Andy Burnham
Prime Minister · MP for Makerfield · Labour (Co-op) · United Kingdom
“The right hon. Lady mentions leadership. Let me tell her and the whole House where Britain is showing leadership. There have been Conservative politicians at this Dispatch Box—Labour politicians, too—for decades who have talked about the importance of the two-state solution between Israel and Palestine.”
“I cannot comment today on quasi-judicial decisions, but we will take a pragmatic approach to oil and gas, as I have said before at the Dispatch Box. Let us get to the heart of this question, as the right hon. Lady invites me to do. What is the right way to fund defence and, yes, bring the welfare budget down?”
“I do not think the right hon. Lady is on strong ground when it comes to defence spending. It was 2.5% of GDP when the last Labour Government left office. It was 2.3% of GDP when the Government she was in left office. It is now set to be 2.7% in the next year.”
“This Chancellor, of all Chancellors, will be willing to provide that funding to our armed forces and back our defence investment plan. This Government’s commitment to the defence of this country is absolute. We have taken the strongest possible stance in supporting President Zelensky and Ukraine.”
“I think there are many people watching Prime Minister’s questions across the south of England who would now like Mr Speaker to be demoted in the way that my hon. Friend suggests. [Interruption.] This is very thin ice for a Leigh Leopards supporter to be on.”
“I remember well my visit to Stourbridge; it will not leave me, actually, because of the devastation, and the loss of everything in a moment for so many families. My hon. Friend’s support for them was really visible on the day, and the community is clearly very strong; that was evident.”
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“and learned Friend the Member for Holborn and St Pancras (Keir Starmer) on forcing their hand.”
“The sad context for today’s debate is that far from coming back together as a country since the referendum, we are probably more divided than ever. The blame for that lies not with the public, but with the way in which Parliament and the Government have responded in the six months since. In the referendum, the public were issuing a sharp rebuke to the political class, which they feel does not listen to them and is not straight with them, but what has the Government’s response been? They have been saying that they want to keep the citizens of this country in the dark about their plans for Brexit so as not to give anything away to the other side—or, as the hon. Member for Reigate (Crispin Blunt) said, “the enemy”. That is simply unacceptable. In these anti-politics times, it is hard to imagine a more politically inept approach.”
“The hon. Gentleman used the phrase “the enemy” and he needs to clarify what he meant by that. I do not think it helped to raise the tone of this debate. The Government’s politically inept approach of saying that they can keep the public in the dark has, first, bred suspicion among remain and leave voters alike, making them think a fix is going on. Secondly, it has cast the negotiation in an unnecessarily aggressive light and has fuelled even more bad feeling towards Britain among its EU partners, in turn meaning that it will now be more difficult to get a favourable deal once article 50 has been triggered. At the moment, we are not getting a hard Brexit or a soft Brexit, but a botched Brexit. For all our sakes, the Government need to get their act together, which is why I congratulate my hon.”
“I will make some progress. Today needs to mark the beginning of a new phase in the Brexit debate. It is time to move beyond the re-running of the referendum arguments and accept what people voted for. The 700,000 people in Greater Manchester who voted to leave, many of them lifelong Labour voters, voted for change on immigration. I am clear about that, and it has to be our starting point in this debate. The status quo—full free movement—was defeated at the ballot box, so it is not an option. What is to be debated is the precise nature of the changes that replace it, so that we get the balance right between responding properly to the public’s legitimate concerns and minimising the impact on our economy.”
“They are welcoming, generous people, but they also want fairness, and they do not think that it is fair that the country’s least well-off communities should expect pressure on wages, housing, public services, primary schools and GP services without any help to manage it.”
“It has also made life more difficult in places where it is already hardest. These are areas that got no real hope from the Government when traditional industry left and that saw house prices collapse and whole streets bought up by absent private landlords. They are places that, alongside taking new arrivals from the EU, continue to take in the vast majority of this country’s asylum seekers and refugees. Largely they do so without any real strife or difficulty, so I do not want to hear anyone claim that people in places such as Leigh who voted to leave are in any way xenophobic or racist.”
