Sir Desmond Swayne
MP for New Forest West · Conservative · United Kingdom
“Just how confident is the Minister that this was not a cyber-attack? How confident is he of the resilience of the system in the event of such an attack, and how confident is he in the willingness and ability of the Government to retaliate in the event of such an attack, as the best form of deterrence?”
“I join that long list of UK Ministers who have raised, at the very highest level in Israel, the most egregious practices in the west bank, designed specifically to prevent a two-state solution, only for Israeli policy to double down. Accordingly, I congratulate the Secretary of State.”
“I am delighted by the reprieve—the New Forest was to be split, and part of it swallowed by Southampton. Will the Secretary of State accept my representation that we want the integrity of the New Forest to remain, and the last thing we want is for it all to be swallowed by Southampton?”
“To address one of the points made by my right hon. Friend the Member for South Holland and The Deepings, that takes account of the fact that there may be different levels of need in different areas.”
“Yes, essentially today we are putting these services on a statutory footing. Of course subsequent Governments can change statutes, but this Bill makes it an explicit decision of this House and Parliament, rather than a fiat by Government decision.”
“I will address exactly that point shortly. If a child is not developing properly and is not sleeping, feeding or communicating, parents need to know that they have somewhere to turn.”
The complete record
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“The National Association of Head Teachers says that the results—up to a quarter of them—are inaccurate to the extent of being one whole level out. If that is incorrect, will the Secretary of State tell us how he knows it is incorrect?”
“The questions that have been asked about the Kelly report and the answers that the Leader of the House has attempted to give are eloquent testimony to the fact that there is clearly a need for a debate on whether we need primary legislation. The fact that the exchanges have been so shambolic today indicates that the Government appear to have been caught napping.”
“2. What assessment he has made of the level of risk of power cuts over the next 10 years resulting from shortages in electricity-generating capacity.”
“The chief executive of Ofgem has said that we are way behind the French and Germans in generating additional low-carbon capacity. How has that arisen? Was it due to negligence, stupidity or what?”
“There is a gulf between what Ministers say at the Dispatch Box and what is actually happening. Yesterday, at column 782W, the Minister told me in terms that these schemes include PAYE, but when I made representations on behalf of my constituents, Excelsior Coaches, and wrote to the Chancellor, I received a letter back from Revenue and Customs saying that the Chancellor had never mentioned PAYE and that no such scheme for PAYE existed. Will the Minister find out exactly what is going on?”
“Given the large and worrying number of people who say that they do not understand why our forces are in Afghanistan, does the Secretary of State acknowledge that there is a need to define the mission better, and to propagandise it?”
“Did the Minister hear the piece on “Farming Today” this morning on what is likely to happen to food prices over the next 20 years? I will not try your patience, Mr. Speaker, so may I just ask the Minister whether he will add his voice to mine in seeking a full day’s debate on agriculture from the Leader of the House?”
“My entry is in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests. What estimate has the Minister made of the impact that this will have on recruitment to the Territorial Army?”
“When may we have a debate on agriculture? I am sure that we are long overdue one. It tends to get crowded out of Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs questions. Might it be a subject for next Thursday’s topical debate?”
“When the recovery starts—I hope it is starting even now—one of the principal difficulties faced by small businesses will be the need for working capital. The Economic Secretary will be aware that the Chancellor has already announced means by which small businesses’ cash-flow difficulties can be addressed during the recession, in particular, through the deferment of taxes. The right hon. Gentleman made it clear that that included national insurance and other payroll taxes, but I can think of no other payroll tax than pay-as-you-earn. Is PAYE included in those provisions?”
“I think that my hon. Friend is rather harsh. I can understand Labour Members’ unwillingness to attend given that when Ministers are asked perfectly straightforward questions they do not give an answer. I asked the Minister a perfectly straightforward question about PAYE, and he avoided answering it. Why should Labour Members turn up? They have got the message and gone elsewhere.”
“My hon. Friend will know that mental illness is no respecter of parliamentary divisions and that the unit serves my constituents as well as his. I hope that the NHS trust does not underestimate the huge anxiety being caused to relatives who know the needs of the loved ones who habitually come and go from the units.”
