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Mr. Key: The Meat and Livestock Commission was offering grants to the companies. My constituent's company, Touchmead, was pursuing the possibility of such a grant, but it did not work out. Surely that was a clear indication that the Government were inducing companies to borrow money and take risks in exactly the way that the Minister has described.
Mr. Baldry: My hon. Friend clearly did not hear me correctly. In the Skoal case, the company was given a grant to set up in business in East Kilbride. To that extent it had a better case or was at least on all fours with the case that my hon. Friend mentions. In that instance, the High Court ruled that provided the Minister acted properly, there was no cause for compensation if the business ceased to trade as a result of a decision by Parliament.
Mr. Elliot Morley (Glanford and Scunthorpe): I expect that the Minister is absolutely right in the legal sense, but the arguments that have been put by hon. Members on both sides of the House go beyond that in terms of the Government's moral obligation in respect of the hardship that has been inflicted on the companies.
I appreciate that the Minister is under certain restraints in terms of Treasury budgets, but will he consider two quick suggestions? He knows that there was substantial overpayment in compensation to slaughterhouses, which has never been clawed back. I do not know whether some agreement has been made, but there may be some scope within existing budgets to redirect some money towards this sector of the industry.
Secondly, the Government stopped the marketing and processing grants scheme, which is an EU scheme. Will he reconsider that scheme, as it might provide some assistance to companies that have moved into other sectors such as pig head deboning?
Mr. Baldry:
I am endeavouring to explain to the House that our decisions have been taken on long-established principles of public law. The fact that we have been unable to offer head deboners the assistance that hon. Members are urging upon us is not a matter of being moral or immoral, but of following long-established public policy and law.
That was made clear in the House yesterday by my right hon. and learned Friend the Home Secretary. Perhaps I should have read the whole exchange between my hon. Friend the Member for St. Ives (Mr. Harris) and my right hon. and learned Friend. My hon. Friend the Member for St. Ives specifically asked:
Mr. Baldry:
We have not been uninterested in the representations that have been made to us by my hon. Friends the Members for Gosport and for Salisbury, among others.
On at least two occasions we have taken counsel's opinion to see whether we can provide further help to cattle head deboners under established law. Contrary to what some people think, Ministers do not have powers capriciously and freely to dish out public money. They have to have some legal authority to do so. When we took counsel's advice, we thoroughly reassessed the case for a change of public policy on supporting deboners, following the meetings that my hon. Friend the Member for Gosport had with my hon. Friend the Parliamentary Secretary. We then sought further advice from leading counsel in the field. Of course we considered the matter carefully.
Counsel's opinion was that, having regard to established law and public policy, the cattle head deboners were not entitled under domestic law to compensation for the loss of their business resulting from the decision to classify the whole cattle head as specified bovine material.
Dame Elaine Kellett-Bowman (Lancaster):
As there is all-party support on the matter, surely the solution is perfectly simple. Blow the QCs--we should bring in a perfectly simple Bill that would be backed by both sides of the House.
Mr. Baldry:
My hon. Friend, who I suspect may have supported the Government last night--
Dame Elaine Kellett-Bowman:
No.
Mr. Baldry:
I am sad that we did not have her support, but she will have recognised that, in a number of instances, such as with firearms, companies go out of business as a consequence of certain Acts of Parliament. This is another such instance. [Interruption.] The hon. Member for Glasgow, Springburn (Mr. Martin), whose contribution to the debate was to make gratuitously offensive comments about my right hon. and learned Friend the Minister of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food, scorns. Of course there is a precedent. As a consequence of the Firearms (Amendment) Bill, certain companies will go out of business. Last night, I heard no Labour Member urge that those companies should receive compensation for their loss of business. Clearly the Opposition pick and choose what they consider to be easy issues to attract public sympathy.
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Mr. Baldry:
I shall not give way to the hon. Gentleman, who makes gratuitously offensive comments.
Ministers have to ensure some consistency in public policy, and we shall do that. The value of the cattle deboning industry has been assessed at some £11 million. We have provided support and assistance to deboners because some cattle head deboners, as cutting plants, have benefited from the beef stock transfer scheme under which the intervention board has purchased unsaleable stock at 65 per cent. of the pre-crisis market price. Cattle head deboners have, therefore, benefited to the tune of some £6.7 million under that scheme.
Out of the total value of the business of £11 million, cattle head deboners have received £6.7 million, and the company that my hon. Friend the Member for Gosport mentioned has received more than £100,000 under that scheme. It was also open to the cattle head deboners to apply for unsaleable stock to be taken off their hands under the separate disposal scheme that we introduced for downstream sectors. I appreciate that those who have companies wish the Government would come up with the money, but hon. Members have not addressed today the long-established principle of United Kingdom law that no Government, at any time or in any circumstances, in any way, have paid compensation for the loss of a business following a legitimate decision of the House.
Mr. Michael Clapham (Barnsley, West and Penistone):
I know that you, Mr. Deputy Speaker, know this subject inside out, because you were at the forefront of a campaign in the past few years to have the disease prescribed. That campaign came to fruition when the disease was prescribed on 13 September 1993. Today's debate is about the callous and uncaring way in which the Government have treated former miners by failing to act on the recommendations that have come from the review carried out by the Industrial Injuries Advisory Council of the prescription test for deciding chronic bronchitis and emphysema.
The Secretary of State for Social Security has had a copy of the recommendations on his desk since February this year--some three months before it was officially published in May 1996. In the mean time, many miners who would probably have been able to succeed with a claim under the recommendations of the review have, sadly, passed on.