“I suggest to the hon. Gentleman that he speaks to the public and listens to what they had to say during the referendum campaign. If he is saying that they were not voting for change on free movement and immigration, I am afraid that he simply was not listening to them. I have long argued for a change in the system of free movement to reflect people’s concerns. As it stands, it is not working for the more deprived parts of our country, particularly those where traditional industry has been replaced by lower-skill, lower-wage employment. My preference was to work within the EU to fix those problems, but the country, understandably, lost patience with that approach. Free movement does not affect all places in the same way; it affects cities differently from former industrial areas.”
“I am no longer prepared to be complicit in that. We need answers to the public’s concerns, but answers that are based on hope, not hate.”
“My call to this side of the House is to put forward a plan that treats all people equally and that applies progressive principles to migration. We need to make the argument for an immigration system that allows greater control and that reduces the numbers coming here, but that does so in a fair way. This would be a system that treats all migrants equally, that does not allow people’s wages to be undercut, as my hon. Friend said, and, crucially, that continues to welcome people from Europe and around the world to work here. Those are progressive principles that can form the basis of a new immigration policy for the left. It is time for many of us on this side of the House to confront a hard truth: our reluctance in confronting this debate is undermining the cohesion of our communities and the safety of our streets.”
“First, in an era of increasing globalisation, free movement has arguably been providing greater benefit to large companies than it has to the most deprived communities. There is nothing socialist about a system of open borders that allows multinationals to treat people as commodities and to move them around Europe to drive down labour costs and create a race to the bottom. Secondly, there is a strong case for saying that the immigration system that has developed over time in this country is inherently discriminatory—it does not treat all migrants equally. Instead, it accords a preferential status to migrants from our nearest neighbours in the context of a policy that seeks to cap numbers. That, therefore, discriminates against those non-EU migrants who seek to come here and who have families here.”
“That is precisely the issue that neither Europe nor, let us be honest, this Parliament was addressing. Free movement was being used to undermine skilled wages and we did not do enough about it. We have to be honest about that. People in my constituency want to continue to welcome people here who contribute to our society, but they want an immigration system that affords greater control and reduces the numbers. I believe that that is what we must work towards. The left across Europe has got to break out of its paralysis on this issue. The fear of being labelled as “pandering” stops people entering the debate, but it also stops progressive ideas that meet the public’s concerns and leaves the pitch clear for those with right-wing solutions. I want to set out two principal reasons why there is a legitimate left-wing case for reform.”
“Ahead of the Christmas recess and what seems likely to be a dangerous winter in the NHS, is there not an overwhelming case for the Government to come to the House in their own time to explain what is happening with the funding of social care? Councils had been led to believe that there would be an announcement in the autumn statement and they were left stunned, as were Members on both sides of the House, when the Chancellor could not even mention the words. I am told No. 10 blocked a deal on social care—a funding package had been prepared—calling for more work on funding options. I do not know whether that is true, but I know that people working in the NHS have a right to know because they need to plan. Ministers need to come to the Dispatch Box and tell us what the hell is going on.”
“The Secretary of State talks about those in need as though the WASPI women are not in need, but of course many of them are. He has talked about resources, but what price justice? What price doing the right thing? These are the women who brought us up, who now care for older relatives and who are the mainstay of their communities. They are not some militant group. At a time when this House has a low standing, I believe that his dismissive attitude towards them will damage not only the Conservative party but politics as a whole in the eyes of the women who have made this country what it is today.”
“I am grateful to the right hon. Gentleman for giving way again. I hear what he is saying about people working, but it is difficult for many older women in this position to run a car. It is something that they often cannot afford, yet free bus passes are not available in all parts of the country. They are available to women at 60 in London, Scotland and Merseyside. People’s ability to access work is different in different parts of the country. In Greater Manchester, they do not have that help. Will the Government do a very practical thing today and commit to helping all women into work by extending that free bus pass on the same basis all over the country?”
