Danny Kruger MP: speeches

Speeches

• 19 Nov 2024 · Food Banks · Hansard source

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  I do recognise the extent of the problem of in-work poverty and of people reliant on benefits to sustain their incomes and on additional support from the outside. I do not accept that that was a new phenomenon; in fact, I will come to the last Government’s record in a moment.

• 19 Nov 2024 · Food Banks · Hansard source

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  Yes, indeed; I very much look forward to that review coming along soon. Many hon. Members have mentioned the record of the last Government. I recognise the extent of low wage growth and in-work poverty that we have seen. If we look at absolute poverty, however, which is the measure that we should ultimately be looking at if we are thinking about the extent of destitution and food poverty, 1 million fewer people are in absolute poverty after housing costs in 2024 than in 2010. That includes 100,000 fewer children, 200,000 fewer pensioners, and 700,000 fewer working-age people, so the last Government made a real impact on absolute poverty. Overall, there are 1 million fewer workless households than in 2010. Much of that impact was driven by the introduction of universal credit. Those of us who worked in the social sector before 2010 might remember the labyrinthine complexity and the perverse incentives that were created by the mess of the benefit system that we inherited in 2010, which we rationalised and improved. It is also worth mentioning the enormous £100 billion cost of living package that the last Government put together in the light of the energy shock. Let us turn to what this Government are doing. The most significant policy that they have announced so far on poverty is the withdrawal of the winter fuel payment. Some 10 million pensioners will be denied that essential benefit, including 70% of disabled pensioners. That is surely not a record that hon. Members are proud of.

• 19 Nov 2024 · Food Banks · Hansard source

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  I am grateful for the intervention. I recognise those points and pay tribute to the hon. Member’s food banks too. Hon. Members have cited some of the facts. It is a fact that the number of parcels handed out by the Trussell Trust doubled in the last Parliament in the light of the covid crisis and the cost of living crisis, but I emphasise that we should not take food bank use as a perfect proxy for poverty, because that data is patchy and affected by the supply of food banks. There is also an important displacement effect. It is not necessarily the case that all the need identified by food banks is new need; that need might formerly have been met by other sources, such as family and friends or other community organisations. Nevertheless, the profile of food bank use tracks the state of the economy and the level of poverty in our country. We saw it spike during lockdowns, then decline and then spike again with the cost of living crisis. I am afraid that it has not really declined since: 1.4% of households have used a food bank in the last month and 3% in the last year, which are significant numbers. So what is going on? I echo the point of my right hon. Friend the Member for Salisbury (John Glen) about the complexity of the causes of food bank use, but we recognise the obvious point that it is ultimately down to household income. The “Hunger in the UK” report points out that the main reasons for people having problems with their household income are difficulties with benefits, as many hon. Members have mentioned; the existence of in-work poverty; and the difficulty of gaining well-paid work, particularly for disabled people and carers.

• 19 Nov 2024 · Food Banks · Hansard source

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  I congratulate the hon. Member for Aberdeenshire North and Moray East (Seamus Logan) on bringing this debate forward. I am grateful for hon. Members’ helpful contributions, and I am happy to take interventions from hon. Members who were not able to speak if there is time. Let me first acknowledge that I agree with hon. Members who have pointed out that the existence and extent of poverty in our country is shameful. It is a source of deep shame to our country that so many people are reliant on the charity of others for essentials. Briefly, I pay tribute to the food banks in my constituency and in my former constituency of Devizes, which do such good work. I also previously worked with the Hammersmith and Fulham food bank. I echo the points made by hon. Members about the valuable work of such organisations.

• 19 Nov 2024 · Jailing of Hong Kong Pro-democracy Activists · Hansard source

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  My constituent and friend, Sir Henry Keswick, who died earlier this month, was for many years the chairman of Jardine Matheson. He was a great believer in the opportunity for good relations between this country and China. There is an awful inevitability in the fact that, the day after the Prime Minister met the Chinese President and declared a new era of positive relations, the Sino-British declaration was comprehensively breached. Does the pragmatic relationship that the Prime Minister thinks he can have with China include getting assurances that the national security law will not jeopardise the interests and welfare of British businesses and employees working in Hong Kong?

• 11 Nov 2024 · Pension Credit: Uptake · Hansard source

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  The withdrawal of the winter fuel payment from 10 million households, including 70% of disabled pensioners, is a huge change, as is using pension credit to distribute the benefit to the minority of people who will still get it, yet the Government have rushed this change through without giving their own statutory advisory committee the chance to properly scrutinise it. Ministers have not even responded to the chair of the committee, who wrote to them several weeks ago with suggestions on how to mitigate the effect of the policy. On top of that, they have failed to provide a full impact assessment to show what the effect on poverty would be. Will they finally produce a full impact assessment of this policy, and when will the Minister respond to the chair of the advisory committee?

