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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Every one of 5,360 lines we hold for Liam Byrne, in date order, each linked to its source. Free to read, in full, without an account. Page 56 of 108.
“We have a Department bedevilled by an excess of stupidity and an absence of spine. The cost is paid not by the Members on the Government Front Bench but by the 1 million children who will be plunged into poverty by the Secretary of State’s Department and the 3.4 million disabled people who will be hit by his strivers tax. He should instead be bringing to this House proposals that would genuinely bring down the welfare bill by getting more people into work. We now have nearly 1 million young people out of work and nearly 1 million people out of work long term, and that is costing us a fortune. He knows full well that the housing benefit bill is set to rise by £8 billion over the course of this Parliament because of his failure to get people back into jobs. That is why the Secretary of State should be arguing.”
“If they move into the private rented sector or to become homeless, that will cost the taxpayer a fortune. This policy will cost more than it saves, as has been powerfully argued today, and I am not surprised that the Minister of State is no longer prepared to swear by the savings that this policy is supposed to deliver. Here we have a Department that is at the height of its powers. It has brought us a Work programme that is worse than doing nothing, it has presided over a universal credit system that I understand is on the brink of collapsing into chaos, and now we have a policy that will cost more than it saves. Why? Because the Secretary of State has been rolled over by a downgraded Chancellor and has not had the strength to resist him. We now have the worst of all worlds.”
“He will have read the reports from all over the country —[Interruption.] Perhaps he will confirm this from a sedentary position. Like me, he will have read the reports from all over the country that have gone to cabinet meetings setting out the impact of his changes to communities up and down the country. The reports could not be clearer and they confirm the substance of the letter leaked by the private secretary to the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government that up to 20,000 people will be made homeless as a result of these changes, and that does not include the impact of the benefit cut. This policy affects councils like Hull city council, which says that 4,700 tenants will be hit, yet in Hull there are just 73 one-bedroom and two-bedroom properties available to let. There is a shortfall of 4,700 properties for tenants.”
“If we are to go back over the history, I should say that, as the hon. Lady will know, at that time the Conservative party supported Labour’s spending limits—that was the announcement made by the then shadow Chancellor at the party conference. The question that confronts the country now is: how do we bring the deficit down? Once upon a time, we were told that we were “all in it together” but we now know that the truth is quite the opposite. Once upon a time, the Chancellor said that he was not going to balance the books on the backs of the poor, but now we know the truth—he absolutely is balancing the books on the backs of the poor, starting with £14 a week extra from 660,000 people. The evidence that this policy is going to cost more than it saves is now staring the Secretary of State in the face, just as I can see it clearly, too.”
“The Minister will have read about the cases of Becky Bell raised by my hon. Friend the Member for Hartlepool (Mr Wright) and of Angel Hooper, the disabled child whose parents have been told that they will lose £20 a week because her specially adapted room will not be shared with another family member. They are two of the 660,000 families being told they will have to fork out extra or move under the bedroom tax. Will he confirm how many one-bedroom properties will be needed for people to downsize to as the bedroom tax kicks in?”
“The Minister knows that 600,000 people will now need a one-bedroom flat, yet the Department’s own assessment states that there are insufficient properties to enable tenants to move to accommodation of an appropriate size, even if they want to move. From the beginning of April, therefore, people in social housing will face a £14 a week extra bill, when those on £1 million a year face a £2,000 a week tax cut. How can the Minister justify this to hon. Members such as the hon. Member for Harlow (Robert Halfon), who said that benefit cuts at a time of tax cuts of this order would send the clearest signal that “Conservatives were looking after vested interests: not so much a dog whistle—more a full blown trumpet.”?”
“There has clearly not been a transparent and open process, and I should think that that would fall foul of a judicial review hearing in any court.”
