Liam Byrne
MP for Birmingham Hodge Hill and Solihull North · Labour · United Kingdom
“The loss of 4,000 jobs at Jaguar Land Rover is a body blow for workers, families and communities across the west midlands, so I commend Richard Parker, the Mayor of the West Midlands, for moving quickly on Monday to put £500,000 on the table to help ensure that everybody gets back to work.”
“I wholeheartedly welcome this well-rounded statement from the Foreign Secretary, and put on record my thanks to the new Prime Minister for the hard yards that I know he has put in over recent days and weeks.”
“I am grateful to my hon. Friend for giving way, and I offer my warmest congratulations to her on her appointment to the role; she will be a brilliant Minister.”
“Let me start with a word of thanks to my hon. Friend the Member for Chester North and Neston (Samantha Dixon), who is not in her place, who said quite rightly that an awful lot has changed since the Bill was first introduced to this House. Indeed, a lot has been revealed over the course of the summer.”
“The effect of new clause 34 would be to ban off-ramping, ban new forms of digital currency transactions and ban memecoins, which are exactly the kind of measures that Ministers now need to bring forward. If we want to take the crypto system out of political finance, this is what we need to do.”
“No doubt we will learn that Mr Cottrell was in fact on the electoral register when that money was passed. No doubt we will discover that his mother, Fiona Cottrell, declared and did not disguise the fact that the money had ultimately come from her son.”
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“The right hon. Gentleman is making a brilliant speech. I just want to flush out one point, which I hope will be a point of consensus. It is possible that this weekend we will get agreement on a fresh issue of $650 billion in special drawing rights. The UK will have surplus SDRs and it is possible that they could be recycled to support aid. It would be a regrettable accounting trick if that, in any way, counted towards making good the cut that has been made. Is that a point of consensus across the House?”
“One has to ask, why would anybody trust him? The truth is that he will soon discover that unless he is more hard-line about keeping his promises, our influence in the world will diminish. Once upon a time, it was known abroad that our word was our bond. That is not something to surrender lightly. My second point is that the Prime Minister risks a serious imbalance in our foreign policy. In today’s world, defence of the realm entails a mixture of deterrence and development. President Biden has a useful guide. He says, “You talk about values. Show me your budget and I will tell you what your values are.” We now have a situation where defence spending is rising by £24 billion and development spending is falling by £4 billion—a £28 billion gap.”
“161.] He declared that 2021 will set the tone for the UK’s international engagement abroad—let us hope not, because on the eve of the G7 this Prime Minister is leading by retreating. The only dynamism he is showing is in the speed with which he is breaking his promises to the world. The former Prime Minister, the right hon. Member for Maidenhead (Mrs May), did not make many speeches about foreign policy, but there was a phrase she used often that was good—the notion of the rules-based order. We should have a Government who extol the benefits and the virtues of a rules-based order. However, we now have a Prime Minister who is ordering the breaking of the rules, not just with the nonsense around the international protocols in Northern Ireland, but with our international promises to the world community.”
“I congratulate the right hon. Member for Sutton Coldfield (Mr Mitchell) and I thank the House authorities and Mr Speaker for the debate today. I have risen to speak because this decision seems, at one and the same time, to be a decision that dishonours our word, dismays our friends and delights our enemies. I want to make just three points. The first is simple: this decision defaces and demeans the strategy that was set out in this House by the Prime Minister as long as 69 days ago, when he came to that Dispatch Box to present the Integrated Review to the House. He said that he was determined to build resilience at home and abroad and to tackle risk at source: “We will be…dynamic abroad”. —[ Official Report , 16 March 2021; Vol. 691, c.”
“Low-income countries will now need $200 billion extra to step up their covid response, followed by $250 billion extra in accelerated investment as we try to move from the pandemic to the Paris agreement. We are now going to—”
“There should be a simple rule of policy that we will not drop aid in places where we drop bombs, or where others drop bombs that they bought from us. Investing in places where we can alleviate poverty is one of the biggest investments we can make in safeguarding our security for the years to come. My final point is simply this. The Chair of the International Development Committee, my hon. Friend the Member for Rotherham (Sarah Champion), helpfully set out the extraordinary range of cuts that are now being confronted. As chair of the Parliamentary Network on the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, I asked the IMF this afternoon for an update on the sheer scale of investment that is needed to get the global community back on its feet.”
