Pat McFadden
MP for Wolverhampton South East · Labour · United Kingdom
“In his review Alan Milburn considered that issue and said that, “the UK’s NEET crisis is much more long-term and deep-seated than any decisions taken in the last few years.” As I said earlier, 400,000 more people are in work this year than last year, and the number of young people in employment is up since the election.”
“Since our last DWP questions, both Alan Milburn and the Pensions Commission have published their respective interim reports on young people and on the current state of saving for retirement. I look forward to receiving their final reports later in the year.”
“As Alan Milburn pointed out in his recent report, the UK’s NEET crisis is much more long-term and deep-seated than any decisions taken in the last few years. There are 400,000 more people in work than last year. The number of young people in employment is up by 74,000 since the election.”
“I thank the right hon. Gentleman and send him commiserations for whatever has left him reliant on his crutches today. I am happy to congratulate the businesses he mentioned in his constituency. He raises a serious point: it is important not only to come up with the right policy, but to make it simple for businesses to use.”
“My hon. Friend is right, and I thank Cardiff football club for being a partner. We are supporting nearly 1 million young people and creating up to half a million opportunities for jobs and training.”
“We are making strong progress on expanding youth hubs, with around 130 already in operation across Great Britain. In March, I announced the locations that we want to open in this year, and I have just announced a further 180 locations for the following two years.”
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“The Secretary of State has said that staff should continue to turn up to work and that they will continue to be paid, but he has also said that he is setting up a helpline at Jobcentre Plus. What assurance can he give the staff—I am thinking particularly of the 400 staff in the Wolverhampton headquarters, as well as staff around the country—that they should continue to turn up, when they face the prospect of that Jobcentre helpline? Also, can he say anything more about investigations into the company’s changes in corporate governance in 2016, which appear to make the clawback of future bonuses more difficult?”
“Why are the Government taking legal advice on suing the European Union for preparing to treat Britain as a third country from March 2019 when that is the express intention of UK Government policy?”
“The cancellation of thousands of elective surgery appointments simply shows that the Tories are doing what they have always done, which is forcing people to wait longer for their operations and rationing healthcare in that way. How will the Minister deal with the backlog that will be created in future months because of all the operations that have been put off?”
“I agree with the right hon. Gentleman, and I ask him to emphasise the point about the resources that are needed to investigate. There is a danger that we are sidetracked into the social media side of this, when, ultimately, the more important thing is the money. Does he believe that the Electoral Commission is sufficiently equipped, resourced and empowered to properly follow the money and to ascertain where donations come from, whether the original donors really own that money and whether the agencies and the Electoral Commission need more powers to properly track the finance and the politics?”
“If the European Communities Act 1972 is abolished on 29 March 2019 and that is the legal basis for following the European Union’s rules at the moment, what does the right hon. Gentleman think will be the legal basis for following the European Union’s rules during the transition period?”
“What the Minister has done today is to pass the buck from the Government to local police and crime commissioners. He has done this at a time when the West Midlands force has lost £145 million in real terms in the past seven years, and 200 officers are no longer there to keep the public safe. Does the Minister not accept that if the tables were turned, and Conservative Members were in opposition facing a Government who had cut police numbers by over 20,000, they would be screaming about the injustice of it from the rooftops?”
“The dog that has not barked so far in these discussions has been the voice of the service industries. They dominate our economy and make up 45% of our exports, and we trade in surplus with the rest of the EU in them. Does the Prime Minister accept that any future agreement aimed only at tariff-free access for goods would be selling Britain short, and that the benchmark for judging success must be the same market access that we have now for our global, world-leading service industries such as education, the creative industries and the financial services?”
“Does my hon. Friend agree that whatever measures the Government might have taken, those measures have not worked and nor have they dealt with the problem? The continuing sense of injustice is still there, which is why we are having this debate.”
“The Minister said that the House would vote on a resolution. This morning’s written ministerial statement also refers to the House voting on a resolution on the final agreement. What would the Government’s response be if the House were to vote against that resolution? What would it mean for Parliament and for the country?”
