Category: Debates

Mr Redwood (Con) (Wokingham): I am very grateful. Will the hon. Lady (Cathy Jamieson) explain which specific tax loopholes Labour would close that the Government are not already closing, and why does Labour not provide any money after April when they would be putting the tax up again?

Cathy Jamieson (Lab) (Kilmarnock & Loudoun): I absolutely will explain that. We think that there are loopholes that can be closed, and I am sure that the Government will also want to close every possible loophole. For example, there is a growing problem with some employment agencies forcing workers to become employees of umbrella companies. They then falsely inflate the workers’ travel and other expense claims, reducing tax and national insurance and pocketing the avoided tax as profits. Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs forecast in 2008 that the cost to the Exchequer of that avoidance would be around £650 million by 2012-13. More recent reports have suggested that the current tax loss could be as high as £1 billion. Even if only a proportion of that money was recouped, it could pay for the fuel duty rise to be postponed.

As I said earlier, I know that many Government Members feel strongly about this issue. We have heard over the weekend and today all the talk about the Chancellor being in listening mode, but at the same time the Treasury’s official line is that no decision has been taken. Nods and winks are no good to families struggling in the run-up to Christmas. The approach that says “It will be all right on the night” is no use to the small business trying to balance the books and plan for the first quarter of next year. If the Chancellor has made up his mind to delay the duty rise, his Ministers should say so, and they should say so today. If we do not hear that announcement loud and clear, every hon. Member who wants to see the increase dropped should not only talk the talk tonight, but walk the walk; they should walk into the Lobby with us and vote for the 3p increase to be delayed.

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Mr John Redwood: The Opposition are right to highlight the issue of the cost of living, and it is timely that we are having a debate about the pressures on it. It is particularly timely that we are having a debate about the pressures that the outgoing Labour Government imposed on the cost of living, which still remain. I am thinking of the hidden increases in petrol duty, and all the other measures that they left in place or that were needed if we were to try to combat the deficit.

There is no doubt that the squeeze on people’s real living standards has been very severe in the last four years. It was most severe under Labour during its slump, but it has continued under the coalition Government. One of the reasons for the intensity of that squeeze on real incomes is the fact that price inflation has remained obstinately high, partly as a result of indirect taxation and partly, as the Minister said, as a result of world pressures on commodity markets.

I find myself unable to support the motion, which may come as no surprise to any Member on either side of the House. I consider it to be defective in two important ways. First, I do not think that a temporary three-month freeze will solve the problem. A double whammy in April, which is what Labour proposes, could be even worse, because people will not have become used to the rising fuel price that was inherent in the Labour plans.

Fiona O’Donnell (Lab) (East Lothian): The right hon. Gentleman suggests that three months do not constitute a long period, but they will be three months of cold weather, during which people will be having to cope with an increase of up to 11% in their energy bills. The three-month freeze would make a difference.

Mr Redwood: I am all in favour of lowering energy bills, although that is probably a topic for another day and another debate. I have made many suggestions to the Government, all of which I think Labour would find unpalatable. I have, for instance, suggested possible methods of making gas much cheaper, thus reducing prices for all our constituents and affecting real incomes in a way that would please me, but is not often favoured by my party.

I think that the first part of the motion is flawed because what it proposes would not solve the underlying problem, namely, the tax increases left by the outgoing Government, but I am not very happy with the second part either. The Minister said that he did not think the Opposition had done their sums properly before proposing the measure to deal with tax avoidance, which they say would pay for the temporary lower duty rate. It was interesting to hear from him that the Labour Government had considered a scheme relating to travel costs, but had decided that it would be unwise to pursue it. We do not know whether they made that decision because of the impact that it would have on people or because it would not bring in enough revenue, but it appears from what the Minister said that there was an issue involving the amount of revenue that it would raise. For those two reasons—it would not solve the duty problem, and the numbers do not add up—I think that it would be unwise for the House to support the motion.

As for the coalition Government’s amendment, I find myself particularly in agreement with the final words, in which we are asked to welcome

“the Government’s commitment to do more to help with the cost of living in future”.

