House of Commons

Tuesday 13th September 2011 Commons Chamber

Tuesday 13 September 2011

The House met at half-past Two o’clock

Prayers

Tuesday 13th September 2011 Commons Chamber

[Mr Speaker in the Chair]

Business before questions

London Local Authorities and Transport for London (No. 2) Bill [Lords] (By Order)

Second Reading opposed and deferred until Tuesday 11 October (Standing Order No. 20).

Oral Answers to Questions

Tuesday 13th September 2011 Commons Chamber

The Secretary of State was asked—

[Yvonne Fovargue (Makerfield) (Lab)]

1. What recent discussions he has had with Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs and the Insolvency Service on the viability of insolvency litigation following the implementation of the reforms proposed by Lord Justice Jackson.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Justice (Mr Jonathan Djanogly)]

The Department has received many representations about different aspects of implementing the reforms proposed by Lord Justice Jackson, which we are taking forward in the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Bill. I and my officials continue to have discussions with Government Departments and others on implementation generally, including with Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs and the Insolvency Service in relation to insolvency proceedings.

[Yvonne Fovargue]

In June, the Minister said that he was discussing with HMRC and the Insolvency Service the specific implications of the Jackson reform for the punishment of dodgy directors of insolvent companies, with a view to reaching a satisfactory conclusion. Three months down the line, what conclusion has been reached?

[Mr Djanogly]

Our current position is not to depart from Lord Justice Jackson’s recommendations on recoverability, with the sole exception that we have outlined in the Bill. However, the Government are aware of the particular issues concerning the impact of abolishing conditional fee agreement recoverability in relation to insolvency and related proceedings. I and my officials will continue to assess and discuss the implications.

[Mr Mark Spencer (Sherwood) (Con)]

Will the Minister find time to meet me to discuss the case of a company based in Staffordshire that sold hot tubs and which defrauded many of my constituents? It took their money, went into insolvency and became a phoenix company.

[Mr Djanogly]

I shall listen to the circumstances of my hon. Friend’s case, but it might be one for the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills rather than the Ministry of Justice. If it is relevant to my Department, however, I will be happy to meet him.

[Jessica Lee (Erewash) (Con)]

2. What recent progress he has made in making prisoners work while in custody; and if he will make a statement.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Justice (Mr Crispin Blunt)]

We have made clear our intention to make prisons places of work and industry. We are already making good progress towards longer prisoner working weeks at a number of prisons, including 13 early-adopter sites that are implementing regimes designed to facilitate increased working hours. We are continuing to develop a framework that will enable us to maximise this approach across the prison estate. To achieve this, we are looking at the experience of other countries and have established a business advisory group to help us to deliver prison industries that operate on a commercial basis so that much more work can be delivered at no cost to the taxpayer and can contribute to victims’ services while competing fairly in open markets.

[Jessica Lee]

Does my hon. Friend agree that having prisoners do real work will help not only by tackling the culture of idleness in prisons, but by giving prisoners valuable vocational skills that we all hope they will put to good use upon their release?

[Mr Blunt]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. There will be substantial benefits from bringing this policy to scale, which I am optimistic we can do. There will be benefits to victims from the resources generated by the work that prisoners do; to the taxpayer from relieving the cost of the regime; and to the stability of the prison regime, as she mentioned. However, there will also be a substantial rehabilitative benefit to prisoners who will leave prison with a CV that includes skills training in the work in which they have been involved as well as experience in the work itself.

[Mrs Jenny Chapman (Darlington) (Lab)]

We all agree that prison industry is good for rehabilitation, but how many additional prison officers does the Minister think will be needed to supervise movement around the estate and to ensure that prison industries are secure and properly delivered?

[Mr Blunt]

The hon. Lady is absolutely right. If we are to change prisons from being simply places of security and of warehousing people, where work is wedged in when possible, there will be additional costs to the prison regime. The businesses that go into prisons will have to generate the resources to support that.

[Mr Julian Brazier (Canterbury) (Con)]

In strongly welcoming my hon. Friend’s initiative, I urge him to consider the position of young people on remand. As successive prison inspectors have said, it cannot be right to have young people, even though they have not been sentenced, sitting about not required even to undertake any education let alone work.

[Mr Blunt]

Again, my hon. Friend is right. Remand prisoners pose a particular challenge, in the youth estate as well as the adult estate, because of the speed with which they tend to turn over in those institutions. That makes getting work for them more difficult, but there needs to be a proper focus on programmes for all people in custody following a proper assessment of their rehabilitative requirements.

[Kate Green (Stretford and Urmston) (Lab)]

The Minister will be aware that women in prison are often under-occupied. Will he tell us what special attention he is giving to creating working opportunities for women who are serving custodial sentences?

[Mr Blunt]

This agenda has to apply to women as well as to men. The sad fact is that, overall, too many of our prisoners are under-occupied, whether women or men, and the same attention must be paid to the women’s estate as to the men’s estate.

[Caroline Lucas (Brighton, Pavilion) (Green)]

3. What his policy is on the right of overseas victims of alleged human rights abuses by UK multinational companies to access justice in the UK.

[Katy Clark (North Ayrshire and Arran) (Lab)]

7. What recent discussions he has had with the Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs on his proposed reform of access to justice for overseas victims of corporate harm.

[The Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice (Mr Kenneth Clarke)]

Overseas victims of alleged corporate harm by UK international companies are, where appropriate, able to bring civil claims in the UK now, and that will continue to be the case following implementation of our reforms to civil litigation funding and costs. My officials and I are in contact with the Foreign and Colonial Office—[Laughter]—the Foreign and Commonwealth Office as and when necessary to discuss the impact of our proposed reforms to legal costs in this class of case in this country, the Commonwealth or the colonies.

[Caroline Lucas]

I thank the Secretary of State for that interesting reply. Notwithstanding his response, he will be aware that the United Nations Special Representative on Business and Human Rights has said that clauses 41 to 43 of the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Bill will present a major barrier to justice for overseas victims of human rights abuses by UK multinationals, not least because of the significant increased cost burdens. Will he therefore withdraw those clauses from the Bill?

[Mr Clarke]

We are not changing the jurisdiction in this country, which certainly does entertain claims in personal injury cases and so on against multinational companies that have some footing in this country. All we are arguing about is how much is paid in legal costs. The reforms to the no win, no fee arrangements that we are proposing would ensure that the costs would be fairer, more balanced and not out of proportion to the claim. We are not making any change at all to the jurisdiction. Most of the cases against multinational companies are not human rights cases; they are personal injury cases. Many of those cases might be attracted here because our present system of rewarding lawyers is far more generous than can be found in any other jurisdiction in the world.

[Katy Clark]

The Secretary of State will be aware that the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination has also criticised the reforms, which would remove access to justice for the victims of corporate abuse overseas. Does he not recognise that the reforms could result in there being no disincentive to environmental and other abuse? Will he not look at this again?

[Mr Clarke]

As I suggested a moment ago, I regard it as just a little disingenuous—I hate to say that about UN agencies—to suggest that we are in any way undermining the jurisdiction here for dealing with racial discrimination or serious personal injury cases involving British companies. What we are talking about is how much the lawyers are paid by way of success fees and other costs. The Trafigura case was a classic scandalous personal injury case involving a British company and an incident in Côte d’Ivoire, in which £30 million in compensation was awarded by the British courts to the plaintiffs and £100 million was paid in legal costs to those who brought the action. All we are doing is going back to where no win, no fee used to be—in getting the costs and the claims back in proportion to each other.

[Mr Andy Slaughter (Hammersmith) (Lab)]

What we are talking about is whether such cases will get into court at all under the regime that the Government are proposing. It appears they will not listen to Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs on insolvency, or to Amnesty International, Oxfam or the United Nations on multinational cases. Now, Admiral, the leading specialist motor insurer, is saying that premiums will go up as a result of the proposals. Is it not time to think again, and to stop favouring insurance companies, crooks and multinationals over their victims?

