a series of parliamentary questions about her management of the scheme, and eventually I told her that I would meet her over a cup of tea at the House of Commons, because I do not see people over dinner. The following week she resigned. The PAC issued its report, and as a Member of Parliament I legitimately pursued matters in the Chamber and in written questions. She was the second person charged with running Thames Gateway who resigned and disappeared quickly.
It might not be the fault of the chief executives, but the problems are indicative of those identified by the PAC. The strategy is flawed. I can give you references, Mr. Deputy Speaker, because the matters are covered in the Committee’s documents and deliberations. The Committee noted that a plethora of bodies have responsibility for the so-called Thames Gateway strategy. There are too many organisations. It is stark, staring bonkers. If we had wanted to create a confusing organisation we could not have done it better.
The hon. Gentleman is one of my heroes for the way he represents his constituents so independently and robustly. Does he recall that the hon. Member for Sittingbourne and Sheppey (Derek Wyatt), who was a member of our Committee, pointed out not only that a plethora of bodies—more than 100—was involved in the financing, but that the Thames Gateway area stopped halfway through his constituency? What kind of planning is that?
I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman, because I assure you, Mr. Deputy Speaker—indeed, I shall write to you next week—that everything I have said is absolutely in the footprint of the documents.
Order. The hon. Gentleman should relax. There is no need for him to write to me. I shall guide him if necessary.
The hon. Member for South Norfolk (Mr. Bacon) raised a legitimate point. One of the things acknowledged by the PAC—thank goodness—was that the Thames Gateway is covered by no fewer than three Government regions. There is the Greater London region and the eastern region, which we are in, although what goes on in Norwich has no relevance to my people—I am sure we love Norwich and Cambridgeshire, but we are not oriented towards that area. The hon. Gentleman referred to our colleague from Kent and of course his constituency is in the south-east region. That illustrates just how many confusing agencies there are. Moreover, the motorway system bears no relation to the scheme; the motorways of the Greater London region go from my region and from Kent into London.
I implore the Government not to take the view they put in their response—that everything in the garden is rosy. It is not. Sooner or later the Prime Minister will wake up to the fact that the developments he attaches such great importance to—creating new homes and quality communities with essential public services commensurate with residential growth and an increasing skills base—will not be achieved unless there is a root and branch review of the policy for the Thames Gateway, and particularly but not exclusively for Thurrock urban development corporation. The Government should use as their starting point the PAC report, which I commend to the House.
It is an enormous pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Thurrock (Andrew Mackinlay). As a former retailer, I assure the House that the hon. Gentleman is not mad. Thurrock is one of the UK’s top 20 retail centres and for it not to be regarded as such by bureaucrats shows how out of touch they are with the reality of the commercial world.
I have served on the Committee with pleasure for the past 18 months and most of my remarks will address how relevant our work is to the world of Government today, rather than focusing on one of the problems identified at our previous opportunity to debate the work of the Committee, which was how often we look back with excessive hindsight at administrative failings. Too much distance makes things less relevant both to our constituents and when making improvements for the future. In some cases, as I will explain, we are highly topical and relevant.
It is essential for the accountability of the Executive that we have a body such as the Public Accounts Committee to provide accountability to the legislature, and that is the role that we fulfil. Without wanting to pat myself and my colleagues on the back too much for being one of the more diligent Committees in the House in the work that we—supported by the National Audit Office—undertake, that diligence is shown by the number of reports that we have before us for consideration.
The vast majority of our reports tend to be connected with events that occurred at some point in the past, as my hon. Friend the Member for South Norfolk (Mr. Bacon) illustrated in relation to the single farm payments case, some of which took place a number of years ago. During the period under review, we also reviewed the Icelandic trawlermen’s compensation arrangements, which meant going back not just years but decades to arrangements that were put in place in the 1970s.
Having said that, some of the reports were still topical while we were dealing with them—for example, the 55th report of the 2006-07 Session, “The Delays in Administering the 2005 Single Payment Scheme in England”, which was published in September 2007. We reviewed the report with the NAO after we had eventually managed to persuade the former chief executive, Mr. McNeill, to come before the Committee. We had a session in June 2007 at which point there were beneficiaries of the payment scheme who had still not been paid the moneys from 2005 to which they were entitled. Although that applied to a relatively small number of people, and in most cases related to farms that had gone into probate, it was still causing considerable anguish among the people who were entitled to the payments.
We encouraged the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs to bring forward payments for the subsequent years of 2006 and 2007, and now of course 2008, in order to learn the lessons of the failures of the past and to try to ensure that payments were made in a much more timely fashion. I called on DEFRA’s permanent secretary to give an undertaking that payments for 2008 should be made within that calendar year. DEFRA will have had more than three years to put this fiasco right, and we are talking about a relatively small number of claimants—118,000 at the time of the report; I think that the number goes down slightly each year instead of going up. In terms of the scale of administration of support schemes, this one is relatively small, and most of the challenges of putting it in place should have been ironed out by now. We will await with interest how it gets on in relation to 2007 and the current year.
My second example of a report that had considerable topicality when we were working on it is the fourth report of the 2007-08 Session—“Environment Agency: Building and maintaining river and coastal flood defences in England”. We met to consider the NAO report in the week after the first of the dramatic floods had occurred last June. We therefore had the opportunity to quiz the chief executive of the Environment Agency about what it had been doing in the interval between that hearing and the previous occasion five years earlier when she appeared before the predecessor Committee. It was most revealing to establish that although the agency had then committed to produce a flood management action plan for each of the 67 separate river catchments, by April 2007 only four of those had been completed, one of which happened to cover the area that I represent.
Ludlow is within the catchment of the upper Severn river basin, where we had suffered very significant flood damage, if not as bad as some of the damage in the areas around Hull. More than 300 houses were flooded and a bridge on one of the main arterial routes into the town of Ludlow was swept away. That bridge was not even identified as being at risk under any of the categories in the flood management defence plan, which the Environment Agency proudly claimed that they had completed for our area. That throws into question the value of such plans if they do not even pick up significant infrastructure elements such as a road bridge. Our Committee was able to highlight, almost contemporaneously, some important aspects of Departments’ administration. That shows its significance.
We are not only occasionally topical or contemporaneous but increasingly forward looking. I shall cite two examples of that. We have begun a scrutiny role for the spending on one of the largest public infrastructure projects that the country is undertaking—the London 2012 Olympics and Paralympics. I am vice-chairman of the all-party London 2012 group, the chairman of which is a former member of the PAC, the hon. Member for Sittingbourne and Sheppey (Derek Wyatt), who was mentioned earlier. He held a conference today to update Members of Parliament and other interested parties on progress.
I support the games, but our Committee has the opportunity to scrutinise the spending to an extent that is not otherwise available to the public. We intend to do so on a basis that, we hope, will allow the games to be delivered on time and on the new, revised and much increased budget, as opposed to looking back in several years to ascertain whether they were delivered on time and on budget. That would not be much use to anyone because we I cannot imagine that we will host another Olympic games in my lifetime. The Committee therefore fulfils a valuable role and we are looking forward to seeing progress every year. It was apparent from our first session, which was held last November, that the information provided to the Olympic Board was perhaps not as full as it might have been. When we next consider the matter, it will be intriguing to learn how much more financial information has been made available.
The financial information that the Olympic Delivery Authority reported to its accountable body—the Olympic Board—could be included on less than two sides of a sheet of A4. For a project of more than £9 billion, that seems a little light. I hope that the most recently appointed member to the board, following the local elections, can bring his forensic eye for detail to its deliberations and that Mayor Boris Johnson will insist on much more vigorous financial information and scrutiny of spending, as, indeed, we will.
The second more or less contemporary role that the Committee has undertaken in the past six months is that of shedding some light on the single largest potential security breach, which did so much to undermine confidence in the Administration’s competence—the loss of data held by Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs. Given that the loss occurred during transmission of data from Revenue and Customs to the NAO, our Committee was quite properly briefed by the Comptroller and Auditor General in a session last December. As a result of that session and our ability to question one side of the transfer, by asking the Comptroller and Auditor General I secured the exchange of e-mails between Revenue and Customs and the NAO, which explained what information was being sought, the manner in which delivery was requested and the individual titles of those in Revenue and Customs who had been copied into the correspondence. Without that, we would have been left with only the Chancellor’s statement, which shed little light at all on the detail of what transpired.
I believe that it was a result of that session—in addition to the work of many hon. Members, particularly those on my Front Bench—that the Government were persuaded to appoint Mr. Kieran Poynter of PricewaterhouseCoopers to undertake a detailed review of what had happened. We have had the first part of that report, but we are eagerly awaiting the second stage to see whether it provides any further illumination on what happened, and whether Government procedures for information, transmission and management of personal information will be improved. Let us hope that the lesson learned from this sorry affair means that better procedures are put in place, which Ministers assure us will be the case.