• 11 Nov 2024 · Pension Credit: Uptake · Hansard source

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  The Minister mentions the equality assessment. That was a high-level equality assessment that was only dragged out of the Government in response to a freedom of information request. The fact is that they are avoiding accountability for this policy and avoiding scrutiny by the House. The Government are saying that the impact of the cut on the poorest pensioners will be mitigated by pension credit, and we have heard from the Minister about the very small numbers who are taking up pension credit in response to this announcement. Their own figures predict that fully a third of eligible pensioners—that is 750,000 of the poorest people in the country—will not get pension credit and will not get the winter fuel payment. That is what the Government are banking on. That is how they are making the savings that they predict from this policy: by cutting benefits to some of the poorest people in our country— [ Interruption. ] The Minister shakes her head, so she might want to put me right. Does she want all eligible pensioners to claim pension credit? [ Interruption. ] The Secretary of State says yes. If she does want that, does she then accept that the Government’s savings from this policy will be completely wiped out?

• 6 Nov 2024 · Budget Resolutions · Hansard source

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  I am delighted to hear that there is, in fact, a businessman on the Labour Benches; that is tremendous, and I hope that he and his business prosper under the Government that he is supporting. The fact is that the OBR itself said in its commentary on the Budget that payroll tax rises are “passed through” into lower wages. The direct effect is that the Government are taxing workers to fund their spending commitments. Those spending commitments go partly towards what they call investment capital projects, but also towards public services’ running costs. As we have heard today, the bulk of that money will be front-loaded at the start of this Parliament, in what one would have thought was direct contravention of good fiscal management. However, more importantly and more worryingly, as we heard, the effect will be largely circular, because the additional spending will simply be taken in tax through the NIC increases. On behalf of my constituents, I would quickly add that the one spending area where I have particular regrets is the cutting of the transport budget. The Government talk about increasing investment in the public sector, but they have cut the transport budget overall and, particularly to the regret of constituents in Wiltshire, scrapped the plan to upgrade the A303 and divert all that horrendous traffic around Stonehenge. I deeply regret that, and I am sorry that we have yet to hear any plans from the Department for Transport or the Treasury to alleviate our chronic traffic problems. Let me finish by saying how much I regret the missed opportunities that this Budget represents. We need growth and productivity, which, fundamentally, will come only from the private sector. We need to see more savings in the public sector, so that we can fund proper deficit reduction, but we are not going to see that. We also need meaningful tax cuts, so that we can get the economy going. One area where we urgently need more spending is defence, which is the one area we really have not heard about. When will we hear about the timetable to get to 2.5%?

