PARLIAMENTARY DEBATE
Engagements - 15 September 2021 (Commons/Commons Chamber)

I know that the whole House will want to join me in congratulating Emma Raducanu, Joe Salisbury, Alfie Hewett and Gordon Reid on their victories in the US Open. They have made the whole nation proud.

On Battle of Britain Day, we honour the legacy of those brave aircrews who defended our nation.

I am sure that hon. Members will also want to join me in wishing you well, Mr Speaker, for the G7 Speakers and Presiding Officers conference in Chorley later this week.

This morning, I had meetings with ministerial colleagues and others. In addition to my duties in this House, I shall have further such meetings later today.

I would like to pass on my condolences to the Prime Minister on the sad loss of his mother.

Raising children is very expensive—more so when they are disabled. The children impacted by sodium valproate have suffered physically, mentally and indeed financially. When the Cumberlege report was published, there was real hope that they would get support. However, on the last day before the summer recess, a written ministerial statement indicated that recommendation 4 of that report would not be actioned. May I please ask my right hon. Friend to urge the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care to look again at that and give the parents of those children the financial redress that they so desperately need?

I thank my right hon. Friend for her kind words. On her substantive point, she is entirely right to raise the issues investigated by Baroness Cumberlege. We have given the report full consideration, accept its overarching conclusions and are committed to making rapid progress in addressing all the areas that it mentions, including the one that my right hon. Friend covered today.

I join the Prime Minister in his comments about Emma Raducanu—a tremendous success in the US Open—the Battle of Britain and the G7 Speakers conference. May I also offer my condolences to the Prime Minister on the loss of his mother? As I know at first hand, losing a parent is never easy.

How many extra hours a week would a single parent working full-time on the minimum wage have to work to get back the £20 a week that the Prime Minister plans to take away from them in his universal credit cuts?

First of all, I thank the right hon. and learned Gentleman for his kind words. On his substantive point about universal credit, it is absurd, because the Labour party—[Interruption.] I will give you a statistic, Mr Speaker: every single recipient of universal credit would lose their benefits under Labour, because it wants to abolish universal credit. I think that this House and this Government should be very proud of what we are doing and continue to do to support the low-paid. It was another Conservative institution, the living wage, that increased the incomes of families on it by £4,000 a head. What the Labour party wants to do is keep this country in lockdown and keep this country in furlough without moving forward at all.

The Prime Minister did not answer the question. The Secretary of State for Work and Pensions seems to think that it is an extra two hours a week, so let me make it even easier for the Prime Minister: is the correct answer higher or lower than that?

What I can tell the right hon. and learned Gentleman is that under this Government, for the first time in decades, wages are rising. Wages across the board are rising, and they are 4.1% up on where they were before the pandemic. In fact, I am very pleased to say—[Interruption.] Of course, what the Opposition want to do is continue to take money in taxation and put it into benefits. We do not think that that is the right way. We want to encourage high wages and high skills. That is the difference between this Government and the Labour party. I think it is a good thing, for instance, that Costa Coffee is now paying 5% more than it was before the pandemic—and never forget, Mr Speaker, that if we had listened to Captain Hindsight, Costa Coffee would still be closed.

It wasn’t a difficult question, Mr Speaker. [Interruption.] It is silly, they say. “How many hours would someone working full time on the minimum wage have to work to make up for the cut?” is apparently a silly question. I will give the Prime Minister the answer to the question. The number is much, much higher. A single parent—who could be a constituent—working on the minimum wage and already working full time would need to work more than nine hours a week on top of that full-time job just to get back the money that the Prime Minister has taken away from them. They are already working full time. They have kids. How on earth does the Prime Minister think they are going to find the time to work an extra nine hours—in truth, an extra day every week?

I will tell you what we are doing, Mr Speaker, to support people on low incomes. We are supporting them not only with the living wage, but with 30 hours of free childcare, and by freezing petrol duty and extending the heating allowance to 780,000 people across the country—but, even more important than that, for the low-paid we are encouraging measures to see their wages rise. We are investing in their skills. We are investing in work coaches.

There is now a dividing line between this Government and the Opposition. We want a high-wage, high-skills economy with controlled immigration; what they want is low wages, low skills, and uncontrolled immigration. That is what they stand for.

