John McDonnell
Queen's Speech debate
In the Gracious Speech, Her Majesty said:
"This approach will enable my Government to continue to invest in the public services, while supporting major programmes of reform on health, education, transport and crime."
The Government are right to recognise the dreadful failure during their five years in office to deliver the public services that people require. They are right to realise that they need to do something dramatic to improve and change the situation. All too many of us have daily evidence in our constituencies of patients who are waiting far too long to get treatment or who are unsure when they will be diagnosed or allowed into an out-patient clinic. All too often we have evidence of parents whose children are not allowed to go to a popular or successful school and who are sent against their choice to a school down the road that will often have results far worse than the school they would like their children to attend.
Above all, my constituents and those of most right hon. and hon. Members are only too well aware of the catastrophic collapse of our transport system. The Government, the many Labour councils and the independent rogue Labour Mayor of London are making the situation worse for those who have to use their motor cars, while offering no positive, attractive or feasible alternative to enable our constituents to get their children to school, or to enable them to get to work, to the shops, to meet their friends or to attend leisure facilities in the evenings.The most disappointing aspect of the Gracious Speech is the Government's refusal to realise that many of their problems in public services are self-inflicted. They have come about because this Government are the Government of tax and waste. They seriously believe that if they just announce a lot of extra money and tip a lot of extra money willy-nilly into the public services from the centre, there will be a miraculous transformation and suddenly nurses and doctors will be available in abundance, patients will be treated, pupils will be well educated, A-levels will go swimmingly and all will go well.
The Government are discovering the hard way that tipping a lot of money into an over-bureaucratic and over-centralised system can make matters worse and, clearly, often does not make them better. Instead of a tax-and-waste Government, I want a Government who are dedicated to proper public service reform that gives freedom to those in schools, hospitals and surgeries to run them in the way that they think best. I want a Government who give real choice and real freedom to all our constituents so that they can take advantage of free treatment or free places while choosing between different providers. I want constituents to exercise some control and to be treated better by the system as a result.
Over the 15 years during which I have been proud to represent my constituents in the House, I have never attended or heard of a debate about the bread supply. Bread is a crucial public service but miraculously, day after day, a good range of loaves is provided in the shops to my constituents and others. The bread industry even manages to handle the phenomenal demand for hot cross buns just before Easter. I never see notices in the shops saying, "Please delay buying your hot cross buns until October. We are short because there is a rush on them." The bread industry manages to handle that by the magic of free enterprise, choice and freedom. Yet when in the winter there is a rush of people with flu who want an even more important public service-the service of decent health care-they are told, "It is impossible to handle all these people because they have all chosen to have flu at the same time."
Brian White (Milton Keynes, North-East): Is the right hon. Gentleman advocating that every industry should receive the same subsidy as the agricultural industry?
Mr. Redwood: I am not advocating that, although I am advocating a system that delivers health free at the point of use and therefore rightly attracts much heavier subsidies overall than the agricultural industry. The hon. Gentleman will also realise that if we broke up the CAP or distanced ourselves it, as the Government sometimes say they want to but never manage to do, we could buy our wheat on the international market at a considerably lower price with no subsidy and we would have even cheaper bread from the free enterprise bakery industry, which has delivered so well througvhout my time in the House. The difference between our handling of the bread supply and the way in which we sort out our hospitals is that we allow ingenuity, innovation, choice and freedom in the one and we have centralisation, bureaucracy and control in the other.
I shall give the House another, even more relevant, analogy: I have never noticed that we have a shortage of hotel beds or holiday places. Many people want to go on holiday at the same time of year, but that does not seem to cause a peaking problem, and many want to use hotels in the same town or city at the same time, particularly when they go to party conferences or pensions conferences, but the free enterprise sector manages to take care of all that. Magically, there are places, and people are not normally turned away. We do not hear many modern versions of the Christmas story with people being turned away as a result of a shortage of hotel accommodation such as that which unfortunately occurred when taxation got in the way in the holy land some 2,000 years ago.
Mr. Paul Tyler (North Cornwall): Does the right hon. Gentleman accept that in both cases there is a considerable surplus, which makes it possible to offer choice? He may not regularly attend Prayers, but does he accept that we pray for our daily bread every day in this House?