• 6 Nov 2024 · Budget Resolutions · Hansard source

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  I start by congratulating my hon. Friend the Member for Arundel and South Downs (Andrew Griffith) on his role as shadow Secretary of State. I know what a distinguished career he has had in business and how eminently qualified he is for this role. I also enjoyed listening to the Secretary of State; I know he is a very intelligent man and I know by reputation what a decent man he is, but while I was sitting in the Chamber I looked up on Wikipedia what his business experience is and what qualifies him for his role. I am sorry to report that he has about as much business experience as I do, which is precisely none. I spent my career before my election working in Parliament and in the charity sector—you could mistake me for a Labour MP, Madam Deputy Speaker; I am almost indistinguishable from them and easily mistaken for one. However, I will do my best to disabuse them of that false impression by saying what a very shameful thing it is that the Labour party allowed the public to be so misled in the run-up to the last election. Labour promised not to raise taxes, not to increase borrowing or to change the borrowing rules and certainly not to impose inheritance tax on family farms. All those things they have done in this Budget, and it is a shameful thing. Leaving aside whether these measures are good or bad for the country, leaving aside the erroneous idea that suddenly Labour understood the public finances after they got into government, when they did not understand them before—even though before the party got into government it said it knew exactly what was in the public finances, and of course it did, because that is what the OBR enables—the fact is that Labour understandably stressed in the run-up to the election that they were standing on a platform of probity, integrity and trust. Those were the words used repeatedly in their election campaigns, and the public responded to that. In so far as it is possible to say that Labour won public support at the election—of course it did not really; we just lost it—it was on the grounds that— [ Interruption. ] Labour Members ask why we lost it. We lost it because the public could not trust us and they did not think we had integrity. I know that. I am not stupid. We understand what the public thought and I am not going to disabuse them, but Labour promised to be different, and in this Budget they have absolutely broken their promises on integrity and trust. This is a day of shame for the party after what they have done with this Budget. In a less partisan spirit, there is much to critique about the economy that the Labour party inherited when it came into government. I recognise that there were things wrong with our economy and deep structural problems. They go back decades—a lot longer than 14 years. In so far as it is possible to critique the Conservative party for failures, those happened for very understandable reasons—not least because of the deficit and the broken economy that we had inherited 14 years previously, as well as other events that took place during our time in power. Our failure was that we did not fix those fundamental structural problems with the economy that we inherited. Those problems were to do with a high-tax, high-borrowing economy that had high levels of public debt caused by high welfare, high and preventable health spending, high rates of private debt, low productivity and low wages. Those are the underlying structural realities of the British economy going back decades; they are the reality of this century so far. It is therefore right that the Chancellor talks often about fixing the foundations. I welcome that because it is absolutely the right framework within which to approach the challenge that the new Government faces on the economy. The problem is that the Government are leaning into the broken model that we have. They are further damaging the foundations of our economy, which need to be fixed, by pursuing more borrowing, more tax and spend and, as my hon. Friend the Member for Arundel and South Downs said from the Front Bench a little while ago, a plan that will not lead to greater growth in the economy over this Parliament, with only minuscule improvements if the forecasts are correct. Nevertheless, in the spirit of cross-party consensus, let me hope that we can fix the foundations of the economy, because we do need to fix them. What are those foundations? Classically understood, the foundations of prosperity—the foundations of any economy—are land, labour and capital. Let me look at each briefly in turn. The fundamental reality of our land economy is the planning system. Work done in the think-tank world by Southwood, Hughes and Bowman called “Foundations” —that is absolutely the right framing—shows that it is impossible to build things in this country, to build them quickly and to build them in the right places. Yes, we need new housing urgently, and I recognise and applaud the Government’s commitment on that, but their approach is entirely wrong. They propose to build houses where they are not needed and not wanted—on our green fields—instead of where they are urgently needed and very much wanted, which is in our cities. What we need all across the country, including in rural areas such as the one I represent in east Wiltshire, is more business space. We need space for industrial use, and we need office space. We urgently need to enable our entrepreneurs to create businesses and to grow them in the places where they want to do that. I am very conscious of the challenge we have in Wiltshire with the lack of affordable and available land for business. Like others, I should also quickly mention the absolute crime of proposing to tax family farms and to insist that farmers sell up when farms are passing from one generation to the next. That is another flagrant abuse of trust by this Government. The second foundation is the labour market. I have not heard the Government address this so far in the Budget or in this Budget debate, but the crucial challenge for our economy is that it is so dependent on high rates of low-skilled migration, which depresses wages, increases welfare and inhibits productivity—crucially, because it disincentivises employers from investing in people, in machinery or in technology that boosts growth and productivity. We have to cap migration and shift spending into the skills economy and into our own people to support them to gain the skills they need in order to do the jobs that need doing. The third foundation is capital itself. We have heard a lot from Ministers about the need for investment, but what they mean is public investment and public spending. What is fundamentally needed is private investment, but we hear nothing about that and do not see much sign of it. We have a broken capital market. Again, I recognise that a lot of this goes back many years—to well before this Government—but it is difficult for businesses to find the capital they need to start and, crucially, to scale. All the incentives are towards rushing to private equity or to an initial public offering and cashing out as soon as possible. We heard from my hon. Friend the Member for Mid Norfolk (George Freeman) during Prime Minister’s questions earlier about the failure of the London capital market to direct capital into UK businesses. That is a perennial challenge with our finance sector, and it needs addressing. I echo the point made by the Liberal Democrat spokesman, the hon. Member for St Albans (Daisy Cooper), who was absolutely right about the importance of investing in UK resilience. We need money—crucially, private money—to go into small and medium-sized enterprises and the key growth sectors that will be needed in the turbulent times to come. We need to use the incentives in the tax and regulation systems to direct finance towards British businesses. Crucially, we also need to make British businesses more competitive. That brings me to the national insurance increase. This huge jobs tax has been imposed on the country with no warning and, in fact, in direct breach of promises made by the Labour party.

• 29 Oct 2024 · Israel: UNRWA Ban · Hansard source

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  The fact is that Hamas are deeply integrated in the civilian and humanitarian infrastructure of Gaza, whether hiding their soldiers in hospitals—we saw this week 100 terror suspects captured by the IDF in a hospital in northern Gaza—or being deeply integrated in UNRWA. My hon. Friend the Member for Harrow East (Bob Blackman) mentioned a senior Hamas commander who was working for UNRWA. The fact is that Israel is not going to facilitate the work of UNRWA in Gaza, so the question is: what is the Government’s policy? Is it simply to lament this decision and to criticise Israel, and to threaten as yet unspecified consequences which are clearly not satisfying this House? Or is it to do something practical to get aid in to the Palestinians, working with Israel and other partners to develop an alternative supply route that will get aid in, accepting that UNRWA will not be that mechanism?

