Mr Toby Perkins
MP for Chesterfield · Labour · United Kingdom
“The hon. Member for Bicester and Woodstock (Calum Miller) is absolutely right to say that what is behind this is the deep unpopularity of President Milei; it is not anything actually that the UK has done.”
“In Chesterfield, there will be unmitigated despair at the statement we have heard today from my right hon. Friend. For the authorities for which she is doing a review—the 14 that thought they had got their decision in July—could she clarify the basis of that review?”
“It is a great pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Desmond. I congratulate the hon. Member for Waveney Valley (Adrian Ramsay) on securing this debate.”
“The report spells out the link between degradation overseas and the impact here. The assessment lays out the consequences: food insecurity, economic insecurity, increased migration and refugees, increased interstate competition, conflict and geopolitical instability, all of which will threaten us here at home.”
“The Government are right to take their time and make sure that they get this right—we saw what happened when the previous Government did not do the work that was needed. This is a delicately balanced decision.”
“Thirdly, will the Minister consider bringing forward the fourth national adaptation programme? NAP3, published by the previous Government in 2023, was deemed ineffective by the Climate Change Committee. NAP4 is not due until 2028, but can we afford to wait two more years before we have an adequate plan?”
The complete record
Every one of 3,898 lines we hold for Mr Toby Perkins, in date order, each linked to its source. Free to read, in full, without an account. Page 76 of 78.
“The Prime Minister is right to say that the country has paid a tremendous debt to Afghanistan in terms of the cost to our country. He said earlier that he would send a message to our friends and allies by setting a deadline, but he also sends a message to our enemies by setting that deadline. What impact does he think the deadline will have on al-Qaeda and the Taliban? Does he think that it will make them more likely to want to negotiate?”
“Does the Chancellor agree that the real lesson that comes out of Ireland—he rightly identified similarities with our economy—is that the impact of the global banking crisis added to a drastic programme of public sector cuts does not mean growth? That is dangerous to the economy.”
“On child benefit, can the Chief Secretary explain why he believes that families earning £45,000 have broader shoulders than those earning £80,000?”
“For every one of the past five years specialist sports colleges have had higher levels of attainment than the national average across the curriculum. The Secretary of State’s decision to axe the entire £162 million school sports partnership fund will decimate the work of specialist sports colleges. Given the success of school sports partnerships in raising attainment, and if he is interested in the east end boys as well as the west end girls, can he explain why he refused even to meet a recognised world expert in school sport such as Baroness Campbell before deciding to axe funding to the Youth Sport Trust and to decimate school sport?”
“For much of the past decade, Ireland was held up by Conservative Members as an example of the direction in which we should have been taking our economy. Now, because Ireland has followed a strategy that largely involves having the same medicine that the Prime Minister is recommending for this country, it is seeing markets questioning its economy, interest rates rising and confidence falling. What lessons has the Prime Minister learned from the situation in Ireland?”
“I think that the Secretary of State is focusing excessively on the cap. My right hon. Friend the Member for Paisley and Renfrewshire South (Mr Alexander) has already made it clear that that is not the main focus of our objections to the Government’s proposals. The Secretary of State dealt with myths earlier. Will he now deal with the myth that housing benefit recipients are out of work? Many of them are working, but they are low-paid. More than 350 of them in Chesterfield will be badly affected, when they are trying to work their way towards a better life. Why are they the people whom the Secretary of State is attacking with his policy?”
“I would like to return to the subject raised by my hon. Friend the Member for North East Derbyshire (Natascha Engel) about the national hereditary breast cancer helpline. The Minister’s response was inept. She said that a national service will be funded by tons of different GP commissioning groups. That just will not happen. She said nice words about Wendy Watson, but her Government’s policies will see the end of that helpline unless she intervenes. Will she please ensure national funding for a national service?”
“The hon. Gentleman has made a powerful case about Cornwall. I believe that the amendment proposed by my hon. Friend the Member for Rhondda (Chris Bryant) would achieve what the hon. Gentleman is trying to achieve. We all accept the need for equalisation, but we also need to allow the Boundary Commission to do what it is paid to do—to recognise that it is not all about numbers; it is also about communities. That is how democracy works: people vote for us; they understand the areas we represent, and we understand them.”
“The right hon. Gentleman is perpetuating the myth that there is no alternative, but he just said that the previous Government had a strategy in place for paying off the deficit, so there is an alternative. An alternative was also put forward in 1945. He can take whichever direction he likes, but he cannot keep claiming that the decisions he is making are the only alternative, because others have been put forward.”
