Mr. Dave Anderson: What recent discussions he has had with ministerial colleagues on levels of pensioner poverty in the north-east.[291881]

The Minister for the North East (Mr. Nicholas Brown): I have had a number of discussions with ministerial colleagues on levels of pensioner poverty in the north-east. My most recent discussion was with the Minister for Pensions and the Ageing Society, my hon. Friend the hon. Member for Wallasey (Angela Eagle), following her visit to the region. I have since organised 19 constituency surgeries in east Newcastle, where I have been accompanied by an official from the Department for Work and Pensions and one from Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs. That was part of a benefits take-up campaign, which is a DWP marketing campaign supported by the local pension service, and which has been ongoing in our region since March 2009.

Mr. Anderson: I thank the Minister for that response, and it is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr. Cook. I would particularly like to welcome the right hon. Member for Berwick-upon-Tweed; it would be nice if he was on the North East Regional Committee with us as well.

I appreciate the Minister's response. Like him, I have been working on this subject over the summer, including with the National Pensioners Convention, which is very concerned about the impact of the recession on older people in the area. Will you come with me -

The Chairman: Order. I remind everyone, including myself, that remarks should be made through the Chairman, rather than directly between Members.

Mr. Anderson: Thank you, Mr. Cook. I was rushing and am out of the habit. I ask, through you, Mr. Cook, whether the Minister will agree to meet the National Pensioners Convention in our area, in particular the regional secretary, Mr. Bob Pinkerton, who lives in Blaydon.

Mr. Brown: I regularly meet representatives of pensioner organisations in our region, and I am more than happy to do so again. I cannot commit myself to a particular date and time, because managing my own diary is one of the many things that I am not allowed to do. However, if I can, I will. If I cannot come to the specific event to which my hon. Friend refers, I am more than happy to meet representatives to discuss the issues. I met representatives of the national convention on their recent lobby of Parliament.

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Mr. Dave Anderson: I thank the Minister for giving way. This is not an original or new idea: we could nationalise the steel industry at Corus, which would protect it not only for now but for when we come out of the recession and start building things such as the 7,000 offshore turbines that we will need. That is what we should do.

Mr. Brown: I am happy to take that intervention, but I cannot announce to the Committee today, on behalf of the Government, that I will take the United Kingdom steel industry into public ownership. I know that that will come as a disappointment to my hon. Friend, but, although I push the powers and responsibilities given to me to the limit, I think that the phone call from the Secretary of State and the Chancellor of the Exchequer if I did such a thing would be hotly followed by one from the Prime Minister. Therefore, it would be wrong of me to exceed the powers that have been given to me. Of course, I understand the comment, and I see that I shall be invited to exceed the powers given to me.

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Mr. Anderson : I fully associate myself with the comments made by my hon. Friend the Member for Sunderland, South. I come from that town and lived and worked in the Easington constituency with my hon. Friend the Member for Easington. For some of us, the discussion about recession is not academic, but real. We know what it was like 20 years ago. That recession, and the one 30 years ago, were deliberately engineered by a Government who believed that unemployment was a price worth paying. It was a price that was paid not by the Tory elites or the Old Etonians, but by the people who live in this and other similar areas. We do not want to go back to that. That is why despite the fact that the recession we are in at the moment is global and not of our own making, I am glad that the attitude taken by our Government has not been to sit back and leave the people alone, but to intervene and do the right thing for the people of this country.

It is not all good news - quite clearly, it is not. In my own constituency, we lost jobs at Virgin Media. We had a major job impact at the dairy in Blaydon, and despite fantastic input from One NorthEast, the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, and from many trade unions, we lost 300 jobs - a real blow to the area. There has clearly been an impact in my constituency, on the financial sector and the supply chain around the motor industry, and on small businesses that have been desperately let down by the banks.