I do not intend to go through the work that we have done on other reports because they have been adequately covered by other Committee members, but I would like to conclude by saying that the Committee is a pleasure to work on. It has been a great privilege to have the opportunity to work with Sir John Bourn during the final year or so of his tenure, and I would like to join other hon. Members in wishing him well in his retirement.
It is a pleasure to participate in this debate on the reports of the Public Accounts Committee. The Committee plays a vital role, and its impact is felt not just in Parliament but outside the House. If we were to ask members of the public which Select Committees they were aware of, they would probably name two: one would be the Select Committee on Transport, which was chaired by the excellent former Member for Crewe and Nantwich, whom we all miss, and I am sure that the other one they would mention would be the Public Accounts Committee. Having listened to members of that Committee contribute to the debate this afternoon, I have a real sense of why it is so effective, and I shall come on to that later.
The Committee has obvious strengths, including the fact that it is cross-party in nature, leading to a need to find common ground. That forces people to remove the politics from the situation and focus on the underlying issues. It also has a particularly clear ethos, which is about unashamedly shining a spotlight into crevices of Government activity—some deep and dark, others very large—where it feels that things are not working quite as well as they might. The spotlight may be blinding and perhaps not particularly welcome to the Government, but the light cast on the issues that are subjects of the Committee’s inquiries is ultimately extremely productive.
The contributions we have heard today, and the knowledge base of Committee members, demonstrated the impressive breadth of issues that they have to consider. I pay tribute to the Committee members, because it is clear from the numbers of reports talked about that the amount of briefs they have to read every week must be phenomenal. I remember when I was lucky and privileged enough to serve on the Select Committee on Work and Pensions that we had to deal with a lot of briefs, but that was nothing compared to what the members of the Public Accounts Committee have on their desks, which they have to digest fully, understand and make the most of when they are carrying out their work. I also pay tribute to the Committee for developing its reports. Given the diverse group of people serving on it—I got a sense of the individual personalities whom the Chairman has to cope with—it is incredibly impressive that it is able to come up with reports of such quality, decisiveness and forensic detail.
As well as having real breadth, the Committee covers a variety of topics, unlike perhaps any other Select Committee. Its focus on public accounts means that it can cover the whole range of activities across Government, in an almost unrestrained way, which is a helpful ability. I welcome the Committee’s reports not only for that reason, but for a number of others.
First, the value of the reports lies in the meticulous way they are pulled together. Critically, they are undeniably fact-based, as I have mentioned. Whether the reports are on the conclusions reached on efficiency savings processes across Government in dementia policy, which the right hon. Member for Islwyn (Mr. Touhig) mentioned, or other issues, it is the facts contained in the Committee’s reports that make them so hard for Ministers to ignore.
Obviously I am disappointed to hear that the Committee is still awaiting a response from the Treasury to one report, but Treasury Ministers have probably been slightly busy over the past few months on other matters, including the Budget, re-writing the Budget, re-writing policies on capital gains tax and non-doms, and various other matters. On this occasion, one can understand why Treasury Ministers have not had the time to get back to the Committee so promptly. However, I am sure that, having listened to the Chairman’s comments this afternoon, Ministers will respond promptly with the outstanding comments that they owe the Committee.
If one wanted to pick a success metric for Select Committees, the most effective would probably be the number of recommendations made in their reports that the Government took up. The Public Accounts Committee has a particularly good record on producing reports whose recommendations are so constructive that the Government take them up. The other key point about the Committee’s success is its clear willingness to take a second look at issues that it has already examined closely and produced recommendations on, if it is concerned that action has not been taken and feels that considering the issues again will bear fruit. That tenacity is a further reason why the Committee’s work is so well regarded.
The flip-side to the Committee’s unrelenting desire to get to the bottom of the situations that it investigates and to take a fact-based approach is that it sometimes discovers that the facts are not there. The facts that exist are not the problem that the Government face, so much as the fact that people do not understand or have the information that they need to take good decisions.
The hon. Member for Southport (Dr. Pugh) mentioned that issue in the context of the Committee’s inquiry into university drop-out rates and my hon. Friend the Member for South Norfolk (Mr. Bacon), who made a brilliant speech, mentioned it in relation to the new deal. He made the particularly valid point that projects such as the new deal can become mired in politics. In that policy area, what was so badly needed was a dispassionate look at the flaws in the implementation of the new deal, such as the lack of data available for the people trying to run it. The Committee’s fact-based—or often lack-of-fact-based—approach is critical.
The second reason why the Committee’s work is of such value is its attempt to look at Government in a more holistic, joined-up way. The hon. Member for Thurrock (Andrew Mackinlay), who I think would fit into the Committee quite well in terms of personality, made that point incredibly well. For what it is worth, judging by when I have been shopping at Thurrock Lakeside, I would have thought it was a regional centre. I base that on the fact that pretty much every time I have been, I have got stuck in traffic on the M25 trying to get in. Clearly, it is being used by people who are not particularly local.
Returning to my point, the way in which the Public Accounts Committee ranges across Departments means that its reports have a broader aspect than those of other Select Committees, as well as forensic detail. It therefore does a more valuable job by giving an overarching view of particular issues from an holistic perspective, which, critically, reflects how the Government’s performance affects the public.
I think that my hon. Friend the Member for Gainsborough (Mr. Leigh) made the point, when he opened the debate, that what the Committee can do incredibly well is reflect the experience of the public in its reports. People experience public services through joined-up government, and, when a Select Committee focuses on a particular Department, it often might not have the chance to reflect on the impact that the Department’s failures or pieces of work have across broader government. Critically, that aspect works very well for the Public Accounts Committee. That is another reason why the Committee is listened to both inside and outside the House when it publishes reports. I am sure that many Select Committee Chairmen would love to be on Radio 5 Live and Radio 4’s “Today” programme as often as the Chairman of the Public Accounts Committee is.
I could not participate in this debate without mentioning the Committee’s work on value for money and on the challenging efficiency savings programme that is ongoing and will be moved up to the next level. At the heart of the Committee’s consideration is money—taxpayers’ money—and how effectively the hard-earned cash that the public hand over to the Government, in the hope that they will deliver effective public services in return, is spent. That key strand runs across all Government Departments and enables the Committee to take such a wide-ranging approach to its reports. Its work on efficiency savings was critical because it was about a programme that is being carried out across government, not just in one Department. It made some profound and positive recommendations about the efficiency savings programme that could have been implemented across the whole gamut of government activity.
Having been involved with the Select Committee on Work and Pensions, which considered concerns about the efficiency savings programme as it was carried out in Jobcentre Plus, I recognise many of the issues that the Public Accounts Committee raised in its report. One such key issue was mentioned earlier—that efficiency savings were being carried out without a clear understanding of the cost that was incurred to get those savings. Before I came to the House, I was an accountant who worked in industry. I remember asking a civil servant at the Department for Work and Pensions about the cost of the efficiency savings programme in Jobcentre Plus and being flabbergasted when he told me that he did not know how much had been spent on delivering savings. I am therefore pleased that the Committee highlighted that issue in a report, and I hope that Ministers will not only respond positively to that, but act on the Committee’s recommendations.
The Committee’s achievement of getting the Government to accompany claims of savings with the cost of achieving those savings was a real win, not only for the Committee, but for Parliament and for the public. As we address the challenging targets on saving resources that the Government have set across a range of Departments—we know that more are coming; it sounds as though there will be a next wave—it is vital for the public that those savings are made not only efficiently but in a way that does not undermine the quality of the public services that people receive on a day-to-day basis.
I know from my time before becoming an MP that it is possible to make savings in two ways. The first involves making a bit of a cut and taking short-term decisions to make the figures add up in whatever way is possible. The other way is far more challenging, but it is the right way to do it. It involves genuinely looking at how to improve the way in which the team and the organisation are working. The Public Accounts Committee has flagged up the fact that it is vital to put the processes in place to ensure that the second approach is taken, rather than the first.
I pay tribute to the Chairman of the Committee, my hon. Friend the Member for Gainsborough. He set out the achievements of the Committee very well at the beginning of the debate. Given the venerable and individual personalities involved in the Committee, some of whom we have heard from today, it is no mean feat to be able to lead that group and to get it to produce a report at the end of any given inquiry. I am sure that, as long as the ability of a Chairman of a Select Committee to stay in post is performance related, my hon. Friend will remain in his position for quite some time. Given that the Government’s performance in any number of areas these days is all too often rather shambolic, there is probably enough work for several Public Accounts Committees working simultaneously.
The reports that the Committee produces are often challenging to the Government, and they might at times feel like harsh medicine. They might make uncomfortable reading, but they are always constructive, and the Government ignore them at their peril. We all look forward to the next gamut of reports from the Committee. As a group of people working closely together on a whole range of issues, they no doubt have a massive contribution to make to ensuring that scrutiny of the Government continues in the way that it needs to on behalf of the public. I congratulate the Committee, and we all look forward to hearing the Minister’s response to the contributions from Committee members and Back Benchers today.
