The Nasty Party returns

In October 2002, Theresa May, then Chairman of the Conservative Party and our current Prime Minister, told the Conservative Party Conference that: "There's a lot we need to do in this party of ours. Our base is too narrow and so, occasionally, are our sympathies. You know what some people call us – the Nasty Party."

She was talking about the Conservative Party being driven by members, and pandering to those electors, who were determined to retain financial and social privilege, who lacked concern about those less fortunate than themselves, who were anti-equalities – particularly anti-homosexual – and anti-minorities.

Of course, she was right. What is disappointing to note is that, in government, Theresa May appears determined to allow nasty sentiments to underpin the thrust of her government’s policy agenda. Two particular examples this month reflect her direction of travel.

The first concerns health and social care. More than a year ago, I wrote about the crisis that would grow in health and social care if the government did not reverse the cuts in councils’ social care resources and address NHS funding. Over the last year, every independent commentator and the government’s own advisers and regulators have reached the same conclusion and spoken out loudly.

Knowing that those with money can always buy their way out of trouble, Mrs May resolutely refused to budge to address the problem for the majority, until the storm of post-Autumn Statement criticism became overwhelming.

And, her response? It amounts to “We will stand by, and take credit for, our tax cuts to the richest individuals and corporates whilst continuing to cut funds for adult social care. But now we will ‘allow’ councils to significantly increase council tax to fund more social care… and then we will blame councils for tax increases.”

The hypocrisy is breath-taking. And, it won’t solve the funding crisis or the despair of many families.

The other example concerns the encouragement being given to the campaigners who want to repeal the 2005 Hunting Act. They are desperate to return to hunting wild mammals such as deer, hare, foxes and mink by packs of dogs.

Nothing could be more symbolic of a nasty party than one whose members are so at variance with the British people, 80% of whom have made it clear that such hunting should remain illegal.

End the uncertainty now

Over the years, one of the many issues that constituents have raised with me has been their frustration about the justice system’s seeming inability to bring to account those foreign criminals who hide in this country and British criminals who have fled overseas to avoid justice.

When you look back over parliamentary debates about this issue, you find that the loudest voices (across the political spectrum) have regularly been from those who point to unfairness compared to, or a lack of consistency with, UK law which, by facilitating extradition, would result in some injustice to the individual. However, the failure to act has led to many injustices with criminals escaping scot-free.

Measures to try to harmonise extradition procedures across Europe started in the mid-1990s. The 2001 September 11^th attacks provided some impetus for change. The European Arrest Warrant (EAW) was finally implemented in 2004, with more states joining the arrangements since then.

The EAW is now seen as absolutely vital for ensuring fast and effective cross-border crime and justice measures. Since 2004, the EAW has meant that more than 7,000 people have been extradited from the UK to face trial or serve a sentence abroad; it has also resulted in more than 1,000 people being returned to the UK to face justice.

An excellent example of the success of the EAW was in apprehending and bringing to justice Sheffield criminal Craig Allen, who was sentenced to 20 years’ imprisonment for supplying Class A drugs in the UK – bringing death and destruction to many local communities – but orchestrating the criminality from Thailand and Holland. Allen was the first fugitive to be captured abroad after the launch of the National Crime Agency.

Without EAW it could take years to extradite dangerous criminals to and from Europe. However, the Government have given no commitment on their plans for crime and justice measures post Brexit.  

It’s nonsense to suggest that a continuing commitment to the EAW or membership of Europol should be part of the Brexit negotiations.

My constituents want criminals to be brought to justice. It’s time to end the uncertainty now.

No room at the inn

Many parents and grand-parents will have gone to their local school, church or community hall during the last week to see their children take part in Nativity performances.

The Christmas story evokes thoughts about the need for children to have a safe home, a secure roof over their head and to be given the opportunity to reach their maximum potential.

Anyone seriously concerned about these issues can only be dismayed by the direction of travel in the UK today.

Last week, without publicity, the government published the latest homelessness statistics.

These reveal that the number of children who are homeless and living in temporary accommodation has reached 124,000, compared to 109,000 at the same time last year.

The number of households that have become homeless after an eviction over the last year is up 12% compared to a year ago at 18,820. In addition, the total number of households in temporary accommodation has risen to 74,630, up 9% on a year earlier.

The vast majority of homeless is not a result of fecklessness. What we have seen over the past decade is a massive increase in the private-rented sector, fuelled by buy-to-let, with shorthold tenancies and persistent rent increases. Working families, who have just managed to hold on financially, have found themselves priced out of their homes and of the rental market at the end of their tenancies

21,400 homeless households – a 15% rise in the last year – have been sent on forced marches to a different area, away from their jobs, the children’s schools and their families and friends, which is having a devastating effect on family life.