Let us test that right now. We have had three questions and the Prime Minister has not answered one of them, and it is obvious why.

The truth is that these low-paid workers cannot work longer hours to get back the money that the Prime Minister is cutting from them. He knows it; they know it. Millions of working families will be hit hard—very hard—by the Prime Minister’s universal credit cut, and the reason, I tell the Prime Minister, is this. Why would those people have to work an extra nine hours—a full day every week—to get that £20 back? It is because of his broken tax system. He has just said how good it is, so let us test it. After his national insurance rise, for every extra pound that those workers earn, his Government will take more than 75p from them. That is why they have to work for those nine hours—one whole extra day.

The Prime Minister has just said that he is going to raise wages, and what else he is going to do, but that is the situation. Why is the Prime Minister making a bad situation worse for working people by hammering them with a cut in universal credit and a tax rise?

Actually, what we have done with our local housing allowance is increase by £600 the amount of money available to exactly the type of person the right hon. and learned Gentleman has mentioned. He has attacked the plan that we announced last week to fix the backlogs in the NHS. I have to say that I thought it utterly incredible that the party of Nye Bevan should have come to the House last Wednesday and voted against measures that would fix the NHS. It is quite clear that ours is now the party of the NHS, and that the Opposition simply do not have a plan. They do not have a plan for universal credit—they want to abolish it—and they do not have a plan to fix the NHS or social care.

An unfair tax rise which will not fix social care and will not clear the NHS backlog is not a plan. The Prime Minister pretends that there is no alternative but to hammer working people with tax rises and universal credit cuts, but that is not true. His approach means that a working single parent who is a qualified nurse would lose £1,143. A supermarket worker could lose £1,093. A teaching assistant could lose £1,081. At the same time, the Prime Minister has wasted billions on crony contracts, cut taxes for people buying second homes and handed out super tax deductions for the biggest companies. That is not taking difficult decisions; that is making political choices. So why is the Prime Minister choosing to take a tax system that is already loaded against working people and making it even more unfair?

It is absolutely ridiculous that the right hon. and learned Gentleman should attack the Government over salaries for nurses when we have put them up by 3% on top of the 12.8% rise that we introduced, when we are hiring 50,000 more nurses and when we are putting another £36 billion into the NHS and social care on top of the £33 billion that this Government invested when we came into office. One in 10 of the people in this country are now on an NHS waiting list. Labour Members know that the NHS backlog needs to be fixed, they know that this Government have a plan and they know that Labour has absolutely nothing to say.

I just wonder what the millions of people on low wages who are facing a £1,000 cut will think of that. This country’s success is built by working people, but the tax system is loaded against them. The Prime Minister may not understand the pressures facing families across the country, but we do. The reality is this. Taxes on working people: up. National insurance—[Hon. Members: “”Up!”] Council tax—[Hon. Members: “Up!”] Energy bills, food prices, burdens on families: up, up, up. The Prime Minister needs to get real and understand the terrible impact of his decisions on working people across this country. This afternoon, he has the chance to change course, to vote with Labour to cancel the cut to universal credit and then to stop clobbering working people with unfair tax rises. Will he do so?

I can see that the panto season has come early—[Interruption.]

Order. If it has, it is certainly behind him.

Let me ask you, Mr Speaker, since you are a man of great restraint and taste and judgment: which country has the fastest growth in the G7? Where is employment up? Where are job vacancies at the highest level? And as for wages, they are up. They are higher than they were before the pandemic. I have listened to the right hon. and learned Gentleman carefully over the last fortnight, and I am told that he has a 14,000-word essay in gestation. I do not know why he cannot produce it right away. Why does the world have to wait for the thoughts of Chairman Keir? Having listened to what he has had to say—his non-existent plan for universal credit, his non-existent plan for health and social care—I could compress those 14,000 words into four: vote Labour, wait longer. That is what he stands for. Our plan for jobs is working and our plan for covid is working.

The Prime Minister needs to count the number of words—come on, Sheryll.

