Prepared: 17:10 on 19 November 2009
1.57 pm
Mr. Nigel Evans (Ribble Valley) (Con): I am grateful for having been given the opportunity to make a short contribution on this Queen’s Speech. Clearly, it will not be as short as the Queen’s Speech—nothing could be. I love pomp and ceremony, but I assume that the events of yesterday were not put on just so that I could be cheered up on a grim, blustery day. This Queen’s Speech covers only three pages—it costs £4 from all good booksellers, no doubt, but it must be one of the worst buys in the country. To distract Her Majesty from her other duties to come all the way to Parliament in order to deliver this very short speech, which most people do not believe will be delivered on in any great way, shape or form, was a complete waste of time. I am sure it was great for the tourists, however—I am sure they enjoyed the event.
Perhaps, however, this was the Prime Minister giving a dry run of what will become the real Queen’s Speech next May, when most people expect the general election to be. We will then get a Queen’s Speech that will be full of substance and will be properly delivered and have the mandate of the public. As we all know, at present the Prime Minister has not been endorsed by any member of the public. Indeed, at the last general election the “great” Tony Blair said he would be Prime Minister for a full term. That did not happen and two and a half years into his premiership the keys of No. 10 were dangled above him and out went Tony Blair and in came the current Prime Minister. Therefore, yesterday’s Queen’s Speech has not got the mandate of the general public.
There was a great opportunity for the current Prime Minister to call a general election as soon as he was given the position; it is a great shame that he did not. If he had won that election, at least we would have had a series of Queen’s Speeches over a five-year period which would have had the endorsement of the general public.
While I am talking about things that have not got the endorsement of the general public, I should mention today that it is very likely that in Brussels our unelected Prime Minister will vote for somebody whom the great British public will also not have a say on: the President of the European Council. I am not quite sure what it takes these days to fulfil that particular post. I do not think that the jobs pages of The Guardian carried an advertisement so that anybody who wished to apply could do so. It is more mysterious than a papal announcement. This is supposed to be a President who will speak on behalf of the whole of Europe, yet who this person will be is a complete mystery. Will it be Herman Van Rompuy, the Belgian Prime Minister—a household name, no doubt, throughout Europe; or will it be someone who really is a household name throughout the UK, at least, and who fills me with even greater dread: Tony Blair? The fact is that this position has not been endorsed by the general public of this country, even though it was created by a treaty that we were told we would have a referendum on.For the growing number of unemployed in this country who have looked at the generality of the Queen’s Speech, the question is, “Is this going to help me? Will it help this country, and help provide more jobs?” Today we are talking about health and education, in the main, but for all the education that is being delivered in this country—vocational education was mentioned by the Chairman of the Children, Schools and Families Committee—the sad truth is that there are no jobs for some of the people now being trained and educated.
What is also very disturbing is the number of firms already based in this country that are now looking at opportunities to outsource or to move part of their company, if not all of it, abroad. David Stern, UK managing partner at Roland Berger, said that the
“Government must help UK companies and employees become more competitive in the global market place. This will require reducing bureaucracy, enhancing the skill of the labour pool, and alleviating the cost burden on business”,
which clearly is not happening. That study found that 49 per cent. of businesses believe they would be significantly more competitive if they moved more business functions outside the UK, and 72 per cent. have moved or are considering moving a proportion of manufacturing overseas. The study’s most alarming finding was that 81 per cent. of the UK’s largest multinational firms are either considering moving or already planning to move at least one major business function overseas by 2015. Furthermore, one in seven companies have already relocated manufacturing abroad. We clearly have a lot more to do to ensure that manufacturing is assisted in this country, and that we look at the burdens we are putting on our businesses. The money being diverted into rules and regulations could be invested in those companies, providing jobs for the future for the work force—for the people whom we are educating now in our schools and in further and higher education.