“My hon. Friend is reflecting on the inequities of the changes to housing benefit. Does she agree that the Government’s focus on the cap is a red herring, because it is relevant to very few housing benefit recipients, and that the really important thing is the 10% cut that will hit housing benefit recipients in the second year?”
“I wish to expand briefly on a couple of those points. In Chesterfield and Derbyshire, unemployed workers have had success in 75% of cases. I turn specifically to Atos Healthcare and its motivation. It did an assessment on behalf of Royal Mail for one of my constituents and found that he was not fit to work. Royal Mail retired him on the grounds of ill health, saying that he would never work again. However, when that person went for a work capability assessment, Atos said that he scored no points. The same company assessed him twice; on behalf of Royal Mail, it said that he was not fit to work and should be laid off, but on behalf of the Department for Work and Pensions, it said that he was fit to work and gave him no points. That puts the company’s performance in context.”
“My right hon. Friend is touching on the choices that the Government have made. The number of attacks that they have made on children, families and women is revealing. They seem willing to give money to married couples who do not have children but they are taking money from families with children. Anyone who has been married and had kids knows that it is not getting married that costs money but having kids. When my son was four months old I thought that he was robbing my wallet because I had no money left. Does not the Government’s approach show how out of touch they are with the real lives of families and children?”
“Teenage pregnancy levels are high in some of our most deprived communities, and the child trust fund at least offered 18-year-olds who were about to have children the chance to take a different track or to receive some support. Does my right hon. Friend agree that the Bill will take away a key tool in the battle against child poverty?”
“My hon. Friend is making a compelling case. Does she agree that, whatever we may have thought about the upper-class buffoons whom we may have considered to constitute the Conservative party, they always seemed to have a sense of gallantry? When they said “Women and children first”, it was supposed to be a good thing. Nowadays, however, when they say “Women and children first”, they mean that women and children should be in the front line, facing a battering from the cuts. It is women and children first who are losing the benefits, it is women and children first who are losing the payments, and, most of all, it is women and children first who are paying the costs for these upper-class buffoons.”
“The Minister just said that higher employment is something that the Labour party knows all about. I do not know whether she is aware that unemployment was up near the 4 million mark under a Conservative Government. What does she consider to be a successful level of unemployment this time?”
“I welcome what the Minister of State, the right hon. Member for Epsom and Ewell (Chris Grayling), said previously about looking into the work capability assessment. I met a delegation from Chesterfield and north Derbyshire on Thursday, although they were due to have a meeting with him. One in the group was told that she was fit to work four days before a cancer operation, while another who had a plaster cast the whole length of his arm was told that he was fit to work. Unfortunately, the Minister cancelled his appointment to see them on the day before they came down to London. Will he commit to seeing them? If he really wants to learn about the work capability assessment, he should meet some of the people who have been affected by it.”
“To expand on that point, a lot of young people’s first contact with politics on a serious level comes when they start their A-levels and do politics A-level. There is a huge amount of interest among the A-level politics groups in my constituency. When an election comes, and they are not allowed to vote, it does seem that we are excluding a group of people who have become engaged with the subject for the first time. For reasons that have been pointed out by my hon. Friend the Member for North East Derbyshire (Natascha Engel) and the hon. Member for Na h-Eileanan an Iar (Mr MacNeil), the age of 16 is established as the point at which many of us move into adulthood in a whole raft of ways. A 16-year-old can get married, have sex legally, start paying tax and join the armed forces.”
“T8. The Chancellor was a millionaire the day he was born, so he has not got a clue what it is like to try to raise a family on £40,000 a year— [ Interruption. ] Do you mind? He cannot hear me. People who earn that much are not the super-rich; they are hard-working people who are getting by and getting on. The cuts to child benefit will take about 10% of the income of some of them. By what definition of fairness does he think robbing 10% from hard-working people is a fair deal for such families?”
“Two head teachers in Chesterfield told me how liberating it was for them when contextual value added measures were put in place and there was finally acknowledgement of the tough circumstances under which they performed their roles. Does the Minister agree that the CVA measures, as a key part of the inspection that assists parents, help parents to assess the strengths of teaching at a school, not just the strengths of an intake?”
“Although we would certainly support the importance of training to create green jobs, is not the reality that all this Government’s policies are about stunting growth, with measures such as the refusal of the loan to Forgemasters? There is no point in increasing training in jobs if we are not going to help to create an environment that will support business and the Government in creating those future green jobs.”
