Jon Trickett
MP for Normanton and Hemsworth · Labour · United Kingdom
“The shadow Minister has said, “Well, we’ve got to be a bit careful. We don’t want to over-regulate these things.” The idea that these activities should be dealt with using a light touch will raise a bitter laugh in the communities I represent, and in communities all across the country who are suffering from the same kinds of problems.”
“They told me that it is probably the worst site in the north of England—other sites are competing for that award, but let us put that to one side for a minute. However, it became clear fairly quickly that the Environment Agency was understaffed and under-resourced and lacked the powers it needed to begin the process of enforcement.”
“At first, the Conservative Government envisaged light-touch regulation. It seemed to me—this has now been confirmed by the Minister, and I welcome her comments—that light-touch regulation simply does not allow the EA to take the necessary enforcement action when activities such as those I have described take place.”
“I welcome the robustness and energy that the Minister has brought to her task—it is very welcome. Inevitably, the shadow Minister, the hon. Member for Chester South and Eddisbury (Aphra Brandreth), wants to revert to some kind of light-touch approach, but we need to make sure the communities we represent are adequately protected—if necess…”
“Many, many years ago, permission was given under licence to do some recycling there, in order to eventually turn it back into arable land. When the people who live there bought their houses or moved in, they had a more than reasonable expectation that that work would be finished within a 10-year period.”
“Secondly, last Monday, we were having a planning appeal on this site, and the planning inspector went way beyond his brief and said to me—I am a Member of the governing party, but he thought I was the Government—“Will you ask the Government what they are going to do about those operators who deliberately take millions of pounds of profit…”
The complete record
Every one of 600 lines we hold for Jon Trickett, in date order, each linked to its source. Free to read, in full, without an account. Page 11 of 12.
“Thank you, Mrs Miller, for your guidance on the four-minute limit, which I will try my very best to adhere to. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Jarrow (Kate Osborne) for securing this debate, and thank the House authorities for allowing it to take place. Colombians are a good-natured and democratic people, who love liberty and life. However, they are experiencing a prolonged crisis, the roots of which lie deep, both in Colombian society, but, above all, in the current failing economic model. The economy is in freefall, and the Government wanted to raise taxes on the hardest hit, so social cohesion is breaking down as inequality accelerates in this wonderful country. Almost half of all Colombians now live in poverty—15% in the most extreme conditions.”
“We should look at the pages of the American health service providers today salivating at the prospect of growing NHS waiting lists, and now, so-called independent providers are to be invited to sit on boards that actually manage the NHS budgets. The idea of profiteering from someone else’s ill health is repulsive to most British people, yet it is intrinsic to this Bill. We can call it only one thing: parasitic capitalism. Along with the Royal College of Nursing, the British Medical Association and many other practitioners, we must resist the creeping destruction of our NHS.”
“Some 20,000 people are living in my constituency with no car to their households’ name and with poor public transport, many of them with chronic health needs. How on earth will they be expected to travel to centralised services in Leeds or elsewhere under those circumstances? There are two competing views of health provision facing each other. Either health is about an ethos of care or it is about making money. This Bill leads in one direction. The Government do not want to fund the NHS properly, so they are trying to entice more private money into health, often from sources, we note, from the Tory party. Privatisation puts one person’s wealth in front of another person’s health.”
“There were cuts to the numbers of staff and to their pay, 100,000 vacancies, 17,000 fewer hospital beds and over 100 fewer A&E facilities, with hospital waiting lists therefore doubling—even before covid arose—since the end of a Labour Government. The Bill continues all that process, as we would expect. It will make the NHS more remote because it is top-down, and it is a Trojan horse for elements of privatisation. Newly remote administrators will have little sensitivity to local health requirements. Members should think of the differences in the health needs of former coalfield communities such as those I represent in West Yorkshire, the inner city of Bradford and the relative affluence of Harrogate, yet all that is to be covered by a single new board, and the centralisation of clinical services makes them less accessible.”