“My third major concern is that, if this proposal goes ahead, it will not last 10 minutes in court. I won and lost enough judicial reviews in my time as a Minister to recognise a process that is not judicial review-proof, and the selection of this site is in no way judicial review-proof. The objective criteria used to select the site have not been published. High Speed 2 has ignored much of its own guidance. Indeed, I have been told by one of the site owners that two of the three sites HS2 identified in its assessment are in green-belt land south of the city, but there has been no clear acknowledgement in its reporting of the economic devastation that the selection of the site at Washwood Heath would wreak.”
“If a site this big, which constitutes half of the best urban land available in the city, is taken out, the city will, of course, be forced to take land out of the green belt—and, my goodness, what a lot of land it would have to take. In fact, it would have to take almost double the amount of green-belt land to compensate for the loss of land in Washwood Heath and Hodge Hill. That is the equivalent of 105 football pitches— 7 million square feet of green-belt land that would have to be taken from other parts of the green belt around the city. I suspect, although I am not an economic geographer, that a great deal of that land would come out of Sutton Coldfield. There are therefore big concerns not just for the residents of Hodge Hill but for citizens across the city.”
“There are two big businesses on the site and they are both ambitious to expand, but they will be forced to move quickly if the proposal is given the green light. This is not a theoretical problem. In the past year or so, two major businesses, both seeking something in the order of 1 million square feet, wanted to invest in the site, but ultimately they turned away to go elsewhere because of the uncertainty that HS2 has cast over the site. At a time of rising unemployment in east Birmingham, that is a tragedy. My second big point is that I am not making this case simply on behalf of the citizens of Hodge Hill, Ladywood and Erdington. The problem confronts not just the citizens of east Birmingham but all residents in Birmingham.”
“When I asked city planners to undertake some rough and ready master planning of what could be done on a site so big and so neatly adjacent to the city centre and to our brilliant transport links in east Birmingham, they said, after a bit of work, that something in the order of 7,500 jobs could be created on the site. There, on the table, is a specific proposal to create 7,500 jobs in the middle of the worst unemployment blackspot in the country. That, at a stroke, would take one in six of those in the city’s dole queue off the dole and into work, paying tax and national insurance, not sitting on the dole and taking benefits. That is why this is too good a prize simply to throw away. Of course, what is worse is that if the proposal for a marshalling yard goes ahead, we will lose 850 jobs within the next couple of years.”
“What is holding up unemployment in my part of the city of Birmingham is that we do not have the local jobs to go around. That is why a couple of years ago I suggested to officials at Birmingham city council and, indeed, to the owners of the site that a once-in-a-century moment was about to come to pass. After the liquidation of LDV and of the regional development agency in 2010, for the first time in 100 years three great pieces of the jigsaw puzzle on the LDV-Alstom site were about to come together. In so doing, it created the second biggest development site in the city of Birmingham, after Longbridge in the south of the city.”
“Around half the city’s unemployment is concentrated in three constituencies, Hodge Hill, Ladywood and Erdington, all of which are at the junction of the site in question, where High Speed 2 proposes to build its marshalling yard. There are 22,000 people on jobseeker’s allowance in those three constituencies. That is 42% of the number of people on the dole in the city of Birmingham. Simply, the problem confronting local MPs is that there are just not enough jobs to go around. This morning I was pleased to meet some of the managers from my local jobcentre, who do an incredible job under the most difficult of circumstances. It is clear from what they tell me that there are simply not enough jobs to go around. Indeed, the unemployment statistics published earlier this week confirmed that in my constituency 24 people are chasing every job.”
“Some estimates have suggested that something in the order of 60,000 jobs could be created in and around the city. Heaven knows we need those jobs, not least in the light of the growth figures we saw this morning. I and other Members of Parliament in and around Birmingham want to join forces with the Government to ensure that the High Speed 2 legislation that is needed hits the statute book as quickly as possible. We want the project to go ahead and we want it to succeed, because we know what kind of prizes it can bring. However, putting a marshalling yard in the middle of the inner city, in the middle of the worst unemployment blackspot in the country, is simply a recipe for hobbling the economic growth of the city, specifically east Birmingham, for literally the next 50 years. We in this House should not stand by and watch that happen.”