[Mr Clarke]

If the hon. Gentleman wants to widen this argument, which is perfectly legitimate, to include a general proposition as well as multinational company cases, the questions must be: how much is proportionate to the claim when it comes to paying costs, and what effect does no win, no fee, since it was changed, have on the judgment on both sides? We do not want such cases to be such a high earner for the plaintiffs’ lawyers that they are prepared to bring more speculative cases, which is happening at the moment. Nor do we want pressure to be put on defendants who have a perfectly sound defence, forcing them to say, “We cannot defend ourselves, because it will cost us less to pay a nuisance fee by way of settlement.” Justice involves striking a balance between what the lawyers are paid and what the plaintiffs get by way of compensation.

[Mr Gordon Marsden (Blackpool South) (Lab)]

4. What assessment he has made of the proposal to allow a right of appeal of decisions by judges to grant bail following the death of Jane Clough and other cases.

[The Minister for Policing and Criminal Justice (Nick Herbert)]

There is a right of appeal against bail decisions made by magistrates, but not against those made by the Crown court. This is not a straightforward matter; we are examining the issues very carefully to identify the best way to take this forward.

[Mr Marsden]

Jane Clough was stabbed to death outside Blackpool Victoria hospital by her former partner who had been freed on bail after being charged with nine counts of rape, and a similar case took place in the Blackpool area in the previous year. Jane Clough’s parents’ MP, the hon. Member for Pendle (Andrew Stephenson) has introduced a ten-minute rule Bill, which commands wide support. I wrote to the Lord Chancellor this July, asking him to give families and the Crown Prosecution Service the chance to appeal against this judicial bail decision. Will the right hon. Gentleman and other Justice Ministers at least consider making this change to the bail law? After such horrific events have taken place, it is not good enough simply to wash their hands of this subject when they have the power to make the change.

[Nick Herbert]

I am not sure whether the hon. Gentleman is aware of it, but along with my hon. Friend the Member for Pendle (Andrew Stephenson), I have met Mr and Mrs Clough. This was an appalling case in which a young mother was tragically killed. No one could have failed to be moved by what the parents said. They made a powerful case and I have said that the Government are considering my hon. Friend’s proposal, but Crown court judges are judges of some seniority and we need to assess the issues with care.

[Philip Davies (Shipley) (Con)]

Ministry of Justice figures show that more than 10% of all crimes and almost 20% of burglaries are committed by people on bail. Is it not time that the Government clamped down on the courts giving people bail and tightened the rules? Is it not self-evident that the more people are remanded in custody, the fewer the crimes will be committed and the fewer victims there will be?

[Nick Herbert]

I am sure that my hon. Friend is aware that many people who are remanded in custody and subsequently found either to be either guilty or not guilty would not have merited a custodial sentence. That is an issue that the House has to confront.

[Sadiq Khan (Tooting) (Lab)]

I am afraid that the Chamber will be concerned about the complacency of the language used in the Minister’s response. I am sure he will agree that judges, like the rest of us, are not infallible and make mistakes. If he accepts that and the fact that it can lead to catastrophic effects, why not allow the CPS the right to appeal in limited circumstances against a decision of a Crown court judge to grant bail?

[Nick Herbert]

I have answered this question, and I thought I did so in very reasonable terms. I said that we all appreciated that the case was very serious and that the Government would consider the proposal. We have to be aware, however, that granting an appeal on a decision of a Crown court judge—a more senior member of the judiciary than a magistrate—raises serious issues, which need to be considered with care.

[Sadiq Khan]

I am really sorry to raise the matter again, but a justice Bill is going through Parliament and it seems to the rest of us to provide the ideal opportunity to make the change required. The Minister will be aware that many colleagues—and not just those in the House—constituents up and down the country, victims of crime and experts working in the justice system all think that Ministers in the Justice Ministry are not fit for purpose. They were out of touch when it came to the issue of rape; they were out of touch when it came to providing a 50% reduction in sentence to those who pleaded guilty; and I am afraid they are out of touch on this issue. The Bill is in Committee, so will the Minister agree to support our amendment, which would allow the CPS in limited circumstances to appeal against a decision of a Crown court judge to grant bail?

[Nick Herbert]

I am not sure how many times I can repeat to the right hon. Gentleman that I have said that the Government are considering these matters. I am not going to announce policy on the hoof when very serious issues are raised. It is not proper to make a link between the provisions in the Bill and the case that arose because the restriction on custodial remands in the Bill applies only to magistrates courts and not to the Crown courts—so it would not have affected the case that gave rise to the question.

[Gavin Shuker (Luton South) (Lab/Co-op)]

5. Whether his Department has undertaken a cost-benefit analysis of the implementation of the office of chief coroner.

[Tom Blenkinsop (Middlesbrough South and East Cleveland) (Lab)]

19. Whether his Department has undertaken a cost-benefit analysis of the implementation of the office of the chief coroner.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Justice (Mr Jonathan Djanogly)]

An impact assessment for part 1 of the Coroners and Justice Act 2009 was published by the Ministry of Justice in December 2008. It summarised the full costs and benefits of implementing the coroner provisions in the Act.

[Gavin Shuker]

I am grateful for that answer. Baroness Finlay, working with the president of the Royal College of Pathologists, proposed a model with much lower running costs—just £300,000—than those that the Government are talking about. So will the Minister accept that the costs for the office he is proposing could be reduced?

[Mr Djanogly]

I have met and discussed this point with Baroness Finlay on a number of occasions. The previous Government said that the set-up costs were going to be £10.9 million and the running costs would be £6.6 million a year. We looked at that those figures and we agree with them. The problem is that as we have to maintain the independence of the judiciary, the chief coroner—if there were to be one—could, unfortunately, not be based in the Ministry of Justice, as Baroness Finlay wanted.

[Tom Blenkinsop]

The delays and current practice in the coroner system is having a direct impact on bereaved families, particularly in the Teesside area. What costs to the UK health services arise as a result of the current coroner system?

[Mr Djanogly]

We remain committed to fundamental reform of the coronial system. I know that there are particular issues to address in the hon. Gentleman’s constituency, and they are being dealt with. Implementing the office of the chief coroner would require new funding, which simply is not available in the current economic climate. Our proposals will allow us to deliver those reforms, but without those additional costs.

[Sir Alan Beith (Berwick-upon-Tweed) (LD)]

Does my hon. Friend recognise that there is a much cheaper and more cost-effective way of raising professional standards and creating a head of the coronial profession? That would involve designating a serving coroner as chief coroner and giving just minimal assistance to support him in that role.

[Mr Djanogly]

Unfortunately, the existing legislation would not allow that; the job would have to be done by a High Court judge or a circuit judge. The point of the matter is that we are putting in place a ministerial committee, which will answer to Parliament in a way that a chief coroner never could.

[Mr James Gray (North Wiltshire) (Con)]

As the repatriation of fallen soldiers through RAF Lyneham and Wootton Bassett in my constituency comes to an end, I know that the Minister will wish to join me in paying tribute to the first-class work done by the Wiltshire coroner over some four or five years. Will the Minister also now work closely with the Royal British Legion to ensure that the maximum possible support is available for bereaved families as these inquests proceed?

[Mr Djanogly]

I certainly congratulate the coroner on his work in tough circumstances. I also wish to tell my hon. Friend that I have met representatives of the RBL on a number of occasions. I believe that our reforms will improve the situation for the armed forces tremendously, through the national charter that we are providing and the ability to train coroners to military standards.

[Robert Flello (Stoke-on-Trent South) (Lab)]

There is a long list of organisations that wish to see a chief coroner in post and just the Minister who thinks he knows better. The Government’s fragmented proposals for the coronial system contain no mechanism to improve the appeals and complaints process—that was to be a key function of the chief coroner’s office. Nobody really believes that the proposed coronial board, reporting to Ministers, will fulfil that role. Does he think it acceptable to expect families to have to continue to pursue expensive judicial reviews and litigation in respect of coronial decisions, at great cost also to the taxpayer, and have no way of holding to account those coroners who do not deliver for bereaved families?

[Mr Djanogly]

As I have said, the Government are committed to urgent reform of the coronial service, and this is exactly what we are going to be doing. We are putting in place all the provisions under the 2009 Act, except the appeal process, which was going to cost £2.2 million a year. We feel that the existing processes are adequate.