Last week, I took the opportunity to check with Centris, the company that now manages the mineworkers' pension scheme, to find out how many miners in receipt of an occupational pension had died since April 1996. I used the criterion of the occupational pension because, as the Minister is aware, the qualification period to claim chronic bronchitis and emphysema is 20 years and, therefore, most of the miners who claim will be members of the mineworkers' pension scheme. Centris provided me with figures showing that 3,502 former miners had passed on since April 1996. I accept that it is not possible to say how many of them would have been made an award under the terms of the new recommendations, but it is fair to assume that a good number of them would have won through.
The House will recall that the disease was first prescribed on 13 September 1993. The prescription was made because new evidence, which was examined at the time by the Industrial Injuries Advisory Council, showed that the disease was an endemic risk of coal mining. The new evidence had come from longitudinal studies that had been carried out in America and Belgium. After that new evidence has been analysed, it showed a greater incidence of the disease among coal miners than in the general population and, consequently, the Industrial Injuries Advisory Council made the recommendation that the disease should be prescribed.
The date of introduction was more than a coincidence. In my view, the Government timed it to sweeten the bitter pill of the colliery closure programme. In other words, political expediency led to the introduction of prescription. Now we find that the delay seems to be caused by public expenditure fears, which I believe to be totally unfounded.
In its first report in November 1992, the Industrial Injuries Advisory Council recommended three tests for diagnosing the disease. The Government accepted those recommendations and implemented them in full. Under the tests, an applicant must first qualify by having worked underground for 20 years. That means that we are talking about miners who had a career in coal mining, not about people who left the industry after a few years. That is a fair point. Secondly, a miner has to show that he has
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Many people have been turned down because of the X-ray evidence. One of the arguments in the early days was about whether the X-rays were of the International Labour Organisation type. We got over that problem and the X-rays now conform to the ILO type, but many injustices still occur. I shall give an example to show the Minister what is happening. In my constituency live three brothers who spent their whole working lives in the industry. The Selwood brothers are aged between 79 and 83. The brother who is 79, Harry Selwood, has 100 per cent. pneumoconiosis. The other two brothers have no pneumoconiosis, but they are racked with chronic bronchitis and emphysema. Because they have been unable to show on their X-rays evidence of dust retention, the other two brothers cannot receive a payment for the disease.
Such examples led the Industrial Injuries Advisory Council to carry out the review. It had soon become evident that the prescription test, as originally introduced, was unfair. The number of applicants and those receiving awards did not come anywhere near the figure that the Government predicted. At the time, the Government predicted that there would be 80,000 to 90,000 applicants.
In fact, the bulk of the applications and awards were made in the first year. I can say that because I have made comparisons between parliamentary answers. For example, on 27 October 1994, in answer to a parliamentary question, it was revealed that between September 1993 and September 1994 a total of 43,827 applications had been received. Of those, 40,338 had been processed and just 4,469 awards had been made. Two years on, according to a parliamentary answer given on Monday this week, by 30 September 1996 a total of 48,778 claims had been received and 5,352 awards had been made. The bulk of the applications and awards have been made and, in the past two years, only about 5,000 new applications have been received.
The number of awards is absurdly low and that has led to the prescription test being challenged by such people as Mr. Peake of Pontefract general infirmary and Mr. Howard of the Hallamshire hospital in Sheffield, two consultants who deal daily with miners suffering from the disease. It also resulted in a regionally based media campaign that included, for example, the Barnsley Chronicle, the Yorkshire Post, the South Wales Echo and the Nottingham Evening Post as well as regional television and radio. As a result of that campaign, the IIAC eventually decided to conduct a review. It started that review on 16 January 1995.
The council reported to the Secretary of State in February 1996. In the review, which was published in May 1996, the council recommended to the Government that the X-rays should be dropped from the prescription test altogether because there was clearly no connection between pneumoconiosis and chronic bronchitis and emphysema. Therefore, to call for X-ray evidence of simple pneumoconiosis did not address the problem. The
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In the final paragraph of his letter to the Secretary of State published at the front of the report, the chairman of the IIAC said:
"Will he take fully into account compensation for the stock of weapons and accessories that such businesses hold and for loss of trade?"
My right hon. and learned Friend made it clear that there should be a distinction between claims for compensation for loss of trade and business. He said:
"So far as I am aware there is no precedent for such claims and I would arouse false hopes and expectations if I were to give my right hon. and hon. Friends any comfort on that point."--[Official Report, 12 November 1996; Vol. 285, c. 182.]
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Mr. Robert Ainsworth:
The Minister is not prepared to set a precedent on loss of trade, and we all understand that. Although there might be a moral argument for compensation, it is not necessarily being sought at the moment. In compliance with the regulations, businesses have spent money on equipment that has been rendered totally useless by a further regulation. Can the Minister not compensate those businesses purely for property that they bought to comply with the regulation and is now of absolutely no use to them? If he has to cover himself by confiscating it, he should do just that, but there should be some compensation.
11 am
"The Council understands that these recommendations may lead to a large number of previously unsuccessful claims being reconsidered and may therefore be relatively costly to implement. Nevertheless the strength of new scientific evidence published since our 1992 report makes it necessary for us to recommend a revision of the terms of prescription. We believe it should not be necessary to review the terms of prescription for the foreseeable future unless there is evidence that levels of exposure to respirable dust in coal mines are increasing."
In other words, the chairman recognised that the prescription test set out in the original report of 1992 was flawed. It is appalling that the Government have so far failed to act on the IIAC review. One gets the impression that interference by the Treasury is to blame for this unjustifiable delay. Perhaps the Minister could shed some light on that.
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