I beg to move, That the House sit in private.

Question put forthwith (Standing Order No. 163).

I beg to move, That the Bill be now read a Second time.

I wish to begin by thanking my right hon. Friends the Members for Islwyn (Mr. Touhig) and for Cardiff, South and Penarth (Alun Michael), my hon. Friends the Members for West Bromwich, West (Mr. Bailey), for Edinburgh, North and Leith (Mark Lazarowicz), for Plymouth, Sutton (Linda Gilroy), for Loughborough (Mr. Reed) and for Sheffield, Heeley (Meg Munn), and the hon. Members for Twickenham (Dr. Cable), for Buckingham (John Bercow) and for Bournemouth, West (Sir John Butterfill) for supporting the Bill. I also wish to record my thanks to officials from the Treasury for their technical support, and to Michael Stephenson and colleagues from the Co-operative party.

Let me place today’s debate in context—historical, contemporary and future. Much debate in this House over many decades has been about the respective merits or demerits of private enterprise, as opposed to public ownership or public service. Yet there is, of course, a formidable third sector—I hesitate to use the term “third way”—based on ideals of mutuality or co-operation.

The early ideal and the practice of co-operation more than two centuries ago was a product of its time, the backdrop being industrialisation and urbanisation with the gross exploitation of men and women during that period of rapid economic and social change. Living standards were threatened for those on modest incomes. As young Beatrice Potter, later Mrs. Sidney Webb, wrote in her first book about the co-op movement:

“The belief in a co-operative system of industry arose in the untutored mind of Robert Owen and, doubtless, in the minds of other English men, as they watched the doings of the stupendous revolution in industry and commerce which engrossed the energies, stimulated and governed the activity of the middle- and working-class from 1770 onwards.”

Robert Owen is, of course, a key figure, but many have traced the origins of co-operation or mutuality to a much earlier history. Indeed, there is even a reference that in 203 AD—[Interruption.] Given his chuckle, my hon. Friend the Member for Brighton, Pavilion (David Lepper) obviously recalls the reference. In 203 AD, the Romans had mutual insurance societies to provide for death and retirement, so giving an early answer to the Pythonesque question of “What did the Romans ever do for us?”

After a long period of slumber and decline, co-operatives and mutuals are experiencing a renaissance. It could hardly be more timely. With the mainstream banking sector in some disrepute, customers seek a reliable and honest home for their money. With many people looking for ethical alternatives, goods that are fairly traded and produced sustainably make co-ops, both large and small, attractive. Some are also attracted to the idea of what we used to refer to as the “divi”, which is not a daily allowance, but an annual one.

Co-ops, mutuals and credit unions are already significant players in the British economy, with total assets in excess of £400 billion and a combined membership of more than 30 million, but now we have the opportunity for a substantial expansion and, in the finance sector, for an alternative both to market structures and to nationalisation.

Renewal is evidenced by three recent significant developments. The Co-operative Retail Society has now combined into one entity, bringing together many separate retail societies and around 2,200 stores. Secondly, the new unified Co-op is taking over more than 800 Somerfield retail stores, which will mean a combined market share of 8 per cent. To serenade the revival, Bob Dylan has allowed “Blowin’ in the Wind” to be used as the soundtrack to a new Co-op advertising campaign—I note that the great man is bringing out a new album. Thirdly, the Co-operative bank and the Britannia building society have announced plans for a merger—a new £70 billion “super-mutual” bank.

It is therefore my pleasure to introduce this Bill for its Second reading. The Bill traces its beginnings to a Government consultation of 2007, which reviewed the legislation for credit unions and co-operatives in Great Britain. Responses to that consultation indicated an overall desire to update the legislation for credit unions and co-ops. Although there have been legislative changes in recent years, the bulk of credit union legislation had not been updated for almost 30 years and much of the legislation for co-ops, as embodied in the Industrial and Provident Society Act 1965, was itself a consolidation of 19th-century legislation. The Government’s response to the initial consultation was equally emphatic and signalled a desire to legislate.

The consultation identified some 30 or so issues for both credit unions and industrial and provident societies that needed to be addressed in order to bring the legislation in line with international comparators and to meet the commercial realities of the 21st century. The Government plan to take forward the majority of the proposed reforms using a legislative reform order, but there are still some residual issues that can be addressed only through primary legislation, hence this private Member’s Bill.

Before I go on to introduce the detailed content of the Bill, I want briefly to highlight the important role that credit unions and co-ops play in today’s society and economy. Credit unions and co-operatives, as mutual societies, are inherently different from proprietary companies. They belong to their members and are not answerable to external shareholders. They are therefore able to operate on longer-term planning horizons without pressure for short-term profit or gain. That ethos is even more important in the current economic climate.

Credit unions in Great Britain not only provide for greater choice and diversity in the economy but offer many people on low incomes an opportunity to engage with mainstream financial services. They encourage their members to save in order to become eligible for loans, thereby instilling a savings culture among them—a culture of thrift and caution that must be admired. I witnessed that good work myself on Monday evening, when I was asked to speak about the Bill at the annual general meeting of the Croydon Savers credit union. That credit union has more than 1,000 members and plays a valuable role in my constituency. Perhaps I should declare a potential interest in that, encouraged by the excellent work of my local credit union, I have decided to become a member. I hope in the initial months to be a saver member, but I never take elections for granted and there is always a possibility that the saving-borrowing situation could change in the future.

Credit unions have also been prolific in supporting savings initiatives such as child trust funds and individual savings accounts. They have historically operated in areas of economic and social deprivation, often being the only means of engagement with the financial system for many who have been financially excluded. They offer an affordable alternative to unscrupulous doorstep lenders, some of whom have been known to charge annual percentage rates that exceed 200 per cent., contributing to increasing debt and misery for thousands of families.

Credit unions are the decent alternative to both the high street banks, which often, sadly, offer little to low-income groups, and the foul loan sharks, charging extortionate interest rates, who stalk single mothers in our most deprived communities. Today there are more than 500 credit unions in Great Britain with nearly 700,000 members and assets in excess of £500 million. From its humble beginnings, the credit union sector has grown from strength to strength.

The contribution of co-operative enterprise to the UK economy is well documented. Co-operative enterprise is at the forefront of responsible business practice including fair trade, ethical policies based on customers’ concerns and corporate social responsibility, as well as significant community sponsorship. Co-operatives are also leading innovation in many sectors; Braille on packaging is just one example.

The way in which my right hon. Friend is tracing the renaissance of the traditional concept of fairness and mutual benefit is compelling. Does he agree that his Bill does more than merely bring a traditional model up to date? It makes that model an ideal option for the internet age and for the types of modern businesses and communications that are playing an increasing part in our society today.

I agree. I have talked about the co-ops leading on much innovation, and internet business is one example of that and is of great help to many families who have internet access and want to use co-operative and ethical alternatives.

Co-operative enterprises have a distinct community focus, engineering social cohesion and fostering local entrepreneurship. They straddle a wide range of businesses from cottage industries to large enterprises such as the Co-operative Group. Co-operative enterprise continues to grow and there are now more than 8,000 co-operatives registered in Great Britain as industrial and provident societies. As we have seen that is a long and honourable tradition on which we can build.

The recent economic downturn has cast a shadow over much of the financial services sector, yet in all this co-operatives and credit unions continue to persevere and, indeed, to thrive. I want to see a revitalised and self-sustaining co-operative and credit union sector, attracting a new generation of members and offering much needed services to its members. The Bill complements other planned legislative changes that the Government are carrying out. It will allow the sector to expand and place it in a better position to operate in today’s competitive economic environment. The Bill will also ensure that important corporate governance improvements can be made to credit union and co-operatives legislation.

There is a distinguished tradition of private Members’ Bills for the mutuals sector. Examples abound and include those promoted by my hon. Friend the Member for Harrow, West (Mr. Thomas), who I see in his place, by my hon. Friend the Member for South Derbyshire (Mr. Todd) and, more recently, by the hon. Member for Bournemouth, West, who is one of the sponsors of this Bill.

My hon. Friend the Member for Harrow, West created an enabling power for the Treasury to amend industrial and provident society legislation using secondary legislation in line with any changes to company law. My hon. Friend the Member for South Derbyshire introduced an important power to enable the Treasury to lay secondary legislation to introduce an asset lock for community benefit societies. The asset lock is designed to ensure that on a break-up of an industrial and provident society, assets are not distributed to individuals but are transferred to a society with similar ideals. The hon. Member for Bournemouth, West introduced important changes to building society legislation and facilitated the transfer of a mutual business to another in the mutual family as an alternative to demutualisation. The recent announcement of the proposed merger between the Co-op Group, including its bank, and Britannia building society was made possible by his important legislation.

May I remind my right hon. Friend that that honourable tradition of private Members’ legislation goes back even further? In the late ’70s, the legislation that set up worker co-operatives was also a private Member’s Bill.

That is a useful reminder.

I shall now turn to the provisions of the Bill, although not in too much detail. It is aimed at modernising the legislative framework for credit unions and co-operatives. I am pleased to inform hon. Members that in addition to making provision for credit unions, this Bill makes provision for co-operatives run for the benefit of their members and co-operatives that are run for the benefit of the community—I am advised that these are often referred to as “bencoms”. Indeed, Treasury lawyers wanted me to say, “Or bencoms, as they are popularly known.” That is a popularity not known on the streets of Croydon, North, but it just goes to show that what is popular in the Treasury in not always popular elsewhere. During Budget week, I should not have said that—strike it from the minutes!

These bencoms have increased in popularity since their inception in 2002 and many housing associations, social clubs and football and rugby supporters clubs now use the model incorporating an asset lock. Clause 1 provides that all new societies registered under the 1965 Act may be registered as co-operative societies or community benefit societies. Most co-operatives are registered under the 1965 Act. However, while many would agree that co-operatives are indeed industrious, it is a bit of a misnomer to refer to all of them as industrial. There is, of course, the exception of agricultural co-operatives. As for the word “provident” in the Act, some might argue that it makes the societies sound like institutions of a bygone age, although we hope that they will be provident and prudent in future.

By modernising the name to one that is in common usage, we can help the sector to adopt a modern, 21st-century persona. The introduction of a requirement for new societies to register will also ensure that they can be properly supervised by the Financial Services Authority; that would improve corporate governance in the sector. Clause 2 changes the name of the Industrial and Provident Societies Act 1965 and other Industrial and Provident Societies Acts, and goes a long way towards removing the term “industrial and provident societies” from the statute book.

Clause 3 applies the Company Directors Disqualification Act 1986 to officers of industrial and provident societies, just as it applies to officers of companies, building societies and friendly societies. The 1986 Act provides for the disqualification of officers of companies and various bodies when such officers have seriously mismanaged them. Disqualification means being prohibited for a period from being involved in the management of a company or acting as an insolvency practitioner. Under the law as it currently stands, officers of industrial and provident societies who have mismanaged the society cannot be disqualified. Clause 3 will make their disqualification possible. That will ensure that officers of industrial and provident societies are subject to appropriate sanctions similar to those faced by directors of companies. It will give reassurance to their members and serve as a useful incentive for sound management practices.

Clause 4 gives the Treasury powers to apply to industrial and provident societies certain provisions of company law—on dissolution and restoration of industrial and provident societies to the register, which is kept by the FSA; on investigation of companies; and on company names. It will give the Treasury the power to apply company law on the striking-off and dissolution of defunct societies by the FSA. The provisions include appropriate modifications for co-operatives, so that in the event of dissolution their assets can be transferred to a society with similar objects. That will serve to improve the power of the FSA to deal with societies that remain on the register but have no contact with the FSA. I understand that a number of societies neither file returns nor respond to correspondence.

The law as it stands does not provide the FSA with the tools that it needs properly to deal with the problem and existing procedures for removing defunct societies are cumbersome. The provisions in the Bill will lead to a neater, clearer, quicker and more formal tool to cancel the registration of such societies. Clause 4 will also give the Treasury the power to enhance the FSA’s power to investigate companies and requisition documents from industrial and provident societies. The FSA is the registrar of industrial and provident societies in the same way that Companies House, an executive agency of the Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform, is the registrar of companies.

Under current law, the FSA has certain powers to investigate industrial and provident societies, but such powers are limited, particularly in respect of those societies that are not regulated by the FSA as providing financial or insurance services. In contrast with that, the Secretary of State for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform has more extensive powers to investigate companies. Clause 4 will enable the Treasury to give the FSA powers of investigation in respect of industrial and provident societies equivalent to the powers that the Secretary of State has in respect of companies. That will increase the FSA’s ability to check the proper running of those societies and their corporate governance.

Clause 4 will also give the Treasury the power to apply to industrial and provident societies certain company law provisions concerning names. The FSA, as registrar of industrial and provident societies, already has certain powers in respect of names of societies. For example, it may refuse to register a society under a name that it considers undesirable. However, the Secretary of State has more extensive powers in respect of the names of companies than the FSA has for societies. For example, the Secretary of State has powers to direct a company to change its name if that name is similar to another name on the register or if a company provides misleading information in order to register by a particular name. By enabling the Treasury to give similar powers to the FSA, clause 4 will improve the FSA’s ability to regulate the names of industrial and provident societies. Great care has been taken to ensure that the proposed modifications are appropriate to industrial and provident societies, and that they do not create extra burdens.

Finally, clause 5 enables provisions corresponding to building society law to be made for credit unions. The power will allow any provisions of building societies legislation that is deemed appropriate to be mirrored for credit unions. There has been a significant expansion in credit union membership in recent years, and the best way of allowing credit union law to keep pace with credit unions’ expanding membership and operations is to be able to bring it into line with building society law, which is tailored to deal with issues specific to institutions that accept deposits. Clauses 6, 7 and 8 deal with technical issues such as the making of consequential amendments and regulations under the Bill, the short title, commencement and territorial extent.

Why is the Bill important? It not only offers an opportunity to make much needed reforms to the legislation on co-operatives and credit unions, but modernises the framework and enhances the corporate governance standards for such societies. Renaming and rebranding them will make the legislation easier to, relate to, and will provide greater appeal to a new, younger generation of members. The Bill comes at a time when the work of credit unions has never been more important, and when ever more consumers are attracted to the ethos and ethics of co-operation and the quality of the product and services offered by such societies.

I welcome the Bill introduced by my right hon. Friend the Member for Croydon, North (Malcolm Wicks). I, too, think that the ideas and practice of co-operation and mutuality have enjoyed a renaissance in recent years. As he has said, they have an even greater significance during this difficult economic period. I supported a number of the private Members’ Bills, to which he has referred, to modernise the law with regard to co-operatives and social enterprises, and I am pleased to do so again in this case. It is always good to meet fellow co-operators on a Friday morning to update and improve our legislation in this area.

In my contribution, which will be a little briefer than that of my right hon. Friend, I want to illustrate how the co-operative movement of today is important, as he did. It is important not just as an idea of history, including our personal history—how many of us remember our parents’ divi number?—but because the ideals of co-operation and mutuality are relevant today and for the future. The Bill will help greatly in that regard. Although it may appear quite technical, my right hon. Friend has explained extremely well how its provisions will make a real difference.

Co-operatives are based on the values of self-help, self-responsibility, democracy and equality. In the tradition of the movement’s founders, co-operative members believe in the ethical values of honesty, openness, and caring for others. Co-operatives invariably have strong and special relationships with the communities to which their members belong, and they strive to be socially responsible in their activities. Many co-operatives show this responsibility by making significant human and financial contributions to those communities, both at home and abroad. A good example is the Co-operative bank. In 1992 it became the first UK high street bank to launch a customer-led ethical policy—a policy that sets out where it will and will not invest members’ money. It has carved out a niche as the ethical banker.

Co-operatives, contrary to the image sometimes presented, can also be a moving force in innovation, as the Co-operative bank showed by being the first to offer telephone and internet banking. It is also at the forefront of tackling climate change—almost all the electricity used by the Co-operative bank is sourced from renewable wind and water. It is good to report that in recent times, there has been an increase in people wanting to move to the Co-operative bank because of its ethical nature.

Does my hon. Friend agree that the co-operative movement generally, and the Co-operative bank in particular, was a decisive factor in the lobbying among the public that led to the Climate Change Act 2008?

My hon. Friend makes an extremely important point. The reason why the co-operative movement and organisations such as the Co-operative bank are so strong in helping to achieve such outcomes is that they do not just talk about the issues, but put what they say into practice. So my hon. Friend is right to identify the importance of this aspect of the co-operative movement.

Another feature with which we are now all familiar, but which was not always the case, is that the co-operative movement is a leading champion of fair trade. It was the first major retailer to sell Fairtrade products in its stores back in 1994, and it was the first UK supermarket to launch its own brand of fair trade products in 2000. As a co-operator, I am pleased that the co-operative retail movement is still the leading British retailer for Fairtrade products.

I know how co-operatives go out of their way to promote equality. Succeeding within a co-operative business is a win-win situation—it is great for the individual, for the business and for society as a whole. There is no doubt in my mind about what co-operatives offer to communities. Having seen people in my constituency setting up their own social enterprises, it is clear to me that the co-operative model gives them more than they would get from just setting up a company.

There is no doubt in my mind that the co-operative business model offers a great deal to women. To exploit the potential of co-operative and mutual enterprises, women need access to information on the various business models available. Organisations such as Co-operatives UK have unique expertise in this field. As well as being part of the co-operative world and wanting to see it grow and succeed, they know the issues that have held women back from starting and growing businesses. During my time in what was then the Department of Trade and Industry, alongside my right hon. Friend the Member for Croydon, North, I recall that Co-operatives UK did a great deal of work promoting women in business, particularly through that model, and I was proud to have worked on that.

My right hon. Friend mentioned a large retail society, the Co-operative Group, but there are, of course, retail societies around the country that may be somewhat bigger than when they started out but that are regional in nature. I have great admiration for the Lincolnshire Co-operative Society, and I recall some years ago meeting a number of women employees from its range of businesses. The society was one of the top 50 places where women want to work in this country. At that meeting were women from pharmacy, accountancy and bakery, and a funeral service manager. They told me how working in a co-operative helped them with their work-life balance, and how they were encouraged to build on their work experiences for the mutual benefit of themselves and the co-operative.

Working for the benefit of those around you forms part of the ethos of that other co-operative institution about which my right hon. Friend spoke, the credit union. I am pleased to tell him that I, too, am a member of a credit union and have so far managed to stay on the saving side. Credit unions are not-for-profit organisations, set up for the benefit of their members. The regular process of saving every month or every week, as is the practice in some credit unions, means that members receive loans related to what they can afford, which promotes good practice.

My right hon. Friend rightly mentioned the low rates of interest, and the help and support that enables people who would otherwise struggle to get loans to manage their financial affairs sensibly. Credit unions are essential local institutions, and although they have not received as much attention as I would like on the financial pages, they are as relevant today as they have ever been.

We need our co-operative and mutual sectors to compete more effectively in the future than they have done up to now. They will be able to fulfil their valuable social role, protect their members’ asset and provide socially responsible growth. The principal purpose of the Bill helps them to do that by ending all artificial legislative obstacles, thereby levelling the playing field. It has tremendous significance for the mutual sector and the wider economy.

I pay tribute to my right hon. Friend for his work and to the co-operative movement, particularly the Co-operative party, for its help. Putting co-operatives on an equal footing with proprietary companies in a number of respects must be an essential step, moving us forward in the 21st century. I am pleased to support the Bill, and I thank my right hon. Friend the Member for Croydon, North for bringing it to the House.

I, too, congratulate my right hon. Friend the Member for Croydon, North (Malcolm Wicks) on bringing the Bill before the House. I look forward to supporting him as it goes forward, I hope, to its future stages. Like many hon. Members present, I have an association with previous legislation, and this is almost the last piece in the jigsaw. It is needed to ensure that co-operatives, community benefit societies and credit unions can go from strength to strength to play their role in our economy at a time when that is needed more than ever.

It is more than 20 years since someone asked me to join the Co-operative party. As I was working in the consumer movement at the time, I was particularly attracted by the way in which it put consumers and their interests first. Having joined the Co-op party, I learned so much more about the history, traditions, values and principles of the movement. Co-operatives are based on the values of self-help, responsibility, democracy, equality, equity and solidarity. As they are so much more than a set of values, history, traditions and principles, the role of co-ops and community benefit societies in the 21st century is set to become increasingly important.

In Plymouth we are blessed with many such organisations. For 149 years we have had the Plymouth Co-operative Society, as it was originally called, which is now the Plymouth & South West Co-operative Society. It is currently in discussions to become part of the Co-operative Group. The Wolseley Community Economic Development Trust is probably the largest of its type in the whole of western Europe. The Millfields Community Economic Development Trust is also a major player in our local economy. We are hoping that a successor body to our new deal organisation, the Devonport Regeneration Company, will be able to develop its own community land trust, which is similar to the type of organisations that we are discussing today.

I am pleased to see my right hon. Friend the Member for Cardiff, South and Penarth (Alun Michael) in his place. When he visited Plymouth back in 2007, he saw for himself that we have a critical mass of such organisations in our city.

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for giving way and for referring to that visit, which was undertaken with officials from the Treasury, who were looking at the potential benefit of co-operative models and governance to the wider public service and the wider economy. She has rightly mentioned the critical mass. Does she hope that the Bill will help the building in other parts of the country of similar critical mass to that enjoyed in Plymouth, and would she encourage members of the Treasury team dealing with the Bill to look at the wider lessons that came out of that valuable visit?