Mr. Redwood: I do not know where the hon. Gentleman has been. I have often prayed in the House and my prayer has always been answered. That demonstrates the miracle of combining religious faith with free enterprise. At the risk of not showing due deference to one much mightier than anyone here, I have a suspicion that free enterprise has rather more to do with that particular prayer being answered, but that is all part of the greater scheme. All this will come to pass, even to the hon. Gentleman in due course when he seeks a place far higher than he has already achieved in this mortal life. [Interruption.] I would not be so cruel as to suggest that he wishes to go to the other place, and I do not believe that the Government would allow him to do so.
If the Government really meant what the Prime Minister told the Labour party conference, they would break up the monoliths of state provision. The Prime Minister certainly talks the talk but on this occasion he is unable to walk the walk because he is supported, or undermined, by Ministers and Members of Parliament who simply do not have their heart in public service reform. That is why it is the duty of the Conservative party, the Loyal Opposition, to set out how we can give people choice and freedom and how we can achieve the necessary expansion in the capacity of public services.
The hon. Gentleman, who said that the problem is one of shortage, is quite right. Is not it interesting that on transport the Government have such different policies and achieve such different results?I would be happy to support much of the Government's aviation policy because it promotes free enterprise, choice and competition. As a result of pursuing that policy, we have a surplus of airplane seats. We could leave the Chamber and book a flight to almost anywhere, and providers would be scrambling to offer us seats at ever lower prices to try to fill capacity. That is the joy of freedom and free enterprise delivering the goods. If, however, we want to drive a car we are handicapped by having to use a public monopoly road, so we are short of road space. If we want to hire a private sector train seat, we are hamstrung by the insufficient capacity of track and signals in the right areas at the right time of day, so again supply is short thanks to a public monopoly or an over-regulated business.
This Government have over-centralised and over-regulated, and wherever they have intervened most, the catastrophic effects have been greatest. Let us consider recent examples. The Government decided that they knew better than the marketplace how to run a railway, and they intervened very badly in Railtrack. Instead of doing a deal and breaking the monopoly, which would have produced better results, they decided to bankrupt the company and set up Network Rail, an operation financed according to the so-called third way. That has created a massive delay in new projects, a huge overspend and a bonanza for consultants. We are now two or three years away from making any progress in increasing railway capacity, which we need. Where are the new signals, the new lines and the dealing with bottlenecks that are clearly required before we can hope to divert more people and freight from road to rail? The Government's intervention has caused delay and damage.
Next, let us take the Government's ham-fisted intervention in this country's examinations system. Many young people have been bitterly disappointed-they were misled about their grades, then led to believe that they would be revised; the grades of some were revised, but others were let down again by being told that their grades were not to be revised after all.
Unfortunately, confidence in the system has been damaged by the clumsy intervention of the Government and their quangos. There was a huge row between the quango chief and the Minister responsible: the Minister made sure the quango chief left, then decided that she had to go as well. At least it was an honest resignation. That affair underlines the fact that all too often the Government intervene and make things worse, and that centralisation and bureaucracy do not work.
Precisely the same theme is seen in the Government's law and order policy. In the Gracious Speech, the Government propose a large number of legislative measures, but most people looking at our criminal justice system would say that what is needed is the Government to get out of the way of the police and let them get on with their proper job of trying to apprehend offenders. It is difficult to prosecute people successfully through the courts and produce the right sort of sentences when the rate of detection is so low, so the Government should ask why the rate of detection remains so low.
There are two obvious reasons for that. The first has been set out by my right hon. Friend the shadow Home Secretary-there are not enough policemen. We look forward to the Government spending some of those huge extra sums on recruiting more police, rather than on recruiting more bureaucrats. The other, even more important reason is the use we currently make of our policemen. Any Member of Parliament who goes out in the evenings or at the weekend with the local police force hears the same story-that police are snowed under with paperwork, deluged with circulars, advice notes, requirements and forms. They spend far too much time in the police station handling the paperwork because that is the requirement imposed by the Government and the Home Office.
If the Government got out of the way, if they understood that they could purge the system of a great deal of the paperwork and did so, a lot more policemen would suddenly be able to do what they need to do-walking around, being a visible presence, picking up intelligence from their contacts on the streets, and, immediately after burglaries, thefts and crimes of vandalism and damage, pursuing the people who are likely to have committed the offences, or witnesses who might be able to help. All too often, my constituents tell me that the police were unable to attend within a reasonable period after an offence was committed, so the trail went cold; and the reason that the police were unable to attend was that too many of them were bogged down in paperwork back at headquarters.