The government’s housing plans are in disarray. The government’s new-build housing promises were being torn up within weeks of them being made. The long-promised housing white paper has been pushed back again into 2017.

We started this century with a decade of falling homelessness and a massive reduction in rough-sleeping. Since 2010, we have seen year-on-year increases. Anyone who says ‘voting doesn’t change anything’ is clearly living in a fact-free world.

Curiosity being quashed

Fifteen years ago, the then Labour government enabled free entry to Britain’s national museums. The policy came into practice on December 1st, 2001.

Visitor numbers at the museums that once charged have rocketed by over 200% from just 7 million in 2001 to nearly 22 million in 2016. Some of the museums – like the Royal Armouries in London, Leeds and Hampshire have seen visitor numbers rise by over 700%, and Liverpool’s National Museums have seen a rise of over 300%.

Not only did the number of visits to national museums increase, but there was also an increase in the number of visitors to many local museums, which received improved grant assistance to improve the quality of their presentations and to improve the educational experience for millions of school-children.

However, since 2010, the whole government approach to our arts, libraries and museums has gone in to reverse. The Conservative/Liberal Democrat coalition government, and then Conservative governments under David Cameron and Theresa May, have significantly cut financial support, requiring councils to cut arts and cultural expenditure by £165 million, including nearly £17 million in Yorkshire and Humberside. The government has now promised further cuts each year through to, at least, 2020.

Now, we are beginning to learn of the scale of EU resources which are used to support cultural services and are now at risk. The UK’s Arts and cultural bodies receive millions of pounds funding from the EU every year – including €17 million from the Creative Europe Programme in 2015 alone.

The Government announced in August that it would underwrite money awarded by EU competitive funds before Brexit through to 2020. The Creative Europe Programme is a competitive fund and, on the face of it, comes with the scope of that announcement; however, there was no mention of arts and culture in the statement and the Secretary of State, Karen Bradley, has been remarkably quiet about the commitment. Even if this resource was protected in the short-term, there is no commitment from 2020.

The free museums policy was bold and has delivered great achievements. It has been hugely successful. But the prospects for our museums and the cultural health of local communities are not good as the government imposes bigger and bigger cuts.

OFCOM asleep on the job

In October 2012, I called on the Competition Commission and the Secretary of State for Trade and Industry to launch an investigation into the telecoms’ suppliers and, particularly, into landline charges. ¹

SKY had just announced that it would increase phone line rental charges by 18%. BT had already announced inflation-busting rises. Virgin and TalkTalk had already implemented way-above-inflation increases in line rental charges, but BT and Sky are the dominant domestic telecoms suppliers.  These new charges were almost double those of the lowest-cost provider. There was no justification for any price rise at all.

I strongly made the point that increasing the unavoidable line rental charges meant that those who made the fewest calls – typically pensioners on the lowest incomes – were getting the highest percentage increases in their bills.

Further, I was sharply critical of the suppliers’ claims that there was a ‘highly competitive market’, asking how it was that BT and Sky managed to arrive at the same charges for daytime calls and connection fees. I said that customers were being taken for a ride.

But, what was the response of the Conservative Minister, Ed Vaizey, and OFCOM then? They said that they believed the retail market was competitive and

“… for Ofcom to open up an investigation in this area, it would need evidence of an abuse of a dominant position or evidence of collusion or anti-competitive agreements.”

They refused to budge from this position, despite the evidence staring them in the face.

Then, last week, Ofcom announced a review ² into “unnecessarily high charges paid by the estimated two million households who pay for a standalone landline service…. Ofcom is concerned that (these) people are not being served well by the market.”

The regulator said that all the major landline providers had raised charges significantly since 2010, by between 28 per cent and 41 per cent in real terms. This was despite benefiting from a 25 per cent fall in the underlying wholesale cost.

Customers have been taken for a ride for the last 6 years whilst OFCOM and the government have been asleep on the job.

¹ LINE UP – we’re being taken for a ride, 16th October 2012, http://www.clivebetts.com/

² http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-38166781

Autumn Statement – austerity revisited

Sober reflection on the Autumn Statement confirms that the last six years of the Conservative’s (with Liberal Democrat support) so-called ‘long-term economic plan’, with austerity at the heart, have simply been disastrous for the short-, medium- and long-term health of UK plc.

George Osborne’s unique triumph as Chancellor of the Exchequer was to have missed each and every one of the economic and fiscal targets. These weren’t targets imposed by outsiders. These were the targets he had set himself.

