Friday 31 March 2017

Keeping the Covenant

The first Armed Forces Covenant was developed in 2000. It set out the duties owed by government and society to those serving in our military services and to their families. Its underlying principles are that the Forces should suffer no disadvantage, and should have special consideration in some circumstances.

Particular emanations of the Covenant have included housing – for example that forces families should not be disadvantaged in access to housing locally because they have been serving overseas – and access to health services. So, Alan Johnson was the first Health Secretary to ensure that veterans received priority treatment on the NHS on their return from active service.

I was extremely pleased when local councils in South Yorkshire were amongst the first local authorities to sign up to local covenants. Despite unprecedented cuts to their budgets, our local councils have made excellent progress in implementing those covenants.
Unfortunately, the same cannot be said of the national situation. Last year, the Forces’ charity SSAFA found that just 16% of veterans thought that the Covenant was being implemented effectively. It warned that the Covenant “provides excellent guidance but there is no guarantee of enforcement,” saying that “serving personnel are returning to their home towns after postings abroad or being discharged to find themselves at the bottom of the housing list and without places in the local schools for their children.”

In fact, it is clear that the government is simply failing to implement the spirit, let alone the letter, of the covenant. Nothing illustrates this better than the state of housing for forces’ families.

Just 50% of forces families are satisfied with the standards of management and maintenance of their homes. Satisfaction with the response to requests for repairs dropped 10 percent compared to the previous year and that 52% of personnel in SFA are dissatisfied with the quality of repairs.

Let me tell you that no council in England could countenance repairs’ satisfaction levels at this depth. Council and other social housing providers’ comparative figures are typically over 85%, and considerably in excess of the satisfaction levels reported by owner-occupiers of their own contracted repairs.

Forces’ housing is maintained in multi-million pound contracts by CarilionAmey. Its performance is a disgrace, and the government’s failure to improve the situation is contemptible. Forces’ families are being betrayed day-in, day-out by this breach of the Covenant.

Where’s the national media outrage?

Thursday 30 March 2017

Racing to stay ahead

Parliament is currently considering the Vehicle Technology and Automotive Bill. Amongst other things, the Bill is about automated and electric vehicles.

This is a welcome opportunity for the UK to stay ahead of the pack in research and innovation that will shape how we travel in the future and create more of the high-skilled jobs that a modern economy needs. But, it needs to be seen in the much wider context of technological and climate change, the global economy and public health concerns.

Meanwhile, today’s news is heavily featuring global environmental pollution, with particular implications for the UK.

World Health Organisation reports confirm that environmental pollution is killing 1.7 million children each year. Environmental risks cause more than 1 in 4 deaths in children aged under 5 years every year. Children are especially vulnerable to pollution due to their developing organs and immune systems, and smaller bodies and airways. The most common causes of infant death globally – diarrhoea, malaria and pneumonia – are preventable with safe water and clean cooking fuels.

Asthma prevalence in children is increasing worldwide, with 11-14% of children aged 5 years and older currently reporting asthma symptoms. Every year, more than 570 000 children under 5 years die from respiratory diseases, such as pneumonia, linked to indoor and outdoor air pollution and second-hand tobacco smoke.

Air pollution is a big issue for every urban part of the UK, but many villages – especially those with main roads – are not immune, shortening the lives of an estimated 40,000 people a year. In my own constituency, there are significant air pollution problems, especially near the M1, and one school has already had to be moved. That’s why there is such an urgent need to develop and promote less-polluting vehicles and transport systems. 

Three weeks ago, the UK was given a final warning to comply with EU air pollution limits for nitrogen dioxide (NO2) or face a case at the European court of justice. If the UK does not show Brussels how it intends to comply with EU law by April, a court hearing with the power to impose heavy fines could begin later this year


 It’s time for the government to stop ducking and diving and to face up to today’s as well as tomorrow’s challenges.

Self-employed shambles

Theresa May and Phillip Hammond got themselves into a complete mess in the budget on the issue of taxation and national insurance and benefits for the self-employed.

There are nearly 5 million self-employed people in the UK, up from 3.8 million in 2008. Self-employment has accounted for 80% of the increase in employment over that period.

But the rise of self-employment is part of a wider shift towards low paid, precarious work. The number of women among the self-employed has risen by almost a third. The average self-employed worker earns £11,000, about half the average of the wider workforce.

It is estimated that around 45% of self-employed workers (1.7 million) are currently paid below the National Living Wage. It appears that most of these people are not self-employed by choice, but that a wide range of big companies have sought to organise their labour through various zero-hours and self-employment arrangements to cut labour costs. Some of these arrangements certainly look unlawful.

The combination of low-earnings and poor protection has left a large proportion of our workforce falling through the gap in the safety net. The self-employed miss out on the social security protections that come with direct employment e.g. Statutory Maternity Pay, Paternity Pay, Statutory Sick Pay or Statutory Adoption Pay.

At the other end of this scale are some very highly paid individuals who are using self-employment as a route to avoid paying their fair share of taxes and national insurance contributions. Apart from this small minority who would have been forced to pay their fair whack, who would have complained if the Chancellor had said ‘Technically, I know that taking this action breaks the letter of our manifesto promise, but the current situation is totally unfair.’?

But, he didn’t do that. His budget announcement would have adversely affected low income self-employed people. That’s why he was forced to u-turn the following day.

We need a new settlement for the self-employed. It must meet a number of tests, most importantly, that of Fairness.


Any future proposals must demonstrate fairness as between rights and responsibilities, contributions and benefits, irrespective of employment status.

Wednesday 29 March 2017

Time to ring the bell

In 1986, the Thatcher government deregulated public transport, especially of our bus services. 