“High Speed 2 proposes to do that in an area that has some of the worst unemployment in the country, and at a cost of some 7,500 jobs, which could not and would not be created in years to come if the proposal were implemented. My argument this afternoon is very simple: to proceed with locking up the land on the LDV-Alstom site in Birmingham is tantamount to a monstrous economic crime against the city. It is a senseless act and an avoidable one. The city of Birmingham is looking to the Minister and to the Secretary of State to bring an end to this lunacy. I want to preface my remarks by saying that I am a passionate and strong advocate of High Speed 2. I think it would transform the economic geography of our country and do an incredible amount for the economy of the west midlands and for the city of Birmingham.”
“I am grateful for the chance to bring this subject to the Floor of the House for debate this afternoon. May I say to the Minister, who has now taken his place, that I am very grateful to the Secretary of State, and indeed to his predecessor and to his right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills, for meeting me to discuss this important subject? I rise, therefore, to reinforce a point. The nub of the matter is extremely simple. Today High Speed 2 is consulting on safeguarding orders that, if put into effect, would lock up, sterilise and write off one of the most important development sites not just in the city of Birmingham but in the entire country.”
“A century ago, in 1913, the city of Birmingham published in full its ambitious plans to create a bigger, better city in east Birmingham, building on the foundations set by some of our great civic entrepreneurs—Joseph Wright and his sons who built the great Metro Cammell engine works; Herbert Austin who built the great site that was the forerunner of Austin cars and LDV; and, of course, Lord Norton, the last lord of the manor at Saltley, who laid out the streets in the design that can still be seen today. Those great civic and industrial engineers helped to create the mighty city of Birmingham and set a standard against which we should judge ourselves. I hope the Minister and the Secretary of State will not fall short.”
“It is true that they are on green-belt land, but they are also land-locked by the M42 and therefore dead; they have no future economic purpose. They are in the middle of a very busy motorway junction that is perfectly suitable and appropriate for designs of this type. I hope that the Secretary of State and the Minister can take a degree of inspiration from our history. One hundred years ago, the city of Birmingham doubled in size following Acts passed in this House in 1911 and 1912.”
“My final point is that some landowners, such as the Homes and Communities Agency, have a legal obligation, in transferring their assets, to seek the best possible outcome for local communities. I cannot see how such an obligation could be satisfied under the current proposals on the table. I hope that the Minister has listened hard to the debate, and I look forward to a full response. I look forward even more to him and the Secretary of State taking the decision to put the marshalling yard somewhere else. Much better sites are available. There are sites much closer to the Y junction at Birmingham international airport, where there are significant land holdings in the hands of Birmingham city council.”
“That cross-party support is jeopardised when we have slipshod, mediocre management of a consultation process which, in the case of the landowners that have talked to me, has involved their producing very detailed and expensive submissions and getting but a letter of acknowledgement, without even the offer of a meeting or an invitation to come to consultation forums. AXA Insurance, one of the site owners, presented some very detailed proposals that were not even acknowledged by High Speed 2, provoking the former Secretary of State herself to have to apologise for the omission. When we have a project that is so significant to the country’s future, we need the world’s best team, not any old team, managing the consultation. I hope that the Minister will take that on board.”
“I am very grateful to my right hon. Friend for making those important points. What he says about the standard and quality of the way in which the High Speed 2 team have gone about public consultation rings very true. I say gently to the Minister that this is one of the most important projects in the country. It will, I hope, be a railway for well over a century to come. It will transform the economic geography and economic prospects of my region. It is controversial, it is difficult, and it will have its ups and downs. It needs a powerful coalition across all parties to support it.”
“The Minister is characteristically generous in giving way, but it is simply inconceivable that he could say that Birmingham city council officers agree with the site selection. I have worked with so many of them for so long, and they are very clear about the economic catastrophe that the chosen site would represent. I hope that, when we conclude the debate over the next month or two, there is a note of consensus, but I must tell the Minister that, if the legislation is not on the books by 2015 and Labour forms the next Government, we will look at the decision again.”
