The Christie hospital has today confirmed that 213 jobs will be lost in the next four years. 60 posts will go completely and another 150 jobs will be outsourced to a private American contractor which will run a new private centre at the hospital.

Tony Lloyd said, ‘Christie’s is a leader in the battle against cancer. It is extremely worrying that this high-profile hospital has been targeted. These cuts show that no area of our NHS is safe despite promises made by David Cameron before the election. The privatisation of the NHS is under way less than a year in to the coalition Government.

‘I am inviting local Lib Dems who have in the past been outspoken in their defence of Christie’s, to join me in opposing these changes to the NHS which create a two tier system and make some lives worth more than others.’

Asked if he was in charge of the nation, Clegg apparently replied: ‘Yeah, I suppose I am. I forgot about that … I’m holding the fort but I’m hoping to take the end of the week off with my kids. Someone else will have to do it then. It sounds more haphazard than it probably is’.

Two of my constituents were stuck in Libya with a two month old baby. They would have liked to spend time with their child relaxing safely in Britain instead of living in fear in Tripoli. Whilst Mr Clegg was taking it easy, I rang the Foreign Office asking to speak to a Minister but was told the relevant one was away. Four days on I still await that call. Cameron away, Hague away, Clegg may as well have been away. This would be funny if it weren’t incompetent.

Fortunately – no thanks to our Government – this family left on a commercial flight.

You’d wish they had made this up. Two very different views of the future of healthcare.

David Bennett, the man appointed to introduce competition into the NHS, tells us, ‘The NHS must be transformed along the lines of the deregulated gas & electricity markets. Patients can expect to see a proliferation of private healthcare providers and even Tesco-style chains of hospitals as the health service is prised open to competition.  We did it in gas, we did it in power, we did it in telecoms. We’ve done it in rail, we’ve done it in water…

Dr Hamish Meldrum, BMA: ‘Comparing the NHS to the gas, electricity and rail markets is not only completely inappropriate, it’s dangerous.’

I know whose side I am on and I know who the overwhelming majority of people would want in charge of the NHS and it’s not someone who wants to sell off our healthcare to private health companies or to supermarket chains.

Young volunteers celebrated on 13th February during the Young and Unsung vinvolved celebration event and award ceremony. This Chinese New Year themed event held at the Ramada Manchester Piccadilly Hotel in Manchester, celebrated voluntary activities carried out by hundreds of local young people over the past twelve months. Tony Lloyd attended the event and presented an award to volunteer Steven Rogerson.

The red carpet was rolled out for the 250 guests, including fourteen award nominees ranging in ages from 16 to 25, who received trophies on the night. There were three award categories, the Active Award, sponsored by Santander and the Care and Team Awards, sponsored by the Community Foundation for Greater Manchester.

Managing Director, Alex Fairweather said “It was marvellous to see such a large turnout of young volunteers and the event was a chance to celebrate the success and hard work of the young people involved.”

All the volunteers and guests enjoyed a night of celebration with entertainment provided by young volunteers including Jim, a young guitarist, singers Paul, Toni, Zoe and Chantelle and Bloco Novo, a community Samba Band from East Manchester.

Greater Manchester Youth Network (GMYN), established in 2007, is a not-for-profit organisation that focuses on empowering young people by supporting them to get involved in volunteering with a wide range of organisations. GMYN receives funding from UK charity, v, as part of the national youth volunteering programme, vinvolved.

Further details on Greater Manchester Youth Network, the vinvolved project, office locations and general information can be found on GMYN’s website www.gmyn.co.uk

Tony Lloyd MP today challenged David Cameron at Prime Ministers Questions about the speed and harshness of the settlement Manchester received.

Tony said, ‘the overwhelming majority of my constituents believe that the local government cuts, the cut in local government spending are not simply too fast and too deep, but are cruel and politically motivated, can he tell the House why my constituents are wrong.’

David Cameron said, ‘Manchester City Council is having its grant cut by 15%, that is less than my council for instance being cut by 23%, but a 15% cut in their grant and yet they are cutting services by 25%.’

Tony said, ‘These figures just don’t add up. David Cameron is insulting the people of Manchester, to tell the residents of the fourth most deprived area in the country who have received the fifth worst settlement that they in fact received a better deal than people living in West Oxfordshire is a disgrace. The Tories can add this to their list of things they need to apologise to the people of Manchester for.’

Tony Lloyd MP today condemned the Government policies that have seen youth unemployment rates soar by 66,000 to 965,000, the highest level since records began.