“T10. In his answer to my hon. Friend the Member for North-East Cambridgeshire (Mr. Moss), the Foreign Secretary implied that our grand abstention was part of a cunning plan involving President Sarkozy. What was the plan?”
“The small firms loan guarantee scheme and the enterprise finance guarantee scheme have produced less than half the target amount of lending. Meanwhile, firms in my constituency with good order books and good prospects are still screaming for credit. What are Ministers going to do about it?”
“And another thing: why is it that someone who is languishing on jobseeker’s allowance has to wait six months before they can retrain? Why can they not start retraining straight away—and perhaps be retrained in some of the skills for the wonderful strategy the Minister has just described?”
“Given the economic difficulty and the background, can the Chancellor tell us whether there is any difference in principle between setting the overall expenditure envelope and setting the departmental total?”
“Does the Chancellor agree with the Governor of the Bank of England’s assessment that it was not clear how the Bank would discharge its new responsibilities if it could not go beyond issuing sermons? Or did the Governor say that simply because the Chancellor had not shown him a copy of the paper that he brought to the House today?”
“Would it not be a much better idea simply to elect people capable of making those decisions? If the Minister thinks that is a good idea—it seems to work elsewhere in the English-speaking world—it is our policy, so the best way of implementing it would be to have a general election very soon.”
“14. How many jobseeker’s allowance claimants there were in (a) the UK and (b) New Forest, West constituency on the latest date for which figures are available.”
“That figure of 963 has increased faster than the comparable figure in almost any other constituency in the land, principally because of the large number of small businesses that are located in the New Forest, many of which have very good order books but have cash flow problems. Were the zombie banks able to lend to them, they would have survived. Does the Minister agree that if the Government had got on the case and had a much more impressive loan guarantee scheme on the books earlier, those businesses would have survived?”
“The Secretary of State rightly pointed out in his statement that we have now established in law very challenging targets for the reduction of emissions. When are we going to get anything like a plan for how those targets are going to be delivered?”
“The Prime Minister has been making much of his proposals for constitutional reform and for a code of conduct for hon. Members—but in forums other than this one. Are we to be favoured with a statement about these proposals, so that we can scrutinise them?”
“Am I am alone in suspecting that this is an entirely content-free Bill? Will the Home Secretary explain in precisely what way the Bill will make it more difficult for people to come here whom we do not want to come here?”
“Does my hon. Friend read any significance into the fact that after having announced the new policy on citizenship, the Secretary of State pointedly refused to take no fewer than three interventions from her own side, despite delivering what was a relatively short speech for a Second Reading debate?”
“A few moments ago, the Secretary of State was asking my hon. Friend from a sedentary position whether he would support her proposals. I hope that he will give no such commitment, as we have no idea what those proposals will be, as yet.”
“With the possible exception of you, Mr. Speaker, virtually every Member of this House was elected on a solemn pledge to put the European constitution to a referendum. If some Members have abrogated that promise on the spurious grounds that the treaty is not the constitution, does the Minister think the electorate will ever trust them again?”
“9. What recent progress has been made in implementing the Government's Building Colleges for the Future programme; and if he will make a statement.”
“The £300 million is about one twentieth of the amount required to meet the expectations of those colleges that have— [Interruption.] I tell the Secretary of State that I would not, but the key question for him is: who was asleep at the wheel when this debacle unfolded? How much of that £300 million will filter down to Brockenhurst college?”
“My interest is in the register. Will the Minister reflect on recommendation 50? Although the result may have more the character of an agreed merger than a hostile takeover bid, ultimately the outcome will be same: we will have lost an Army with its own ethos and acquired a mere reserve, and something of value will have been lost.”
“Is that really what this day’s debate is about—the Opposition? Is it not extraordinary that the Government begin with an attack on the Opposition rather than with an exposition of their own case?”
