Permitted Excess of the Fund

Part of New Clause 3 – in the House of Commons at 6:06 pm on 20 July 1987.

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Photo of Andrew Smith Andrew Smith , Oxford East 6:06, 20 July 1987

I, too, am rising for the first time to speak in the House and I should like first to congratulate the hon. Member for Gedling (Mr. Mitchell) on his speech, which I found eloquent and confident and which taught me a great deal about his constituency. It is a double pleasure to congratulate him because, last week, I had the misfortune to lose my identity pass and the hon. Member was, first, observant enough to find it and, secondly, kind enough to return it to me personally.

It is an honour to have been elected to represent the people of Oxford, East. I sincerely thank them for the privilege that they have afforded me. That Labour gained the seat with an increase in our vote of more than 20 per cent. on 1983 is a real tribute to the Labour party members and supporters in our constituency and beyond who worked hard and long to secure victory. It is a tribute, too, to the standing which Labour has built up in our community over the years. The result was proof that Labour can win new seats in southern England. I am sure that it will be followed by other similar southern successes in the next election.

It is not as though my predecessor, Steve Norris, and the local Conservative association were any pushover. Indeed. I should like to express the thanks of the constituency, as I did on election night, for his service, especially his assiduous work on behalf of individual constituents. I thank him also for his stance on issues such as freedom of information and sanctions against apartheid. As many hon. Members will know, Steve Norris is a man of very considerable ability and persuasiveness. I do not want to damage his chances by saying this, but if the Conservative party has any sense, it will forgive his achievement in securing last year the title of The Guardian Back Bencher of the year and get him back in the House by finding bluer waters for him to swim in next time.

For those who do not know our constituency, Oxford, East is not the Oxford of "dreaming spires" or colleges but the Oxford of the people who built them, who work in them and who are rightly proud of the city's heritage, for it is their heritage—a heritage which also takes in the Oxford of motor manufacture, very fine hospitals and a polytechnic which is second to none. It is a compact and yet varied constituency in which the pride, the sense of community and the very diversity of the parts bring something greater to the whole.

I especially place on record my gratitude to the people of Blackbird Leys estate, where I live, for their invaluable advice and support over the years I have had the privilege of representing them on the city council.

I also record my personal appreciation of the contribution of the ethnic minorities to the community life of our constituency and pledge to continue here the work to eliminate the evils of racism whereby ethnic minorities are seen as a problem rather than as an opportunity for a genuine multi-cultural society based on equality, mutual respect, and full and fair opportunities for all.

Ours is a constituency which has escaped the very worst ravages of monetarism and recession. By present national standards, the Oxford area is a prosperous one; yet we have in our midst pockets of bad unemployment, serious poverty, one of the worst housing crises in Britain and shortages of funds for health and education that are drastically undermining services held in the highest regard by all in the area. Across our constituency, people of all backgrounds and political persuasion have come to demand and expect quality in public service provision that can only be secured by harnessing to the dedication of the work force adequate resources efficiently managed and applied in an economic and political environment that backs up their collective efforts and provides a democratic framework within which the individual and the family— not just a few of them, but every individual and family —can make the most of their lives. The Government's programme, the Finance Bill and the Budget that preceded it contain nothing to enable our people to do that. It is such a waste of the potential of my constituency, as it is of Britain as a whole.

I should like to make two comments and one suggestion about the fiscal incentives for profit-related pay in the Bill. My comments are, first, that if those provisions have any merit, which I think is doubtful, in any case there is nothing whatever in them for Austin Rover workers, local authority workers, hospital workers and the many others in Oxford, East working in the public sector, as clause 6 of the Bill specifically excludes them from the scheme and further relegates them to the status of second-class citizens. If there is benefit to be had, they lose out twice. They lose out by not being eligible and, to add insult to injury, they will be paying through their taxes for any benefits that others may enjoy.

My second comment is that, if we are to provide fiscal incentives for pay to be linked to profits, any sense of natural justice would require that this be conditional upon rights to information and, indeed, bargaining on the part of employees as to how those profits are determined. The absence of any such rights destroys any benign purpose that this part of the Bill may have had.

My suggestion is that if the Government are not merely engaged in a wage-cutting exercise, as the Financial Secretary said, if they are genuinely convinced of the merits of taxpayers subsidising linked pay and profits, they could best demonstrate their conviction by going the whole hog—by applying the thing the other way round and providing the same incentives for linking distributed profits to wage levels. We could have wage-related profits. That way, shareholders would benefit only where managements succeeded in getting wages up—a true harmony of interest, to my mind. However, I fear that that is not altogether what the Government have in mind.

Hon. Members on both sides in Committee referred to Austin Rover workers and others under the control of the Crown being excluded from the profit-related pay provisions of the Bill. Even more disturbing was the response on behalf of the Government to the effect that this way was all okay because public sector activities would be covered when they were transferred to the private sector. This can only add to the anxieties that afflict the future of our car industry.

The Oxford area has seen 11,500 jobs in the car industry destroyed in the past 10 years. We have seen car workers wages' tumbling down the pay ladder not because of any lack of effort on the part of the work force; workers are working harder than ever before. It is not because of any resistance to new technology; some of the most advanced robotics in Britain are at Cowley. It is because the Government have signally failed to provide the market conditions for the success of the domestic car industry. Worse than that, they have heaped on top of the high exchange and high interest regimes that all but crippled the industry all the uncertainties about the future ownership of Austin Rover. Last year's Ford sell-off talks and the forced disclosure of commercial secrets to Ford dealt a body blow to the company at the very time when all the efforts of the work force and the completion of the new model range were starting to turn the company around.

I would hope to stay within the conventions on controversy in maiden speeches and have the support of Conservative Members when I say that the future of the car industry depends, first, on keeping Austin Rover in the ownership of the British people; secondly, on assuring investment for the models for the future; and, thirdly, on creating the market conditions in which the products the workers are so keen to produce can be sold. Long-term planning is needed to ensure the success of this key industry, not just for the sake of those directly employed and those in components manufacture who, together with dependants, total around 1 million people, but for the sake of the future of other key industries — steel, robotics, plastics, electronics and glass industries, all of which have a future linked closely to the success of our car industry.

There would be no clearer sign that Britain is the first undeveloping country than to further dismember and dispose of the only bits of the car industry in British hands. It would be a catastrophe not just for my constituency but for the country as a whole—a catastrophe of such an order that I sincerely hope that even the present Government will shrink from the prospect and instead now provide the support for the industry that its efforts and contribution to the economy so richly deserve. That way, our key manufacturing industries might generate profits for investment and profits from which workers can take a share. It is fair shares and fair opportunities for all that the Oxford, East voters and Labour Members are looking for. It is a tragedy and a great pity that those fair shares and those fair opportunities are not reflected in the Bill any more than they are in the Government's programme.