Its 1984 White Paper stated there “has been too little incentive to develop markets, to woo the customer” and that without “the dead hand of restrictive regulation” fares could be reduced, new and better services would be provided and more people would travel. That White Paper also said “if the customer has the final say, bus operators will look keenly to see where and when people want to travel. If one operator fails to provide a service that is wanted, another will.”

Of course, the opposite has happened.
  • Between 1986 and 2016, bus patronage in England outside London declined by 35%.
  • The decline in S Yorkshire has been almost twice that. In 1986, 286 million bus journeys were made. Today, that figure has fallen by 62% to 102 million.
  • Bu,t in London, where bus services remained regulated, bus patronage rose by 99%.
  • Bus fares in England outside London rose by over 156 per cent between 1995 and 2016, whilst the retail price index (RPI) rose by 77 per cent, which means bus fares have risen more than twice inflation.
  • The market is now dominated by five big bus operators – locally First and Stagecoach - with bus services run effectively as private monopolies. Unsurprisingly, they have high operating profits.
  • Today, about 40% of bus funding is public, but there is little local say about services.
So, the result of deregulation is that fares rose massively, passenger numbers fell dramatically, the number of routes fell, service frequencies suffered and congestion increased exponentially, at great cost to local businesses as well as to commuters.

Given the current considerable concern about adult social care, it is also worth recalling that the bus deregulation changes led to a significant increase in demand for care services, as many relatives and friends found they were unable (increased costs, cuts in frequency) to continue to give the voluntary care they had previously provided.


As the Bus Services Bill goes through Parliament, the government still needs to be persuaded that local transport and city region authorities must have greater powers to improve local public transport, through franchising and, if necessary, by establishing their own bus companies.

Not another broken promise?

Since Chancellor of the Exchequer Philip Hammond’s budget statement, nearly all the media reporting and comment has been about just one aspect of his announcements: changes to National Insurance for the self-employed.

Hammond and May’s perception of weak opposition has clearly made them and their advisers act complacently. It’s no surprise that Conservative internal tensions have been exposed.

Conservative opponents of Hammond’s proposals have focused their arguments in two ways.

First, they say that the proposal breaks an explicit Conservative 2015 Manifesto pledge. Well, of course that’s true, but I didn’t hear these same MPs jumping up and down with rage over the last eight years as Conservative-led governments broke promise after promise…on the NHS, on housing, on SureStart, on school budget…there is an almost endless list of broken pledges.

Second, they have argued, ideologically, that self-employment is close to the Conservative spirit, and that self-employment nurtures the entrepreneurial spirit which should be encouraged.

Of course, the entrepreneurial spirit should be encouraged, but that’s not a good reason for giving huge tax- and national insurance subsidies to wealthy and very high-paid individuals and to companies which abuse self-employment and zero hours’ contracts to conduct unfair competition with companies who play fair.

I welcome the review, led by Matthew Taylor, into the implications of new forms of work on worker rights and responsibilities, and on employer freedoms and obligations.

Nearly 1 in 6 of those working in the UK are now self-employed. There has been a big rise in short-term, casual, allegedly temporary work. There has also been an explosion of ‘disruptive’ businesses, where new ways of working and technology come together to create new products and services. Just consider the rise in internet shopping and its impact on the High Street and traffic congestion, let alone on working practices and arrangements.

The issue of tax cannot be isolated from the wider problems faced by self-employed people, including bogus self-employment and the overall impact on the economy and on communities and families. For example, the rise in self-employment and zero hours contracts has made it far more difficult – and expensive – for young people wanting to buy a home to satisfy building societies about their financial credibility.


The vast majority of people want to see fairness in employment rights and responsibilities and fairness in contribution arrangements in return for pension, health and other benefits. I support that.

Forget what they say; consider what they do

Two policies currently being promoted by the Conservative government in office and the Conservative Party in the country sharply highlight the Conservative’s values and priorities.

From April, the government is implementing changes in Inheritance Tax. The policy will only benefit families with homes worth more than £650,000. Under the new system, families will have a new £175,000 inheritance tax allowance for their home on top of the existing £325,000 threshold. It amounts to a tax giveaway of £38,400 for each of the estates affected. It amounts to a £1bn tax giveaway.

Of the 100 constituencies that will benefit the most, 96 are in London or the south-east. They are mostly represented by Conservative MPs, as are the 4 constituencies outside of London – Tatton (George Osborne’s constituency in Cheshire), Bath, Altrincham and Sale West (also in Cheshire) and Stratford-upon-Avon. Whereas these constituencies may each have 2000 or more homes valued at £650,000 or more, for the vast majority of constituencies, like mine, there are likely to 20 or less.

Carl Emmerson, of the independent Institute for Fiscal Studies, says that the policy clearly benefits the wealthy. When the threshold reaches its final level in 2020, “the biggest beneficiaries of this tax cut will be those whose parents are married and have an estate worth between £1m and £2m,” he said. “This small number of typically well-off individuals will see a £140,000 reduction in their inheritance tax bill.”

Meanwhile, the government is planning to make big cuts in the support to the poorest bereaved families.

The existing scheme, which is based on the NI record of the person who died, has three different benefits to support spouses and civil partners: Bereavement Payment (BP) – lump sum, Widowed Parent’s Allowance (WPA) and Bereavement Allowance (BA). The new replacement Bereavement Support Payment (BSP) will be for new claimants from 6 April 2017.

Under BSP, three-quarters of bereaved families will receive less in cash terms than under the current system. Further, nine-out-of-ten families will also see a cut to the length of time that they can receive support following a bereavement.

So, bereavement for the very wealthiest families (the top 5%) is to be acknowledged with big tax cuts, and bereavement for the poorest families means big cuts in support.


These policies tell you everything you need to know about the Conservative instinct.