It is a great pleasure to respond to what has been a very good debate. We often get quality rather than quantity in our Public Accounts Committee debates, and we have seen that again today. I start by thanking the members of the Committee for their work. The Chairman, the hon. Member for Gainsborough (Mr. Leigh), is rightly proud of its role in driving through efficiency and the accountability of all Government Departments to Parliament. That is a key part of its work, and it was that aspect of the work that I particularly enjoyed as a Back Bencher, and as a member of the Committee twice. I am now on the Committee for a third time, albeit in an ex officio role, which also gives me great pleasure.
The hon. Gentleman managed to get Confucius and Arnold Schwarzenegger into the same sentence.
No mean feat.
Indeed. I would not even attempt to compete with that, even with three hours’ notice, and I congratulate the Chairman of the Committee on his achievement.
The PAC highlights problems and points out specifically where things have gone wrong. That is a key part of its work of ensuring that lessons are learned, that best practice can be spread and that bad practice can be driven out from whatever corner of Government it exists in. The hon. Member for Gainsborough was right to say that there were signs of changing cultures and increasingly positive responses to the Committee’s reports. It is important that there should be criticism when problems arise, but it is important to use praise as well, which the Committee does. When it sees elements of good practice, it rightly highlights them. For example, as mentioned earlier in our debate, the roll-out of Jobcentre Plus was done successfully and under budget, while the pensions regulator and NHS financial management could also be mentioned.
Before the Minister moves on from the subject of praising Government Departments and the roll-out of Jobcentre Plus, I want to say that the report on that was exceptionally impressive, highlighting that the roll-out had won nine awards. One thing that greatly struck the Committee was that although the three witnesses in charge who came before us had between them 112 years of experience of administering social security, not one of them had started out as a fast-stream administrative trainee. They had all worked up from the bottom and they plainly knew the consequences of their actions on the people who were still at the bottom.
That is a key point and I hope that the head of the civil service will have noticed it in his regular perusals of the Committee’s reports. When I was a Minister in the then Department of Social Security, I was anxious to ensure that there were feedback loops and mechanisms from the front line to those working on policy. Policy will be more successful when those feedback mechanisms are healthy, so I entirely agree with the hon. Gentleman’s comments. It is important to learn from good and best practice, as well as from criticisms. When they are justified, as they often are, we should accept them, hold up our hands and learn the lessons.
My right hon. Friend the Member for Islwyn (Mr. Touhig) made an impassioned speech. He rightly pointed out the importance of the report on dementia inaugurated by the Public Accounts Committee. In a powerful contribution, he highlighted the importance of making progress on that issue. The Department has said that it will consider whether a compelling case can be made for having a strategy and a national clinical director for dementia. The Department agrees with the Committee on the need for early diagnosis—an issue that will be addressed by the creation of a national dementia strategy—and it also accepts the need to improve public and professional awareness. It has already commissioned a public awareness campaign by the Alzheimer’s Society, which will be launched later this month. The PAC has done the country a singular service by raising this issue. As my right hon. Friend said, dementia does not often come to the forefront of debate, but it is an important issue.
The hon. Member for Gainsborough said that we were not getting a bang for our buck in respect of the extra money that we are putting into the NHS. He mentioned the second report on prescription drugs and pointed out that 752 million prescriptions were dispensed in primary care, which cost the NHS £8 billion. That is true. He rightly pointed out that 98 per cent. of those prescriptions were written by GPs. However, to put the other side of the argument, 83 per cent. were for generic drugs, which are cheaper than branded drugs, and that is the highest percentage in Europe. Although there is clearly scope for more savings, I want to put on record the fact that the percentage of generic drugs dispensed in the NHS as a proportion of the total number is high. We must all chase the possibility of making more savings, but I want to point out that the NHS does not do too badly in that respect.
The Government are making appreciable progress in that area, but the remarks of the hon. Member for Gainsborough (Mr. Leigh) about efficiency and getting value for money are more appropriate to the Public Accounts Committee report on the consultants’ contract, which showed an increase in costs but no gain in efficiency.
The hon. Gentleman is right to raise those important issues. We must continue to work on our definition of productivity in the public sector if we are not to produce perverse results, and we need the tools with which to analyse how well expenditure is being used. We must do more technical work on all those issues, as he suggests.
My hon. Friend the Member for Great Grimsby (Mr. Mitchell) announced to the Chamber that he was developing increasingly sycophantic tendencies. I can hardly believe that that is true: having known him for as long as I have, I should be amazed if such a thing were happening. I am not sure that he has made the appropriate assessment of the way in which his character is evolving over time.
My hon. Friend said that he had made some interesting discoveries during his membership of the Committee, particularly the discovery that motorbikes escaped automatic number plate recognition technology and could thus evade vehicle excise duty and even, perhaps, speeding fines with impunity unless caught by a handy police officer. I am afraid I have bad news for him if he is thinking of mitigating the costs incurred by his household in the form of speeding fines: automatic number plate recognition cameras can now identify motorbikes, so I fear that his method of evading motoring law and potential extra costs has just slipped through his fingers.
Bang goes my wife’s Christmas present.
My hon. Friend will have to think of something more useful to buy his wife for Christmas.
The hon. Member for South Norfolk (Mr. Bacon) asked a series of, as always, relevant questions. He spoke of ending the ban on what can be debated under the motion so that our debates could become more contemporary. The Government do not have a particular view on that; it is a matter for the House. If the House decides that it wants to change the way in which we debate PAC reports, I shall do my best—or whoever succeeds me in my post will do their best—to respond in a timely fashion.
The hon. Gentleman asked about the following up of Treasury guidance. Such guidance takes a number of forms. A recent example is the “Dear auditor” letter which was sent to all Departments after I had been in correspondence with the hon. Member for Gainsborough about the follow-up to a PAC report in a certain non-departmental public body. It instructed Departments to follow up and publish in their annual reports what they are doing about the recommendations agreed in PAC reports. The NAO often alerts the Treasury to emerging problems in particular areas, and there is a great deal of constructive discussion and debate between them. We do not like anything to slip through our fingers, and we are trying to establish programmes that will ensure that no recommendations issued either to Departments or to other bodies slip through the net in future. Every Department has a team in the Treasury that has its ear to the ground and tries to keep an eye on things. It is obviously regrettable if something slips through the net, but we try to minimise that.
My hon. Friend the Member for Thurrock (Andrew Mackinlay) made an extremely good contribution on landfill, and on the prospect of a new Thames barrier to mitigate flooding risks. He also spoke about the Thames Gateway in principle, as well as about his local shopping centre. He clearly has views on the way in which the gateway has been set up, but I cannot stray into them because they are not in my ministerial area. I will say, however, that major progress has been made in the development of the Thames Gateway. More than 42,000 new homes were built in the Gateway between 2001 and 2007. The number of jobs created in the Gateway has grown by 10 per cent. between 2001 and 2006, compared with an average 4 per cent. increase in England as a whole. The Government have never believed that a top-down centralised structure is right for the Gateway, which is an area 40 miles in length with a population of 1.5 million and dozens of different towns and communities. However, my hon. Friend has robust views on the matter and I am sure he will continue to express them to the appropriate Ministers. I undertake to write to the appropriate Minister about his retail park, which is clearly bugging him greatly; I would like to find out whether I can do anything to assist him in that.
The hon. Member for Ludlow (Mr. Dunne) has during his parliamentary career been involved in some of the same Select Committees on which I have, as a Back-Bench Member, had the privilege to serve: the Treasury Committee and the Public Accounts Committee. He is clearly enjoying himself, and he made an extremely good speech on some of the reports he has been particularly involved in. I hope he continues to enjoy his membership of the Committee as much as I did.
The hon. Gentleman made a point about hindsight and looking at things retrospectively—after the horse has bolted, so to speak. That is because the Committee looks at value-for-money issues. If the PAC wishes to change its remit, that is a matter for the House. The Committee would have to develop its views on that, and the House would then have to decide whether to agree to the change. I agree with the hon. Gentleman that it is important that accounting officers are questioned—my hon. Friend the Member for Great Grimsby made this point, too—as the Committee has never concerned itself with policy, but deals with value for money and efficiency. That is an extremely important part of its focus.
The hon. Member for Putney (Justine Greening) was right to highlight the strengths of the Committee’s cross-party structure and the holistic approach it takes, and the importance of the focus on value for money and efficiency savings, which are at the heart of its work.
The Chairman, the hon. Member for Gainsborough, drew our attention to the tax credits system. Tax credits provide support for 6 million families and take-up is now at unprecedented levels. The system has helped lift 600,000 people out of poverty since 1998-99. Figures published in March 2008 show that in 2005-06 take-up of the child tax credit was 82 per cent. with more than 90 per cent. of allocated money being claimed. Importantly, for those on incomes of less than £10,000, take-up is now at 96 per cent. For lone parents, it is now up to 95 per cent. Furthermore, Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs has established the tax credits transformation programme to improve the services that families receive. That includes a new service that allows couples whose relationship has broken down to initiate a new single claim by making a single telephone call.