I was interested to hear the Minister not only say that he understood the points that many of my right hon. and hon. Friends had been making about the level of fuel duties, but imply that action might be forthcoming in the autumn statement and the subsequent Budget statement to tackle that or related problems. I shall be happy if the Government tackle the over-burden of taxation in a variety of ways. I do not think that we need be too prescriptive tonight. We know that an autumn statement is coming up, and we know that there will be a Budget statement after that. However, I want to address my few remarks in this short debate to the issue of what the commitment to do more to help people in the future might amount to in those two important statements of Government policy.

The first point that I hope the Government will grasp is that this country’s problem is not that it is undertaxed. If we look at the budgets and the state of the national finances, we see that there is every sign that successive Governments have tried to increase the tax burden substantially to keep pace with accelerating current public spending. I think that we have now reached the point of no return—the point of saturation. The high rate of income tax introduced by Labour has led to a big fall in income tax receipts at the top level, which is not very surprising—and which, of course, is of no interest to Labour Members. They had their little jibe about millionaires, but they should be asking themselves what tax rate will cause rich people to make the maximum contribution to filling the massive financial hole in which we find ourselves.

We are well above that rate now, as the figures clearly indicate. I think that the Government will find that their higher rate of capital gains tax also collects rather less revenue than before, or than they would like, and that fuel duties, while probably still contributing some increment to taxation, are not creating as big an increment as they would like either, as people simply cannot afford all the fuel that they used to buy because the duties are so high.

We know that more than 60% of the pump price—and the price of petrol and diesel in this country is currently very high—goes, in one form or another, to the UK Government. Of course, part of the rest of the price goes in taxes to other Governments so that they can produce the fuel in the first place. A massive amount of tax is being taken by the British Government directly, along with the 60%-plus that is taken by them indirectly through the tax on oil companies, and by foreign Governments in their taxation on the oil. The motorist is seen as an easy target for huge amounts of tax in an attempt to meet the bills. I hope that, when considering ways of easing the cost of living, the Government will bear in mind that motorists and business drivers—people who are trying to power the economic recovery—are incurring very large bills through this particular tax.

I think that all Members agree with two propositions about the economy. First, we would like it to grow faster, and secondly we would like to make big cuts in public spending by getting people back to work, so that they can earn more in jobs than they can receive in out-of-work benefits. Those are the aims that the Government must pursue. They have told us that they wish to make work more worth while. It is now clear that the economy has had a good job generation capability in the private sector over the last couple of years or so, and that is very welcome. However, we now need to ensure that we can reduce public spending by getting many more people into jobs, so that they require less benefit support, and we need to do that partly by cutting tax rates, so that we can collect more revenue in a friendlier way.

There is no doubt that we have tax saturation, and the Government need to take that on board for the purposes of the autumn statement and the Budget. We should reject the rather foolish motion, which was never going to ensnare many Conservatives—Labour will have to get better at ensnaring Conservatives, if that is its game—and support, and ensure that the Government deliver on, their proposal to do more about the cost of living, because that is a very real issue which worries many of our constituents.

8.29 pm

Mr William Bain (Glasgow North East) (Lab): I was intrigued by the Economic Secretary’s arguments when he moved the amendment. He is no longer in his place, but wherever he is at the moment, I hope he can afford enough fuel to return to planet Earth, as that was not a place he was able to inhabit much during his contribution. He spoke of the fanfare of international approval for the Chancellor’s policies, yet the OECD says that this year demand in our country will be one tenth of that in the United States and in the lowest fifth among EU countries. He said this Government dealt in costed spending commitments, from the very Dispatch Box where a few weeks ago the Prime Minister caused chaos in the energy industry by saying every consumer would be on the lowest possible tariff. The Economic Secretary also boasted about taking action on high commodity prices on behalf of a Government who are blocking the enactment of a global Dodd-Frank Bill in line with the successful approach in the United States.