[Toby Perkins (Chesterfield) (Lab)]

6. What recent representations he has received from people with mesothelioma and mesothelioma support groups on the potential implications of his proposed reforms to legal aid.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Justice (Mr Jonathan Djanogly)]

Legal aid for personal injury claims was abolished by the previous Administration in 1999, so I take the hon. Gentleman to be referring to the proposed reforms to civil litigation funding and costs, and will answer on that basis. I have received several letters from MPs and others about the potential impact on mesothelioma sufferers. The Government’s package of reforms includes a number of measures to help claimants. We believe that valid claims will still be brought under the new regime but will be resolved at more proportionate cost.

[Toby Perkins]

Mesothelioma victims are often in the last year of their life by the time they are diagnosed and many are already too ill to seek redress. The proposals to prevent their being able to recover afterwards from the insurance premiums will mean a big up-front cost for many people. Derbyshire asbestos support team is very concerned that they and their families will miss out on access to justice because of these proposals. What can the Minister do to ensure that those people, who are very ill and who do not have trivial claims, have access to justice?

[Mr Djanogly]

The hon. Gentleman makes an important point. We recognise that reducing the time from diagnosis of the disease to settlement of the claim without the need for litigation would be preferable. Proposals to introduce a scheme that will incorporate a fixed time scale and cost each stage of the claim so that only the most complex cases reach litigation are being considered.

[Mr Jack Straw (Blackburn) (Lab)]

8. What decisions he has reached on implementing the recommendation of the review by Lord Justice Jackson to abolish referral fees.

[The Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice (Mr Kenneth Clarke)]

As the House was informed on Friday 9 September in a written ministerial statement, the Government have decided to ban referral fees in personal injury cases as recommended by Lord Justice Jackson. The ban complements our wider reforms to no win, no fee arrangements, which are being taken forward in the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Bill.

[Mr Straw]

May I first express an unequivocal welcome for the announcement that the right hon. and learned Gentleman and the Under-Secretary of State for Justice, the hon. Member for Huntingdon (Mr Djanogly), made on Friday not only in respect of motor insurance but more widely about implementing this central plank of Lord Justice Jackson’s recommendations? Since the Justice Secretary used the word “ban”, which I think is the correct word, may I ask him whether he accepts that, given the level of malpractice we see across the legal and paralegal industry, the ban will have to be backed by the criminal law?

[Mr Clarke]

First, may I say that I am glad that my old friend the right hon. Member for Blackburn (Mr Straw) and I are in complete agreement on this subject? It is not the first time. He got in first, really, because I waited for the opinion of the Legal Services Board, which I have not followed but which I had to consider, and he rightly prompted a decision. People who agree with us include not only Lord Justice Jackson but my noble Friend Lord Young in his report, “Common Sense, Common Safety”, the Law Society, the Bar Council and the Association of British Insurers. The main beneficiaries will be claimants who are genuinely referred to the best expert to act for them and the justice system in general. We are now considering the way in which to put this into practice, but it is likely to be in the form recommended.

[Mr Robert Buckland (South Swindon) (Con)]

Developing on that point, does my right hon. and learned Friend agree that we should consider not only criminal law but close liaison with professional bodies to ensure that strict disciplinary action is brought against individuals or bodies who seek to circumvent any ban by rebranding fees as other costs or, worse still, start an emerging black market in referrals?

[Mr Clarke]

My hon. Friend makes extremely sensible and welcome suggestions. We have not decided exactly what form the ban will take yet, so I will not predetermine its eventual form. As the professional bodies strongly support us, we look forward to their co-operation because they are in the best position of all to ensure that different types of abuse with the same bad consequences are not used to evade the ban.

[Mr William Bain (Glasgow North East) (Lab)]

9. If he will make an assessment of the effectiveness of the Human Rights Act 1998 in respect of the balance between fundamental liberties and obligations to society.

[The Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice (Mr Kenneth Clarke)]

We have established an independent commission to investigate the creation of a United Kingdom Bill of Rights. The commission is due to report no later than the end of next year and the Government look forward to receiving and considering its findings.

[Mr Bain]

I am grateful for that answer. Does the Secretary of State support Liberty’s campaign, entitled “Common Values”, that seeks to separate the myths from the truths of the Human Rights Act, which has, for example, protected the victims of rape from being cross-examined in court by their assailants? Is this not the right way to tackle what the Prime Minister recently called the misrepresentation of human rights?

[Mr Clarke]

The best way to answer that is to say that I agree with the campaign, with the hon. Gentleman and with the Prime Minister. A perfectly serious debate has taken place about human rights legislation and I look forward to the commission’s advice. A lot of the difficulty comes when human rights are invoked by officials in excuse for bad decisions or in all kinds of cases that have nothing to do with any human rights legislation. We would have an altogether more sensible debate if people understood the real problems and difficulties—and that they are not all problems and difficulties.

[Andrew Bridgen (North West Leicestershire) (Con)]

For many, the perception of the application of human rights law is that the pendulum has swung too far away from responsibilities and duties. Does my right hon. and learned Friend agree that the commission will present a good opportunity to extend the understanding that with rights go responsibilities?

[Mr Clarke]

I think the commission is a very helpful idea for getting some objective and balanced advice on the whole subject. Otherwise, I agree with my hon. Friend that there is no reason why human rights should interfere with the proper balance between the responsibilities and duties that one properly owes to society. Everybody in this country is in favour of basic human rights and everybody wants to have an orderly society. I think the commission will help to steer the debate in a more sensible direction.

[Jeremy Corbyn (Islington North) (Lab)]

Will the Secretary of State take this opportunity to assure us that any review of the Human Rights Act will not include withdrawal from the European convention on human rights or the European Court of Human Rights? Will he recognise that both those institutions have done a great deal of good to improve the human rights of minorities and ordinary citizens across Europe and that the convention is worth staying in?

[Mr Clarke]

The convention was largely drafted by British lawyers led by Lord Kilmuir. Successive British Governments have adhered to the convention and have put great value on it and the Court. Since the fall of the Berlin wall and the end of the cold war, the convention has acquired new importance in making sure that we support advancing standards in eastern and central Europe. There is not the faintest chance of the present Government withdrawing from the convention on human rights, and we are waiting for the commission to give us—[Hon. Members: “Ooh!”] Have a look at our coalition agreement. Indeed, it is not just the coalition agreement—we have agreed to have a fresh look at this through the commission and we are not prejudging its findings.

[Dr Thérèse Coffey (Suffolk Coastal) (Con)]

10. What steps he is taking to eradicate gang culture within prisons and young offenders institutions.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Justice (Mr Crispin Blunt)]

Youth and adult custodial establishments have access to a range of accredited programmes that address offending behaviour, including gang-related issues. Programmes include engaging community and voluntary sector groups to help deliver solutions to gang-related issues, and the National Offender Management Service and the Youth Justice Board support this work. The Government are developing a cross-departmental programme of action to tackle gangs and gang violence. An inter-ministerial group will report to Parliament in October.

[Dr Coffey]

I thank the Minister for that answer, which goes part of the way to addressing these issues. However, when I visited the Warren Hill young offenders institution in my constituency last year after there had been a riot, one of the reasons cited for the riot was the growing emergence of gang culture and the fact that when people are placed in young offenders institutions, proximity takes priority over gang dispersal. I would like him to look at this policy again.

[Mr Blunt]

I am very grateful to my hon. Friend for the interest she takes in Warren Hill. I have followed up the discussions that we have had and I assure her in relation to gang violence that there is no absolute, rigid rule that proximity should take precedence. When placing young people and adults into custodial establishments, both the YJB and NOMS take proper account of all the factors required and there is emerging good practice around identifying gang affiliations.

[Keith Vaz (Leicester East) (Lab)]

As the Minister knows from the evidence that has been received about the recent riots in London and other cities, a number of people involved in gangs were part of those riots. Will he ask his Department to deal with organisations such as User Voice, which consists of ex-offenders who were in gangs, which are willing to work with the Ministry of Justice and assist it in its projects?

[Mr Blunt]

The right hon. Gentleman has made an excellent suggestion, which I am very happy to pass on to officials in the Department.

