PARLIAMENTARY DEBATE
Engagements - 27 November 2024 (Commons/Commons Chamber)

The sympathies of everyone in this House will be with those affected by the devastating flooding that we have seen recently. Our thanks go to all those working tirelessly to support the affected communities. We have committed £2.4 billion over the next two years to build, maintain and repair vital defences to protect more communities from the awful impact of the flooding.

The ceasefire announced in Lebanon is long overdue, but demonstrates that diplomacy can succeed even in the most challenging of circumstances. We must seize this opportunity to build trust, de-escalate tensions and push for a wider ceasefire.

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 associate myself with the Prime Minister’s remarks.

West Hertfordshire teaching hospitals NHS trust has eliminated 65-week waits and has now met all three national cancer standards. Those remarkable achievements by the staff are happening despite their working in terrible buildings that are life-expired and crumbling. If the Government are looking for a project that is high-performing and shovel-ready, that is it. Will the Prime Minister give our trust the green light to build a new hospital without further delay?

I thank the hon. Lady for raising that issue, which is of importance to her constituents and beyond. The new hospital programme we inherited was a failure of the previous Government. We are committed to delivering, and we are reviewing to ensure that we can deliver. The Health Secretary will set out further details, but I am very happy for her to have a meeting with the relevant Minister if she wants to follow up on the specifics.

Yes, we will do so. I agree that the last Government totally failed to tackle the unfairness of the leasehold system. We will provide homeowners with more powers, protection and data rights by bringing that legislation forward.

I call the Leader of the Opposition.

At the CBI conference on Monday, the Chancellor said:

“I’m clear…I’m not coming back with more borrowing or more taxes”.

I know that telling the truth to the House is important to the Prime Minister, so will he repeat his Chancellor’s pledge now?

We set out our position at the Budget that was just set out. We are fixing the foundations. We are dealing with the £22 billion black hole that the Conservatives left. I am not going to write the next five years of Budgets at the Dispatch Box. We said that we would not hit the payslips of working people. We passed the Budget, we invested in the future and we kept that promise.

The Prime Minister is not fixing any foundations; he is making everything worse. The whole House will have heard him refuse to repeat the Chancellor’s pledge, a pledge as worthless as the manifesto promises that he is talking about. If he is fixing foundations, why is it that the PMI index shows that business confidence has crashed since the Budget?

We are fixing the foundations. We got record investment into this country. The right hon. Lady talks about tax rises. Two weeks ago, she stood there and said that she wanted all the investment and all the benefits of the Budget, but she did not know how she was going to pay for it. I notice that, having come here criticising the national insurance rises over and over again, on Monday she admitted that she would not reverse the position. Meanwhile, her shadow science Minister was saying energetically that he would do the opposite. They haven’t got a clue what they are doing.

If the right hon. and learned Gentleman wants to know what Conservatives would do, he should resign and find out. [Hon. Members: “More!”]

I’ll decide when there’s more.

Until then, I am the one asking the questions. There is a petition out there with 2 million people asking the right hon. and learned Gentleman to go. He is the one who does not know how things work. It is not Governments who create growth; it is business. His Minister for Employment, the hon. Member for Birkenhead (Alison McGovern)—I do not see her here—wants more young people in work, but businesses say that they are cutting jobs because of the Chancellor’s Budget. His Deputy Prime Minister’s Employment Rights Bill—she is not here—will stop businesses hiring. That is what they say. The CBI said on Monday that the dots of the Government’s policy do not join up. It is right, isn’t it?

On Monday the right hon. Lady said that she would not reverse the increase in national insurance. Yesterday, on their predecessor legacy legislation, the Opposition could not decide what their position was. Today, they have launched a policy commission asking other people to give them some ideas for government.

The right hon. Lady talks about a petition. We had a massive petition on 4 July in this country. We spent years taking our party from a party of protest to a party of government; they are hurtling in the opposite direction.

What a load of nonsense. We had a Budget in March this year, and tractors were not blockading the streets of Whitehall afterwards.

Let me give the Prime Minister another example of a real business. Following his Budget, the head of McVitie’s said that it was “harder to understand” what the case for investment in the UK was. While the Prime Minister has been “hobnobbing” in Brazil, businesses have been struggling to “digest” his Budget. Is it not the case that the Employment Rights Bill shows that it is not only the “ginger nut” that is causing him problems?