The Autumn Statement ditched every one of the key forecasts that George Osborne had asserted in March this year:

• Economic growth was revised downwards for both next year and 2018
• Wage growth has been revised downwards, not just for this year and next but also for the three years to 2020
• The National Living Wage is now going to be lower for the next 4 years, with an estimated 2.7 million workers seeing a direct total cut in their incomes of up to £1,324 by 2020
• Business investment has been revised downwards for each year to 2020, and
• Productivity has been revised downwards for next year and then in each year to 2020.

If all that weren’t sufficient bad news, the Conservative Party 2015 Manifesto pledged to double UK exports to £1 trillion by 2020. But the Office of Budget Responsibility has now confirmed that the Government is set to miss this target by £329 billion.

It isn’t surprising, therefore, that the UK deficit is expected to rise by £122bn by 2020/21, of which some £59bn is being directly attributed to Brexit.

Further, there was no additional money for

• the NHS, experiencing its first real-terms cut since it was founded. It is no surprise that waiting-times and waiting-lists for out-patient and in-patient services are rising each and every day;
• adult social care, which is approaching a crisis and exacerbating NHS problems as discharges from hospital are being held up because of a lack of community care support;
• education, suffering its first real-terms cut since the 1970s. Little wonder that, in most schools, teaching and teaching assistant numbers are falling. It is just disgraceful that £60m pa is being diverted to the grammar school’s vanity project, which will do nothing for raising achievement or for social mobility.

It is not hard to understand why so many people are angry, concerned and worried about the prospects for themselves, their families and their communities.

To turn our country and our economy around will require a patient long-term investment strategy focused on exploiting our strengths in science, technology, and the creative industries. There is no sense that the current government has either the will or the policies to make this happen.

We should be very, very worried.

There’s a triple whammy heading straight towards us.

It’s the triple whammy of a lack of social care expenditure, NHS services deteriorating in response, and the re-distribution of social care and NHS resources from the poorest to the wealthiest areas.

These whammies aren’t happening by chance, but because of the choices the Government are making.

Social care funding was slashed by £4.6billion during the last Parliament. Spending on adult social care has dropped further since 2015, despite demand increasing with a rapidly ageing society.

For most councils with adult social care functions, it consumes more than 35% of their total budget; in some. Last year, councils diverted £900 million from other services to maintain adult social and have a projected £500m overspend this year.

The additional revenue from the 2% council tax precept in 2015/16 did not even meet the additional cost of the Living Wage changes .

The number of over-65s receiving social care from local councils has fallen by a quarter – more than 400,000 mainly elderly people - since 2010 .Three-quarters of people who apply for social care are now being turned away.. Over the same period, 1,500 care homes have closed - that’s almost one in ten of the total. 

This is hitting the poorest areas hardest. Since 2010, social care spending has fallen by £65 per person in the most deprived areas  like South Yorkshire, but risen by £28 per person in the wealthiest areas . 

In Sheffield, we are very lucky to have some of the best-performing health and hospital services in the country. They have consistently done well against all performance indicators and consistently achieved that within budget. But, the latest statistics and forecasts should worry us all. For instance, in the first half of 2013, just 6% of people waited more than 4 hours in A&E in Sheffield; this year it is 20%. And we haven’t got to the winter periods yet.

Nationally and locally, there are longer waits to see a GP, hospital beds are full and a £2.45 billion deficit in the NHS – the worst on record.

“Bedblocking” - where people are stranded on hospital wards because there is no social care available for them when they leave - stands at record levels, costing hospitals £820 million a year. In September, we saw the highest number of delayed discharge days since records began. There has also been an 18% increase in A&E admissions of elderly people since 2010.

I have been highlighting the scale of this problem for more than 12 months. Over the last few weeks, every independent commentator, including the government’s own Care Quality Commission, has been shouting about the scale of the problem.

But, in the Autumn Statement, the Chancellor said not a word. It was both extraordinary and disgraceful. 

Housing failure for the many; merry dancing for the few.

Last week, the Office for Budget Responsibility said that the measures announced in the Autumn Statement will actually further slow housebuilding. It said there will be 13,000 fewer affordable homes over the next five years.

Between 1997 and 2010, the government delivered two million more homes, a million more home-owners and the biggest investment in social housing in a generation. By contrast, the Coalition and Conservative governments’ record on housing is six years of failure on all fronts.

Under Cameron and Clegg, we built fewer homes than under any Prime Minister since 1923. The number of homeowning households fell by 200,000 under their stewardship.

The latest figures reveal that just 141,680 homes were built in the year to September 2016, some 20% lower than the 176,640 built nine years ago. Young people have been hardest hit. The number of under-35s who own their own home is down by 21% since 2010, that’s 344,000 homes.

The number of shared ownership and other low-cost home ownership homes built has fallen by 66% since 2010 to just 7,540 homes last year.