[Mr Philip Hollobone (Kettering) (Con)]

Many of the foreign national prisoners in our jails are members of foreign national EU gangs that commit organised crime in this country. What is the Justice Department doing to tackle this aspect of gang culture in our cities and in our prisons?

[Mr Blunt]

Of course, where evidence and intelligence of that kind are received, they will be acted on to make sure that those gangs cannot operate within the prison estate and that gang members are properly dispersed by the placement decisions taken by NOMS. We will also want, as we do with all foreign national prisoners, to try to make sure that those people go home to serve their sentences.

[Stephen Pound (Ealing North) (Lab)]

11. What assessment he has made of recent trends in the size of the prison population; and if he will make a statement.

[The Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice (Mr Kenneth Clarke)]

Since the summer of 2008, the prison population has been increasing much less quickly than had been the case for a number of years. The public disorder in early August has, however, resulted in a sharp rise in the number of prisoners in recent weeks, with the prison population reaching 86,842 on Friday 9 September. Despite this unprecedented rise, sufficient capacity has been maintained in the prison estate to accommodate the prison population effectively.

[Stephen Pound]

Like any decent, reasonable human being, I am grateful for that answer from the Secretary of State. Could I ask him to give credit to the prison officers who have participated in this expansion, and the people working within the prison estate? It cannot have been easy for them. An additional 500 operational usable places have appeared in the last few weeks. Where from?

[Mr Clarke]

First, I agree strongly with the praise that the hon. Gentleman gives to the prison officers. The system did respond—the criminal justice system responded very well to the totally unexpected pressure of the riots. Partly it proved that our criminal justice system does work well in such circumstances. Secondly, it was entirely because of the public-spiritedness and good will of prison officers, probation officers, policemen and court staff, all of whom responded to the events with horror, as did every decent member of society, and decided to put the public interest first.

We always carry a cushion in the prison estate, because we do not know what number of prisoners will come. I know the consequences, which some of my predecessors have encountered, of running out of places in the prisons, and for that reason, I am glad to say, we were able to cope—there is still sufficient capacity—and it is very important that we continue to do so.

[Tom Brake (Carshalton and Wallington) (LD)]

Has the Secretary of State had time to consider the Make Justice Work report, “Community or Custody?” which sets out clearly how much more effective properly managed community sentences are than short-term prison sentences, and the potential for greater use of community sentences to push down the prison population?

[Mr Clarke]

We have to have all forms of punishment available, because no two cases are the same. What is likely to be most effective with one offender may not be with another. We do have to punish, and then we have to see what we can do to rehabilitate and prevent people from reoffending. But I quite agree: for some prisoners, the best effect from the public point of view—returning them to an honest life—can be achieved by non-custodial sentences, and the Government hope to make them more credible to magistrates and to strengthen them, so they can be used effectively in suitable cases.

[Sadiq Khan (Tooting) (Lab)]

The Secretary of State has, on a number of occasions, said and written that he intends to reduce the prison population significantly over this Parliament. As he has confirmed, 16 months into the Parliament, the prison population is at a record high. It was also at a very high level before the riots. As he is aware, the prison estate is struggling to cope. Prison officers and probation officers are increasingly stretched, and prisoners are spending even longer times idling in their cells rather than engaged in productive activities such as work. In the light of that, is he still committed to reducing the prison population significantly, and if so, how will he do it in a way that puts public protection first?

[Mr Clarke]

I do not think I have ever said that. I have made it quite clear that the prison population responds to demand. I did not anticipate the riots, but we have to have a prison population that can cope with the judgment of judges and magistrates who send us a number of people who have to be dealt with and punished in that way. I have said that I expect to have a more stable system, but I cannot understand why everything possible was done under the last Government to push up the total number of prisoners but to let them all out earlier, so that the system looked tough but actually turned into something of a shambles. I am also hoping that prison can be made somewhat more effective, and that it might be better at putting people to work, getting them off drugs, tackling their mental health problems and getting fewer of them to go on to commit more crimes—

[Mr Speaker]

Order. I am grateful, but we must move on.

[Mr Edward Leigh (Gainsborough) (Con)]

12. What steps he is taking to improve the functioning of the Special Immigration Appeals Commission.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Justice (Mr Jonathan Djanogly)]

The operation of the Special Immigration Appeals Commission is kept under regular review. There are no present plans to change current arrangements.

[Mr Leigh]

Too often immigration cases are deliberately spun out using never-ending reviews and ever-upwards appeals. What steps will the Minister take to protect the much-needed immigration reforms proposed by the Government from such delaying tactics?

[Mr Djanogly]

Parliament has on previous occasions decided against the ousting of the High Court’s judicial review jurisdiction. The Supreme Court recently indicated that it considered it would not be appropriate for the Government to take that route. However, improvements are being made. The legal aid reforms currently before Parliament seek to remove legal aid from repeat applications for judicial review in immigration and asylum cases.

[Ben Gummer (Ipswich) (Con)]

13. What recent progress he has made in implementing his policy of payment by results to reduce the rate of reoffending.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Justice (Mr Crispin Blunt)]

Payment by results is gathering pace. We are piloting a number of different approaches to see what works best. Two prison pilots have been put in place at Her Majesty’s prisons Peterborough and Doncaster.

Pilots also will begin in public sector prisons next year. Six justice reinvestment pilots have been put in place through memorandums of understanding with either local authority chief executives or local police chiefs in Manchester and London.

In 2012 two community pilots will commence to rehabilitate offenders while serving sentences in the community, in addition to one or more provider-led innovation pilots. We are also working with the Department for Work and Pensions through the Work programme and with the Department of Health on drug and alcohol recovery to look more widely at payment by results mechanisms which fully—

[Mr Speaker]

Order. I advise the Minister, for next month the answers should be a bit shorter. They are just a bit too long.

[Ben Gummer]

I thank the Minister for that careful reply. He will be aware of the Justice Committee’s recommendation that contracts should follow the offender through the criminal justice system, rather than attach themselves to the various institutions through which he or she might pass. What progress has the Department made in considering those proposals?

[Mr Blunt]

My hon. Friend will have realised, given the number of pilots we are conducting—I am sorry, Mr Speaker, that the list was too long for me to deliver satisfactorily—that we are testing the different elements of the system to identify the best and most effective way to deliver payment by results. I hope that, in the end, we can deliver the offender-centric process on which my hon. Friend relies, once we have identified which part of the system makes offenders best respond to effective rehabilitation measures.

[Fiona Mactaggart (Slough) (Lab)]

Do any of those projects help to test whether providing housing for people leaving prison helps them to be less likely to reoffend?

[Mr Blunt]

Housing—having a home to go to—is plainly a key crime desistance factor, but an awful lot of other key factors, such as work and drug addiction, are well-documented. We want to get out of the business of identifying exactly what inputs people must deliver to offenders, but make all sorts of institutions responsible for focusing on the outputs and let them take the decisions about which are the appropriate desistance factors to address for the offenders whom they are treating.

[Gemma Doyle (West Dunbartonshire) (Lab/Co-op)]

14. When he plans to bring forward proposals on compensation for victims of overseas terrorism.

[The Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice (Mr Kenneth Clarke)]

Compensation for victims of terrorism overseas is being considered alongside the Government’s review of victims’ services and compensation in this country, at the conclusion of which we will publish a consultation document. We plan to make an announcement on the victims of terrorism overseas at the same time as we launch the consultation.

[Gemma Doyle]

I thank the Minister, but the families of the victims of overseas terrorism and the survivors were promised on 28 June that an announcement would be made “in the coming weeks”. Some two and a half months have now passed with no announcement. How much longer should the victims and their families expect to wait?

[Mr Clarke]

I have to confess that the hon. Lady has a valid point on the timing, but the fact is that it makes sense to consider the victim support that we give, the present criminal injuries compensation scheme and the support that the Foreign Office gives overseas alongside the proposed terrorism compensation scheme. This has always been a great difficulty over the years. We can all recall that, probably over the past 20 years, people’s aspirations to help victims here and abroad have run rather ahead of the arrangements made to finance them. I assure the hon. Lady that we are having to look at this again. I realise that we are slipping behind the timetable that we announced, but we will proceed as quickly as we can.

