Claire Hanna: ...-blowing array of interventions with young people, including homework support, citizenship, fitness, nutrition and lawfulness, making them good citizens and getting them ready for the world and the jobs out there. What is sustainable about its finances being cut by over a third, which will undermine all of its work with those young people? We have put off hard decisions for too long, but...
Claire Hanna: ...the vulnerable. On green technology and transition, some progress is welcome but, as the Leader of the Opposition said, we are not yet really even on the pitch. I remind the Government that green jobs are not just people in hi-vis jackets working with steel and all that; jobs in caring and education are, by definition, low emission. Northern Ireland can play a real part in the multi-level...
Claire Hanna: ...afternoon. Clearly, the hope and the goal is to get back into Stormont as soon as possible to get on with the things that people desperately need us to progress on—in care, climate, housing and jobs. Without doubt, health is the most acute and burning issue, in terms of the need that is out there and the corrosive impact of stop-start government and what that has done to our health...
Claire Hanna: ...head in Northern Ireland was £1,325, compared with a UK average of £1,407. Of course, all that has contributed to a failure to attract quality investment and foreign direct investment, and decent jobs. That is reflected in our rates of economically inactive people, which are substantially higher than those in other regions. The founder of our party, John Hume, said many times that the...
Claire Hanna: ...and the people who deliver it for us in a really parlous state. No party is without fault in that regard, but the two largest parties deserve the most opprobrium for walking off and staying off the job in late 2016 after the Bengoa report created a little bit of shared purpose and the little bit of hope that we could possibly reform services. What we are doing instead is allowing little...
Claire Hanna: ...for devolved Ministers in Northern Ireland, where a majority of people want to keep fossil fuels in the ground and want instead to see investment in renewables and their huge potential for green jobs?
Claire Hanna: ..., the responsibility to govern and the refusal of it does have a measurable impact on public services. Nobody is saying that the parties in charge over the past decade have done a particularly good job of running those services, but it is absolutely the case that having no Ministers degrades decision making. We should be in no doubt, either, that the normalisation of crisis politics is...
Claire Hanna: You are doing a great job yourself. We began that work by tabling amendments to the Northern Ireland (Ministers, Elections and Petitions of Concern) Act 2022 to introduce an alternative election of First Ministers—[Interruption.] We do that work despite the chuntering from a sedentary position of people who just say no, who just nag from the sidelines, who are blocking good governance, and...
Claire Hanna: ...the one at which many people are able to earn. The enduring myths about wealth, which we will hear mentioned in this debate, include the idea that wealth taxes would slow down the economy, deter job creation and prompt capital flight. One myth is that, simply by existing, wealthy people create jobs; but we know that in fact it is demand that creates jobs. If we take a billion pounds and...
Claire Hanna: ...to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Robertson, and I offer my warmest commendations and congratulations to the hon. Member for Swansea East (Carolyn Harris), who has done such a magnificent job of raising awareness and understanding of the menopause. She has ensured that many women feel heard and understood, but crucially has also galvanised change—information, services, policy, and a...
Claire Hanna: ...investment over many decades and, of course, a stark failure to attract quality foreign direct investment. The founder of our party, John Hume, said many times that the best peace process is a job: the best way to enable people to build and have hope in their futures and, I suppose, to get around the things that have divided them is for them to have meaningful employment—a reason to...
Claire Hanna: ...are huge opportunities for Northern Ireland, which has not had a unique selling point in many decades, to trade equally into the UK single market and into the EU single market. That could create jobs, create prosperity and change our futures. The founder of our party, John Hume, said, many times, that the best peace process is a job. We finally have the opportunity to say to businesses,...
Claire Hanna: ..., some of these have been demonstrated to not necessarily have the solution to all our problems. We need to embrace lower labour productivity at times, and accept that long hours and low-reward jobs, where people are working just to stand still economically and consume, are not good for them or for the planet. We also need to encourage reporting of non-GDP measurements. The ONS records...
Claire Hanna: To ask the Chancellor of the Exchequer, if he will make it his policy to retain the Coronavirus Job Retention Scheme beyond September 2021 for sectors of the economy that have not returned to pre-covid-19 pandemic levels of customers.
Claire Hanna: ...about the Government failing to capitalise on the opportunities, although they have abjectly failed to bother to do that. Why are they now actively thwarting those who want to create, privately, jobs and prosperity after decades of economic underperformance?
Claire Hanna: ...Assembly. That prevents any potential emergence of a coalition of the willing, as might have come forward in the last three-year stand-off of MLAs from all parties. They wanted to get on with the job to which they were elected but, because of the privatisation of the First Minister’s nomination, had essentially been relegated to being bystanders and commentators with no power to...
Claire Hanna: ...integral to democracy and fundamental to ensuring that a society is underpinned by transparency and accountability. At the heart of that is ensuring that journalists are free and safe to do their jobs unhampered and without fear of intimidation or attack. At home in Northern Ireland, unfortunately, attacks on journalists are not new and have not been confined to the past. This is a society...
Claire Hanna: ..., workers have to go to court to achieve basic protections. We are also experiencing a wage squeeze. In November, the Office for National Statistics said that there were hundreds of thousands of jobs in which employees over the age of 16 were being paid below the legal minimum, and the number is only increasing. Also, those in the lowest-paying jobs are over five times more likely to be...
Claire Hanna: ...emergency because it lacks the ambition and the urgency required to meet the UK’s obligations under the Paris agreement. It does not deliver the transformational investment needed to create green jobs, particularly at a time when so many people have lost their work and when so many sectors will take time to recover. Opportunities also need to be there, not least here in Northern Ireland....
Claire Hanna: ...are much less excusable—missed opportunities to have a genuine and meaningful green recovery, to invest in a resilient health service and the NHS workforce, or to support those who have lost jobs and income over the last year. It appears that the Government have not learned much from the last decade. Rather than injecting stimulus through people to tackle inequality, such as through a...