“We were proud to set the ambition, and we set a critical path to doing it, because we knew precisely this—that development and deterrence are two sides of the same coin. They are essential to the defence of the realm. The Prime Minister, when he presented the Integrated Review, boasted that we were about to send the new Queen Elizabeth carrier group on a worldwide tour. In how many of the 100 countries where we are cutting aid will that carrier group come into port? I bet that everywhere it does, we will find that our projection of power is as nothing compared with the power of a project to make poverty history. Two thirds of the world’s poorest live in fragile, conflict- affected and violent states. It beggars belief that under the Government’s proposals, nations such as Libya and Iraq will no longer receive bilateral aid.”
“Covid has triggered the first global rise in extreme poverty this century, but at the G7 the Prime Minister could act. He can ask leaders to reallocate the International Monetary Fund’s £1 trillion-worth of special drawing rights and restock the World Bank’s £83 billion-worth of International Development Association funds. This is a multi-billion pound package of support for the world’s poorest. Will the Prime Minister today commit to leading that argument at the G7, so that a pandemic of disease does not now become a pandemic of poverty?”
“It is vital that we suspend the sale of arms to Israel until we know the outcomes of these prosecutions. Crucially, it is vital that the UK understands that the hope of peace is disappearing because people no longer believe that a two-state solution is possible. That is why we have to act now to sustain hope among Palestinians by ensuring recognition of the state of Palestine. We voted for it in 2014. On 7 July 2020, the Government said: “The UK will recognise a Palestinian state at a time when it best serves the objective of peace”—”
“We heard the Minister’s statement of policy; we just do not understand the strategy for advancing it. He has to realise, like the rest of us, that there is no peace without justice. The way to disarm Hamas, to make progress towards peace and to ensure genuine calm and de-escalation can only be through the full realisation of Palestinian rights and the end of systematic discrimination against Palestinians in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. It is vital that the UK uses its influence with the United States to insist on a ceasefire. It is vital that the UK Government fully support the International Criminal Court investigation into all alleged war crimes, no matter which party stands accused, including those who are launching appalling rockets and those launching airstrikes.”
“Not all fairy tales begin with the words “Once upon a time”; some fairy tales begin with the words “When I am elected”. What we now need from the Government, the Mayor and Ministers is action, not words.”
“I want to work with the Mayor, Labour leaders and the Chancellor to drive through the proper gateway around the new hospital for Arden Cross, because we know that health policy is economic policy. We need the new east Birmingham tramline—all 13 km of it—finally to be built. We need to retrain workers for an ambitious programme of retrofitting. High Speed 2 needs to be instructed to hand back the land at the second biggest industrial site, at the heart of three constituencies with high unemployment, so that we can crack on with building jobs. Crucially, we need the Chancellor’s support for a new towns fund based around the Bordesley action plan. East Birmingham is a place the size of Nottingham—it could be the fifth or sixth biggest city in the country.”
“Fourthly, we need to devolve energy powers, because there are currently firms in the Black Country that have power cuts in the middle of the day because our energy system is so outdated. Fifthly, we need a new deal on transport, because there is a £1.1 billion black hole in our transport spending proposals. Those are the five necessary steps for which the Chancellor should be taking personal responsibility if he is serious about levelling up not simply the country but regions like the west midlands. Finally, I wish to make an unashamed special plea for the people of east Birmingham, the part of the country I serve, where five generations of my family have lived and worked. It is the place with the worst unemployment in Britain.”
“We have to devolve at least £4 billion to the west midlands so that we can make sure that everybody not only has a roof over their head, but has a home that is warm and a home that is green. In so doing, we could create hundreds of thousands of jobs for people without work. Thirdly, we need a new deal on skills. Apprenticeship numbers have collapsed by 40%. We will have to retrain a generation or two of workers, but at the moment we have the ridiculous situation of the Department for Education handing unspent apprenticeship budget back to the Treasury. We have budgets such as the national skills fund and the national prosperity fund all being dictated from Whitehall. Just hand the whole thing over to the west midlands and trust the people of the west midlands to implement these plans properly.”
“There is a win-win to be had with the Government’s 10-point plan, but there are five action points that we need the Minister to drive through in the weeks and months ahead. First, as the shadow Chancellor, my hon. Friend the Member for Leeds West (Rachel Reeves), said in a brilliant speech, we have to get the gigafactory built at Coventry airport. There are 16 gigafactories already up and running or being built in Europe. In jeopardy are 110,000 jobs in the automotive industry. The window is closing fast and, Chancellor, we need to act quickly. Secondly, we have to devolve the budget for retrofitting. The green homes grant is what is known in Treasury parlance as “a shambles”.”
