Health, Social Care and Security — House of Commons, 2017-06-28
Topic: Law and Crime
Ian Colin Lucas (Labour, Centre-left): It is a real pleasure to follow my hon. Friend the Member for Kingston upon Hull North (Diana Johnson) and to take part in this very interesting debate. There has been a very strong message from this Chamber on public sector pay. One great advantage of general elections is that the voters tell us what they want to talk about. The Prime Minister may have wanted to have an election on Brexit, but on the doorstep public sector pay was a huge issue in my constituency, and, I suspect, in constituencies up and down the country The strong message from the campaign was that the country has had enough of inequality. I am a member of the Nationwide building society. Its chief executive receives £3.5 million per annum, on top of all the additional support he receives. That is a building society, not a bank, and a mutual organisation that I support and am a member of. I do not have a bank account, because I do not like banks very much at all, but the chief executive of my building society receives £3.5 million a year. We have been talking about hourly rates of £9 and £10 an hour for midwives who save people’s lives. The message for Government Members, regardless of which way they vote this evening, is that this is coming: this argument has been won. I urge the Government to reconsider their position and do what those of us on the Labour Benches want them to do, because they will have to make up their mind and do the right thing in due course In the short time available, I would like to focus on criminal justice. This was another massive issue in my constituency during the election. The message from my constituents is that they recognise that community policing, which the Labour Government carried forward magnificently when in office, introducing police community support officers and funding police officers in every ward of my constituency, has been undermined since 2010 by the huge cuts to police budgets that were introduced first by the coalition Government. I listened with some hilarity to some of the observations made by Liberal Democrat Members about the dreadful police cuts. They had Cabinet Ministers in the Government that implemented them, so I listen to their arguments with some incredulity. I want to see the re-establishment of proper community policing, not only in Wrexham but up and down the country There is one area that I want to highlight for the Home Secretary in the short time available. She referred to the legislation on legal highs that was introduced in 2015 and which has already been amended once. I have a message for the Home Secretary: it is simply not working, and there is a crisis with legal highs in many town centres up and down the country. We need to look at that in the Queen’s Speech as a matter of urgency, because unless the legislation is amended huge amounts of public money will be spent on trying to enforce legislation that is simply incapable of doing the job for which we drafted it. Will the Government therefore please go away, look at the issue of legal highs and the legislation that has already been passed, redraft it, consult, reach out, recognise that they do not have an overall majority, speak to the people who want to try to solve the problem and work with the Opposition to resolve this important issue?