“T2. The renewable heat incentive is a particular concern for Worcester Bosch, a boiler manufacturer, and for the benefit of the Minister I should say that Worcester Bosch is a private sector company, not a local authority. It is particularly concerned about the Government’s decision to scrap the low-carbon buildings programme and to offer no commitment to the renewable heat incentive. Does he appreciate how that indecision is affecting the green jobs that Worcester Bosch and other manufacturing companies that rely on the incentive could create in order to develop a greener future and jobs?”
“Will the Minister acknowledge that the broad range of issues that he now says he will take into consideration were entirely absent from his discussions in the run-up to the election or in the coalition agreement, which states that the coalition Government will implement the Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman’s recommendation? People in the Equitable Members Action Group will be extremely disappointed with the Minister’s tone when they compare it with the tone he took in the run-up to the election.”
“Many former Equitable Life policyholders who have spoken to me unquestionably felt that both previous Governments had been too slow to act. They will be very surprised by the extent to which Members who signed that pledge now apparently welcome proposals that are so far removed from what the Conservative and Liberal Democrat parties promised in the run-up to the election.”
“The amount of money that my hon. Friend mentions demonstrates the extent to which such a suggestion is out of reach for many people. At one time, football was very much the working man’s game, but it has become an increasingly expensive pastime. If one has to have £600 to own a stake in a club, the prospect will be out of reach for a large percentage of our society. The example of the Glazers, who bought the club with the club’s own money and then put it into debt, shows how the game has been stolen away from the supporters and become merely an interest to big business.”
“My right hon. Friend is making a powerful point about the contribution of the Liberal Democrats. Many people have wondered whether this Government would be any different if the Lib Dems were not involved, but are we perhaps now starting to see how they are involved? When we look at the cuts in policing, the decision to put yobbos on to the street rather than in prison, and they ways in which the Government are on the side of the criminals rather than of the police, we can see that the lily-livered Liberals are indeed making their contribution to government, just as people were beginning to wonder what they were doing.”
“The hon. Gentleman is presenting an interesting theory, which I do not think I have heard before. When the Liberal Democrats spoke of putting an extra 3,000 police on the beat, was that not something to do with reducing crime?”
“I am fascinated by the hon. Gentleman’s conversation, because I am sure that many Members have met their local chief constables. He mentioned that they would be able to limit the effect of the reductions that we will have to make, but did they explain what they would have to do? Will the hon. Gentleman touch on what they said they would no longer be able to do? I am interested to hear that they did at least admit that the cuts would affect the service that they are going to provide.”
“A huge amount of police time is taken up attending them, but no crime has been committed in most cases. If the responsibility of the police is only to stop crime, they might stop going out to road traffic accidents. Again, this shows the simplicity of the message; it might be attractive to the readers of tabloid newspapers, but it does not reflect the complexity or reality of what the police do. I am not advocating that the police should not turn up to road traffic accidents or should not turn up when a man is about to commit suicide by jumping off a bridge. What I am saying is that if we take the Home Secretary at her word, we need to think about the sort of service that we will end up with.”
“When I was out with the police, they explained to me another problem they have with the mental health wing of a local hospital. There is a secure unit there and patients from it are sometimes given a pass to go out. The pass might be for three, four or 24 hours. At 23 hours and 59 minutes, there is no problem, but at 24 hours and a minute, the police are called out to find a missing person. Again, no crime has been committed, but the police are called. We need to be sensible in this debate about what to expect from the police. I would certainly like to think that all Labour Members would join me in assisting the Police Minister in fighting his corner to get recognition for the message he wants to send out about what we want the police to do. Road traffic accidents provide another example.”
“With the level of the cuts that are coming, the role we expect of the police is going to change drastically. There is no point anyone pretending otherwise. The Home Secretary said that she wants to strip all the targets away so that the police have just one basic target—to cut crime. That fails to acknowledge the many different aspects of police work where no crime has been committed. If we see a man on a bridge who looks as if he is going to throw himself down on to the motorway, we are going to call the police—but no crime has been committed; it is just a man stood on a bridge. I would like to think that the police of the future would still turn up at such an incident. If not, we would be living in a very strange world.”
“People have been driven out of their homes by vandalism to their car, for example. Every morning, when they come out to go to work, they do not know whether their tyres will have been let down or their wing mirrors smashed, or whether a big scratch will have appeared on the bonnet. Those might be considered lower-level crimes, but if they are not dealt with, the perpetrators will decide that they are above the law and one thing will lead to another and their crimes will become more and more serious. We need real honesty in this debate about what we expect from the police. My right hon. Friend the Member for Don Valley (Caroline Flint) made the important point that we now have an opportunity to reconsider the role of the police and decide what we want them to do.”