But there is good news locally as well. The BAE factory in Birtley has secured a contract to supply ammunitions to the MOD for 15 years. It has been so successful that the factory will move from Birtley to the neighbouring constituency in Washington, but that is a positive move in terms of securing jobs and industry for this region. I have more good news, which will please my hon. Friend the Member for Sunderland, South. Graphite, which is moving into the waste disposal industry, has built a state-of-the-art factory in the Tyne valley in Blaydon. It will deal with over 350,000 tonnes of waste a year - 100 per cent. goes in at one end, and only 20 per cent. will come out the other. At the moment - when it is up and running - 80 per cent. will be recycled. Discussions are going on with people in this part of the world about converting the remaining 20 per cent. into fuel - a win-win for everyone. It is a relatively small project in terms of what we are talking about for the wider south-of-Tyne disposal, which may well be placed in Gateshead, but it is clearly positive. It has created 50 new jobs, and for some of those jobs, the people who are running that factory have worked with the people who have lost their jobs at the dairy to try to get them redeployed. That is a good example of businesses working together in partnership with One NorthEast to try to support people.

Even more important going forward is the great stuff that has been happening at De La Rue plant in the Tyne valley. De La Rue has a long history in printing bank notes. In the past year, it has increased its work force by 80. Even better, it has won the contract for producing the new passports for this country for the foreseeable future: a £400 million contract that will create 80 new jobs, with very high-tech, high-skilled and highly paid work right in the heart of my constituency.

I take on board what my hon. Friend the Member for Sunderland, South said. We should say to people who knock this area, the real moaning Minnies, "Go and have a look. Open your eyes. Have a walk down the quayside in Newcastle and in Gateshead and think what it was like 10 or 20 years ago. Go and have a look in places such as Merton and Seaham." Seaham is unrecognisable - the site that was Vane Tempest colliery now has some of the best quality housing anywhere in this country. We have the Seaham Hall hotel - it was beyond anyone's wildest dreams that something like that would ever be in our constituencies. Those are tremendous things, in addition to the reality of what we have to offer right across the region. I suggest to the people who are here today, not just my colleagues, that they visit some of those places. The journalists and broadcasters should go out and have a look at what is going on in this area.

I wanted to speak about the work being done in the Regional Select Committee. I will not go into detail of my hon. Friend the Member for Stockton, South covered so admirably, but I want to mention NETPark and NAREC - the new and renewable energy centre - and Alcan, which is doing tremendous work not just in producing aluminium for the world, but in developing carbon capture and storage. People should go and see what is being done in those places. Nobody there is negative. The people there face tough times and are in competition with the world, but they are delivering quality. They are not sitting back - they are getting stuck in.

A year ago, my hon. Friend the Member for Gateshead, East and Washington, West and I met representatives of the association of councils about what we could do to try to bring forward training facilities for people working for Nissan. Working together with the Education Secretary of State responsible for higher education, we were able to convince Gateshead college and Nissan to work together with the Department and they brought forward training opportunities. Unfortunately, that did not change the fact that 1,200 people had to lose their jobs at Nissan, but we made a visit to Nissan at the beginning of the summer recess and were told that it has re-employed some of those people and the factory is working flat out - and that is before we get the electric vehicles. Its car production is at least one and a half times greater than it had envisaged before the recession hit. It reckons that if the recession had not hit, it would be producing three times more than had been estimated. That is a success story of which we should all be very proud.

I also want to mention the work going on down at Wilton with NEPIC. People face real problems, as my hon. Friend the Member for Stockton, South highlighted, but they are not sitting back and moaning about it. They might moan that they want more from the Government, and it is right that they want that. It is the role of those of us here today to try to secure it. We make no excuses about that, but the people down there are committed to this region.

I will touch on Corus. I hope that there is no need for my solution, because my solution would ultimately mean that more public money was needed for the nationalisation of the steel industry. I hope that Tata can deliver. I hope that it works together with the MPs, the work force and other people to ensure the security of the steel industry, because it is not just about this part of our region; it is about the whole of the region, particularly if we are to be successful at developing the technologies that will drive this place forward. If we are to build 7,000 offshore wind turbines, which has been committed to; if we are to start developing the offshore coal industry again, which is being piloted by Newcastle university; and if we are to develop CCS and have hundreds of miles of pipe coming out of the North sea, we will need a steel industry. Otherwise, we will end up having to ship our steel halfway around the world, which would defeat the purpose of having a CCS policy and a clean coal policy. We need to think seriously about that.

If the talks at Corus fail and the reality is that the plant has to shut, I would seriously say to the Minister that we want the Government to intervene - to continue intervening. People on the street will say, "Why shouldn't you? You intervened to save the banks." A lot of people say, "We don't know why you did that." I am quite clear that if we had not intervened, we would not have had a banking system in this country, but the banking system is still letting us down. If we ultimately have to intervene to save the steel industry, we should do that.

