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8.5 pm
Mr. Barry Jones (Alyn and Deeside): I am glad to follow the informed speech of the hon. Member for the great city of Gloucester (Mr. French), particularly in view of his generous remarks about my hon. Friend the Member for Barnsley, East (Mr. Ennis) and his maiden speech. My hon. Friend paid a nice tribute to Terry Patchett, whom we all miss. His speech was humorous. It was a strong speech, a caring speech and an informed speech. I appreciated his remarks about education and health. He brings a great deal of experience to this place and will be a member of this honourable House for many years.
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I heard the Chief Secretary to the Treasury refer to the national health service. Last week I visited the district general hospital in Wrexham that serves my constituents. It is a good hospital and has received the honour of a charter mark. However, when I visited that excellent and successful hospital, I found it stretched to the limit of its human and financial resources. The dedicated staff were coping with intense pressure. During the week, that great hospital had to abandon its programme of operations to cope with the massive influx of those who had fallen prey to the epidemic of influenza, or whatever it is, in north-east Wales. I do not recognise the picture of the national health service given by the Chief Secretary.
I am more than glad to support the amendment tabled by Her Majesty's Opposition, because there is insufficient investment and employment and the Government have no strategy to tackle long-term unemployment or the scandal of widespread youth unemployment. The latter is connected to drugs-related crime. Many pensioners in my constituency are afraid of burglaries and are scandalised by vandalism and graffiti. Their fears are the consequence of widespread youth unemployment. There is certainly a connection. There is no strategy in the Bill with regard to those evils. I therefore believe that the policy of the Shadow Chancellor, my right hon. Friend the Member for Dunfermline, East (Mr. Brown), to train 250,000 young people is very good. His policies will bring some hope to Wales and the community that I represent on industrial Deeside.
I had hoped that the Finance Bill would include a reduction in fuel bills as a result of a cut in value added tax, a boost to energy conservation and the release of moneys from the sale of council houses so that funding for repairs and modernisation of houses could be made available. I make my views known following assessment of the terrible impact that the recent very severe arctic weather, especially the wind chill, had on tenants. The strong wind that blew and blew for several weeks made houses very cold.
In my constituency, far too many homes still have rotting windows, draughty doors and rooms without radiators or any form of central heating. I want to speak up for tenants in such houses for they have experienced severe conditions as a consequence of the frighteningly cold weather that gripped our country for weeks. The House should consider the consequences for young families of those freezing temperatures. It became an ordeal. It was a misery for them and pointed to unhappiness and the onset of ill health.
The severe weather impacted greatly on the domestic budgets of people who do not earn a large wage or are on benefits. One example from my constituency surgery that comes to mind is of a young mother whose four-week old baby had been born, I believe, nine weeks prematurely. The home in which she sheltered with her husband and baby during the terrifyingly cold weather had no radiators; there was but a gas fire. Consequently, that young family, with the responsibility for that young child, decided in the end to decamp, leave the house and take shelter in the young mother's mother's home five miles away. They simply locked up their house and went to a warmer one because their home had not been modernised; it did not have modern window frames or the modicum of central heating that it deserved.
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The second example that I would cite is of a very old council house that is tenanted by a respectable man, aged 60, who has been an exemplary tenant for 40 years. He came to my surgery to tell me of his family's distress in the arctic weather owing to window and door frames simply failing to keep out the cold. As an unskilled council worker on a low wage, he had very little spare money to cope with the demands on his heating budget.
A number of my constituents have told me that during the very cold weather they had icicles near windows and mould grew on walls. They told me of their need for coal at £6.50 a bag and that their wages and benefits were insufficient. The consequence was that many families--tens of thousands across Wales and many hundreds in my constituency--were at a very severe disadvantage during that arctic spell. I wish that the Finance Bill had included measures pointing to some relief for such people. Pensioners who came to see me told me that they needed cold weather payments urgently and that they have to wait too long for the extra relief. They asked me to request urgent payments rather than relatively laggardly ones.