I very much agree that that needs to be done, for reasons that I shall go on to describe more fully.

On that day we also visited Playtots, one of several nurseries in the city that run along co-operative lines, and the Hope Credit Union, of which I became member No. 100 a few years ago, and which has gained several hundred more members since then. We also visited the Tamar View community centre in the neighbouring constituency of my hon. Friend the Member for Plymouth, Devonport (Alison Seabeck).

My right hon. Friend the Member for Croydon, North discussed the renaissance in the ideals and values of co-operative organisations, and in an intervention my right hon. Friend the Member for Cardiff, South and Penarth remarked on how appropriate they are to the internet age. My right hon. Friend the Member for Croydon, North comprehensively set out how and why that is happening, and I would like to add a few further thoughts. Their ethos, principles and structure tend to circulate money, which, after all, is only the means of exchange within the local and regional community, which, in contrast to globalisation, promotes a virtuous circle of economic activity. We have seen many benefits from globalisation, but we have failed to reinvent some important checks and balances, and co-operative and mutual organisations will allow us to do that in future. Hence the great importance of this Bill.

The activity of plcs is so much more unpredictable and volatile than that of co-operatives. As I often say to my many friends who are concerned about the matter, plcs fund a large part of our insurance and pension industries, so in themselves they are a good thing, but they are less predictable and more volatile than co-operatives, whereas co-operatives allow us to anchor more activity in a local and regional community. Co-operatives work with the grain of what is good about markets. Markets often fail, and worker co-operatives are often used to conduct phoenix rescues of such businesses, which people in my community are particularly well known for implementing. Co-operatives also work to restrain some of the volatility in the open and free markets.

Co-ops, community benefit societies and credit unions can fail and falter themselves, and the Bill contains some important provisions on registration and disqualification of directors in the case of serious mismanagement, which it is important to have on the statute book. Co-operative and community benefit societies have a couple of other important roles that are beneficial to our macro-economy—they may become increasingly important—and to the hard-pressed circumstances that Government funding will find in the future decade and decades, including in our important local government and public services. I wish that I had a pound for every time that someone said to me during my working life, “Linda, I have been running this voluntary service and now the grant has gone. Please don’t let them take my grant away.” I also wish that I had a pound for every time that someone said to me, “Linda, I have such a good idea. If only somebody would give me some money for it, but I’m told that there is just not enough money to go round.” I also wish that I had a pound for every time since I started work 35 years ago with the voluntary organisation Age Concern Scotland that it said, “If only our core funding could be guaranteed.”

Effectively, at the moment, there is a cap on social enterprise, but there are many examples of how co-ops and social enterprises have developed trading activities that can release them from that straitjacket. Elected Members here in Parliament and local government should become much more conscious of how we can empower voluntary and community organisations to develop the tools to earn their own core funding, and we should concentrate on providing those tools and making it conditional when a grant is awarded for three, five or even 10 years in some cases, that they should be able to earn by whatever means—it might not even be their core activity; it might be by some trading function—the money that will allow them to become independent and allow those who are elected to fund other organisations. I welcome the Bill and the work of my right hon. Friend the Member for Cardiff, South and Penarth, a copy of whose report I have here, which demonstrates how, in a thoughtful way, we could tackle the tax trap that puts that cap on social enterprise.

By sheer coincidence, late last night someone sent me a think piece on the role of universities in unlocking social enterprise and creating a sustainable and future-facing knowledge city. It is a perspective from Plymouth university, which I want to quote because it has opened my eyes to the extent to which that critical mass operates within my community and the potential that it has elsewhere:

“In 2005, the Annual Survey of Small Businesses UK found that there are 55,000 social enterprises in the UK”—

not all of them, of course, are co-op and mutual or community benefit societies, but many of them are—

“with a combined turnover of £27 billion. Social enterprises account for 5% of all businesses with employees, and contribute £8.4 billion per year to the UK economy. The Cabinet Office states that ‘whatever form they take, social enterprises prove that social and environmental responsibility can be combined with financial success’…Research demonstrates that social enterprises enjoy a good survival rate in recessions. In economically challenging conditions, enterprises set up on social principles weather the financial storm and in many cases grow stronger. It is also exciting that social enterprises are usually set up by people who are passionate about creating a business and giving back something to the community…The opportunity this brings for universities to work with talented people means engaging with a new tranche of people and learning more about outreach and delivery in place, working with schools, colleges and other learning providers such as Business Link. The South West region is responsible for almost a fifth…of all social enterprises set up in the UK”.

I hope that as my university goes forward as the enterprise university, it will have a strong social enterprise dimension, including community benefit and the co-operative organisations with which the Bill deals today.

I hope that the Bill will not only achieve that but give a new lease of life to some important traditional values at a time when people are looking for something on which to base their future—as my right hon. Friend the Member for Kingston upon Hull, East (Mr. Prescott) said when he was Deputy Prime Minister, traditional values in a modern setting.

The Liberal Democrats support the Bill and it is worth putting on record why. I do not think that we will be alone in that. The Government will support it and a good number of Labour Members here are warm in their support for it. The reason why we support it is obviously that credit unions address the issue of financial exclusion. They deal with people who cannot use banks or who are uncomfortable with using banks. I dare say that more people then ever are uncomfortable with using banks these days. Certainly it is best that such people avoid the loan sharks, which were mentioned by the right hon. Member for Croydon, North (Malcolm Wicks), or the pawnbroker, with all the horrific consequences that they often entail.

The right hon. Gentleman is right to suggest that the time has come for this idea: the time for credit unions is now. He spoke of substantial expansion in this sector—mergers, developments and the introduction of big players such as Britannia. Local authorities now look very positively on credit unions—as something other than a marginal aspect of their work—and the Government look fairly positively on them, too. The thinking is that, perhaps, credit unions should extend their reach beyond the usual groups to which they appeal to people in middle-class and suburban areas who have not thought of them as a viable financial alternative. There is no doubt that credit unions will become an increasingly significant player.

If we accept that credit unions are to become larger, better funded and state supported, however, we must look very hard at governance. There is a dilemma, because although we do not want them to lose their volunteer base, which is their strength, we want them to gain a proper professional approach. The Joseph Rowntree Foundation recently studied credit unions and decided that, in many cases and for no bad reason, they were devoid of a range of skills that would help them enormously in their work: skills in management, in product marketing, and critically, in accountancy.

The Bill provides for those skills, to some extent, by bringing in regulation, because a properly regulated credit union will have to possess those skills or be asked to acquire them. However, the foundation makes the point that, with increasing local authority involvement and state and local authority support, we must be very careful not to denature an organisation so that it becomes something else—just another financial institution. We do not want to diminish the role that people play as individual contributors and depositors.

Some reassurance on that—possibly during the winding-up speeches—would be helpful, as would some reassurance that smaller credit unions, which, perforce, will want to stay small and will stay small, will not be crushed by the burden of regulation. It is important, however, that we do our maximum to encourage probity in those organisations, because probity is crucial to the reputation of credit unions but, in some cases, has not always existed.

There is one point that the right hon. Gentleman did not make, and it is worth considering in the context of the debate. Credit unions often start in working-class areas and provide a method for the community to pull itself up by its own bootstraps, but an unstated and important aspect of their role, which is often missed, is informal financial education. Will the right hon. Gentleman consider whether that, too, should be supported and encouraged by legislation or, indeed, whether legislation can actually do so? That aside, the Bill deserves to progress and may do much good.

I congratulate my right hon. Friend the Member for Croydon, North (Malcolm Wicks) on introducing the Bill, which is an important contribution to the changes taking place in the mutual movement. I congratulate him for several reasons. The Bill is modernising legislation. It will bring industrial and provident societies and credit unions into the 21st century, and that is important at this stage in their development. Crucially, for industrial and provident societies, it will modernise their image: they are finally beginning to get away from their origins in 19th-century philanthropy. The words “provident” and “industrial” in the context of co-operative and credit unions are misnomers, and this change is long overdue.

I hope the hon. Gentleman is not suggesting that there is anything wrong with 19th-century philanthropy.

The hon. Gentleman can take that for granted. Those organisations were built on the strength of 19th-century philanthropy and owe it a great debt, but they also owe it to current and future generations to be relevant to the purposes for which they are required at this point in their development. This legislation will make a positive contribution to that, and I hope to explain why.

The legislation is also important because it will create a level playing field and protect organisations’ assets, as companies’ assets are protected. It will also protect the membership, which is often dependent on those who run the organisation, and help to modernise it. The Bill affects a not insubstantial part of the economic and social fabric of our country. My right hon. Friend mentioned that it was part of both the third sector—a very large sector—and of the so-called mutual movement. We are dealing specifically with industrial and provident societies, community benefit societies and credit unions, and they have an important role in providing goods and services for their members and communities throughout the country. The Bill will improve the administration of those organisations.

Coincidentally and interestingly, I received through the post this week, as I suspect other Members did, the first “Mutuals Yearbook 2008”, produced by an organisation called Mutuo. The yearbook tells me that the mutuals sector has just over 16,000 member organisations and a United Kingdom membership of 23 million, and that, if members linked arm in arm, they could stretch from London to Sydney and all the way back again. With a turnover of £83 billion a year, it is, by any yardstick, a substantial movement, and it consists of a diverse group of co-operatives. I have been involved with worker, housing and community co-operatives, but in the movement’s orbit there are also agricultural co-operatives and various other organisations in different parts of the economy.

The retail and consumer co-operative movement is probably the best part of the sector, as it is so prevalent on high streets throughout the country. As my right hon. Friend mentioned, the Co-operative group recently took over the Somerfield group of companies and, as a result, that co-operative is now the fifth largest retailer in the country, providing significant benefits to its members in communities throughout England and Wales.

My hon. Friend has a long and respectable history in housing, so does he share my puzzlement at the fact that co-operative housing has been a relatively small sector of housing provision in the United Kingdom, and does he hope for a renaissance in co-operative housing development?

I thank my hon. Friend for that question, because it gives me the opportunity to describe a conundrum: we often talk about the need not to get tied up in housing tenure, so we should talk not about rented or owner-occupied accommodation but about providing good accommodation. Co-operative housing shifts the focus off tenure and tries to deal with quality and the provision of decent standards in housing. I am amazed that, while Scandinavian countries, Canada and many other western countries have significant co-operative housing movements, the United Kingdom, sadly, does not. As policy makers, we ought to think seriously—although perhaps not in this debate today—about trying to create the conditions in which a housing co-operative movement can flourish.

Let me return to the retail co-operative movement. Bob Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind” has been part and parcel of the Co-operative’s insignia and television adverts, and the group has taken over Somerfield; furthermore, Co-operative Financial Services and Britannia building society have amalgamated. Some suspect that the first super-mutual is being created. We can thank the hon. Member for Bournemouth, West (Sir John Butterfill), whose legislation created the conditions under which that could happen. I hope that the Bill will help to create conditions in which the co-operative and credit union movements can go forward.

Credit unions have been growing relatively fast since the original legislation that created the credit union movement came into being in the late 1970s. Currently, there are about 650,000 members of credit unions, with roughly £590 million in assets. We ought to look at the ambition of the movement if we are to grasp the possibilities. In conjunction with the Co-operative bank, credit unions have recently been able to set up current accounts for their members, and many are considering partnerships that will allow them to issue credit cards. Moving into mainstream financial services is the way forward for credit unions, and we must do everything we can to foster that.

At the time of the original legislation in the late 1970s, this country’s credit unions, formed mainly through immigrant Irish and West Indian communities, had fewer than 10,000 members and assets of less than £1 million. We can see how much credit unions have advanced in that time, but they have much more to do if they are to be relevant to communities and members throughout the country. I hope that the Bill will allow us to make changes. Credit unions still exist under the framework of the original Act of Parliament, and modernisation is long overdue. I hope that my right hon. Friend’s Bill will help to achieve it.

What will the Bill do for co-operatives and credit unions? First, it will allow them to improve their services. Member and customer loyalty is important, and the Bill will help strengthen it. It will help create greater trust. We know, for example, that the public trust building societies much more than banks, and all the evidence says that the public—especially credit union members—also trust credit unions. Retail and other co-operatives undoubtedly have a strong link with their members, and that trust, which is critical, is fostered in the Bill.

The Bill will help the organisations to respond to community and membership needs, which is also critical. Co-operatives, community benefit societies and credit unions serve particular markets—often markets ignored by the private sector. We have talked about the need of low-income consumers for basic financial services; often, they cannot go to a bank or any other conventional high-street organisation, and credit unions are critical in helping them get such services.

The Bill will help modernise the movement and make it more relevant. It will also help the organisations to innovate. As was mentioned, the 2007 Treasury consultation is pertinent. The members and customers of co-operatives, credit unions and community benefit societies were consulted about what they needed to improve their organisations. Not everything will appear in the Bill, although it does a great deal; other things could be enacted through secondary legislation in the House, and many are critical for the future of credit unions.

I mention, in passing, the issue of the reform of the common bond, on which there has been debate. Sadly, my own Edmonton credit union is no longer with us, but I remember our many debates about how we could form a common bond that would make it possible for it to expand its services. We are beginning to see the need for that type of reform. Payment of interest on accounts happens within other conventional financial services organisations, and it ought to happen in credit unions. The membership of corporate bodies might seem a simple issue, but it could make an enormous difference to the well-being and progress of credit unions up and down the country.

Many of those changes and the changes in the Bill have been promoted by the credit union movement and co-operatives, and the Bill addresses issues for which there is a need for primary legislation. It has the strong support of members and of the organisations concerned, which is why I am pleased that we are here today supporting it. I understand that Government Front Benchers and one of the Opposition parties support it; I wait to hear the position of the other one. I am sad that so few Members are in the Chamber today, but I hope that everyone here supports the Bill.

I turn briefly to the changes to be introduced by the Bill. I am sorry if I am repeating what has already been said, but it is important that we clarify why the Bill is being brought forward. Industrial provident societies will now be registered as co-operative societies or community benefit societies. I would like to be reassured that the newly named co-operative societies will comprise only bona fide societies that have in their rules the Rochdale principles, on which co-operation is based, if they are to qualify to be called co-operative societies. I am not clear whether that is the case, but it is an important consideration. When the Bill is in Committee, I hope that the Minister will give a reassurance that those principles will be a core component of any organisation that calls itself a co-operative society.

It seems plausible and logical that to be a community benefit society, a society must be for the “benefit of the community”. That is an important consideration. Not all so-called industrial and provident societies that are supposed to be for community benefit turn out to have a benefit for the community. The upgrade is important and will reassure the public that something called a community benefit society will truly be one.

I mentioned earlier that the Bill would update the language we use, making it relevant to people today and giving them a much more accurate view of what these organisations do. Similarly, clause 2 would change the name of the Industrial and Provident Societies Act 1965 to the Co-operative and Community Benefit Societies and Credit Unions Act 1965. That may sound like a very simple change, but during the passage of previous legislation—other Members here have were present at that time—we have called for a change of this nature to update the name and, without putting it too dramatically, in effect to sweep away industrial and provident societies by renaming them. I congratulate my right hon. Friend the Member for Croydon, North on that—although I have to say that referring to co-operative and community benefit societies and credit unions Acts would be quite a mouthful for those 600,000 credit union members when discussing them at their meetings.

Clause 3 would make credit unions and industrial and provident societies subject to the Company Directors Disqualification Act 1986. One of the most curious anomalies in this area has been that until the time of that Act, these organisations could not disqualify someone who had mismanaged the organisation of which they were part. It seems unbelievable that people could continue to be at the centre of organisations when it was clear that they had totally mismanaged them. The Bill also covers disqualification for criminal conduct—a very welcome clarification that would provide a strengthened role for the membership of these organisations to ensure that they are administered properly.

The benefits of the Bill would be threefold. First, it would in many ways provide a level playing field with other organisations with which these organisations compete in the marketplace. That is very important. Secondly, it would give protection against unfit directors, or trustees as they are called in these organisations, thereby strengthening the membership’s role in ensuring that their trustees act in the best interests of their organisation. Thirdly, it would provide transparency, clarity and consistency for members, again strengthening their role, which is vital in terms of their being democratic organisations.

The next part of the Bill would bring certain provisions of company law into operation for industrial and provident societies and credit unions. As a result, some of the secondary legislation that applies to companies would now apply to these organisations, so that they would be able to carry out investigations. That is absolutely vital. A member should be able to go to the registrar and call for action on something, and it should be able to be done; that has not been the case so far. The ability to take action on company names is an important power. Often, names will exist not to provide transparency but to hide the purpose of the organisation. There would be the power to dissolve societies and to remove them from the register—although I think that that would satisfy the Financial Services Authority, which wants to get rid of these organisations, more than their memberships. Those would be welcome changes, updating the legislation to bring it into the 21st century and bringing it up to the standards of legislation covering other companies and organisations.

Clause 5 would align credit union legislation with the existing provisions of building society law. That is very important. As I said, credit union legislation has not been comprehensively updated since the original Act way back in the late ’70s. That Act was very proscriptive: it covered almost everything that credit unions could do and limited their room for innovation. The ability to introduce changes that are taking place in building society law would ensure that these organisations do not continue to be left behind. For all those credit union members out there who may be worried about this, the first thing we should say is that none of this would affect the defining characteristics of credit unions. Credit unions would still be financial organisations based in the community and run by their members on democratic principles—important principles that separate credit unions from other financial organisations. Those defining characteristics would be protected in the Bill. Nevertheless, it would facilitate, through secondary legislation, the updating of credit union law to bring it into line with that on building societies, creating a level playing field. These organisations do not want any preferential treatment, but they do not want to be disadvantaged in the marketplace, and the Bill would help to ensure that that does not happen.

What would the Bill do overall to improve the situation for both these types of organisation? Its most important effect would be to increase protection for the ordinary member. For an ordinary member with a deposit in a credit union—I have been one in the past—it would increase the protection they are afforded. For an ordinary retail co-operative member, it would provide reassurance that if something was going wrong, action could be taken. It would modernise the language and the law to bring them into the 21st century. It would—I repeat this point, but it is really important to grasp it—create a level playing field. It would remove unreasonable barriers and burdens that have been placed on industrial and provident societies and credit unions. Much of that would be done through secondary legislation, but the Bill would enable that secondary legislation to occur. On the basis of the provisions in the Bill, including its enabling provisions to make further changes, I commend it to the House.

It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Edmonton (Mr. Love), who speaks on these issues with great passion and eloquence. I thought that he almost argued his case for being a member of the Committee that scrutinises the Bill in referring to the amendments that he envisaged might be tabled to ensure that the Rochdale principles were enshrined in it. I saw the right hon. Member for Croydon, North (Malcolm Wicks) nodding at the prospect of somebody else joining the Bill Committee. If the hon. Gentleman thinks that he might escape joining that Committee by joining the Finance Bill Committee, that might indeed be his only way of salvaging his position.

The hon. Gentleman mentioned the Rochdale principles, as did my hon.—and Co-operative—Friend the Member for Edmonton (Mr. Love). I welcome that, but I hope that they will note that those principles grew out of the work of Dr. William King and his newspaper, “The Co-operator”, which was published in Brighton from the late 1820s onwards, and that the Brighton co-operative movement predates that of Rochdale, while contributing to the principles that I hope all Members present wish to support.

It is always interesting to hear about the historical roots of the co-operative movement, and clearly the hon. Gentleman’s comments will go down well in the Brighton Argus. I am afraid that he was trumped by the right hon. Member for Croydon, North and his reference to the Roman mutual societies. No one is in a position to outdo the Romans’ pioneering work in establishing mutuals.

The hon. Member for Edmonton was disappointed so few people were in the Chamber to support the Bill. I think that the Prime Minister is looking to change that with the reforms that he is proposing. His official spokesman said yesterday that he thought they might bring more Members to the House, which would clearly be of benefit on Friday mornings.

The hon. Gentleman asked whether we would support the Bill. He acknowledged that the Liberal Democrats were going to do so, and I see that the hon. Member for Twickenham (Dr. Cable) is a sponsor. I am pleased to say that we, too, will support it. It is very important, as it will modernise the legal framework of co-operatives and protect the interests of the members of co-operatives and industrial provident societies through the provisions that have been expanded on at great length.

The Bill is a link in the chain of private Members’ Bills that have been introduced over a number of years to update the legislative framework for industrial and provident societies. I had the pleasure of leading for the Opposition on the Bill that my hon. Friend the Member for Bournemouth, West (Sir John Butterfill) introduced to update the framework for financial mutuals. As a note of caution for the right hon. Member for Croydon, North, I point out that when that Bill received its Second Reading in March 2007 it was greeted with acclamation on both sides of the House, but when it reached its final stages in October 2007 its main purpose was not quite as popular as it had been just a few months earlier. Its main purpose at the time of its Second Reading was to increase the ability of building societies to borrow from wholesale financial markets. The run on Northern Rock rather put an end to that particular purpose, but of course that Bill has now been used to facilitate the merger of different financial mutuals, which is an important purpose. I have to say to the right hon. Gentleman that I have not spotted any provision in this Bill that might lead to a similar ebbing away of popularity over the course of the next few months, but perhaps if there is any, the Minister might be able to point it out to us.

