Debate on the Address

I accept the spirit in which that intervention is made, but the problem is that there is no serious disincentive for those who are not interested in school and who simply will not turn up, or who want to disrupt lessons for the majority. There is no serious sanction against them. They can be expelled, but they appeal, the governors are overturned and they come back into the class. We have to find more serious sanctions. I do not see the connection that the hon. Gentleman makes between expelling the very small minority who impinge on the right of the rest of the class to get the education that they deserve, and the hooligan group who might later terrorise town centres. On immigration, the Government have only themselves to blame for losing control of the numbers. People now simply have no confidence in the official statistics: they come from different sources; they are quoted by different Ministers. Clearly, no one believes in an authoritative Government source for how many people are coming to this country, are leaving it or are here. We do not have a proper system of controls. On the contrary, we have far too many categories of people who are here under different programmes and initiatives. The different types of status, such as ““highly skilled”” or ““leave to remain””, mean that we do not simply know how many people are here. Nothing in the Queen's Speech gives me any confidence that we will know more accurately in a year's time exactly what the numbers are. My right hon. Friend the Member for Wokingham (Mr. Redwood) has referred to the unbalanced economy. Nothing in the Queen's Speech shows us that Ministers have really learned the lessons from Northern Rock. We are promised some reform to"““ensure confidence in the banking system.””" We have a banking system of supervision in which there is total confusion. We have two bodies—the Bank of England and the Financial Services Authority—that seem to be responsible for different aspects of liquidity: the Bank, for overall liquidity; and the FSA, for the liquidity of individual institutions. The Bank of England is theoretically the lender of last resort, but it has been unable to mount such an operation covertly, because of various restrictions and regulations that the Government have put in place. If any Labour Member still believes in the sanctity of the tripartite system, which was put in place by the then Prime Minister and Chancellor back in 1987, they should consider the fact that, on 14 August, all parties concerned—the Bank of England, the FSA and Treasury Ministers—were told that Northern Rock could run out of money. On 14 September, Northern Rock did run out of money. The tripartite system failed, and we urgently need legislation to improve it, to ensure that we never have a run on a bank like that again and that we have a proper system of depositor protection.