YouSaid · the spoken record
Jon Trickett
On the record 2018–2026
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This is everything the corpus holds for Jon Trickett. It is not everything they have said on the record.
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“Huge amounts of money—tens of billions of pounds—have been taken out of local government across the whole country, in all communities, and Tory MPs are no doubt finding the squeeze as tough as it has been in our areas for the last 13 years and beyond.”
House of Commons8 February 2023Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“Although I was the leader of the great city of Leeds for a number of years—under Mrs Thatcher—let me refer to the situation in Wakefield, which is my home council. Local government was difficult in those days; it is almost intolerable to be part of it now—I speak with experience. Wakefield Council, which is a great Labour council led by Councillor Denise Jeffery, has had major cuts. I think £2 in every £5 has been cut since 2015, in a community on its knees. I will illustrate that point in a moment or two. This year, it looks as if there will be another £14 million of cuts. How is that for a Minister who is trying to celebrate the amount of money that he says he is giving to local government? In the meantime, we will have to raise council tax. If I remember to, I will make a point about raising council tax in a moment or two.”
House of Commons8 February 2023Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“My right hon. Friend is absolutely right. We need indices that reflect the need that communities experience. Those indices should then be translated into a formula that provides some kind of social justice. I represent a rural community in what was once the mighty Yorkshire coalfield, which heated, lit and provided power for our country. It helped to create the wealth that is now in the hands of a very few corporations and rich individuals. The hard-working people in that community were brought to their knees by a Government decision that left us in a really deprived position. It is not our normal practice to get up and whinge, and that is not what I want to do today. I want to make the political case that we have got this wrong; that the Government are wrong.”
House of Commons8 February 2023Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“When they hear the now Prime Minister saying, in a swaggering tone, “On behalf of prosperity, and in the face of deprivation, we have shovelled money into communities like mine”, they think it is unfair, unjust, cruel and untrue. I predict this: when the local elections come in May, people are not going to believe it is the Labour council’s fault that the council tax has gone up. They will know where the responsibility lies. It lies with this Government, and mark my words they will pay a price in May this year.”
House of Commons8 February 2023Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“We have heard people across the House talking about their constituencies, as I have partly done about mine, and then trying to make a special case. I do not want to make a special case; I want to say that the Government’s indices are wrong. It is true that the formula is incorrect, but the bottom line is that we have underprovided for social services, public services, education and all the other services that councils should provide. The aggregate is too small, and the Government should accept that. It would be better to hear that than what we are hearing now as some sort of good news. My final point is this. I can speak on behalf of my constituency: in two weeks, I will have been first elected 27 years ago. I know what my people think.”
House of Commons8 February 2023Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“The final link in this chain is social mobility. If a large population is not achieving its full potential because of underinvestment in education, social mobility begins to collapse. The hon. Member for West Dorset was talking about social mobility in his constituency. The Government created a mobility index, which shows that of the 533 seats in England, mine is the 529th least socially mobile. How can it be that statistically a child born today in my constituency will die younger than those elsewhere, live in poverty and be very unlikely to make it up the so-called social ladder? There is a continuum of effects from underinvestment in a community that has been suffering from deprivation for a long time. The situation is this: austerity has gone too far and too deep, and it is impacting on communities.”
House of Commons8 February 2023Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“The number of people in my constituency with NVQ level 4 or higher is 22%; in the Prime Minister’s constituency, it is 42% and in London it is 59%. There is massive educational underachievement in some communities across the country, including the one I represent. Yet there are these cuts. What happens with a community that has underachieved educationally? I will tell the House: wages are in decline. I refer again to my constituency, but I am making a general, national point: the average wage there is £495 a week—£12,000 a year less than the average worker earns in London, or £5,000 a year less than the average across the nation as a whole. That is a consequence of underinvestment in education because of the cuts. Funding cuts feed through to poor education results and then to low wages and underinvestment in business.”
House of Commons8 February 2023Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“I entirely agree. I am not making a special point about former coalfield communities, but they were treated particularly badly by a previous Conservative Government and have never been allowed to properly get back on their feet. I want to take one council service—education—to illustrate an important point that I would like the Government to think about, although I do not expect particularly progressive decisions from them. In my district, the cuts to school funding over the years have been £400 per pupil—£400 less for every child in my community since the cuts began. People might say, “Well, we’ve all had to take a little bit of austerity”, and we have. But look at the educational results in my constituency—we have also heard about this in Reading, North Durham, Luton and elsewhere.”
