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General matters

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Edgbaston (Ms Stuart) on initiating the debate on winter tyres. I should like briefly to say something about the impacts and benefits. The impact on the economy of what has been happening over the past seven days has been enormous. Last weekend, the retail sector in Birmingham, which was suffering gridlock, lost a third of its anticipated business. Distribution and logistics companies in the midlands such as DPD and TNT, which serve retail and manufacturing industries and Royal Mail, have had immense problems in discharging their responsibilities at their busiest time of the year. Royal Mail itself has had to take on an additional 7,000 employees. I pay tribute to the remarkable postmen and postwomen out there in all weathers serving this country well. The impact has also been felt in terms of accidents. Last weekend, the ambulance service in Birmingham had 3,000 calls in one day—Saturday—many of them about very serious accidents that occurred as a consequence of the appalling weather that hit the city. Increasingly, the problem is that citizens are struggling to get where they want to in Britain—even to admirable counties like Suffolk and Norfolk. The benefit of winter tyres is therefore absolutely clear. Sadly, we no longer have the tyre industry in Britain that we once had. At its height, Fort Dunlop in my constituency had 15,000 employees. There is still the aircraft tyres factory that employs 400 people; it is a highly successful company. Britain no longer has mass production of car tyres. However, but we still have the Michelin factory in Stoke and the Goodyear factory in Wolverhampton. I know both factories very well and visited them personally when I was deputy general secretary of Unite. Both have the capacity and technology to manufacture winter tyres. If we were to promote winter tyres, as we must, given the chaos of the past seven days and the certainty that we will have further bitter winters of the kind we are encountering at the moment, the benefits would be enormous for our economy generally and for the motor manufacturing cluster in the midlands, employing 150,000 people, in particular. My hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Edgbaston is absolutely right to raise this issue, because winter tyres will save money even if insurance companies incentivise; she is right when she says that that would be the thing to do. The evidence from continental experience is that that would save them money in terms of reduced insurance claims. It would save lives and it could create jobs. Let us hope, therefore, as we wish this House a very merry Christmas, that this is the last winter in Britain that we see this lack of winter tyres. The future must lie in people being smart, buying British, buying winter tyres, saving themselves money, and being able to get to admirable places like Suffolk and Norfolk.