My hon. Friend is absolutely right to point out the problem of lorry driver shortages, which is affecting the whole world, from Europe to North America. What we are doing immediately is working to get out more licences. We are taking advantage of our post-Brexit freedom so that all the young thrusters on the Conservative Benches with a post-1997 driver’s licence can now drive a vehicle with a trailer as well—everybody can drive a vehicle with a trailer as well. But after a long period of stagnation in wages for those in the road haulage industry, we are also seeing a long-overdue increase in wages. That is part of the same phenomenon that this Government are introducing and the Labour party is opposing.

I pass on my condolences to the Prime Minister and his family on the sad loss of his mother the other day. And I join the Prime Minister and the Leader of the Opposition in congratulating Emma Raducanu on her fantastic success in New York last Saturday.

Of course, we mourn the anniversary last Saturday of 20 years since the horrors of 9/11. We remember all those who paid the sacrifice in that outrage.

This morning we learned that the rate of inflation has reached its highest level in a decade. For ordinary workers and families, prices are going up at the very moment when they can least afford it. Workers and families need more than just a winter plan for covid; they need a winter action plan to fight a Tory poverty pandemic that is only going to get worse.

Does the Prime Minister know, and can he tell us, how much Tory Government cuts to social welfare will cost the average nurse?

We are protecting people on low incomes up and down the country—[Interruption.] Indeed we are. And we are freezing fuel duty and supporting childcare. We have brought in a huge package of measures, not least the living wage, which has already seen an increase of £4,000 for every family on the living wage.

More importantly, the right hon. Gentleman talks about the income of nurses. We are investing massively in health and social care up and down the country. That will help to fund, apart from anything else, the increase in nurses’ pay that they so thoroughly deserve. I hope he will support that package.

My goodness, my goodness, an increase in nurses’ pay. Either the Prime Minister does not know or he simply does not care. When we take the cuts to universal credit and the increase in national insurance, the figure he was looking for is that the average nurse will lose £1,736. Once again, this Government are cutting the pay of key workers, the very people we are relying on to see us through another difficult winter. The cost of living is spiralling and people are left with a Prime Minister who does not know how much his cuts are hitting key workers and a Secretary of State for Work and Pensions who does not know how universal credit works.

If any Scottish Tories are in possession of a backbone, now would be a good time to find it. Does the Prime Minister expect any MPs from his Scottish branch office to stand against the callous cuts to universal credit, or has he already bought them off with promises of jobs in his reshuffle?

What is actually happening is that we are funding the NHS across the whole of the UK, including in Scotland I am proud to say, with record sums. We have ensured that nurses have access to a training bursary worth £5,000 and a further bursary of £3,000 for childcare costs, and that is before we put up their pay by 3%. That is only possible because of the investment we are making, the measures I outlined last week and the package we are putting forward for health and social care. If the right hon. Gentleman is really saying that the Scottish nationalist party is opposed to that investment, if he is really saying that he would send it back, he would be better off banging on, as he normally does, about a referendum. He is better on that.

I am very grateful for the vigilance of my hon. Friend about the matter of ID cards. I can tell him that we have absolutely no plans to bring them in, but I will watch the nationalists very carefully.

I, too, offer my condolences to the Prime Minister on the loss of his mother.

Health waiting lists are through the roof in Northern Ireland and hard-pressed families are being hit by decisions from this Government, but the Democratic Unionist party has been hit by a bad opinion poll so it is threatening to bring down the very institutions of the Good Friday agreement. Will this Prime Minister commit today to fast-tracking the legislation going through this House, agreed at New Decade, New Approach, to stop the institutions coming down if one political party has a petulant strop?

I thank the hon. Gentleman. I agree with him that it is very important that the institutions of Northern Ireland should be robust and should continue, but I also think that a responsible Government have to address the issues of the protocol, the lopsidedness and the way in which the European Union has chosen to interpret those issues, which I do not believe satisfies the Belfast/Good Friday agreement. That is what we are going to do.

I am sure that my hon. Friend speaks for millions and millions of people up and down this country who abhor the fur trade and do not want to wear fur. Obviously, we have banned fur farming in this country for a long time, and we are going to look at what we can do, working with the fur sector, to prevent fur from being imported into Britain.