[Bob Blackman (Harrow East) (Con)]

15. What recent assessment he has made of the operation of the courts during the public disorder of August 2011.

[The Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice (Mr Kenneth Clarke)]

The courts responded swiftly, fairly and properly during the recent public disorder and continue to process cases as soon as they are brought by the prosecution. Although it is too early to make a final assessment of the courts response to the disorder, my Department is reviewing all aspects of the response to find out whether opportunities for continued improvement in public service can be identified.

[Bob Blackman]

I thank my right hon. and learned Friend for that answer. One of the lessons of the riots was that those who were responsible were arrested, held on remand and processed through the courts and, if found guilty, began their sentences almost immediately, thus protecting the public and acting as a significant deterrent to others. Surely, that should be the norm, rather than the exception.

[Mr Clarke]

First, I have already praised the staff of all the services involved for the service that they delivered, and I think that we have all noticed that it was possible to handle certainly the straightforward cases much more quickly than we have become too used to regarding as the norm elsewhere. Obviously, we realise that we cannot expect such extraordinary efforts to be made all the time and in all normal circumstances, but efficiency can be improved. My right hon. Friend the Minister for Policing and Criminal Justice is taking a particular interest in improving the efficiency of the system and learning the best lessons that we can from our welcome experience of the riots.

[Kerry McCarthy (Bristol East) (Lab)]

It seems that in the immediate aftermath of the riots, in many cases, courts completely dispensed with asking for pre-sentence reports. One of the consequences was that parents of young children received custodial sentences, and no regard at all was paid to what would happen to those children. Does the Secretary of State agree that when parents are sentenced to custody, there ought to be automatic checks on what happens to the children?

[Mr Clarke]

My colleagues and I have just been checking with each other, and we all think—well, we all know—that pre-sentence reports were provided. One cannot proceed to swift justice without getting the necessary information about the circumstances of the client and their family. I am sure that pre-sentence reports were, in fact, required by courts, and they can certainly be obtained at adequate length in the time available if one is moving briskly. Of course, all the sentences are open to appeal, and the situation and the consequences can all be looked at in the normal way that always follows a sentence involving someone with family responsibilities.

[Sajid Javid (Bromsgrove) (Con)]

16. What plans he has to improve the efficiency of the criminal justice system.

[The Minister for Policing and Criminal Justice (Nick Herbert)]

We are taking forward a programme of work to tackle inefficiency, including by streamlining the administration of cases, extending digital working, and making greater use of video links. We will in due course bring to the House further proposals that will build on the effective response of the criminal justice system to recent public disorder.

[Sajid Javid]

Does the Minister agree with me that we can make better use of our magistrates courts?

[Nick Herbert]

Yes, I do, and we are looking to do precisely that, so my hon. Friend is right. It is noticeable, for instance, that more than half of defendants in either-way cases sentenced in the Crown court receive a sentence that could have been imposed by magistrates. The Government understand that the Sentencing Council is developing draft allocation guidelines to support magistrates in determining where cases should be heard, and we will consult on the draft guidelines in the autumn.

[Kevin Brennan (Cardiff West) (Lab)]

In considering the efficiency of the criminal justice system, does the Minister know whether there has been any discussion in Cabinet about what the appropriate punishment is for drug-related offences involving class A substances, such as cocaine?

[Nick Herbert]

No.

[Mr Peter Bone (Wellingborough) (Con)]

17. How many prisoners are serving sentences for (a) human trafficking and (b) drug-related offences; and what the average length of sentence is in each case.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Justice (Mr Crispin Blunt)]

Between 2006 and 2010, 109 people were sentenced for human trafficking offences, with an average determinate custodial sentence length of 50 months, and 254,980 people were sentenced for drug-related offences, with an average determinate custodial sentence length of 32 months. The average determinate custodial sentence length for trafficking for sexual exploitation was 50 months; in the case of trafficking for forced labour, it was 51 months, and in the case of drug trafficking, it was 73.5 months.

[Mr Bone]

I think that the House will agree that there is a bit of difference between the figures for human trafficking and for drug-related offences, yet the two crimes—human trafficking and drug offences—are very difficult for the victims. We should surely rebalance the criminal justice system to ensure that more traffickers are caught. I know that the Government have produced their human trafficking strategy, but there is a terrible imbalance at the moment.

[Mr Blunt]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend, and I thank him for his energetic chairmanship of the all-party group on human trafficking, and for continuing to bring the issues to my attention. Trafficking drugs and people are both extremely serious offences, and when people are caught—obviously, we want to make sure that they are, on every conceivable occasion—they should serve an appropriately serious tariff.

[Mr Speaker]

I am grateful to the Minister both for his succinctness and his control of his breathing, which was impressive.

[Bridget Phillipson (Houghton and Sunderland South) (Lab)]

T1. If he will make a statement on his departmental responsibilities.

[The Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice (Mr Kenneth Clarke)]

I begin by making a topical statement, Mr Speaker, controlling my breathing carefully as I do. Last week, as well as announcing plans to allow cameras into courts, I outlined plans to open up the justice system by publishing unprecedented local data. We will publish data on court performance, sentencing and reoffending, and provide information on what happens next following a crime, alongside street-level crime data. That will allow people to see how the criminal justice system operates in their area. We will also encourage consistent publication of the names of offenders unlawfully at large; that will help in apprehending them and returning them to custody. Those measures will place the crime and justice sector at the forefront of the Government’s policy on transparency.

[Bridget Phillipson]

We have seen real success across Sunderland in reducing reoffending year on year. Of course, more needs to be done to tackle that, but it has been put at risk by cuts to the local probation trust. Does the Lord Chancellor think that reoffending rates will be higher or lower by the end of this Parliament?

[Mr Clarke]

Criminal statistics are more reliable than they used to be, but I still do not have total confidence in them, and I would certainly never make forecasts with them because crime trends are very difficult to predict. However, I am glad that success has been achieved in Sunderland on reoffending, which we propose to make the prime focus of our policy: punish offenders effectively and, at the same time, try to stop them offending again.

[Sajid Javid (Bromsgrove) (Con)]

T2. In Worcestershire, we have had persistent problems with Travellers who refuse to respect the law. My fellow MPs in the county have recently written to the Justice Secretary with some suggestions about that, and I know that he is considering them. Does he agree that we should help Travellers to preserve their way of life—their travelling way of life—by moving them on?

[Mr Clarke]

This is a difficult subject, and it certainly needs to be looked at all the time. I agree: my experience in my part of the world is that many Travellers do not travel as frequently as they are supposed to, and they are fond of occupying vacant land and building houses on it, while still describing themselves as Travellers. The subject is more complex than that, and if we can make any improvements to the law that protect the legitimate interests of society as a whole, we will certainly do so.

[Helen Goodman (Bishop Auckland) (Lab)]

Last week, the Under-Secretary of State for Justice, the hon. Member for Huntingdon (Mr Djanogly), defended the Government’s narrow definition of domestic violence in the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Bill with these words:

“We are concerned that to include admission to a refuge in the criteria would be to rely on self-reporting…We are not persuaded that medical professionals would be best placed to assess whether domestic violence has occurred. Although they may witness injuries…nor would the fact of a police investigation without more evidence provide sufficient evidence”.––[Official Report, Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Public Bill Committee, 6 September 2011; c. 359-60.]

Women in this country will be appalled by those remarks. Would the Under-Secretary like to take them back, and also change his definition in the Bill?

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Justice (Mr Jonathan Djanogly)]

It is not a question of taking them back; it is a question of making them in a very transparent way in our consultation. Having looked at the consultation, we came back and reassessed the definition of domestic violence, broadened what is included, and we are prepared to debate it in Committee. That is the process that is under way, and the Government stand by that.

[Elizabeth Truss (South West Norfolk) (Con)]

T4. I fully support the plans to introduce television cameras in courts to improve transparency. What plans are there to improve transparency in the Prison Service so that we can see exactly what work and activity have been undertaken in each prison so that justice can be seen to be done?

[Mr Kenneth Clarke]

We intend to apply exactly the same policy in all sensible ways to the prison system generally as far as is practicable. We publish more figures all the time about reoffending rates and we will certainly be open about our success in extending the policy of providing more worthwhile working opportunities for prisoners, because getting them back into the habit of work is one way of getting them to live as responsible citizens in a normal society.