The number of social rented homes started in 2009/10 was almost 40,000, but last year, in 2015/16 was less than 1,000 – a fall of 98%, and the lowest level since records began. The overall number of affordable homes to buy and rent being built has fallen to the lowest level in 24 years.

In 2010, the Cameron and Clegg coalition cut investment in affordable homes by 60%. Nine in ten of the genuinely affordable homes built between 2010 and 2015 were under programmes inherited from the former government.

Similarly, private renters have been failed badly in the last six years. The latest figures show that 29% of private rented homes are ‘non-decent’. Private rents on new lettings have reached an average of almost £900 per month– an annual increase of over £2,000 since 2010.

Despite the concerns about housing standards, the government has opposed proposals to ensure all rented homes are ‘fit for human habitation’ when let and throughout the course of the tenancy.

Now the government is preparing to relax the protections on building in the Green Belt. The big housing developers, who are sitting on record levels of housing land already with planning permission for development and declaring record levels of profit, are dancing with glee.

Treasure our assets

The BBC is one of the UK's treasures.

Of course, that doesn’t stop the Murdoch media – for commercial reasons – and the Daily Mail – for ideological reasons – relentlessly publishing negative stories about it. Like any organisation, it doesn’t get everything right, but the British public have said time and time again that they value the BBC and its independence.

The current Royal Charter for the BBC runs out at the end of this year. The new one will run for 11 years. Unsurprisingly, Conservative MPs and government ministers – whose long-standing hostility to the BBC is on the record – saw the negotiations about the Charter as an opportunity to undermine the BBC’s editorial independence, financial independence, and its core mission. Fortunately, the Tories were forced to backtrack on many of their most extreme proposals for the BBC because they were out of step with the overwhelming majority of the public.

However, there are still real concerns that the Government will seek to influence the BBC’s editorial decision making, and that the broadcaster will come under undue political interference as a result.

Last year, there was shoddy deal between the BBC Trust and then-Chancellor George Osborne which saw the cost of funding free TV licences for the over-75s from the Government to the BBC. This is costing the BBC £1.3bn until 2020 and £750m a year from 2020-21. Quite disgracefully, the Government also transferred responsibility for setting policy on free TV licences to the BBC as well. This change means that the BBC could choose to restrict free TV licences in future without the democratic accountability which governments operate under.

Tory Culture Minister John Whittingdale said that it was ‘debatable’ whether the BBC should be making programmes like Strictly Come Dancing. The resultant uproar forced him to backtrack.  Yes, the BBC should be distinctive, but the Charter’s distinctiveness test should apply to the totality of the BBC’s services not individual programmes.

The BBC’s treatment of Bake Off was exceptional and distinctive. But, in underlining its Charter requirement for financial prudence, the BBC (on our behalf) was absolutely right to refuse to be ripped off in the future. We’ll just have to wait and see what Channel 4 does with the format. Will it all end in custard pies?

Breaking new ground

Our parliamentary select committees attract a lot of attention from parliaments and emerging democracies throughout the world.

In the House of Commons, there is a select committee for every government department. Each committee is concerned with examining the relevant department’s performance on spending, policy and administration. Committees are all-party with membership proportional to each party’s representation in parliament.

Each committee decides what it wants to investigate. It invites written evidence, holds oral hearings to question relevant witnesses and publishes reports to which the government is normally meant to respond within 60 days. The real strength is in the way members work together; it is quite rare for reports to be other than unanimous.

Last year, I was fortunate enough to be re-elected as the Chair of the Communities and Local Government Committee. I am pleased to be able to report that we are breaking new constitutional ground.

We conducted an inquiry into homelessness. We discovered enormous pressures on most councils which was resulting in some placing individuals and families a long way from where they worked, other members of their families lived and where the children went to school. But we also found some quite unacceptable services in some local authorities, where people who are homeless or in danger of becoming homeless often face a hostile process.

We recommended the introduction of a mandatory code of good practice for councils. We also wanted an emphasis on homelessness prevention, provision for domestic violence victims and consideration for those with mental health conditions.

Normally, we would just report, recommend and then harry Ministers to make changes and then follow through any policy or practice changes.

However, on this subject, one of the Committee members drew up a Private Member’s Bill – that is one that isn’t promoted by the government – based on our recommendations. We then examined his draft Bill in pre-legislative scrutiny and proposed a list of amendments.

The outcome is that on 28th October, the House of Commons will be considering this Bill, together with the Committee’s amendments. As the MP who drew up the Bill has drawn second place in the ballot, this amended Bill stands a really good chance of making it into law.

This will be the first time this has ever happened and I’m very proud of the way that everyone has worked together to achieve this.