Last week’s election in the United States showed that for voters both across the Atlantic and in the United Kingdom the key issue is living standards. During the longest journey out of an economic slump in Britain for 140 years, living standards have declined at a more prolific rate than during the recessions presided over by the Conservative party in the 1980s and 1990s. As last month’s Office for National Statistics study of well-being showed, on the net national incomes measure, incomes in the second quarter of 2012 were 13.2% lower than before the start of the great recession in 2008. We should be under no illusion: a real economic recovery for millions of lower and middle-income people in this country will not happen until these trends show signs of being reversed.

Mr Redwood: Does the hon. Gentleman agree that the biggest fall in living standards occurred on Labour’s watch, when boom went to bust?

Mr Bain: Tax credits helped to sustain family incomes in that period, but that is precisely the part of the tax and benefit system that is under such great assault from the Government the right hon. Gentleman supports.

We need a long-term strategy to tackle declining living standards, but there are short-term measures we can take now that will help ordinary families. We can have a cut in VAT and not proceed with the 3p rise in fuel duty next January. Both those measures would help to restore growth to an economy that has been starved of it for a year, and which is smaller now than at the time of the Chancellor’s comprehensive spending review of October 2010.

Despite a decrease in the headline consumer prices index inflation rate from 5.2% to 2.2% since last October, costs of basic goods such as electricity and food are going up. Average electricity bills are up by £200 since the coalition took office, taking the average bill to £1,310 a year. Costs for childminders for the over-2s in Scotland have risen at nearly twice the CPI inflation rate this year. Living costs are, therefore, soaring for millions of people.

Mr John Redwood (Wokingham) (Con): Will the Secretary of State speak up for licence payers and ask Lord Patten, when she next talks to him, whether he will reconsider the outrageous and over-the-top pay-off and what he intends to do about the excessive number of highly paid managers, which he now condemns as if he were a critic, rather than their boss?

The Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport (Maria Miller): My right hon. Friend makes a powerful point. He will know that we have frozen the licence fee, and I am sure he will know that I have made my views very clear to Lord Patten on this matter.

Mr Simon Hughes (Bermondsey and Old Southwark) (LD) : Of course none of us wants stalled sites and there are many of them, but will the Secretary of State be helpful, as his Ministers have indicated, and ensure that we have a much more transparent check on what developers say is economically viable? Our experience on the south bank is that they say certain things are not economically viable. They then build the housing and flog it off at higher prices that were not revealed at the beginning.

The Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government (Mr Eric Pickles): Of course this is not going to be done on the basis of a developer’s word—developers will have to demonstrate clearly to an inspector that the current targets are uneconomic. I believe that we will get more social houses built because of this measure and I believe that we will have more affordable houses. We have put additional sums in, as my right hon. Friend will recall, and fairly soon the schemes will be going out to tender.

Mr John Redwood (Wokingham) (Con): I think that this is the best bit in the Bill. It is so obvious that we have to allow the developers and the council to decide what is affordable and realistic. It may be that in some cases all we can get built is houses for sale. What is wrong with that?

Mr Pickles: There is absolutely nothing wrong with that, but I am afraid that a strange municipal machismo has grown up—if one authority managed 40%, another would say, “Well we managed to negotiate 50%.” It is wholly unrealistic.
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Mr Redwood: I welcome the wish to get on with sensible infrastructure development, and I see that there are provisions to speed up planning permissions for power stations. As EU carbon dioxide regulations will entail the closure of a lot of necessary power stations quite soon, how much quicker will things be under the new procedures? We need to get on with it.

Mr Pickles: The new procedures remove a lot of the old regulations, which have been superseded by time, and make it much easier for those providing power to adapt to modern conditions. Technologies have improved, and the new procedures will enable us to adapt to them.
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Mr Redwood: Does the shadow Secretary of State agree that, given the weakness of the banks and the problems in the credit markets, section 106 deals will be far less generous than they were prior to the boom going bust?

Hilary Benn (Leeds Central) (Lab): Of course, and the fact that local authorities have been willing to renegotiate the section 106 affordable housing requirements is proof of that—[ Interruption. ] Well, lots of them have done so, and no doubt the planning Minister will tell us about those that have not.

