John Hayes MP: speeches

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Speeches

27 Nov 2025 · Business of the House · Hansard source
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Budgets are often about what is not in them, as well as what is; no doubt we will debate that later. A glaring omission from this Budget was a settlement for the women of the Women Against State Pension Inequality Campaign. We had a statement in which the Government, presumably fearful of the court case that they are about to lose, said that they would do more, but will the Leader of the House recognise that these women, whom the ombudsman has acknowledged were so badly treated, deserve better? Will he arrange for a statement on when there will be further Government action?
27 Nov 2025 · Budget Resolutions · Hansard source
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I support the minimum wage. It is important that working people, particularly less well-off working people, are adequately rewarded. Does my hon. Friend agree that the real impact will be on small and medium-sized businesses? Those businesses are already dealing with increasing cost burdens. When the Minister sums up, he might want to reflect on the effect that that may have on the creation of employment in those kind of businesses.
27 Nov 2025 · Budget Resolutions · Hansard source
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Will the hon. Gentleman give way?
27 Nov 2025 · Budget Resolutions · Hansard source
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My right hon. Friend did a service to the House a week or two ago when he drew what he is describing now to the attention of this Chamber. He told the Government that these leaks were not only doing damage to the economy, in the way he has just described, but were a discourtesy to this House. Many times, Madam Deputy Speaker, you and Mr Speaker have said that announcements should be made to this House first. It is fundamental to this place that what the Government announce is brought here for scrutiny, not the public realm.
27 Nov 2025 · Budget Resolutions · Hansard source
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I notice that the Minister is wearing a William Morris—or William Morris-esque—tie, and what Morris understood was the importance of craft and skills. The Government addressed apprenticeships in the Budget in a minor way, but does the Minister know that simultaneously the skills White Paper envisages downgrading apprenticeships by diluting the competencies they confer, thereby undermining their reputation with learners and employers?
27 Nov 2025 · Budget Resolutions · Hansard source
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Food production in this country is critical to my constituency, my hon. Friend’s and others’, yet public procurement still does not prioritise British goods. Might he invite the Government to look at that again? It is absolutely right that this House, the Government and the public sector should support British-made goods, and British-made food in particular.
27 Nov 2025 · Budget Resolutions · Hansard source
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I am very interested in that part of the Budget and I am grateful to the right hon. Gentleman for setting it out in more detail. One part of the youth guarantee is the boost for apprenticeships, particularly in small and medium-sized enterprises, but looking at the fine print, is that not already supplied by the apprenticeship levy? What small and medium-sized enterprises need, as I learned when I was the apprenticeships Minister, is some grant funding to get them started in the process. Does the Government have that in mind or is this simply a rehash of the apprenticeship levy?
27 Nov 2025 · Budget Resolutions · Hansard source
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G. K. Chesterton said: “It is human to err; and the only final and deadly error, among all our errors, is denying that we have ever erred.” Yesterday’s Budget brought into stark relief the fact that the Chancellor and this Government have erred and, worse, are in denial about their error. The UK faces a twin-pronged fiscal crisis. Public debt is at around 100% of GDP and rising, with debt interest making up about three quarters of the deficit. Public spending, at close to 45% of GDP, is near to a high in the post-war years. Much of that failure is systemic—Governments of all colours have failed to address some fundamental macroeconomic challenges—but yesterday’s Budget not only failed to fix that entrenched mess, but did not even acknowledge that it is happening. As the global liberal order decays, we face global economic challenges on a scale we have not seen for 100 years. Artificial intelligence risks transforming the jobs market. A recent study by the National Foundation for Educational Research forecast that up to 3 million jobs could disappear by 2035. Employment in sales and customer service occupations has fallen by more than 10% since 2021, and around 12 million people in England currently work in occupations deemed to be in decline. That requires Government to play a role. Government can be a force for good. This House took far too long to recognise the damage that would be done by the internet, and finally, when those horrors were obvious, it legislated. We need to restrict AI where it does similar damage, rather than indulging this naive faith in technological change at all costs. The old, comforting bourgeois assumptions about the benign nature of globalisation and the faith in technological change risk endangering many of the jobs I have described, and the purpose and pride they fuel. The US President was right to impose tariffs on cheap goods that were destroying vital US industries. In response, China is dumping surplus goods in Europe, and it has been estimated that 3 million industrial jobs in the EU are at risk from that surge of subsidised imported goods. In response to these existential threats, the Government seem frozen in time. Too much of the establishment remains wedded to dysfunctional orthodoxies. We are playing by the rules of the game when the important players have left the table. We cannot continue to proselytise for unbridled free trade when the two biggest economies in the world, China and America, have given up on it. We have to protect those industries that are critical to our national economic interests, building greater economic resilience by reindustrialising and by manufacturing again, so ensuring that more of what we consume is made here in Britain, with the jobs, skills and reassurance that provides. An economy can nourish communal health, but it cannot do so in a world that is wedded to globalised, multinational, corporate companies that are careless of the difference they make to communities such as mine in Lincolnshire and those across the country. Here in Britain, and across the western world, living standards are stagnating, productivity growth has all but disappeared, and the state grows ever bigger in the face of rising poverty and worklessness. Why, then, does the political class continue to profess a blind faith in an economic model that has delivered record levels of state dependency? The assumption that little can be done to reverse the inevitable process of industrial decline is simply wrong, as the experience of the United States suggests. Once we tune out the noise surrounding President Trump’s on-and-off tariffs, we can hear the faint stirrings of industrial revival. A detailed study of the impact of tariffs during the President’s first term found that once the pre-existing decline in manufacturing employment was accounted for, tariffs contributed to rising employment in areas with a large presence of protected industries. Neither did consumer prices surge in the United States, despite the predictions of liberal economists. Just imagine the potential benefits of a consistent and coherent trade policy that puts the needs of British industry first.