“As a neo-classical liberal, I could not disagree more profoundly with the world view of the hon. Member for Luton, North (Kelvin Hopkins). Indeed, I wonder whether we grew up in different worlds. He described, through rose-tinted spectacles, the 1970s. My recollections are so different: revising for my O-levels by candlelight because of the chaos engendered by the social democratic ideal that he described.”
“Principally, however, I put it down to the enormous number of small businesses in the industrial estates around the market towns. They have been very hard hit by the credit crunch. The world that the Secretary of State described of the real help that is being provided now to small business and getting credit flowing again does not bear any relationship to the reality faced by small businesses in my constituency. I am approached every Friday at my surgeries by small businesses that have viable order books; they are good businesses, but are experiencing enormous cash-flow problems. Their difficulty is that they are still being serviced by zombie banks, which are still withdrawing credit or providing it only on impossible terms.”
“Let us take it on the chin now, rather than have the economy flinching, knowing that the blow is to come, as that will be so damaging for confidence in the future and, in particular, as we attempt to recover. I want to say a few words about the New Forest. We had high expectations of what might come out of the Budget because we had been hit so hard by the recession. In fact, the growth in unemployment in my constituency has been higher than almost anywhere else in the country since the end of last summer. I put that down largely to the fact that so many people have commuted to financial services industries in and around Bournemouth and Southampton and that we have headquartered a disproportionate number of construction companies.”
“The way in which this debate began was, of course, ridiculous—with the Secretary of State for Innovation, Universities and Skills announcing that it is about what the Opposition propose, rather than the Government’s Budget resolutions. The reality is exactly as I said: this is the post-dated Budget, the do nothing Budget, the Budget that will not tackle the elephant in the room—the huge deficit. It is extraordinary that the Government had so little to say about their forecasts and the deficits that will build up. It is extraordinarily important that those should be dealt with. I would of course prefer that those deficits were dealt with in the next financial period.”
“Member for Luton, North might disparage the International Monetary Fund’s forecasting, it was noticeable that, within minutes of the Chancellor sitting down last Wednesday, the IMF came up with a very different set of forecasts. That is important because this is the post-dated Budget. All the important decisions on what is to happen are not in the next financial year. How we are to deal with the enormous, crushing deficits is not to be decided in the next financial year. That has all been put off for future years and decisions. Therefore, the forecasts become ever more important than they were in the past. That is why it is important that those on the Treasury Bench should give an account of those forecasts.”
“They were the result of it—the stagflation and everything that went with it, although however much I might disagree with the hon. Gentleman, it is a privilege to follow him in the debate, because he is assiduous in this Chamber, courageously doing his duty to hold the Executive to account. For that, we should all be grateful. I hope that, at some stage during the debate on the Budget resolutions, we will get a full exposition of the Government’s growth forecasts and how they were arrived at. Perhaps the Minister plans to give us that exposition when making the winding-up speech from the Treasury Bench. It is important that we get it, because, to be charitable, those forecasts have proved controversial. However much the hon.”
“All those issues have never been discussed or scrutinised. I begin to wonder whether that might after all provide some part of the explanation for the extraordinary growth statistics that were brought before us last Wednesday, with the so-called trampoline bounce. Could it possibly be an inflationary bounce? Could it possibly be a bounce that will destroy the savings of those who still have some left?”
“I would have thought that the Chancellor would have given us an exposition of precisely where we are with this key departure from conventional monetary policy. It is extraordinary that the Bank of England has created bank deposits to a significant proportion of our national income—printing money, as the euphemism goes. We have not had a vote on that. We have not had a statement on it. We have not even debated it. It is extraordinary in a free Parliament that is supposed to have its finger on the pulse of Government policy that that has gone so unmentioned. I am not saying that I am against the policy. I know that economists such as Tim Congdon believe that it is right, but there is a series of questions that we ought properly to have scrutinised—how much, when, when do we stop, and where are we in the cycle?”
