Communities and Local Government/Environment, Food and Rural Affairs

It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Harrogate and Knaresborough (Mr. Willis), who made a thought-provoking speech on an issue that we should all be interested in and that will be before Parliament soon. Creating economic security should always be at the centre of the social democratic agenda because it is essential to its success and long-term political health. The people who Labour was created to represent often rely on the security and opportunity engendered by empowering Government action to enhance their prospects in life. After all, it is those at the bottom end of the income distribution who are usually the first to suffer from the cold winds of political philosophies that seek to shrink the role of the state and advocate tax cuts and lower public expenditure. This legislative programme contains some welcome further additions to Labour’s economic opportunity agenda, which will spread the advances that we have already made as a Government even further. Ten years ago, we inherited a laissez-faire mantra of despair from the previous Thatcherite Tory Government. According to their philosophy, poverty did not exist in the UK and the state was part of the problem, not ever any part of the solution. If someone was struggling, tough luck. If they had to use public transport, they were a failure. If they needed to claim benefits, they were a scrounger, the subject of sneering ministerial verse at Tory party conference. Worse still, if they were a single mother, they were to blame for virtually all society’s ills. Contemptuous, mocking, uncaring: it was the nasty party in the prime of its political dominance. Times have changed and the public have realised that there is another way. The state can be enabling and the Government can become a force for good. We have seen in the past 10 years that reducing child and pensioner poverty is not only compatible with a stronger economy, but enhances our ability as a society to harness all our talents. The minimum wage does not destroy jobs. In fact, it protects the weakest from exploitation at work. The political choice is not between social justice and economic success. The fact is that achieving a fairer, more equal society in which security and opportunity are available to all, enhances our economic success. Those positive advances in social justice did not happen by accident. They came about because a Labour Government initiated them after the electorate supported them. Those advances were not inevitable, and they should not be taken for granted. They are unlikely to endure if the political weather changes and the Conservative party returns to power. Here are just a few highlights of a substantial and serious legislative programme that I am particularly pleased to see included in Labour’s plans for this parliamentary Session. The pensions Bill will enable women to have easier access to the state pension for the first time since it was created. That will assist in closing the gender pension gap, which stands at an unacceptable 43 per cent. The Bill will set out a framework that will enable all our citizens to have access to simplified provision and a low-cost national system of personal saving accounts. At the other end of the age range, the further education and training Bill will restructure the further education sector to make it more effective in its delivery of opportunities for many who do not wish to go to university. The Leech review highlighted the real challenges that persist in the UK to deliver higher levels of skills in our work force. If we are to continue competing successfully in a globalising economy, we must get this right and quickly. Allowing further education institutions to acquire powers to award foundation degrees should open ladders of opportunity in the vocational sector that have been absent for far too long. I particularly welcome the two transport Bills in the Government’s legislative programme. They have the potential to transform the lives of many of my constituents in Wallasey for the better. The concessionary bus travel Bill will enable everyone over 60 and all people with disabilities to take advantage of free travel on all local buses anywhere in England by April 2008. That £600 million package will improve the lives of 11 million people, many of whom have been denied the chance to travel, often on the ground of the prohibitive cost. The draft road transport Bill offers an even more important and long overdue re-regulation of local bus services. That will enable locally accountable bodies to get proper value for money for the huge public subsidies that are paid to private bus companies. In Merseyside alone, that amounts to £1 million a week, with no control over routes or timetables and no stability in local bus services. The result has been a halving of passenger use and a 30 per cent. increase in fares. It is high time that the disastrous Tory deregulation of our bus services outside London was reversed and I look forward to seeing the Bill in draft when it is published. Like many other hon. Members, I wish to make some observations on the major challenges we face in tacking climate change in the aftermath of the Stern review. I also wish to comment on the discrimination law review that is being undertaken by the Government and which I believe should lead to a radical single equality Bill, ideally in this legislative Session rather than the next. The Stern review will be seen in retrospect as a ground-breaking report of global importance. I agree with its conclusion that the effect of human activity on emissions of greenhouse gases presents us with a very serious global risk that will require an urgent global response. I agree also with Stern’s observation that only international collective action can drive an effective and equitable response on the scale required to affect the currently disastrous likely outcome and to give us a chance of staving off the serious risks of calamity that we are now running. The report makes sobering reading for those sceptics who advocate a business-as-usual approach. It plausibly demonstrates that, with no action to tackle the danger of greenhouse