Mr John Redwood (Wokingham) (Con): I welcome strongly the Government’s wish to have a new relationship with the EU, which is so appropriate now that it is going to integrate for the euro, so why is this not the time to negotiate different arrangements on how much we contribute and how many spending programmes we are part of, as the framework covers such a long period of time?

The Financial Secretary to the Treasury (Greg Clark): That is exactly what we are doing in this multi-annual financial framework, and the opportunity we have to veto a settlement that we are not in favour of gives us leverage in that.

Mr John Redwood (Wokingham) (Con): In the appraisals of the new competition being held for the west coast franchise, what will the role of Ministers be in setting the terms of the competition, supervising the arithmetic and making sure that a fair assessment is made?

The Secretary of State for Transport (Mr Patrick McLoughlin): I hope Ministers set out the policy. I am not sure that we are there to check every line of every spreadsheet. That is something that we should rightly expect officials to do for us at the request of Ministers, to ensure that we get the best value for the taxpayer out of what has been a huge amount of investment on this railway line, which has been made on behalf of the British public. It is one of the most important lines that serves the United Kingdom so I will certainly bear in mind what my right hon. Friend says, but part of the point of going for longer franchises was to try to deliver better services to the passenger.

Mr John Redwood (Wokingham) (Con): I warmly welcome the Prime Minister’s wish to have a new settlement with the European Union and encourage him to negotiate just that. Is not our veto over a six-year budget perspective for which the others want a huge expansion of spending the opportunity to negotiate that new settlement?

The Prime Minister (Mr David Cameron): The point about the European budget is that we need to maximise our negotiation leverage on that specific issue, as we are part of this union and we want it to have a sustainable budget. As I wrote in the letter of 18 December 2010,

“payment appropriations should increase, at most, by no more than inflation over the next financial perspectives”—[ Interruption. ]

The shadow Chancellor asks from a sedentary position what our leverage is, and it is very simple. The decision must be agreed by unanimity. Tony Blair, when he sat in that seat, gave up our rebate without any need, but we will not do that.

Mr John Redwood (Wokingham) (Con): I warmly welcome the Home Secretary’s wish to improve our extradition arrangements. Does she accept that many of us in this House feel that the US-UK arrangements were unfair to the UK and that the European arrest warrant is unfair to the UK? We look to her to reform to give Britain and her people a better deal.

The Secretary of State for the Home Department (Mrs Theresa May): I thank my right hon. Friend for his comment. As I said in my statement, I think that the UK-US treaty is, as Sir Scott Baker found, broadly sound. It is important that we have a robust treaty on extradition with the United States and that we ensure that extradition can take place both ways across the Atlantic. As I have said, there are a number of ways in which we need to change how we operate so that people can see that the extradition arrangements are fair and can take comfort and have confidence in them. The British people need to have confidence in our extradition arrangements.

Mr John Redwood (Wokingham) (Con): We are being invited to agree to a potential £50 billion commitment. Do the Opposition have any thoughts on the pace of that kind of expenditure? What levels would they recommend for this year, next year and the following year?

Chris Leslie (Nottingham East) (Lab/Co-op): It is difficult to say, when looking at a guarantee scheme or underwriting scheme, because certain things are not wholly in the control of Ministers. They are putting the guarantee out there and waiting for organisations in the private sector or elsewhere to come forward and bid for the resource. It is a bit like pushing against a piece of string; it is impossible to know what the demand will be. We do not rule out the possibility of the proposal being of benefit—of course it could be—but it is impossible to know at this stage. We are holding up a finger to test the direction of the wind. There are no time scales in the Bill, and the explanatory notes do not add any information in that regard. We want to know the judgment of the studied intellects in the Treasury.
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Mr Redwood: I think we should be a bit careful. I thought that the Bill to which we are being invited to consent would provide solely, or primarily, for guarantees and loans, but in fact it allows expenditure and “any… kind of financial assistance”, which could include direct purchase. It certainly includes court or prison facilities and roads, which, in many cases, will involve no revenue, so presumably that means direct spending.