“For phase 2 of the discussions, the Brexit Secretary has set a benchmark of securing a free trade agreement with the exact same benefits that we currently enjoy. Does the Prime Minister agree with her Environment Secretary and many others that if the public do not like the terms of the final deal, they have every right to change their mind?”
“The Minister has told us that he is not going to accept new clause 70. Timing is important, too. Does he realise the signal that will be sent out if Ministers ask their party to vote against it at the end of this debate?”
“The agreement respects whatever choice the people of Northern Ireland make about their constitutional status and says “it would be wrong to make any change in the status of Northern Ireland save with the consent of a majority of its people”. That was hugely important, but the agreement is also a package. What it says about equality and the equal status of people from every community is very important.”
“Avoiding the decision and pretending it is not there or that we can simply pick and choose from what we like in both options is what produced the chaos and humiliation this week. On the issue of the Good Friday agreement, the amendment seeks to ensure that any changes are only those arising directly as a consequence of the UK’s decision to leave the European Union. It therefore places obligations on the Secretary of State and on Ministers in the devolved Assembly to act in line with the principles of the agreement. Those principles are hugely important. First and foremost was a rejection of violence and a commitment to exclusively peaceful means in the pursuit of political ends. Secondly, this was about consent.”
“We can be part of a rule-based European-wide system, whatever language is used, be it “regulatory alignment”, “convergence” or some other form of words, in which case we keep the economic benefits from the UK and there is absolutely no need for a hard border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland. Alternatively, we can make a decision to leave the system in its entirety, in which case we have different systems and regulations on either side, we have major consequences for our economy and we necessitate a border. We either have a border or we do not. It is not a negotiation—it is a decision. All the way through, this kind of decision will have to be confronted. If we get a deal and we get approval to move on to phase two of these negotiations in the coming days, this kind of decision will confront us more and more.”
“I rise to support new clause 70, tabled by the hon. Member for North Down (Lady Hermon). Let me begin by paying tribute to her courage, and to her wonderful and moving speech at the start of this debate. The aim of the amendment is both simple and important: to place in the Bill the continuing importance of the Belfast or Good Friday agreement in the new post-Brexit context in which it will have to operate. We have already seen the difficulties that contradictory red lines from the Government have caused; red lines on the single market, customs union and no border infrastructure have been jostling and competing with one another, producing the tensions we have seen this week. Fundamentally, this is a tension between two things.”
“It gives everyone in Northern Ireland an equal status and a legitimate sense of belonging.”
“We are under some time pressure, so I would rather continue. The agreement is also important in what it says about identity, and I wish to stress this point. It gets to the heart of the old problem that dogged Northern Ireland politics, which was the view that if one community gained, the other had necessarily lost. The tyranny of identity politics can be that it forces people to choose between multiple and overlapping identities—are they one thing or the other? When it comes to identity, the genius of the Good Friday agreement is that it does not force people to choose. Instead, it talks of “the birthright of all the people of Northern Ireland to identify themselves and be accepted as Irish or British, or both”. Let us not forget the “or both", as it is very important.”
“By doing that, he would be making a statement confirming that we hold dear to the beliefs enshrined in the agreement. I return to the question of identity. Those in Northern Ireland should be able to choose freely to be British or Irish or both. Brexit must not become a divisive wall that separates those identities. It must not mean losing those all-important words “or both”, and all the beneficial consequences that have come from them.”
“The truth is that if the Minister wanted to avoid a vote tonight, he should have accepted the new clause. That would have shown that he was willing to legislate for what he said at the Dispatch Box. The excuses he has given for not accepting it are out of the standard book of Ministers’ excuses for not accepting amendments. He said, “I agree with the sentiment, but it is technically flawed. I will give the hon. Member a meeting.” Ministers have been standing at that Dispatch Box saying that kind of thing for decades. The truth is that if he wants to avoid a vote, he has to go much further and guarantee that he will legislate to put in the Bill a commitment to the Good Friday agreement in the new post-Brexit context in which it will have to operate.”