[Barbara Keeley (Worsley and Eccles South) (Lab)]

T3. Using a restricted definition of domestic violence, as discussed a moment ago, will penalise victims of domestic violence, many of whom suffer for long periods before they begin to report incidents to the police. Will the Minister, given that he appears to be in some difficulty over this, consider meeting organisations working on domestic violence to work out how to make that definition work?

[Mr Djanogly]

I have met organisations and we have consulted on the issue. I am always prepared to meet organisations. I have to tell the hon. Lady that the key issue is having tests that are objective, and that is what we are trying to achieve.

[Laura Sandys (South Thanet) (Con)]

T6. Does the Minister agree that it is a scandal that so many drugs are swilling around prisons? It is crucial that we ensure that those who arrive in prison clean do not leave as addicts.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Justice (Mr Crispin Blunt)]

I completely agree with my hon. Friend. Some 55% of those entering prison have been reported to have a serious drug problem, and 64% in a recent survey had used drugs in the previous month, which gives a sense of the scale of the problem. My hon. Friend is absolutely right: we must use all means possible, in a multi-faceted way, to address the problem, and provide safe places in prison, at the very least, for those attempting to recover from drug addiction, which is why we are beginning to develop drug recovery wings.

[Julie Hilling (Bolton West) (Lab)]

T5. There are 66 people in Bolton and more than 10,000 across the UK who are still driving with more than 12 points on their driving licence. Many are repeat offenders of the offences of speeding and driving without insurance and have more than 20 points. Is there a problem with the legislation or are judges being too lenient? Will the Secretary of State investigate?

[Mr Kenneth Clarke]

I think the answer is that we will investigate. I am grateful to the hon. Lady for the figures. They sound astonishing, so I look forward to her providing me with sufficient details for myself and my ministerial team to find out what lies behind them.

[Stephen Barclay (North East Cambridgeshire) (Con)]

T9. The building that formerly housed Wisbech magistrates court is owned by the Ministry of Justice and is in a prime site next to the historic port in Wisbech and a couple of yards from a conference centre. Will my hon. Friend the Minister meet me to discuss how we best use the site for regeneration so that it does not get locked in the stalemate that there has been with the police service locally?

[Mr Djanogly]

I will meet my hon. Friend. The court closed in April this year and Her Majesty’s Courts and Tribunals Service is progressing the disposal of the courthouse. As part of that process it is due to meet officials from both Cambridgeshire district council and Fenland district council later this month.

[Angela Smith (Penistone and Stocksbridge) (Lab)]

T7. In the aftermath of the riots that so rocked the country last month, what lessons does the Justice Secretary think can be learned about the need to respond swiftly to public outrage at the actions of a lawless minority, balanced with the need to deliver justice?

[Mr Kenneth Clarke]

We obviously have to study the events closely, looking for any lessons we can learn from recent experience. More and more facts will come to light, upon which we can base firm conclusions. The question that the hon. Lady raises about the rapidity of the response in the early days to the first threats to public order and to citizens is not primarily for my Department, but I know that the Home Office is taking it extremely seriously. It is easy with hindsight to criticise operational decisions. What is important is looking to see how we can improve the response in the future.

[Miss Anne McIntosh (Thirsk and Malton) (Con)]

Is it not bizarre that many Travellers originate in Ireland? The Irish Government changed their law, so now the Travellers have moved to England. In his review, will the Justice Secretary learn from how the Human Rights Act in Ireland does not prevent Travellers from being moved on?

[Mr Clarke]

I agree that there is a problem. Let us be clear. Travellers, like anybody else, are entitled to the protection of the law and are also subject to the law. We have to deal with Travellers on the basis of how they behave, not start going against them as a class. But we have to look at how the operation of the law at present is enabling people to lead a somewhat odd way of life which is totally at variance with that which is led by the rest of the population, and to seek to disregard laws to which everybody else is subject. I am not sure that the Human Rights Act and human rights legislation generally is terribly relevant, but if it gets drawn in, we will look and see what it can do to help with the case.

[Bill Esterson (Sefton Central) (Lab)]

T8. The Government cancelled the building of the Maghull prison after work had already started. Will the Lord Chancellor take this opportunity to tell my constituents what plans he has for the site, to allay their concerns about the Maghull prison site and nearby greenfield projects, which developers are eyeing up?

[Mr Blunt]

I am grateful for that detailed question from the hon. Gentleman. I will write to him with a full answer.

[Mrs Helen Grant (Maidstone and The Weald) (Con)]

Does the Minister agree that prison is not the right place for women who pose no risk to the public, and that robust community sentences would be a much better option?

[Mr Kenneth Clarke]

It depends on what they have done for which they have to be punished. I do not think that prison is the right place for people who pose no risk to the public, but if they have done something heinous, they have to be punished in a way that the public regard as proportionate to the crime. We are paying considerable attention to the problem of women in prisons. There are too many. The combination of problems is sometimes quite specific, and in many cases there are multiple problems. Anything that can sensibly be done to improve the way we handle women prisoners, with proper regard to punishment and the protection of the public, we will do.

[Gregg McClymont (Cumbernauld, Kilsyth and Kirkintilloch East) (Lab)]

T10. Further to the question raised by the hon. Member for Brighton, Pavilion (Caroline Lucas), without legal aid or Government financial backing for the fee arrangements, how can we ensure that overseas victims of alleged human rights abuses by UK multinational companies get justice?

[Mr Clarke]

They have the jurisdiction. Britain entertains these personal injuries cases, these actions in tort, against multinational companies that have an adequate presence here in a perfectly open way, but it is still necessary for the costs of a case to be proportionate to the claim. We do not want people coming here and bringing their cases in British courts because the costs available to the lawyers greatly exceed those which could be attained by bringing similar cases in other jurisdictions.

[George Eustice (Camborne and Redruth) (Con)]

Does the Secretary of State agree that we need to do more to curb the compensation culture in this country and that one way of doing so would be to ensure that plaintiffs incur some form of financial risk in bringing their case so that they focus their minds on the merits of their case?

[Mr Clarke]

I am glad to say that I agree with my hon. Friend’s every word. There is a compensation culture. We are taking practical steps to get it back to common sense.

[Meg Munn (Sheffield, Heeley) (Lab/Co-op)]

The Secretary of State has stated his commitment to rehabilitation as a priority. Probation officers are key to this. They often need highly developed skills, particularly when working with violent offenders and sex offenders. Is he committed not only to maintaining levels of funding for probation officers, but increasing it in order to continue the downward trend in crime that continued under a Labour Government?

[Mr Blunt]

As the hon. Lady very well knows, we are having to manage a 23% reduction in our budget over the next four years in order to make the Ministry of Justice’s contribution to rescuing the nation’s finances. Sadly, probation services, like other elements, are not exempt from this. However, for the reasons she has given, they have been relatively protected under the spending review. We will of course continue to look for all available efficiency savings wherever we can, but the output of probation is very important.

[Alun Cairns (Vale of Glamorgan) (Con)]

An appeal to the special educational needs and disability tribunal listed today will not be heard until late February 2012. Does the Minister agree that that is wholly unacceptable and that a much quicker process is needed in order to resolve some of the cases relating to special needs?

[Mr Djanogly]

If my hon. Friend would like to write to me, I will look into that.

[Ian Paisley (North Antrim) (DUP)]

Can the Secretary of State inform the House what efforts he is making to ensure that sentencing policy and practice is consistent across all parts of the United Kingdom for rioters, and that rioters in Rasharkin and Belfast who try to kill police officers and damage property will face the same swift, certain and good judgment faced by rioters in England?

[Mr Kenneth Clarke]

I realise that our fellow citizens in Ulster have unfortunately had just as much experience of rioting as some of our British cities have. Among the many things that we must look at when we get the full facts about the very good response of our courts and criminal justice system to the recent English riots is how it compares with the experience in Northern Ireland. I agree with the hon. Gentleman that there should be some general consistency of approach, with swift and firm justice, particularly when rioting is taking place, because it stops people imitating it and lessens the likelihood that the disorder will spread.