“Borne of the worry about grip on detail, I hope the Minister can give a commitment that either he or the Secretary of State will come to Birmingham and discuss with the leader of the city council, me and Birmingham city council officers the whys and wherefores and the logic of the case we are making this afternoon, before they come to a final conclusion in February?”
“The Minister is generous in giving way a second time. The argument that has been rehearsed this afternoon is an argument that has been rehearsed by HS2 in the past year and a half, and it has been systematically taken apart. There will be no comfort in the notion of 300 or 400 jobs being created some time in the 2020s when 7,500 jobs could be created in the next few years. The idea that history is any guide to what could be done now is, I am afraid, almost completely irrelevant. A site of this size and scale has not been put together for more than a century. This is a completely new opportunity.”
“I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman, who is giving way with characteristic generosity. He will accept that hitherto in this country, and for many years, the proposal to uprate benefits has been presented annually and much closer to the time at which uprating should take place, so that the Chancellor can take account of the latest economic circumstances and the latest level of inflation. It is only now that the House of Commons is being invited to set in stone a strategy that will stretch ahead for many years to come. That is the unusual situation.”
“The hon. Gentleman is incredibly generous in giving way. Does he think the Bill is unconnected to the OBR’s decision to uprate the claimant count by a third of a million over the next few years, lifting its forecast for spending on unemployment and other out-of-work benefits by £6 billion? The Bill is needed to pay the price of economic failure. Surely that is the arithmetic.”
“The Minister will remember that it was Sir William Beveridge who used the phrase about idleness being an evil. There is a difference between reporting a conversation on a doorstep in one’s constituency and using a line as the basis of a political strategy that seeks to punish those on low incomes while handing out a £3 billion tax cut to Britain’s richest citizens. I am simply not sure how the Minister, as a Liberal Democrat, can support that policy.”
“Over the past month or two, as the Secretary of State has warmed up the debate for tonight’s Bill, he has launched attack after attack on tax credits. Will he just accept the principle that tax credits are important in helping to make sure that people are better off in work and, indeed, that that is why he is not abolishing tax credits but incorporating them into the new system of universal credit? Will he just set that point straight for the House?”
“That is why we think the Secretary of State should have brought forward plans to sort out the Work programme, which is failing, and to fix universal credit, which is in disarray.”
“I am grateful to the Secretary of State for giving way. We have said that contributory employment and support allowance should be limited to two years. We have said that there should be an independent gateway for disability living allowance. We have said that we should switch the way we uprate benefits from RPI to CPI. We have said that there should be a benefit cap which, yes, is different in London from the rest of the country, but a benefit cap none the less. We have said that disregards in tax credits should be reduced. Crucially, we have said that there should be a two-year limit on jobseeker’s allowance. That is a far bigger list than the current Chancellor of the Exchequer ever set out when he was in opposition. We think welfare spending should come down. We think getting people back into work is the way to do it.”
“The impact of changes announced in the autumn statement will be, between now and April 2015, to reduce the real income of the one-earner working family by £534 on average, net of any increase in the personal allowance. That is why this is a strivers’ tax, pure and simple, which we will oppose.”
“When the Bill was first presented to us, we were invited to believe that it was squarely aimed at those of our neighbours who were “sleeping off a life on benefits”, in supposed contrast with a Budget that allegedly helped working people and gave effect to the Prime Minister’s determination, expressed to the party faithful—their number is dwindling—at his party’s conference. He said: “They call us the party of the better-off”. That is true; we do. He continued: “no: we are the party of the want to be better-off, those who strive to make a better life for themselves and their families.” How does the Bill help those who are striving to be better off? The Institute for Fiscal Studies could not have been blunter: 7 million working people will be hurt by the Bill.”
“Originally, we were told that the Bill would not hurt working people, that the Government would protect disabled people, and that they cared about “family-raisers”, to use the Prime Minister’s term, yet in vote after vote tonight the Government have refused to stand by their word. They have refused to protect working people or to offer safeguards for disabled people, and we have heard nothing remotely credible from them about how child poverty will be tackled. After tonight’s debate, no one will believe that there is such a thing as compassionate conservatism. To be frank, it was always a wild claim and, lo and behold, so it has turned out.”