Chris Leslie: I think that the right hon. Gentleman is technically correct. The wording of the Bill is very loosely framed. We know that accounting officers in the Treasury had put a big question mark over exactly what Ministers were proposing. They wanted one line to cover them in circumstances in which things might go wrong, and they would be challenged and hauled before the Public Accounts Committee. That dates back to the 1932 concordat on public accounts, and it is being radically changed by the Bill. We do not necessarily think that that is the wrong thing to do, but it is noticeable that legislation has been presented to the House of Commons by Ministers who cannot say what it will be used for. We need information on the specifics of the schemes and the dates on which they will be supported. That is the level of detail that we require.

Amendment 9 relates to the definition of “infrastructure” in clause 1. I am sorry that the amendment tabled by my hon. Friend the Member for York Central (Hugh Bayley) was not selected; he noticed that flood defence schemes were not included in the list of items covered by infrastructure expenditure.

Our amendment seeks to insert the word “childcare”. Education is included in the set of infrastructure projects that might benefit from the scheme, but child care is quite different. We consider that to be an obvious anomaly which the Government should correct. We know that the costs of child care are afflicting many families throughout the country, a number of whom are not necessarily choosing to enter employment because the child care options are too limited or too expensive. One of the reasons why child care is so expensive is that the facilities are expensive. We do not have enough of them, and we need more investment in them.
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Mr Redwood: My concern about this Bill is with the definitions and the amount of money involved. I am obviously very much in favour of more productive infrastructure projects going ahead as quickly as possible. There may well be utility in facilitating the Government to make guarantees, support or indemnities available at a time when the banking system is still not functioning well and it is difficult getting these things financed privately in the way we normally like. However, I start from the proposition that what we really need to be doing is generating a lot more freestanding private sector investment projects. It would be better if we took stronger and faster action to remedy the banking problems that lie underneath the problems we face in getting these things financed.

I am concerned that the wide-ranging powers in clause 1 may lead to a big increase in public spending, which would damage the Government’s fiscal targets. A lot of time and energy has been expended by Governments on reducing capital programmes to try to get public spending down to levels thought to be more compatible with reality and markets. We want to avoid this Bill becoming a way of undoing all the hard work that has been done to try to get the deficit down, at a time when this Government strongly believe that deficit reduction is crucial. The outgoing Government actually enacted legislation committing themselves to halving the deficit over the lifetime of this Parliament.

The definition of “infrastructure” in clause 1(2) is wide ranging. I thought that the type of infrastructure we had in mind for this Bill was that in subsection 2(a), which states that infrastructure is about “water, electricity, gas, telecommunications”. Those services are all provided by the private sector with charges to customers, so there is a flow of revenue that can remunerate the capital. If those projects are held up because of banking difficulties, I have every wish to encourage the Minister, newly in his job—I give him my congratulations—to expedite them. One hopes that the Government would be properly rewarded for the indemnities and the guarantees, or that they would not be necessary in the fullness of time, and so the taxpayer would not lose by this process. I am happy with that provision, which I thought was the thrust of the Bill.

However, subsection (2) also provides for mixed projects and entirely public sector projects. It includes mixed projects in the form of railway facilities. Railways are extremely heavily subsidised, and any new project is likely to require many years of future subsidy, because such projects do not normally reward the railway operator or the taxpayer sufficiently from the fare revenue. We therefore need to consider, for any one of these projects, the medium-term and long-term implications of cash outflows from the public sector, as well as the private sector revenues. Those things cause difficulty in the evaluation, as we have found recently through one of the franchise problems.

Subsection (2) also makes provision in respect of areas where spending must entirely be an expense for the public sector—I assume that we are not envisaging court or prison facilities having paying guests who would contribute towards the costs, so this money will be entirely expended by the public sector.

Mr Crispin Blunt (Reigate) (Con): I return to an argument about prisons that I made on Second Reading. New prisons cost substantially less to run per place than old prisons and can better develop wider policy objectives—for example, on rehabilitation and work in prisons. When debating the Bill, reference should be made to the spending on prisons that would come from the Ministry of Justice’s delegated expenditure limit. This approach would enable the capital expenditure to happen now, in order to take the savings later.