I am very much looking forward to conducting the inquiry into tourism in our area. We have a huge offer in terms of tourism, from Saltburn right up the coast to Berwick - all the fantastic castles and beaches - and inland, there are some of the best moors and dales anywhere in the country. The work being done by One NorthEast in its "Passionate People, Passionate Places" project has been tremendous. This is one of the few tourist areas in the country that has seen growth in the last year, but we could do better: we could learn lessons from people in Northern Ireland, with its very troubled history, where they have focused on maximising their offer in terms of tourism. I suggest that it would do us good to talk to people there and possibly consider the report that was done by our colleagues on the Northern Ireland Committee a couple of years ago about how they approached the work on tourism.

The role of One NorthEast has been vital. The Conservatives are clearly going to do away with bodies such as One NorthEast; it is not very clear what the Liberal Democrats would intend to do. I understand that the leader wants to do away with them altogether. The shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer says that we should keep some possibly, but not others. Clearly, the leader of Newcastle council is committed to One NorthEast, because he sits on the board, and he does a good job there. The truth is that One NorthEast has been tremendous and letting it go would be a huge mistake. The possibility of all this falling apart is real. We have much more to argue for, but I never thought that I would agree with the CBI, whose director general, Richard Lambert, was quoted in The Observer over the weekend as saying, "Forgive me" - I should have brought my glasses; no, he didn't say that -

"for sounding romantic...But we do have the capacity for a manufacturing renaissance over the next few years, and if we don't grasp it, future generations will curse us one way or another."

We have the chance in my constituency to build high-speed trains at Tyne yard and there is the possibility of tapping into more than 3 billion tonnes of coal off the North sea coast with the work of One NorthEast and Newcastle university, but we really, really need to keep the pressure on.

This is a clear dividing line between us and our potential replacement in Government. If, somewhere down the line - whether in nine months, six months or many years' time - we are replaced by the Conservatives, make no mistake, they will not do the sort of things that we have done. They do not believe in intervention; they do not believe in investing in public services; and they do not believe in helping those who cannot help themselves. Look at the history of what they have done; we do not need reminding of it, but we have to remind our people that the Conservatives have not changed. We do not want to go back there.

If you do not believe that, I suggest that everyone in this room and beyond look closely at the report mentioned by my hon. Friend the Member for Tyne Bridge. The Taxpayers' Alliance and the Institute of Directors argue that they are not part of the Conservative party, but their membership suggests that they are very close. We know their friends by who they ride with. Along with the things that have already been mentioned - again, I wish I had my glasses - they want to reduce non-front-line staff in health and schools by 10 per cent.; reduce the size of the civil service by 10 per cent.; rationalise the framework of regional government and business support; and cut 25 per cent. from the Department for Culture, Media and Sport. If that happens, we can forget about the film studio in Seaham, forget about bringing the Lindisfarne gospels back up here and forget about the work going on around the Olympics.

The Taxpayers' Alliance and the Institute of Directors also want a one-year freeze on the grants from the Department for Communities and Local Government to local and regional government. They also want to

"simplify and rationalise the skills system and the plethora of skills programmes"

- in other words,

"Don't help people who need help"

The Taxpayers' Alliance and Institute of Directors also want the abolition of child benefit and the child trust fund, as well as a further one-year pay freeze. We know what is in store for our country if the people make the mistake of voting Conservative in the next few months.

I am massively proud of this region. We have so much to be proud of, particularly the way we have worked so hard in the past decade to turn things around after the despair that we all felt at the end of the 1990s. I believe that this region and this country are genuinely safe in Labour's hands, and that if the people of this country make the mistake of voting Conservative, they will rue the day.

This is an uncorrected transcript of evidence taken in public and reported to the House. The transcript has been placed on the internet on the authority of the Committee. Neither witnesses nor Members have had the opportunity to correct the record. The transcript is not yet an approved formal record of these proceedings.

The full transcript may be read here.

Promoted by Paul Foy on behalf of Dave Anderson, both of St Cuthbert's Church Hall, Shibdon Road, Blaydon, NE21 5PT