We are told that the Government are now on the case and we have been given some fascinating paperwork. My right hon. Friend the Leader of the Opposition referred to it in his excellent speech, but I think that the House should be given more information. The Government have homed in on the problem of excess paperwork in the education service. To illustrate that, I shall read the project summary from "Good Practice in Cutting Bureaucracy Volume 2"-a real must for any insomniac seeking bedtime reading. The fact that in all there are three volumes of this great tome is itself a delicious irony or a paradox. I cannot detain the House by reading all of it, but it might be helpful if I give a little flavour. The project summary states:
"In January 2000 the then Department for Education and Employment"- which reminds us that since then the Department has been though changes of name, logo and literature; a worthy expense, I am sure- "asked PricewaterhouseCoopers to undertake a project to 'Investigate, Test and Implement a Holistic Approach to Reducing Bureaucratic Burdens in a Range of Schools'. This was a second phase of work, which aimed to build on the work of Phase 1"- very logical - "by focusing on how individual schools could implement good practice in setting up 'lean burn' management and administrative systems across the full range of their activities. Phase 2 focused in particular on"- and so it continues, for several pages. You will have noticed, Madam Deputy Speaker, given your great attention to such matters, that the project summary tries to streamline schools' response to the massive amount of paperwork emanating from the Department for Education and Skills. There is nothing in phase 2 about the Government requiring schools to do less, although their wanting all those things caused the massive workload in the first place.
"Good Practice in Cutting Bureaucracy/1", which is not necessarily a beginners' guide, as a scholarship in gobbledegook is still required to understand the finer points, expects each school to begin by drawing up a plan-a suitably bureaucratic response-and undertake a thorough review of all the paperwork foisted on it by Her Majesty's Government; it is not allowed to cast that paperwork in the wastepaper bin. The simplest way to get schools moving again is to tell them, "Dump everything from the Department in the bin and get on with teaching children."
Mr. Ken Purchase (Wolverhampton, North-East): The right hon. Gentleman has amused the House with his anecdotal evidence, which many of us have heard before from friends and relatives who teach. What does he suggest are the best lines of accountability for parents who want to know more about what their children are doing and achieving at school? Does he have a formula for achieving that without teachers being involved in significant paperwork?
Mr. Redwood: I would like to leave that to teachers and parents. The best ways of communicating are perhaps the traditional reports on pupils, and sessions during which parents can meet teachers and talk to them about their children. That always worked when I was a parent with children at state school, and I am sure that it can continue to work in schools with the time and energy to do it. Schools do not need massive bureaucracy from quangos and national Government insisting that they complete forms for national record purposes. The hon. Gentleman will appreciate that teachers could usefully spend most of that time teaching children and a limited period communicating directly with parents and pupils to keep them up to date on progress.
I have therefore recommended that my right hon. and hon. Friends in a future Conservative manifesto offer to abolish the apartheid that divides independent and state schools. Everyone should be allowed to go to an independent school, and I would like every state school to become independent. Schools could adopt a number of forms, and choose whether to become a mutual or teachers' co-operative-that may attract the hon. Member for Wolverhampton, North-East (Mr. Purchase)-or a profit or not-for-profit private company. I would guarantee that money would flow from taxpayers to pay for free places for the many pupils whose parents wanted the free place that their children currently enjoy. However, I would not be prescriptive-I would not stop schools allowing top-up fees or charging much higher fees than average, as long as there was a guarantee of free places at good-quality schools for everyone who wanted them.
Mr. Soley: The two broad thrusts of the right hon. Gentleman's argument are about cutting public expenditure and privatising more public services. He has been saying that to enthusiastic nods from his Front Bench. Are those two policies the policies of the Conservative party?
Mr. Redwood: The Conservative party will set out its proposals on taxation and spending in the next Parliament nearer the time of that Parliament. I fully support my right hon. and hon. Friends on the importance of studying things carefully and not making our plans known until the Government have published theirs. The hon. Gentleman could not tell me about the spending plans that the Labour Government will put to the electorate at the next election in the hope of winning another term. When we have seen those plans, we will able to say how much more or less we will wish to spend in a number of different areas. I strongly believe that we should spend a lot less in big areas that have been deliberately expanded by the Government, but not on schools and hospitals, or nurses, teachers or policemen, on whom we should spend more. We may have at least to match Labour's spending plans or direct even more money at those crucial public servants. However, those services account for only a quarter of total public spending.