We have also improved performance, so that far fewer overpayments are caused by processing or software error. Accuracy in processing and calculating awards has risen from 78.6 per cent. in 2003-04 to about 97 per cent. in 2006-07. HMRC has revised its code of practice on recovering overpayments, replacing the reasonable belief test with a clearer test that will set out customers’ responsibilities for checking factual information. In effect, there is a contract of responsibility. For instance, the recipient is expected to check that the amount going into their bank account matches the amount in the award notice. As before, they will not be expected to check the calculation; that will be a relief to all Members in terms of our constituency surgery work. If there is an official error and customers meet their responsibilities, the overpayment should be written off. The change will mean a fairer balance of responsibilities between the customer and HMRC. The Government regret the amount of error and fraud. The clear intention is for them to be reduced. HMRC will set targets to reflect that intention during this year.
Officials are working hard to publish at the earliest opportunity the Treasury minutes on tax credits that Members are awaiting. Although the delay is regrettable, I should add in mitigation that the record for meeting deadlines for such minutes is extremely good.
Various hon. Members have mentioned the Government’s efficiency programme. The Committee has, on several occasions, rightly focused on this ambitious programme and I welcome its support for what we are trying to achieve. I am, of course, aware of the Committee’s concerns about the robustness of the efficiency gains identified by the Government. Hon. Members are of course right that the savings claimed need to be genuine and credible. However, we should not overlook the National Audit Office’s view that
“projects across the public sector are making significant improvements to the efficiency of public services”.
I hope that hon. Members on both sides of the House will welcome that view. Nor should we ignore the fact that the programme is the largest concerted and continuous efficiency drive embarked upon by any Government in modern times.
By December last year, we had achieved some £23 billion of efficiency gains. Our target for the current comprehensive spending review period up to 2010-11 is to achieve another £30 billion of savings. We have already seen some 78,000 net reductions in staff numbers as well as 12,600 posts reallocated to the front line. We are incredibly proud of the dedication and professionalism shown by civil servants across the country who have accepted the message that the Government need to work smarter and faster to deliver public services.
We are determined to seize opportunities to provide taxpayers with genuine value for money wherever possible. We are also on target to reach our target of relocating some 20,000 jobs from London and the south-east by 2010 and, by the end of last year, had already moved 15,700 posts to the rest of the United Kingdom. That good progress has strengthened local economies and enabled the civil service to tap into a broader pool of talented recruits from across our country. All nations and regions in the UK have benefited from these moves, with 3,275 posts moving to the north-west, 3,259 posts moving to Wales and 3,268 posts moving to Yorkshire and the Humber.
Thirdly, I shall turn to financial accountability. Full and open financial transparency is an essential and defining characteristic of a modern parliamentary democracy. The PAC, supported by the NAO, continues to be at the heart of the scrutiny process in our democracy and its unstinting and challenging examination of the use of scarce public resources contributes to our story of accountability in the United Kingdom.
The hon. Member for South Norfolk gave a dizzying list of PAC equivalents that he had managed to visit the world over on his travels, but pointed out that the UK version is still a world leader. However, Parliament and Government cannot afford to be complacent about financial scrutiny. This point was clearly recognised in the Liaison Committee’s report, “Parliament and Government Finance—Financial Scrutiny”, which was published just over three weeks ago, on 21 April, and which the Government welcome.
We are particularly grateful for the Liaison Committee’s support for what has become known as our alignment project, which the Prime Minister announced last July. The project aims to bring all the Government’s publication of information about public spending into a common format. This comprises public spending plans, parliamentary estimates and published resource accounts. Implementation of the alignment project will make a significant contribution to greater transparency and accountability and will allow Parliament and the public to track more readily Government spending from planning and budgeting stages right through to actual out-turn. As a result, Parliament will enjoy greater financial control over departmental budgets and, at the same time, have clearer and better financial information on the efficacy of planned public spending.
The PAC must share some of the credit for these reforms, as is evidenced in its welcome paper, “Improving Financial Scrutiny”, published as far back as July 2006. Hon. Members will recall that my predecessor as Financial Secretary promised to work with Parliament in bringing about change in the public interest. The alignment project clearly demonstrates our commitment to this worthy ambition and the Government continue to look forward to working with Parliament to achieve our common goals.
Turning from projects, I should like to reflect on the developments under way to modernise the NAO’s governance structures—another matter referred to by the hon. Member for Gainsborough. Members have already welcomed the Public Accounts Commission’s 15th report on the governance of the NAO. I should like to restate the Government’s support for those reforms. We support the Public Accounts Commission’s objective in establishing systems of governance and internal control at the NAO that are consistent with best practice but that do not fetter its ability to form completely independent judgments.
The current governance arrangements for the NAO and the Comptroller and Auditor General give priority to independence at the expense of good governance. The Government believe that the Public Accounts Commission’s report strikes the right balance between the Comptroller and Auditor General’s independence and the governance expected of an organisation that operates in the 21st century, rather than perhaps the 18th or 19th centuries. The new governance arrangements will give the Comptroller and Auditor General and the NAO the authority that they need for the important work that they do and spur them to improved performance. As hon. Members will know, the Prime Minister agreed that such provisions would be included in the Constitutional Renewal Bill, which has now started its pre-legislative scrutiny under a Joint Committee. It is important that Parliament and the Government work in harmony towards our shared objectives.
I understand the hon. Gentleman’s enthusiasm for bringing about the agreed new governance arrangements at the NAO—a point that he made very powerfully in his speech today. However, the important thing is to settle on a robust governance structure and to ensure that it commands the public support that it must have for credibility.
I should like to thank Tim Burr not only for agreeing to serve as the Comptroller and Auditor General until the reforms are completed and in place, but also for presiding over a seamless transition from the previous regime. That reflects his outstanding ability as a public servant. He is clearly demonstrating his ability to preside over the NAO in these times and to prepare it for the new governance arrangements.
It has been a pleasure to listen to the debate today, and I congratulate all hon. Members on their contributions. Before I sit down, I should like to add my voice to those who have wished the outgoing Comptroller and Auditor General, Sir John Bourn, under whom I served two terms as a Back-Bench member of the Public Accounts Committee, a long and happy retirement.
If I may crave your indulgence, Mr. Deputy Speaker, just for three or four minutes, I shall thank all the hon. Members who have taken part in the debate, particularly the right hon. Member for Islwyn (Mr. Touhig), who sat through the entire debate and backed up what I and others have said about dementia. He made a very moving speech, and if people think that our work is rather dry and does not concern real people and that it is just about accounts, I hope that they will read and listen to his speech. I seriously think that that report is one of the most important things that we have done this year, and it will make a real difference to millions of people’s lives.
On a slightly lighter note, we much enjoyed the speech made by the hon. Member for Southport (Dr. Pugh), who referred to us as some kind of pop group. Seriously, I think that there is a need for the public sector to take a few hints from what is going on in the private sector. We perhaps need to engage the media more in what we do. Perhaps there should be a public sector version of “The Apprentice”, in which the hon. Member for Thurrock (Andrew Mackinlay) or perhaps the hon. Member for Great Grimsby (Mr. Mitchell) could play the part of Sir Alan Sugar and say to some of those civil servants, “You’re fired.”
You mean the nice guy.
Indeed. Of course, that leads me straight on to the hon. Member for Great Grimsby, who brought us down to reality in a typically robust, wide-ranging speech. He reminded us again not only that much of our work is about helping the lives of ordinary people, but that many of the problems that we face in this country relate to our excellent civil service gold-plating European directives. We saw that particularly with the Rural Payments Agency.
My hon. Friend the Member for South Norfolk (Mr. Bacon) gave a virtuoso performance. The temptation in our debates is always to read out our speeches, because we want to get everything in and be serious, but he did not read his speech at all; he just produced about 20 reports and used them brilliantly as a prop. After what he has said today, we have to try to modernise our procedures in this debate and ensure that they are up to date. The concept of having to stick rigidly to matters on which there has been a Treasury minute is outmoded. It was outrageous that yesterday, when Postcomm was before the Committee, its representatives did not once say that Postcomm was to come out with a major announcement two hours after appearing before us, the senior Committee of Parliament. It is unbelievable. It is perhaps even more wrong that we cannot have a proper debate about that today.
Of course I thank the hon. Member for Thurrock, not least because he is not a member of the Committee. It is important that these debates do not become a Committee love-in, in which we all pat ourselves on the shoulder. We want to bring in people who are not Committee members. His constituency was the common thread in his comments on all the reports that he mentioned, including the reports on the Thames Gateway, flood alleviation and landfill; I thought that that was an excellent way to go about making his speech.