I was attending the G20 summit. I suspect that, on their current trajectory, the Opposition do not know whether they would attend the G20. Perhaps the policy commission will come up with an answer on that one.

We have had record overseas investment in this country. The right hon. Lady keeps carping from the sidelines. She says at the Dispatch Box that she wants all the benefits of the Budget, all the investment, but she does not want to pay for any of it. She has racked up £6.7 billion of unfunded commitments in just three weeks as Leader of the Opposition. When it comes to the economy, we are the ones who are growing the economy.

The investment for which the Prime Minister is taking the credit was our work. When I was the Business Secretary, we negotiated those deals that he announced. The bottom line, however, is that in all that he has said, he does not seem to care about the young people who will lose their jobs as a result of his Budget. Perhaps he can show concern for the 1,100 people who found out yesterday that they could lose their jobs at Vauxhall’s plant in Luton. While he flies around making unilateral commitments, back at home the real-world effects are businesses closing in Bedfordshire and Basildon. Does he stand by his promise to ban the sale of petrol cars by 2030, even if more jobs will be lost? [Interruption.]

I would not normally invite a heckle, but that one was accurate.

The question of the position of jobs in Luton is a very serious one—families and workers will be very worried, and we are engaging with them—but I remind the Leader of the Opposition that the electric vehicle mandates that are an issue in this particular case were introduced by the last Government. I also remind her that she was the Business Secretary who introduced them. We are getting on with supporting those communities while she is shouting from the sidelines.

The Prime Minister clearly did not read his briefing about the EV mandate. The fact is that we changed the date and made it easier for people. Everything he has done has attacked people. The Budget was an attack on farmers, an attack on workers, an attack on pensioners, an attack on the young, and an attack on thousands of charities and businesses across the country. The whole system is broken, and the Prime Minister is making things worse. Everyone is unhappy. Is it not a good thing that the Chancellor is an expert on customer complaints?

I think the right hon. Lady has just read out the charge sheet against the last Government. Everything is broken, but the Opposition come here every week with absolutely nothing to offer except complaints—nothing constructive; no new ideas. They do not know what they are doing from one day to the next. They are living in a fantasy world in which everything was fine, apparently, for 14 years. Well, the country is fed up with those fantasies. It has got rid of those fantasies. We are going to take the hard decisions. The Opposition are jumping on every passing bandwagon, while we are taking the country forward.

My hon. Friend is right to raise Islamophobia. There has been a concerning rise in Islamophobia and antisemitism over recent months, and we are committed to tackling all forms of hatred. We will work with others on an ongoing basis to make sure that we do.

I call the leader of the Liberal Democrats.

May I associate myself with the Prime Minister’s remarks about the terrible impact of Storm Bert and all the flooding? Our thoughts are with all those affected, with thanks to our amazing emergency services.

Christine’s father was told that he needed end of life care, but after a few days it was removed due to funding cuts. He was told that he would not get it, and he died a few weeks later in excruciating pain. Christine says that it was terrible to watch him suffer. Does the Prime Minister agree that, whatever the House decides on Friday, it is urgent that we improve access to high-quality end of life care? Will he make that a key focus of the 10-year NHS plan, and will he now commit to protect hospices from the national insurance rise?

I thank the right hon. Gentleman for raising that case, and I am sure the thoughts of the whole House are with the family involved. Obviously there is a very important vote on Friday, but whichever way that vote goes, we must invest properly in care across our health service. That is why, in addition to putting the NHS back on its feet, we are putting forward a 10-year plan to make sure that the NHS can give the care that everybody would expect across the spectrum, including end of life care.

I thank the Prime Minister for his reply. I hope that we will hear more from Ministers, particularly on hospices and national insurance, in the days to come.

I turn to the cost of living crisis. On Friday, Ofgem said that energy bills will go up again in January, after last month’s 10% rise. Millions of people are really worried about how they will make ends meet this winter, not least hundreds of thousands of pensioners who are in poverty but above the pension credit limit, who will now lose winter fuel payments. With energy bills going up again, will the Prime Minister reconsider and restore winter fuel payments?

Obviously the whole House is concerned about energy bills, which are actually lower this year than they were last year. The long-term way to deal with this issue is to have clean power by 2030, to make sure that we drive energy bills down on a permanent basis, and that is what we will do. On the winter fuel allowance, the right hon. Gentleman knows very well what the Government’s position is; indeed, I have rehearsed it with him many times.