“The Government’s health strategy is clear: while health demand rises, the amount of resources being provided to the NHS is declining, which leaves well-heeled patients with nowhere else to go to avoid ill health except into the so-called independent sector. For example, a constituent told me that his opticians had said that he could wait six years for cataract operations, by which time he would be nearly blind, or he could pay for a cataract operation now in the private sector. Even before covid, the Government had cut the health budget and spending. In Britain we were spending £2,000 per head of population less than was being spent in Germany.”
“We require a Government who will transform our country, create a rupture with the way in which this British establishment has ruled our country for the past two to three generations, and build a fairer, more just and more democratic society.”
“For all those reasons, we can understand how it came about that output per worker in our area is half the level that it is in London, that wages in my constituency are £300 a week less than they are in the Prime Minister’s, that there are twice as many top jobs in administration and management in his constituency than mine, and that children born today in my constituency—according to his Social Mobility Commission—face a future that is much more difficult than it is in other parts of the country. The Prime Minister climbed his way to the top by arguing for a turbocharged inequality, and now he is trying to paper over the cracks of the very inequality his party helped to create. This Queen’s Speech does not address the central problems facing my community and many others I try to speak for in this House every day—it papers over the cracks.”
“First, the Prime Minister wants infrastructure, but he must then explain why seven times as much is spent on transport in London as it is in parts of Yorkshire. Infrastructure takes decades to introduce, and people in our area and elsewhere will feel that it is jam tomorrow and that no difference will be made now. Secondly, there is the idea of education and skills. But then the Prime Minister has to explain why, over the past 10 years, the Government cuts to school funding in my constituency were 16 times higher than the cuts in his constituency. The final point that the Prime Minister makes is about IT, which he says is the way forward. The fact of the matter is that in my constituency and other parts of Yorkshire, the broadband speed is less than half of what it is in his constituency.”
“In a striking opening comment in the Queen’s Speech debates, the Prime Minister remarked that genius can be found everywhere in our country—of course, you and I know that that is especially true in God’s own country, Madam Deputy Speaker, but we will draw a veil over that. He also said that opportunity is lacking throughout the country. We arrive, then, at the central thrust of the Queen’s Speech: the idea that we should level up. There are two things to say about that. The first is that we have to will the means as well as the ends, and the Government have failed to do that, as I will describe in a moment or two. Secondly, we have to analyse why the country needs levelling up in the way that the Prime Minister described. Three aspects of the Queen’s Speech address the levelling-up agenda, and none of them works for Yorkshire.”
“If I were to draw a map of England—the health service that we are responsible for—and shade the economic-social demography, it would be clear that there continues to be a north-south divide. If I were to draw a map of covid, the same would apply. It is striking. The averages conceal quite a bit; none the less, there has been a rapid decline in covid infections. The figures that I will quote are per 100,000. In January, there were 406 infections per 100,000; now, it is 28 per 100,000. That is remarkable.”
“Let me raise two brief points before I get to the central issue. First, statistics. They talk about lies and statistics. I have confidence in the statistics that I will use, because I have been tracking what has been happening since January. They vary a bit, but I am sure that the trends I will describe are correct. I will use comparisons between my area and the Minister’s area—not to suggest that somehow she has been neglectful of our area while protecting hers, but because the differences are extraordinary. Not for one second do I think she is anything other than someone who wants to do their best for the whole country. However, there are chronic underlying problems in the way that our country is organised. The Government have said they will begin to level up; hon. Members will see how far we have to go.”
“I beg to move, That this House has considered health inequalities and the covid-19 outbreak in West Yorkshire. Thank you for calling me, Mr Hollobone. I thank everyone who has enabled me to secure this important debate so that a Yorkshire voice can make the case. I will be speaking about covid and the vaccine, so first I should like to place on record our thanks from every part of the House to everyone who helped to develop the vaccine, be they scientists, pharmacologists or all the people who have rolled it out. It has been an incredible journey, which shows humanity in a common endeavour against a disease. I congratulate all those involved. I need not detain the House for long, but I will make a clear case for my constituency in West Yorkshire, where I have lived all my life, although there are lessons for the rest of the country, too.”
