The sympathies of everyone in this House will be with those affected by the devastating flooding that we have seen recently. Our thanks go to all those working tirelessly to support the affected communities. We have committed £2.4 billion over the next two years to build, maintain and repair vital defences to protect more communities from the awful impact of the flooding.
The ceasefire announced in Lebanon is long overdue, but demonstrates that diplomacy can succeed even in the most challenging of circumstances. We must seize this opportunity to build trust, de-escalate tensions and push for a wider ceasefire.
This morning, I had meetings with ministerial colleagues and others. In addition to my duties in this House, I shall have further such meetings later today.
I associate myself with the Prime Minister’s remarks.
West Hertfordshire teaching hospitals NHS trust has eliminated 65-week waits and has now met all three national cancer standards. Those remarkable achievements by the staff are happening despite their working in terrible buildings that are life-expired and crumbling. If the Government are looking for a project that is high-performing and shovel-ready, that is it. Will the Prime Minister give our trust the green light to build a new hospital without further delay?
I thank the hon. Lady for raising that issue, which is of importance to her constituents and beyond. The new hospital programme we inherited was a failure of the previous Government. We are committed to delivering, and we are reviewing to ensure that we can deliver. The Health Secretary will set out further details, but I am very happy for her to have a meeting with the relevant Minister if she wants to follow up on the specifics.
Q3. Residents in Redhouse Park in my constituency are suffering from soaring management fees and poor service from their fleeceholder management company. Recent BBC reporting has once again demonstrated the consequences of the outdated and feudal leasehold system. All of them are frustrated by the broken promises of the previous Government. Will the Prime Minister reassure them that this Government will introduce legislation as soon as possible to resolve the fleeceholder and leaseholder crisis?
Yes, we will do so. I agree that the last Government totally failed to tackle the unfairness of the leasehold system. We will provide homeowners with more powers, protection and data rights by bringing that legislation forward.
We set out our position at the Budget that was just set out. We are fixing the foundations. We are dealing with the £22 billion black hole that the Conservatives left. I am not going to write the next five years of Budgets at the Dispatch Box. We said that we would not hit the payslips of working people. We passed the Budget, we invested in the future and we kept that promise.
The Prime Minister is not fixing any foundations; he is making everything worse. The whole House will have heard him refuse to repeat the Chancellor’s pledge, a pledge as worthless as the manifesto promises that he is talking about. If he is fixing foundations, why is it that the PMI index shows that business confidence has crashed since the Budget?
We are fixing the foundations. We got record investment into this country. The right hon. Lady talks about tax rises. Two weeks ago, she stood there and said that she wanted all the investment and all the benefits of the Budget, but she did not know how she was going to pay for it. I notice that, having come here criticising the national insurance rises over and over again, on Monday she admitted that she would not reverse the position. Meanwhile, her shadow science Minister was saying energetically that he would do the opposite. They haven’t got a clue what they are doing.
Until then, I am the one asking the questions. There is a petition out there with 2 million people asking the right hon. and learned Gentleman to go. He is the one who does not know how things work. It is not Governments who create growth; it is business. His Minister for Employment, the hon. Member for Birkenhead (Alison McGovern)—I do not see her here—wants more young people in work, but businesses say that they are cutting jobs because of the Chancellor’s Budget. His Deputy Prime Minister’s Employment Rights Bill—she is not here—will stop businesses hiring. That is what they say. The CBI said on Monday that the dots of the Government’s policy do not join up. It is right, isn’t it?
On Monday the right hon. Lady said that she would not reverse the increase in national insurance. Yesterday, on their predecessor legacy legislation, the Opposition could not decide what their position was. Today, they have launched a policy commission asking other people to give them some ideas for government.
The right hon. Lady talks about a petition. We had a massive petition on 4 July in this country. We spent years taking our party from a party of protest to a party of government; they are hurtling in the opposite direction.
What a load of nonsense. We had a Budget in March this year, and tractors were not blockading the streets of Whitehall afterwards.
Let me give the Prime Minister another example of a real business. Following his Budget, the head of McVitie’s said that it was “harder to understand” what the case for investment in the UK was. While the Prime Minister has been “hobnobbing” in Brazil, businesses have been struggling to “digest” his Budget. Is it not the case that the Employment Rights Bill shows that it is not only the “ginger nut” that is causing him problems?
I was attending the G20 summit. I suspect that, on their current trajectory, the Opposition do not know whether they would attend the G20. Perhaps the policy commission will come up with an answer on that one.
We have had record overseas investment in this country. The right hon. Lady keeps carping from the sidelines. She says at the Dispatch Box that she wants all the benefits of the Budget, all the investment, but she does not want to pay for any of it. She has racked up £6.7 billion of unfunded commitments in just three weeks as Leader of the Opposition. When it comes to the economy, we are the ones who are growing the economy.
The investment for which the Prime Minister is taking the credit was our work. When I was the Business Secretary, we negotiated those deals that he announced. The bottom line, however, is that in all that he has said, he does not seem to care about the young people who will lose their jobs as a result of his Budget. Perhaps he can show concern for the 1,100 people who found out yesterday that they could lose their jobs at Vauxhall’s plant in Luton. While he flies around making unilateral commitments, back at home the real-world effects are businesses closing in Bedfordshire and Basildon. Does he stand by his promise to ban the sale of petrol cars by 2030, even if more jobs will be lost? [Interruption.]
I would not normally invite a heckle, but that one was accurate.
The question of the position of jobs in Luton is a very serious one—families and workers will be very worried, and we are engaging with them—but I remind the Leader of the Opposition that the electric vehicle mandates that are an issue in this particular case were introduced by the last Government. I also remind her that she was the Business Secretary who introduced them. We are getting on with supporting those communities while she is shouting from the sidelines.
The Prime Minister clearly did not read his briefing about the EV mandate. The fact is that we changed the date and made it easier for people. Everything he has done has attacked people. The Budget was an attack on farmers, an attack on workers, an attack on pensioners, an attack on the young, and an attack on thousands of charities and businesses across the country. The whole system is broken, and the Prime Minister is making things worse. Everyone is unhappy. Is it not a good thing that the Chancellor is an expert on customer complaints?