Jerome Mayhew MP: speeches

Speeches

• 27 Mar 2025 · Passenger Rail Performance · Hansard source

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  I thank the Secretary of State for that answer, but she ducks the point that if she had the political will she could bring CrossCountry in-house now. It is not the first operator to come under GBR or even close to it. Under current plans, the Government will not get around to tackling CrossCountry until 2031. In the meantime, highly effective private operators with some of the highest levels of customer satisfaction such as c2c and Greater Anglia will be subjected to dislocating nationalisation this year. Why are the Government forcing nationalisation in areas where current services are liked, and sitting on their hands where people are crying out for improvements?

• 26 Mar 2025 · Engagements · Hansard source

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  In October last year the Chancellor delivered a massive tax, borrow and spend Budget. Now her plans have collapsed around her ears, with an emergency Budget to cut that spending, so has the time now come for the Prime Minister to state in public that he has full confidence in the Chancellor?

• 26 Mar 2025 · Draft Agriculture (Delinked Payments) (Reductions) (England) Regulations 2025 · Hansard source

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  I drove a tractor to Fakenham racecourse about five or six weeks ago, to take part in a demonstration that not only involved farmers but encompassed the wider rural community, including farming industry suppliers. Does my hon. Friend agree that the mood in relation to the Government is sulphurous?

• 26 Mar 2025 · Draft Agriculture (Delinked Payments) (Reductions) (England) Regulations 2025 · Hansard source

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  The rate of decrease has been increased substantially. Does the Minister not agree that that will have a negative impact on financial viability? The change in the pace of the decrease of the delinked payments makes an old impact assessment unreliable.

• 26 Mar 2025 · Draft Agriculture (Delinked Payments) (Reductions) (England) Regulations 2025 · Hansard source

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  I am grateful to my hon. Friend for allowing multiple interventions. We have heard about food security, but the Government have a number of other legal obligations, one of which is to halt biodiversity net loss by 2030. If SFI—the key measure to help farmers in the fight against biodiversity loss—is effectively cancelled, how on earth will they hit their legal obligations?

• 26 Mar 2025 · Draft Agriculture (Delinked Payments) (Reductions) (England) Regulations 2025 · Hansard source

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  Is the problem not worse than that? Farmers can no longer rely on the schemes that seem to be applicable to them because the SFI can be paused or cancelled without notice. What confidence can they have that any scheme to which they seem able to apply will be there when they need it most?

• 26 Mar 2025 · Draft Agriculture (Delinked Payments) (Reductions) (England) Regulations 2025 · Hansard source

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  I should have referred to my entry in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests. I personally benefit from these payments, and I am the director of a farming company that benefits indirectly from the payments. I want to make that absolutely clear , Mr Twigg.

• 26 Mar 2025 · Draft Agriculture (Delinked Payments) (Reductions) (England) Regulations 2025 · Hansard source

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  We all enjoyed the emergency Budget earlier today. One of the core elements that the Chancellor of the Exchequer planted her flag on was economic stability. How does my hon. Friend the shadow Minister think farmers can have economic stability when schemes such as the SFI are removed without any notice, while at the same time they suffer a 76% reduction in the first £30,000 of the delinked payments and nothing above? How do we get economic stability with that approach?

• 26 Mar 2025 · Draft Agriculture (Delinked Payments) (Reductions) (England) Regulations 2025 · Hansard source

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  The Minister has mentioned the £5 billion over two years on a number of occasions—not just in this debate, but in previous ones—but does he accept that if we take the £2.4 billion per year that started in 2019, at the start of the previous Parliament, and simply update that for inflation, the figure of £5 billion over two years actually represents a real-terms cut in support for our farmers of several hundred million pounds? My second question, which I would love him to answer, is what happens afterward? The Red Book suggests a £600 million reduction in support thereafter.

• 26 Mar 2025 · Draft Agriculture (Delinked Payments) (Reductions) (England) Regulations 2025 · Hansard source

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  Does my hon. Friend accept that farmers right across the country are currently seeing a cash-flow crisis? A business may be profitable in one, two, three or five years’ time, but if it cannot pay the bills now, it will go bust. Does my hon. Friend accept that the Government’s cumulative actions are putting farmers at risk?