“Although the figures in my area are going down quite rapidly, as a multiple of the average, they are horrific, really. It is unacceptable that we are in this situation. On Tuesday I spoke to Wakefield Council leader Denise Jeffery. I asked whether it was possible for her public health people to identify hotspots of transmission and move in—almost like a hit squad—to test and trace, and perhaps also accelerate the vaccination programme, although that might undermine the Government’s age-related vaccination priorities. Will the Minister reflect on the points that I have raised and could we have a further exchange, to see what can be done to tackle this chronic problem? I thank the House for listening so courteously.”
“The employer said to me, “Well, we have told people that if they don’t feel safe, they can go home, but we won’t pay them and we won’t furlough them.” That is not acceptable behaviour from an employer in 2021. It is simply unacceptable that they leave people feeling exposed and at risk but then say, “It’s up to them, but we won’t pay them. They can stay at home with no money.” I live in a fairly poor area, and that is not an acceptable prospect. Here is what I hope might happen—that the Government and the public authorities accept that employers and employees have a duty and an obligation to try to eliminate covid at work and elsewhere. I do not think it is good enough simply to leave it to the employers. The public authorities need to intervene in hotspot areas and identify what is going wrong.”
“It is a household name that provides goods on the high street—everybody knows the name. The workforce, most of whom live in my area, have repeatedly raised with us a sense of not feeling safe at work. I asked the council to visit the employer, and work has been done to make the warehouse a safer place and to reduce transmission. However, my point about sharing cars to and from work still stands, as people share cars if they are not on large incomes or if they live in rural areas such as mine. Also, at the start and end of shifts large numbers of workers are squashed into a small space to get in and out of the workplace, so there are lots of opportunities for workplace transmission.”
“I read in this morning’s newspaper, which covered some of the issues that I am trying to raise, that the Government had responded by saying, “We’ve made available to employers the possibility for an enhanced test, trace and isolate service.” Although I welcome that, because there needs to be as much emphasis as possible on trying to find out who is infected and ensuring that they isolate, there are two problems. First, some people are on very low wages and will not necessarily volunteer that they have symptoms because they are worried about the financial impact on themselves and their households. Secondly, employers are variable, just like any other part of the population. Some employers are very careful, others less so. I have been approached by a firm, which I will not name, that has a large warehouse in my constituency.”
“She said that the figures are slightly susceptible to small variations at ward level, but she still defended them. I then spoke to the chief executive of our health trust. Obviously, he was most concerned about the number of hospital admissions; although that number is now going down because of the medical treatment that we have developed, the ratio is still far too high in our area. He also thought that workplace transmission was an issue. What do I think ought to happen? Well, the Government may well have already formed a view about workplace transmission.”
“Again, I am not saying that the Government were wrong to do the regional lockdowns—we could clearly see that those had an effect—but at the end of the day, they abandoned them. I do not want anyone to listen to my points and say to themselves, “Well, actually there’s a bit of a problem in Yorkshire. We need to protect other parts of the country; let’s lock down Yorkshire.” If I am right—I would be interested to know whether the Government have other statistics on this—workplace transmission is a serious issue. I spoke about that with the local GP in the most seriously affected village in my constituency, and he thought that it is now about workplaces, and car and minibus sharing. I spoke to the director of public health, who told me broadly the same thing.”
“I would not suggest that we should have done anything differently, but the Government, and we as a country, need to think clearly about the issue of workplace transmission of the virus. I have one further point on this matter. Some people might say that we should lock down the hotspots, but that will not work. Why do I say that? Because a lockdown affects people who are not key workers. People who work in key industries, such as retailing, care or warehousing, if they are delivering important services or commodities, are still going to work. A lockdown does not protect the people who are at work, and therefore it does not prevent workplace transmission. That seems to be quite an issue for us.”
“There is a second related issue, which is access to cars. If someone lives in a village and their place of work is, say, a large warehouse near the A1, then they have to get to work. There are no buses or trains, so what do they do? They share a vehicle, either a minibus or a car, with someone else who lives in the village. The possibility of transmission related to work is clear. Another point is about the vaccine roll-out. Rightly, the vaccine roll-out tackled the oldest and most vulnerable people first. We are only now arriving at vaccinating the under-50s, but they are the people who are often working in the workplace rather than at home. The vaccine has not reached many of the people who are working in the workplace and who are obviously the most vulnerable to workplace transmission.”