I shall make some general remarks about the importance of the mutual sector before turning to the details of the Bill’s proposals. We should not underestimate the vital contribution that co-operatives make to the economy. One in three of the population are members of at least one mutual, and among Members of Parliament that rises to the staggering proportion of seven in 10. That strikes me as a very high proportion and shows that it is not just on the Labour Benches that there is interest in, and membership of, the co-operative and mutual sector. I myself am a member of a credit union, the Portsmouth Savers credit union, and my wife is a member of the Co-operative Retail Society. The largest supermarket in the part of my constituency in which I live is run by the Co-op, as indeed are many of the convenience stores. Co-ops are sometimes characterised as being something of the north—I say that as someone who was born and brought up in Durham, and whose mother still remembers her dividend number—but the co-operative and mutual societies movement spreads across the whole country. Every community is touched in some way by its work.

There are more than 16,000 mutual organisations, ranging from building societies to NHS foundation trusts—a new approach in which the model of mutualities has been used. Football supporters’ clubs are also in the mutuals sector, and mutuals as a whole employ almost 1 million people and serve a membership of 23 million. Not only are mutual societies popular, they have an important contribution to make to the economy as a whole. They have annual revenues of £85 billion and a portfolio of assets of £477 billion, so they play an important role in the economy. As a number of hon. Members have commented, the increased scepticism about some of the more conventional models of ownership has led to a renaissance of interest in mutuals. Of course, the large mutuals compete alongside the very best in the private sector. The hon. Member for Edmonton and others mentioned the acquisition by the Co-op of Somerfield, and in the retail sector we also see the continuing success of John Lewis, which is a partnership and an employee-owned co-operative.

Despite the changes in society, mutuals remain an important part of its fabric. Why is that? Because the very best mutuals harness the power of mutuality to ensure their survival. Good mutuals offer excellent products and services focused on the needs of their customers, as well as strong accountability to their members. Mutuals continually need to justify their existence, and what better way for them to do that than reminding members that they are the owners, and that it is to the owners that the management are accountable? If an organisation’s owners are its customers, accountability comes through not just the formal mechanism of meetings but the buying decisions that the members make.

Mutuals are going through a renaissance as mutuality is applied to new areas. The growth of credit unions, on which a number of Members have focused, is a good example. Increasingly, policy makers see benefits arising from models of mutuality, because in many different ways they fill a gap between the public and private sectors. To use an old Blairite phrase, they are the third way, offering the best of each. They are democratically accountable and have a public service ethos, with the characteristics of the public sector, but with dynamism and customer focus, which are often the characteristics of the private sector. They have provided a vital bridge between the public and private sectors, bringing the advantages of democratic accountability and consumer focus.

We are starting to see, for instance through changes in the health service, how mutuals can be used in the provision of services to our communities. In a way, it is an echo of the pre-1945 model of health care. Prior to the introduction of the national health service, a lot of health care was provided by mutuals. Now, as primary care trusts are splitting off some of their provision from their commissioning role, mutuals are again seen as a way of providing a governance framework for the provision of services.

Mutuals are not just a focus of Government policy, but a matter in which the Conservative party is particularly interested. That is why we set up the Conservative co-operative movement—to explore new and creative ways in which communities can deliver public services. I shall give an example from overseas. One thing that we are keen to explore is liberalising the supply side of education by enabling co-operatives to be a vehicle for the governance of establishing new schools. They could play a key role, as parent-run co-operatives provide both accountability and consumer focus. They could retain the public sector ethos yet be dynamic, because they would be freed from unnecessary bureaucracy. That model is used in Spain, where there are more than 600 co-operative schools, and in Sweden where there are nearly 100. There is one co-operative-run school in the UK, in Redditch. We believe that such models can be applied to the provision of public services in future.

What has stood out in the debate is that whether it is new models of public service delivery through mutuals or the way in which co-operatives continue to thrive in providing financial or retail services or as football supporters’ trusts, mutuals have thrived despite an arcane legal framework. We welcome the fact that there have been successive moves over recent years to modernise that arrangement and provide co-operatives with the framework that they need to continue to develop in the 21st century. Indeed, that is the purpose of the Bill.

However, we need to be mindful about whether we are creating the impression that mutuals are in every way perfect. As the hon. Member for Edmonton and others pointed out, they are not successful all the time. Sometimes there are problems. That is why mutuals need effective regulation and an effective legislative framework. That is why we need to think for a moment about some of the provisions in the Bill and how they may interact.

Before I do that, however, I want to draw one distinction. In my opening remarks I lumped all mutuals together as a class, but there is quite an important legislative distinction, which comes through in the Industrial and Provident Societies Act 1965 and is repeated in the Bill. The Bill relates to industrial and provident societies, whose remit is set out in the 1965 Act, which makes it clear that a co-operative society

“does not include a society which carries on, or intends to carry on, business with the object of making profits mainly for the payment of interest, dividends or bonuses on money invested or deposited with, or lent to, the society or any other person.”

There is therefore a clear distinction between what industrial and provident societies are able to do and what other mutuals are able to do. Clearly there is a fairly extensive legislative framework for other mutuals, such as building societies, credit unions, which are touched on in the Bill, and mutual insurers, which are regulated much more closely than industrial and provident societies are, by the Financial Services Authority. Of course the FSA regulates industrial and provident societies by operating the register, but it regulates only those industrial and provident societies that are registered under the 1965 Act.

In Northern Ireland there is a comparable Act—the Industrial and Provident Societies Act (Northern Ireland) 1969—and the role of the registrar is played by the Department of Enterprise, Trade and Investment. The importance of getting the regulatory regime right for industrial and provident societies is emphasised by some recent events in Northern Ireland and the fate of one particular industrial and provident society, the Presbyterian Mutual Society.

The Presbyterian Mutual Society was registered under the 1969 Act and was strongly supported by members of the Presbyterian Church. Sadly, the society is now in administration, because of a run on it by creditors and members. We should bear in mind the fact that the definition used for Northern Ireland in the 1969 Act is exactly the same as the definition used in the 1965 Act, which applies to industrial and provident societies set up in Great Britain. However, it appears that the Presbyterian Mutual Society was, under the nose of its regulator, the Department of Enterprise, Trade and Investment, acting as a bank. That was not picked up, either by the society’s own regulator or by the FSA, in its role as a regulator of financial services.

Because the Presbyterian Mutual Society is outside the regulatory remit of the Financial Services and Markets Act 2000, it is not covered by the Financial Services Compensation Scheme, so its members are dependant upon the outcome of the administration to recover their investments. That will cause a great deal of hardship and uncertainty for its members. According to the investigation carried out by the FSA, the Presbyterian Mutual Society should have sought authorisation from the FSA, but it did not do so. As a consequence, the Presbyterian Mutual Society’s members lack the normal protection that members and customers of a financial mutual would have.

The Treasury and the Department of Enterprise, Trade and Investment have announced an investigation of the regulation of Northern Irish industrial and provident societies. However, does the Minister agree that we need to ensure that the investigation looks at why neither the Department of Enterprise, Trade and Investment, as the registrar of industrial and provident societies in Northern Ireland, nor the FSA, the UK’s financial regulator, picked up on the fact that the Presbyterian Mutual Society was acting in breach of law?

We owe it to the members of the Presbyterian Mutual Society to consider the issue carefully. I would also like to ask the Minister whether he is confident that the procedures used by the FSA, in its role as registrar of industrial and provident societies, and by the Department of Enterprise, Trade and Investment in Northern Ireland, were sufficiently robust to enable them to spot industrial and provident societies operating in breach of the rules. Is there adequate oversight of the sector to ensure that what has happened to the Presbyterian Mutual Society cannot happen again?

What has happened is, along with the problems with the Dunfermline building society, a timely reminder that mutuals are a hugely important part of the economy. They are trusted by so many people, but they need proper supervision, regulation and legislation. That is an important reason why we support the Bill—because it takes forward those opportunities so much further and provides reassurance to members of industrial and provident societies.

The Bill flows from the consultation that the Government initiated in 2007 on the legislation covering industrial and provident societies and credit unions. The purpose of that review was to identify areas where inflexible regulation hinders operational effectiveness and acts as a barrier to societies being used in the 21st century, and to ensure that their members have the same safeguards that shareholders of companies would have. Bringing the rules that govern industrial and provident societies into line with those that affect companies is an important aspect of the Bill. That is also true of bringing the legislation for credit unions into line with the measures that are already set out for building societies.

The issues covered in the Bill range from corporate governance and accounting standards through to competitiveness. However, as the review indicated, not all the things identified as barriers to operational effectiveness required primary legislation. Some of the issues, such as lowering the minimum age for membership of a society and auditing and capital requirements, can be addressed either through the forthcoming legislative reform order, which has received widespread support from across the mutual sector, or through secondary legislation. The remit of the Bill is important, but it is also quite narrow. The Bill should therefore be seen as only part of the modernisation of the legislative framework for financial and non-financial mutuals.

The Bill will require new industrial and provident societies to register as either co-operatives or community benefit societies, as well as renaming the various industrial and provident societies Acts. The Bill will also apply the Company Directors Disqualification Act 1986 to industrial and provident societies and their management, which is important. Where someone involved in the management of an industrial and provident society has let down its members, we should ensure that they cannot have a management role in a similar society in the future. That provision strengthens the protection for members of industrial and provident societies and gives people much more confidence in the governance of such societies.

Much of the Bill is about enabling the Treasury to bring forward various powers. The Bill gives it the power to apply company law provisions to industrial and provident societies in respect of the investigation of companies, company names and dissolution and restoration in respect of the register. The hon. Member for Edmonton asked whether the FSA was seeking to purge such societies from its register. It is important that someone seeking to find out whether a society is valid and active should be able to consult an up-to-date register. My concern is how, if there are too many societies in the register, including dormant societies, people will be able to be reassured that a society is a valid organisation that is not being used for wrongful purposes. As I said earlier, the Bill also gives the Treasury powers to make provisions for credit unions correspond to any provisions applying to building societies.

I have yet to find a word of criticism for the Bill. [Interruption.] The right hon. Member for Croydon, North is encouraging me to sit down. I will do so shortly. The Bill has been greeted with popular support, which is positive. It is rare that a measure comes to the House about which there is not a word of criticism from some quarter or some corner of life.

The proposal to change the name of industrial and provident societies is certainly necessary. One of the comments in the feedback was that the title “industrial and provident society” was outdated and could even have a negative impact on the sector by appearing old fashioned and out of touch. We want these societies to be seen not as industrial or providential relics of the past but as institutions that are ripe for the 21st century. Going back to a point made by the hon. Member for Plymouth, Sutton (Linda Gilroy), the great phrase from the former Deputy Prime Minister about “traditional values in a modern setting” could also apply to the renaming of these societies. It is funny how all these phrases from the past are proving so helpful in discussing the Bill today.

The synchronisation of the laws governing companies with the laws governing industrial and provident societies is an important provision. Respondents to the consultation felt that there was no reason for mutuals to be treated any differently from other companies. That applies particularly to the disqualification procedures. There were calls for the legislation to go slightly further, and a suggestion that the winding up of mutuals that had become dormant should be simplified, so as to accelerate the process and to make it more akin to the process relating to companies. A response to that suggestion, however, highlighted the need to be mindful of the nature of mutuals, because the objectives of the societies and the requirement for fair treatment of their members mean that the winding up of a dormant mutual must be much more sophisticated than the winding up of a dormant company.

The Bill also makes provision for credit unions, and the consultation summarised the need for a degree of compromise in that area. The trade bodies were unanimous in favouring further consultation on whether there should be a power to assimilate the law for building societies and companies into the law for credit unions. That would mean that credit union law could be kept up to date with the latest developments in related fields by order rather than by primary legislation, which might not be available. Respondents did not want credit union law to fall behind, but were keen to ensure that changes that were made as a result of the Bill were consistent with the nature of credit unions and made only after consultation. It is important to ensure that we do not simply railroad the changes for building societies through wholesale in relation to credit unions as well. As the sector develops and strengthens, we need to ensure that the changes are made in consultation with the sector. We should not lose sight of the unique features of the credit unions; we must ensure that the law preserves them.

There has been widespread support for the proposals in the Bill. It has been welcomed, and we are happy to support it. As I have said, it is not the final word on reform; the legislative reform order will take that further. I would like to raise a couple of points with the Minister. There is some pressure for the implementation of previous changes to carried out. The Industrial and Provident Societies Act 2002 introduced a power which allowed society law to be updated if company law had changed. A number of areas in the Companies Act 2006 have been changed, and societies would like to take advantage of them, but the power under the 2002 Act that would enable them to do so has still to be implemented. Further work needs to be carried out in that area.

The Electronic Communications Act 2000 is also relevant. A number of co-operatives have pointed out that many credit reference agencies use online sources for credit checks these days, but very little information on the societies is available online at the moment. We need to look at that area carefully. If we are to enable co-operatives, industrial and provident societies and other forms of mutual society to compete on a level playing field with private companies, we need to ensure that credit reference agencies can treat them in the same way when getting hold of their information. We need to see what more can be done to ease that process.

This is an important Bill. It is not controversial, and it will give members of industrial and provident societies the legislative framework that they need in order to feel protected, and that will enable them to continue to do their vital work in the 21st century without being seen as relics of an industrial past.

I am conscious of the fact that there are other important Bills on the Order Paper today, and that many of the points I was going to make have been made by previous speakers, so I shall try to keep my remarks brief. I should preface my comments by saying that I am a Labour and Co-operative Member of Parliament. Prior to my current employment, I spent 18 years as a Co-operative party organiser, and I am now chair of the all-party parliamentary group on building societies and financial mutuals. My experience in those roles will inform the remarks I make.

I wish to join others in congratulating my right hon. Friend the Member for Croydon, North (Malcolm Wicks) on introducing the Bill. My professional background makes me highly sympathetic to it. Its title—the Co-operative and Community Benefit Societies and Credit Unions Bill—is a demonstration of the fact that a family of corporate models is developing to meet the changing needs of our economy and the changing social habits and values of the public. Different models have different aims, but they share two essential features: they are democratically owned and run by consumers, employees, producers or local communities, and the money earned—the profit—is reinvested, for social, educational or environmental purposes and for the local community. There is an emerging consensus among the public at large that this kind of business is the way forward. The old, traditional perception that our economy should be run by shareholder-driven proprietary companies or monolithic public corporations is disappearing. A new model is emerging that is more sensitive to the needs of local communities and that accurately reflects the public’s values and aspirations.

From my experience as a Co-operative party organiser, I can remember the 1980s and 1990s, when the co-operative movement struggled to meet the challenge of the aggressive retail multiples, and lost market share as a result. That was partly a result of its outdated corporate legislative base. The public perception of the co-operative movement at that time was of an outdated retail provider that was not responding adequately to changes in retailing habits. The new co-operatives were often unfairly characterised as the province of sandal-wearing, muesli-munching, long-haired, hirsute members providing for a tiny niche market. I might add that my appearance is totally coincidental in this context. Generally, the movement did not reflect the values and public perceptions of the time. The building societies were also under sustained attack. Privatisation was in the air, and they too were often perceived as anachronistic and not delivering the services that the modern public wanted.

What a transformation there has been in the years since! The excesses of the current banking crisis have clearly demonstrated that mutually owned businesses are far more highly regarded than those that are shareholder-owned or shareholder-driven. The co-operative movement has come of age in many ways. It has reinvented and reformed itself as an ethical provider, going back to its community roots. Its turnover is £27.4 billion and it has assets worth just under £10 billion. It consists of 4,700-plus democratic businesses with about 10 million members. It is a very significant proportion of the economy.

There are 55 building societies, which have 23 million members and assets worth £360 billion—huge organisations of enormous significance and, notwithstanding one or two unfortunate examples such as the Dunfermline, with a record of durability that the proprietary sector simply cannot match. Yesterday, I attended the 160th anniversary of the West Bromwich building society, which is not untypical of these organisations and their history. Perhaps they were seen as anachronistic 20 years ago, but now they are not.

A YouGov survey showed that 90 per cent. of people trusted customer-owned businesses; 84 per cent. trusted employee-owned businesses; just 32 per cent. trusted Government-owned business; and only 20 per cent. trusted shareholder proprietary companies.

The present credit crunch started in the US sub-prime market and it severely affected trust. Does my hon. Friend agree that that is one further factor showing what an important role this sector should play in our macro-economic thinking?

I thank my hon. Friend for her intervention. I agree that a clear demonstration of the point has been the flow of investment from the proprietary banking sector to the building society sector as a result of events following the sub-prime market crisis.

It makes sense for the Government to promote legislation that strengthens the sector, so let me briefly highlight a couple of proposals that I particularly support. First, I support the change of name. Speaking as a Co-op historian, I am very sorry to see the demise of the term “industrial and provident society”, which is redolent of those sepia-tinted photographs of moustachioed, waistcoated Victorian gentlemen that I see so often in the Victorian boardrooms of the former co-operative movement, but it does not accord with the wishes and preferences of the modern consumer, which it is important to reflect. Like others, I find it absolutely unacceptable that directors could ruin other businesses or act improperly and that the same actions would be okay for a co-operative.

Lastly, it is important for the continuation of the development of the credit union movement that credit union and building society legislation is brought into line. It is symptomatic of how it is now regarded that people are looking to this sector as a way of strengthening post office services by aligning them with credit union outlets.

I emphasise those issues because they demonstrate the evolution in the perception of this form of corporate organisation and how important it will be in future. I thank my right hon. Friend the Member for Croydon, North for introducing this Bill to accelerate these much-needed processes.

I thank my right hon. Friend the Member for Croydon, North (Malcolm Wicks) for his eloquent and erudite introduction to the Bill. He set out the issues clearly and concisely, and his Bill certainly has Government support.

I thank hon. Members who spoke in the debate, because they all made important and valuable contributions. My hon. Friend the Member for Sheffield, Heeley (Meg Munn) spoke about the ethical values embedded in co-operation and the valuable work of co-operators in the community. She highlighted the activities of co-operative banking and its role in reducing greenhouse gas emissions and promoting women in business, both of which initiatives I strongly applaud.

My hon. Friend the Member for Plymouth, Sutton (Linda Gilroy) referred to the 149-year history of the Plymouth & South West Co-operative Society and the Wolseley Community Economic Development Trust and others. I recognise, as do the Government, the important role that co-operation and community development has played in Plymouth. She rightly pointed out the strength of this sector in the south-west and mentioned the role of social enterprises in our economy and their resilience in difficult economic times—something that we all recognise.

Speaking for the Liberal Democrats, the hon. Member for Southport (Dr. Pugh) gave his party’s support to the Bill. He mentioned the risk of denaturing the sector, which I know it is aware of and am sure it will avoid. He also mentioned the sector’s important role in providing informal financial education. He will be aware that financial education is very high on the Government’s agenda. He will also know that, in tandem with the Financial Services Authority, we recently launched pathfinders in north-west and north-east England under the “Money made clear” brand to help promote greater financial literacy in education. We hope that they will be rolled out as quickly as possible, following the announcement in this week’s Budget.

My hon. Friend the Member for Edmonton (Mr. Love) supported the change in the name of the industrial and provident society Acts and, in particular, the creation of the level playing field that the Bill seeks to achieve. He pointed to the growth of credit unions and spoke about the level of ambition of the sector. I certainly agree with him in wanting to do more.

My hon. Friend the Member for West Bromwich, West (Mr. Bailey) talked about his 18-year career as a Co-operative party organiser. I well know from the fact that he is a constituency near-neighbour of mine that he has been a long-standing champion of this sector. He quoted statistics about the people’s trust in mutuals and co-operation, which demonstrated a very important point. I am pleased that, although the historian in him might have had reservations about the changing of the name from industrial and provident societies, he nevertheless supports it, as the practical politician and experienced organiser in him probably recognises it is the right thing to do.

As has been noted, the Bill builds on a tradition of previous private Members’ Bills proposed by my hon. Friend the Member for Harrow, West (Mr. Thomas), my hon. Friend the Member for South Derbyshire, (Mr. Todd) and the hon. Member for Bournemouth, West (Sir John Butterfill), which sought to update legislation. The Bill contains measures for which the co-operative and credit union sector specifically asked. It will help to modernise the legislative framework for co-operatives and credit unions and put in place appropriate mechanisms to enhance their corporate governance. It will, I am sure, help the sector to continue to flourish, which we all want to see.

Co-operatives and credit unions make an important contribution to the UK’s economic and social well-being. Many people’s perception of a co-operative will be defined by the local Co-op retail stores that they know and shop at. My hon. Friend the Member for Plymouth, Sutton spoke about their pioneering promotion of Fairtrade products—again, the Government strongly support that. I might add they regularly have some quite stunning wine offers.

The Minister should not forget the role of the Co-op in bringing Divine chocolate to many more customers in the UK.

Again, my hon. Friend makes a good point about how the ethical underpinnings of the co-operative movement drive the desire to introduce products that are fair trade and that benefit people in developing countries.

I want to stress, however, that co-operative retailing is only one small part of a bigger story in respect of the mutual sector. Co-operatives now operate in many different sectors of the economy. They are involved in a wide variety of businesses, such as banking, insurance, agriculture and food, livestock and grain marketing, the manufacture of surgical equipment, health food wholesale and distribution, telecoms, and even natural sciences research and development.