“Like my hon. Friend, I have a very vibrant WASPI group in Leigh. Does she know that today the Secretary of State described the Government’s treatment of WASPI women as fair? How does she think her constituents to whom she refers will react to that?”
“The north of England is crying out for a plan for investment in rail, and people will be left asking today, “Where is it?” It is also crying out for investment in social care. It is quite frankly unbelievable that the Chancellor could find no place to mention it today. Six years of cuts to social care have left a record number of older people trapped in hospital and the NHS on the brink. With a dangerous winter now facing us, can he say a little more about how he came to the judgment that new grammar schools are a higher spending priority than the funding of care for older people?”
“My hon. Friend is making an outstanding speech. Have we not seen the problem with Tory education thinking this afternoon? Government Members think that some types of schools are better than others and that some children deserve better opportunities than others. That is what is so entirely wrong with what they are arguing today.”
“The Secretary of State rightly spoke about building a consensus across the House on education policy, but I put it to her that that will be more likely to happen if the Government stick to their mandate on education. Will she read out the precise section of the Conservative party manifesto from the last election that gives her a mandate to lift the bar on the creation of new grammar schools?”
“Does the hon. Lady agree that the major flaw in the Secretary of State’s speech was that she could not bring herself to acknowledge that if she pursues this policy it will lead to the creation of more secondary modern schools? That is the truth that Government Members will not face up to.”
“I am listening carefully to what the right hon. Lady is saying. Does she agree with me that this policy is a distraction, and that if we wanted to make the biggest difference to education in our country, we would do that by focusing on the 0 to 4 age group and ensuring that more children arrive in reception classes ready to learn, with the language and social skills that they need?”
“That is a completely useless analogy. Education is about life. It is about the skills that people need to get through life—the basic literacy and numeracy. Sport is not about the entirety of life. That is why education is different, and that is why it is wrong for any child to be labelled second class at the age of 11.”
“The problem with the Conservatives’ script is that they talk about NHS funding, but they completely neglect social care. There can be no debate about the fact they have cut social care every year for the last six years, taking support away from half a million older people, many of whom are now trapped in hospital beds. Greater Manchester says that it has a shortfall of about £80 million in social care; the figure is £1 billion nationally. Has the Secretary of State raised this issue with the Chancellor? Has he made an emergency bid for funding? Will there be more money for social care this year?”
“The Secretary of State is trying to blame hospitals for the deficit, but the point is that the spend on agency staff has ballooned in England over the past six years. The reason is that the Government, and their predecessor, cut nurse training places and left hospitals in the grip of private staffing agencies. It is therefore simply not fair of the Secretary of State to stand at the Dispatch Box and blame hospitals for a problem of the Government’s making.”
“I heard the Secretary of State’s earlier words about EU carers. I am sure that they were genuine, but words are not good enough for them. The longer the Government leave them in limbo, the greater the risk is that they will leave. Our national health service and our care system could not cope with losing all those staff, so what more is he doing? Is he petitioning the Prime Minister for a decision now that will give them leave to stay and properly respects their contribution to our society?”
“I did say that, and it was irresponsible to social care in the way they did to pay for their commitment to the NHS. Social care was cut by 9% during the last Parliament, with 400,000 vulnerable people losing support in their homes. Those people ended up in A&E or trapped in hospital beds, piling pressure on the hospital system.”
“That brings me to what happened after the election, when, as shadow Health Secretary, I challenged the Government from the Opposition Front Bench about the poster that they had put out during the election saying that they would cut the deficit, not the NHS. I made the point that if they did so, they would in effect cut social care: if they prioritised NHS spending within the reduced envelope, that would have devastating consequences for social care and would in the end come back to affect the NHS. From the Dispatch Box at every Prime Minister’s Question Time, the then Prime Minister used to quote me as claiming that it would be irresponsible to give the NHS real-terms increases, but he never commented on the second part of what I had said, which was that it was irresponsible to do so if we were cutting social care.”