Mr Redwood: That is a helpful contribution, but it shows the dangers of this clause, because it demonstrates that if these projects are not properly evaluated they could be more expensive overall. My hon. Friend has recent experience as Minister with responsibility for prisons and he is saying that in the short term they will definitely be dearer, because the state will have a big cash outflow in order to buy the new prison. It will take time to close down the old one and find some alternative use for it, and that process might not produce anything like the amount of money that the new prison costs. He is arguing, with his former brief in mind, that this may still represent a good bargain for the taxpayer, but when we come to account for it, we will have to account for the fact that a lot more has been spent in the first couple of years; there may be benefits for Governments to come if, as he hopes, the thing is cheaper and better in the longer term.

In debating this clause, we need to unpack the three types of project we are talking about. The first is a genuine private sector project, where we hope that there will be no ultimate call on the taxpayer and it may just involve a facilitation guarantee that will be properly rewarded. The second is a mixed project, where a lot of accounting has to be done—as the Department for Transport is discovering, such projects are difficult to evaluate. The third is the pure public sector project, where we need to go into the departmental budget. So I hope that the Minister will give me some reassurances about this.

Hugh Bayley (York Central) (Lab): I follow the argument that the right hon. Gentleman is making, although I do not necessarily share his conclusion. Health facilities are defined as one of the fields of infrastructure that this fund could be used to support. The recent health Bill showed that the Government favour more NHS services being provided by private contractors and private hospitals. Is he telling the Committee that he would be happy for this fund to be used to finance a private clinic or a private hospital, but not happy for it to be used to fund an NHS hospital trust?

Mr Redwood: I am not trying to say anything that contentious. I am trying to unpack what is going on in this clause, because we are in Committee. I was not going to presume to give my views on total public spending, because that is a matter for another day and another debate. I am trying to get the Committee to understand that we are dealing with three different types of project, and the health one is closer to the pure public sector project. Even if it is carried out in a private sector facility with some so-called “private sector risk”, all the patients will be paid for by the NHS if it is for the NHS and so it is a flow of public revenue. We have to account for it in the proper way and be realistic about that.

Kate Green (Stretford and Urmston) (Lab): The right hon. Gentleman is making an interesting argument. Does he not also accept that one of the difficulties with long-term infrastructure projects is that they have different phases, some of which may be susceptible to public intervention and some of which, later on, will require private investment. Let me give the example of a large site in my constituency that is currently in private ownership and has large redevelopment potential. The initial investment will have to be public investment to decontaminate the land and prepare the planning requirements, but down the line one would hope to see private investment. Does that not create a further accounting conundrum?

Mr Redwood: Yes, indeed. My point, which is not hostile to the Minister and is merely an attempt to inform the debate, is that we are discussing a set of very different projects and we are not sure what we are talking about because the Bill is very generic and general. We can probably all come to the conclusion that for this to work we will need precise control over what is being proposed—of how much of it is public, how much is private, how much involves a direct charge on the taxpayer and how much involves a guarantee or indemnity.

If a guarantee or indemnity is involved, I am sure that the Minister, with his forensic financial backgrounds and skills, will be able to keep control of it and to reassure the Committee that it is unlikely to be called on unless it was absolutely essential and a very important project would not go ahead without it, which would mean that it was a reasonable risk to run. I am happy at that end of the spectrum, as we will have to trust the Minister’s judgment and this is a good Minister with the skills and ability to do such things. We need to probe when such projects are proposed, however, as we are the custodians of public money and do not want to end up with white elephant projects with huge guarantees and indemnities that will in due course have to be met by some Government.

I am also concerned about the projects in which there is more of a mixture or a muddle, because they must be fitted in to the public expenditure plans. That does not prejudge whether the expenditure should be higher or lower, and there will be different views on that in the Committee, but they will need to be fitted into the plans. A large sum is involved—£50 billion—and we do not know the time scale. The Government might want to come back and ask for more money, and a provision allows them to do so by order, so I want a little more information from the Minister about how such projects will fit into the public expenditure plans and how Ministers collectively will evaluate the mixed projects that receive a big flow of public subsidy and, more particularly, those that really are public sector projects. They might be dressed up as private sector projects, but as far as I am concerned if all the money for the provision on behalf of customers or users of the service comes from the state, that is a public sector project and the private sector is merely a franchisee or agent of the state. If all the money comes from the state, I expect the state to have a grip of the project and to satisfy us that it represents value for money that is being organised in the best way.