Two other areas are also under pressure, one of which is the pub industry. I am vice-chairman of the all-party group on beer, as everybody knows; it is an arduous task, which I fulfil with great dexterity. When the VAT rate was reduced to 15 per cent., a percentage was added on to alcohol so that it did not benefit from the reduction. In the context of tourism and the great British pub, beer is one of the great British traditions. As the Government know, 50 pubs are closing a week, destroying not only jobs but the fabric of life in many parts of the country. When the VAT rate goes back up to 17.5 per cent. on 1 January, I do hope that the Government will make a similar alteration to ensure that—just as VAT on alcohol went up so that there was no benefit to the public when VAT generally went down—that issue will be addressed. Otherwise, there will be another 6p on a pint of beer, and many more pubs will close every week and jobs will be lost.
I turn now to the dairy industry, another industry that is struggling, but which is vital to the Ribble Valley. In 2000, there were 20,000 dairy holdings; by 2008, the figure had virtually halved, to 10,112. In Lancashire, there were 1,144 dairy holdings; by 2008, the figure was down to 634. In the Ribble Valley over a similar period, a figure of 206 dairy farms reduced to 134—a decline of 35 per cent. Such a great number of dairy farms are closing simply because the cost of production is beyond what they can sell their milk for. No business can survive for any length of time when the cost of production exceeds the sale price.
I want to touch on one aspect of education that has not been mentioned today: the student loan fiasco. We are trying to encourage as many people as possible to enter university and higher education, but to date some 119,000 students still have not had their student loans. I heard a student say on the radio that his university has a scheme whereby if a student is suffering from complete hardship, they can borrow from the university, which he has done up to now. However, that still means that for the time that he has been at university he has been unable to fulfil the full role of a student, simply because he has not had any money. I suspect that a great many of the 119,000 students who have not received their loans to date are struggling, facing Christmas with still no prospect of their loans being paid to them.
Mr. Graham Stuart: Has my hon. Friend, like me, had constituents on low incomes contact him who are themselves suffering hardship because they are having to give money to their children to enable them to survive at university? It is a disgrace that that has been allowed to happen, and that those who are most vulnerable are suffering the most.
Mr. Evans: Absolutely. I imagine that every constituency will have a number of families who are wondering how they will survive this Christmas. There might even be guilt on the part of some students, thinking that they will go back to university in January still having to rely on parental contributions so that they can eat and live. It is an absolute scandal. The Secretary of State said that more money is going into education, which is absolutely true, but this issue needs to be properly addressed.
At least the Secretary of State cheered me up no end when he said that this is the last Queen’s Speech of this Administration. In fact, this is the last November of this Administration; next month will be the last December; and then we will have the last Christmas of this Administration—until we finally get to the general election, which will further cheer me up no end. Like my hon. Friend the Member for Worthing, West (Peter Bottomley), I will be working very hard indeed for a change of Administration, but I suspect that we have a half-open door to a general public who want such a change and to see fresh policies and ideas.
Given the obesity time bomb in this country, the Government want more young people to get off the couch and participate in sport. We must do more to ensure that when youngsters go to school, they have the necessary facilities and time within the curriculum for sport. Sport must not be seen as the easy option, or something that they do instead of the serious work of academic education. Sport and a healthy lifestyle are vital to our youngsters, and in many senses this issue is relevant to the health arena. If youngsters participate in sport they will be healthier, and the health budget will probably thereby be less than if they were not doing sport, eating the wrong sorts of foods and leading very unhealthy lifestyles. This issue will have a huge health impact, so let us get it right now by investing in our youngsters through sport. Let us not treat sport as a Cinderella subject that is unimportant in schools. It is vital.
I also mentioned to the Select Committee Chairman the question of youngsters, in the main, getting a bad press, which they do; I do not know why. I know that it is easier for journalists to pick on the very small number of young people who do bad things, and blow it out of all proportion, as if everybody under the age of 18 is a young thug waiting to pick on some unsuspecting member of the public and rob them, for example. That is clearly not the case. I am co-president of the British Youth Council and in my estimation, having talked to young people, the vast majority are really interested in what they are doing. They actually want to make a contribution to society, and a lot of them do tremendous charitable work, day in, day out, of which we read very little in the newspapers. I wish that there could be a deal or pact with young people so that, for every bad story that a newspaper carries about them, they also print a good one about some of the great things that some young people are doing in this country.