Several Members cited figures, and the figures I have show that in the UK alone more than 8,000 co-operatives are registered as industrial and provident societies, with about 19 million members and total assets of almost £120 billion. There are also more than 500 credit unions in Great Britain, with almost 700,000 members and total assets of more than £500 million. As my right hon. Friend the Member for Croydon, North said when talking about the Croydon Savers credit union, for those on low incomes credit unions continue to offer a viable alternative to the unscrupulous doorstep lenders, who often charge interest in excess of 200 per cent. APR. We must do all we can to ensure that credit unions thrive and play an even more important role in the economy. I agree with my right hon. Friend’s comment that credit unions are the “decent alternative”.

In all this, the common thread of mutuality is that the business is owned by the members and run for the benefit of their members—the savers and borrowers of a credit union, or the farmers in an agricultural co-operative. These businesses have no external shareholders whose interests may be different from those of members. Often, this can give them the freedom to operate on long-term horizons without pressure for short-term gain or profit—something that other business models may not be able to do so easily. Having these different corporate forms enhances choice and competition, to the benefit of all consumers. To stress that mutuals operate for the benefit of members is not to say that only their members benefit from their activities; after all, we all know that not all Co-op shoppers are members. We should also recognise the wider community functions that mutuals often play—for example, the Co-op Group sponsoring the “Pride of Britain” awards and, as my right hon. Friend pointed out, the role of the sector in promoting social cohesion and entrepreneurship.

For all these reasons, it has been a long-standing aim of this Government to see a thriving and self-sustaining mutual sector. We have done a great deal in recent years to help the sector grow and fulfil its potential. We have done that partly through funding. For example, the Government have set up an £80 million growth fund for credit unions and community development financial institutions. A further £18.75 million was announced in this week’s Budget, to bring the total to almost £100 million. This fund is providing community-based lenders with additional capital to on-lend to those on low incomes in areas of high financial exclusion and the revenue support to cover the costs of the service. More than 160,000 credit union members have benefited from these loans since the start of the fund in July 2006.

The Government have also taken steps to ensure that the sector has an up-to-date regulatory framework within which to operate. We are taking forward important legislative reforms for credit unions and co-operatives, using a legislative reform order. We propose that the LRO will go through Parliament under the affirmative resolution procedure, so Members will have a further opportunity to debate this subject.

Before concluding, I want to respond to the comments of the hon. Member for Fareham (Mr. Hoban), who spoke on behalf of the official Opposition. He also spoke about the importance of the mutual sector and gave the examples of NHS foundation trusts and football supporters’ clubs in addition to the usual areas we talk about in respect of this sector. He mentioned on at least two occasions the renaissance of interest in mutuals, and he is right about that. He also talked about the benefits of democratic accountability and consumer focus, and I am pleased to hear that the Conservative party believes that they are important. I also agree that co-operative models can be applied to the delivery of public services. That is an important area where the Government have already taken action, but I believe that more can be done.

The hon. Gentleman mentioned the Presbyterian Mutual Society. As he is aware, the Department of Enterprise, Trade and Investment in Northern Ireland is the registrar. However, there is nothing in the Industrial and Provident Societies Act (Northern Ireland) 1969 about prudential regulation or hands-on supervision. The onus has been on a society to seek authorisation, in this case from the Financial Services Authority, if it was planning to carry on business within the scope of that authority. However, as the legislation does not say anything about prudential supervision, we might need to review it. As he will be aware, in the 2008 pre-Budget report, we announced a review of the framework for credit unions and industrial and provident societies in Northern Ireland, working closely with the Northern Ireland Executive. I hope to be able to publish the findings of that review very shortly.

Does the Minister not think, however, that there is an obligation on the Government here in London and on the devolved Assembly in Northern Ireland to understand why the Presbyterian Mutual Society seemed to disappear beneath the radar of the FSA as regulator of financial services and the DETI in Northern Ireland as the registrar for industrial and provident societies in Northern Ireland?

I certainly agree that it is important that we learn the lessons from what has happened with the Presbyterian Mutual Society. These will be considered as part of the review, and, as I have said, I hope to publish its findings shortly.

Will the Minister confirm that those findings will explicitly refer to what happened with the Presbyterian mutual and why its problems were not spotted earlier by the relevant regulatory authorities?

At present we are still looking at a draft of the review. As the hon. Gentleman will be aware, it has a wider remit because it is looking at credit unions and industrial and provident societies and the framework of regulation, but we will certainly take on board the points he makes.

The hon. Gentleman also mentioned the powers in the Industrial and Provident Societies Act 2002, and electronic and electronic communications and the need not to hinder the sector in that regard. Those are issues that, if appropriate, we can consider in Committee.

I am pleased to confirm that the Government fully agree with the objectives of the Bill and we support my right hon. Friend the Member for Croydon, North in introducing it. He talked about the work of credit unions never being more important than it is now, and the ethos of co-operation in today’s climate is certainly strong and growing. I look forward to the smooth passage of this Bill and to debating the detailed provisions further in Committee.

This has been a very well-informed and thoughtful debate and, from my point of view, an entirely agreeable one. There has been a remarkable outbreak of consensus, not least with the Conservative spokesman, the hon. Member for Fareham (Mr. Hoban), following a prompt earlier, almost becoming Prescottian in his advocacy of traditional values in a modern setting. May I say to the hon. Gentleman that when I urged him to sit down earlier, I was not being rude? I urged him to do so because he was at the point in his speech where he said that he could find nothing to disagree with, and as I could see that he had a few more pages to go, I thought that they might involve disagreement. However, he continued in his very positive way. Indeed, he was so agreeable that I am tempted this evening, notwithstanding the mentions of Presbyterianism, to open a bottle of Wine Society liquid. Some hon. Members will know that the full title of the Wine Society is the International Exhibition Co-operative Wine Society Ltd. I have never thought of myself as a champagne socialist, but on this brief occasion I am happy to become a chianti co-operator.

I should, of course, have referred to my membership of the Wine Society earlier. The Wine Society demonstrates some of the benefits of mutuality, in that it offers very good quality wine at a lower price because it is not seeking to make a profit from its members. That is a very good example of the practical benefits that many members of the Wine Society enjoy.

Order. I should observe for the benefit of the House, lest the wrong impression be given, that this is, of course, a temperate Chamber.

Absolutely, Mr. Deputy Speaker. Harold Wilson once said that the Labour party perhaps learnt more from Methodism than from Marxism, and temperance is something that all of my colleagues in the Chamber today have learnt—certainly in theory.

I shall not respond to every point that has been made today. We heard some very good speeches from my hon. Friends the Members for Sheffield, Heeley (Meg Munn), for Plymouth, Sutton (Linda Gilroy), for West Bromwich, West (Mr. Bailey)—he treated us to some good history—and for Edmonton (Mr. Love), and a very important intervention from my right hon. Friend the Member for Cardiff, South and Penarth (Alun Michael).

My hon. Friend the Member for Edmonton talked about the importance of the Rochdale pioneers—those on the Conservative Benches of course know the details of those pioneers—and the short answer to his question whether those principles will be reflected in the Bill is yes. Clause 1 states:

“A society may be registered as a co-operative society only if it is shown to the satisfaction of the Authority that the society is a bona fide co-operative society.”

No doubt we will be able to look at some of those issues in some more detail—I hope not in great detail—in Committee. The question that he raised was important.

The hon. Member for Southport (Dr. Pugh), who speaks for the Liberal Democrats, made a thoughtful speech. He urged us not to be complacent on some of these issues, and I can see the point that he is making: there will always be a tension between the virtues of smallness—small can be beautiful when it comes to credit unions—and, because many are seeking to expand, enabling modernisation and, in some respects, expansion.

How do we hold on to the virtues of the self-help nature of the credit union? I have mentioned that I attended the annual general meeting of the Croydon Savers credit union, where I saw for myself the 40 to 60 people in that room discussing for an hour and a half or so the nitty-gritty details of a very local, 1,000-member credit union. We need to hang on to those principles. Indeed, despite the fervour of many of us in favour of mutuality and co-operation, we should remember that we must put those principles into practice.

When one looks back at the demutualisation of part of the building society movement, one finds that it has had catastrophic effects. How many of those demutualised building societies are now independent banking entities? They have been taken over and nationalised. That demutualisation was able to take place—people agreed to take a few hundred pounds to vote for it—because some of those mutuals had lost contact with their members; they were mutual in theory but not in practice. The hon. Gentleman’s thoughtful speech reminds us that we must not be complacent and get too carried away with mere rhetoric.

I am very grateful for support from the Liberal Democrats and, indeed, from the hon. Member for Fareham, who made a very good speech. He rather reminded us that sometimes great support for a private Member’s Bill can evaporate. He referred to the private Member’s Bill promoted by his colleague, the hon. Member for Bournemouth, West (Sir John Butterfill), and that was an important warning. I shall ensure that, with my colleagues in the Treasury, we will scrutinise my Bill most thoroughly to ensure that the Croydon credit union cannot make a late takeover bid for Lehman Brothers. I think that that was the gist of the hon. Gentleman’s warning.

The hon. Gentleman also reminded us, from his vantage point in Fareham, that although we often associate the history and much of the strength of the co-op movement with the north, there is a strong southern tradition too. He may note that under my Bill, through an Order in Council, it might be possible for the legislation to apply to the Channel Islands. As someone who is married to a Channel Islander, I know that both Guernsey and Jersey have a thriving co-operative sector. If my geography is right, both are somewhat south of Fareham.

We have had a useful debate, with support across the Chamber. A spirit of consensus has broken out, and we are all co-operators now. That may have something to do with the fact that while those of us on the left in politics are proud of the origins of the co-operative movement as part of a wider labour movement, there is a sense in which many of the virtues of mutuality, thrift, self-help and responsibility strike chords on the other side of the Chamber. That is perhaps the reason for the wide support for the Bill. I look forward to further exchanges in Committee, should that be the will of the House.

Question put and agreed to.

Bill accordingly read a Second time; to stand committed to a Public Bill Committee (Standing Order No. 63).

I beg to move, That the Bill be now read a Second time.

Like many other hon. Members, I have been through the experience of losing a much loved relative in the sometimes undignified setting of a hospital ward. So my motivation in proposing this Bill is to secure a better quality of life for the final days of people’s natural lives.

The Bill aims to confer on patients a right to choose where to receive end-of-life care. I want to make it clear at the outset that “palliative care” should be understood as palliating all types of advanced, progressive and incurable conditions, and not just cancer. The well respected Birmingham cardiologist, James Beattie, came to see me to impress on me the inadequate nature of the provision for his patients with heart failure. That includes those who have undergone a transplant and those who have chosen not to undergo a transplant, who are often seen as not needing palliative care.

I also pay tribute to the work of Dr. Keri Thomas, a GP who decided to specialise in palliative care through her own experience as a GP and realising that more could be done for her patients. She has been responsible for drawing up the gold standard framework for palliative care, which all mainstream parties now accept as something that should be integral to the health service that we provide. However, the provision of palliative care to that standard is still patchy.

The Bill is necessary for several reasons. First, palliative care provision is likely to affect most people in the country. Secondly, as I have said, the commissioning and provision of end-of-life care services is still patchy.

Palliative care depends heavily on the voluntary sector. It is provided in all settings across all sectors by multi-professional teams. Co-ordinating those teams is crucial, and I believe that it requires this legislative pressure.

Palliative care has been on the parliamentary agenda for a number of years. Hon. Members introduced private Member’s Bills on the subject in 2005 and 2006 and Baroness Finlay of Llandaff presented a private Member’s Bill in the other place in 2007. The right hon. Member for Birkenhead (Mr. Field) has consistently raised the issue of end-of-life care, and although he is unable to be with us today, all hon. Members know how strongly he feels on the subject. He recently articulated those feelings in an Adjournment debate in Westminster Hall, in which he most generously shared part of the very limited time available with me.

My own interest in this subject has been fuelled by the work of the Leveson centre for the study of ageing, spirituality and social policy in my constituency. Dr. James Woodward, who was until recently the director of that research facility, has written thoughtful and original papers on the subject of how we treat those who are nearing death.

Research carried out by the Marie Curie Cancer Care charity shows that the majority of people with a terminal illness want to die at home, yet only one in five achieve that. There were 503,000 deaths in England and Wales in 2006 and 290,000 of those took place in hospital. Those are the most recently available statistics.

Does my hon. Friend recognise that palliative care is not only about the elderly as they approach death, but about children? The work of children’s hospices in my area shows just how incredibly important palliative care can be for children nearing death, and it shows how much those hospices can provide to avoid those children being hospitalised at the end of their lives.

I thank my right hon. Friend for that intervention. The untimely death of a younger person or younger member of the family is always difficult for parents who outlive their children and for other members of the family. We all have constituents who have been deeply grateful for the existence of specialised children’s hospices and the specialised palliative care that they offer. I am sure that my hon. Friend, too, shares my concern about the security of funding for children’s hospices, which I shall come on to later in my speech.

It is stating the obvious to say that we only die once, but it is essential that end-of-life care is provided consistently and to a high standard for all. Although it is very expensive to keep a patient in an acute hospital bed, there is still no adequate lever to enable the funding to follow a patient out of hospital and into the community when they go back home, enter a hospice or return to the care home from which they emanated before their admission to hospital. My Bill aims to ensure that the money follows the patient and is not tied to the bed.

As I am sure is the case for many of my hon. Friends, countless constituents come to my surgeries to tell of the distress caused by inflexible care provision at the end of the life of a loved one. I should explain that the lady whom I am about to mention is content for me raise her case in the House. Very recently, Mrs. Anita Gee of Marston Green came to see me. Her husband, Malcolm, died from a terminal illness and was able to spend his last days at home with his wife. Sadly, the care package that had been promised on his discharge from hospital never arrived, and Mrs. Gee was left to struggle on her own. To make matters worse, she received a bill in the post from the council a short time after her husband’s death, charging her for the care that he never received. She has stated:

“It’s an extremely vulnerable time in your life. I’m usually on top of things but my brain just stopped. There needs to be something in place so that you don’t have to scrabble around making phone calls to ensure your loved one receives the care they need.”

That is a poignant reminder to us all of the shortcomings in the present situation. Mrs. Gee’s dearest wish is that other families do not have to experience what she did. In raising her case, she hopes that the situation can be improved. I, too, hope that it can be improved not only for my constituents, but for the constituents of all hon. Members.

Surely we are not a country where bureaucracy and pragmatism prosper in the place of flexibility and deep concern for the wishes of individuals. Many terminally ill patients find themselves in a care home setting. Funding of places in care is a vexed issue that can affect the ability of the care home to fulfil the wish of residents to end their days in the place that has become home for them. All too often, through inadequate funding or lack of training, a care home has to get a resident admitted to hospital to ensure that the resident’s medical needs are, in their view, better met.

Most residents and their families are unaware that in moving between a care home and a hospital, they make a perilous journey between two Government Departments, whose funding streams are quite different. Many care homes are dependent on local authority funding, which often needs to be topped up by family members to provide a standard of care regarded as acceptable. There is a real crisis in adult social care provision. Costs are increasing at the rate of 6 per cent. per annum, but local authorities receive an average grant increase of 2 per cent. per annum. That needs resolving if care home residents are to secure their wish to receive palliative care in that setting.

The Bill does not extend to Scotland, but the Scottish Commission for the Regulation of Care commissioned a report on the quality of palliative care in care homes, which highlights a number of the issues. Not least of those issues is the fact that 43 per cent. of residents did not have their palliative care needs met. I would be very interested to know the comparable figures for England and Wales; perhaps the Government will make them available. It is good practice for care home managers to discuss with a resident and their family preferences for end-of-life care before the crisis, but it can then be a great disappointment to the resident and the family if expectations so raised cannot be met.

I am not talking about unachievable ideals when I state that every patient should be able to choose where to receive end-of-life care. Marie Curie Cancer Care had a “delivering choice” programme, which ran from September 2004 to September 2008 in Lincolnshire. That important pilot provided a package of solutions to increase the number of people who achieve their wish not to die in an acute care setting. A palliative care co-ordination centre, discharge community link nurses and a community-based rapid response team were set up. There was also training for health care professionals in end-of-life care, and greater support for carers to combat the main problems in the system that keep patients in hospital. A King’s Fund report concluded that

“the project in Lincolnshire has significantly increased the proportion of deaths at home and decreased the proportion of deaths in hospital, while keeping the overall combined cost of acute and community care stable for patients with cancer receiving palliative care in the last eight weeks of life.”

During this pilot, the percentage of people who achieved their wish to die at home rose from 19 per cent. in 2005-06 to 42 per cent. in 2006-07, so the dream of making every death dignified is achievable, if the money follows the patient to where they want to receive palliative care. Many of those involved in palliative care have pointed out that the fact that Jade Goody managed to achieve the death at home that she wanted has raised awareness that that is achievable.

As laid out in clause 3, “palliative care” means

“care given with the intention of improving the quality of life of persons with a terminal illness”,

with an awareness not only of a person’s physical needs, but of their psychological, social and spiritual needs. Palliative care is most commonly provided in hospices. There are 153 charitable hospices in England, six of which are run by Marie Curie and six by Sue Ryder Care. In addition, there are 36 NHS hospices.

As hospices are generally the place where palliative care is provided at a consistently high standard, I want to discuss their survival in the current economic climate. In a survey carried out by Help the Hospices in January 2009, only 2 per cent. of responding hospices said that they were not worried about the financial situation.

Another constituent of mine, Mr. William Marjurey, wrote to me last month to express his concern that the Acorns children’s hospice in Birmingham is experiencing severe financial difficulties. That hospice published a report in January this year entitled, “Surviving the Recession”, to combat the very real threat of the financial crisis. On average, hospices receive only 30 per cent. of their funding from statutory sources. That makes the huge drop in cash donations—down 49 per cent.—a very worrying trend. A further 16 per cent. of hospices said that they were considering closing or reducing their services.

If my Bill were enacted and the money could genuinely follow the patient from an acute care setting back to a hospice where they chose to spend their final days, this would undoubtedly help our hospices through the present difficult economic climate. Such worrying figures highlight the lack of adequate Government funding for the hospice sector. The end-of-life care strategy, which I welcome, promised that

“any new services which are agreed as part of a local strategy should be fully funded from statutory sources”,

but it did not address the continued underfunding of current services.

Sue Ryder Care, a leading third sector provider of specialist palliative care and long-term neurological care in the UK, raises funds voluntarily to provide extra services, such as a bereavement centre, and it would ask health care commissioners to pay the true cost of the care that they choose to purchase. I was dismayed to learn, for example, that my local Marie Curie hospice, Warren Pearl, is receiving bills, which it simply cannot meet, for MRI scans for patients in its care from the local NHS trust.

The current palliative care force is equivalent to just 5,233 full-time nurses and 208 doctors. With the annual number of deaths forecast to rise from 503,000 in 2006 to 586,000 by 2030, this number of trained professionals is clearly not adequate to meet the need. In the west midlands, we have struggled, even at the level of specialist provision, to find a pain consultant for a population the size of Denmark’s. Dr. Mark Taubert, a palliative care registrar in south Wales, who has undertaken research in this area, has informed me that some out-of-hours GPs fear palliative care issues and often feel out of their depth.

Without adequate training for all health care professionals, access to palliative care for all terminally ill patients will simply never be possible. Across-the-board training is required for the medical profession, professions allied to medicine and those involved in social care, because no one can be sure when they will be the one who will be accountable for a dying patient. The wrong words can stick like a cracked record in the minds of grieving relatives for years afterwards, not to speak of the hurt that the patient may take to the grave. That situation can be avoided by giving adequate end-of-life-care training across the whole spectrum of those helping someone through to the last days of their life.

It is training in not only delivering palliative care but talking about death that is required. This is a subject on which I know that the right hon. Member for Birkenhead feels strongly. Patients can make an informed choice only if they are themselves informed clearly and sensitively about their prognosis. Death is an area that our death-defying society would happily choose to ignore or brush under the carpet. It has become clinical and awkward to discuss, which does not help to achieve the aim of enabling every person to choose where they die. I welcome the General Medical Council’s plan to publish guidance entitled, “End of Life treatment and care: Good practice in decision-making”, consultation on which is under way.

The opening sentence of the NHS constitution, which is referred to in the new Health Bill, states:

“The NHS is there to improve our health and well-being…and when we cannot fully recover, to stay as well as we can to the end of our lives.”

A shift in our thinking about death and care of the dying is required. The social, health and family affairs committee of the Council of Europe published a report in November 2008 on palliative care, which states that the protection of fundamental rights is a Government task and should not be left to the pushing and pulling of pressure group politics.

I hope that in introducing the Bill discussion will not be unduly guided away from the matter in hand towards the idea held by some that it is our right to choose not only where to receive palliative care but when life should be ended. I want the House to concentrate on how to provide dignified end-of-life care, so that people do not feel that they have to resort to ending their life prematurely. I firmly commend the palliative care charities, such as Macmillan, Marie Curie and Sue Ryder Care, and the many independent hospices that are working through the recession to deliver an invaluable service to their community. I commend the Bill to the House.