House of Commons8 February 2023Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“Work had been done, and further work had been carried out not simply by the council but by other officers and by the firm I referred to—it is called Backstage Academy—on the basis of a promise made to this House. What happened, Minister? People in our area know that I am not allowed to say that the Ministers were liars, and I would not dream of saying that, but they are saying that I should say that we were cheated of that money and the opportunities and life chances that we might have had. Those people have grown up in villages that were left devastated all that time ago with the closure of the pits.”
House of Commons7 February 2023Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“The average pay on the campus they have set up is more than £40,000, whereas average pay in the village is £18,000. We all recognised that we needed to build a bridge between the deprivation in South Kirkby and the immensely successful private sector development at the top of the hill. They have raised £50 million of investment. We then put in a bid for £20 million, which would have levered in a further £30 million—that could have had a dramatic effect, and it was private-sector led. Apart from the whole process being a disgrace, I feel so annoyed because a Government Minister—of course under a previous Prime Minister, if Members can remember back to last June—told the House that we were getting our £20 million.”
House of Commons7 February 2023Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“Areas such as mine have been devastated by successive Tory Governments, starting with the closure of the collieries without a proper industrial strategy. So by any criteria those areas should be gaining access to additional funding if the Government are serious about dealing with deprivation. Notwithstanding my objections, we put together a bid for South Kirkby, one of the poorest areas of my constituency. It was put together with a private sector firm that is quite the most remarkable company I have seen. It was built from nothing. Adrian and Lee are behind it, and they realised that there is big money in the industry of rock and roll. They are producing a series of activities, and the company is unique in Europe—there are only two such companies in the world. We put a bid together with them.”
House of Commons7 February 2023Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“I represent a community that is among the most deprived—if we are not careful, we will be into a “Four Yorkshiremen” sketch, as we share details of deprivation. We do not want to get into that, and it is not right that that is how the Government have structured the competition for funding. The average weekly wage in my area is £495; in London it is £728—each worker on average pay earns £12,0000 a year more in London. In terms of NVQ level 4, we are at 22%, whereas in the Prime Minister’s constituency it is twice as many people. In terms of professional and managerial jobs, we have half as many as in London, and since 2010, weekly earnings have increased by only 6% in my area, as opposed to 22% in London.”
House of Commons7 February 2023Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“Thank you for your guidance, Sir Christopher, and for your generosity in giving us an extra seven minutes. I am grateful to the hon. Member for Glasgow North East (Anne McLaughlin) for initiating this important debate. I object to the whole process: the Government created the divisions in our society that the levelling-up programme is meant to repair. Those divisions are so deep, and the cuts so vast, particularly in more deprived areas, that the proposed programme is simply a competition among areas of deprivation for crumbs off the Government’s table. It is not acceptable that the Government have set out the programme as they have. If they really want to deal with levelling up—clearly, they do not—they need to change the entire market-led, “Government stand back” approach and make serious interventions.”
House of Commons7 February 2023Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“I totally agree. The Prime Minister changed and the politics of the country changed, and they suddenly saw an opportunity to dip their hands into a bag of funds that a previous Prime Minister had created and to use those for their own political purposes. It is a disgrace. We are dealing with the poorest people in the country. Is the Minister aware that women in my constituency are now dying younger than ever before? I think the average is 66 years of healthy life. They are dying before men, which is very unusual, and that number is declining. We need something to be done as a matter of urgency. Will the Minister at least send us a courtesy letter—we have not had one—as to why we were betrayed in the way we were?”
House of Commons7 February 2023Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“I say that because I have become aware of large numbers of people over the years whose children have been excluded from school and who subsequently said that they realised that their child had undiagnosed and unaddressed health problems. I have to say that it seemed to be a particular issue in school academies. I wonder whether the Minister has had a look at that and whether she could write to the relevant Committee with any data on that matter.”
House of Commons6 February 2023Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“I wonder whether school academies, which are relatively autonomous and self-governing, have sufficiently strong guidance relating to children and young people who have what is called “challenging behaviour”. It may well be that some of them are challenging, but many of them have undiagnosed neurodivergent issues that need to be addressed. Is the Minister satisfied that there are sufficiently strong processes in place to prevent the exclusion, sometimes from more than one school, of young pupils who are neurodivergent? Eventually they either abscond or truant from school, or are simply kept at home by their parents because they feel that the system is almost abusive to their child.”