[Tom Brake (Carshalton and Wallington) (LD)]

On the subject of payment by results, what guarantee can Ministers give that small providers will win some contracts and that small and large providers will have to make information about their performance publicly available?

[Mr Blunt]

Of course, anyone who is going to deliver payment by results would be crazy not to engage the voluntary and charitable sector as part of their delivery mechanism. Some of those charities will not have the resources to be able to underwrite payment-by-results schemes, but the prime provider would be mad not to engage those services.

[John McDonnell (Hayes and Harlington) (Lab)]

The Government are currently consulting on the criminalisation of squatting. Has the Secretary of State seen the report “The Hidden Truth about Homelessness”, produced by the housing charity Crisis, which reveals that 39% of vulnerable homeless people have at some stage resorted to squatting to find a roof over their heads, and has he made an assessment of how the proposals he is putting forward will affect homeless people?

[Mr Blunt]

The consultation will end on 5 October, and I will of course be looking at all the reports and responses to it, including the one from Crisis.

[Philip Davies (Shipley) (Con)]

The Secretary of State was good enough to accept on Second Reading of the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Bill that people who served indeterminate sentences for public protection had a very low reoffending rate, despite the fact that 29% of them have more than 15 convictions. Given that people with indeterminate sentences are in prison for manslaughter, other homicide, rape, robbery, arson and other violent crimes, why does he want to let them out?

[Mr Kenneth Clarke]

I made some cautious remarks a little earlier about criminal justice statistics. There is a very small number of people on indeterminate sentences who have ever been released, and I am very glad that there has been a low level of reoffending.

We are committed to ending that system. We have 3,500 people who have finished their normal sentence—that is, the tariff—and are unable to satisfy the Parole Board that they can be released, but we are looking at all those cases to find the best possible way of ensuring that the bulk of them do not reoffend. Some of them always will, however, and we cannot avoid that.

[Mr David Hanson (Delyn) (Lab)]

On the question of compensation for overseas terrorism, will the Secretary of State confirm that any scheme eventually brought in will apply from 18 January 2010, as originally proposed by the previous Labour Government?

[Mr Clarke]

I do not want to trail parts of the announcement that we will make when we are able to start the consultation, but I do remember very clearly that that was the commitment upon which everybody has been firmly proceeding.

[Several hon. Members]

rose—

[Mr Speaker]

Order. I do apologise to colleagues whom I have not been able to accommodate. I could listen to the Secretary of State all day—and indeed all night for that matter. An additional session should be put on precisely perhaps for that purpose, but today I am afraid that we must move on.

Swansea Coastguard Station

Tuesday 13th September 2011 Commons Chamber

Martin Caton (Gower) (Lab)

- Hansard - - Excerpts

I present a petition on behalf of the “Save Swansea Coastguard” campaign, which in a few weeks has collected more than 100,000 signatures in opposition to the closure of the coastguard station at Mumbles, Swansea.

The petition states:

The Petition of people concerned about maritime safety in the Bristol Channel,

Declares that the recommendation of the UK Government to close the Swansea Maritime Rescue Coordination Centre at Tutts Head, Mumbles, would endanger the lives and wellbeing of people on the water and around the coast of the Bristol Channel.

The Petitioners therefore request that the House of Commons press the UK Government to retain the Swansea Maritime Rescue Centre as a 24-hour staffed coastguard station.

And the Petitioners remain, etc.

[P000957]

Lauderdale Avenue Tram Crossing (Blackpool)

Tuesday 13th September 2011 Commons Chamber

Paul Maynard (Blackpool North and Cleveleys) (Con)

- Hansard - - Excerpts

I should like to present a petition from the people of Blackpool and Cleveleys.

The petition declares:

The Petition of the people of Blackpool and Cleveleys,

Declares that the Petitioners are opposed to the permanent closure of the Lauderdale Avenue/Blandford Avenue crossing to traffic and pedestrians.

The Petitioners therefore request that the House of Commons urges the Government to encourage Blackpool Council to ensure that the Lauderdale Avenue/Blandford Avenue crossing remains open.

And the Petitioners remain, etc.

[P000959]

Port of Falmouth Masterplan

Tuesday 13th September 2011 Commons Chamber

Sarah Newton (Truro and Falmouth) (Con)

- Hansard - - Excerpts

This petition states:

The Petition of the residents of Falmouth,

Declares that the Petitioners believe that the dredging of Falmouth Harbour should be permitted to go ahead so as to enable the implementation of the Port of Falmouth Masterplan which is essential to the future prosperity of Falmouth.

The Petitioners therefore request that the House of Commons urges the Government to ensure that the Marine Management Organisation strikes the appropriate balance between environmental protection and social and economic development, with particular regard to the Port of Falmouth Masterplan including the dredging of Falmouth Harbour.

And the Petitioners remain, etc.

[P000958]

Points of Order

Tuesday 13th September 2011 Commons Chamber

15:35

[Chris Bryant (Rhondda) (Lab)]

On a point of order, Mr Speaker. I am not sure whether I concur with your last remarks, but I am sure that since noon on Monday you have been considering your own boundary recommendations, as indeed have many other English Members of Parliament. Unfortunately, at the moment it is impossible to go to the Vote Office and get copies of the boundary recommendations for the whole United Kingdom. In fact, in the House of Lords they are not available at all. Can I suggest to you that it might be a good idea if the draft recommendations were available in the Vote Office, so that the whole of this House might consider them, come to a firm view—and, I hope, reject them?

[Mr Speaker]

The hon. Gentleman asks whether he can suggest that. He can, he has done. I do listen, I have listened on this occasion, and he is proving himself, as ever, the candid friend. I will make inquiries into the matter and try to ensure that satisfaction is provided. That would be a very happy state of affairs.

[Jack Dromey (Birmingham, Erdington) (Lab)]

On a point of order, Mr Speaker. The Government have now made a number of misleading statements about their increasingly chaotic planning reforms. Last week the Minister of State, Department for Communities and Local Government, the right hon. Member for Tunbridge Wells (Greg Clark) told Parliament that the previous Government’s successful “brownfield first” policy, whereby previously developed land was to be prioritised before building on greenfield land was considered, had been retained. The Government’s own impact assessment in the national planning policy framework, however, makes it clear that the brownfield first presumption has been abolished. In addition, the Minister has been describing the policy as a “national ban”, when he knows that it is nothing of the kind. Has the right hon. Gentleman indicated his intention to come before the House to put right his misleading statements, and to explain to the House why priority is not once again being given to using brownfield land, of which there is enough to build 1.2 million homes on?

[Mr Speaker]

I am sorry to disappoint the hon. Gentleman, but the Minister in question has given no such indication. That said, I am grateful to the hon. Member for Birmingham, Erdington (Jack Dromey) for notice of his point of order. I am always concerned that the House should be given accurate information. I hope that he and the House will understand that it is not really for the Speaker to compare the accuracy of remarks inside the House with that of those made outside, let alone to offer an assessment of the relative merits or accuracy of comments that might appear on websites. I am sure that the hon. Gentleman, who is nothing if not the proverbial woodpecker in these matters, will seek advice from the Table Office on the ways in which he can pursue his concerns.

If there are no further points of order, we come to the ten-minute rule Bill, for which the right hon. Member for Blackburn (Mr Straw) has been patiently waiting.

Motor Insurance Regulation

Tuesday 13th September 2011 Commons Chamber

Motion for leave to bring in a Bill (Standing Order No. 23)

15:39

[Mr Jack Straw (Blackburn) (Lab)]

I beg to move,

That leave be given to bring in a Bill to reform the regulation and operation of the market in motor insurance; and specifically, to ban the payment of referral fees; to establish new standards relating to the evidence required and damages payable for whiplash; to reform the Pre-Action Protocol for Personal Injury Claims in Road Traffic Accidents; to set requirements in respect of risk pricing for personal injury claims; and for connected purposes.

The last time I had a ten-minute rule Bill was as a young and callow Back Bencher—

[Sadiq Khan (Tooting) (Lab)]

You still are, Jack.

[Mr Straw]

Thank you.

That was in April 1980, with my Police Authorities (Powers) Bill. Successive Home Secretaries were unpersuaded by the merits of my proposals until a new Home Secretary took over 17 years later, in May 1997, and progressively implemented most of the Bill.