“With an economy such as the one that we have in my area, lots of people work in small manufacturing, warehousing, care services, retailing and other forms of services. We could say that they are all key workers in one form or another because they have kept the country going, but they are working in the workplace rather than at home, so they are exposed to the possibility of workplace transmission. I have given a lot of figures already, but it is good to get them on the record. Yorkshire has 9% of the English population, but 36% of all workplace transmissions for the whole of the country occurred there. So, it is clear that workplace transmission, reflecting the occupational structure and economic base, is a factor. So, more than a third of all workplace transmissions were in Yorkshire alone, which is an important point.”
“That compares with nearly 60% of people working from home in London. In the Minister’s region, there are 10% more people working from home than in Yorkshire. As might be imagined, seven out of 10 people in professional occupations are now working from home, whereas in caring, leisure and other services it is only 15% and among process plant machine operatives it is only 5%. So, 5% compared with 70% shows that there is a stratification issue. Why is that relevant? Because people who are working from home are clearly less prone or susceptible to possible disease transmission at a place of work. As their place of work is their home, they are in their domestic bubble. It is striking that homeworking or working in the workplace relates precisely to occupational structure and the character of the local economy.”
“I do not necessarily expect the Minister to reply to me now, but has the relationship between sparsity and access to hospital services ever been properly considered? It was in my area, because I made sure that the people who were making the decisions fully understood the implications of closing hospitals and reducing the number of beds. There are 10,300 households with no car in my constituency alone, which is a problem. My final point, in terms of what is causing not only our area but West Yorkshire to be a hotspot, is to do with homeworking. Anyone looking at the data will see how striking it is that the proportion of the population who are homeworking varies considerably across the country. For example, in Yorkshire just over a third of people are working from home; two thirds are still working at their place of work.”
“I will discuss the fourth factor before I come to the main issue that I want to raise. We have low access to car ownership in my community, and more than a quarter of households do not have access to a car. As I have already said, I represent a series of villages. The buses are not very good and there is not a frequent service—I am sure thata many hon. Members could say the same thing about their areas. It is very hard for someone to get to hospital if they do not have a car and the bus service is rubbish. There is a problem not simply with the aggregate number of beds throughout the country, but in connection with population sparsity. I wonder whether more work has been done on this issue.”
“Added to that is the fact that I represent former mining communities, where many older men have serious respiratory problems, which obviously makes them vulnerable to a respiratory disease. The second factor is the cuts that have happened. About 38% of our expenditure has been cut since 2010, which leaves our communities less resilient to all kinds of things, including covid, than they would otherwise be. The third factor that I want to briefly highlight is the reduction in the number of bed spaces. There has been a kind of consensus that there were too many beds. I never agreed with that; I fought the cuts in the hospitals in my area, unsuccessfully. Some 21,000 beds—I think I am right in saying critical care beds—have closed since 2010, which is too many. We were not ready for the pandemic.”
“On the other hand, Wakefield—my area—is vaccinating more than the Minister’s council is. I assume that it was a short-term reduction in supply of the vaccine, rather than something that is continuing through to this day, but perhaps the Minister could confirm that. There are four underlying factors. I want to focus on one at the end of my speech, but why is it that some areas of the country have alarming hotspots, such as the ones in my area that I mentioned? The four factors all relate to socioeconomic class, stratification or however one wants to describe it. The first is deprivation. Covid is definitely a disease that feeds off poverty in deprived areas. My constituency is the 111th most deprived; the Minister’s constituency is the 417th.”
“Across the whole of West Yorkshire, there are 20 areas with levels of ongoing infection that are at least 12 times higher than those in her area. Mine is not even the highest in West Yorkshire. The figures are stark. Plotting a graph—clearly I cannot illustrate it here, although I would like to—shows that the rate of infection in my constituency was around the English average back at the beginning of January. Suddenly, the line on the graph takes off relative to the national average. That was within three or four days of the decision that was taken—by scientists, I presume, but with the support of the Government—to reduce the vaccine supply to Yorkshire. They halved the amount of vaccine coming into Yorkshire. The average rate in England has continued on its way, whereas the rate across Yorkshire has accelerated rapidly.”
