Debate on the Address — House of Commons, 2022-05-10
Topic: Macroeconomics
Matthew Raymond Western (Labour, Centre-left): It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Glasgow North (Patrick Grady). It was also good to see the hon. Member for East Dunbartonshire (Amy Callaghan) back in her place earlier, and to hear the very good maiden speech by the new hon. Member for Southend West (Anna Firth). We have been reminded of the three good colleagues we have lost: David Amess, James Brokenshire, whose memorial service took place yesterday, and, of course, our own Jack Dromey. They are all missed I intended to say a few words about the Prime Minister, but I will save that for another day. I will touch on a few issues. The Government have put forward a higher education Bill, and I look forward to that. I am particularly interested in proposals for lifelong learning, but there are huge issues across the educational sector in terms of what is happening in our schools and nurseries. There is the haemorrhaging of teachers, teaching assistants and senior leadership teams because the budgets are not there, the pressures are so great and morale has sunk through a lack of respect from the UK Government The priorities that the Prime Minister is missing are around the cost of living. The Prime Minister and his Chancellor are really out of touch. We should remember that the Prime Minister said in the autumn that any talk of high inflation was unfounded. I hate to say this, but I was on BBC Coventry and Warwickshire Radio last September, saying how concerned I was that inflation might reach 6%—it was only 3.5% at the time. Of course, it has now run away We should have had an emergency Budget. Why do we not have one? People are hurting badly. One in seven people are food insecure and an estimated 2 million people are unable to eat every day. People going to food banks are saying, "I’m sorry, but I won’t take food that needs cooking. I’ll only take food that’s cold because we can’t afford to cook it." I know that from visiting food banks in recent weeks. That is the harsh reality The Business, Enterprise and Skills Committee heard from the energy companies, which anticipate that 40% of UK households will be in energy poverty by the autumn. They estimate that a typical annual bill will be £2,900 for households come the autumn. That is why the chief executive of ScottishPower said the other day that he believes that 10 million homes will need something like £1,000 per household to see them through the energy crisis. Of course, no money on anything like that scale is coming from the Government Yet we could have that—we have proposed a windfall tax. When we hear the figure of £9 billion a quarter, it sounds like a telephone number—it is hard to get our heads around it. Just 12 years ago, the company I worked for was worth £3 billion, and that was the Peugeot-Citroën corporation globally, yet here we are considering £9 billion in one quarter. It is a huge amount of money and a windfall tax could allay so much of the financial crisis for households throughout the country. The energy cap in France was 4%. How can they do that, but we cannot On inflation, the Federal Reserve says that it is a serious problem that will be sustained, whereas the Bank of England is being slightly too optimistic in its forecast The outlook for the economy is not good. We will have the worst economic performance of the G7 countries next year. We also had the worst economic performance in 2019, before the pandemic, so we are the hardest hit. I am not sure how that is getting the big calls right. That is probably the most marked indicator of how the Government and this Prime Minister got it wrong. We have had 15 tax increases since the Chancellor took over two years ago I would have liked some talk of an industrial strategy in the Queen’s Speech, addressing the challenges of our automotive industry, which has seen a 34% reduction in production this year. Last year was not that great, either. We need to address the global supply chain issues and the issue of semi-conductors. We also need to urgently get our heads around the need for the transition to electric vehicles and hydrogen motor power, sourcing lithium production, cheaper energy and the gigafactories, such as the one proposed in Coventry, that we desperately need On the energy Bill, Warwickshire is one of the few counties that has no onshore wind turbines. We desperately need that. It is the cheapest form of energy and we should be investing in it On housing, I cannot believe that we are so way off the pace on the sort of housing that we need, the mix and the volume. The fact is that zero-carbon homes should have been built from 2016. The last Labour Government would have delivered 1 million zero-carbon homes. Instead, I see houses, to this day, with 50mm insulation, which is nothing. That is why we have the worst housing stock in Europe when it comes to energy efficiency I would love to see what is going to come out on planning. We had the national planning policy framework in 2012. The Localism Act 2011 promised the public and communities more say, but guess what? That did not happen. Communities up and down my constituency do not have the required infrastructure—the bus services, the shops, the cycle routes and so on There is a lot of other legislation on which I would love to touch, including the issues for renters and the precarity that they face, with the increase in the private rental market. There were a lot of warm words on the environment. We have to address that with the onshore wind energy that I mentioned earlier. Fracking is not the right solution. It would be deeply damaging to our environment. It is not necessary and we could have anticipated the energy shortages a long time ago by building in resilience On justice and the police, of course we want safer streets, but we have lost 7,000 police since 2015. It was clear what was going to happen on our streets—hence the rise in knife crime in constituencies such as Warwick and Leamington, a rise in drugs, a rise in antisocial behaviour, a rise in speeding and so on. We need more community support officers on our streets and the police hubs to go with them When it comes to security, we should be talking much more about food security and sourcing more food from the UK. My constituency has some excellent farmers, but we are losing land to housing development and potentially to quarries, as is happening just outside Barford There are several omissions in the legislation that the Government have put forward. I have only touched on some of the Bills that have been proposed, but I see that there is nothing in terms of legislation on business reforms. For example, there is a need for legislation on auditing and governance. Let us think about the £4 billion that was lost in covid loans. How did that happen? There is no true oversight. We need an audit watchdog, which is something that the Institute of Directors has been calling for. It is disappointing that the Government’s football measures have been dropped from the Queen’s Speech. We desperately need them and clubs such as Leamington FC and Racing Club Warwick would have loved to see them as well A lot of legislation is being proposed by the Government. I hope that they can change their priorities because the public are desperate to be heard and desperate for their needs to be met. The cost of living is such an immediate crisis, as is the climate crisis. So many of these issues are inter-related. I fear that, without the right strategies in place, such as the industrial strategy that I mentioned, for housing and for the automotive industries, those priorities will not be met.