“Labour controls the three great cities of the west midlands, along with the borough of Sandwell. We also now have challenges, which are multiplying. Healthy life expectancy was falling in our region before covid hit. We have the worst youth unemployment in the country. We have the worst unemployment in the country. Exports were falling by £2 billion a year before covid struck. That is why we need the Chancellor of the Exchequer and his colleagues in Cabinet to work with the Mayor and Labour leaders in the region and now back some of the most popular ideas that we proposed, which were to lead green Britain and to bring back industry. Once upon a time, our region was the workshop of the world. In this century, we have the potential and the ambition to become the green workshop of a greener planet.”
“I had not planned to speak today, but last Thursday the good people of the west midlands decided that they needed me fighting their corner from the cockpit of the west midlands, rather than from the office of the Mayor, so this afternoon I plan to crack on with a word for the Mayor and a word for Ministers. To the Mayor, Andy Street, I offer my warmest congratulations. In a year of tragedy, he, too, was hit by personal tragedy, but despite that he continued to work and campaign with grace under pressure. Grace under pressure is what Ernest Hemingway called courage, so I congratulate the Mayor on both his conquest and his courage. He has now earned the right to lead and, I hope, also earned the duty to listen. Forty-six per cent. of my region voted Labour.”
“I thank the right hon. Gentleman for his kind words. Does he agree that at the G7 and later this year at COP26, Her Majesty’s Government would stand a far better chance of encouraging sign-up to the new International Development Association programme if, ahead of those important events, they were prepared to commit to the 0.7% target?”
“I conclude with my condolences to Her Majesty the Queen and her family. St Augustine said that those who have left us are invisible, but never absent. Prince Philip will not be absent to any of us here today. He was a Duke of duty who we will remember for the rest of our time. He got to live the blessing of Tobias. He lived with the Queen long. That was because he lived in the spirit of the Book of Ruth: “Wherever you go, I will go. Wherever you live, I will live. Your people will be my people. Your God will be my God… We shall be together forever. And our love will be the gift of our God.” As we remember Prince Philip today, that is a blessing to give thanks for.”
“Milne: “Promise me you’ll always remember: you’re braver than you believe, stronger than you seem and smarter than you think.” Millions of our children know that about themselves because of the Duke of Edinburgh’s Award scheme. My final thought is for the Commonwealth. The Duke of Edinburgh made 229 visits to 67 countries over and above those visits that he made with Her Majesty the Queen. Next year, this country, and my home city, is host to the Commonwealth games. We know that our success will be judged not simply by the medals we win but by the lives we change. What a fantastic memorial it would be to the Duke of Edinburgh if we can find a way of getting the next Duke of Edinburgh Award winners to work with Commonwealth countries around the world to carry forward the inspiration and the lessons of Prince Philip for a new generation.”
“He understood that, in a difficult world, humour is often the oil that keeps the wheels moving, especially when those axles are frozen with nerves. He had grit and wit. Grit and wit are what the British Isles are made of, and grit and wit were what the Duke of Edinburgh was made of. That is why the Duke of Edinburgh Award scheme was so important to so many, certainly to the three poor children in my family. It encourages the ethos of service and adventure, which is the best of our national spirit. That is not always clear to those shivering in a tent on a windswept hillside, but character education is so important for our children because it teaches them not simply about the world around them but about the world inside them—the place where values are truly hammered out on the anvil of the soul. It teaches children those words of A.A.”
“It is an ethos that we want to protect, preserve and pass on. As has been said, the Duke of Edinburgh was one of the last members of that greatest generation who protected us in our hour of maximum danger. A distinguished sailor, he was saved by the Royal Navy at birth and served the Royal Navy with brilliance, courage and fortitude. With his marriage to Her Majesty the Queen, his orders changed, but his duty never did. He came to epitomise a reserved resilience, a strength in putting another first. He became not simply a touchstone for the Queen, but a cornerstone for the Queen’s family and a key stone for the institution of monarchy in our country. What distinguished him was not simply his backbone, but his banter.”
“I first want to offer the condolences of everybody in Britain’s second city, the city of Birmingham, to Her Majesty and her family today. The Duke was not always in Birmingham, but he was always there when we needed him. He was in Birmingham General Hospital to comfort the victims of the terrible Birmingham pub bombings, which ripped the heart out of families and the heart out of our city. He was there to open the Bullring in 1964 and to open New Street station in 2015. He was there to visit for the silver jubilee, to open the International Convention Centre, and of course most recently to inspect Jaguar Land Rover, that fine maker of what will be his final chariot. The reason I think so many people in our country mourn the Duke of Edinburgh is the sense that an era is passing, but there is an ethos that we want to endure.”