I congratulate the hon. Member for Meriden (Mrs. Spelman) on bringing forward a Bill on this important and entirely relevant topic. I support passionately palliative care and, like her, I have profound doubts about euthanasia. To some extent, successful palliative care gets the Government and the nation off the hook in the euthanasia debate, because one of the strongest arguments for euthanasia is the avoidance of unbearable and unnecessary pain, and without good palliative care models that simply is not possible. Where there are good models, it may be possible.

The reality is that we all die and most of us will die undergoing some sort of medical treatment, and there is normally a ready equation of medical treatment with cure. Doctors and hospitals are people and institutions that fix us; that is how we usually look at the matter. However, it is a sad truth that most people die in hospital and it is a truth that, by and large, hospitals seek to avoid and to disguise. They avoid acknowledging that people die, and people die on wards opposite people who may well get better.

I spent a short period as a hospital porter, and one chore that I had to do from time to time was to remove people who had died from the wards. It was always interesting to see how they were moved closer and closer to the door and then to the side wards, and that other patients were told that they had been moved somewhere else. It was never actually explained that they had been moved on to the mortuary, because that obviously had a bad effect on the morale of other patients, if nothing else.

Hospices, however, are predicated on the opposite assumption—that people die and can, in theory, die well. When someone is in imminent prospect of dying, the Bill tries to give them a right to quality palliative care. That is what the Bill is fundamentally about, and, having read it, I presume that the model is to provide state funding for it and to make available a type of care that is appropriate to, or in line with, the patient’s will. That, as such, is completely admirable, and I do not have a problem with the objective. There are some problems, however, which I shall highlight, and in summing up perhaps the hon. Member for Meriden can address my concerns.

First, candidates for palliative care are not always as easily identifiable as we might think. Terminal cancer patients with metastases, secondaries and so on are fairly obvious candidates, but what about the elderly and the infirm? On a hospital ward, there can be genuine differences between relatives, medics and individuals as to whether they are on a short, irreversible journey to death or have a faint prospect of recovery. There is often an unwillingness on either side—relatives and medics—to recognise that there is a case for palliative care.

Secondly, it is not clear whether the Bill has effectively dealt with, thought through or addressed another question: who would make the choice when, as in some cases, the patient is barely conscious and incapable of making the choice themselves? Does their right transfer to relatives and, if so, under what circumstances? There are, therefore, two grey areas: who qualifies; and who chooses in cases when choice is not a realistic concept that can be applied to the condition of an individual patient who may be slipping in and out of a coma—or in and out of consciousness, anyway.

I am surprised to raise this, my third problem. What I ordinarily understand by palliative care is making a patient comfortable, enabling autonomy so that they can arrange their affairs without being distracted by pain, and alleviating pain and depression. Those are services that carers and medics are used to delivering and can deliver, but perhaps do not deliver as well as they should at times; none the less, such services are within their capacity.

Included in the Bill’s definition of palliative care, however, is spiritual help, and I have two problems with that. First, from the left field, I should hope that spiritual help is more than, and possibly different from, palliative care, because they are not the same thing. Secondly, there may be some doubt about the capacity of the national health service, a local authority or whoever to fund or provide spiritual help, enlightenment and so on, and the desirability of their doing so. I totally accept the model of the hospital chaplain, but the hon. Lady seeks to put in place much broader arrangements, so I simply question whether the state would be prepared to fund every action, counsel and pre-funerary right of a person’s religion in all circumstances—whether it might not create difficulties and some doubt about whether that was appropriate for a public body.

I say that as someone who believes that such activity is an integral part of a good death, who sympathises with the laudable emphasis on psychological, social and spiritual help and who applauds the Bill’s objective. The Bill is about the good death—about making death as good as it can be—and ascribing the state a role in achieving it. That is entirely laudable, but the issue for me is whether it is within the state’s competence.

I should begin by saying that my brief appearance in the Chamber without a tie was not an expression of extreme Cameroonian modernism, but merely an oversight on my part; I do not have a mirror in my office. I hope that it will be recognised that I am now perfectly attired.

This Bill, brought forward by my hon. Friend the Member for Meriden (Mrs. Spelman), is enormously valuable and I want to speak about three of its elements. I take entirely into account the thoughtful observations of the hon. Member for Southport (Dr. Pugh) about some of the practical issues, but my first point is that there are severe strains in the current palliative care system. I mentioned the case of children’s hospices in my intervention, as did my hon. Friend in her speech; it does not conform to the general pattern for hospices, which receive, as my hon. Friend said, about 30 per cent. of their support from the state. In many instances, very little support from the taxpayer is available to children’s hospices at all.

I have associated in my constituency with two children’s hospices that have had particular problems in recent months. That is due partly to the peculiar circumstances of the Icelandic banking crisis and partly to the decline in giving that has inevitably resulted from the recession. The lack of serious taxpayer funding is a significant problem under such circumstances, and my hon. Friend’s Bill would do much to help address that practical issue. The two children’s hospices that I mentioned serve my constituents, so I have looked into the issue at some length. I am not persuaded that, when all the sums are done, there will be a saving to the taxpayer as a result of the current arrangements. On the contrary, I suspect that the taxpayer would, in a hidden way, meet considerable additional costs if the provision from children’s hospices were to decline as a result of the current problems.

Although she is now at the Department of Health, the Minister has been a distinguished occupant of a Treasury post; what I have mentioned may be a case of immediate Treasury control causing additional fiscal problems at a time when the nation certainly cannot afford such problems. Discussion of the Bill offers fertile ground for combining a prevention of decline in quality of life with, unusually, savings in public expenditure. I hope that the Minister can use her good offices and her past record in the Treasury to try to disentangle all that, and that as a result the Bill ends up benefiting both the taxpayer and those who most need the services.

My second point is wider and more human. Both my hon. Friend the Member for Meriden and the hon. Member for Southport mentioned the phrases “a good death” and “dying well”. What my hon. Friend said about the importance of the moment of death and the approach to death is enormously welcome. The hon. Gentleman mentioned that our natural attitude to medicine, hospitals and so on is that they are “fix you” places, and that was also welcome. There is a significant and large-scale issue, of which that concern is one part. We have all had the experience of relations and others close to us dying at one time or another. Because of my father’s condition, I also have experience of the incredible ability of our national health service to intervene and sustain life in a way that would have been impossible in previous eras.

However, as a result of those various experiences, I also have, unfortunately, a pretty acute sense that there is a great gulf. On the one side, there is our current concentration on the ability to fix things, even to the extent of restoring life when it would otherwise have disappeared; that is something enormously impressive, to which huge resources are devoted and in which the techniques employed are now staggeringly effective. On the other side, there is the extreme paucity of provision for quality of life once someone has been rescued from near death, or once someone is kept in being for a period leading to their death.

It would be wrong to say that keeping someone alive lacks all value if the quality of life is less; there is a value in life. However, the truth is that if one imagines oneself in the position of the person involved, mere life is not enough. There is an increasing problem of an imbalance between our attention to the question of keeping people alive, and our relative lack of attention to the question of the quality of life they enjoy while alive. At no time is that question more acute than as people approach death. It is therefore enormously welcome that we should focus not only on the Bill’s technical characteristics, but on the points it raises about the need for a reorientation of our concerns away from the invasive and remarkable ways in which we can keep people alive and towards the question of how we can, as a nation, ensure that people have a quality of life, even right to the end, that is in accord with what we would wish for ourselves and for those we love and care for.

The third and final point that I want to make is this. Having quite frequently visited friends, relations and constituents in hospices, and having also, as we all have, seen people approaching the end of their lives in hospitals, I have noticed a remarkable contrast. Of course, the level of care in hospitals is frequently admirable, as is the level of medical attention, but there is something about the way in which the patients feel and are treated in a hospice that is peculiarly suited to this very strange time of life—perhaps, in some ways, the most important time of life, as one approaches the end. There is nothing that I fear, particularly, about being dead, but we all fear the process of coming to death.

I accept the points made by the Liberal Democrat spokesman about the difficulty of the state having a role in spiritual and psychological counselling. Nevertheless, my hon. Friend the Member for Meriden is surely right that there is, as one approaches the end of life, a need for something that goes way beyond what is usually perceived as medical support. It is almost inevitable that hospitals will focus largely on medical activity. That is not a failing of our hospitals; I cannot see what else a hospital would ever do. We demand of our hospitals that they are brilliantly good at fixing people—we hope, at least, that they will be good at doing it—and, by and large, they are. However, we cannot ask them at the same time to put the amount and quality of effort that a hospice can afford to put into the kind of support that—even if we do not describe it as spiritual, which is perhaps quite a long way down the track—is psychological. A hospice can provide the degree of psychological support that can make an enormous difference to the quality of those last days and weeks of a person’s life. It is a good idea to enable people to transfer from a setting in which it is intrinsically difficult to do that to one in which it is intrinsically easier to do so. That is a large part of the gist of my hon. Friend’s Bill, and I strongly support it.

I begin by warmly congratulating my hon. Friend the Member for Meriden (Mrs. Spelman) on selecting this subject for her private Member’s Bill. She made a strong and lucid case for prioritising the needs of patients receiving palliative care. I am sure that the House will agree that her compassion shone through her wonderful speech, which covered the ground comprehensively and cogently, particularly with regard to asserting the right of those undergoing end-of-life care to choose the setting in which they are treated.

I am sure that all hon. Members present, and those who will read our proceedings, will agree with my hon. Friend that each individual deserves to die with dignity, in the place where they feel most at rest and comforted, be it at home, in a hospice or in a hospital. I echo the tributes that other hon. Members paid to the hospice movement, and in particular I pay tribute to St. Luke’s hospice in Winsford in my constituency. It is one of the many hospices around the country working tirelessly to provide a place of refuge for people who are undergoing the ordeal of terminal or life-threatening illnesses and conditions, and for their families, friends and other loved ones. Its cause, and that of every hospice, is close to my heart. Through the work of my wife as a nurse at St. Luke’s I have come to know a great deal about the tremendous commitment and dedication and the special skill, which my right hon. Friend the Member for West Dorset (Mr. Letwin) mentioned, of those who work in hospices and all the ancillary workers. It is a wonderful form of work.

As my right hon. Friend said, we need to bear in mind the fact that there is something extraordinarily special about those who engage themselves with people coming towards the end of life. It is care in all its contexts and meanings. It is care for individuals, their families and communities, and it is available in all settings and geographies and in relation to all illnesses and conditions. There is no greater compass of the word “care” than applies to palliative care and, above all, care as people approach the end of their lives. It ensures that pain control, comfort, confidence and good counsel are available.

The issues raised by the Bill prompt the question of what it means to die well. In fact, the hon. Member for Southport (Dr. Pugh), who spoke for the Liberal Democrats, used the term “a good death”. I dare say that if we track back only a few years, we as politicians would have been extremely chary about using that sort of phrase in the public domain. People recoiled from that slightly. It is a remarkable sign of how much we have come to understand the issues that surround this important matter that we are able to use a term such as “a good death” to help inform and shape the approach that we as policy makers, and society itself, take towards the extraordinarily important issue of giving people confidence through their lives that there is a process by which they can aim to have a good death and die well.

If we are to have a choice about where we receive care at the end of our lives, the Government, the NHS and social care services must seek to understand the preferred circumstances in which an individual wants his or her life to come to an end. For most of us, dying well would entail spending our final moments free of pain, surrounded by loved ones in an environment of our choosing. As my hon. Friend the Member for Meriden asserted, the majority of us do not wish to die in hospital, yet there are those who would prefer to be cared for there than place the burden of their care on their family and friends.

I am sure that hon. Members agree that legislation must ensure that the fulfilment of patients’ wishes for the end of their lives is not impeded by patchy delivery of palliative care resources and care services. If patients are to be given choice over the location of their palliative care, the palliative care sector must become a priority for the Government. It has remained the NHS’s poorer cousin for perhaps too long. The Government shower the work of palliative care services with praise, and I pay tribute to them for that, yet we are all aware that it has been a problem for the Department of Health and other organs of government to match that expression with the action that is required to put in place the policies and other actions that will ensure that that work is adopted as part of mainstream thinking in care services. It is about not just putting in resources but removing barriers both cultural and active.

The Government’s long-awaited end-of-life care strategy goes some way towards acknowledging that the palliative care agenda must be prioritised in the coming years. I welcome that. Prior to the strategy, however, the Government had, to some degree, sidelined—although that is probably too strong a word in this context—palliative care, dismissing it as a lower priority sector. Indeed, the strategy admits that, describing palliative care’s profile as “relatively low” in the NHS and social services.

Hon. Members will be aware that, despite the strategy, palliative care still lacks its own payment-by-results tariff and relies on charitable donations to provide many of its services to patients. The Treasury, under the reign of the Prime Minister when he was Chancellor of the Exchequer, promised that by April 2006 charities would not subsidise the taxpayer. That pledge was made in the 2002 cross-cutting review of the role of the voluntary and community sector in service delivery. Since 2004, however, Government spending on hospices has actually fallen by 3 per cent. Figures from Help the Hospices show that today only 31 per cent. of hospice expenditure is Government funded, compared with 34 per cent. in 2004.

indicated dissent.

I see the Minister is nodding her head negatively.

The hon. Gentleman made a point but then gave different evidence. He said that Government investment in hospices had fallen. It has not: it has increased. The hospice movement, including St. Peter’s in Bristol, with which I am very closely connected, has already made it clear to me—and, I am sure, to him—that it wants to be able to maintain its independence, while also seeing a stream of financial support from the Government, and the Government are delivering that.

I am grateful to the Minister and glad that she took the opportunity to clarify the position. I was quoting the figures from Help the Hospices, as I am sure she is aware, and from the Sue Ryder Care briefing. Her answer might have indicated that there has been an increase in the absolute number, whereas I was focusing on the percentage of expenditure that is Government funded, but perhaps I paused for breath too quickly in the middle of a sentence before I could do so. None the less, the fact that there has been a percentage drop is an important point, even if the Government have clearly put it on the record that there has been an absolute rise.

The National Audit Office has also emphasised the fact that nearly a quarter of PCT contracts with hospices are for one year only. Therefore, not only do the Government have to try to match their rhetoric with results, but we need to be careful that there is no watering down of any commitment to palliative care as each year passes. In order to fulfil the Government’s pledge on palliative care, the Department of Health promised in 2004 to provide a tariff for palliative care by 2008-09. That tariff would ensure that palliative care services outside the NHS had their costs met in full by NHS funding. However, five years on and after that intended deadline, there is no sign of the tariff appearing. I hope that the Government will take the opportunity that this private Member’s Bill provides to set that pledge right, because it is now both needed and desired.

However, it is not the specifics of palliative care funding that I want to focus on today. Rather, I want to highlight how a collaborative approach to care from health and social services can enable palliative care to exceed the bounds of hospitals and hospices and become rooted in the community. I am grateful to the people at St. Luke’s in Winsford for briefing me on how they are trying to move beyond those bounds. The Bill highlights the need for co-operation among NHS bodies, social services and voluntary organisations in the delivery of palliative care. Durable partnerships between those authorities will be instrumental in providing choice for palliative care patients and in opening up more opportunities to be cared for in the home, which is what we need to focus on.

My hon. Friend has frequently drawn our attention to the fact that out of the 75 per cent. of people who die in hospital, 25 per cent. express a wish to die at home. Opinion polls from Marie Curie also suggest that 65 per cent. of the population would like to die at home. The desire for community based end-of-life care is clearly widespread, and if the public’s call for more community care were not evidence enough to convince Ministers of the need for action, the stark demographic fact of our ageing population must surely persuade them.

My right hon. Friend the Member for West Dorset talked about children’s hospices, particularly those in his constituency. There is an important need for co-operation between social services and health provision in this context. Co-operation between social services and adult health is easier to achieve than similar co-operation with child health provision. Adult social services now come under the remit of the Department of Health, whereas the Department for Children, Schools and Families is responsible for children’s social services. Work must be done to ensure that palliative care in the home is an option for children as well as for adults. The Government must ensure that the departmental divisions in responsibility for health and social care do not impede the co-operation between the services. The NHS and social services should investigate ways of working together to identify children in need of home care, and to deliver that care when it is requested and appropriate. I hope that the Government will take the opportunity, either today or shortly, to give us some clarification and hope on that matter.

Turning back to the demographic changes and challenges that we face, the annual United Kingdom death rate is set to rise from 503,000 in 2006 to 586,000 in 2030—an increase of 17 per cent. It is an indisputable fact that demand for palliative care will increase. If health and social care services are to stand a chance of meeting that demand, palliative care services will have no choice but to filter out of hospitals and hospices and to permeate homes and communities. The terms of the Bill raise certain questions. What measures are the Government taking to plan for the emerging needs of our ageing population in regard to palliative care? When will they act? How will they ensure that a patient’s wish to be cared for at home can be honoured?

In recent years, I have investigated and championed the treatment of dementia in the NHS and beyond, and I am pleased to see that my hon. Friend the Member for Rugby and Kenilworth (Jeremy Wright) is with us today. He is the chairman of the all-party parliamentary group on dementia, and has done a tremendous amount of work to raise the profile and understanding of this great demand facing society. Dementia has no known cure, and palliative care comes heavily into play in this context. Figures suggest that a large proportion of the elderly do not access specialist services, and that palliative care is confined largely to those suffering from cancer. Indeed, 95 per cent. of palliative care patients suffer from a cancerous disease, while elderly people with conditions other than cancer account for but a small fraction of service users.

The number of elderly people receiving palliative care would surely increase if services were made more widely available in the community and in the home. Dementia sufferers are rarely treated in hospital for long periods, and their care is often undertaken by relatives and friends. Bringing palliative care to the doorstep of the patient, whether in a care home or a private home, would benefit the patient and greatly aid the relatives and friends devoted to their care. I hope that the Minister will tell us what measures the Government will put in place to ensure that those who are not in a mental position to make an informed choice about their palliative care will not be discriminated against. The hon. Member for Southport touched on that point earlier. I also call on the Government to promote palliative care options to patients diagnosed with dementia, so that palliative care services can become more widely available and are not limited to cancer patients. That underpins the argument put by my hon. Friend the Member for Meriden.

My hon. Friend was right to say that thought must be given to the work force requirements needed to accommodate this approach. She drew our attention to the limited scale of the palliative care work force, which comprises just over 5,000 nurses and 200 doctors nationwide. We need to recognise that these are very specialist professionals; they are trained doctors, nurses, therapists and auxiliaries.

It is important not to confuse this work force with those mentioned in this week’s Budget, and the major demand for more people to work in social care generally. Here, we are talking about the specialist qualities and training required to give people palliative care and help them and their families through the process as they move towards the end of life. If the NHS is to offer more choice to patients, the skills to help deliver such care must infiltrate the wider care professions and disciplines. These professionals, along with social workers, will also be key to identifying the individuals in need of palliative care. A closer relationship between the NHS and social services with regard to the palliative care strategy could enable the services to identify individuals who could benefit from palliative care and ascertain their preferred care setting so that services can be commissioned accordingly.

The Government recognise in their end-of-life strategy the desire among patients for a choice of settings in which to receive palliative care, so I hope that they will use this Bill, promoted by my hon. Friend the Member for Meriden, as a vehicle to enable the NHS and social care work forces to be upskilled in order to offer choice across the country. Palliative care should not be sidelined into its own sector or specialism. If access and availability are to increase, it must enter the mainstream of NHS treatments. We offer significant medical and emotional support whenever life begins, so we now need to give careful thought to why we do not attend to the end of life with the same sense of reverence and expertise.

As the Bill asserts, the definition of palliative care constitutes much more than just the supply of medical treatment. The term includes the provision of psychological, social and spiritual health and support. Some patients who value such support may well feel that it is best delivered outside the hospital. Individuals and families who have made use of hospice services often comment on the enhanced pastoral support they are able to receive once they leave the busyness of the hospital setting and can gain the time and space for reflection and rest.

If patients are to be given the option of receiving care at home and if hospice services are to be extended to be part of the community and delivered in homes, neither their pastoral support nor medical treatment should suffer neglect. Home care must not be allowed to become a guise for inaction or cost cutting, whether on the part of the Government or of any other public service organisation. Although delivering palliative care in the home will inevitably take some pressure off hospital beds and staff—a benefit highlighted in the end-of-life care strategy itself—this outcome should be a by-product of a service that is driven by the needs of the patient.

There are three potential areas in which legislating for choice for patients could be abused, all of which my hon. Friend’s Bill would safeguard against. First, patients must not be coerced into receiving care at home if they would prefer to be treated in hospital. We do not want to reach a situation in which patients who have elected to be cared for in hospital are made to feel burdensome or undervalued. We must guard against pushing patients down an avenue of care that they are unhappy with; it is that issue of choice that lies at the heart of my hon. Friend’s Bill.

Secondly, relatives sharing the care of patients must not be made to feel isolated and unsupported outside hospital. Measures must be instigated to ensure that palliative care in the home or care home meets the same standards as care in the hospital or hospice. Even as I spoke that sentence, it was clear that a great deal of variation is evident to all. We have excellent care in some hospitals, but in others, the care for those approaching the end of life is not well regarded or renowned.

Thirdly, as I observed earlier, choice entails co-operation between the health, social care and voluntary sectors. The need for collaboration between the organisations must not detract from the pressing need for a palliative care tariff. The Government cannot continue to assume that the voluntary sector will come in to fill the services cut or withdrawn. I hope that the Government will again view this Bill as providing a wonderful opportunity to bring forward the tariff that they have promised.

