HC Deb 10 May 1995 vol 259 cc734-5
6. Mr. Skinner

To ask the President of the Board of Trade what recent meeting he has had with owners of the newly privatised coal industry with regard to overall production and costs. [21947]

Mr. Heseltine

DTI Ministers have met representatives of successor coal companies on a number of occasions and a range of issues have been discussed. I invite the hon. Gentleman to agree with me that there was nothing crooked in the arrangements that brought those companies into existence.

Mr. Skinner

There is one easy way to find out, is there not? The President of the Board of Trade has one story. "Panorama" and some other people, including myself and other Opposition Members, believe another story. He must do the decent thing and clean the matter up. Why does he not set up a fully independent public inquiry to find out the truth about the sequence of events that led to one of his friends, Richard Budge, getting the coal pits and then having £100 million knocked off the bid? Only an independent inquiry will be able to find out the truth.

Mr. Heseltine

I am glad that the hon. Member has not repeated the disgraceful allegations he made yesterday. What he does not understand is that all the papers relevant to this matter will be at the disposal of the National Audit Office and that it will be for it to determine whether any matters should he drawn to the attention of the Public Accounts Committee.

What I find utterly intolerable in the hon. Member's allegations is that he thinks that a Minister in my position has the power so to order civil servants in my Department that they would carry out the sort of activities of which he is accusing them and the Government. To suggest that the permanent secretary in my Department and all the civil servants involved would behave in the way suggested by the hon. Member is an intolerable abuse of the privileges of the House.

Mr. David Evans

Does my right hon. Friend agree that, since privatisation, jobs have been created in the mining industry every single day and coal is being produced more competitively? Does he not think it a bit rich that, when the lot opposite were in power from 1964 to 1970 and from 1974 to 1979, 313 pits were closed, with the loss of 230,000 miners' jobs? Is that what is meant by the new, caring, sharing Labour party of the lot opposite?

Mr. Heseltine

My hon. Friend, as so often, has hit the nail firmly on the head. The real determination of the Labour party is to try to obscure by smear the remarkable success of the privatised coal industry. That coal industry is seeing increases in productivity; sales of British coal overseas and increased profitability. It has kept open far more pits in the private sector than the nationalised industry considered possible in the public sector. Once again, privatisation has proved immensely successful, despite everything that the Labour party has said.