“I rise to oppose Third Reading. I have not been in the House for as long as the Secretary of State, but never in my years here have I seen so much taken from so many so fast. It is a disgrace that the Government should have rammed the Bill through the House in just two weeks. I hope that the other place will have listened hard to our debates today and seen how little time has been granted to us in the Commons to debate measures that will hurt thousands and thousands of our constituents. In the fortnight since the Bill was introduced, claim after claim made by the Government has simply fallen apart.”
“On average, they will be £156 a year worse off. Hundreds of thousands of people on employment and support allowance—people who the Department says have a disability—will be £87.50 a year worse off.”
“My hon. Friend is absolutely right that it would make sense to uprate in line with inflation for the rest of this Parliament, but frankly we do not know what kind of mess will be inherited in the next Parliament, which is why my right hon. Friend the shadow Chancellor is right to say that a zero-based review will be needed. In the seven minutes that remain, I want to make two more points. One is about disabled people, who the Chancellor and Secretary of State said would be protected under the Bill. The Chancellor said that he would “support the vulnerable” and that disability benefits would be “increased in line with inflation” —[ Official Report , 5 December 2012; Vol. 554, c. 879.] Then we learned the truth: 3.4 million disabled households will be hit by the Bill, admitted the Pensions Minister in a written answer.”
“How are Government Members going to justify that to people in their constituencies?”
“In those seats, there are 150,000 mothers who will be hurt by this Bill, losing £180 a year. In fact, as a result of measures put through by this Government, they are now losing £1,400, and tonight Members on the Treasury Bench voted to allow that to continue. They were given the chance to protect those 150,000 mothers and they chose not to. Over the next few months, we will be getting in touch with mothers in those constituencies and making it very clear that their Member of Parliament had a chance to protect their maternity pay and chose not to. Right now, the price of children’s clothing is rising by 4.5% and food prices are rising by 3.6%. Working mothers going on to statutory maternity pay are losing £180 a year at a time when someone on £1 million a year is getting a £2,000 tax cut.”
“The truth is now before us: 200,000 children will be pushed into poverty as a result of this Bill. According to the Child Poverty Action Group, the measures in this Bill, alongside other measures that have been introduced, mean that 1 million children will be pushed into poverty by this Government. That will be the Secretary of State’s legacy. He spent all those years trying to persuade us that the Conservative party was finally a party that cared about poverty, and now, because the Chancellor needed a new year’s dividing line on welfare, he is accountable for putting 1 million children into poverty. It is well and truly clear that the nasty party is back. This is about not just children but their mothers. A fortnight ago, my hon. Friend the Member for West Bromwich East (Mr Watson) published a list of 106 battle- ground constituencies.”
“The Secretary of State spent some time casting doubt on the strategy for tackling child poverty, which I seem to remember he voted for when he supported the Child Poverty Act 2010. On 24 November 2004, the Prime Minister said: “I believe that poverty is an economic waste and a moral disgrace. In the past, we used to think of poverty only in absolute terms… That’s not enough. We need to think of poverty in relative terms.” The Chancellor was even blunter when he said to the News of the World : “We’re all in this together. I’m not going to balance the Budget on the backs of the poor.” That encouraged the Secretary of State to wade in on “Sky News” in June 2010, when he said that “you have” to make savings “but protect the poorest and that’s my absolute priority.” How hollow those words ring tonight.”
“No. Given the hon. Gentleman’s support for a programme motion that has given me six minutes to respond to a Bill that takes hundreds of pounds off thousands of his constituents, he will forgive me for carrying on. Some 206,000 disabled people will be £62 a year worse off as a result of this Bill. The Government have been caught red-handed trying to keep the truth from this House. I am glad that today we have had an extensive debate on child poverty, because we were told nothing about how many children and how many working parents would be hurt by this Bill. Only in the past couple of weeks has the truth finally emerged. I want to put on record Labour Members’ gratitude to the Child Poverty Action Group for ruthlessly exposing the impact of the Bill and the cumulative impact of other measures.”