Recently, the rather ill-defined euphemism “local work” has been used to refer to the delivery of end-of-life care for the elderly in the dementia strategy. In using that term, there is a danger that the strategy could seek an absolution from responsibility for any real push for improved dementia services. I therefore hope that the Minister will assure us that the right to choose the location of palliative care will not become ensnared by attempts to avoid being blamed. I do not say that to the Government alone, as there is a broader culture of anxiety and concern about the possibility of being blamed in our public services and society in general. That is driving a lot of policy, which is unhelpful to attempts to take positive steps forward, such as through the measures in my hon. Friend’s Bill.

Choice must be accompanied by a clear set of standards and responsibilities. My hon. Friend’s Bill rightly accentuates the need for these standards to be put in place for each palliative care setting on offer to patients, including home care. It also makes provision for assigning responsibility for the care of patients in each setting, and it would mandate the Secretary of State to issue guidance on the funding of patient choice, so that palliative care capital could be passed from one palliative care services provider to another, depending on where the patient chooses to be cared for.

I was interested to hear the comments of my right hon. Friend the Member for West Dorset about this area offering the best example of the “spend to save” argument. Given that all of us on the Opposition Benches have to try to get our policies past him on those grounds, that was most encouraging and helpful—and I hope that the Government will have recognised the great force and impact of what he said, and will respond accordingly, not least on children’s hospices.

The Bill would ensure that funding followed the patient. It would lessen the financial advantage gained by hospitals whose patients choose home care over hospital care and ensure that, whatever the care setting, the needs of the patient are prioritised.

I had considered referring to the discussions about end of life in recent debates on organ donation and the organ donation taskforce. I will not do so, however, as that has not really cropped up as a matter of debate today, and I will not stray outside our remit. There is a debate to be had, however, about the impact of some of these issues in relation to our recent organ donations debates.

There is no direct mention of the introduction of an NHS payment by results tariff for palliative care in the Bill, but the provisions would, by default, necessitate action by the Government in this area. The introduction of ubiquitous patient choice will require careful budgeting and a tariff that ensures that the palliative care sector can cover the cost of providing care in a number of settings. The Conservative policy paper, “The patient will see you now, doctor”, draws a clear link between enabling choice and creating a tariff; the two go hand in hand.

It is time for this Government to cash in on the promises they have made, and to treat the tariff as something that is now required and that can be put in place, rather than as an elusive pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. We want this to be put in place now. I hope the Bill will be viewed by Ministers as an opportunity to change gear from neutral to fast forward, so they can fulfil their palliative care pledges.

On a point of order, Madam Deputy Speaker. On today’s Order Paper, the Leader of the House, who is also the Minister for Women and Equality, has given notice of the presentation of her Equality Bill, and that is all well and good. The Bill is not available in the Vote Office until Monday, so Members will not have the opportunity to furnish themselves with an idea of its contents until then. Unfortunately, this morning’s The Times contains details of its contents. The relevant article states that the details will

“come as a shock to company directors, most of whom will hear about the new law when they read about it in The Times.”

Sadly, the same is true in respect of Members. There is also a story on this matter in the Evening Standard and, worst of all, The Guardian contains direct, on-the-record quotes about the Bill from the Leader of the House.

If the Leader of the House, who is supposed to be the guardian of the rights of this House and of Back Benchers, acting on behalf of our constituents, cannot even make details of legislation available to the House before she personally briefs the press, I do not know what the Government are coming to. Have you received any notice from the Leader of the House, Madam Deputy Speaker, that she intends to come to the House to apologise for this behaviour? It would be preferable if she did so today, while the House is still sitting. If not, what can we do to hold the Government to account?

I thank the hon. Member for his point of order. Mr. Speaker’s views are indeed well known on such matters. I have not received any notice from any Minister in respect of their coming to the House. The hon. Member’s comments are on the record, and the Minister on the Treasury Bench will have heard them.

I congratulate the hon. Member for Meriden (Mrs. Spelman) on securing a Second Reading debate for this Bill. It is a very worthy Bill, with a worthy intent, and it raises important issues that affect every single one of us.

It strikes me that there is nothing more personal than one’s experience of death and dying, whether in respect of our own death or sharing the last moments with our loved ones. If we can talk about the age of truly personalised services—services that afford people genuine choice and control over their futures—its ultimate test must be the care and support that we provide for people at the end of their lives. As the hon. Lady said, how people die also remains in the memories of those who live on. These are clearly principles that we all hold dear, and indeed it informs the end-of-life care strategy that the Government published last year, about which I wish to say a little more later.

As hon. Members will appreciate—they have touched on this—the support that people need towards the end of their lives will vary enormously depending on so many factors: their medical condition, religious beliefs, family background, personal character and so on. We must be equal to that diversity in the provision that we make for palliative care, and it is important to say from the outset that in many cases we are equal to it. Many people do receive excellent end-of-life support; many are cared for with tremendous dignity and respect, surrounded by family and friends in surroundings where they feel comfortable and safe; and they get support that is well co-ordinated and holistic, and that pays regard to their personal beliefs and care preferences. Many receive such support, but, as the hon. Lady rightly says, not everyone does so. I agree with hon. Members who say that we need to do everything we can to ensure that they do so in future. That means overcoming some pretty big challenges, and I wish to deal with some of the specifics in a moment.

There are major obstacles to better end-of-life support, many of them with historical foundations in the way in which our society and the health and care services that we use have developed over the years. Traditionally there has been a bias in provision and access to specialist palliative care services. The modern hospice movement is excellent—I support entirely the comments made about the respect in which we hold those services. The very idea of modern palliative care emerged from that movement, which continues to focus primarily on care for cancer patients. As the hon. Member for Eddisbury (Mr. O'Brien) mentioned, consequently some 95 per cent. of referrals to specialist palliative care services are of terminal cancer sufferers, yet they represent only 25 per cent. of deaths. The second biggest obstacle, to which he, like the hon. Member for Southport (Dr. Pugh) referred, involves wider issues about appropriate care.

The hon. Member for Eddisbury specifically raised the issue of dementia, and I would say to him that St. Christopher’s hospice is running a three-year palliative care in treating dementia project, which will look specifically at how to provide to meet the palliative care needs of people with advanced dementia, and their families. It involves outreach services provided by specially trained nurses and support from consultants. That needs to inform the development of such services.

The second big obstacle—and the hon. Member for Southport also touched on it—is public recognition. It is a cliché, but death is still the final taboo. As a society, we find it hard to talk about death. It was not always that way. We rarely stop to think about the experience of death and how it has changed in our society. We live in an age when chronic diseases are pre-eminent and the vast majority of deaths follow a protracted period of sickness or failing health. We might have thought that that would give people more opportunity to plan more carefully the circumstances of their death, but what actually happens—especially since the advent of improved medical technology—is that death becomes almost hidden from view, a forbidden topic. Only a third of people say that they have discussed their death with anyone. There is a similar reluctance among health and social care professionals to talk to people about their end-of-life care as the time comes closer.

As the hon. Member for Eddisbury also suggested, that issue is reflected in the number of hospital deaths. Surveys tell us that between a half and three quarters of people would prefer to die at home, but the reality is very different. Only about one fifth of people die at home, with about one in six dying in a care home, which, for many, is their home. Nearly three fifths—57 per cent.—end up dying in hospital.

So the third big issue is the extent to which end-of-life care has been sidelined by an understandable focus on curing and clinical treatment. Tremendous advances in medical science over the past 50 years have led to the tendency to see death as a medical failure. That can cause an unwillingness on behalf of professional staff to accept that someone is dying, leading to the administering of invasive, uncomfortable treatments right up to death, as well as a failure to provide appropriate holistic care at a difficult time for patients and their families.

Finally, there is also a general problem that it is difficult to pin down precisely when someone will die. The diagnosis of terminal conditions does not necessarily mean imminent death. As hon. Members have said, doctors can do a great deal to extend life, sometimes beyond the initial prognosis. For many patients, it is hard to pinpoint when they want such interventions to be stopped.

It is important to acknowledge all those complexities when we consider the specifics of the Bill. In fairness, the hon. Member for Meriden did that in introducing it. The conundrum is that on the one hand we want greater provision for palliative care, but on the other we recognise how much work needs to be done to ensure that that care is available now. No one would argue with the basic tenets of the Bill, and everyone agrees that end-of-life care should be provided. However, the argument that I want to make today is that the Bill is not the best way to deliver better end-of-life care. It could be argued that while the principle and the purpose of the Bill are right, the timing is not.

It is tempting to see a statutory right as the appropriate stick to whip errant trusts and councils into line. In this case, however, I think that the problem is not so much that councils and trusts are erring, but that they are not yet in a position to deliver a full range of options that people could conceivably request if a right to choose were formally conferred. We do not want to reach a position where the formal right exists but the services cannot be provided. Such a situation would raise expectations at a very difficult time when the services cannot be there. It is because of those complexities that the Government’s approach has been, essentially, to invest in all the things that the hon. Lady and other hon. Members have mentioned: the provision of services; the provision of training; and the co-ordination of work.

The Bill essentially duplicates the efforts that we are already making to improve end-of-life care through the implementation of the end-of-life care strategy. Both share the same ends: to extend far greater choice and control to people over what happens to them as they approach their death. Leading up to that, the Government have supported a range of initiatives. For example, over three years from 2003 we invested an additional £50 million to tackle inequalities in access to specialist palliative care. That was made recurrent in primary care trust baselines in 2006-07. As part of the dignity for older people measures, we have made a £40 million capital grant available to hospices over the past two years. Those and other early efforts paved the way for last year’s end-of-life care strategy, which is the means of fulfilling our election manifesto to double the investment in palliative care and to provide people with the choice to die at home. For instance, the strategy has a strong focus on the very matters identified by the hon. Lady, such as developing community services so that people are effectively cared for and supported in their own home and in care homes—for many people, care homes are their homes.

The strategy emphasises the importance of training the health and social care work force and ensuring that hundreds of thousands of staff who come into contact with dying people have the necessary skills. It highlights the benefit of utilising hospice expertise by encouraging the development of the hospice community outreach programmes.

So we are doing a lot to improve delivery on the ground. It is important to stress that the strategy is a joint venture between central Government and local agencies. The next-stage review charged the strategic health authorities with developing visions for eight key pathways for care, including at the end of life. Clinical groups have been established to put that in practice.

PCTs are developing strategic plans to deliver on those visions, working with local partners, including local authorities and hospices. We have made available £286 million centrally over the next two years to support the implementation of the strategy. We are committed to monitoring this investment carefully through the resources and applications planning form. Working with the strategic health authority clinical leads, we are developing a set of quality markers for end-of-life care to support the commissioning, provision and audit of services. We are also funding the national end-of-life care programme to disseminate best practice and to work with organisations and professionals to develop better guidance and models of care.

We are supporting training and development in a number of ways. We are developing competences and core principles in end-of-life care and we are also developing communications skills training, with 12 pilot schemes selected to test these approaches. We have also asked e-Learning for Healthcare to develop an e-learning programme for health and social care staff.

Another key concern is the need to tackle societal attitudes to death and dying. We are working with and providing funding for the National Council for Palliative Care. It is establishing a national coalition to promote public discussion and awareness of the issues around death and dying.

We are doing precisely what the hon. Member for Meriden says is necessary, and I agree with her on that. We are holding discussions and enabling people to be better informed about the decisions that they can take about their end-of-life strategy. We are investing in training to make sure that the professionals with whom people come into contact are properly trained and are able to deal with the issues. We are investing in the appropriate resources that need to be there to support people in their homes.

I have set out why I feel that it is not appropriate, and not the right time, to put in place a legal right establishing access to palliative care. It is not the right time to do so; it is not a question of being against the principle of the proposals. They may be put in place at a later stage. I conclude by thanking hon. Members for their contributions. I want to make it clear that the Government view end-of-life care as an incredibly important issue, and we are committed to giving it the prominence and due attention that hon. Members have mentioned. Through our end-of-life care strategy, we are already making better care and support for the dying a mainstream issue in local services. I am confident that all that work will reach fruition, and we will deliver the progress that we all want. Rather than offer promises that cannot be kept at present because of capacity, it is far more appropriate to focus all our energies on implementing the strategy and building the infrastructure, skills and cultural change needed to break down the barriers to choice. That is why the Government intend to oppose the Bill.

I thank all hon. Members who contributed to this debate about palliative care. They made thoughtful contributions and helped me in the cause of trying to move the issue up the agenda.

I want to pick up a couple of points from the discussion. The hon. Member for Southport (Dr. Pugh) asked who would choose the right setting in which to receive palliative care. The Bill makes it clear that the patient should choose, but obviously the advice of those in the medical profession is indispensable in making that choice, because they have professional expertise. Doctors who have seen many lives end bring an understanding to the issue that is required by the patient and their family, if they are to make a good decision. It is important for the medical profession, as far as possible, to have a clear understanding of the patient’s preferences, because if preferences are not established prior to the point of crisis, they can be very difficult to establish.

I clearly did not make myself as clear as I would wish. The hon. Member for Eddisbury (Mr. O’Brien) raised the issue of people who suffer from Alzheimer’s. I raised the general issue of people who ought to have the choice, but who are probably not competent to make a very good choice. I asked whether, under the hon. Lady’s legislation, that right would transfer to relatives, guardians or whoever.

That is much clearer to me now. That aspect—the fine point about the competence of the person empowered to choose—needs to be debated in Committee. We need to discuss the point at which responsibility transfers to a named family member, a relative, the spouse or the next of kin.

A number of hon. Members have made points, which it is right for the House of Commons to debate, about where society has travelled to in coping with death, and about the impact on the extent of medical intervention at the end of life. There are qualitative judgments to be made. Obviously, such judgments should be informed by the medical profession, but we also need to weigh in the balance the quality of life that ensues following further and further interventions. We all understand that that issue needs to be addressed.

I particularly thank my hon. Friend the Member for Eddisbury (Mr. O’Brien), who raised the important point that my Bill would enable children to receive their palliative care at home. It is one thing for an adult to have enough understanding to appreciate what it might mean to be admitted to hospital for one’s last days, but such maturity is often lacking in a child, who may have had very little experience of a hospital setting and may fear a setting with which they are not familiar. The opportunity to provide more palliative care for a child in a familiar domestic setting is very precious indeed.

I listened carefully to the Minister, who was very kind in her remarks about the aims and objectives of my Bill. I appreciate that, but we shall have to differ on the question whether there is a need for my Bill. I heard all she had to say about the end-of-life care strategy, but it is just that—a strategy. It is not yet delivery. It is work in progress, and I am firmly of the view that the Bill would increase the likelihood that real progress is achieved. For that reason I hope the Bill will proceed to Committee.

Question put, That the Bill be now read a Second time.

I beg to move, That the Bill be now read a Second time.

Most people in the House know that for 20 years before I entered Parliament, I was a personal injury lawyer; I suppose that I still am—once a lawyer always a lawyer. I still have my practice certificate and remain a consultant with my firm, although I do not take on any cases. It would be impossible to do that job as well as this one, but I have maintained a keen interest in the development of this area of law. During the course of my practice, I have represented many sufferers of various asbestos-related illnesses and diseases, but the Bill is narrowly drawn, as it is designed to deal with pleural plaques.

Pleural plaques are a thickening of the lining of the lung, which is usually visible on an X-ray or a CT scan, and they are caused by exposure to asbestos. They represent an increased risk—between 5 and 10 per cent.—of more serious asbestos-related diseases, and, because of that, pleural plaques cause real anxiety and stress for those who have them. It is hard to imagine someone’s fear if they are at risk of developing an evil, disabling illness such as mesothelioma, which is painful and always fatal. During the course of my practice and, indeed, my time in the House, I have met many pleural plaques sufferers who have expressed to me their strong feelings about the issue and the problems that have recently arisen because of a decision in the courts.

Until recently, pleural plaques were compensated at common law. Since 1984, there have been three cases against the Ministry of Defence, the leading one being Church v. Ministry of Defence. With a diagnosis of asbestos-related pleural plaques, or asymptomatic fibrosis on the pleural lining of the lungs as it is described in the cases, it was decided in Church v. Ministry of Defence that the condition constituted an injury, enabling damages to be claimed. The amount of compensation has varied over the years, but on a provisional basis the rate until recently was probably about £4,000, although at times it has been as high as £7,000.

In the 2006 case of Rothwell v. Chemical and Insulating Company Ltd, the Court of Appeal found that pleural plaques are not compensatable, mainly on public policy grounds. The Court refused to aggregate the condition of pleural plaques with the anxiety and distress that they cause, deciding that each individual condition is not compensatable and that courts cannot look at the aggregate of both pleural plaques and the psychological conditions that they cause. In autumn 2007, that decision was upheld by the House of Lords in a case called Johnston v. NEI International Combustion Ltd; in fact, it was the same as the Rothwell case, because a number of cases had been consolidated and the appeals were linked. The House of Lords upheld the Court of Appeal decision that pleural plaques are not compensatable, which has been a cause of concern in the wider community and the House ever since. There have been numerous parliamentary questions, early-day motions, amendments to Government Bills and pieces of private Members’ legislation, and I do not know how many Adjournment debates the issue has been raised in.

At Prime Minister’s questions on 12 March last year, the Prime Minister announced that there would be a consultation on how to resolve the issue. That was followed on 9 July by a written statement with the consultation, which ended on 1 October 2008. We are still awaiting the outcome of the consultation, which included three different options: a no-fault payments scheme, presumably funded by the taxpayer, only for historic cases prior to the House of Lords ruling; a general no-fault scheme, which would relate both to the historic cases and to the future; and a return to the common law scheme. So far, the Government have made no announcements about their position.

There is no perfect option for dealing with this issue, but pleural plaques are a serious condition that affects many people, and doing nothing is simply not an option.

My hon. Friend will be aware that the medical evidence shows that pleural plaques occur only when there has been exposure to asbestos. After about 20 years, they can start to calcify, forming a hard part on the pleura. Furthermore, they are irreversible. Given what his Bill says in respect of impairment, does he agree that because the medical evidence is that the plaques are irreversible and there is a great deal of evidence that they lead to breathlessness, the condition should be compensatable, as the Bill says?

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for his intervention, and I very much agree with what he has said. He has been a redoubtable campaigner on this issue for many years, ever since the court cases. I am pleased to see him and hope that he will support my Bill.

My Bill tries to build on what has happened in Scotland, where people are ahead of the game. The Scottish Parliament has passed its own legislation to restore the position in law to where it was before the cases in the Court of Appeal and House of Lords. That Bill is simply awaiting Royal Assent and has completed all the other stages.

My Bill is modest. All it seeks to do is turn back the law to what we all thought it was prior to the decisions in the courts. Any scheme case would, of course, cost the taxpayer. However, turning the law back to where it was would mean that the insurers, which were on risk at the time, would meet the liability rather than getting the windfall of having collected the premiums without having to pay out on the risk.

The Bill is tightly drawn—it is not the thin end of the wedge, and it will not open the floodgates to any form of parallel litigation for other illnesses or injuries; it relates purely and simply to pleural plaques. It maintains the basic principles of negligence or breach of statutory duty as the test for liability. The burden of proof that the claim exists and should be upheld is still on the claimant. The Bill provides for a suspension of the limitation period from the date of the House of Lords decision until the coming into force of the Bill. That is only fair, but it would not affect any cases that were already settled or decided in the courts. The Bill also leaves out Scotland, where, as I have said, a decision to legislate has already been made.

Will the hon. Gentleman clarify that point? It is not clear whether his Bill would be generally retrospective. I appreciate that he has tackled that point, but I want it to be clarified.

My Bill, under clause 4(2), would not affect any claims that have already been decided through a settlement or by the courts. It would allow people who had pleural plaques and whose cases had not been disposed of to reactivate them, as it were, to claim compensation. It would not try to undo anything that has already been decided, but, in cases that were in abeyance because of the decision of the House of Lords, had not been decided or had been dismissed, the people involved could still be compensated. That is basically the nub of the issue. The aim is simply to turn the law back to where we thought it was.

In conclusion, I thank those who helped me to draft the Bill—the Association of Personal Injury Lawyers, Thompsons, the GMB union, my own law firm, Russell Jones and Walker, and all the others who have been involved in the campaign.

I join my hon. Friend in thanking the trade unions. Will the Bill fully restore the security that people who developed pleural plaques once had, whereby if they went on to develop the whole disease, they had the basic plank from which to make a further compensation claim without the hassle otherwise involved? Plymouth has been a hot spot for that.

My hon. Friend has made an important point. If the decision on liability were to be made at an early stage on the basis of a pleural plaques case, with a provisional damages award, someone who developed, further down the track, mesothelioma, asbestosis or lung cancer as a result of asbestos exposure would not have to go all the way through establishing liability again. That would be of benefit not only to the claimant but to insurers, because it could avoid difficult and costly litigation many years later when the evidence would be harder to establish.

This is not only about compassion for people who are suffering from pleural plaques and the psychological consequences that are caused, which are equally bad. We are simply asking for justice for people who have, through no fault of their own, been exposed to asbestos during the course of their employment, who should be enabled to recover the compensation to which they are justly entitled.