First, I want to say how sad I am to hear about the hon. Gentleman’s constituent Lynda. I think her experiences have been shared by literally millions of people in this country during the pandemic, because they have not been willing or able to get the oncology treatment that they need because of the pressure of covid on the system. The system is now coming back, trying to help everybody as fast as possible to fix the backlogs. So yes, it is necessary to hire more nurses and doctors, and there about 10,000 more nurses now and about 6,000 more doctors—

Pathologists and radiologists.

The hon. Gentleman is totally right in what he says about radiologists and pathologists, but may I respectfully say to him that that must be done by means of the big powerful package that we put forward last week to raise the funding necessary? I believe his party should have supported that and it is incredible that it did not.

Yes. I thank my hon. Friend for raising this matter; I know he has campaigned on that issue. The review is going ahead and we will look at what to do once it has been completed, but in the meantime Nottingham University Hospitals NHS Trust is going to be supported through the national maternity safety support programme.

The hon. Lady raises an important point. When the Government came into office, a key part of the extra £14 billion that we put into education was for investment in special educational needs, to allow local areas to build more SEND schools where they were necessary. We are putting another £780 million into extra SEND education for our kids. If the hon. Lady wishes to raise a particular shortfall in a particular school or area, will she please write to me about it?

My right hon. Friend is absolutely right in what he says about the importance of buying British and eating British. Our food is the best in the world. He is also right to address the problems that we are currently seeing in the supply chain, but we are taking steps. Of course, it has been a problem for a long time, but we will use the seasonal agricultural workers scheme to ensure that British farms get the labour that they need.

Yes. Since just 2012, when I think I was Mayor of London—I was—we have cut CO₂ massively and we have cut our dependence on coal from 40% to less than 1%. How about that, Mr Speaker?

Yes. My hon. Friend is a great campaigner for the people of Penrith and The Border, and I can tell him that in addition to our support for 500 school-rebuilding projects in the next decade—we are doing 100 immediately—Cumbria County Council has been allocated £5.3 million for the financial year 2021-22 to improve buildings, including Ullswater Community College.

Does the Prime Minister agree that the impending cuts to universal credit will not just have a devastating financial impact on people, but lead to stress and anxiety and undoubtedly have a hugely detrimental effect on their mental health, which, on top of the pressures of the pandemic, could prove devastating for some?

I have answered that question many times. The answer is no, and, in any case, Labour would abolish universal credit altogether.

Yes, I totally agree with my right hon. Friend. That is why we are investing in the NHS, and we want the NHS to be a better place for the dental profession. Would it not be a fine thing if this House of Commons voted overwhelmingly—with all Members voting—for our package of measures to support the NHS?

September marks Childhood Cancer Awareness Month. Every day across the UK, 12 children and young people will be diagnosed with cancer, and, of those, two will not survive. My constituent Nadia Majid and her family are campaigning to improve research and funding in this field. Nadia’s son, Rayhan, was only four years old when he was diagnosed with an aggressive brain tumour. Rayhan tragically passed away only four months after his diagnosis. Will the Prime Minister join me in thanking all the doctors, nurses and support staff who work tirelessly to fight against childhood cancer and meet with me to discuss how the four nations can work together to improve research and funding into childhood cancers and to support families like Nadia’s?

I know that the hon. Lady echoes the thoughts of millions of people. There is not a family in this country that has not been touched by cancer. Childhood cancer is particularly tragic, which is why the Government are investing huge sums in research and also in supporting some of the fantastic charities that she mentions, particularly those investigating brain cancers.

I have great respect for Dr Kingdon as I have for my right hon. Friend. It is one of a number of views in the scientific community, but we continue to think that testing is a very important route for keeping schools open, which is the best possible thing for the physical and mental health of our kids.

My condolences to the Prime Minister on the sad loss of his mother.

I was privileged to be able to take the time off work that I needed to recover from post-traumatic stress disorder, but that should be a right for everyone, not a privilege. Far too many people cannot take the time off that they need because, by the former Health Secretary’s own admission, statutory sick pay at £95 a week is not enough to live on. This is a simple question—yes or no? Will the Prime Minister today commit to full sick pay at a real living wage, not the Government’s current age-restricted minimum wage?