“What the Government should have been doing tonight is bringing us measures to bring down unemployment, long-term unemployment and youth unemployment, and to save this country the cost of failure. Instead, the debate on this Bill has shown a Government and Secretary of State who are hellbent on making savings and clearing up the cost of the failure of a rising unemployment bill by taking that money from working people—6,000 working people for every Conservative-held marginal constituency.”
“No, there is too little time. It is a disgrace that this Bill is being rammed through the House tonight. The Secretary of State did not want public hearings and Ministers did not want to defend the detail of the Bill in Committee. We hope that the other place will give it the scrutiny that was denied to Members of this House. The tragedy is that there is another way to bring down welfare spending. Long-term unemployment is now rising towards the 1 million mark, as is youth unemployment. Nothing in this Bill fixes the Work programme, which gets only 2.6 people out of every 100 back into work, or fixes the disarray that is now unfolding in universal credit.”
“I am grateful to the Secretary of State for giving way so early in the debate. Will he confirm to the House that on his watch the welfare bill has risen nearly £14 billion higher than anticipated?”
“It is significant that the Secretary of State has just admitted for the first time that welfare spending on his watch is rising £14 billion higher than projected. Will he go a step further and confirm his understanding of the OBR figures that show that the claimant count is forecast to rise by a third of a million more than anticipated over the next few years? Will he admit that, yes or no?”
“I am grateful to the Secretary of State for giving way again: he is being typically generous. No doubt he, like me, will have looked at the DWP benefit expenditure tables, which show that spending on out-of-work benefits between 1996-97 and 2009-10 did not rise, but fell by £7.5 billion. That is why Lord Freud said that Labour’s record in getting people back to work was “remarkable” and noted that Labour had tackled the long-term dependency on unemployment benefits that it had inherited from the Tories in 1997.”
“My right hon. Friend the shadow Chancellor has set out far more about the difficult decisions that we would make than the Chancellor ever made. We have said that uprating of benefits should be slower; that there should be a two-year cap on contributory ESA; that there should be a reduction in disregards in tax credits; that there should be a benefit cap in different parts of the country; and that no one in this country should be allowed to live a life on welfare and languish for more than two years on JSA. The best way to bring the welfare bill down is to get people into work, not give them a failed Work programme.”
“The Secretary of State has the temerity to criticise proposals we launched on Friday, when he is presiding over a Work programme that is literally worse than doing nothing. He stands before the House justifying the position of his Government, which is that it is possible to spend a life on welfare, but we say that is wrong. The way to bring welfare spending down is to get people into jobs, and when there are no jobs we invest in creating them.”
“It is good to see the Secretary of State fronting the Bill today and to see the Economic Secretary to the Treasury in his place. Where, however, is the Chancellor? It is a disgrace that he is not here in person. Where is he?”
“I beg to move, That this House declines to give a Second Reading to the Welfare Benefits Uprating Bill because it fails to address the reasons why the cost of benefits is exceeding the Government’s plans; notes that the Resolution Foundation has calculated that 68 per cent of households affected by these measures are in work and that figures from the Institute for Fiscal Studies show that all the measures announced in the Autumn Statement, including those in the Bill, will mean a single-earner family with children on average will be £534 worse off by 2015; further notes that the Bill does not include anything to remedy the deficiencies in the Government’s work programme or the slipped timetable for universal credit; believes that a comprehensive plan to reduce the benefits bill must include measures to create economic growth and help the 129,400 adults over the age of 25 out of work for 24 months or more, but that the Bill does not do so; further believes that the Bill should introduce a compulsory jobs guarantee, which would give long-term unemployed adults a job they would have to take up or lose benefits, funded by limiting tax relief on pension contributions for people earning over £150,000 to 20 per cent; and further believes that the proposals in the Bill are unfair when the additional rate of income tax is being reduced, which will result in those earning over a million pounds per year receiving an average tax cut of over £100,000 a year.”