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9.28 pm
Mr. Quentin Davies (Grantham and Stamford): We have had a thoughtful and well-informed debate, to which many members of the Select Committee on Social Security have contributed. It has been an unusually original debate, and some very original remarks were made.
What has been most notable about the debate is the strange absence of party politics. People listening to the debate, if they were not in the Chamber or watching on television, would have had difficulty in guessing from which side a contribution came. However, they would have had no difficulty in grasping that most speakers have criticised the Government. Very few had a good word to say about the Bill.
Perhaps even more surprising is that Liberal Democrat Members, who are normally so subservient to, and so glamorised by, the Administration, decided to stand up and be counted. That may, perhaps, make the Government's business managers pause, at least for a second or two.
We have heard powerful speeches, including that of my hon. Friend the Member for Canterbury (Mr. Brazier), who spoke bravely and well in acknowledging that not all was as it should have been under the previous Administration. Serious mistakes were made then, but my hon. Friend pointed out the extraordinary irony that a Labour Government who won power by claiming to offer a different deal to the British people have in fact simply aggravated the position that they inherited. The Government have gone much further down the bad road of means-testing, and they have begun to attack the national insurance system in a way that their predecessor would not have dreamed of doing.
We heard penetrating and expert contributions from my hon. Friends the Members for Ryedale (Mr. Greenway) and for Arundel and South Downs (Mr. Flight), each of whom has long-standing professional expertise in the field. The House always listens to my two hon. Friends with great attention, and it did so again tonight. I hope that we shall defeat this extremely bad Bill in half an hour or so, but, if we cannot succeed in doing so, I hope that we shall hear from my hon. Friends again in the Standing Committee.
My hon. Friend the Member for Beckenham (Mrs. Lait) also gave us an effective indictment of the Bill and of the impact of means-testing on saving. She made a slightly different calculation from that which I made in the Chamber a couple of weeks ago, and she came up with the figure of £100,000, below which anyone who could not save that much would be better off not saving at all. To save some lesser sum would only deprive that benighted individual of the thousands of pounds of means-tested benefits to which he or she would otherwise be entitled.
My hon. Friend's £100,000 is somewhat more than the £80,000 that I calculated, but both figures are far too high. It is appalling to think of people on low or modest incomes saving all their lives for nothing at all. It is appalling that their sacrifices should be mocked and made as nothing by the new Labour Government. As each month passes, and the Government go further down the road of means-testing, the figure will rise higher and higher. It will continue to rise throughout this Parliament unless the Government see the error of their ways, and there has been little sign of that.
We heard a particularly thoughtful and frank speech from my hon. Friend the Member for Gainsborough (Mr. Leigh) who did not spare us in the language that he used. He referred to the corruption of family life, and to a deliberate increase of dependency in our culture. Such things need to be said because the House is the one place in which the wiles, deceptions and cover-ups of the Government may be revealed. Only here can we get away from the clever press spin to which we have become so used over the past two years. It is here that we can get behind that spin to see the reality of what is happening.
Perhaps the most shattering indictments of the course on which the Government have embarked have come from their own side of the House. They came from a range of right hon. and hon. Members who carry great respect in the House. As all hon. Members here would bear out, they have had a record since they have been in the House of taking a close interest in social security and welfare. They have fine personal records of compassion and concern for the disadvantaged. I think in particular of the right hon. Member for Birkenhead (Mr. Field) and the hon. Members for Preston (Audrey Wise) and for Croydon, North (Mr. Wicks), but they were joined by other hon. Members, including the hon. Member for Islington, North (Mr. Corbyn), who always speaks sincerely, even if it is--[Interruption.] I was about to say that it is relatively unusual that I find myself agreeing with the hon. Gentleman, but I certainly did so tonight.
After all that, Mr. Deputy Speaker, you might think that we not only had a good debate, which we certainly have had, but that the House has had a good day. In fact, the House has had not a good but a very bad day. We have had a shameful day and I trust that the Government will not try on the House another day like this.