• 28 Oct 2024 · Middle East · Hansard source

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  Naturally, the Foreign Secretary says that we need to prevent escalation in the conflict between Israel and Iran but, as he says, that conflict is being driven by Iran, using a network of proxies in the Arab world. I have a genuine question for the Foreign Secretary: does he understand why Israel is increasingly thinking that it needs to go after the head of the octopus, rather than defending itself against the tentacles, or does he think that Israel should never take steps to deter Iran directly?

• 28 Oct 2024 · China: Human Rights and Sanctions · Hansard source

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  Another topic that did not seem to make it into the Foreign Office read-out on the Foreign Secretary’s meeting is Taiwan, but I think he confirmed in answer to my right hon. Friend the Member for Chingford and Woodford Green (Sir Iain Duncan Smith) that that topic was discussed. Could he specify a little more clearly what he said, and was he clearer about the UK’s red lines on Taiwan?

• 15 Oct 2024 · Draft Armed Forces Act 2006 (Continuation) Order 2024 · Hansard source

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  I start by paying tribute to the Minister and welcoming him to his place. The Labour Front Bench, and indeed the whole House, is greatly enhanced by his presence, and I pay tribute to him and to his speech. I look forward to working with him on the important matters in the brief that we share. The previous Government renewed the Armed Forces Act 2006, including through the Armed Forces Act 2021 and the Armed Forces Act 2006 (Continuation) Order 2023. Of course, we support today’s draft order. As the Minister mentioned, it reflects the constitutional principle that goes back many hundreds of years to the Bill of Rights in the 17th century, when Parliament insisted on its own right to approve the presence of a standing Army. That was in the days when the rest of Europe suffered under absolute monarchy; who knew our Parliament could insist on the rights and liberties of British subjects on its own? I am pleased to be standing in the tradition set all those years ago. As is customary in these debates, I pay tribute to our armed forces. I have the great privilege of representing East Wiltshire. Thousands of serving personnel are stationed at the camps and garrisons at Tidworth, Netheravon, Bulford, Larkhill, Perham Down and Upavon. I was recently taken up on to Salisbury plain by the commander of the Army’s south-west region, and he showed me with a sweep of his arm where 20,000 British service personnel and their families live. I represent what I call the home of the British Army, despite what it says outside Aldershot. We have the best people in the world serving in our armed forces. They keep us safe in a world fraught with risk and threats, and we must give them the tools they need. Labour Members will not be surprised to hear me reiterate once again the absolute imperative for a clear pathway for increasing defence spending to 2.5% of GDP by 2030. That is a paramount requirement, and if the Government do not commit to it now or at the Budget in a few weeks, there is a real risk of defence cuts at the worst possible time for our armed forces, when countries around the world are doing the exact opposite—rearming and increasing defence spending in order to prevent escalation and keep their people safe. At oral questions yesterday, Ministers could not even commit that defence training or research and development will have their budgets protected in the upcoming Budget. We should not beat around the bush: cuts in these areas would undermine our armed forces and our security. Our support for the draft order is total, but we are implacably opposed to any cuts in spending, including by delaying the increases that the Government have—at least in principle—committed to in due course. The real test of our commitment to the armed forces is whether we are prepared to make that spending commitment soon.

• 14 Oct 2024 · Defence Research and Development: Funding · Hansard source

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  Ministers repeatedly state their commitment to reaching a spending level of 2.5% of GDP on defence, but they simply will not tell the House when they will do so. It is no surprise that we are already hearing reports of potential cuts to programmes in defence R&D. Will the Minister simply rule out cuts to defence R&D and science spending in this financial year and the next?

• 9 Oct 2024 · Renters’ Rights Bill · Hansard source

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  My hon. Friend is making a very important speech. Does he agree that it would be very helpful for the whole House if the Government published an impact assessment on the effects of the Bill, and does he understand why that has not happened?

• 29 Jul 2024 · Public Spending: Inheritance · Hansard source

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  The Chancellor claims to have discovered a black hole in this year’s Budget, yet she is proposing to cut infrastructure investment for years to come. It makes no sense. One example is the Stonehenge tunnel, which was due to cost very little money this year, yet she has cancelled the whole thing. My constituents in Shrewton, Amesbury and all the villages around the A303 will be really disappointed to hear that news. What would she say to those residents? What will she do to relieve the traffic congestion that has blighted those communities for so long?