House of Commons6 February 2023Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“The Government promised that by the end of the strategy in 2026, which is years away, they would have made “demonstrable progress on reducing diagnosis waiting times and improving diagnostic pathways for children, young people and adults across the country.” That is not an ambitious statement. I do not want to be too discordant, because there is agreement on both sides of the House that this problem needs to be addressed and that we can transform lives. I am sure the Minister is fully conscious of that, given her professional background. I will not continue too long, because a number of Members still want to speak, but I want to say that is important that we reflect on school admissions and exclusions.”
House of Commons6 February 2023Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“ITN and the Bureau of Investigative Journalism did a careful analysis across the country, and they estimate that the true scale of the SEND funding crisis, the true financial black hole facing councils, is more than £1 billion, which is a staggering amount of money. It would be interesting to know whether the Government have an accurate assessment of how much it would cost to resolve these issues. After all, the Government can make a difference to people’s lives if they choose to act, which is what they should be doing. I looked at the national autism strategy, which was published last year and offered peanuts to try to resolve some of these problems. I understand how difficult this is, and how we have to train skilled professionals; none the less, it offered peanuts.”
House of Commons6 February 2023Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“These children would be less likely to develop mental health issues later in life if they are diagnosed early, and the same is true of adults who are awaiting diagnosis. Both sides of the House agree that is clear. I congratulate everyone who signed the petitions asking for Parliament to debate this subject, and I look forward to the Minister’s response. I do not want to strike a discordant note, but two Conservative Members raised the question of money. I am from Yorkshire, and Yorkshiremen and women do not like spending money, although it is occasionally necessary—moths fly out of my purse if I ever manage to take out a £5 note.”
House of Commons6 February 2023Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“We have heard these figures before, so I will be brief, but in England alone 120,000 people are currently waiting for an autism assessment, and 100,000 have waited more than three months, which is an important moment because NICE says that people should be seen within three months. That is a huge increase in the number of people waiting for assistance, diagnosis and treatment—a 40% increase in a single year. This problem exploded during the period of lockdown. No doubt there are a number of reasons for that, but these are individual human beings whose lives could be transformed if an early diagnosis was made and treatment recommended. Late diagnosis causes problems for children in school, for the other children, for teachers and for parents and families.”
House of Commons6 February 2023Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“The family spent every penny of their savings on home adaptations, and now there is no money left. The mother has had to go on to universal credit. Even if they wanted to go private, they could not afford it, and they should not have to do so. [Dame Angela Eagle in the Chair ] There is a second case, on which I do not want to spend long because it is neither autism nor ADHD—it is dyspraxia, which is a related condition. A daughter was diagnosed and received some support, but the system failed to allow for her transition from school to university, which caused a great crisis in the family. We are seeing problems all over the country but, as I said in my opening remarks, these personal, familial and household crises are brought on by the way in which we organise our country.”
House of Commons6 February 2023Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“Of course it is a crisis brought on by the way in which we organise our society, but I will come back to that in a moment. I want first to record the experience of one family, although of course we all have many similar stories. This is a family with a three-year-old son awaiting assessment for autism, sensory processing disorder and ADHD. He is non-verbal at three years old and has high sensory needs; he receives the high rate of disability living allowance. The referral in this three-year-old boy’s case was made in March 2022. As of two weeks ago, he had had no access at all to any support. The family are managing on two to three hours’ sleep a night. The mother felt it was necessary to give up her job to care for the boy—no doubt there are many mothers, fathers and grandparents all over the country doing similar things.”
House of Commons6 February 2023Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“It is a pleasure to be here under your guidance, Ms Fovargue. I congratulate the hon. Member for Carshalton and Wallington (Elliot Colburn), who introduced this debate, and the Petitions Committee on organising the debate, even though the petitions had not reached 100,000 signatures. This is a very important debate. We have heard heartbreaking stories from Members across the House. I am sure that the Minister will have noted the unity across the House on this matter and will respond appropriately. I argue that there is a crisis in our country. It is a crisis for millions of individuals. I think it was said that there are 3 million people—children and adults—with ADHD and nearly three quarters of a million, at least, with autism. For each one of those people and for each of those families and households, this is a personal crisis.”
House of Commons6 February 2023Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“It is difficult to find the information, but there was a major incident at Sellafield in, I think, November of 2019, when a lot of radioactive liquor went into the ground from the Magnox swarf storage silo—to get the correct wording. The terrain remains polluted, but we are told that the remediation works will not take place until after the facility is totally decommissioned. Four out of five current reactors are due to be decommissioned by 2028. Will the HSE, now that this has been brought under UK legislation, be supervising carefully that decommissioning process—”
House of Commons30 January 2023Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Hollobone. The Minister would like us to focus purely on the mistake that was made, although I guess she does not want to have made a mistake in the first place, but I think we are entitled to ask whether, in bringing the legislation home to the UK, the HSE is tooled up properly to deal with nuclear industry issues. I will therefore make a couple of points to test whether the HSE is capable of handling the work that has now been brought solely within the UK. I tried to find the number of accidents that have taken place in the nuclear industry in the past few years.”