“It is a great pleasure to follow such a beautiful tribute. “There is an appointed time for everything”, says the Book of Ecclesiastes. “A time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance”. This has been a brilliant tribute this afternoon, because amidst the mourning there has been warmth, joy and happiness, and many fond memories. I hope those memories will be of some comfort to the Queen and her family when they have a chance to read this debate. To remember the life of one is to remember the life lessons for all. When we celebrate the virtues of a life well lived, we affirm the values of what it means to live well. Today we remember not just an individual, but an ideal; not just a man but a marriage—a father who hated fuss and a husband who treasured humour.”
“The towns funds that we secured today are just three quarters of what Andy Burnham and Steve Rotheram got up in the north-west and just 39% of what was secured by council leaders in the east midlands. We cannot go on like this. We need a Mayor who is going to stand up and fight for our region, and in May, that is what the residents of our region are going to get.”
“I want our region to be a place where we have police back on the streets, because we have seen violent crime soar by more than 100% over the last two to three years. But that is not what we got today. We have asked for help, but we have been given just 5% of the £3 billion we asked for to get our recovery moving. What did we get today? The grand total of £2 per person per week—that was it. There is £431 billion in the national capital budget. What did we get today? We should have got an extra £7.7 billion, which would reflect our population share. We got just 3% of that money today. I am afraid that, once again, we have been left behind, looked over and left out.”
“I think that is the biggest tax rise that we have ever seen in Budget history, and it is so high because the growth rate for this country is coming further and further down. That is why what we needed from the Chancellor today was a meaningful strategy to go from the pandemic to the Paris agreement—a plan to reindustrialise our country and create new green manufacturing jobs, avoiding the perils that the International Monetary Fund is warning about of a K-shaped recovery where the rich go in one direction and the poor go in another. That is what I want for our region. I want our region to be the green workshop of the world. I want our region—the youngest region in Europe—to be the place with the best life chances for young people.”
“I am here to speak for the west midlands because we have a Tory Mayor who is failing to use his voice. The truth is that covid has hit our region harder than any other region in our country, and over the last four years, life in our region was getting shorter, getting poorer and getting less safe. That is why what we needed from the Chancellor today was a Budget that genuinely levelled up this country, so that we can level up our region. I am grateful for the help in the short term that will make a difference, but the truth is that, over the medium term, we saw today £66 billion-worth of tax rises—tax rises that will also fall on teachers, nurses and police officers for the years to come.”
“On big hubs and GPs, we do not have access to those kinds of services in the same way that the richer wards do. Viruses that evade a vaccine are viruses that continue to evolve, and no one is safe until everybody is safe. We need a different approach to vaccination roll-out, and we need it now.”
“Underlining, underpinning and exacerbating this problem is the fact that our testing uptake has a similar pattern. In fact, the amount of testing in the richer wards is 60% greater than the testing in the poorer wards. Anecdotally, we have people who cannot afford to find out they have covid but happen to live in wards where the vaccination uptake is lowest. Cases are now concentrated in the poorest places, and the risk is that these poor places will languish in a kind of long covid for many more months than richer places. That opens the risk of a pandemic of disease now triggering a pandemic of poverty. I call on Ministers today to please make sure that this data is more widely available, and for heaven’s sake start using our community pharmacies to start rolling out the vaccination programme in our poorest places.”
“It was then made available to public health directors through the dashboards that they can see, but it was marked as restricted, which means they cannot share it. We have been able to get it into the public domain by putting it on the agenda in some preparatory work for the covid-O committee that we have to set up, but it is really not good enough that we have to go this roundabout way to get crucial data published. The reason this is so serious is that the data in Birmingham reveals a story of two cities, if not two nations: rich and poor. In the richest wards in Birmingham, we have vaccination rates that are over 90%; in the poorest wards, we have vaccination rates that are under 60%. We have a dramatically different vaccination uptake in the richest wards compared with the poorest wards.”