“It seems incredible that the Government should choose to strip the police of a power that is clearly working, at a time when all parties are concerned about reoffending rates. About 65% of recipients of an ASBO did not reoffend, and 93% desisted after their third one. We have also heard a lot of talk about the effect on communities of antisocial behaviour orders. My right hon. Friend the Member for Tottenham (Mr Lammy) spoke of the situation in his community. Chesterfield has a different environment, but our antisocial behaviour problems also lead on to low-level crime and, if those problems are not tackled at an early age, people can go on to become serial offenders who will be found guilty of much more serious crimes. I know that that is the experience of Members on both sides of the House.”
“Was she suggesting that, in regard to antisocial behaviour, the only difference between a poor community and a wealthy one was that poor people felt as though they were suffering as a result of it, and that if the millionaires took the trouble to look out of their castles, they would see all the terrible things going on outside the castle walls? Her reference to the perception of antisocial behaviour was quite revealing about her mindset and her view of the job that she has come into. Like me, the police I have spoken to were staggered by the Home Secretary’s decision to abandon the antisocial behaviour order powers. They say that those powers have done much to help them to work with community groups, with tenants and residents associations, and with local councils to clean up the streets.”
“She implied that they were like joiners with too many tools, standing by a wall unsure which hammer to use, and that the extra powers at their disposal were somehow slowing them down and preventing them from getting on with policing. That was a rather strange thing to say. The antisocial behaviour powers gave the police the ability to deal in a different and more effective way with the low-level antisocial element that exists in every constituency in the country. The Home Secretary showed us a window into her mind earlier, when she said that there was an increased perception of antisocial behaviour in poorer communities.”
“As the Minister for Policing and Criminal Justice admitted yesterday, the Labour Government were the first in history to preside over a consistent reduction in crime. In addition to fighting serious crime and tackling the new threats of more complicated terrorist networks, more sophisticated paedophile rings and increasingly complex international drug and crime cartels, the Labour Government also gave the police far more significant powers to reduce antisocial behaviour than ever before. It was interesting to hear the Home Secretary claim that one of the problems was that the police had too many different powers.”
“The shadow Home Secretary made it absolutely clear that there would have been cuts; he listed some of them for the second time, for the benefit of the Home Secretary, who had missed them the first time round. He was quite specific about them. We also put in our manifesto that front-line policing would be protected, and that is key. A Government’s first duty must be to do all that they can to keep their citizens safe, and that is a duty that Labour understood well. It was demonstrated by the 17,000 extra police officers—compared with 1997—who are now patrolling Britain’s streets, 350 or so of them in Derbyshire, and by the 16,000 police community support officers introduced by Labour. The PCSOs have moved from being scorned by the press to being greatly valued by the public, who can see the contribution that they are making.”
“When she says that an excellent chief constable will look at the current situation and create a better service with less money, she is indulging in a myth. It is really unfair to the people in our communities, who rely on the Government and the police to keep them safe, to continue to allow them to believe that the police will be able continually to achieve more with less. When the hon. Lady says that Labour would have had to face the same choices, she is not quite telling the truth, because the Conservatives have chosen to double the speed with which the deficit is paid off. Now that they have made that decision, we will have extra cuts.”
“Thank you, Mr Deputy Speaker. I would be happy to let the hon. Member for Broxtowe (Anna Soubry) intervene for three minutes if she feels that she has been robbed. It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Lady’s thoughtful speech. She is right to say that there is a difference in analysis, but none the less, she brings her experience to bear and it was a pleasure to hear it. However, after listening to her speech and many of the other contributions that we have heard, I also felt that there was a bit missing. She says that she has spoken to her chief constable and she is in no doubt that there will be fewer police stations, but with the cuts that we are talking about, the reality is that we will have fewer police officers. Some 80% of the police budget goes on people. We will not save that money simply by shutting a few buildings down.”
“I urge the Government to think again before pulling the rug from under the feet of our police.”
“The Tories seem not to understand, as he did, how poorer communities and people in deprived areas have been badly affected by crime. The Government are showing a lack of honesty about what will be faced by people on the streets if cuts of this magnitude are made, and a lack of awareness of what it is like to live in a deprived community that is under pressure from criminals. They do not seem to understand what it is like for people to wake up not knowing whether their properties will be left alone that day, or to go on holiday not knowing whether their properties will be broken into. The current lack of vision about the best way in which to spend police resources leaves our police force, our communities and the value of a law-abiding, decent society dangerously exposed.”