“Twenty years on, we must guard against any complacency that would see the agreement as a 20-year-old document that can simply be put aside. The agreement was the basis for a new normality, which has not only saved many, many lives—although it certainly has done—but led to a new normality in trade, in relations between the UK and Ireland, and in relationships within Northern Ireland and on both sides of the border. There is peace, but it must not be taken for granted, be treated harshly or be subject to complacency. Great care must be taken. The Minister and Government Members have, essentially, put forward two arguments for not accepting the new clause: first, that it is technically flawed and, secondly, that it is declaratory and does not add anything. Both those things cannot be true.”
“I am going to continue. The point about identity is crucial, because we have to understand that the Good Friday agreement’s effects were not just economic or governmental, but profoundly psychological. By enshrining these principles, the agreement turned a page. The great danger is that Brexit is seen as going back, and we must not go back in any sense of the term. So if hon. Members want to know why the amendment is important and why it is necessary, I say to them that that is why it is necessary. It is because we must hold dear to these principles in a new political context, where, for the first time in history, one country is going to be outside the European Union and its neighbour is going to be inside it. We have never had that before. When the agreement was signed, it was different: both countries were members of the European Union.”
“The Prime Minister’s humiliation yesterday, when she was forced to disagree with herself, shows that this is less a negotiation and more a set of decisions, and those decisions are being framed by the contradictory red lines that the Government have thrown out, without regard to the consequences, on a hard border, the single market and the customs union. The Secretary of State’s colleague Ruth Davidson said this morning: “If regulatory alignment in a number of specific areas is the requirement for a frictionless border, then the Prime Minister should conclude this must be on a UK-wide basis.” She is right, is she not?”
“She would not need to rely on the state for financial support, and her family would not have had to go through the huge difficulties that they have all been through together over the last couple of years. It is time for a step change in the urgency with which the issue of cochlear implants is treated. The guidelines must be revised. NICE needs to move on that soon, so that the suffering of my constituent Lamina Lloyd, and the many people around the country who are in a similar position, can be alleviated.”
“Secondly, does he agree that Lamina’s case and many similar cases around the country show that there is an overwhelming argument for revising those criteria? Thirdly, whatever hearing loss threshold is picked, does the Minister agree that the hearing loss test needs to be done in real-world conditions that approximate to how people actually live their lives and conduct conversations, and so on? Fourthly, and perhaps most fundamentally, why does it take so long for people to get an implant? Why is it such a battle? The NHS is there for those who need it; it should not be an organisation that people have to battle with to get the treatment that they need. Had my constituent been helped earlier, she might still be in a job.”
“Friend the Member for Poplar and Limehouse raised those issues in an Adjournment debate earlier this year, and briefly at the beginning of his speech today. He was told earlier this year that the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence was launching a consultation on the relevant guidelines. That has not happened. The guidelines have been in place since 2009, but technology and costs have moved on a great deal since then. I wish to ask the Minister a few questions. If he cannot respond to them all today, I would be very happy for him to consult with colleagues and write to me, and other Members participating in the debate, with a more considered response. First, why has the NICE consultation, which we were promised would be launched this summer, not yet been launched, and when will it be?”
“Her hearing has deteriorated even further in recent months, and she has an appointment to be assessed at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Birmingham in two weeks’ time, but she and many others in her position have serious reservations about how the assessments are made. The Bamford-Kowal-Bench test uses short sentences in lab conditions. It does not replicate normal conversation or real-world conditions. Lamina and many others feel that that tool is not fit for the purpose of properly measuring hearing ability and hearing loss. Even if Lamina is approved for an implant, why has it taken so long? Why do we put people and their families through such pain before giving them the help that could be life changing? My hon.”
“To try to alleviate her condition, Lamina wears the most powerful hearing aids available, turned up to maximum volume, but they make little difference and give her frequent ear infections and headaches from their feedback and squealing noises. She can no longer hear music or follow conversations, yet she has been in a battle—that is the only word for it—for the past two years to try to get a cochlear implant. She falls just 5 dB short, which is no more than a whisper, of the 90 dB hearing loss threshold for consideration for an implant. That threshold is one of the strictest in the western world. It is estimated that only 5% of those who could benefit from the technology get access to it in the UK. Lamina describes her condition as being too deaf to hear, yet not deaf enough to get the help that could make a huge difference to her life.”