I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Ludlow (Mr. Dunne) for hot-footing it back from Crewe and Nantwich—I know that he has spent a lot of time there recently—to grace the Conservative Benches in his typically diligent way. My hon. Friend the Member for Putney (Justine Greening), the Opposition spokesman, is a newcomer to our debates. She put her finger on it: the point of our reports is that they are based on evidence and fact, as the right hon. Member for Swansea, West (Mr. Williams), who is the Father of the House and the longest-serving member of the Committee, always says. Our reports are only as good as the facts on which they are based, and that is why it was such an appalling let-down when the Department for Transport gave us incorrect figures on motorcycle evasion. We never want to see that happen again. It destroys the credibility of the Committee, and of Parliament, when we are given wrong information.
Lastly, may I thank the Exchequer Secretary to the Treasury for a typically witty, charming tribute to our work? Quite rightly, she set us right a bit when we perhaps strayed into criticism of the Government on tax credits or prescriptions. As always, the debate was not a party political affair. It genuinely sought to shed light on the workings of Government, and not to generate only heat. I thank the House for its attendance.
Question put and agreed to.
Resolved,
That this House takes note of the 41st and the 42nd and the 46th to the 65th Reports of the Committee of Public Accounts of Session 2006-07, and of the Treasury Minutes on these Reports (Cm 7275, 7276 and 7322); and of the 1st to the 4th, the 6th and the 9th to the 13th Reports of the Committee of Session 2007-08, and of the Treasury Minutes on these Reports (Cm 7323 and 7364).
Boiler Room Fraud
Motion made, and Question proposed, That this House do now adjourn.—[Mr. Khan.]
I am delighted to have this opportunity to raise an issue that should be of interest to everyone in the House, although I suspect that many Members do not even know that the scam I shall describe is going on. There are people who are ignorant of the fact that they are victims of boiler room fraud. I am delighted that today’s business finished a little early, because it gives the Solicitor-General and me the luxury of a little more time to elaborate, to fully explore the issue, and to identify what we all ought to do to ensure that people are properly protected. I am chairman of the all-party identity fraud group; that is how the scam was brought to my attention. I am grateful to see that the Solicitor-General is present. That gives an important signal that the Government intend to take the issue very seriously.
In the past few days, I have mentioned the debate to a number of MPs, and others have seen it announced on the Annunciator. Some of them thought that it had something to do with plumbing. They had not the faintest idea what boiler room fraud was. They asked, “What’s that all about, then, Nigel?” When I explained it to them, they took it very seriously. They went white when they realised the scale of the problem.
Boiler room fraud is a big crime, yet not many people know about it. The police have called it the biggest fraud threat to households. It is even bigger than credit card fraud. The estimated loss last year was more than £500 million. One estimate puts the figure close to £1 billion. The fact is that nobody really knows what the top-level figure is, because, as I said earlier, not everybody involved knows that they are a victim.
Boiler room fraud is the name given to share investment scams—mostly share investment scams—where crooks posing as brokers use high pressure marketing techniques to sell investors shares that turn out to be worthless. This usually happens over the telephone, and usually the victims are cold-called—they receive calls that they have not initiated. The shares might be shares in real companies, but they are sold above the market price and turn out to be highly illiquid, preventing the investor from selling them on, but as often as not, investors are sold shares in companies that do not even exist.
The criminals will do anything to part victims from their money, including lying, cheating and threatening. They are persistent and they are ruthless. The conmen who operate the boiler rooms try to locate themselves beyond the reach of UK law enforcement. Many of the boiler rooms targeting the UK appear to be located in Spain. The police estimate there are around 400 boiler rooms operating in Spain, employing over 600 people. They earn big money. I should not use the word “earn”—they steal big money.
Other popular locations for boiler rooms are the USA, Dubai, Berlin, France—they can operate from anywhere. In this era of the telephone, fax and email, a boiler room can be located anywhere in the world, and tracking them down can be difficult, because they are dishonest about their true location.
Many boiler rooms go to great lengths to build up a believable facade of respectability. They choose respectable names such as Bayer Investments, Legacy International, and Total Asset Management, which all sound legitimate. They might have a UK telephone number, but this can just be a forwarding service to anywhere in the world.
The people used by boiler rooms are highly trained to con victims out of their money. They have posh British accents or American accents, and many of them adopt what may seem to be Biblical names so that people will trust them from the beginning. Mostly, the names are false. Boiler rooms hire young people by advertising in newspapers to get them to come to Spain—I shall use Spain as an example because it seems to be very popular. The advertisement invites young people to come and work in Spain as a financial adviser, or young people may be recruited at employment fairs and lured into a job. In some cases their passports are taken from them when they arrive in the country, and they are threatened that they had better not tell anyone what they are doing. It is frightening.
My advice to newspapers is to take more responsibility for the advertisements that they accept. I also have advice for parents. Boiler room conmen seem to be picking on gap year students—young people between school and university, or those who have just left university—or young people who happen to be out in Spain already, who see people coming to bars flashing lots of money and driving fancy cars. That seems attractive to them.
I advise parents to pay more attention to what their youngsters get up to in their gap year. They should investigate far more thoroughly what their jobs are all about, because if a young person is offered a job as a financial adviser working abroad, the chances are that it is one of these scams.
The youngsters have to learn a script. They are drilled and trained thoroughly so that they sound believable. They do their homework about their would-be victims. They look up share registers to find out whether people regularly invest in shares, and the sort of shares that they invest in. They go so far as looking through yachting magazines or car magazines such as Auto Trader to find out who is selling those items. They know that if those people sell their car or yacht, they will shortly have a few thousand pounds in their pocket, and their telephone number may appear in the magazine, so the conman has all the information necessary to try to part them from their cash.
Why have I called for this debate? Members and their constituents might wonder, given that the crime is not new. I have done so because only very recently has the massive scale of the crime become apparent in the UK. I first heard about it when I was contacted by BBC Radio 4’s “You and Yours” programme for a comment. Reporter Shari Vahl has conducted an investigation into boiler room fraud for the past two years; I pay tribute to her determination and doggedness and to “You and Yours” for raising this issue. Every time it is mentioned on the radio or television, the police are inundated with mail, phone calls and e-mails from people who have finally concluded that they have been conned. The more we get the issue on the TV or in newspapers, the more people will come forward with their own evidence.
Even the police have been shocked by the scale of the crime. One officer on the case has admitted that the problem is much bigger than he had realised. I am sure that the majority of hon. Members have constituents who have been affected. I suspect that even today some of our constituents will have written cheques to send the con men; some may not yet have sent the cheques. One clear piece of advice would be that they should not send that cheque, no matter what harassment they are getting from the con men, but seek independent financial advice today—otherwise they will be the next victims. The con men may well lie low for a little bit while there is more publicity about this issue, but then they will come back again; as one boiler room closes down, another opens. The con men are persistent.
I want the Financial Services Authority to do more and the police to be given more resources, more training and better guidance. I have nothing but praise for the City of London police. I was with them today, and they are clearly focusing on and specialising in this scam. Other police forces, however, will not be up to speed with what is going on; I shall give examples of that later.
Boiler room fraud has been called a billion-pound business by an insider. As I said, that figure is hard for the police to verify, but they admit that they are merely scratching the surface of the problem. The police have given the figure of £500 million, which reflects the boiler room fraud that they know of. A senior fraud squad officer said:
“I’ve never dealt with a crime where there are such consistently high losses and so many victims. There’s a tidal wave of grief coming from these people.”
Here are some examples that give an idea of the scale of the problem. In the past two months, the FBI in Florida raided a $50 million boiler room based in Sao Paolo, Brazil. Twenty people were arrested. There are known to be thousands of victims of that one boiler room, and all are thought to be British. In another recent case, a British fraudster was arrested in the United States of America. This man, Mr. Gunter, and his daughter, had an estimated 15,000 British victims. He stole about £16 million.
Whom do boiler rooms target? Boiler room fraud is causing untold harm to ordinary people trying hard to save money for their retirement or to put their children through university. People even borrow money to invest in some of these scams—and when they think that they are on to a good thing, they tell their friends about it, and their friends invest as well. The issue is not about reckless city traders gambling on the stock markets with other people’s money; the people involved are victims of professional, clever crooks.
It is important to emphasise that this is not a crime that happens to stupid, greedy people with more money than sense. I know that a lot of us find it rather hard to believe that someone can get cold-called and, in a matter of months, start to part with thousands of pounds. We think, “I wouldn’t do that, so why would anyone else?” We have not had the telephone call from those professional con men, so, fortunately, the vast majority do not know what it is like to be on the receiving end.
One of the biggest misconceptions about boiler room fraud, which needs to be dispelled, is that its victims are stupid and greedy. The criminals play sophisticated tricks to steal people’s money. Even when money has been stolen—when people find that the shares that they bought were worthless or when they do not do as well as expected—the fraudsters come back. People think, “I can make up my losses.” It is just like the old casino stuff. People will part with even more money to try to get their money back.