“There are two or three points that I want to make very quickly tonight, after first thanking the extraordinary national health service team and the public health team in Birmingham, of Justin Varney, David Rosser and Paul Jennings, who meet with Birmingham MPs each week. The clarity of the information that they give and the quality of their leadership in our city are absolutely extraordinary. The three quick points I want to add to this debate are these. First, it is now crucial that Ministers make available detailed ward-level data about vaccinations. As some people know, we have been fighting for this data in Birmingham for some time, and I thank the right hon. Member for Sutton Coldfield (Mr Mitchell) for working with me. The Secretary of State promised us the data back in about January.”
“She wants us to reflect on how we help them to connect at a human level, and on how we recognise their pledges by bringing them together and putting them on a national stage, giving our young people, through their leadership, the chance to genuinely spark a movement for change against hate.”
“They were among thousands of ordinary Danes who came together inspired by one simple idea: that ordinary people can make a difference in standing up to hate. I am so grateful that our schools are now teaching this lesson to our children—schools like Rockwood Academy in Alum Rock in my constituency. This is a gold standard Holocaust Educational Trust school that has brought alive the testimony of Mady Gerrard. It has named its new building after Mady, and its lights now shine out like a light in the darkness to help light up the January skies here in Birmingham. I want our region to become a region of sanctuary for refugees in the years to come. I want us to listen to the lessons of Sofia Darr, the headteacher, who I heard from this morning. She said that she has just seen the most extraordinary emotional journey of her children.”
“Those of us have been to Yad Vashem will know that in the Avenue of the Righteous there is only one memorial to an entire national movement, and that is the memorial to the Danish resistance. This movement came together in 1940 after Hitler invaded Denmark. Together, it organised the extraordinary evacuation of 7,200 Jews, along with 700 of their relatives, in October 1943 after Hitler had given the order to arrest the Jews, with extermination in mind. This was an exercise in good people coming together—people like Sven Teisen, a member of the Danish resistance, who lost his life in the course of 1943, and Oliver Sandberg, who gave over their house next to the Øresund, across which Jews were ferried to safety in Sweden. Sven Teisen was the uncle that I never knew. Oliver Sandberg was his cousin.”
“Let me add my thanks to everybody who has helped to sponsor and organise this debate. I, too, pay tribute to the Holocaust Educational Trust and the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust for helping to ensure that the debate is so well organised and so well informed. Seventy-six years on, we still do not look out on a world where we have banished genocide. We cannot yet look out on a world where we have banished antisemitism. Until that moment comes, we need debates like this to remember with contrition and humility, as well as determination, how much further we still have to go. I want to offer two lessons today that I have reflected on in the run-up to this important day. One is a lesson not from Britain but from Denmark: it is the story of the Danish resistance.”
“How on earth can it be right that council tax payers in places such as Surrey are being cushioned, when council tax payers in Birmingham and the west midlands are being punished? We took the Secretary of State at his word when he told us that he would ensure that there were the resources we needed to do the job. He has reneged on that. It is people—people who are going through hell on earth—who are now being asked to pick up a bill for Government underfunding. That is simply not right, and I, along with my colleagues, urge the Government to think again.”
“That included the £92 million extra for social care, to cover the costs of PPE that never arrived or to ensure that there was a safe social care system after the protective ring around care homes failed, and £95 million in lost income, as well as business rates going down and council tax support going up. It is true that the Secretary of State provided some grants to make good on that, but as of last year, we were still £100 million short because our council, led by Councillor Ian Ward, decided to step up and help protect the people of our city where there were shortcomings from the Government. Now, what was the result of that? A 4.99% increase in council tax—£72 a year for a band D home.”
“She got the news from her husband that she had feared by text message: “Told just 24 to 48 hours to live.” Or stories such as Bishop Windsor’s, who buried so many people in his congregation that he did not know how that congregation would ever recover from their agony of loss. Now, after all that agony and pain, and after all the anxiety of the job losses, in Britain’s second city we are being handed a bill—a bill to make good on the underfunding of this Government. Last May, we wrote a cross-party letter to the Minister to warn that the costs of covid in our city would total some £282 million.”
“Let me just start with a point that I think many of us will share: in these debates about numbers, statistics and finances, we must remember the lives that are at stake. Most of us will never forget the stories of love and loss that we have heard this year, stories such as those I heard from the family of Sarah Scully. Their mum, Sarah, went into hospital and said goodbye to her family at the hospital door. Sarah was pregnant. She had to be given a caesarean section, but was so ill she had to be put into an induced coma. Tragically, she died before she was ever able to hold her newborn baby in her arms. Or stories such as Monica’s. She had been married to her husband since she was a teenager. They both got covid, but went into different hospitals.”