House of Commons30 January 2023Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“While we are constructing the new nuclear facilities, will the HSE be able to charge fees, and levy other charges, to the industry for the construction period? How will that be managed? Finally, the HSE looks, to me, as though it is drastically understaffed. Nuclear is one of the most dangerous industries in the country, and we are proposing to build more facilities, as well as to decommission some. Can the Minister convince us that, by bringing all this legislation home into the UK, the fees that will be charged to the industry will cover all the aspects of work which I have just described?”
House of Commons30 January 2023Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“Instead of 1,500 inspectors across the whole HSE, there are now fewer than 500 main grade inspectors. With the fees and charges that the HSE collects from industry, will it be able to staff the nuclear industry properly? What does the Minister imagine the fees and charges will amount to? Will that aggregate on top of the £136 million budgeted now? Finally, as well as the costs of decommissioning—presumably charged to the industry through fees and charges by the HSE—what will be the situation in relation to the construction of all the nuclear facilities being envisaged by the Government? I worked as a manual worker for many years in the construction industry, which is very dangerous. Thousands of days a year are lost because of accidents in the construction industry.”
House of Commons30 January 2023Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“Thank you for that advice, Mr Hollobone. That is precisely the point that I was about to arrive at. The industry is meant to be charged to recover costs incurred by the HSE, but—my hon. Friend the Member for Oldham East and Saddleworth made this point—there have been huge cuts in the budgetary provision to the HSE by the taxpayer in recent years: £100 million less. Not all that goes to nuclear, and the Chair wants me to keep to the subject of the legislation, but will the Minister tell the Committee whether the fees charged to the industry will cover all the costs of decommissioning—the point I have just made—and of other accidents? Outside the nuclear accidents I have just described, will the Minister also tell us how many other accidents at workplaces happened? Is all that expenditure recovered in fees and charges, as discussed?”
House of Commons30 January 2023Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“In her written response, could the Minister indicate what the costs were in relation to the incident at Sellafield? How much of those costs were recovered, possibly including anticipated costs because it is not yet finished?”
House of Commons30 January 2023Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“In earlier comments, I found that the Leader of the House was trying to suggest that ambulance workers are not co-operating with management as nurses are. I recently visited my local picket of ambulance workers, and there was a protocol in place: when there was an emergency, the picket immediately and voluntarily went to see the patient. Will she withdraw her comments? Has she noted that this morning T he T elegraph says that recent weekly statistics show that 2,837 more people than usual died, which is 20% higher than the average. Does she accept what is happening? There is not a shred of evidence that the strikes are causing these problems; it is a failure of management of the NHS by the Government.”
House of Commons26 January 2023Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“It is around £300 billion, which is an astonishing amount of money. The OECD, the European Commission and the United Nations have all said that procurement carries the biggest risk of corruption or fraud in modern states. Of the £12 billion that was spent on PPE, £4 billion was spent on contracts that failed to meet the NHS standards—a third was spent on supplies that were not fit for purpose. Some £10.5 billion-worth of contracts was awarded without any fair or open competition in a seven-month period at the height of the pandemic. We understand that there was a national crisis and huge pressure on the NHS, but notwithstanding that, something went badly wrong; everybody must agree with that.”
House of Commons25 January 2023Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“I am pleased to speak under your chairpersonship, Ms McVey. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Birkenhead (Mick Whitley), who has made a great contribution to the debate. I agree with him that the procurement of services and goods during the pandemic was a disgrace. It is hard to avoid the word “racketeering” when we consider what happened. There was a time when suppliers would meet on the golf course—perhaps at the 19th hole, as they used to say—to rig the prices for providing services to local councils, and there was debate about whether that took place in freemasons’ lodges and elsewhere; now, it seems that they just pick up the phone to a Tory Minister or MP and it gives them access to the VIP lane. One pound in every £3 of public spending goes on procurement, and possibly more.”