Victims who have recently come forward to tell their stories are intelligent, educated people. They include university professors, architects and lawyers. I even know of one case where an independent financial adviser lost £20,000. Part of the problem is that people are embarrassed, and that is why we have not scratched the surface of the problem. Not everyone tells their wife or husband what they are doing with the money. I know of one case where the victim kept it secret and lied about how much money they were investing. Victims are embarrassed when they find out that they have lost all the money. In some cases, they will not even go to the police and report the crime. I say to anyone who has been a victim of boiler room fraud, “Please go to the police and ensure that they know about it.” It should not be kept secret.
The criminals tend to pick on elderly people, although they do not do so exclusively. Sons, daughters and relatives should advise parents and grandparents about the scam. They should tell them what is going on and ensure that they have not been taking any cold calls whatsoever, let alone starting to invest their money with so-called brokers who are only out to steal it. It goes the other way, too. Parents should ensure that their sons, daughters and other younger relatives know about these scams. Everybody should tell everybody else about the scams, or else they could find that their relatives are soon victims.
My hon. Friend is making an excellent speech on a serious issue. Does he agree that as many of these crimes are perpetrated by those involved in organised crime and are often transborder crimes, they might be an issue for the Serious Organised Crime Agency?
Organised crime is certainly involved. There are no two ways about it. The police have broken up boiler rooms before, but others have sprung up. The real problem is that the pickings are so rich that the criminals are preying on people’s entire life savings. They are callous, cruel people without an ounce of compassion. Their only intention is to try to steal people’s money. They drive around in flash cars, such as Ferraris, and flash their money all over the place, but it is not their money. They have stolen it. Later, I shall say a little more about what I believe that all sorts of organisations, including SOCA, ought to be doing.
I mentioned elderly victims and the fact that the criminals are trying to steal their life savings. That is what it is all about. Let me give some examples. The first, sadly, led to a suicide, as the consequences of this crime can be devastating. I spoke this week to the widow of a man who committed suicide in October last year as a direct result of his losses.
The story of how the victim was conned is fairly typical. He had made some investments previously so his name appeared in several places as a share owner. The crooks obtained his details from a publicly available register of shareholders, which is a common tactic. The fake brokers were in touch with him for some time before they got him to part with his cash. They build confidence by saying, “Something may be happening. We’ve heard that there may be an investment opportunity but we don’t want you to send any money yet. Are you interested if it comes off?” They learn dialogues to build up people’s confidence and persuade them that they will get a share of something big.
After the fraudsters build up people’s confidence, they go in for the kill. In the case I am describing, at first it was only a few thousand pounds, then a few thousand more and so on. The largest cheque the victim signed was for £38,000. It was two years before he admitted to his wife—in October 2007—the scale of his losses. The crooks had stolen more than £200,000 from him. The shame of having been conned and losing so much money, which was meant to support his wife and his young daughter, caused him to commit suicide.
Astonishingly, within weeks of his death his wife was contacted by another group of fraudsters—perhaps related to the first group, or even the same people. They told her that her husband had bought as an investment 36 bottles of Chateau Lafite worth almost £13,000. They threatened the widow and her young daughter with losing her home if she did not pay the money. How callous. How could they stoop so low? The fraudsters are clever. They sent flowers to one of their victims when he was in hospital. They wished him well, but they were still trying to sell him shares while he was in hospital.
This morning I visited Operation Archway, which is run by the City of London police to combat boiler room fraud. The police showed me piles of mail, much of it handwritten by elderly people—their evidence on lavender writing paper. I saw a letter from a man aged 83 who had lost £95,000. I saw a letter from a couple in their 80s who had lost £50,000. I was shown their e-mail inbox, which contained almost 1,600 e-mails sent over recent months.
I have been contacted directly by a lady whose parents lost more than £100,000. Her father contacted the largest firm of stockbrokers in Liverpool for advice because he had suspicions about the company. Not one person mentioned boiler room fraud. Only after several phone calls did a junior member of staff suggest that he should contact the police.
The House can imagine the outcry if £500 million a year had been stolen from people’s houses in burglaries. I pay tribute to the BBC programme “Working Lunch”, which today featured Mr. and Mrs. Fudge from Bournemouth who had £20,000 stolen from them. Mrs. Fudge said:
“It’s like having your house broken into. They’ve stolen everything we’ve ever worked for.”
The Financial Services Authority has made a poor response. The authority is supposed to be the UK regulator responsible for protecting consumers, including shareholders. I put a question to the Treasury earlier this month and received the following answer:
“The Treasury does not undertake consumer protection activity or raise awareness of boiler room frauds directly. The Financial Services Authority has a specific statutory objective to protect consumers, which includes advising and protecting investors against boiler room frauds.”—[Official Report, 12 May 2008; Vol. 475, c. 1427W.]
The FSA has gone on record as saying:
“Boiler rooms are not authorised by the FSA, and are based abroad outside our reach, so victims are not protected by the financial services compensation and complaints schemes. Our strongest tool is to make people aware of the scam”.
I would argue that it is utterly failing in its remit to protect consumers and to help them to get a fair deal, and failing in the objective that it has set itself:
“to make people aware of the scam”.
The FSA says that it has been proactive, so what has it done? First, it has a page on its website about boiler room fraud. However, when I went online I found it incredibly difficult to get to that page. There is nothing on the front page of the website to warn people about boiler room fraud; one has to know what one is looking for. Several different pages refer to boiler rooms and investment scams, but they do not all link to each other. Unbelievably, there is no reference at all to Operation Archway on the boiler room fraud page.
Secondly, the FSA claims that most existing shareholders should have received warnings from their legitimate brokers. In fact, it has given brokers a form of words to use and asked them to fund their own publicity. As a result, many people have never seen a warning. That is astonishing complacency from the FSA and from legitimate brokers who risk having their reputations tarnished by the criminals who imitate them. I received from my hon. Friend the Member for Croydon, South (Richard Ottaway) a letter from one of his constituents who had heard me on the radio and written to Mr. Phelan of the FSA, who was on the same programme. The constituent—I will not name him—says:
“In the programme you say that Registrars have been sending out FSA advertisements about boiler rooms for the last two years and that the vast majority of investors should know about boiler room fraud as a result. I fear you may be out of touch with reality.”
I concur. He continues:
“It is precisely because I had never ever received any boiler room fraud warning…that I wrote to you on 27 March 2008 with some suggestions. One of those suggestions was ‘Have you enclosed information leaflets with, for example, Tax Returns or pension advices, or contacted registrars so that something can be sent with company Annual Reports?’. I was quite surprised to hear you claim this had been going on for 2 years.”
He therefore asked some of his friends, most of whom—apart from one, who is involved in the finance industry—had never seen anything about boiler room frauds and knew nothing about them. He went on:
“There are three major Registrars, Capita, Computershare and Equiniti. Capita tell me they do not send out any FSA advertisement or warning about boiler rooms. They do have an advice line though if people telephone about boiler rooms. Computershare will only enclose a warning if requested to do so by the company concerned. Computershare look after about 1000 UK companies. I have asked how many of those 1000 agree to the boiler room warning being included. The compliance department at Equiniti are still due to contact me.”
I think that speaks for itself. The FSA believes that these warnings are going out, but they are not. People are totally ignorant about what boiler room fraud is, and there is astonishing complacency on the part of the FSA.
So what can we do? A publicity campaign is vital. There is a strong case for a national awareness-raising campaign, which should be led by the FSA—that is its job, and it should be getting on and doing it. All legitimate brokers, banks and financial institutions should be giving out leaflets to customers, shareholders, and people who bank with them. Credit card companies should also be involved. We could even consider asking telephone companies and other companies that regularly send out statements to warn their customers about boiler room fraud. Many victims and potential victims do not use the internet, so just putting something up on the internet is not good enough. As I said, the FSA is not doing enough in that regard.
The City of London police are trying hard to raise awareness in innovative ways. For example, they are reaching out to older victims by putting articles in Saga magazine; publicising the scam through the Caravan Club and its members; and producing a DVD to show on holiday cruise ships. That is clever. They are thinking outside the box to try to reach as many people as they can.
The FSA should take the lead on awareness-raising. It should work closely with trading standards and the UK Consumer Protection Agency to conduct a national campaign. It should spearhead an advertising campaign to raise people’s awareness of boiler room fraud. The FSA also needs to work more closely with the police. It is not good enough that it does not even have a link to Operation Archway on its website. It should correct that immediately.
The national police need more resources. I welcome the creation of the National Fraud Strategic Authority, which will co-ordinate national counter-fraud efforts. I also welcome the Government’s announcement of the creation of a national fraud reporting centre.
Will the Solicitor-General assure me that those new initiatives will mean more officers and resources to tackle boiler room fraud, not just a rebranding of existing assets? What recent talks has the Solicitor-General held with her counterparts in the Home Office, officers in the Serious Fraud Office and in the Serious Organised Crime Agency, which my hon. Friend the Member for The Wrekin (Mark Pritchard) mentioned, and the City of London police about a co-ordinated approach to tackling boiler room fraud?