“Until last year, Lamina had a flourishing career as the manager of a local citizens advice bureau. However, Lamina has Meniere’s disease, which has resulted in progressive hearing loss—so much so that last year she had to give up work. She has two children who themselves have additional needs. She can no longer hear her children, who have to act as her ears. She describes her family as having gone from being an outdoor family to one that rarely leaves the house. Lamina is an intelligent, capable person, but hearing loss has meant the end of her career, a diminishment in the quality of her family life, and increasing isolation.”
“I begin by echoing the tribute paid to my hon. Friend the Member for Poplar and Limehouse (Jim Fitzpatrick) for securing this debate. As we have heard, there are a number of dimensions and aspects to deafness, but I want to focus on one issue: the criteria for receiving cochlear implants under the NHS. My argument today is simple: the criteria should be reviewed so that it is easier to get an implant. That would transform the lives of those who need this technology, and improve the lives of their families and loved ones. It would be a prudent investment, because it would obviate the need for more expenditure further down the line as a consequence of people not receiving the implants they desperately need. I will tell the story of my constituent, Lamina Lloyd.”
“There are two salient features about the news that is emerging. The first is that this is the opposite of what was promised during the referendum. We were promised £350 million a week more, and now the Government are set to pay up to £50 billion, when our constituents urgently need money for health, housing, policing and much more. But, secondly, what is it that we are paying for? Other countries pay significant sums to get into the single market; we are lining up to pay up to £50 billion to leave the single market. Is not the tragedy that these huge sums are going to pay for a worse deal than we have at present? That is hardly strategic genius.”
“This situation is entirely of the Government’s making. The motion passed by this House did not give the Government discretion to take this information and decide for themselves what to give to the Select Committee and what not to give to the Select Committee. The Government have not complied with the motion, which they did not resist. There is another underlying point here—apart from questions of parliamentary privilege and contempt—and it is this: do we believe that the public have a right to know the consequences of the options facing the country on Brexit? I believe that they do. Does the Minister agree?”
“There might be an argument for some of that expenditure if it was going to buy us a better deal, but the Government have said that they want to secure exactly the same benefits for goods and services as the ones we have now, not by staying in the single market and the customs union but by leaving them. Countries normally pay for access to the single market, but we have chosen to pay to leave it. The Government are not investing £40 billion in getting us a better deal than the one we currently enjoy; they are prepared to spend £40 billion, which could go towards public services in our constituencies, on a worse deal. That was not an inevitable result of the referendum. The Government could have chosen to stay in the single market and the customs union, but they did not, and that is a bad deal for Britain.”
“In my constituency, the West Midlands police have lost 2,000 officers and £145 million from their budget in the last seven years. They could do with some of the £40 billion that will be spent on Brexit. We have almost 10,000 people on the local housing waiting list. I see these people in my constituency surgery, desperate for a home. They could do with some of the £40 billion set aside to pay for Brexit. The social mobility study out today describes the midlands as a coldspot where social mobility suffers. Nursery schools in my constituency facing cuts could do with some of the £40 billion set aside for Brexit.”
“For our constituents, it means lower than expected pay. Average income is expected to fall by £1,400 to £1,500 a year. Those are the real effects of the mother of all downgrades. There is one area where the Government are setting aside huge sums of money, and that of course is Brexit—there is £3 billion for it in the Budget, on top of the £700 million already announced—and we are told that the Cabinet has agreed to pay a £40 billion divorce bill. In a few short weeks, we have gone from “go whistle”, to £20 billion in the Florence speech, to £40 billion now. There is a lot that we could do with £40 billion. We could build more than 70 new hospitals, or over 1,100 new schools. It is more than the total housing and environment budget. It is more than the total public order and safety budget.”