gas emissions, one in six of the world’s population would be threatened by water shortages in this century, while 200 million people would be displaced by rising sea levels. Declining crop yields would increase death by malnutrition and we would face the extinction of up to 40 per cent. of our world’s biodiversity. Unlike the disruption of the two world wars, with which the economic costs of this are comparable, climate change would be irreversible and could become uncontrollable. The Treasury Committee has been taking evidence on globalisation and, like the Stern report, I have been struck by an emerging consensus among non-governmental organisations and normally right-wing economists alike that Governments have to do something. As an eminent economist, Stern is correct to identify climate change as""the greatest and widest ranging market failure ever seen"." That presents a significant challenge to orthodox economic theory. Creating the analytical tools to help us understand these potentially catastrophic processes will require the incorporation of some of the more radical economic theories into the mainstream. The current analytical framework that excludes externalities such as pollution and fails to identify environmental sustainability at all, will simply not be fit for purpose as we confront the challenges of climate change. Stern is correct to emphasise the role of the economics of risk and uncertainty, the long time horizons necessary to price the environmental cost of human activity appropriately, and the need to drive a dramatic and rapid switch to less damaging activity over a relatively short time scale. He concludes that we must develop major non-marginal change at a global level. The move to a ““significantly lower carbon trajectory”” must be seen as an investment rather than a cost, as it would be seen traditionally, and it has to be globally co-ordinated if it is to be effective. Happily, the Stern review also charts realistic ways forward and emphasises that there is not a choice between economic growth and irreversible climate change. We can continue with economic development, but only alongside carbon pricing, rapid technological development and technology transfer, as well as significant behavioural change among both individuals and corporations. All of that is challenging, but possible and we must now build the global framework agreements and institutions that will make it a reality. The climate change Bill is one small part of what must be a huge international effort. One major issue that works against both security and opportunity in our society as it is currently constructed is the stubborn persistence of significant discrimination and unfairness in Britain. The lives of far too many of our fellow citizens are still blighted by bigotry and narrowed by unlawful discrimination that simply goes unpunished by ineffective legal protection or inadequate enforcement. People with disabilities are at only the start of their long fight for access to adequate educational and employment opportunities. Illegal discrimination against pregnant women is rife and mostly unchecked. Only 58 per cent. of people from ethnic minorities are in work, whereas the proportion for the population as a whole is 75 per cent. Both the gender and the race pay gaps persist and are widening in many areas, especially in the private sector. The part-time gender pay gap now stands at a massive 40 per cent. Despite 30 years of legislative effort, much still needs to be done. This Government have made great strides and have introduced important new protections, but now is the right time for a step change in this crucial area. Ministers have recognised the need to look again at the nature of the equality law by appointing the head of the new Commission for Equality and Human Rights to undertake the discrimination law review. That is expected to result in conclusions that will feed into a single equality Act in the lifetime of this Parliament. That is an exciting once-in-a-generation opportunity to deliver the step change that we need. We must create a radically simplified but more comprehensive and effective legislative framework for equality and opportunity than the one that we have. To tackle the pay gaps, we need to have compulsory pay audits and annual monitoring of the situation in the private sector. That works well in Northern Ireland, where the Fair Employment and Treatment (Northern Ireland) Order 1998, which requires such monitoring and publishes the results, has had a big impact. We also need to allow class actions, to make a reality of the legal requirement for equal pay for work of equal value. It is completely unacceptable that equal pay claims currently take up to 12 years to resolve and, even if they are successful, they only apply to the individuals who were brave enough to take them up. A single equality Act should extend the duty to promote equality from the public sector to the private sector, where the pay gaps are much larger and are growing. It should also allow the use of public sector procurement to require compliance with those standards. The current word in Whitehall is that the discrimination law review is turning into a missed opportunity—or, to put it another way, a damp squib. It appears to be narrowing its vision and scaling down its ambition. That must not be allowed to happen. I appeal to Ministers to seize the opportunity that they have to turn our under-inclusive but over-complex equality law into a real instrument for change. We need it to help us achieve the improvement in life chances that the original law was put on the statute book to produce. It must be simpler to understand, focused on outputs and much more effectively enforced. Such a Bill should be included in this legislative programme and not have to wait for the next, because it is at the centre of Labour’s values and philosophy. I wholeheartedly welcome the measures contained in the Queen’s Speech, and I hope that we can work on a cross-party basis to improve our prospects of dealing with the global challenge of climate change. I also hope that Ministers will heed the following words: be bold, be ambitious and give us an equality law that we can work with.