House of Commons25 January 2023Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“One is serving and enhancing shareholder value as a private sector provider; the other is public service. Well, I know what I want for the staff who treat me, my family or my constituents. I want people who are motivated by one thing only: providing the highest possible quality service. That is what motivated people. The three women I just talked about, who were cleaners and went on strike, were treated in a really shabby way. Their greatest concern was the kids left in the school. The toilets were not being cleaned. They would talk to me regularly about their guilty consciences at being unable to provide the service. They were interested in only one thing: providing a service to those children.”
House of Commons25 January 2023Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“I have experience of that in my constituency. We had a service for cleaning a school a few years ago. The first thing the company did was to cut wages and try to get rid of some of the staff. The staff went on strike, which went on a long time, and the school was filthy. That contract was frankly a disgrace. We all know that that happens everywhere. We see wages falling as a share of GDP. What is the process behind that happening? There are a number of processes, but one is outsourcing, driving down wages in order to increase profits. My fifth point is this. A service provided in the public sector is motivated by the single ethos of public service. It tries to provide a service to the public without a mind to delivering profits and dividends to shareholders. There are two contesting ethoses—if that is the correct plural—in play.”
House of Commons25 January 2023Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“No evidence has been produced anywhere in the world that outsourcing is cheaper than insourcing. It has been looked at by the Public Accounts Committee and various bodies throughout the world. What is striking is that larger global companies are now insourcing. They were outsourcing, buying in accountancy and legal services and so on. That is stopping. Why are they insourcing? Because it is cheaper and more effective, and delivers better value for money. Yet here we are with a Government that seem hellbent on outsourcing, for ideological reasons rather than to protect the public purse. My fourth point is that the private sector puts in prices, but the first thing it does when it wins the contract is to drive down the pay and conditions of the staff employed. Wherever one looks, that is the case.”
House of Commons25 January 2023Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“When I was the leader of Leeds City Council, I would ensure that if something was going out to the private sector, there would be a public sector bid made by the council, which would not have a slice on top for profitability. I would then see whether the private sector could compete with the public sector bid. That is one thing that might be done, but there are no public sector comparators under the present neoliberal economic settlement, which we regard with despair, to be honest. Therefore, there is no guarantee that a cartel or group of racketeers is not fixing prices between them to rip off the taxpayer. We cannot be clear about whether that is happening, although without a proper procurement service, I am sure that it is. My third point is this.”
House of Commons25 January 2023Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“I worked in the private sector, as a plumber in the building industry. We were monitored by the main developers to make sure that we provided value for money. Quite often, I confess, we would see whether we could get extras built in on top of the money in the original contract. It was for the quantity surveyors who worked for the developers and builders to make sure that we did not get away with anything. Can we honestly say that every single line in every contract is monitored in the same way as in the private sector? I do not think we can. The reason is because staff are under-resourced, and we are under-resourced because we are outsourcing as an ideological decision rather than anything else. Here is my second point. More often than not, there is no public comparator.”
House of Commons25 January 2023Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“I hasten to say, though, that there will always be a case for some procurement from the private sector—for instance, police motorbikes will not be nationalised in the immediate future, so one can see that there is a case there—but the presumption should end. Let me briefly refer to the seven issues that it is important to consider. First, the Government Procurement Service is not as professional as it needs to be. It is possible to get a university degree these days in good procurement practice. That is a necessity to ensure value for money for every penny spent, but the service is under-resourced and not as professional as it needs to be. That is not to criticise the civil servants who do a difficult job in difficult circumstances, but they are in danger of being flooded by the provision of contracts.”
House of Commons25 January 2023Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“My hon. Friend is absolutely right to ask that question. No convincing answer has been provided as to whether value for money was achieved. In fact, it is as plain as the nose on your face that there was no value for money, and I will come to that in a second. In recent decades, there has been a presumption in favour of outsourcing. That was never the case before. Britain used to be proud of its public service and of the high standards of ethics in the civil service and in politics. It is hard to share that pride these days. The presumption in favour of outsourcing contracts and obtaining services from the private sector has gone through the leadership of all the political parties, and it is time it stopped. There are seven separate reasons why one should be cautious about that presumption.”
House of Commons25 January 2023Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“If we do not control procurement in a proper way, we are unable to direct it to local providers of services in a way that we would expect to be able to do with taxpayers’ money. That has an impact, too, on the local economy. For all those reasons, this is an important debate, and I am glad that it was raised by my hon. Friend the Member for Birkenhead. It is beyond the legislation that is before us. We need an ideological shift; we need a presumption in favour of the public sector, not the private sector, and I hope that I have contributed in a small way to making an argument for that.”