I thank my hon. Friend for raising this issue, because antisocial behaviour affects so many people. Sometimes it is described to me as “low level”, but its impact is not, particularly when it comes to off-road bikes. That is why we are implementing tough new respect orders, which will give powers to the police, including powers to seize off-road bikes and, crucially, a power of arrest for breach of orders—something that has been missing in recent years. We will tackle this problem, because it blights communities across the country.

As everyone in the House will be aware, we are currently in the middle of the BBC’s scam awareness week. The advice in that context is always simple: if you see a scam, you should report it. With that in mind, can the Prime Minister advise the House whether he is aware of anyone who has promised to reduce energy bills only for them to increase? Is he aware of anyone who promised to back business, only to tax business? And is he aware of anyone who promised to protect pensioners, only to pick their pockets for their winter fuel allowance?

It is very—[Interruption.]

Order. Those in the Gallery will not clap or interrupt the proceedings.

I am very glad to see the right hon. Gentleman in his seat in the House, and I am sure that many of his colleagues in Scotland share that sentiment. What I can point to is a Government in Scotland that promised to take Scotland forward and took it backwards, so I can identify the first one and it is right there.

I agree that desecration is awful and should be condemned across the House. We are, as I said before, committed to tackling all forms of hatred and division, including Islamophobia in all its forms.

I am grateful to the hon. Lady for raising that case and the awful bereavement. If she would kindly send me the details, I will certainly have a look at the case. In relation to farming more broadly, as she knows, £5 billion was set aside in the Budget over the next two years as an investment in farming. That is the biggest amount that has ever been set aside—[Interruption.] I hear the chuntering, but the Conservatives actually failed to spend the last farming budget by £300 million. On the question of inheritance of family farms, it is important to bear in mind that in a typical case, which is parents passing to a child, the threshold is £3 million, and that is why, as she knows, the vast majority of farms will be totally unaffected.

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for raising this, because public confidence in the police has been badly eroded under the last Government. We will drive that up with a major programme of reform. That includes recruiting 13,000 more police into neighbourhood policing and the tough new respect orders, coupled with the power to arrest for breach of the order.

I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for raising this. I know there has been an exchange on it, and as soon as I have an update, I will provide him with it.

Within weeks of the general election, this Labour Government delivered for the mineworkers and the mineworkers’ pension scheme. It was well received, and it was justice done. However, is it not time to seek the truth on policing during the miners’ strike? Will the Prime Minister commit to an early and full inquiry, something which that lot denied for generations?

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for raising this. The decision on the mineworkers’ pension scheme reversed a historic injustice, and I am so pleased that we were able to do it in the Budget. As I think he knows, I met some of the Orgreave campaigners and listened very carefully to what they had to say. They are entitled to the truth, and we are carefully considering the next steps to deliver it for them.

I thank the hon. Member for raising that tragic case, and I pay tribute to Tracey for her campaigning. I have met a number of families on the issue of bleed kits, so I know at first hand how important this is. We are taking measures in relation to knife crime, including banning the online sale of knives to make them less available, steering young people away from offending and implementing real penalties. I am happy to look at bleed kits, and I will make sure that Tracey gets a meeting with the relevant Minister to hear more about what we are doing and to make her case.

I refer to my entry in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests.

The proposed closure of Luton’s Vauxhall van plant by Stellantis is devastating news for our town, with over 1,000 jobs at risk and the town’s future prosperity threatened. Can the Prime Minister assure me that there will be a cross-departmental response to support the automotive sector and, importantly, good, skilled jobs in Luton?

Yes, I will. I thank my hon. Friend for raising this, at a difficult and uncertain time for workers and constituents in Luton, and their families. That is why we are working with the industry. There will be a statement later today, and it is important that we do whatever we can to support these communities.

I am grateful to the hon. Lady for raising this awful situation for her constituents. We all know how devastating flooding is, both the initial damage and the ongoing challenges, including problems with insurance for many years. We are committed to tackling this, which is why we set aside money in the Budget. I will happily arrange for her to have a meeting with the relevant Minister to discuss the particular details of this case. I thank her for raising it, as it is such an important issue for her constituents.

Last weekend in Cwmtillery, torrential rain caused a landslip. Slurry, even boulders, poured down streets—people were afraid. The Chancellor just agreed a welcome £25 million for coal tip maintenance in Wales. Given the impact of extreme weather events, will the Prime Minister continue to prioritise coal tips, in order to keep our communities safe?