Spain is a favourite destination for the boiler room fraudsters and it took the City of London police some time to get any co-operation from the Spanish authorities. They are getting it, but it is belated. They say that United States of America is fantastic and co-operates brilliantly. One would think that an EU country might be a little more proactive in trying to help protect the citizens of the so-called union. It was suggested to me today that the lack of co-operation was because the victims were British, not Spanish, so perhaps the Spanish authorities did not perceive the fraud as important to them whereas, of course, if such fraud takes off here, it will happen everywhere. Police authorities throughout the EU should consider a co-ordinated approach to the matter.
Local police need more guidance. People currently report cases of suspected boiler room fraud to their local police station. They should be directed to their local fraud squad and Operation Archway. However, I know of a case in north Wales in which a victim was left in limbo after discovering that the local police force did not have fraud officers. Not all the police stations in the country know about boiler room scams and they should be brought up to speed.
Does the Solicitor-General believe that trying to combat international organised crime through local police forces is the most effective approach? Perhaps we should think out of the box
As I said, the City of London police told me this morning that their co-operation with counterparts outside the EU is much better than with those in it. Clearly, that should not be the case. Will the Solicitor-General assure me that she will speak to her Cabinet colleagues to ensure that all relevant Departments work together to get maximum co-operation at European Commission level and with our European and international partners?
I want to send a message to anybody out there who may be on the receiving end of such calls and who may think that the so-called brokers are legitimate. Of course people may think that they are legitimate—it is their job to con. I say to those on the receiving end, “Be aware.” If they have an envelope on the mantelpiece with a cheque in it already, they should not send it. Indeed, if they have sent a cheque in the past 24 hours, they should take speedy financial advice about whether to allow it to clear. They need to protect themselves.
We are considering a seismic scam, which leaves a trail of misery, despair, tears and, sadly, in one case that was brought to our attention, suicide. If people do not know about the scam, they cannot protect themselves against it. They cannot protect their money or financial security. If they are left ignorant, they could lose everything, including their lives. That is not good enough. We must all do more.
I congratulate the hon. Member for Ribble Valley (Mr. Evans) on securing this debate and on bringing this extremely serious issue before the House. I also congratulate him on his pursuit of the issue in his speech and through the all-party parliamentary group that he leads with the vigour that he has shown today. I thank him further for the unusual step, which should be taken more frequently, of kindly letting me have a summary of what he wanted to say, so that I knew in advance the points he wanted me to tackle. That is a better way of ensuring that we have a good debate than leaving things a mystery and providing the questions all at the last minute.
I agree entirely with what the hon. Gentleman said about the misleading nature of the name boiler room fraud, which does tend to make one think of central heating or ballcocks although it concerns things that are much more venal than that. The cost of fraud is devastating and affects us all. Fraud against business does not just drive up costs for consumers; the cases of Enron, the Bank of Credit and Commerce International and Barlow Clowes show that it puts whole communities at risk. The Government, too, are a regular victim of fraud, and when they are, fraudsters are robbing taxpayers of the modern public services that they have paid for. As the hon. Gentleman has shown, the fraudster’s victim of choice will often come from among our most vulnerable citizens, who are targeted for their life savings and their livelihoods.
Boiler room fraud shows that although fraudsters’ methods may be complex, internationally organised and highly sophisticated, their motive is just simple criminal profit—deliberate, cruel and totally unchecked by any compassion for victims. Numbers are very hard to determine, as the hon. Gentleman said. We get about 100 new victims of boiler room fraud contacting the police each week. Losses range from £3,000 to more than £1 million—a very substantial amount for an individual. The Financial Services Authority estimates that about 2,000 victims contact it each year, with average losses of about £20,000.
The human cost, as well as the financial cost, is often appalling, as the hon. Gentleman’s examples showed. I am glad to hear that he has visited the City of London police; the Attorney-General and I went there a month ago, and indeed, we found them impressive, as the hon. Gentleman clearly did. The appalling story he was told of the lady whose husband was driven to suicide—he lost his life savings of about £200,000 and was obviously completely unable to live with that fact—is a human tragedy of matchless proportions. Another caller to the City of London just sobbed on the telephone and could not explain to the officer at that time any detail of what had happened; she was clearly devastated. One man in his 80s had lost more than £400,000 and was about to buy some more worthless shares when the City of London police were apprised of the scam and arranged for an officer in his local force, which was in Scotland, to explain to him what was happening and head it off.
Those are the depths to which the fraudsters sink. Amazingly, it is not generally seen as evil crime, like violent crime, rape or armed robbery, but it does massive damage to people’s lives. For people to lose the cash that they and their family were depending on for the future produces shame and guilt, and there will be massive under-reporting because such feelings are an ordinary human reaction. People suffer a loss of faith in their own judgment and a loss of self-esteem, all of which is massively more injurious to health than a punch on the nose in the street.
It is a very serious crime that the Government take very seriously, and the risks are rising fast for the perpetrators of such crimes. In recent months, a multi-agency taskforce, co-ordinated by the City of London police, joining with key agencies such as the Serious Organised Crime Agency, the Serious Fraud Office and the FSA, has become increasingly public in its work. That is Operation Archway, about which the hon. Gentleman has spoken. It provides a contact point for victims and a concentrated pool of expertise that turns national intelligence about boiler room fraudsters into action against them.
I acknowledge the hon. Gentleman’s concerns about whether local police are the appropriate people to tackle the issue internationally. However, Operation Archway has worked fluidly across borders, with operations, supporting action and arrests by international partners in the US, Ireland, Hong Kong, Singapore and Gibraltar so far. In the example that he mentioned, the father and daughter who were suspected of boiler room fraud totalling £35 million to £50 million were indeed arrested in the US, but that was with the critical assistance of the City of London police who were safeguarding British victims. Numerous people have been detained in this country and abroad over the past year, as part of seven major multi-agency operations against boiler rooms. For instance, last week, an arrest operation across five English counties produced a series of arrests of both men and women who were engaged in boiler room fraud.
Although such operations are vital in increasing the risks for fraudsters, parallel efforts are helping to remove their rewards, by tracing, freezing and seizing their stolen assets around the world. Letting fraudsters know that they will not be able to keep their ill-gotten gains is the way to get to the heart of the problem. Anti-money laundering specialists in the City of London police—I will come to more police forces in a moment—found assets in the US, Canada, Belize, Nevis, Cyprus, Tanzania, Lebanon, Latvia and, despite what the hon. Gentleman said, Spain.
The Government’s major reforms have in recent years put criminal assets at risk in a major way, as they never have been before. We have introduced tough asset recovery powers. They were not universally supported as they went through the House, because they appeared at first sight to be quite draconian, but they are working. Those powers are popular and are becoming increasingly tough in their implementation. Financial investigation is becoming an increasingly mainstream part of police work. We are aiming to make the UK a tougher target for boiler room fraud.
Contrary to the hon. Gentleman’s concerns about local police forces and the absence of fraud officers in some places, I am pleased to say that every police force in the country has contacted Operation Archway for advice and support. Those forces will be referring to Archway complainants in inquiries that Archway is taking on. However, local forces are simultaneously taking away advice and support to build up their own capacity, so that they can better tackle such crimes nationwide. There is, I am fairly sure, an element of regionalisation in the location of fraud officers, so that that expertise builds up in bodies that deal with such issues regularly.
We are, however, taking the challenge to boiler room fraudsters beyond the operational front line. We will use all the tools in our power to protect the public and will acquire new ones where necessary. The fairly recent Fraud Act 2006 has brought about a major simplification of legislation on fraud, which is helping to get boiler room fraudsters to justice more quickly. Over-complex law is a recipe for criminals who are used to scheming in the first instance to try to play the system and extend trials. Fraud law is “relatively straightforward”, or at least much more so than it used to be, so that people can see where it is going and jurors can better understand it. As the hon. Gentleman will know, we are holding a public consultation on the implementation of a plea negotiation framework, to enhance the ability of prosecutors to get an early settlement in what might otherwise be complex and lengthy trials.
The Financial Services Authority is not a part of the Government for me to defend or criticise. Essentially, it is an independent authority. However, the hon. Gentleman has put what he wanted to say about the FSA very courteously in this debate. I have read a press releases by him in which he said that it was time that the FSA got its finger out. I am never one to avoid mixing my metaphors, but the FSA would say that it was “all hands on deck”. The FSA regards itself as being tough in supervising the UK framework of financial regulations and has used its powers to shut down any firm in the UK that has helped boiler rooms, closing seven firms last year, with two people subsequently reported to the police for arrest. A solicitor who had authorised adverts promoting boiler rooms was fined £150,000 and is, I hope, currently in the middle of disciplinary proceedings.
The FSA would say that it is building coalitions against the fraudster with its sister agencies overseas. Co-operation between the FSA and its counterparts in Ontario and British Columbia has helped to recover £1 million of UK victims’ funds. We have to do things all ways. It is fine to simplify prosecutions and to make arrests, but that is after the event, and the money is often a long way away by the time we get to that stage. It is therefore important to think not only about prevention but about earlier intervention, when the money will not be so far away from concealment and might be easier to recover. It would save people who have suffered from that fraud from being demoralised if they realised that they were not alone. It helps them to realise that the fraud is happening across the board, and that they are not so foolish as they think when they self-stigmatise.