House of Commons25 January 2023Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“That is not congenial to providing a public-oriented service, which is what we would want to see. Pay ratios in the public sector are accountable through Parliament to the public in a way that they are not once they have been privatised. Indeed, once a service has been privatised—outsourced—it is no longer subject to all the constraints that the public sector has to operate under. Indeed, one further point to make is that if I want to understand why a public sector service in my constituency or the country is deteriorating, I can submit a freedom of information request or ask questions in Parliament. The minute that service has been privatised, we cannot do that, so it is not accountable. My final point is about the impact on the local and national economy.”
House of Commons25 January 2023Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“I totally agree with the hon. Member. We are seeing a fragmentation of the labour market and the driving down of people’s incomes—particularly of manual workers and others—and I resent it, on behalf of those people. It is not right for the country; after all, if wages are in long-term decline, the economy itself will be in long-term decline as well. My sixth and penultimate point is about pay and pay ratios. What happens in the public sector—although we would have to say, if we were living in a purely ethical economic environment, that certain public servants are probably paid more than they ought to be—is that pay ratios accelerate the minute a service is outsourced, to the point where we see people earning massive multiples of what the lowest paid in the same service receive.”
House of Commons25 January 2023Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“I wonder whether the hon. Lady agrees with those learned commentators who said that EU rules actually preclude the use of procurement to achieve social objectives, and that that was an argument for Brexit rather than for remaining in the European Union.”
House of Commons25 January 2023Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“My hon. Friend is making a strong speech, although I wish her good luck if she is trying to persuade this ideologically driven Government to change their course. She may recall that three Prime Ministers ago—not so long ago in weeks or months, but some time ago in politics—the then Prime Minister advocated Brexit on two grounds: state aid to industry and procurement. Does my hon. Friend think the Government’s procurement policies are doing anything to level up the country socially, economically or otherwise?”
House of Commons25 January 2023Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“The Minister prays in aid the money that is being given to households across the country, and I acknowledge that that is a significant amount of money, but it is not working, is it? One prepayment meter is issued every 10 seconds. Millions of people live in fuel poverty. My constituent, for example, is disabled and trapped in his house. He had a prepayment meter imposed on him, but no voucher. He was left in freezing cold conditions in the run-up to Christmas. That just is not acceptable. I am afraid to say that polite letters from the Secretary of State or cups of tea this afternoon with the Minister will not hack it. Does he agree that it is time that the Government took legal powers to intervene directly in the energy market in order to protect the people of this country?”
House of Commons25 January 2023Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“I am grateful to my hon. Friend, who is a great champion for his constituency, working people and the north of England. Has he seen the reports today saying that if the north of England were a country, it would be more or less the worst in the whole OECD for investment by the public or private sector? Have we in the north not been let down enough, and particularly those in my hon. Friend’s constituency, who were led up the garden path, by the looks of it, on a promise that will now not be delivered?”
House of Commons25 January 2023Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“The Leader of the House no doubt believes she is an extremely persuasive person, and no doubt she is, so can she not, over the weekend, persuade the Prime Minister to make a statement on Monday or Tuesday—since there is another action on Tuesday—that he will resolve the nurses’ case to their satisfaction so that we can have a Christmas where the NHS begins to rebuild?”
House of Commons15 December 2022Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“Season’s greetings to you, Mr Speaker, and all members of staff of the House. On today’s nurses’ action, which has been taken most reluctantly, I want to say that two of the closest members of my family were gravely ill for weeks in Yorkshire hospitals, and I had an accident and almost lost the use of my leg, which was recovered thanks to the skill of the staff. The nurses looked after all three of us, as they do tens of thousands of other patients every day. They do not ask for anything, except that we leave that hospital better than we came in. They stand by us; it is time we stood by them.”
House of Commons15 December 2022Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“The Minister referred to environmental concerns relating to the planning process. It is remarkable, then, that there is no requirement to do an ecological survey of local wildlife—flora and fauna—before planning consent is considered, so I have proposed some amendments to new clause 5 to achieve that.”
House of Commons13 December 2022Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“The Leader of the House may know that yesterday, during discussions about biodiversity in Canada, the Secretary-General of the United Nations said that humanity was is in danger of becoming a “weapon of mass extinction”. In my constituency there is proposal for a major incursion into the green belt that would threaten 27 separate native species, including some ancient woodland. Will she find time to reaffirm the Government’s commitment to green belt land and biodiversity, and may we have a debate on this essential subject, which should provide the background for any planning decisions for the future?”
House of Commons8 December 2022Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