“I was told that Andy Coulson had put pressure on Andrew Lansley to do it, and that he did not really want to, but felt he could not say no. I do not know whether that is true, but I know that the Conservatives, who asked me for cross-party talks, betrayed the confidence that I gave, and they have never seen fit to apologise for that. The point is not about the personal political damage that that did, but about the chilling effect the poster had on the social care debate. It instantly killed any talk of radical reform, and it actually had a deadening effect for the rest of the following Parliament—the last Parliament—during which no real progress was made.”
“Friend the Member for Barrow and Furness (John Woodcock) has suggested, that we should take the issue out of party politics, which would be better for everybody. We had a couple of meetings, in which we went round the issues. I favoured the more ambitious, comprehensive reform of paying for social care on the NHS principle—that everybody contributes, but everybody is covered for their care needs and has peace of mind in later life. Andrew Lansley wanted a more voluntary system, in which the insurance market would come up with solutions. That was where we left it. Then a bombshell was dropped in February 2010: the poster saying, “Now Gordon wants £20,000 when you die.” I very vividly remember the day when it landed.”
“I was ready to grasp the nettle, because it was clear to me that the NHS was facing a decade of lower funding from 2010 and 2020, and that one of the ways it could cope with that was with the efficiencies we could unlock through properly and fully integrating health and social care and by moving from a hospital-based medical model to a person-centred social model of care starting in the home. This is where things went wrong. Picking up that I was ready to up the momentum for reform, the then shadow Health Secretary, Andrew Lansley, approached me in Portcullis House just before Christmas 2009 and asked me for cross-party talks. I thought about it, but I agreed. I thought, as my hon.”
“A Green Paper was published in July 2009, and the idea of a national care service was first put forward. The thinking was that only by bringing the systems together, with a system of clear national entitlement, would we be able properly to move towards integration. The maintenance of two entirely differently funded systems—one free at the point of use and the other means-tested and charged for—would mean that they would never be able to speak the same language and there would always be barriers to integration.”
“The urgency of such action had been recognised almost a decade earlier, in 1999, when a report by a royal commission on the matter recommended free personal care, paid for by general taxation. It did so for the reason that if we pay for free preventive care in people’s homes, those people do not end up in hospital and costing us all more. Nothing was done, and by 2007 the need for reform was urgent. So between 2007 and 2009, a huge amount of detailed modelling work was done and options were looked at. When I arrived in the post of Health Secretary in 2009, the work had come to a head. The analysis supported a clear conclusion that radical reform, rather than patching up, was needed. Department of Health officials supported the Treasury analysis that there would be risks to the NHS if social care was allowed to decline.”
“To be honest, it is quite a shocking story of partisan point-scoring and, worse, political cowardice, which have seriously failed millions of older and disabled people. The story started nine years ago at the spending review in 2007. I was Chief Secretary to the Treasury at the time, and at the insistence of the Treasury I gave the Department of Health the condition on its spending review settlement that it would conduct a root and branch review of the funding of social care. There was a recognition, even in the Treasury, that if we allowed the situation to continue, it could, in the end, damage the national health service. Quite clearly, the funding was not sustainable, and if social care was left to collapse, it would drag down the NHS with it.”
“I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Worsley and Eccles South (Barbara Keeley)—my good friend—on an excellent speech. She has no equal in this House as a champion for older people and their carers. Her speech, unlike the speech by the Secretary of State, was firmly rooted in the real world. This is the century of the ageing society. Caring for people as they live longer lives is the greatest public policy challenge of our times, but for years Parliament has shown itself to be unequal to that challenge. I want to speak today to tell the story of the efforts to reform social care over the last decade, because I want the facts to be on the record, so that people can understand what happened and vow to do better. The story explains the mess we are in today.”
“It is no answer; in fact, it just cynically devolves the responsibility for the whole issue to local government, even though councils did not create the problem. I still favour an all-in system. I will say it: I favour a system in which we ask older people to pay a set contribution, so that they have peace of mind in later life, with all their care costs covered.”