I welcome the fact that the hon. Member for Hendon (Mr. Dismore) has introduced this Bill, because it concerns an important matter that deserves discussion in this House. Conservative Members certainly have the compassion to which he referred. We have great sympathy for people who have unwittingly had to work with asbestos for much of their working lives; and, indeed, for those who have not directly worked with asbestos but have come into contact with it because members of their family and others have worked with it. There is no doubt—we acknowledge it, of course, because it is a clear fact—that many thousands of people undertook, sometimes for a lifetime, work that they had no idea was dangerous.

Some time ago, when, like the hon. Gentleman, I practised the law instead of just talking about it, I dealt with a case that had gone on for years and years, involving the insurance aspects of asbestos injuries and affecting hundreds of thousands of people. I well remember the evidence that I dealt with, and I am well aware of how horrible the effects of asbestos and asbestosis can be, and are, for very many people. Of course, we accept the principle, as is normal in personal injury law generally, that where someone has suffered, and is suffering, because of the work that they did, they should be entitled to compensation.

However, there are various areas in which I believe the hon. Gentleman’s Bill varies from the principle I have just stated. First, we must make a distinction between pleural plaques as a benign condition, pleural plaques where there is a physical impairment and other asbestos-related diseases. I hope he accepts that and I think he probably does, because his Bill is specifically about pleural plaques. If we do not make that distinction between those three different types of asbestos-related disease, we are in danger of widening the effects of the law enormously. It is the duty of Parliament to balance the needs and rights of the individual with the amount spent from the public purse on the taxpayer’s behalf.

The hon. Lady identified three types of injury. She called the first benign, although I prefer to call it asymptomatic, because I do not think it is benign. The remaining two are already actionable in law. The only one that remains is asymptomatic pleural plaques, which is what my Bill is intended to address. The other two are already actionable, so the issue does not arise.

I thank the hon. Gentleman for making that point, which I fully appreciate. That is why I am making the distinction quite clear. Of course the other two are actionable—I understand that that is exactly why the hon. Gentleman has brought the matter before the House today. However, I have been considering the medical evidence; I suggest it is important that we do that when considering new legislation such as this. Sometimes it is right that general principles of personal injury law should be upheld rather than specific instances isolated, as they would be by the Bill.

In saying all this, I am exploring the possibilities in the Bill rather than speaking vehemently against it. As I said, when we consider this issue we do so with great compassion for and sympathy with people who have worked with asbestos and who suffer from asbestos-related diseases.

As the hon. Lady knows, there is a great disparity in some of the evidence. There are two chaps who come regularly to my surgery, both of whom have difficulty in breathing and have been exposed to asbestos for the bigger part of their working lives. Both have pleural plaques, and both take the view that pleural plaques are causing their breathlessness. Yet I know of another case, of a younger man who was diagnosed with pleural plaques. When the doctor made the diagnosis, that man could tell him precisely where the pleural plaques were, because when he walked vigorously he could feel the spot. When he pointed to the spot, the doctor agreed. There is a real need for us to see much more medical evidence in future, because the decision that the Law Lords made on 17 October 2007 belittled people to some degree.

I entirely see the hon. Gentleman’s point, including about the particular people to whom he refers. It seems to me that as a matter of the general principle of personal injury law, if there is an identifiable and provable link between suffering or injury in such cases and action taken by, or negligence on the part of, an employer—a legally provable causal link with the injury that someone is now suffering—the normal law of this country, without any amendment such as in the Bill, would give those people a locus for action. I am sure that the hon. Gentleman will have advised his constituents to take both medical and legal advice on the matter. Indeed, if he were to come forward with the medical and legal advice that showed that causal link, there would surely be a case to answer without the need for today’s Bill.

The real problem is the general view that the House of Lords got it wrong. Part of the problem was its refusal to aggregate the psychological and the asymptomatic impact—that is, the physical changes—of pleural plaques. However, if pleural plaques were on the outside of the body rather than on the inside, there would be no argument about their being compensatable, yet because we cannot see them, they do not count. I was grateful for what the hon. Lady said earlier, but I am not sure whether she is opposing my Bill or not. If she is concerned about the detail of the wording, let me assure her that I am not wedded to it. Should the Bill proceed to Committee, I should be more than happy to discuss any suggestions for amendments that she may wish to make to improve it.

I thank the hon. Gentleman for that. It might benefit the House in considering the matter to take into account the published medical opinion on it. For example, the president of the British Lung Foundation, Dr. John Moore-Gillon, has said:

“Pleural plaques do not themselves ‘turn malignant’ and become a malignant mesothelioma. They do not in themselves cause asbestosis to develop, nor do pleural plaques increase the risk of lung cancer, and they are a different condition from diffuse pleural thickening.”

I would press the hon. Lady to clarify whether she intends to allow the Bill to receive its Second Reading and say whether she has picked up on the point made by the presenter of the Bill, my hon. Friend the Member for Hendon (Mr. Dismore), that we need to consider the psychological aspects. When somebody has a pleural plaque, they live in fear of it. Does she know that there are thousands of people who served in the Royal Navy who were required to pull flash hoods with asbestos in them over their faces—many are in their late 70s and 80s today—who live with that fear?

Yes, I appreciate that. I think that I said quite clearly, although I will repeat for the sake of clarity, that we on the Conservative Benches certainly acknowledge that there are hundreds of thousands of people—not just in Britain, but throughout the world—who were forced to work with asbestos when the awful effects it can have were not known. I have previously seen evidence of the dreadful effects of asbestosis. I also accept what the hon. Lady says about the employer in question sometimes being Her Majesty’s Government, which means that the person legally responsible for compensation for the injuries suffered is the British taxpayer. I entirely agree that that is an incontrovertible fact.

The hon. Lady asks whether I intend to oppose the Bill today. We are dealing with something that is in the balance—something that is not clear. It is not a matter for party political argument, nor of political principle. It is not a question of our thinking and saying one thing, and the Government thinking and saying another. Far from it: we recognise that people are suffering and have suffered. I believe that the matter ought to be more carefully explored. As a matter of principle, I would always encourage us to allow such a Bill to go to Committee, so that it can be properly considered.

The hon. Member for Hendon said that he would welcome amendments to the Bill in Committee. As a mark of respect to our legislative process, I would not oppose a Bill such as this at this stage in the proceedings. I am not yet certain whether I will support it, but I will not seek to prevent it from having a Second Reading. It is right that all these matters should be explored.

I should like to continue with my exploration of the published medical opinion. I have already quoted Dr. John Moore-Gillon, and I should like to quote a leading consultant, Dr. Robin Rudd, who has said:

“Pleural plaques are not thought to lead directly to any of the other benign varieties of asbestosis-induced pleural disease”.

Dr. John Moore-Gillon has also said:

“Pleural plaques do not themselves ‘turn malignant’ and become a malignant mesothelioma”.

The issue is whether the development of pleural plaques amounts to an actionable injury. I would argue that, if there is a causal link between the suffering and the employment that caused the suffering, there is clearly a case in law. If there is no such causal link or no quantifiable suffering, there is no case in law.

Is not the extent of the pleural plaques a key point? In themselves, they can be asymptomatic—that is, they present no symptoms. Contrary to the example given earlier, if people are not suffering from a particular dysfunction, it could be argued that there is no cause for compensation to be paid. Unless there is an X-ray or some other form of diagnosis, there is no way of telling whether someone has pleural plaques.

My hon. Friend, as ever, makes a very good point, which helps the debate.

I take the point made by the hon. Member for Plymouth, Sutton (Linda Gilroy), which I think is the crux of the matter. She said that the hon. Member for Hendon was trying to widen the law so that not only the disease, injury and suffering but the fear of the consequences—and therefore the psychological effect of having developed pleural plaques—would be taken into consideration. I see the hon. Gentleman nodding; I am glad I have identified the crux of the matter correctly.

This is rightly a narrow Bill about a specific issue. The principle behind the way in which personal injury law has developed in this country would be changed considerably by it—

indicated dissent.

The hon. Gentleman says no. I shall certainly give way to him so he can explain that.

The problem is that psychological injury in these circumstances can be looked at by the courts only if there is also a physical injury that they consider compensatable. My Bill simply tries to establish that pleural plaques are compensatable, so that a link could therefore be made to the psychological injury. There is no new principle involved.

I thank the hon. Gentleman for his perfectly logical and reasonable explanation.

Unlike the hon. Member for Hendon (Mr. Dismore), I am not a personal injury lawyer, or indeed a lawyer of any shape or form, but it seems to me that he wishes to overturn a ruling of the House of Lords. For all I know, he may be right to want to do so, but does it not seem strange that overturning such a ruling should be reliant on him? I would rather have expected the Government, if they felt that the ruling was unsound, to have come forward with their own proposals to improve the law. I have to say that we are going through a fairly strange constitutional procedure when a Back Bencher is determining, on a Friday when the Chamber is very empty, how to overturn a ruling of this country’s highest court.

My hon. Friend makes an extremely good point. Clearly, there would have been no need for the hon. Gentleman to introduce his Bill had it not been for the House of Lords’ decision, which was quite clear on this matter. Indeed, it has been discussed in many different ways in this Chamber over the last several years since the case was first brought—quite rightly, long before it ever came to the House of Lords. I well understand why the hon. Gentleman has brought his Bill forward in an attempt to overturn the ruling, but we need to reflect that before the House of Lords finally made that ruling, the matter had been considered in great detail—year after year and on the basis of all the necessary evidence put before the various courts that had considered it. If he wishes to challenge the House of Lords, there is no way for him to do so other than by trying to change the law himself.

I agree, of course, with my hon. Friend the Member for Blaby (Mr. Robathan) that if the law is to be changed in this way, it should be for the Government to decide how best to do it, so I shall conclude shortly to allow the Minister to give us the Government’s opinion.

We can all tell from my hon. Friend’s accent that she is Scottish and she will be aware that the Scottish Parliament passed similar legislation. Is she aware of whether any additional costs were created for Scottish businesses and whether the legislation was applied to people who had not suffered from specific symptoms? Let me make it clear that hon. Members on both sides of the House will feel that people who have symptoms of any kind deserve compensation.

On that last point, I agree, of course, with my hon. Friend, who is absolutely right to mention the position in Scotland. I was just coming to that because the Scottish equivalent of the hon. Gentleman’s Bill was passed by the Scottish Parliament on 11 March this year. My colleagues there agreed with its general principles and, as I have said, I agree that it was right to bring forward this Bill today and I understand the hon. Gentleman’s motives. Nevertheless, our colleagues in the Scottish Parliament rightly asked for the costs of implementing that Bill to be routinely monitored.

As I said a little while ago, it is our duty as a Parliament to balance the rights of the individual against the rights of the taxpayer and the public purse. I say that with compassion and sympathy for all those suffering from pleural plaques—asbestosis has terrible consequences, which we all understand—and it is on the basis of that sympathy and compassion that I conclude in order to hear what the Minister has to say.

I want to say a few words, because I, too, have had constituents with asbestosis coming to my surgery—although not, I think, as many as some other Members. Interestingly, I have been made aware of an example involving someone who was in the Royal Navy. The circumstances related not to putting on an asbestos mask, but to working with pipes that were clad with asbestos. That has also been a major cause of this particular dysfunction.

Where people are clearly suffering from a symptom, or have a condition that will clearly lead to a further condition that will have a symptom, there is an acceptance by every right-thinking person—and, indeed, an acceptance in the law—that compensation should be asked for and given. The problem with the Bill, however, is one of degree. A single pleural plaque, if restricted in size and in a certain part of the pleura, might not give a symptom to the person who has it. Neither is there any clear indication that a pleural plaque or group of pleural plaques will lead to asbestosis or any other lung condition; as my hon. Friend the Member for Epping Forest (Mrs. Laing) has said, several specialists have confirmed that.

The hon. Member for Plymouth, Sutton (Linda Gilroy) pointed out that some people might have concerns that this might develop into a condition, and I understand that, but there comes a point at which one has to say that an unreasonable fear cannot be compensated for—and, indeed, at which it would be unreasonable to ask for compensation. [Interruption.] I invite the hon. Lady to intervene, if she wishes to do so.

rose—

I am happy to give way to the hon. Gentleman.

The research done by Dr. Rudd, who is probably the pre-eminent doctor in this area, of 150 dockyard workers re-examined 10 years after the detection of asymptomatic pleural changes, shows that 10.3 per cent. had radiographic changes suggestive of asbestosis, and 4.5 per cent. had clinical and radiological signs of asbestosis. Therefore, although there may not be a causative link, there is certainly a statistical link, which is what creates the distress, fear and worry that the individuals concerned suffer from. That distress, fear and worry can be compensated if there is a physical injury to link it to—if there is a physical change, asymptomatic though it may be. The problem is how to compensate if there also has to be treatment.

I thank the hon. Gentleman for his comments, which were very helpful, because I now understand why people may well be concerned if they are demonstrating this condition. Pleural plaques also appear for other reasons, of course, and people can have other concerns.

I do not want the hon. Member for Hendon (Mr. Dismore) to misunderstand me, so let me first of all say that this is a very well-intentioned Bill. However, it seems to me that he was arguing that people should be compensated for stress, and—

indicated dissent.

Well that is what the hon. Gentleman said, I think, and that seems to me to be a fairly strange route to go down, in what is a very serious matter to do with the development of diseases from which people die.

I hear what my hon. Friend says, but I am not sure that I wholly agree with him. If someone has been working in circumstances where they have been in contact with asbestos—through no fault of the employer at the time, as they would not necessarily have known that asbestos was a clear cause of pleura and other types of lung dysfunction—then I understand why they might be concerned. The hon. Member for Hendon made a good point, therefore, and I can now understand the irritation, anger and disbelief of the hon. Member for Plymouth, Sutton about what I was saying earlier. This is a good example of why this sort of debate is useful, because in true and full debate information can sometimes be made available that might not otherwise become available.

Nevertheless, even if we accept, as I am now slightly inclined to do, the argument that there can be fear, concern and stress—to adopt the word used by my hon. Friend the Member for Blaby (Mr. Robathan) and the hon. Member for Hendon—if pleural plaques are in existence, the question remains: is there a damage done and is there a tort done when the pleural plaques are asymptomatic? I am talking about situations where they are so small and sparse that they are not showing any symptoms.

Will my hon. Friend give way?

I am very happy to give way, particularly to my hon. Friend, who is a practising lawyer.

I should make it clear that I am not a practising lawyer, and I certainly did not practise in the field of personal injury. What I ask my hon. Friend to consider in the context of his remarks is clause 2(3), which, as I have no doubt that the hon. Member for Hendon has spelt out very clearly, clearly states the following:

“It is not necessary for a person seeking damages in respect of asbestos-related pleural thickening or asbestosis to prove that it has caused, is causing or is likely to cause impairment of that person’s physical condition.”

Does my hon. Friend agree that that is an extraordinarily sweeping statement and that it would be more helpful, in the context of this debate, if it could be a little more closely defined, so that if the hon. Gentleman’s argument is, as I suspect it may be, that these things are in themselves pernicious, it can be explained why they are pernicious in the context of the recognisable law in this country in respect of establishing who is liable for damages?

I thank my hon. Friend for that helpful remark and explanation of that part of the Bill, and I invite the hon. Member for Hendon to accept that particular argument. Surely the hon. Gentleman is not arguing—or is he?—that someone who is not suffering a symptom, and is not likely to suffer a symptom or any form of damage, should be able to seek compensation. Can he clarify whether he would be prepared to alter the wording of that particular provision if the Bill reaches Committee, in order to make it more acceptable?

Of course I am prepared to consider the wording. The point is that this involves a physical change in the anatomy, and that is what I am arguing should be compensated, whether or not it causes symptoms, because that is the trigger for bringing the psychological claim. All wording is subject to discussion in more detail and amendment in Committee. I am happy to discuss things, and if someone has a better formulation, I am happy to consider it.

I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for explaining that. However, I feel very uneasy when he talks about any change in the body that may give cause for concern, although there may not be justifiable cause for concern. I can think of many other types of dysfunction, although many doctors would not classify them as such, that involve a change in the nature of the body that does not actually lead to anything that could be called an injury. I accept the earlier arguments that both he and my hon. Friend the Member for Plymouth, Sutton made that there is a fear that perhaps these conditions can lead to greater things, but what he has just said is far more worrying. If this principle were accepted, so many other types of changes that are asymptomatic and not in any way damaging could be open to claims for damages, based on the particular wording that he has just mentioned.

I do not wish to add to my hon. Friend’s unease, but I suspect that I might be about to do so. Does he agree that what we should really be dealing with in this Bill is any impairment of the person’s mental or psychiatric condition and that that is really what the hon. Member for Hendon is describing? Is he not focusing his Bill on the wrong target? We should not be talking about a physical condition that may or may not have any further effects; we should be focusing on the effects. If the person has a recognisable mental impairment or a psychiatric effect caused by the worry that the hon. Gentleman has described—I am perfectly prepared to accept that that may be a worthwhile cause of action—it is that which is the cause of action, not a physical condition that may or may not lead to that harm.

I hear what my hon. Friend says, but earlier the hon. Member for Hendon did raise that point by saying that it is a question of cause and effect, and without recognition that pleural plaques are a cause for concern, there would be no basis for any legal action. I wonder whether that is the case. I would have thought that the link could be established anyway—[Interruption.] I see that the hon. Gentleman shakes his head. He argues that no such link can be established.

I am uncomfortable about the Bill for several reasons. We all recognise that compensation must be paid to those suffering from conditions that cause distress and impairment, and I well remember arguments in this House about vibration white finger. For a long time, that too was ignored by Governments, but now compensation is paid. But if there are no symptoms at all, it is a different matter.

That is the point that I wished to raise. Vibration white finger is measurable. It can be seen, and I have constituents who have it. Whatever the rights and wrongs of the issue, they are compensated, rightly. But the Bill specifically states that

“a condition…which…is not causing or is not likely to cause impairment of a person’s physical condition is a personal injury”.

How can that be the case?

The point is that it can be the case only if it is written in the law. It needs to be written in the law because the common law says that where there is no injury, there is no basis for a claim. If the Bill were passed, we would therefore be in a worrying position.

I personally do not wish to oppose the Second Reading of the Bill. Nor would it be right to talk out the Bill, and that is not my aim. However, it involves some major issues of principle that not only affect this condition, but could affect a gamut of conditions. That is why it is so important to say that while we all recognise the real problems that have been encountered by workers in the asbestos industry and by those who have come into contact with asbestos as they served their country—particularly in the Royal Navy, but also in other branches of the military—we must recognise that this Bill, unamended, would make a major change in the law. That change would not be just, because it would allow claims to be made for damage when no damage had been incurred.

I am pleased to speak at the end of this useful debate, which has probed some of the issues that we will undoubtedly wish to probe further should the Bill be given a Second Reading today.

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Hendon (Mr. Dismore) on his efforts in introducing this Bill. He reflects the strong feeling on both sides of the House that this issue needs to be addressed. Indeed, it has recently been addressed by the Prime Minister, the Secretary of State for Justice and the Under-Secretary of State for Justice, my hon. Friend the Member for Lewisham, East (Bridget Prentice).

I am also grateful for the comments of the hon. Members for Epping Forest (Mrs. Laing) and for Lichfield (Michael Fabricant), who raised issues that we will wish to explore in any debate in Committee. I am also pleased to see my hon. Friends the Members for Barnsley, West and Penistone (Mr. Clapham), for Plymouth, Sutton (Linda Gilroy) and for Ealing, North (Stephen Pound), as well as my hon. Friend the Member for Paisley and Renfrewshire, North (Jim Sheridan), who raised this issue in an Adjournment debate on 11 February this year.

All those hon. Members have a strong and honourable tradition of raising in this House the issue of asbestos-related conditions. They reflected widespread concern about the issue outside the House, too. For example, let me look at the submissions from the trade union movement to the Government as part of our recent consultation. I can see strong elements of support for action in relation to this Bill from Unite the Union, which has indicated that many of its members have suffered and died as a result of asbestos-related illnesses. The Union of Construction, Allied Trades and Technicians has said that the House of Lords decision in Johnston, to which my hon. Friend the Member for Hendon referred, was a huge blow to sufferers of pleural plaques. Unison has said that it believes that those who, through no fault of their own, have been exposed negligibly to asbestos should be rightfully entitled to compensation.

The Minister mentioned Unite. He will be aware that Unite is asking for £5 million to £10 million to fund an asbestos-related disease centre rather like the one in Australia. The Australian Government provided 6.2 million Australian dollars. Are the Government minded to provide such funding?

The hon. Gentleman will expect us to consider those issues seriously, but no decisions have been taken. We need to look, as we are, at a range of matters relating to the issue.

As my hon. Friend the Member for Hendon said, there has been considerable legal discussion. As he will know, there have been interpretations through the High Court following the challenge by the insurance industry, Rothwell v. Chemical and Insulating Co. Ltd and conjoined cases. My hon. Friend has outlined—I do not need to repeat this point—the continued discussions in the legal system, which ended with the House of Lords judgment on 17 October 2007, when the Law Lords upheld the Court of Appeal decision that the existence of pleural plaques does not constitute actionable or compensable damage. In this instance, the House of Lords based its decision on two further principles underpinning the law of negligence. These are the matters that relate to today, and my hon. Friend’s Bill is trying to examine that issue and to make a change on that basis.