27 Nov 2025 · Budget Resolutions · Hansard source
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My hon. Friend makes a valuable point. Both Governments and these big corporates welcome a regulatory system that disadvantages small and innovative companies. Big organisations quite like regulation, for they can cope with it because of their scale; small organisations struggle with it, because they simply do not have the resources to deal with it. In 1979, manufacturing accounted for 30% of GDP in Britain; today that figure is just 8.5%. Manufacturing employed 21% of the workforce in 1982; by 2023 it employed just 8%. By some measure this is the greatest deindustrialisation of any major nation. We can and should build a different economic model—a new order. We need a fundamental rethink of our economic model, breaking from the failed orthodoxy that currently prevails and moving towards what Hilaire Belloc and GK Chesterton called “distributism”, where local economies —introspective, feeding communal health, with shorter supply chains—mean that we can make more of what we need here in the UK, fuelling skills and nourishing communities. What Chesterton and Belloc intuitively understood was that the excessive concentration of economic power harms society and fuels the discontent that many people in Britain feel today. Real wages have stagnated, while those at the top—large corporations in particular, often based overseas—accumulate huge wealth and power. We can build that new order. Small family businesses enrich the places in which we all live. Mutuals and co-operatives sustain communal and economic health in localities. We can do this, but it requires a radical rethink of the economic orthodoxy. The Budget does not suggest that rethink. All parties must step up to the mark and understand that we live in a post-liberal age where a new order is possible. Let us together build that new order, to deliver the common good by sustaining our national interest.
18 Nov 2025 · Northern Ireland Troubles Bill · Hansard source
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The truth is, the Secretary of State has said there is no equivalence between those who fought us and those who defended us, but his Bill says the very opposite. Every investigation has a view to criminal prosecution. Everyone pursued will feel hounded, because they will be hounded.
18 Nov 2025 · China Espionage: Government Security Response · Hansard source
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This is a welcome statement from the Security Minister, whom I hold in high regard, as does the House. He will be familiar with the report on China produced by the ISC—of which I was and remain a member—which dealt with exactly the matters that he has described: the widespread penetration of our universities, the theft of intellectual property and the attempt to compromise our democratic institutions. Will he add to his list a review of contracts with China—public sector contracts, Government contracts and so on—particularly those relating to sensitive matters? He said that he was a plain-speaking man, so, mindful of the collapse of the recent trial, will he do the simple task of saying from the Dispatch Box that China is a threat to our national security?
12 Nov 2025 · Public Bodies: Governance and Accountability · Hansard source
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I will call Valerie Vaz to move the motion, and I will then call the Minister to respond. Other Members may intervene only with the permission of the Member in charge. As is the convention with these half-hour debates, there will not be an opportunity for the Member in charge to wind up.
12 Nov 2025 · Public Bodies: Governance and Accountability · Hansard source
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I probably ought not to say so, Valerie, but that is music to my ears.
12 Nov 2025 · Carbon Budget Delivery Plan · Hansard source
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Order. I see that quite a lot of people want to speak. I will not set a time limit, but if you can be disciplined in how long your contributions last, that would be very helpful.
12 Nov 2025 · Carbon Budget Delivery Plan · Hansard source
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Well done for keeping to time. I am calling the Front Benchers at 5.28 pm. I call Jim Shannon—you have a minute and a half.
12 Nov 2025 · Carbon Budget Delivery Plan · Hansard source
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Thank you, Minister; that leaves a moment or two for Abtisam Mohamed to complete our discussion.
12 Nov 2025 · Carbon Budget Delivery Plan · Hansard source
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Order. There is a Division in the House. We will suspend for 15 minutes, and when we return Ellie will draw her speech to its conclusion reasonably speedily.
12 Nov 2025 · Carbon Budget Delivery Plan · Hansard source
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I call Susan Murray—you have a couple of minutes.
12 Nov 2025 · Carbon Budget Delivery Plan · Hansard source
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I call Sureena Brackenridge —you have two minutes.
12 Nov 2025 · Carbon Budget Delivery Plan · Hansard source
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About six people want to contribute, so they each have about four minutes. I will not make it formal, but I know I can rely on you not to let me down.
12 Nov 2025 · Carbon Budget Delivery Plan · Hansard source
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Order. Can you bring your remarks to a close, otherwise no one else will be able to get in?
12 Nov 2025 · Carbon Budget Delivery Plan · Hansard source
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Order. I said four minutes a speech. This is partly a debate about targets and figures, Barry, and the difference between four and nine is five.
12 Nov 2025 · SEND Provision: Kent · Hansard source
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Excellent. I call the shadow Minister, Saqib Bhatti.
12 Nov 2025 · SEND Provision: Kent · Hansard source
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Before I call the shadow Minister, I point out to the hon. Lady the courtesies and behaviour in the House. If you are going to name another Member, you should notify them in advance. Did you do that?
12 Nov 2025 · SEND Provision: Kent · Hansard source
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I remind the hon. Gentleman that interventions should be short—but I am a kind and generous Chairman.

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