We are trying to take action across the board to hold fraudsters who prey on British victims to account, wherever they try to hide. We have to look at prevention, deterrents and detection, as well as disruption. The key agencies with responsibility have taken new steps to make boiler room fraud harder to commit. The FSA shares its intelligence by listing suspected boiler rooms, and its website is much visited, so I think that the hon. Gentleman must have found only one or two pages that were relevant. About 18 new firms are listed each month on the website, which appears to have received a substantial number of hits. The FSA has also shut down sites that are run by suspected boiler rooms.
The hon. Gentleman talked about working with share registrar companies. We understand, from the FSA, that it works with such companies to include preventive advice as part of the annual reports of legitimate companies, because—we agree on this much at least—people who are already shareholders are commonly the victims of this fraud. The FSA informs us that it is doing that, but, in view of the hon. Gentleman’s comments and the correspondence that he has had, we will go back to it to ask about this. I will write to him to ascertain that I am not in danger of misleading anyone by saying that the FSA is confident that it is spreading information to the people who are most commonly victims.
The FSA takes an up-front role in media activities, working with local and regional radio, TV news programmes and features, and print media. The list gets longer every week. It has not excluded the national press, but people take note of what happened to Mrs. Smith up the street, so they are more likely to be put on notice by something local than by something that they read about nationally.
The FSA also runs a website called “Money made clear”, which is intended to be a public awareness site that rolls out material to raise public awareness about all kinds of scams and swindles, including boiler room frauds. It has a contact centre for people who respond to what they see on the site and who might, as the hon. Gentleman said, appreciate for the first time that they are in the middle of something and so not write the cheque that someone has been trying to get them to write.
We will build on such progress more centrally in the months ahead. The hon. Gentleman mentioned the new institutions that we are setting up. Fraud has never been higher on the agenda, and the major reforms that he mentioned are under way to make the UK a tougher target for all kinds of fraud, including boiler room fraud. Concerted action is needed to tackle the threat, and not just from the Government. Action is also needed from criminal justice practitioners, charities, business, all the regulators and all the public. They each have a vital role to play and a stake in each others’ success.
As the hon. Gentleman knows, the Government have carried out a fraud review, consulting widely and getting a substantial response. They are driving forward with major changes that are backed by new funding. He asked for reassurance about that: £28 million was allocated for the new institutions in the comprehensive spending review. That funding must be added to the money that already goes to the Serious Fraud Office, which receives both core funding and what is known as blockbuster funding for individual cases. The Crown Prosecution Service has a fraud prosecutions division, which is accumulating a body of expertise. The Revenue and Customs prosecution office prosecutes fraud, as do the Departments for Work and Pensions and for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform. The funding—which will go to different institutions, and also boost the investigation and prosecution arm—is in addition to all of that. The reform programme is not just about prosecuting; it is about concerted action.
The national fraud strategic authority will deliver on the core recommendations resulting from the responses to the consultation. It reports directly to Ministers. The hon. Gentleman asked me when I last had contact with—he was pleased to say—my Cabinet colleagues. There were important Ministers present at the time, and I am in the group. The Attorney-General, who does attend Cabinet, is also in the group, as are all the Ministers to whom the hon. Gentleman referred.
The strategic authority has a mandate to develop a national strategy on fraud that, interestingly, involves setting out a vision of success. This is not a straightforward process; it is important that there should be prosecutions and convictions, but they are after the event for the victims, and asset recovery is absolutely key. Perhaps we should judge the success at least partly by the increasing number of reports. People are often unwilling to report this kind of fraud, but an increase in reporting would make it look as though it was escalating. There will be elements of that, I am sure, and the incidence of fraud will look as though it has gone up when the proposals get on their feet. However, if the strategic authority can set out a vision of what success means, it will be able to develop a national strategy for fraud. There will be a programme of action that involves deterrence, prevention, detection, investigation, sanctions for perpetrators and redress for victims.
A further important component is the national fraud reporting centre, which will have to set up strong links with industry, business and other law enforcement agencies, so as to receive reports. It will need to have networks and tentacles everywhere, so that when Mr. Jones in Redcar makes a report, it will know that that is a problem not only in Redcar and that there have also been examples in Ribble Valley, for example, and elsewhere. It will then work with intelligence analysts, who will work out, from the individual reports, a better picture of the networks involved, their techniques and the opportunities to bring them to book. It will then send back to the institutions involved—the banks, businesses or whatever—the recipe to deal with the problem.
I shall give way to the hon. Gentleman—I hope fairly briefly, as I have a little left to say.
I understand that we can go on until half-past 6, so we are not under a great deal of time pressure.
On financial institutions, why does the Solicitor-General think that the banks and the credit card companies—they are often interlinked—are not taking this matter more seriously? I was given an example recently. If a customer does something that is “out of profile” with their credit card, even if only a small amount of money is involved, the credit card company might intervene and stop the transaction until it can be assured that it is legitimate. The company is afraid that it, or the bank, might lose money. However, if a person who regularly spends small sums of money suddenly tries to wire £100,000 to the Dutch Antilles, the banks are not interested. Does the Solicitor-General not agree that these financial institutions should play a far greater role in trying to protect their customers?
That is absolutely imperative. The hon. Gentleman has put his finger on an important point. The strategic authority, although it will be responsible to Ministers, will have to work—and is working—with business on all levels and across the entire range of organisations that he has mentioned.
This is about focusing on a crime that has been very dispersed and diffuse in its effects, and for which no one has taken central responsibility. Once we embarked on the consultation and began to appreciate the task that faced us, it became imperative for us to involve all the organisations in the financial sector. That is what the strategic authority intends to do. We hope that the reporting centre will work in a preventive way, by sending back packages about how to deal with the fraud that people are experiencing. It will also deter, as well as helping with investigation. Although it will not necessarily give people their money back, we hope that it will stop them losing it in the first place.
I have a little more to say, for perhaps another three or four minutes, if that is a practical proposition, about the lead force, policing and prosecution. The hon. Gentleman asked me specifically about funding in that regard. Better intelligence and knowledge of fraud can, of course, be an end in itself up to a point, but part of its purpose is to increase the risk faced by fraudsters and to target their reward.
It being Six o’clock, the motion for the Adjournment of the House lapsed, without Question put.
Motion made, and Question proposed, That this House do now adjourn.—[Mr. Khan.]
I am sure that the public are utterly baffled, but we are all pleased that we can go on a little bit longer—but let me reassure those people that it will only be a little bit longer.
We are investing up front—this is the important point I want to put to the hon. Gentleman to help him with his concerns—to build up the specialist skills we need to make action against fraud a mainstream part of British policing. We are expanding the highly successful role—he agrees that it has been successful—played by the City of London police as the lead force in the south-east. It has £8 million of new ring-fenced funding, which is separate from the £28 million in the spending review, to which I have already referred, and it will become the national lead force as well. Apart from that money to boost its role in the south-east, it will have additional moneys of £28 million from the comprehensive spending review to enable it to boost investigations around the country and, as a centre of excellence, to build investigative expertise around the country. Two quite separate pots of money are going to that excellent force, which works so well and with such commitment—and, indeed, with such excitement at the chase.
We will go further, because we will need to look at how the framework of performance management for the police can be adapted to strengthen incentives to chase such crime and recognition for delivering strong action against fraud. It is very important that fraud is dealt with and that people locally gain confidence that action will be taken.
I have mentioned in passing the Crown Prosecution Service, which is already funded to do fraud prosecutions. It has a fraud division and it is accumulating expertise from people who are doing the work in depth. Those involved did 117 cases last year—they are very new—and had an 80 per cent. conviction rate, while there are currently 250 active cases. The Serious Fraud Office had 67 cases last year with a conviction rate of 68 per cent. The Fraud Act 2006 is helping to ensure that those investigations are brought to fruitful prosecutions.
We are now determined and very committed to delivering an integrated response to fraud such as the plague of boiler room fraud that preys on the vulnerable, but also to fraud across the board. We must ensure that knowledge of fraud is managed effectively so that we can improve nationally in how we tackle it. We need activity across the system that is properly co-ordinated for maximum impact, and law makers and law enforcers must work together to change the balance of risk and reward against the fraudster. We must also earn public confidence by delivering justice and redress, not least so that more people will be relieved from the burdens that the hon. Gentleman spoke about and so that more people will report, enabling us to pre-empt more of this invidious crime. By focusing very hard on immediate key threats such as boiler room fraud, but also by addressing the longer-term challenges for the future, we will make this country—this is our mission and we intend to do it—the hardest target in the world for fraudsters.
Question put and agreed to.
Adjourned accordingly at three minutes past Six o’clock.