“I am very grateful to the hon. Gentleman for his intervention and the spirit in which he made it. He is absolutely right: that set everything back and meant that there was no possibility of a cross-party approach. There will have to be such an approach if we are to fix social care and, indeed, to give the NHS what it needs, because they will both need more funding during this Parliament. That is the real shame. I did not make my point about Andrew Lansley for political reasons; I just want people to understand what happened, so that the current generations of politicians might do something different. The answers we have since had from the Government are wholly inadequate. We have heard today that the precept does not raise enough money, particularly for poorer councils.”
“Standards in care homes have slipped even further, and stories of neglect and abuse abound—we hear them all the time. Countless vulnerable people and their families still have to pay these cruel dementia taxes, which have risen under this Government, losing everything they have worked for and going into later life with everything on the roulette table: home, pension, savings—the lot. That is not the care system we should have in 2016 in this country. At what point are we going to say, “Enough is enough,” and actually do something about it?”
“I feel so strongly about this because I saw my grandmother go through the care system in England 20 years ago and, frankly, it was nowhere near good enough. I arrived here saying that I would do something about it. I tried to do something about it, but we have not got anywhere near a solution to the scale of the challenge. People will need to put party politics aside and find common ground. The point scoring and failure to grasp big issues have led to a situation where people have low regard for this place. We are left with a malnourished, privatised care system in England that is sinking lower as we speak. A culture of slap-dash 15-minute visits is entrenched, in which staff do not get properly treated, trained or respected.”
“In a week when Virgin Care is taking on a huge community care contract, I do not think the Secretary of State should be making that point—particularly the Secretary of State who privatised ambulance services in Greater Manchester. I honestly do not think we need to go there. The point that I am making is about funding social care. The Conservatives claimed that we were introducing a new inheritance tax. Do people not understand that just 3.4% of estates in this country attract inheritance tax? Why is that? Because the vast majority of estates are whittled down by the costs of care—tens of thousands of pounds, or hundreds of thousands of pounds for some people. That is not fair and it is not sustainable. We must be able to do better.”
“I hear what the Minister says, but it seems to me that, in common with the Secretary of State, he is avoiding the main issue. The main issue is the urgent financial crisis that councils are facing. They have not got enough money to care for the people who need care. Will the Minister answer a direct question? Has he or the Secretary of State made a submission to the Treasury for more funding for social care as part of the autumn statement—yes or no?”
“I welcome the fact that HS2 has listened to residents in the Lowton and Golborne area and moved the depot off a site of special scientific interest to a more appropriate location. Is it not the truth, however, that the investment in HS2 will make sense to the majority of people in the north only when it is combined with investment in new east-west, high-speed lines linking the great cities? Our roads are full and cannot take any more, so will the Secretary of State press the Chancellor to use the autumn statement to set out a clear timetable for northern powerhouse rail, including a completion date to tie in with HS2? Will the Government make that investment a higher priority for transport investment than spending billions more pounds on London with Crossrail 2?”
“I do not doubt the Minister’s sincerity and fine words, but there is a gap between them and the reality. Today, I spoke to Bryn Hughes, the father of Nicola Hughes, who, as the Minister will know, was murdered in Greater Manchester a couple of years ago. I do not know if he has seen the Daily Mirror today, but the headline is “Cop killer’s life of luxury behind bars”. What message does he think that sends out to people who commit these appalling acts against police officers? I do not doubt his sincerity, but he needs to act on the reality, which is that those people are not being treated harshly enough.”
“Secondly, on protection for police officers, body-worn cameras need to be introduced now, because they can protect police officers today. We need a debate about the greater use of Tasers, and we really need to look at sentencing. I have mentioned the Dale Cregan situation previously, but there are other examples. An off-duty police officer, Neil Doyle, was killed in Liverpool. His attacker also committed a violent offence against two other individuals, but he only got three years and will soon be moved to an open prison.”