I emphasise the fact that when there is no insulation, fuel taxes are high and modernisation schemes falter due to the lack of Government policy, young families suffer. I ask the House to consider the dilemma faced by many young mothers who have asthmatic or bronchitic young children. Such youngsters cannot be put to bed in freezing cold bedrooms that have no radiators. The House should consider the predicament of such young families and the consequential effect on the health of the children who live in such homes. Many young mothers and fathers and others were at their wits end during the frighteningly cold arctic spell, and the House should consider how it can attempt to prevent such unhappiness recurring. Clearly, such arctic weather could return.
Although no Government can be blamed for arctic weather, the present Government must accept blame for the destruction of the energy conservation programme. Such destruction has been their policy; that is where they have cut. They must face the fact that they have implemented a major hike in fuel bills by imposing tax. Despite that, they still stubbornly refuse to release more receipts from council house sales. Our local authorities are anxious for the release of such receipts so that money can be made available for new building and modernisation.
If such policies were implemented and the Government were to relent, there would be an increase in the happiness and the warmth of tenants whose predicament I have described. There would also be more work, as those who are unemployed could be the very people to repair and modernise the homes in which so many families still live. We should move to end the distress of families such as those who live in my constituency.
For poorer people, the savage, continuous and brutal arctic weather made life a misery, destroyed domestic budgets and pre-empted all household expenditure. Keeping warm was a constant and expensive struggle. Not keeping warm destroyed morale and health. Children suffered, school budgets suffered, yet the Finance Bill for certain contains nothing that might prevent such miserable happenings from recurring. Deficiencies and omissions in Government policy put pressure on our vulnerable families during the terrible cold weather.
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Mr. Nicholas Budgen (Wolverhampton, South-West):
The hon. Member for Alyn and Deeside (Mr. Jones) is, of course, entirely justified in this general debate in referring to what he believes to be a grave omission from the Finance Bill.
I wish to start by saying how much I enjoyed the maiden speech of the hon. Member for Barnsley, East (Mr. Ennis). I enjoyed his wit, his attachment to his constituency and his elegant and amusing reference to his many relatives. The House warmed to him and much enjoyed his speech, which was delivered with great self-confidence. Let us hope that we hear him many times in such good form.
We crawl over every minute detail of the Finance Bill--indeed, my hon. Friend the Member for Gloucester (Mr. French) did some minute crawling when he gave us the details of the Bill's effect on individual citizens, and it was proper for him to do so. The Finance Bill and the Budget are tremendously important to people who are affected by it, especially, as my hon. Friend pointed out, to those who are not sure whether they fall on one side or the other of a line. It is entirely right that the House of Commons should spend much time trying to ensure that the details of the legislation are, at least, no worse than usual. We recognise that most legislation does not have entirely the desired effect. It is often rough and ready and sometimes creates injustices, but we try to do something with it.
It is strange and ironic, however, that when we have finished talking about all the details, the Budget is usually fairly insignificant in its effect on the general health of the economy. Wise men argue about whether the Budget will be mildly contractionary, will put a bit more money into the economy or will be broadly neutral. We can all argue about how the figures have been fiddled and make clever points about whether the fiddling is worse this year than it was last year or whether this year the clever people in the Treasury have used words slightly differently to enable them to put favourable assumptions into the Budget. Such debates are all very clever and interesting, but the Budget does not have an enormous general effect on the economy.
That fact brings me to the only point that I wish to make in what I fear may be an embarrassingly short speech. Monetary policy is far more important in its overall effect on the economy than are the minutiae of fiscal policy. Why does the average citizen now feel more comfortable in his job and about being able to sell his house or look for another job, and why has negative equity diminished so much? It is not because we have had three or four clever Budgets in the past three or four years: it is because of the relaxation of monetary policy.
Page 47 of the Red Book shows the extraordinary way in which monetary growth slumped dramatically between 1990 and 1992, how monetary growth was minimal in the six or nine months before we came out of the exchange rate mechanism and how this country was squeezed dramatically and dreadfully in an over-tight monetary
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