Yes, I will. I know how much of a concern it is to my hon. Friend’s constituents. Indeed, he and I went together to meet some of those constituents last time there was terrible flooding. The £25 million commitment to coal tip maintenance is very important. We have now had two questions about flooding. If other hon. Members have individual issues that they are unable to raise on the Floor of the House, they should get in touch with me or my office and I will ensure that they get whatever they need in support of their constituents.

We have set out our position under the current law, as the hon. Gentleman well knows. I have set out my position very clearly in relation to the sale of capability to Israel to defend itself against attacks, such as those from Iran, and I am very clear that we will continue to do so.

Derby city centre is turning the page on 14 years of Conservative decline, with a new performance venue, a new business school and a restored market hall, but across the country we see too many empty shops and quiet high streets. [Interruption.] This Budget is putting more money into the pockets of working people to spend supporting local businesses. Will the Prime Minister commit, contrary to Conservative scaremongering, to support and protect the small businesses that are the beating heart of our high streets?

Conservative Members can chunter all they like, but my hon. Friend is describing their legacy. We are turning that around. We are supporting small businesses, we are supporting the high street and we are rebuilding our country, as the Conservatives go backwards.

I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for raising this issue, which is of real importance to his constituents. We have committed £30 million to mitigate the impact of the construction at Old Oak Common. Local services will be unaffected and current plans will see services run between Exeter and London Euston. I am very happy to arrange a meeting with the relevant Minister, if the hon. Gentleman wants that, to follow up on the particular concern of his constituents.

After 14 years of the Tories, our criminal justice system is on its knees, with just 4.4% of domestic assault cases recorded by the police resulting in a conviction. Last Monday was the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women, so will the Prime Minister tell us what he will do to ensure that the criminal justice system works for women and girls in North West Leicestershire and beyond?

My hon. Friend is right to say that the criminal justice system was broken by the last Government, like everything else they touched in the past 14 years. We take the issue extremely seriously. We have made a commitment to halving violence against women and girls. We are taking a number of measures in relation to that, for example piloting domestic abuse protection orders and making it clear that we will introduce a stand-alone offence of spiking. Those are some of the measures that, frankly, we ought to be able to work on across the House, because the issue is of such importance.

Ukraine faces a hell of a battle on its eastern front with Russia, but on the home front the challenge is just as great. As it faces a harsh winter, it was reported just last week that 80% of Ukraine’s energy infrastructure is either damaged or destroyed. They desperately need power generators and associated equipment. Will the Prime Minister agree to meet me to discuss the provision of energy aid to this important ally, Ukraine?

This is a very serious issue. We have provided £370 million of support to the energy sector in Ukraine, which is being targeted by the Russian strikes. I will ensure that my hon. Friend gets a meeting with the relevant Minister. I am pleased that on this issue there is unity across the House in our defence of Ukraine in the face of Russia’s aggression.

The hon. Lady is absolutely right that the NHS was broken by the last Administration, and the Darzi report makes that absolutely—[Interruption.] They should hang their heads in shame, frankly. We are providing in the Budget £22 billion of additional funding this year for our NHS. That is a huge investment that is much welcomed and much needed across the NHS. We will work with GPs and consult the sector on the services they provide and the money they are entitled to in return. All that funding will be confirmed in the usual way.

I certainly agree that the deal we got under the last Government is not the best deal that we can get. That is why we are determined to reset the relationship and we have already begun that. Obviously, there will be no return to freedom of movement, the customs union or the single market, but beyond that we can increase and improve the situation, whether on trading, security or other co-operation, and we are actively working on that.

The final question is from Frank McNally.

Following a major fire at the Tradebe depot in my constituency in 2021, Scotland’s clinical waste was forced to be transported to England due to a complete lack of forward planning. Tradebe was only appointed after the previous contract had collapsed, leaving human remains languishing in a warehouse. It has now been revealed that the Spanish company was bailed out with £5.4 million of taxpayers’ money. Does the Prime Minister agree that the SNP Government have consistently failed to get a grip of clinical waste disposal and must act appropriately to protect the public purse and ensure public safety?

I do agree with that, and it is the rule rather than the exception when it comes to the SNP Government. The challenge for them now is that they have the powers to act and they have now been given the money to act. They have run out of excuses.

That completes Prime Minister’s questions.