I would love to slash the regional government that Ministers constantly foist on us. I want no regional government at all in my part of the country. The Government do not even know what my region is called. Sometimes we are the rest of the south-east, sometimes we are London and the south-east, sometimes we are Wessex, and sometimes we are the Thames valley. They do not know, because where I live, there is no entity that is a region.
Mr. Clelland: Would the right hon. Gentleman inform the House what research he has done into the costs to which he refers? How much will regional government cost, and what proportion is that of national expenditure?
Mr. Redwood: I have indeed researched the cost. I can assure the hon. Gentleman that in the months ahead I will be producing plans that will save billions of pounds by reducing the Government overhead, and save several hundred millions from the regional government area. We do not need a regional government office in Guildford or the south-east.
Mr. Tyler: I am following the right hon. Gentleman's thesis with great interest and have memories of his sojourn in the Welsh Office. Can he say whether it is his policy to abolish devolution in Wales, and what the saving would be if he did?
Mr. Redwood: No, I am not recommending that, because the Welsh and the Scottish people were offered a different type of government and voted for it in a referendum. I would abolish the posts of Secretary of State for Wales and for Scotland-and for Northern Ireland if it goes back to having a devolved Assembly. I see no point in paying twice for the same thing. The people of Wales, Scotland and indeed England are paying for the superstructure of First Ministers and all their supporting staff in the devolved Assemblies, and there is no need for a similar establishment in Whitehall. There is a need for one senior Minister, who would probably be properly styled Secretary of State for the regions and local government, and who would argue the case in Cabinet for the relative sums of money that needed to go to English local government and to Scottish, Welsh and Northern Ireland devolved Assemblies. That Minister would have more detailed duties in England, because he would be facing a range of responsibilities day by day and week by week in English local government, whereas one would hope that he would have to intervene very little in the devolved Assemblies in the other parts of the United Kingdom.
David Taylor (North-West Leicestershire): The right hon. Gentleman said that he would not reverse the settled position that exists in Wales and Scotland, not least because the people voted for those arrangements by a majority. If, by the time of any change in government, the regions in the north, the west midlands or wherever be had similarly voted by a majority for an elected regional assembly, would that be sufficient for him to desist from reversing that position?
Mr. Redwood: It might be, but we would need to cross many hurdles before we got there. The hon. Gentleman assumes that the necessary legislation would go through; that a referendum would then be called; and that a region would be foolish enough to vote for a regional assembly. Those are three rather big ifs, and the hon. Gentleman should have a little modesty. Legislation sometimes gets modified or changed in both Houses of Parliament. That is a noble tradition, and the hon. Gentleman should be a little careful, in case he pre-empts all the discretion that the Houses have.
Looking at the problem in the run-up to an election, my hon. Friends would obviously investigate very carefully both turnout and percentage majority, should the event that the hon. Gentleman describes come to pass. My observation in London was that very few people wanted devolved London government. If we re-ran that referendum today, I suspect that even fewer would want that outcome, because they now know that it was an expensive waste of time and money. I did not include London, as I believe the Conservative party has serious thinking to do about London.
I am not sure that the mayoralty is serving the capital well. It may need to have its powers even more reduced. It has no significant powers, but those that it does have, it seems to abuse and use to make life difficult. Perhaps we need to ask the public in a general election or a further referendum whether it was a good idea to save the money. It looks as though the present mayor is all tax and waste, and doing that to an even greater degree in London than the Government are doing for the country as a whole.
Mr. Bercow: Does my right hon. Friend agree that the premise upon which regionalism is based is that in some sense we in this country suffer from too few politicians and too little government? Is that not eccentric, to put it mildly?
Mr. Redwood: Indeed. My hon. Friend warms my heart. There needs to be a powerful voice in this country for fewer politicians and fewer bureaucrats, and for some control to be placed on the political classes. The Government have been a wonderful Government for the political classes and their bag carriers, advisers and consultants. With reference to an earlier intervention, one of the big areas in which I would like to see huge cuts is in the amount of money that we waste on the political classes themselves. We do not need huge armies of politicians at every conceivable level and layer.
In some parts of the country now, we have parish councils, district councils, county councils, regional offices, regional development agencies, national Government and the European Union-massive bureaucracies. The result for the public is that they pay the bill many times over for expensive staff, consultants and, in many cases, politicians. They all row with each other; they often do deals in private behind closed doors; and the public find it very difficult to understand who has done what, whom they can blame and whom they can throw out. We need much less of it, and the politicians whom we do have should be much more accountable.