“The figures were for the UK as a whole. It has gone from 406 in January to 28 now. We often hear that no one is safe unless everybody is safe. There are clear hotspots where the infection is still raging, while in other areas it has almost been eliminated. To make the areas that are already low safe, we have to tackle the hotspots. The UK average is now 28 infections per 100,000, but in my council area it is three times higher, at 72 per 100,000. In West Suffolk, infections are 8.4 per 100,000. Infections are nine times higher in my area of Wakefield than in the Minister’s constituency. That is a staggering difference. I represent 23 small former mining villages in my constituency. In one ward, the figure is five times higher than the English average, but 17 times higher than the figure for the Minister’s constituency. It is staggering.”
“First, I imagine the whole House will join me in mourning the 364 care workers who have died in public service since covid began. Many care workers have told me that they feel undervalued by the fact that their average salary is only £17,200. I am sure there are very few Ministers who could live on that kind of salary. They particularly feel devalued when they discover that the Government are paying nine times that salary equivalent to Test and Trace consultants. It is an outrage. Will the Minister now say how she will show that these people are valued by doing three things: first, end privatisation; secondly, insist on a proper salary rise; and thirdly, ensure that a professional career structure is instituted which recognises and rewards the professionalism, talent and commitment of these essential workers?”
“Is the central fact not that there was communication between a former Prime Minister and Ministers about his private interests? Will the Minister confirm that that is a breach of the long-standing British value that high office is not a grubby route through to great riches in the afterlife? Will he indicate that he could take immediate action while we wait for this inquiry, which sounds like a whitewash to me, to remove the impression that powerful wealth dominates public institutions? He could stop the revolving door between Ministers and the private sector. He could stop immediately all forms of lobbying within Westminster and Whitehall. Finally, he could stop the process of outsourcing to Tory chums.”
“This Government claim to have their roots in libertarianism and, of course, they are champions of liberty, but it is liberty only for the powerful and the wealthy, the “get rich quick” merchants and the spivs, those whose freedoms allow them to cause all kinds of annoyance—firing decent, hard-working employees and then rehiring them on worse conditions and paying poverty wages. Now we have a new freedom—the freedom to bung multimillion-pound taxpayer contracts to mates in the private sector. They have set their sights on our tradition of dissent, because their legislation is designed to crack down on our rights to take action against injustice. Black Lives Matter activists, workers who take industrial action, environmentalists and the women’s movement are all in their sights.”
“I join others in expressing my condolences. This Bill continues the authoritarian drift of this Government. First, we had the Overseas Operations (Service Personnel and Veterans) Bill, which basically gives immunity to people abroad serving our country who committed torture. Then we had immunity given to state agents breaking the law in our country, including the crime of rape. Now we have clause 59 of the Bill, which proposes a 10-year jail sentence for causing the risk of “serious annoyance”—those are the words in the Bill. Note that is not even for causing “annoyance”, but for causing the risk that there may be annoyance. There are many things with which we might risk causing annoyance every day, but it is only in dictatorships or repressive regimes that such actions are subject to drastic sentencing.”
“It is interesting that many police officers have said that they do not wish that power to be bestowed upon them. This House of Commons should be a beacon of liberty—a protector of our rights to speak, associate freely and assemble in public to express our reservations about how the country is going. Repressive legislation will never eliminate the thirst and hunger for justice that remains so powerful in our country today. It is the duty of the Commons to stand up this evening and reject this Bill.”
“I have indeed worked many times with my hon. Friend on all kinds of activities. What the Government have in their sights are the ancient rights of assembly and freedom of association, which are now threatened by clause 59. The fundamental right to free speech means nothing if these other freedoms come under attack. We may end up with a situation in which we are free to shout at the telly in the privacy of our own homes but not free to organise ourselves collectively in public. It is not as if our country has done away with all forms of injustice and inequality, is it? Yet instead of standing against injustice alongside, for example, the women on Clapham Common the other night, the Government appear to be more interested in empowering the police force to arrest people who the state judges to have risked causing annoyance.”