• 25 Mar 2025 · National Insurance Contributions (Secondary Class 1 Contributions) Bill · Hansard source

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  I am just flummoxed by the Government’s approach to the Bill. Clause 1 raises employer national insurance from 13.8% to 15%. Almost more damagingly, clause 2 reduces the threshold at which they start paying it from £9,100 to just £5,000. The Government know how damaging this measure is for healthcare. We can see that because they have taken action to exempt the NHS from it. That will cost billions of pounds, because healthcare providers cannot just diversify as other sections of the economy might be able to. They cannot raise prices. A general practitioner’s customer is the state, and prices are fixed by the Treasury. As a result, the Government know exactly what the impact of this proposal will be on hospices. We have already heard that without an exemption, they will face an additional £30 million of costs every year as a result of these changes. When the Bill was first announced, I assumed that there had been an oversight by the Treasury and that it would be addressed as the Bill progressed. But both last week and this week, the Lords have moved to fix what was originally considered to be perhaps an oversight. Today’s decision to seek to reverse Lords amendments 1B and 5B in particular demonstrates beyond doubt that it is not an oversight but a deliberate decision taken by Labour to penalise hospices for the care of the dying, and to do what with that money? We may be in the obscene position in a few weeks’ time of funding for state-assisted dying being raised by taxing palliative care. This is absolute madness. If Members wanted any other reason why they should not support the Government, that is an overwhelming one. I make one last reference to the emptiness of the Government Benches. There are now two Labour Members sitting there who are not required to be— [ Interruption. ] I take it back, there is only one. That indicates to me that Labour Members do not want to be associated with the Bill. They will scurry through the Lobby later, but they are not brave enough to stand up and defend the decision of their Government.

• 24 Mar 2025 · Chancel Repair (Church Commissioners' Liability) Measure (HC 773) Church Funds Investment Measure (HC 772) · Hansard source

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  This appears to be a very sensible proposal. I noticed that the parishes of Brundall, St Lawrence, Great Plumstead, St Mary and Buxton, St Andrew are all in my constituency. Am I right in thinking that as a result of the Measure, their liability for the repair costs of their chancels will not be increased, that there will be no increased liability for parishioners and that it will just make the process of applying for payment from central funds much simpler?

• 19 Mar 2025 · Transport Connectivity: North-west England · Hansard source

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  Their concerns were wrong. I had a minor position in the Treasury at the time, and I can assure the hon. Lady that that was genuine redirection of funds, albeit over a period, as one would expect, with the release of funds associated with the development of HS2 in the northern sector. To conclude the list, we had £3.3 billion for road improvements and an additional £11.5 billion for Northern Powerhouse Rail from Manchester to Liverpool. The question that is easy to miss in opposition but impossible to avoid in government is this: where do the Government want money to be spent? That money could be used for those widespread improvements or be rediverted to a northern branch of a version of HS2, but it is impossible to spend the same money twice. If the Minister wants to do both, where is the money going to come from? Finally, many hon. Members referred to the seeming disconnect between investment decisions in London and the south-east and elsewhere in the country, the north-west in particular. The hon. Member for Leigh and Atherton used a good phrase: “Growth goes where the growth already is.” The previous Government at least took the first step in tackling an injustice in the Green Book analysis. That was undertaken to unlock some of the levelling-up investment that the hon. Member for Westmorland and Lonsdale (Tim Farron) referred to. I am concerned that the new Government—certainly the new Treasury—are reverting to type. When the Chancellor of the Exchequer had her growth panic a few weeks ago—

• 19 Mar 2025 · Transport Connectivity: North-west England · Hansard source

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  It is lovely to see you in the Chair, Dr Murrison. I pay tribute to the hon. Member for Leigh and Atherton (Jo Platt) for securing the debate, and congratulate all hon. Members, who have put very forceful cases for transport in the north-west. Their combined contributions have demonstrated that there are many shared problems in the region. I do not have time to mention every hon. Member who has contributed, so I will limit myself to commenting on the contribution of the hon. Member for Leigh and Atherton, who highlighted that her constituency, like I suspect many others in the area, is a post-industrial commuter belt that is struggling to cope with the consequential increase in traffic. Because of the over-reliance on cars, the society suffers from high transport-related social exclusion. There are a number of issues, but I will try to mash them together into three headlines. Let us start with the positive news, which is the welcome devolution of transport policy. It was implemented by Andy Burnham, the Mayor of Greater Manchester, but it was of course a Conservative policy that was brought in in 2017, so while we welcome it, we should share the plaudits. I welcome the success of the Bee network, but we have to recognise that it was expensive—there was £1 billion of Government support. That raises a big issue, because as well as that £1 billion, Bee is supported by considerably north of £130 million a year from central funds, by my calculations. Its parent, as it were—Transport for London—receives in excess of £1 billion a year. There is therefore a fundamental question here for the Minister. The Bus Services (No. 2) Bill is going through the House of Lords, and I have with me the consultation on Great British Railways and “A railway fit for Britain’s future”. If this is the model for the future, can the Minister shed some light on where the increased funding will come from? It is a good development—it was Conservative policy—but where it is expanded beyond the large mayoral combined authorities to other combined authorities, there will inevitably be an associated cost. The second related issue is the potential conflict when regional policy butts up against national policy, when a strong regional mayor rightly wants control over a combined transport policy, whether that is buses, rail or road. We potentially have a directing mind under Great British Railways—intended to be one of its key benefits—coming up against Andy Burnham, for example. The consultation paper refers to that, but has no detail on how those potential conflicts will be resolved and who will be the final arbiter. Perhaps the Minister will take the opportunity to respond on that. Many hon. Members called for the reintroduction of the northern HS2 extension, focusing not on speed, but on capacity. We have to recognise that, again, it comes back to money. The cancellation of the northern part of HS2 redirected £19.8 billion to other transport projects for the region. This is not a comprehensive list, but it gives a flavour: £2 billion for the new station at Bradford and a new connection to Manchester; £3 billion for upgraded and electrified lines from Manchester to Sheffield, Sheffield to Leeds, Sheffield to Hull and Hull to Leeds; about £4 billion of additional transport funding for the six city regions; £2.5 billion of additional funding for outside the city regions; and £3.3 billion for road improvements, albeit largely filling potholes.