Mr. Don Foster: Does the right hon. Gentleman agree that we have too much regional governance, given that in every region there are some 70-odd quangos spending billions of pounds, and costing a great deal of money because of all the quangocrats that run them, each operating in its individual silo with no joined-up thinking, and no opportunity for local people to have any influence on what they do? Surely regional government, directly elected, would provide an opportunity to bring functions together, reduce some of the bureaucratic costs, ensure that there is more joined-up thinking and ensure that there is true democratic accountability? May I add one further brief point? I would agree with the right hon. Gentleman-
Madam Deputy Speaker: Order. That intervention was too long.
Mr. Redwood: I am grateful, Madam Deputy Speaker. I got the drift of the hon. Gentleman's remarks. I agree with the first part; we have far too many quangos and unelected bodies.
Mr. Tyler: You set them up.
Mr. Redwood: The hon. Gentleman says that I set them up. He is mistaking history. He should know that, as Secretary of State for Wales, I transferred some powers from quangos to local government and wanted to do rather more, but other events transpired which took my interest at the time. He should also know that the present Government have become the king and queen of the quangos. It is they who have transferred to quangos huge areas that were previously accountable directly to this House. They have transferred a big chunk of our economic policy to the Bank of England. They have transferred our food safety policy to a new agency. They have transferred more powers over the environment to the Environment Agency. They have transferred most City regulation to the Financial Services Authority, whereas much of that was originally under Ministers at the Department of Trade and Industry and the Treasury.
There has been a massive transfer. In each case, the Government have argued that technicians and professionals are better at doing those things than elected people. The ideal world for Labour Ministers is one where they have a completely empty Red Box and a very large salary, and can say on every matter that it is absolutely nothing to do with them, because they know a quango down the road that will carry the can.
In the regional area, to which the hon. Gentleman drew my attention, I would like to see the functions that are worth carrying out transferred to elected local government, and the others abolished. I would like my local council to have real planning powers, I would like it rather than the Environment Agency to deal with matters such as flood control, I would like it to deal with some aspects of law and order, and I would like to see the quangos in those areas abolished or given a thoroughly good haircut, so that they spend much less of our money and trouble us far less than they currently do.
If we in the House are serious about democracy, we should be saying to the Government, "You have given away far too many powers. You set up too many quangos. You transferred far too many important functions outside democratic control. You have given away massive powers to the European Union. You are not serious, Government, about creating democratic accountability." Everything that Ministers do, as the Queen's Speech reveals, transfers matters away from probing, from the light of democracy, from challenge and from accountability in the Chamber. I would like to see a streamlined Government. I would like to see us curb the political classes. I would like us to have far fewer elected politicians, but I would like those whom we do have to be in serious Chambers, doing a serious job of work.
David Taylor: The right hon. Gentleman seems to be making an immensely powerful and persuasive case for democratic centralism, which as I remember did for Stalin. Would it do for the Conservative party as well?
Mr. Redwood: The hon. Gentleman has clearly been listening to a different debate. The main proposals that I have put forward are for true devolution. I want schools in every part of the country to be independent, to get their money because pupils go there on free places, and to choose how to spend that money. That would mean that they got far more money to spend on education than they currently get, because the huge educational quangos and the national Government machinery would be cut back, and the money would be better spent.
I want the Government to propose foundation hospital status for all hospitals and to give those hospitals real independence so that patients have choice, and I want those hospitals to have enough independence to be able to borrow and spend money so that they can provide the extra capacity that we so clearly need.
I want there to be bridges between the public and the private sectors. I do not want to live in a world like the one in which I was brought up where there was an apartheid whereby someone from a low income family like me simply could not go to the really smart hospitals and schools. I want everyone to be able to go to an independent school or hospital if they so choose, and I want the money to follow them out of taxpayers' revenues. That would be cheaper, better and fairer, and it would expand capacity and bring the joy of choice and free enterprise to public services. It would implement the Prime Minister's strange idea that he will break the monoliths of state provision. I only wish he would.
The Queen's Speech is a ragbag of hopeless ideas. It does not go nearly far enough. It will not give hospitals or schools independence, it will not give people choice and it will not solve the shortages and the transport problem. My right hon. and hon. Friends are right to oppose it.