“This is a Budget that sustains everything we have seen—unemployment, poor work, precarious employment, poverty, cuts to the public services and austerity. It should be rejected tomorrow night. The Chancellor needs to go back, with a new calculator, to bring a new Budget back in due course.”
“That is a large amount of money, but it is 147 times less than the amount of money that Germany is spending on infrastructure and it is 15 times less than what the Government are spending with their Tory chums on the track and trace system, which is not working very well. All those things mean that one has to worry about the chronic nature of the problems facing working people in our country. A towns fund has been created, but it has already been cut, actually, through austerity and it is not going to the towns in most need. It is going to those that are most convenient to the Tory party. As for housing, of course they are giving more money to buy houses, but they have done nothing to build more houses, thereby contributing to the chronic problem of housing facing our country. This is not a Budget to build back better.”
“There is almost £1 trillion in unspent corporate liquidity in the banks. There is a large amount of wealth available in our country. The problem is that it is held in a very few hands, and the Chancellor failed to touch it. At the same time, working people, who have sustained our country through the pandemic, are facing a disgraceful situation. We have £8 million being taken by stealth because of the income tax changes. We have a third of key workers now paid less than the living wage. Ten million people are currently working in precarious employment and 14 million people are living in poverty in our country today, alongside the vast wealth I have just spoken about. It is true that the Budget envisages expenditure on infrastructure, but it is £2.4 billion a year.”
“I have three tests for this Budget. The first is: does it leave anybody behind? If someone works hard and plays by the rules, they should be able to expect to get on in society. People who are unable to work should be protected and expect to have benefits that secure a decent life, and public services should be universal, properly financed and available to all. By those standards, the Budget fails. Government Members argue that there is not enough money in Britain. This is one of the richest countries in the world. The problem is that the wealth is located in a handful of large corporations and a few thousand very wealthy people. In the last six months, during the pandemic, the stock exchange increased in value by £630 billion. Since the banking crash, the 1,000 richest people in our country have increased their wealth by £400 billion.”
“We rarely debate the Government’s poor treatment of the north, where life expectancy is falling for the first time in a century, but where we have seen the severest cuts to public health service provision of any region. There are now 195 fewer GP surgeries in Yorkshire and we have the slowest declining covid infection rates. Meanwhile, the Government sent half of the north’s vaccine supply down south. We know that they cut free school meals for the autumn break, but hunger, poverty, service cuts and covid all march hand in hand. May we therefore have a debate in Government time on their disgraceful health record in the north of England?”
“First, however, we would need to replace that part of the British establishment that serves the interests of big money rather than seeking to be its master. With a radical Government on their side and adequate funding, Britain’s towns can once again become the cradles of economic growth, cultural creativity and social justice.”
“Deprived communities are forced to compete against each other for a share of a fund that in any case is unfairly distributed. More than half the towns that get the money from the towns fund are not even in the most deprived category, and quite a lot of them just happen to be in areas of political interest to the governing party. The distribution of financial resources and the location of economic growth are dictated largely by the whims of financial markets, leaving so many towns left behind, and then there is the apparently grubby gerrymandering of the fund itself, as I see it. It does not have to be like that. We do have the power to change things. Don’t say it can’t be done: look at how the last Labour Government used their power to intervene in the collapsing banking market.”
“I represent small towns and villages that at one time were at the very heart of the mighty Yorkshire coalfield. They helped create our wealth, heated our homes and powered our industries, but now too often they feel abandoned, especially as covid begins to impact more heavily on those same towns. We owe those communities a huge duty of solidarity. Large areas in my constituency—those great Yorkshire villages and towns such as Featherstone, Hemsworth, South Elmsall, Upton, South Kirkby, and the list goes on—are among the most deprived communities in the country, but not a penny has come to us from the towns fund. Let us be honest, the financial allocation is inadequate, and much of it is anyway recycled from other spending programmes.”
“Thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker, and I look forward to this technology of the clock counting me down. This is an important debate. Britain’s lop-sided economy has left many of our towns, in recent decades, feeling abandoned as we both centralise and deindustrialise our economy. Of course, we cannot halt economic progress, but we should never turn our backs on those held-back communities in the towns. We clearly need state intervention, but on a massive scale—a new Marshall plan. The towns fund simply does not hack it. Towns have been left behind by gigantic global capital flows driven by a new and even more remote phase of capitalism and by a political elite operating in the interests of capitalism, rather than of those communities.”
“Wakefield CCG decided not to provide information to local residents about the vaccination roll-out here. It said it feared it would lead to awkward questions from a sceptical public about differential treatment—a kind of postcode lottery for key workers, the elderly and the chronically sick. Can the Secretary of State confirm the comments he has made today, which I welcome, about the release of more granular data? However, they are to be provided by huge and remote sustainability and transformation partnerships, so will we know what is happening at the local level to maintain local public confidence? Finally, will he comment on reports in the Health Service Journal today that next week, the amount of vaccine will be cut by half in Yorkshire and the Humber?”
“After 10 years of this Government, before covid, constituents of mine were averaging £100 a week less in earnings than the average for the rest of the country; now a third of them are on furlough, which means a further £100 less per week—£10,000 a year less than the average. Will the Minister understand that when the Government talk about levelling up, in an area like mine people will say it is time that Ministers got out of their privileged bubbles and did something for communities all over this country, where millions of people are living very precarious lives?”
“When people discover that it is costing each household £3,500, I think the general response will be that this is a massive rip-off—some would go further and suggest that our British standards of probity, which lasted for more than a century, have been abandoned and have become so corrupted as to no longer be acceptable. Whatever one’s view on that, it is hard to disagree that the Government are spending taxpayers’ money like confetti at a wedding—in a most wasteful and reckless manner.”
“I know it is not the subject of the audit report, but given the facts that emerged when Carillion went bust—that the Government had abandoned any attempt whatever to monitor the delivery of the contract—it is extraordinary that no further steps have been taken to protect the public purse. This is taxpayer money being wasted on a colossal scale, and in an unjustifiable way. When we consider that outsourcing is costing each household in this country £3,500, the scale is extraordinary. There is an old expression, is there not, about never wasting a crisis? The Tories have not wasted this one. They have handed over billions of pounds to their Tory chums in the private sector in a wasteful manner, with no real effort to monitor contracts or secure value for money.”
“To listen to the hon. Member for North East Derbyshire (Lee Rowley), one would think everything was rosy in the garden—of course, it is not. The Government have adopted processes that abandon the decades-old traditions of checking value for money when spending in the private sector. How else can we explain that, for example, £95 billion of outsourcing resulted in a 20% increase in contracts, and the £14.3 billion of additional expenditure on contracts that had been let? How else can we explain that many contracts were let without tendering processes of any kind? Some £10 billion of taxpayers’ money was spent without any form of tendering at all. To rely on the process that the hon. Member for North East Derbyshire has just described simply does not convince. One billion pounds have gone to Tory chums—these are staggering amounts of money.”
“I am sure that the Prime Minister will share the pleasure that we all take in the great engineering skills that are displayed in our country, especially in the north, and agree that some of the great jewels in the crown are the engineers at Rolls-Royce. Is he aware that Rolls-Royce is about to offshore 350 jobs from the north of England? That will be a devastating blow to that part of the country and remove part of our national industrial infrastructure. Does he agree with the workforce, who are campaigning, that it is in the national interest to retain those jobs in our country, and will he use everything in his power to ensure that that offshoring does not take place?”
“It is well known that working-class boys and young men are severely disadvantaged in the education system, but I wonder whether the House is aware of the recent Sutton Trust report, which showed that the situation has become deeply entrenched during the Government’s mishandling of the covid crisis. It is the job of the Department for Education to promote social mobility, yet the report predicts that working-class young men and boys will be 7.5% less mobile, with £4,000 less in lifetime earnings. Either the Government are incompetent or they simply do not care about the entrenchment of privilege and poverty—which is it?”