“This is a shambles. I say thank you to Birmingham City Council and thank you to Graeme Brown, the editor of the Birmingham Post and the Birmingham Mail for offering to jump into the breach and organise laptop collections, because where the Department has failed, we now need the good people and the good companies of Birmingham to come together to fill the breach.”
“Listen to Maddie Bromley from Court Farm Primary School: “Deprived school. Allocation 51 laptops, only 10 arrived. Still waiting on the rest. Had to chase Government repeatedly.” Or Helen Slack, the head of Twickenham Primary School: “No allocation for years 1, 2 and 3. Parents ringing in tears. Can’t get an answer from the Department for Education.” Another school said: “We are an infant school. We have been ignored by the DFE.” And another: “As an infant school, we were not eligible for laptops.” Another head said: “We have been in desperate need for laptops. Any help appreciated, thank you”, and another told me: “We have requested over 15 times now from the Department for Education and still haven’t had a response.” Some are reporting that there are anywhere between 70 and 250 parents in desperate need of technology support.”
“Here in the west midlands, youth services have been cut by two and a half times more than the national average, we have youth unemployment that is over 20%, and now our young people are being punished because they cannot get the education they need at home. I was glad to hear that the Secretary of State is now interested in social policy. Let me share some data with him. We surveyed 443 schools last week in Birmingham, and I thank Ian Ward, the leader of the council, and cabinet member Jayne Francis for organising that. All but one of the respondents said that they had problems with technology for children at home. Some secondary schools are saying that they are 400 laptops short, 70% said that there were problems with connectivity and almost all of them said that there were problems getting through to the DFE.”
“It is a great pleasure to follow the right hon. Member for East Hampshire (Damian Hinds). I want to share a few thoughts from the frontline here in Europe’s youngest city, Birmingham. It is fair to say that many people will have a degree of sympathy, in that this was a crisis that could not have been foreseen, but nor could anybody else have foreseen it, and yet somehow here in this country we have had more lives lost than almost anywhere else, livelihoods have been hit harder than almost anywhere else, and now, as we are going to hear from this debate, more lessons are being lost here than anywhere else. The right hon. Gentleman was absolutely right to say that young people have a very hard road ahead of them. Here in Birmingham, like everywhere else in Britain, our children have really suffered from the exams fiasco last year.”
“What they need is eligibility for the self-employment scheme, so will the Prime Minister bring forward changes to the scheme, or is he hellbent on starving our entrepreneurs this Christmas?”
“On Friday, I met online with nurses in Birmingham who said that they had never seen so much death on the wards. They have had to bid goodbye to colleagues who have left the hospital in hearses. Many are suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. We owe it to them to play by the rules to save our NHS, but we have to save livelihoods, too. I have read the action plan that the Prime Minister has published. There is one mention of the self-employed on page 39, but in the west midlands, half the self-employed are not eligible for the Government support scheme—that is 121,000 people. They are not going to be helped by VAT cuts, bounce back loans or the art and culture schemes.”
“Unemployment here in the west midlands is soaring to a level that we last saw in the 1980s, but our Mayor has proved so ineffective that we have failed to secure 95% of what we have asked for in our recovery plan. Yesterday the International Monetary Fund’s chief economist called on Governments to bring forward large-scale investment to kick-start demand. In May, the Government set out their capital budget of £358 billion over the next five years. When are the Government going to allocate that capital budget, will the Chief Secretary maximise what is brought forward into the eye of the storm to kick-start demand for next year, and will he, for the first time, guarantee that the west midlands, at long last, will secure its fair share of that money?”
“I believe that the sharp ends to the furlough arrangements will put many people out of work, and there is no subsidy scheme for new cars of the type that has been announced in France and Germany. We want to be the capital of green manufacturing. I fear that, from today, we are now looking at manufacturing meltdown.”
“The country expects us to pull together now to get our country back on its feet. In that spirit, let me welcome the investment that the Chancellor has announced today for young people and for the hospitality trade. My observation, though, is that of the money he has brought forward, the capital is only about 5% to 6% of the budget that he has earmarked for the next four or five years. What that means in my region is 50p per person per week invested in so-called shovel-ready projects. That is not enough. But crucially, there is a gaping hole in today’s announcement where support for manufacturing should be. We have 330,000 people across the west midlands on furlough in construction, manufacturing and the car business.”
“This is an opportunity for the Government to do the right thing—the right thing against the judgment of history, the right thing for the people of the west midlands and the right thing for those who live their lives in poverty today.”