Tony said, ‘This Tory government are leaving our young people nowhere to turn. They have cut the Future Jobs Fund, scrapped EMA and trebled tuition fees. If our young people can’t work or study they have no choice but to claim benefits, which we all know isn’t in their best interests or the best interests of the country. The Tories and Lib Dems have got to face up to the facts that their policies are failing our young people and invest in schemes that will get young people working now.’

This entry was edited on 25 March 2011.

Manchester Central residents have today learnt that the unfair cuts imposed on the city by the Tories will affect all areas and all council services.

Tony Lloyd said, ‘These announcements are bad news for all Manchester residents but they are catastrophic for the vulnerable people who rely on the help and support they receive from the City Council. The Tories and their Lib Dem friends knew that the council would have to make these cuts given the harshness of the settlement they gave to Manchester, they have shown that they don’t care about this area or the people in it. Despite Manchester being the fourth most deprived area in the country it is in the top five hardest hit by the Tories. Manchester residents know that their Labour council and MPs will do all they can locally and nationally to make sure that those most in need are not left behind as we saw in the 1980′s.’

The council have announced,

Adult Social Services will lose over a fifth of its budget meaning that the council will have to cut some services, charge more for those it does provide and rely more on outside and voluntary agencies.

Children’s Services will lose a quarter of their budget. The Council is working hard to find groups to run Sure Start and has already made agreements with local schools to take control of some centres, where no group is able to take control Sure Start centres will close.

Libraries in Clayton, Miles Platting and Bradford wards will close and Miles Platting will also lose its swimming pool. Ardwick and Newton Heath will lose their leisure centres as the council can no longer provide youth services directly. Bin collections will change to fortnightly and overnight street cleaning will end.

But the council is committed to keep all Sure Start Centres open, and to maintain care, by commissioning Sure Start services to be delivered by a range of organisations. The council will set the standards, quality and charges along with many other protections. The Commissioned organisations selected to deliver Sure Start will be overseen and regulated by the Council.

Tony Lloyd said, “I welcome these developments but I still must deplore the way the Tory-Lib Dem government has been indifferent to the future of Manchester children.”

High Pay Commission Motion for leave to bring in a Bill (Standing Order No. 23)

Tony Lloyd (Manchester Central) (Lab): I beg to move,
That leave be given to bring in a Bill to make provision for the establishment of a High Pay Commission; and for connected purposes.

The Bill would begin to do something credible about the problem of high pay for those at the very top of the earnings ladder in Britain, who are gorging themselves while the rest of the country is doing badly. I am delighted that the Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills is in his place, because he was an advocate of a high pay commission in an earlier incarnation. I hope that he still shares that view this side of the general election.

The public are still furious about the Government’s failure to deal with bankers’ bonuses. Nothing makes people up and down this land so angry as the knowledge that before the election both coalition partners promised tough action on bankers’ bonuses, but the Bob Diamonds of this world and their gilt-edged friends still operate seemingly with impunity. People contrast that with members of the Government who did not commit themselves to the austerity programme that is being brought in, but who are now presiding over a situation in which real wages will have dropped by 4% between 2009 and the end of this year, the Governor of the Bank of England is on record as warning of the biggest squeeze since the 1920s, and the Office for Budget Responsibility, the Government’s own independent body, says that average pay for those on low and middle incomes will drop by £720 a year.

People in work are making big sacrifices, and of course those who will lose their jobs as a result of the Government’s programme will lose out even more. When the Governor of the Bank of England says that that is the inevitable consequence of an economy that is rebalancing, we therefore have to say that we also need some rebalancing of the pay of those at the very top.

The top-paid are doing not just very well but very much better than they were not so long ago. There is very little evidence that very high pay makes a material difference to the success of business in our country. In fact, rather the opposite. The gross bonus culture has actually led to short-termism, not just in the banking industry but across British industry of all kinds. There is little evidence, too, that pay needs to be ratcheted up to such levels to retain the top managers. There is no brain drain of managers. British managers are actually better paid than those anywhere else other than the United States, and there is no systematic evidence of our managers being poached and moving across the Atlantic. The arguments in favour of top pay are effectively spurious.

Top pay is driven by the bonus culture and by the capacity of remuneration committees—the old pals’ act—to operate on the basis of “I’ll scratch your pay packet as long as you’ll scratch mine.” That is wrong and unacceptable. If we look at the evidence on pay, we see that the bonus culture has grown massively in the years since 1997. That is not just in banking, because the Prime Minister is right that we should not scapegoat banking. We should examine the top pay across the whole of our society. In 1997, bonuses across the City were estimated at £1.5 billion, not a small sum. By 2006, that figure had grown to £8.8 billion. It dropped a little at the bottom of the financial crisis, to £3.6 billion in 2008, but it is believed that this year bonuses will be back up to £7 billion. The Government, frankly, have not dealt with the problem.
If we examine the pay of chief executives across British industry, we see that the average pay of chief executives in FTSE 100 companies was something in the order of 47 times that of the average worker in those companies in 2000. That difference had grown to 88 times in 2009, so it has doubled in real terms from already colossal levels. In fact, the average chief executive is now paid 200 times the minimum wage. In a society such as ours, fairness means that if the poor and those on squeezed middle incomes are playing their part in the Government’s austerity programme, so should those at the very top. People on 200 times the minimum wage—not just the Bob Diamonds but those across all our industries—ought to begin to take their fair share of the strain.