In the light of concerns raised by hon. Members after constituents were diagnosed with pleural plaques, the Government published a consultation paper on 9 July 2008 to gather views on the most appropriate means of responding to the House of Lords decision. Indeed, my hon. Friend referred to the fact that my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister responded to that decision in Prime Minister’s questions, whereas my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Justice brought forward the consultation paper, which considered several issues.

The consultation paper considered the law and medical evidence underpinning the House of Lords decision and sought views on a range of possible options. It proposed that action should be taken to improve understanding of pleural plaques and in particular to provide support and reassurance to those diagnosed with pleural plaques to help allay their concerns. In the light of representations that have been received from those who are strongly of the view that pleural plaques should be compensable, the paper considered the issues that arise in relation to changing the law of negligence and invited views on whether that would be appropriate.

The consultation also invited views on the merits of establishing a no-fault payment scheme for individuals who have been diagnosed with pleural plaques and considered two possible approaches. One would be to establish a no-fault payment scheme limited to those with work-related exposure to asbestos, and the other would be to establish a no-fault payment scheme for those similarly exposed and diagnosed now or in the future. The paper discussed whether any payments should be made and, if so, crucially, by whom, what amount the payment should be and the risks, benefits and costs of both schemes.

The paper also explained that it was important to ensure that any decisions on pleural plaques were reached on the basis of the best available current medical evidence, an issue that was alluded to by the hon. Members for Epping Forest and for Lichfield. For that reason, the paper indicated that independent reviews of the medical evidence have been commissioned from the Industrial Injuries Advisory Council and the chief medical officer.

The consultation closed at the beginning of October last year. Let me be honest: I fully understand the concerns about the time that we are taking to consider the consultation issues. In some way, that answers the questions asked by the hon. Member for Blaby (Mr. Robathan) about why my hon. Friend the Member for Hendon introduced the Bill today, and whether the matter is not one for the Government. I say to the hon. Member for Blaby that we are looking into the issue extremely seriously. We have had the consultation, and it has been considered. Responses have been received; there were over 224 in total, including 125 from people who have been diagnosed with pleural plaques, or whose relatives have been diagnosed with the condition—so the Government do take the issue seriously.

My hon. Friend the Member for Hendon has rightly taken the opportunity offered by the Bill to raise the issue and to seek legislative redress. We are considering the matter. There is confluence of the Government’s consideration of the consultation and my hon. Friend’s Bill, but that, I hope, does not reflect on either party.

In all seriousness, the issue is not, as far as I am concerned, in any way a party political matter. It is a serious subject, and concerned constituents have written to me about pleural plaques. Has the Minister received responses to the consultation? I know that the process takes a long time, and although I do not doubt the Government’s good intent—well, I sometimes do, but not in this case—the House needs to know the Government’s view, following the consultation. When will we get the response? With all due respect to the hon. Member for Hendon (Mr. Dismore), the Bill may raise the issue and perhaps goad the Government a little bit, but I think it has been introduced at the wrong time.

The hon. Gentleman will understand that we have to produce the response to that consultation, and we will do so. It will be provided to the House, and it will be part of the ongoing discussions. I very much hope that it will be part of the considerations when we reflect on the points that my hon. Friend the Member for Hendon has discussed .

Nothing would please me more than if the Government introduced their own proposals. I simply say that my Bill is designed to push them along a little bit and help them to make their mind up. Of course, I am more than happy to consider any Government amendments to my Bill, should it reach Committee.

My hon. Friend brings me to a point that is worth putting on record. There are concerns, some of which were recognised by the hon. Members for Epping Forest and for Lichfield. The Government have concerns about some aspects of the Bill, and those concerns will have to be explored if it proceeds to Committee. For example, the Bill does not interact with law on Northern Ireland. There are different limitations and different legislation available in Northern Ireland, and clause 3 does not reflect that. Clause 2 extends the Bill to asbestosis and asbestos-related pleural thickening; those conditions were not included in the consultation, and we need to consider carefully whether they should be included in any legislation.

Having said all that, although we have reservations that need to be explored, I am happy to allow the Bill to be read a Second time today, if the House so wishes. I am happy for those issues, and the issues raised by the hon. Member for Epping Forest, to be explored in Committee. Undoubtedly, as my hon. Friend the Member for Hendon will be aware, there will come a time when we respond to our consultation. Hopefully, that will be within relatively short order. We will look at the consultation response in light of the progress in Committee. I cannot say today whether ultimately we will support all the details of my hon. Friend’s Bill, but if the House wishes the Bill to proceed, we certainly will not today force a situation in which it cannot do so.

I thank hon. Members for their contributions, and thank my hon. Friend the Member for Hendon for introducing the Bill. It deals with a serious issue that affects people who have had injuries and illnesses that have damaged their lives in considerable ways. It is up to the House to reflect that in a proper and effective way. If the House wishes the Bill to proceed to Committee, I know that full consideration will be given to all the issues raised, not just by me as the Minister speaking on behalf of my colleagues, but by all Members of the House. I thank my hon. Friend for the opportunity to discuss the issues today.

I am keen not to talk the Bill out, but I have to say to the Government that I do not think that they have given an adequate response. We are talking about a very serious issue that affects my constituents and others. It is not an adequate response to say, “We’ll push the matter into Committee and discuss it through a private Member’s Bill.” The Government have had time to consider the issue, and they must determine whether they wish to change the law or not.

Question put and agreed to.

Bill accordingly read a Second time; to stand committed to a Public Bill Committee. (Standing Order No. 63)

In a few weeks I will have represented the people of Vauxhall as their Member of Parliament for 20 years. When I was elected, I promised to speak out loudly about their needs and concerns, and to represent them powerfully, whoever was running Lambeth and whoever was in government.

My constituency, covering the north of Lambeth, is a wonderful diverse community with very many people deeply committed to working with others to make where they live a better place to be. The 2007 index of multiple deprivation places Lambeth as the fifth most deprived borough in London and the 19th most deprived in England. There are, of course, pockets of affluence, and one of the most pleasant corollaries of this is that in areas such as Kennington, Waterloo, Stockwell, Brixton and Clapham there is a coming together in the myriad community and voluntary organisations of people from all backgrounds and financial income.

Over the years we have seen huge improvements in the environment in the borough—in our parks, streets, street cleaning and so on. Although a large number of my constituents are well paid, highly educated and play a major role in the wider London economy, many are denied opportunities to succeed and we still face long-term problems, such as higher than average rates of unemployment, low levels of skills, and high teenage pregnancy and crime.

However, throughout my time as an MP there has been one overriding theme of discontent and even anger, as I am sure my right hon. Friend the Member for Streatham (Keith Hill), who I am pleased to see beside me today, will agree. Regardless which political party has been in power at Lambeth town hall, whether Labour, Liberal Democrat or no overall control, there have been real failures in the housing department and in housing management. I emphasise that this is not a strictly party political issue. It has been a fact, regardless who has been nominally in control. There has been a culture of incompetence, arrogance and—I choose my words carefully—outright corruption among too many in the structures of the housing department, many of whom have now left.

I know that the current administration is aware of the situation and of the history, and that greater attention is being paid to trying to tackle it. In particular, I pay tribute to the ongoing efforts of our chief executive, Derrick Anderson, who has taken a huge hands-on role in trying to sort housing out once and for all, and of our cabinet member for housing, Lib Peck, who is relatively new to the job and showing a determination to face up to the challenge. But it is still nowhere near fixed, and I could spend all the time available to me today chronicling the many mess-ups that there have been. I shall however refer to just a few.

During the past few years we have seen a fraudster from within the housing department steal £2.9 million, which was eventually retrieved through insurance; an £11 million budget for homeless accommodation overspent by £6 million, because the council had leased too much property for a declining number of homeless people; and an all-party report by councillors finding that the authority ignored Government homelessness funding cuts, branding the officers reckless. There have been failings to keep contractors in check, shoddy work that is never penalised and countless other examples of financial mismanagement, as well as failings on the monitoring of repairs and other day-to-day management of what is happening on our estates.

The word “blame” could be widely used against many people and the organisation generally over a long period, but my right hon. Friend the Minister of Housing must be aware that the one group throughout all this who certainly cannot be blamed and have had no hand in any of the mismanagement is the council tenants, who make up about 50 per cent. of the residents across Vauxhall and who have suffered terribly poor service from their housing department. The department is often unresponsive, dismissive and hostile. Repairs have not been done and many of my constituents are in despair at the service that they receive.

I want to pay tribute to the many tenant leaders who give up so much of their time to improve the situation—Roz Munday, Rita Fitzgerald, Norah Anne Sheey and, most of all, Pat Scahill from the Mursell estate who has badgered tirelessly to get Lambeth officers to do their job properly. If only the council had listened over the many years to the tenants who knew what was going on. Eighteen months ago I brought a delegation of tenants to see the former Minister, and they said then how dire things were. Those very same tenants now face enormous rent rises to make up for matters beyond their control. They have never been listened to and I hope that they will now be listened to.

The proposed rent increases this year will mean an additional £11.79 a week for a one-bedroomed flat and an additional £12.20 a week for a two-bedroomed flat, rising to £15 a week for larger flats. On top of that, increases in service charges will mean an additional 68p a week across the board. These huge rises, totalling about 16.49 per cent. on average, are by far the largest proposed anywhere in London and indeed in the country, and they will hit many tenants hard, particularly those who do not receive housing benefit. Those people are largely men and women who have worked hard all their lives, paid their taxes and contributed fully to their communities, and they will now find themselves clobbered by these increases, which have nothing at all to do with them.

The reason for the proposed rent increases is to plug the deficit in Lambeth’s housing revenue account, which is projected to be £9 million over the next 18 months, and to meet the forecast need to bring the account back into surplus in the medium term. That was despite last summer the tenants council being told by officers that the HRA was fine—no problem. Two months later, we suddenly had a huge deficit and the rent increases were discussed. The suggested alternative of swingeing cuts in the housing repairs budget, which is already not delivering nearly enough and practically nothing on some estates, is just not possible.

The reason for my coming to Parliament today is to see how my right hon. Friend the Minister for Housing can help. I am being very honest. There is a solution and I know that my right hon. Friend wants to help if she can. Lambeth’s administration had expectations of receiving funds through the rent constraint allowance, which was paid out in 2006-07 and 2007-08 to authorities that were able to hold down rents. Lambeth was not entitled to receive RCA until the incoming Labour administration de-pooled its rents from its service charges for 2007-08. However, it was considered that that was too late, because by the time the RCA ended at the end of that period, Lambeth had not established a two-year base of data. An earlier de-pooling under the previous administration might have made Lambeth eligible.

The council has calculated that the difference in RCA entitlement before and after de-pooling is a subsidy loss of £11 million—enough to plug the deficit in the housing revenue account. I know that the council leader has been lobbying the Department for Communities and Local Government for a one-off special determination for that amount to reflect the loss from de-pooling in expectation of the RCA in 2007-08, and my plea today to the Minister is to look favourably on that. If the Secretary of State would use her discretionary powers to issue a special housing subsidy determination to grant Lambeth an amount equivalent to that which due to the time lag was lost in the RCA calculations, the HRA would be immediately restored to balance and decent people who do not deserve the worry of all this, particularly at a time of economic recession, would not be penalised by such large rent increases.

There is another way in which my right hon. Friend the Minister might help. Lambeth council has included in its response to the HRA subsidy amending determination consultation a way of allowing an authority that de-pooled in 2007-08 additional subsidy for the amount of RCA lost. Currently, the Government’s incredibly welcome determination to get rent increases down to an average of 3.1 per cent., and their offer of help to those local councils that do so, does not in any way help the tenants of Lambeth. All around them they see other boroughs’ tiny increases being made even tinier because of the Government’s welcome guidelines, and even some boroughs that have made reductions, but all they have is ever-increasing bills.

I know that my right hon. Friend will have huge sympathy for the problems that those tenants face; she has a long history of involvement in and concern about housing. I have been inundated with letters and e-mails from despairing tenants. Time is short and I cannot read from all of them, but I shall read one extract from one e-mail, which sums up the overall feeling. It is from a lady—I shall not give her name—living in my constituency on Minet road. She writes:

“I would like to know if there is anything the parliament can do to intervene against the Rent Increase planned to begin in April 2009 in Lambeth. I usually expect an annual increase in rent but when I received a letter stating that the increase would be £15.00 per week on top of weekly rent I was more than unhappy. The letter from my housing office stated that this is because of mismanagement of funds and basically we have to pay. I work…and am on an average income with two children to support and just cannot afford to pay this huge amount. I think this is wrong, because we the people who live within Lambeth are not responsible for handling the funds that come through and don’t think we should be made liable to pay for the council’s mistakes. If it is at all possible I would like this to be pushed as far as it can to ensure Lambeth Council clean up their own mess and don’t dump the bill on us residents who are already financially strained.”

That is a reflection of the very many—the hundreds—of responses that I have had. People feel very upset, as one would imagine.

I know that my right hon. Friend has looked at the issue and been willing to meet me, and I am very grateful for all the meetings that we have had. My right hon. Friend the Member for Streatham has been a Lambeth Member for a very long time, although not quite as long as I have, and we both want Lambeth to be on a level playing field and its housing department to be restored so that we can feel confident about its financial situation. Whatever my right hon. Friend the Minister says today, she should note that we would definitely welcome the Government’s greater oversight of that Lambeth department. Tenants asked some time ago for inspectors to go in and try to sort out Lambeth housing, although that request perhaps went a little too far. I accept, however, that anything the Government offer has to come with strings attached—a call for greater oversight to ensure that good practice is followed and the old complacent failures in the department are weeded out.

I know that my right hon. Friend is busy, but she might like to meet representative tenants in the borough so that she can hear directly from them. I also remind her that the Government have taken quite a lot of money—£712 million of subsidy surplus—since 2003-04 from the housing revenue account system. Tenants feel that if only they could get some of it back, it would help their situation.

I thank the Minister for all the time that she has already spent on this issue, but I hope that she can respond today in a way that will give us some hope. I cannot express strongly enough the anger, upset, misery and desperation in the homes of many of my constituents just down the road from Parliament. They feel that they can do nothing to stop this incredible increase and that the last resort has to be for me and my right hon. Friend the Member for Streatham to come here and speak directly to the Minister for Housing to see what the Government can do. I know that the Government want to help, and I hope that between us all we can find a solution.

I begin by acknowledging at once the real concern that has been expressed by my hon. Friend the Member for Vauxhall (Kate Hoey) and my right hon. Friends the Members for Streatham (Keith Hill) and for Dulwich and West Norwood (Tessa Jowell) not only in this debate, but over the weeks and months. All Lambeth MPs share the same concerns, and my hon. Friend the Member for Vauxhall has made a powerful case today on the long-standing nature of the some of the problems in Lambeth, about which I have heard on many occasions over the years. As she has rightly and powerfully said, those problems are in no way to be laid at the door of the tenants, who are most impacted by the failures of service and the proposals that the council is making.

I also acknowledge at once that, as my hon. Friend has said, the reason for the rent increase that the council is considering is the need to balance the housing revenue account and the real difficulty in so doing. My understanding is that the council’s rises come against a background of what have historically been some of the lowest rents in London and that, in addition, the council has experienced a number of challenging issues in respect of its housing service and management of stock. Incidentally, I entirely accept my hon. Friend’s point that such issues have happened under Administrations of all political shades.

Because the problems are of long standing, they can be difficult to resolve. However, I also recognise that the current council has begun to take significant steps forward, and I congratulate it on its progress. For example, it is working hard with the arm’s length management organisations to reach a position at which they can qualify for funding to deliver a decent homes investment programme. I hope that the council will ensure that the ALMOs keep the Homes and Communities Agency advised of their progress and of any problems to make sure that there is a full understanding of the position and so that support that might be made available can be discussed.

As my hon. Friend has pointed out, we have recognised the general concerns raised by councils, including Lambeth council, about the current system of providing subsidy for council housing, and its impacts, including those on rents, for this year. The system is complex, and if there is anyone around who sees it as fair or transparent, they are keeping very quiet about it. The Government want to ensure that there is a long-term sustainable system for the future that is fair and affordable for councils, tenants and taxpayers, so a widespread review has been looking in depth at the cost of the landlord business, rents and the use of surpluses, redistribution and the background issues that influence the position in Lambeth and elsewhere. I hope that we will have the report of the review soon.

Whatever comes out of the review, I accept that it is vital that the council puts its housing finances on a better footing for the future. I am grateful to my hon. Friend for saying that both Lambeth’s Members of Parliament and its tenants have concerns about that. As local authority and landlord, that is something for which the council has full responsibility. However, I share the concern expressed by my hon. Friend about how working council tenants, many of whom are among the least well-off in the community, can be expected to cope with very high rent increases in the present economic conditions.

Having recognised that, on 6 March I announced that the Government would consult on the overall position with regard to local authority rent increases. Guideline rent increases of just over 6 per cent. for 2009-10 and 2010-11 had initially been agreed with local authorities, after consultation, in order to give what was felt at that time to be much-needed certainty to local councils in planning their future budgeting and their spending on housing. Since then, of course, inflation has fallen very sharply, and it became clear that it would be wise to look again at the position to see whether we could provide help and assistance to council tenants. We had many representations expressing concern about the widening gap between the assumptions made by the Department last September and current levels of inflation.

Because, as a Government, we listen to the concerns that stakeholders express, we accepted that, if at all possible, something had to be done to address the situation, and we reacted quickly. First, I promised to look again at the guideline rent increase for the second year—2010-11—in the full understanding that the certainty that had been thought to be more desirable than anything else was beginning to look less desirable. I then began urgently to investigate the options to offer reduced guideline rents for 2009-10. The system is, as I have said, very complex, and we had to spend some time exploring the financial consequences of the different options. Having done so, and having successfully negotiated the necessary resources, I immediately announced our decision. It is our intention that any council reducing its actual rent rises for 2009-10 in accordance with the level of its average guideline rent reduction—from just over 6 per cent. to just 3 per cent.—will be compensated through increased subsidy, to pass on to the tenant through reduced rent rises.

I will take this opportunity, if I may, to refer to the point that has been raised on this issue—we have not revisited local authorities’ allowances, which were set in the original subsidy determination last autumn. They were set, as were the guideline increases, according to inflation assumptions at the time, which were at a significantly higher level, and consequently the allowances are much more generous than they would be if they were calculated now.

Overall, this is a generous offer of improvements for tenants on the maintenance of the funding available to councils to help them to manage their own administrative responsibilities. I hope to see all councils take advantage of this opportunity to help their tenants by lowering their rents in these difficult economic times. I fully accept that, as my hon. Friend has said, against that background the dilemma faced by a council in Lambeth’s position is particularly acute. It wants to help its tenants, which neighbouring boroughs may be able to do, but it needs to raise significant sums to tackle the complex and serious underlying problems in its housing finances.

Of course, whatever the guidelines, all councils are free to make their own decisions on the actual rent levels that they set in their particular circumstances. However, we are keen to see what can be done to help councils that wish to provide a better deal for their tenants to lower their rent increases. Our general consultation on the guideline rent reduction ends today, and we are now analysing the responses, so I have yet to establish the level of take-up of our offer or to fully assess the issues that councils have raised in responding. We will carefully consider all the responses, particularly Lambeth’s, when we make the final subsidy determination.

My hon. Friend was kind enough to say that she believes that I want to help find a way forward, if at all possible. She is absolutely right about that, because I recognise the strength of the case that she has made. She referred particularly to the rental constraint allowance and to Lambeth’s request for a special determination to make an adjustment to increase its rental constraint allowance bearing in mind that it uncoupled service charges from rents in 2007-08. She touched on the fact that that could perhaps deal with councils that are in that general position

It might help if I try to clarify the position. The rental constraint allowance was introduced for a limited period only, between 2006-07 and 2007-8. The purpose of that introduction was to meet a specific Government aim of enabling councils to keep their actual rent increases down to 5 per cent. in those years. Although I recognise the argument that Lambeth is putting, I understand that there was never any intention that the rental constraint allowance itself should be a means of encouraging local housing authorities to separate service charges from rents—de-pooling—in the way that some authorities, although not Lambeth, did at the time. Any benefits that authorities might have derived from de-pooling during the relevant period when the allowance was in place were coincidental.

That suggests that Lambeth has not been treated differently from other local authorities. I know that my hon. Friend will recognise, however reluctantly, the problems that would be caused if Lambeth were treated differently. It is impossible for any Government not to treat all councils fairly and to make particular exceptions because of unique circumstances. However, I assure her that we are prepared to listen and have been doing so, as she was kind enough to acknowledge.

We are already providing sector-led support through the Government office for London to help Lambeth to take forward the progress that it has made and build on its achievements so far. As my hon. Friend acknowledged, Department for Communities and Local Government officials have very recently met council officers, and we are considering very carefully all the issues that they put to us.

I know that it will be disappointing to my hon. Friend that I cannot say today that we have found a way forward through the path that she identified, but I assure her that I will continue to examine these issues very carefully with officers, representatives of the local authority and my parliamentary colleagues. We will reply quickly to Lambeth’s response to our subsidy consultation, and I will continue to explore whether there are ways in which, without breaching the normal methods of handling problems that arise in local authorities, we can alleviate the real problems for Lambeth’s tenants that she so eloquently identified.

Question put and agreed to.