I am not ideologically driven as regards the provision of state services. I think that should be done in the cheapest possible way, provided that they offer good quality, and that always causes problems, but I hope that the Minister will give us some guidance about how he will differentiate and seek reassurances about the granting of those indemnities and guarantees and about what proportion of the projects will involve pure public spending, as the Bill entitles him to spend as well as offer guarantees.
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Mark Field (Cities of London and Westminster) (Con): Although I accept much of the thrust of what my right hon. Friend has to say, does he not accept that if too much time and Treasury orthodoxy are spent on evaluating schemes at this stage, many of the infrastructure projects will simply not be built? We need to move ahead with getting them under way at the earliest opportunity if there is to be economic growth and some of the evaluation process to which he refers might be better placed at a later date.

Mr Redwood: I normally agree with my hon. Friend, but I am afraid that I do not on this occasion. There is not now an excuse to go in for projects that do not make any economic sense just because we all want some more growth and jobs. Indeed, that would be a very good way of setting us all back further as it would damage the public finances without giving us the benefit of a good project that people wanted to use and that produced plenty of user revenue. When one is in a financial hole, as our country is, one needs to be very careful. We look to the Treasury, in particular, to evaluate such matters carefully and I want a little more guidance because £50 billion is a huge sum. I am not surprised that so few MPs want to discuss it—if we were debating £500 million, the place would probably be packed, but because we are discussing £50 billion everyone has gone off for a tea or a coffee—but to me it is a serious sum of money and I want some reassurance that we will get something worth having for it.
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Mr Redwood: I remind the right hon. Gentleman that the Government could not merely offer a loan for the new school door; they could pay for it—they can pay for operating expenditure. So the issue is very wide-ranging.

Mr Nick Raynsford (Greenwich & Woolwich) (Lab): The right hon. Gentleman makes a perfectly fair point, and I concur.

The Institution of Civil Engineers, the professional body for engineers and those involved in the provision of infrastructure, makes a telling point in its submission to us about the Bill. It says that the approval criteria that the Government have set out for considering schemes state clearly that “any project must be nationally significant before it can receive financial support.”

It would clearly be a total waste of time if people read the fine print of the Bill and believed that it was appropriate for the kind of project to which the right hon. Gentleman and I were referring and submitted one, simply for it to be rejected because it did not have national significance. That is why the amendment has been tabled—to help the Government by bringing a degree of clarity and focus to the Bill.

I entirely concur with the objective of helping schemes that are stalled and ought to be able to proceed, but they should only be schemes of national significance. That is the purpose of my amendments, to which I hope the Government will be sympathetic.

Mr John Redwood (Wokingham) (Con): Who in the Government speaks for England on these matters, and when will English MPs be able to settle English issues without outside help in this Parliament?

The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Scotland (David Mundell): As I am sure my right hon. Friend is aware, the Government have established a commission that is looking at the so-called West Lothian question and will deal with the issue he raises about the governance of England within a range of devolved settlements for the other nations of the United Kingdom.

Mr John Redwood (Wokingham) (Con): I am grateful for the Home Secretary’s statement and I fully support opting out of the whole lot (of powers). Will she make sure that, were we to want to co-operate with our partners in certain areas in future, that will not be done by a route that prevents us from changing our minds or prevents Parliament from being sovereign?

The Secretary of State for the Home Department (Mrs Theresa May): As my right hon. Friend knows, this Government have done more than any other to address the issue of the balance of our relationship with the European Union. It is right that we should have the opportunity to opt out from these measures and that we should look seriously at measures that we might wish to opt into. Obviously, that will take time and involve a considerable amount of discussion and negotiation with the European Commission and other member states.