Sometimes I hit the supermarket industry—I declare my entry in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests at this point—for the way in which it forces down the amount of money that it is prepared to pay to the dairy industry, to give just one example. However, one thing that supermarkets do on education and training—I should mention Tesco and Sainsbury’s in this regard—is operate the voucher scheme that provides computers and other equipment to a number of rural schools in my constituency that otherwise would not get access to it. I am sure that a number of MPs get the opportunity to present those goods to their local schools once a year, and I think that the scheme is fantastic; the gratitude, in particular that of small rural schools, is tremendous to see. If ever the supermarkets look to change the emphasis of that scheme, they could give shoppers an opportunity to donate their vouchers in store so that they could be reallocated to smaller, more rural schools, because the number of parents and grandparents collecting vouchers for those schools will be that much less. That is the one suggestion that I make to supermarkets.
I shall briefly discuss health. On this morning’s “Today” programme, we all heard that Nexavar, a drug that would help and prolong the life of those with advanced liver cancer, is not going to be provided to those people, who are suffering, thanks to the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence. The reason given for their not being able to get the drug is that it costs too much. That is despite the fact that Cancer Research UK’s chief clinician, Pete Johnson, says that the situation is enormously frustrating because people know how effective that particular drug is. Some 600 to 700 patients a year are affected by this. People who are suffering from cancer, and their families, are hearing that a drug is available that can prolong their life and are then being told that they cannot have access to it, despite that fact that people in Romania get access to it. What is so special about Romania that people there are able to get access to this drug when this advanced country, which is giving cohesion funds through the European Union to countries such as Romania, cannot give the same guarantee to its patients who are suffering and to the families who are suffering, in other ways, with them?
I hope that we can reconsider which drugs are made available to the public. Where a drug could improve somebody’s life, there must be a really compelling reason for it not to be made available here when it is available in other parts of the world. Money simply cannot be the only criterion—if it were, we could say that we are not going to provide all sorts of drugs and procedures because they cost too much.
“N”, “H” and “S” were the three letters missing from this Queen’s Speech. As many hon. Members know, my mother died of clostridium difficile this year. I hope that when the Government, yet again, look at the procedures in place, they will place a special emphasis on tackling C. difficile and hospital-acquired infections. The number of death certificates mentioning C. diff increased each year from 1999 to 2007. In 2007, there were 8,324 such cases—an increase of 28 per cent. on 2006. Among death certificates mentioning C. diff, the percentage on which it was an underlying cause of death has been similar in each year, at about 55 per cent. The mortality rates in 2007 involving C. diff in the 85 and over age group were 3,429 and 3,396 per million of population for males and females respectively.
There needs to be far more education of, and awareness among the public on this. C. diff is not the same as methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus. On MRSA, we clearly need to ensure that our hospitals are clean and that the deep cleansing that the Government promise is delivered, so that people who go into hospital with one condition do not come out with another or die in hospital from a hospital-acquired infection. Why, for things such as C. difficile, are prebiotics not made available as a matter of course to ensure that people with one sort of condition are not left so weak that they then pick up a hospital-acquired infection?
I am grateful for the opportunity to participate in debating the last Queen’s Speech of this Administration. We will all be going back to our constituencies at the end of this year and the general election campaign is fairly well started as it is. I am not surprised that a man who occupies the position of Prime Minister and takes 12 days to work out what sort of biscuit he likes dithers to a greater extent as to when the date of the general election will be. This Queen’s Speech is a great wasted opportunity but, unlike the Lib Dems, I do not think that we ought to have spent the next few months trying to sort ourselves out. The only thing that will sort out Parliament and bring back the trust that people want to have in this institution is a general election. People widely expect one and the House that will come back will have at least 300 or so new Members. That new House will be elected with a mandate to clean up properly the arrangements for how this House should be working. Aside from the NHS, the other thing missing from the Queen’s Speech was mention of something to deal with the legislation necessary to implement the Kelly findings; the Conservative party fully endorses those recommendations.