“First, on funding, I am afraid that the Minister is wrong to say that the police budget has been protected. It has not been protected; it has been cut in real terms. Greater Manchester police’s revenue support grant was cut by £8.5 million this year, and the precept powers that it was given raised only £3.5 million. Let us get these facts straight, because otherwise the public will get confused. About 1,800 officers have already been lost from the frontline. We cannot take these cuts anymore. A story in The Mail on Sunday over the weekend said that the thin blue line of Greater Manchester is the thinnest of them all—it is the thinnest in the country. The cuts cannot continue. We need a commitment from the Government to honour their promise of no real-terms cuts to police budgets, because that has not happened.”
“I am sure that some people might see challenging past injustice as in some way anti-police, but nothing could be further from the truth, and I am glad to have the chance to say that. I am pro-police, and I want to do whatever I can to strengthen the position of those out there on the frontline. There are three ways in which we can do that. The first relates to police numbers and funding, and the second to protecting police officers through the powers we give them and through sentencing. The third is that we can build public trust in our police force by challenging past misdeeds. Unresolved past injustice can infect the present and unfairly leave a cloud hanging over officers on the frontline. It is right to remove it. I want to touch on each of those three issues briefly.”
“The outstanding speech by my hon. Friend the Member for Batley and Spen (Tracy Brabin) was a truly memorable parliamentary occasion, as was the fine speech by my hon. Friend the Member for Halifax (Holly Lynch). I do not often say this, but the other side of the Pennines has a lot to be proud of, including even the hon. Member for Shipley (Philip Davies). To elicit from him an emotional reaction and support for the Labour party is a truly big achievement, and my hon. Friend the Member for Batley and Spen has managed that today. This is an important and well-timed debate, because it provides me with an opportunity to put into proper context the recent work that I have been doing on policing.”
“The Government have made their decision, but this House should make a different decision. I have today advanced the idea, based on the suggestion made by the hon. Member for Gainsborough (Sir Edward Leigh), that a Select Committee should look at Orgreave. In my view, that is the right thing to do. I appeal to Members from all parts of the House to back that suggestion, so that we can build trust in our police and give them proper funding and protection.”
“The decision on Orgreave this week was, in my view, wrong, and it makes it harder for the South Yorkshire police to move forward. That decision does not help officers in South Yorkshire who are out there on the frontline, because it leaves a cloud hanging over them. Let me give the House a quick quote: “Historical inquiries are not archaeological excavations… We must never underestimate how the poison of decades-old misdeeds seeps down through the years and is just as toxic today as it was then. That’s why difficult truths, however unpalatable they may be, must be confronted head on”. I could not agree more with those words—the words of our Prime Minister to the Police Federation this year. She is right, so what has changed? Why are we now pushing away those things and leaving them unresolved?”
“I agree with the hon. Gentleman. We have always been too lenient on motoring offences, particularly death by dangerous driving. I was talking about police officers, who need greater protection in law and in the sentencing guidelines. The Police Federation said today that the sentences that are handed out are often inadequate and inconsistent, and they simply do not provide the strong message that is required. We must resolve across the House to strengthen those sentencing guidelines, and I want to make my support for that absolutely clear. I will finish on the point of public trust in the police. I believe we are all sent here to challenge injustice wherever we find it. Where we have evidence of it, we have a moral duty to act. Failure to do so corrodes the bond of trust between public and police, and it damages policing by consent.”
“I am listening carefully to the hon. Gentleman’s argument, but he will be aware of a case earlier this year in Telford where the footballer Dalian Atkinson was killed in an incident. We do not know all the circumstances, and generally I support the use of Tasers, but does the hon. Gentleman not think that that case should give us pause for thought before we go for a major roll-out?”
“There were 864 assaults on police officers in Greater Manchester last year—a force that is seeing cuts to the frontline. To listen to the Minister this afternoon, one would think everything is rosy, but morale is very low. What does my hon. Friend think the Government need to do to lift morale, because I believe it is dangerously low?”