First, the Government came to the House with three distinct Bills wrapped up in one: one on stakeholder pensions, one on pension sharing and one on their disreputable, so-called welfare reform proposals, which are designed to take money from the bereaved and widows, some of the most vulnerable people in our society. Why did they wrap those three distinct Bills in one? I will give way to any right hon. or hon. Member on the Treasury Bench who wants to intervene to offer another explanation of that extraordinary procedure. The Government thought that, by wrapping all those measures together, they could confuse the public debate and bury some of the most unpleasant proposals, which would escape the scrutiny that they so obviously require.
If that were not enough, the Government have compounded the error. Someone--no doubt, Mr. Alastair Campbell, once again--decided to be even cleverer than wrapping up three distinct Bills in one document. He decided--I say "he" advisedly, because those on the Treasury Bench are mere puppets in his hands--that he could bamboozle the British public even more effectively, first, by ensuring that the Bill, which is actually three Bills, was put before the House on the day on which we have a statement on the euro, when two hours would be taken out of the time that we might otherwise have to debate it. Secondly, he calculated that tomorrow's headlines would concentrate on the euro, so some extremely unpleasant realities for millions of people could be hidden from public view.
Mr. Chris Pond (Gravesham)
rose--
Mr. Davies:
I will give way in a moment, but, first, the hon. Gentleman will have to listen to the third reason--in some ways the most disgraceful--why the procedure tonight has been extremely disreputable. It is that the stakeholder pension Bill should not have been debated in the House today either as a separate Bill or wrapped up with a lot of extraneous legislative proposals because the consultation period set out in the Green Paper that the House received in December does not end until 31 March. If the public cannot have confidence that the Government will not formulate final proposals in the form of a Bill until a consultation period has come to an end and they have listened to what those who want to comment on the proposals have to say, they will cease to respond to consultation.
By treating Parliament and the public with such contempt, the Government are ensuring that the whole principle of consultation is devalued. By doing so, Ministers have done a terribly bad day's work, not only for their Department and for the people who depend on the national insurance system, but for the whole cause of good, effective Government--Government who listen to people and who take account of realities before drafting Bills.
The Government have been so carried away by their vast majority, which they think will allow any amount of ill-considered rubbish through the Chamber, that they have decided that they can contemptuously discard the consultation process.
Mr. Pond:
I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for giving way, and apologise for having caught him in mid-flow. Does he recognise that one of the reasons why Labour has such a large majority is that the Conservatives
Mr. Davies:
The hon. Gentleman is obviously dissatisfied that he failed to catch your eye, Mr. Deputy Speaker, and so was unable to make a speech. What an extraordinarily perverse and idiotic line to take--that, because the previous Government made a few mistakes, it is a good idea for the Labour Government to make a load of colossal new mistakes in the same vein.
There is a great deal wrong with the Bill. On the subject of pension sharing, we heard some interesting suggestions on how to deal with flaws in the Bill from the hon. Member for Croydon, North and my hon. Friend the Member for Gainsborough. On stakeholder pensions, it is clear that a range of essential issues have not been thought through--the burden on employers, the heavy management and administration structure of the trust and, in particular, the utter confusion created by the Treasury having put forward its rival set of proposals for lifelong individual savings accounts. People will now need to take expensive and complex advice if they are to sort out the confusion that the Government have gratuitously created.
As I have said before, perhaps the most fundamental problem with stakeholder pensions is that, although they are supposedly designed for the less well-paid and the lowest-paid members of our society, the Government are rapidly making it clear that the less well-paid should not be investing or saving at all, whether in a pension or by any other means. That is the great tragedy of what the Government are doing to our society and to our future as a nation.
On welfare reform--so-called reform--what the Government are doing is quite unspeakable: it is a brutal attack on the most vulnerable. Suggestions have been made tonight about the line that genuine welfare reform might take--I look again at the hon. Member for Croydon, North. Far from adopting such a course, the Government, under the orders of the Treasury or perhaps of Mr. Campbell, have not been ashamed to go for the softest targets, the people who can least easily defend themselves--widows and those who qualify for incapacity benefit. They cannot get much lower than that.
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