• 19 Mar 2025 · Transport Connectivity: North-west England · Hansard source

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  Will the Minister give way?

• 18 Mar 2025 · Welfare Reform · Hansard source

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  When I fought the last election, I was honest with my electorate, telling them that we would save £12 billion from the welfare budget. Was the Minister honest with her electorate when she talked about Labour’s plans to cut disability welfare, or is she making this policy on the hoof because the Chancellor has destroyed economic growth?

• 13 Mar 2025 · NHS England Update · Hansard source

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  It is an inescapable fact that one top-down reform is being fixed by another—one that will last about two years, according to the statement. Although I wish the reform every success, we must recognise that the experience of the NHS in Wales shows that reform on its own is no guarantee of success. The Secretary of State rightly said that change is hard, and it is inescapable, I am afraid, that while this reform is ongoing, the NHS leadership will be hugely distracted by turf wars, redundancies and the development of new working practices. What steps will he take to prevent that distraction from having a negative effect on frontline services?

• 12 Mar 2025 · Employment Rights Bill · Hansard source

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  On a point of order, Madam Deputy Speaker.

• 12 Mar 2025 · Employment Rights Bill · Hansard source

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  I did not follow that, so I will just have to move on.

• 12 Mar 2025 · Employment Rights Bill · Hansard source

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  The hon. Member for Blyth and Ashington (Ian Lavery) suggested that we should have a return to secondary action. What is my hon. Friend’s view?

• 12 Mar 2025 · Employment Rights Bill · Hansard source

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  I will give way to the hon. Lady, and then I will make some progress.

• 12 Mar 2025 · Employment Rights Bill · Hansard source

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  Yes, Madam Deputy Speaker. As we all know, Members are required to draw attention to any potential conflicts of interest prior to speaking, in order to avoid any impression of, among other things, paid advocacy. Given that clause 52 will lead directly to increased payment of money from unions to Labour Members of Parliament, I ask for guidance on the proper declaration of interests. Most Labour Members due to speak this afternoon have received thousands of pounds from the unions—totted up, I make it £283,974.86. In addition to a general reference to their entry in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests, in this instance, where there is a direct link, should they not also set out the actual amount of money they have received?

• 12 Mar 2025 · Employment Rights Bill · Hansard source

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  I completely agree with my hon. Friend. I cannot add any more to that. He has hit the nail on the head. I support amendment 291, in the name of the Opposition, which would remove clause 52. At the moment, this is a circular Bill of self-interest: Labour Members get money from the unions, the Bill increases union powers and that clause increases the amount of money from the unions. The clause is brazen and shaming, and it should be removed.

• 12 Mar 2025 · Employment Rights Bill · Hansard source

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  The intervention from the hon. Member for Birmingham Northfield (Laurence Turner) is a classic distraction technique. This Bill addresses the unions and union membership, and clause 52 moves money from unsuspecting union joiners directly to the Labour party. There is no other explanation for the clause.

• 12 Mar 2025 · Employment Rights Bill · Hansard source

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  I will in a moment. Here we have it: a clause of direct financial interest to Labour Members. We have so far had two speakers who have both received very significant sums from the unions, to which they did not directly refer. The first was the hon. Member for Blyth and Ashington (Ian Lavery), who has received £20,000 from the unions, according to his entry in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests. The second is the hon. Member for Cumbernauld and Kirkintilloch (Katrina Murray), who has received £14,000 directly from the unions. This is germane to this debate.