“It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Chichester (Gillian Keegan). We began the debate talking about industrial strategy. I approve of the Government’s industrial strategy. The reason I like it so much is that I launched it eight years ago, and it is nice to see the Government picking up on some of our ideas. However, the big story in this Budget is the downgrade in our growth prospects—the biggest downgrade since the financial crisis and in the history of the OBR. It was described by the Resolution Foundation as “the mother of all downgrades”. The prediction is that the economy will, in a few years’ time, be 2%—or in financial terms, £42 billion—smaller than was thought only last year. That means borrowing £13 billion more in a few years, and £17 billion a year after that. It means austerity going on into the mid-2020s.”
“The Minister has talked quite a lot about the purpose of this exercise being to provide continuity and certainty, but is it not the case that that will be true only on day one? He cannot guarantee any continuity or certainty on day 100 or day 1,000, but is not that, for many of his colleagues, the whole point of leaving the European Union?”
“Fundamentally, at some point, the Government will have to face up to the truth, be candid with their Back Benchers and the House as a whole, and be candid with the public. The choice, in the end, is not just a choice between systems, but a choice between economics and nationalism. It is a choice about whether we put the prosperity of our constituents first or the nationalist ideology that is driving this agenda, and I know which I prefer.”
“Tens and hundreds of thousands of jobs are sustained by financial services, insurance, legal services, business services and so on. I must say to those who advocate the FTA option that the blunt truth is that no existing FTA would give us anything like the access to the services market that we currently enjoy as members of the single market. That, fundamentally, is the choice that we must make. The Solicitor General resisted the existing comparisons, as the Government have throughout: they have said, “We will have a bespoke arrangement that is somehow different from this.” Let me tell the Solicitor General candidly that not a single person on the other side of the table last week thought that that was possible. This is a decision, a choice. What kind of Brexit will we have?”
“There is, of course, the issue of having a say in the rules, and whatever our say is outside, it will not be like the say that we have now. My hon. Friend the Member for Lewisham East covered that as well. The other option involves a free trade agreement, something akin to what has been negotiated with other countries. This matters to our economy. We have talked a lot in these debates—and I have been guilty of it myself—about the importance of manufactured goods. We have talked a lot about cars, we have talked a lot about aerospace, and we have talked a lot about agricultural products. All those are all hugely important to our economy, but 80% of it consists of services. We are hugely successful at them, and we are hugely successful at exporting them.”
“Basically, there are two ways of doing this. The first is the way outlined by my hon. Friend the Member for Lewisham East—that, having voted to leave the European Union, we remain part of its single market system and adhere to the rights and obligations that that gives us, and in so doing, we put the economic prosperity of our people first. That is one way, and I wholeheartedly back my hon. Friend’s assertion that the referendum did not decide this question. The referendum decided our membership of the institutions. The referendum did not decide on the manner of leaving the European Union. There are countries outside the European Union that take part in this system, and we know which they are. I do not think that this is a perfect solution by any means.”
“I serve on the Brexit Select Committee, but I should add that I do not seek to speak on its behalf here today: this is my interpretation of the situation. Last week, the Committee spent a couple of days in Brussels and Paris talking to some of the people involved in the so-called negotiations. There may be negotiation about parts of this process, particularly in phase 1, but the point that I want to make—which refers to new clause 22 and the European Economic Area—is that our future relationship is less about negotiation than about a fundamental choice. What is the relationship that we want to have with the European Union? Where do we want to be in relation to its system, which is a market with rules? The people that we talked to about this round of talks made it pretty clear that this is a choice. It is a decision.”
“We were told that Brexit would save huge amounts of money, yet one of the critical issues in the talks is how to settle a multi-billion pound divorce bill that was mentioned by no one during the referendum campaign. So language can obscure as well as shed light. Perhaps this is nowhere more true than in all this talk about “the negotiations”. Unsurprisingly, the public place great faith in anything called “negotiations”. If I were buying a house from someone—I hesitate to tread here after yesterday’s exchanges—who was asking a certain selling price and I offered a certain purchase price, the negotiation would involve us meeting somewhere in the middle. There might be parts of the Brexit talks that involve negotiation in that sense of the word.”