“I support, by and large, the main plank of monetary policy, which is a significant reduction in interest rates, however painful that may have been to a very high proportion of savers in my constituency—hon. Members should bear in mind that I have, I think, the second-highest age profile of any parliamentary division. Those people have saved all their lives and done the right thing, but they are now suffering very much in order to see interest rates reduced for people who often enough have not done the right thing. The Budget should have been much more generous to those savers to compensate them in other ways for the important policy of reducing interest rates. However, it is the other aspect of monetary policy, which is scarcely mentioned, that concerns me more—the whole business of quantitative easing.”
“We have to provide the guarantee and the insurance to that new business rather than dust the old toxic business that already pollutes their balance sheet. That is why we have been asking since well before Christmas for a much more ambitious loan guarantee scheme. All the schemes that the Government have announced have not delivered a single loan to constituents in the New Forest. That is the difficulty that we face: credit is not flowing, and it has to if we are to recover from this recession. I want to conclude by saying a bit about the Government’s monetary policy. I would have thought that the Budget statement and debate ought to have at least focused on elements of that.”
“Given the state of their balance sheets, banks should be averse to taking on more of those assets and to making more of those loans to small businesses. The Government’s second banking rescue attempted to deal with the problem of toxic assets by saying, “Right, we’re providing a guarantee—a form of insurance.” That was necessary, but it was not enough, because that guarantee does not cut in until the banks lose virtually all their capital base. The prudent banker will still hoard his cash and try to rebuild his balance sheet rather than make loans to the small businesses in my constituency that desperately need them. If we are to deal with that problem, and to stop the banks being zombie banks and get them lending again, we have to deal with the new loans that we are encouraging them to take on.”
“I agree that those are important avenues, but I still support the initial banking rescue and the second banking rescue. They were both necessary, but far from sufficient. The problem is this: were I a prudent and risk-averse banker—I wish we had had more of those over the past 10 years—I would be arguing against making loans to the very small businesses for which I am demanding action now. That is the irony. The banks’ balance sheets are stuffed with an enormous amount of high-risk assets—toxic assets, if you like, Mr. Deputy Speaker. The last thing that a prudent banker should do is to start taking on more high-risk lending—and let us face it, lending to small business in a recession is relatively high risk.”
“Those are precisely the debates that we used to have when I was a student. It was healthy that there was that political divide and argument on those points. The problem is that we have arrived at the current situation with an enormous proportion of the national income being consumed by the Government, particularly in the future as the debt grows, not as a consequence of any thought-through, discussed or debated action, but purely by accident and incompetence.”
“If the Government are successful in achieving their target, announced in “Digital Britain”, of reducing illegal file sharing by 70 per cent., that will still leave 2 million individuals to be sued. That is clearly an unrealistic possibility. Will the Secretary of State look again at the technological possibilities of excluding the miscreants, rather than clogging up our courts? “Digital Britain” should be a huge opportunity for creative industries to lead the country out of recession, but at the moment, for every file legally downloaded, 600 are stolen.”
“The Minister did not draw attention to the fact that Iranian activity has been responsible for the deaths of our servicemen in Iraq—and now, particularly, in Afghanistan. What are we going to do, other than merely protest?”
“One of the most important ways in which to get young people to take on apprenticeships is to interest them in science and engineering. Will the Government accept my congratulations on their announcement earlier this week that they will implement the Conservative Teach First policy? May I urge them to hold fast to those principles and not to be put off by the agitation of teacher trade unions?”
“Given that the working time directive is, in essence, a health and safety measure, can it be healthy or safe that the future generation of consultants will have less than half the clinical exposure that the current generation has?”
“Ministers have made it clear that the agency will have a key role in carrying forward the eco-towns initiative. In doing so, will it make any concession whatever to democratic accountability?”
“T5. What are Ministers going to do to rescue small sports clubs from the disaster of the Licensing Act 2003, which has meant their licensing fees go up from £25 to the best part of £1,000?”
“If the amount that the Chancellor has said that RBS must lose before his guarantee kicks in is correct, then, if I were still doing the job that I was doing 12 years ago in group risk management in RBS—[Hon. Members: “Ah!”] It would not have happened on my watch. On the basis of traditional banking practices, I would be urging the bank to build up reserves rather than engage in additional lending. Why would I be wrong?”