As the whole House will know, what we have done is make sure that everybody who gets covid-related statutory sick pay gets it on day one. We have also ensured that most people in this country, when they fall sick or when they need to recover as the hon. Lady has, receive considerably more than statutory sick pay.

Yes; I had no idea that the Scout Association was doing that, but I think it is fantastic. Uniformed youth services make a huge difference to outcomes for young people, and it is fantastic that the Squirrels are now starting them off at the age of four.

You could register Wilfred. I call Jack Dromey.

For more than half a century, the GKN factory in Erdington has produced high-quality parts for the automotive industry. Now, following the hostile takeover by Melrose, the company has announced its intention to close the factory, sack 519 workers, and export jobs and production to continental Europe. There has been some welcome engagement with Ministers on this issue, but does the Prime Minister agree that, in one of the poorest parts of Britain, if the levelling-up agenda and support for British manufacturing mean anything, this factory cannot close? Does he therefore also agree that it would be a betrayal of the British national interest were this great, historic factory to become history?

My right hon. Friend the Business Secretary is working with GKN to do whatever we can, but I believe that the future of the UK automotive sector is incredibly bright. That is because—to go back to the question of the hon. Member for Bath (Wera Hobhouse)—we are the Government who took the historic step, ahead of every other European country, to move towards electric vehicles by 2030. We want this country to be in the lead. We are making sure that we get the investment in the UK that will drive new technology, drive growth, and drive high-wage and high-skilled jobs in this country.

I am sorry that we have not yet found time to discuss this matter properly, person to person. The Government are very much interested in what my hon. Friend says about geothermal projects, so I will ensure that a meeting is arranged as soon as possible.

I am sure that the Prime Minister will be as pleased as I am that the Scottish Land Court has this week given the final green light to establishing a space launch facility in Sutherland. This is great for the UK, and it is time to bury party political differences. On behalf of the delighted crofters of the community of Melness, I extend a warm invitation to the Prime Minister to come to the first launch, where he will be given a delicious highland tea, including some home-made scones.

I thank the hon. Gentleman for his kind invitation. I look forward to taking it up. What we need is a suitable payload to send into space, and I think the hon. Gentleman would do very well.

I thank my hon. Friend. We are already working with Rolls-Royce. We gave £20 million seed money to the Rolls-Royce-led consortium when this Government first came in to help them to develop their small modular reactor design. As I said to him the other day, we want to see that company coming forward with a fully worked out plan—a fully worked out business case—that we can all get behind.

The Prime Minister has set out today that he wants a high-skill, high-wage economy. He has also been on the record as saying that the tactic of fire and rehire is “unacceptable”. Surely the best way of ensuring that we have a high-wage economy is to work with the proposals in my private Member’s Bill so that we end that tactic of fire and rehire.

The most vivid example of fire and rehire is that conducted by the Labour party. If I recall, the leader of the Labour party himself fired his deputy leader and then rehired her as shadow Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster and shadow Secretary of State for the future of work. The future of work under Labour is low wages and low skills driven by uncontrolled immigration. The people of this country have had enough of that; what they want to see is high wages, high skills and controlled immigration, and that is what this Government are committed to deliver.

Will my right hon. Friend come to No. 1 George Street and celebrate great British farming today, can we have public procurement that uses British food, and can we have food envoys all across the world promoting our great British food and farming?

Yes. I thank my hon. Friend, who is the living embodiment of the robustness of British agriculture, and indeed of the benefits of English food—of British food, particularly the beef of Devon, or Somerset. He is right in what he says about food envoys. We have taken that up. Every single embassy across the world has a food envoy.

My constituents in Bridge House, Croydon live in flats covered in dangerous cladding that will cost millions to remove. They are not eligible for the Government’s building safety fund because it is the wrong type of cladding. Can the Prime Minister confirm: do my constituents have to pay the £23,000 each that they are being charged to remove this cladding, or does he have a better plan?

If the hon. Lady’s constituents are being told that they do not have to remove that cladding, then the answer is no. It is very, very important that this House should recognise that too many buildings have been unnecessarily—unfairly, I believe—categorised as dangerous and unsafe. Of course we must remove dangerous cladding, and we are doing that, but I want householders and leaseholders—people living in flats across this country—to have the confidence that they can do so in safety, and that is what this Government are doing.