“I want to make a few points about new clause 22, which my hon. Friend the Member for Lewisham East (Heidi Alexander) spoke to a little while ago. Language can obscure things as well as shed light on them, and that is true of much of our Brexit debate. For example, we were told that this was all about taking back control but, as we have seen many times since the referendum, the Government have stoutly resisted giving control to Parliament, resisted publishing a White Paper, and resisted allowing us a meaningful vote. They have finally caved in on having legislation, but they are still resisting allowing us a meaningful say on a real choice, rather than a choice between whatever is negotiated and no deal and WTO rules.”
“I welcome the Secretary of State’s retreat today in the face of impending votes on the withdrawal Bill, but why is he intent on holding a gun to this House’s head by presenting us with a choice only between the deal he negotiates and no deal at all? Surely, a meaningful vote and meaningful legislation would give this House the possibility of asking the Government to go back and amend the deal, including, as the right hon. and learned Member for Beaconsfield (Mr Grieve) said, by extending the timetable, if that is what is required?”
“If people do not feel safe in their community, on their streets or in their homes, they are not free to go about their lives. Fear of crime destroys liberty. Nor does it apply equally: lower-income communities and people on lower incomes suffer the most, because they do not have the options available to some wealthier citizens. They cannot live in a gated community. They do not have the option sometimes of moving to a more expensive property, perhaps in an area with lower crime levels. Crime is therefore an issue not just of safety but of liberty and of equality, too. That is why we should be deeply concerned at the juxtaposition of falling police numbers and rising crime, which is what the country now faces.”
“I congratulate the right hon. Member for Kingston and Surbiton (Sir Edward Davey) on arranging the debate. I want to make a couple of points because the debate is timely, given the approach of the autumn Budget in a couple of weeks’ time. In the west midlands, our police force has lost £145 million in real terms from its budget since 2010. That has resulted in a loss of 2,000 police officers and a further loss of a considerable number of civilian non-uniformed policing staff. Crime in the region is up 14% in the latest figures, and some crimes are up by more than that. Burglary is up 31% and car crime by a similar amount, all at a time when the country is having to cope with a significant terrorism threat, which requires significant police resources. The effect of all that is obvious, deep and profound.”
“It is simply indefensible to continue with police cuts after what we have had in the past seven years, in the light of both the terrorism threat and now the recorded crime figures showing the rises that I have set out in the west midlands. I want to use today to make my appeal to the Minister to consult with the Chancellor, to say, “Enough is enough.” Cuts in policing have gone too far. They are affecting people’s liberties, and it is an issue of equality, too. We want to see fair funding for police forces right around the country so that we can give the community both the visible presence and the real protection against crime that they deserve.”
“I wholeheartedly agree with the right hon. Gentleman. As I said, this is an issue of liberty and it is an issue of equality, too. I want to make an obvious political point. Let us imagine the roles were reversed here and we had a Labour Government presiding over a huge cut in police numbers and a significant rise in crime. Do we honestly think that Conservative Members would be saying, “It’s got nothing to do with police numbers”? I do not think so. I know that opposition can do strange things to a political party and the conclusions it sometimes reaches, but so too can government make Government Members—particularly Back-Bench Members—end up defending the indefensible.”
“There are times when a Government have the stench of death about them. They are leaderless and directionless, and we learn today that their defence is that they are also contentless. Most concerning of all is the Minister’s attempt to come to the House today and say that those who ask for this information should have their patriotism questioned. This will not stand, and it cannot be allowed to stand. The House gave the Minister an instruction, so my request to him today is to show a modicum of competence—in this week, of all weeks, for the Government —and pass these studies to the Committee, without redaction, as soon as possible.”
“With the Under-Secretary of State for Exiting the European Union, the hon. Member for Worcester (Mr Walker), saying one thing from the Dispatch Box on 7 February and the Secretary of State saying not one but two things in the space of 24 hours yesterday, it is clear that ministerial assurances on this matter are not enough. Does the Secretary of State not agree that after the shambles of the last 24 hours, when he had to be rebutted by his own departmental spokesman, the only way to guarantee Parliament a meaningful say on and input into these most vital negotiations is to amend the European Union (Withdrawal) Bill accordingly?”