A high pay commission—as I said, the Business Secretary is already on record as supporting the concept—could begin to do something positive about the problem. I hope that it can be charged with the following, among other things. First, we have to have transparency. We have to know what these people really are paid, not simply through their basic pay but through bonuses and the very high pension contributions that companies make on their behalf. That is simply a matter of social equity. Stakeholders, not just shareholders—employees, customers and wider society—are entitled to know what is going on. The high pay commission should therefore establish mechanisms for making transparent the whole question of high pay.

Inevitably, the high pay commission ought also to deal with the regulation of bonus payments, and to set down a framework by which bonus payments can be paid. It could set limits and time frames within which bonuses can be achieved. Of course, it could also make recommendations about the taxation of bonuses, which is an important part of bringing the bonus culture into some form of realism.

The commission should look at the role of remuneration committees—the old pals’ act that I have described, when one person looks after his friend’s pay, with the inevitable result that pay is ratcheted ever upwards. Remuneration committees ought to be opened up to the wider world. For example, employee representatives, whether trade union officials or others, and perhaps representatives of society more widely, should be on them, so that there is some reality in how pay is fixed for top earners.

The commission should be charged, every year, with making a report on tax avoidance. We know that tax avoidance among top earners amounts at least to an astonishing £13 billion a year. I must tell Ministers that recouping that £13 billion would make a serious contribution to the kind of deficit reduction with which the Government are concerning themselves, and in particular that it would make a big, material difference to the cuts in our police forces and our social and health services. It is not unreasonable that those at the top, who after all have the biggest shoulders, take the weight and make a proper contribution by way of taxation.
The thing that many people would most like the commission to look at is pay ratios. The Prime Minister asked Will Hutton to look at pay ratios in the public sector, and recommended a guarantee that the top earners earn no more than 20 times those at the bottom. That is a good starting point, but there is absolutely no reason why the principle for the public sector should not also apply to the private sector. That 20:1 ratio might be a good starting point for the high pay commission. The Government could ask the commission to make recommendations and to begin the process of a proper national debate. People are now being paid 200 times the national minimum wage—200 times what the lowest paid people in our society are legally paid, even if we ignore those who are paid less than that.

Fairness, social cohesion, simple common justice and the natural decency of the British public say that we must now do something about high pay. The rich and the better off in our society are gorging themselves when the rest of society is being asked to make restraint a way of life. It is about time that those who can afford to make that contribution are asked to do so.

Question put and agreed to.
Ordered,
That Tony Lloyd, Mr Dennis Skinner, Kate Green, Ian Mearns, Jim Sheridan, Frank Dobson, Mr David Anderson, Mr David Crausby and Martin Caton present the Bill.
Tony Lloyd accordingly presented the Bill.

Bill read the First time; to be read a Second time on Friday 18 March, and to be printed (Bill 141).

Tony Lloyd Labour MP for Manchester Central will move The High Pay Commission Bill on Wednesday which will establish a mechanism for controlling excessive pay and bonus settlements for the very top earners.

Tony Lloyd said, ‘The public is still rightly furious that at a time of austerity and government spending cuts, bankers’ bonuses seem to be undamaged and the pay for top earners continues to accelerate away from those of ordinary wage earners. Both Prime Minister Cameron and Deputy PM Clegg promised action. We are still waiting.’

The High Pay Commission will be given powers, amongst other things, to:

establish the pay ratio between the top earners and the bottom earner in any company (Economist Will Hutton suggested 20:1 for the public sector which could serve as a good reference point for all employers),

to bring in controls over bonus payments and the bonus culture,

to involve employees and other stakeholder representatives in Remuneration Committees and to establish rules for the publication of high pay and bonuses

to report on the scale of tax avoidance by top earners (currently estimated at £13billion a year).

Tony Lloyd said, ‘The British public see many people losing their jobs whilst those in work are seeing the value of their wages sink. Those at the very top must pull their weight and show the nation is in this together. Fairness and social cohesion demand an end not only to the bonus culture and the short-termism this has caused but to the unacceptable gap between those at the top and those at the bottom of Britain’s economic ladder.’