“I referred earlier to Liberal Democrats’ contribution to the policing policies pursued by the present Government. People ask what the Liberal Democrats are doing, but in this context their influence is clear, whether it involves their wish to get rid of ASBOs, their opposition to the DNA database—without which, as we have heard, 26 more murderers would be out on the streets—or their justice proposals, which mean that yobbos and criminals would not go to prison, but would be out on the streets as well. It is hardly surprising that someone who was on the run decided that it was well worth supporting the Liberal Democrat party financially: he may have felt that there was some benefit in doing so. I wonder what happened to the Conservative party. I suspect that Lord Tebbit is turning in his crypt at the current Tory policies.”
“What often happens there is that the police put in a great deal of work to get the evidence together to achieve a prosecution, only to find that the victim of the violence has subsequently patched up the relationship and decided not to prosecute. The police have specialist teams dealing with child sex abuse. Such people may not be considered to be front-line police officers, but I should like to think that in any civilised society they would continue to work in the police force, and I believe that the narrowness of the new police target will be counterproductive. Far from being a Whitehall diktat, the policing pledge was put together by senior police officers who wanted to specify the standards of policing that people could expect wherever they lived.”
“The CPS requires such high evidential standards before it will take cases to court that the police have to provide a tremendous amount of evidence to back the service up. A lot of it takes up time. If we are going to remove such bureaucracy, we will have to accept that the police are likely to achieve fewer prosecutions. The CPS might have to take more cases to court, but that might increase the justice budget, so we would be saving on the one hand and losing out on the other. My hon. Friends have also referred to other back- office functions—the massive amount of work done on counter-terrorism, for example, or on breaking international drug rings and international crime syndicates. The police also have people whose work is dedicated to the reduction of domestic violence.”
“I would have thought that the hon. Gentleman could understand the basic point I am making—that the police do a hell of a lot of work that does not actually involve cutting crime. I simply gave a number of examples. We also need to look at what some of the backroom people do in the police service. I would not pretend that if we spoke to 100 police officers, none of them would complain about bureaucracy. I have spoken to senior police officers and I know that they do complain about it. Equally, however, I have not met a single police officer who believes that 25% cuts to the budget can be made by cutting the forms. That is not realistic. Much bureaucracy falls outside the Home Office remit and, as some of my hon. Friends said earlier, much of police bureaucracy arises from the Crown Prosecution Service.”
“Seeing as the hon. Gentleman has set up his contribution based on the economy, he might choose to reflect on the fact that there is a fundamental difference between our parties. The Labour Government proposed to reduce the deficit, but not by nearly as much as the new Conservative Government. Because they are increasing the pace at which we are repaying the deficit, they will have to cut more and there will be fewer police on the beat and more crime. That is a fundamental difference in approach.”
“The Minister spoke about “uncontrolled” immigration, but is not the whole point of the Australian-style points system to provide sensible controls on immigration while also allowing the country to attract the skills it needs? Is it not the case that the immigration policies pursued by this Government are all about the soundbite and how the measures will be reported rather than about having effective measures to ensure that we continue to attract the skills we need while maintaining the controls put in place towards the end of the previous Government’s tenure?”
“T2. During the recess I spent a day with police on the Grangewood estate in Chesterfield, meeting people there. Grangewood has suffered tremendously from antisocial behaviour in the past. The police were certain that, when properly employed, antisocial behaviour orders were an incredibly successful and effective way of reducing the incidence of antisocial behaviour. Why do we not continue to give the police a vital tool that will help them to reduce the incidence of such behaviour in their community?”
“On the comments that have been made about the Budget proving that we are all in this together, the analysis that my hon. Friend is setting out demonstrates not only that women are getting it with both barrels, but that at the same time as women are being asked to pay such a high price for the mistakes of the bankers who got the country into this financial mess, the situation of major industries will, through the cut in corporation tax, improve. Women will be expected to pay more, but big business, and particularly the banking sector, will be better off as a result of the Budget. Does that not demonstrate that we are not in fact all in this together?”
“If the hon. Lady believes that the Library was biased, does she think that the IFS was also biased when it said that the Budget was clearly regressive?”
“I am glad to hear that the Minister has some ideas on increasing youth participation in sport, but, as someone who has coached young people in rugby for the past five-and-a-half years and as a parent of a sports-mad child, I have to say that the idea that over the past 10 years there has not been any encouragement for competitive sports always seems quite ridiculous. Does he agree that the tabloid myth that there is no support for competitive sports is an insult not just to the previous Government, but to all those PE teachers who give up so much of their time and to all those people who voluntarily coach young people in sport?”