The contrast between the fate of that first Bill and the fate of the Bill before the House today could not be more stark. Even before I had had this opportunity to move it, the Government announced last Friday that they were accepting one of the fundamental propositions of the Bill—the abolition of referral fees. The problems in the insurance market are, let me say, not of this Government’s making. As I have already expressed during Question Time, I am very grateful to the Justice Secretary and his Ministers for recognising the need for change, and to the backers of this Bill from across the House in giving momentum to the campaign that I have been mounting. Although there has been that welcome announcement by the Government, which will implement a key recommendation of the Jackson report, there are other necessary reforms that my Bill covers and which I hope the Government will also adopt.

First, let me spell out the concerns that exist in all parties about the wholly unacceptable state of the motor insurance market. In the past year alone there has been a 40% increase in the average premiums paid by Britain’s motorists to insure their cars. Young drivers face premiums of £2,500 or more, even if they can find underwriters to cover their risk. Older drivers with impeccable records who live in certain urban areas have been especially hard hit.

The principal factor behind these rocketing premiums has been an extraordinary increase in the number and value of claims for personal injuries—but this increase in personal injury claims has in no sense been caused by any commensurate increase in the number of accidents leading to such injuries. Indeed, the number of accidents has been going down, not up. Britain’s roads, long among the safest in the world, have been getting safer still, with fewer accidents and, where accidents do occur, fewer serious injuries. Those improvements have been paralleled by a dramatic drop in the number of thefts of and from vehicles.

Instead, the increase in claims has been artificially generated by a new industry, unheard of 20 years ago—a “claims industry”—with, I am afraid, the complicity of the insurance companies themselves. Claims management companies, personal injury lawyers, credit hire companies and repair and recovery firms have built a lucrative and self-serving merry-go-round in which the personal information of anyone involved in any collision with another vehicle, no matter how trivial its effects, is traded like a commodity, typically for £600 to £800 a shot, with the aim of pursuing a claim—any claim—provided that it brings rich rewards to all those involved in this industry.

Some police and NHS employees have been unlawfully engaged in this trade. Some police authorities have officially been charging recovery firms to pass on information about drivers and vehicles involved in accidents; one such made over £1.3 million in two years. I can also tell the House that some NHS acute trusts have been making money from this so-called industry, charging ambulance-chasing lawyers to advertise their services to patients waiting in accident and emergency departments. I have here data which show that since 2006, in aggregate, 70 NHS acute trusts have received £2 million in this way. As the Information Commissioner, Mr Christopher Graham, told the Justice Committee this morning, data protection and telecommunication laws are routinely broken by this claims industry as firms cold call, harass and browbeat individuals whose details they have purchased into pursuing claims.

Often such claims are for whiplash, which is not so much an injury, more a profitable invention of the human imagination—undiagnosable except by third-rate doctors in the pay of the claims management companies or personal injury lawyers. Whiplash now accounts for 80% of all personal injury claims, adding about £66 to every premium. Latest figures suggest that 1,200 claims for whiplash are now made in the United Kingdom each day. The bait of £3,500 in compensation for no discernible injury and sometimes for no accident at all, which features so prominently in the text messages, telephone calls and high-pressure advertising, characterises this extensive and grubby industry.

Driving out the parasitic practitioners and cleaning up the motor insurance system will be complex and will take time. I suggest to the House that my Bill would make an important start. Clause 1 would make it unlawful to solicit, offer or pay a referral fee relating to a personal injury road traffic claim, although I would like to see that extended across the piece. Breach would be a criminal offence. That, in my view, is the only way to stamp out this unethical and unwholesome practice. I was pleased to hear earlier from the Lord Chancellor that he accepts that view.

Clause 2 deals with whiplash. Some jurisdictions abroad restrict the payment of damages for whiplash to claims where there is clear objective evidence that real injury has been suffered. Clause 2 provides for the need for such objective evidence. No one who has genuinely suffered an injury would be in any way disadvantaged by the provisions in the Bill.

In my Blackburn constituency, and in many other constituencies, there are law firms with banners outside their offices promising £650 in cash in return for any new personal injury claim. They can make those promises and pay out because the flat fee that insurers pay the lawyers for claims below £10,000 has been set too high. Such claims are now processed through an electronic portal, which costs the law firm no more than £100 in staff time to operate. The flat fee is £1,200, so even if a firm pays a £650 introduction fee it can make exorbitant profits. Clause 3 would cut the fee in half.

I will now deal with the fourth provision in the Bill. Honest law-abiding drivers in my constituency, and in many similar urban areas, especially in the north and the midlands, have faced even higher increases in premiums than most drivers, despite their impeccable driving records and inherent low risk of a future claim. That is because of postcode discrimination by insurers. Such practices do not harm those involved in the rackets, but they do harm entirely innocent people. Clause 4 would prohibit insurers from isolating the level of risk arising from personal injury claims in an area smaller than Wales, or a standard English region.

There are other measures that need to be taken alongside this Bill. There is already provision on the statute book for tougher custodial sentences for selling and trading in data contrary to section 55 of the Data Protection Act 1998. Those provisions, in the Criminal Justice and Immigration Act 2008, should be brought into force without delay. The prosecuting authorities should consider whether criminal proceedings under the Bribery Act 2010 should be instituted against some of the worst abuses, as the Bar Council has suggested. All the regulators—not just the Information Commissioner who, commendably, is seeking to do so—must toughen up their approach.

The changes in my Bill would make a significant difference for Britain’s hard-pressed motorists. The insurance companies would have to start stabilising their premiums and, as their costs came down, would have to reduce their premiums. I commend the Bill to the House.

Question put and agreed to.

Ordered,

That Mr Jack Straw, Sir Alan Beith, Sir Peter Bottomley, Steve McCabe, Graham Jones, Penny Mordaunt and Mr David Ward present the Bill.

Mr Jack Straw accordingly presented the Bill.

Bill read the First time; to be read a Second time on Friday 20 January 2012, and to be printed (Bill 229).

Opposition Day

Tuesday 13th September 2011 Commons Chamber

[20th Allotted Day]

Opportunities for the Next Generation

Tuesday 13th September 2011 Commons Chamber

15:49

[Mr John Denham (Southampton, Itchen) (Lab)]

I beg to move,

That this House believes that young people face a more uncertain future which may not offer the increased opportunities and prosperity enjoyed by their parents and their grandparents; notes that, following the Government’s decision to cut public spending too far and too fast, it has targeted young people with cuts, resulting in nearly one million young people not in education, employment or training; further notes with concern that there were no university places for around 100,000 applicants this year, that tuition fees are trebling, university places will be cut next year and many universities will lose popular courses; highlights that the proportion of apprenticeship places for 16 to 18 year olds has decreased by 11 per cent., new apprenticeships are providing mainly short-term training for older workers, the Future Jobs Fund has been scrapped, the apprenticeship guarantee abandoned, Education Maintenance Allowance ended, homelessness has risen and homebuilding is at a 90-year low; believes the Government must take action to secure business growth to create opportunities for young people; resolves that the Government should repeat the bank bonus levy to create over 100,000 jobs through a youth jobs fund, to build 25,000 affordable homes and to support business through increased funding for the Regional Growth Fund; calls on the Government to expand apprenticeships for young people and to ensure that public sector contractors offer apprenticeships; and further calls on the Government to enact a temporary VAT cut to boost consumer spending, business confidence and support the UK’s high streets.

The motion is in my name and those of my right hon. Friend the Member for Leigh (Andy Burnham) and others. I thank the Minister for Further Education, Skills and Lifelong Learning, who has given his apologies for his absence this afternoon, which is for understandable reasons. I see that the Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills is not here to answer the debate; he seems to be curiously reluctant to answer when I introduce Opposition day debates, but no doubt he is trying to work out how to be selected as the coalition candidate for Richmond at the next election.

We British people have always been confident that each new generation will do better than their parents and their grandparents. There have been wars and economic crises, and individual families have had their ups and downs, but what my right hon. Friend the leader of the Labour party calls “the promise of Britain” has held true. Parents have been able to say, “Our children have had more opportunities, a better education and a higher standard of living than we had.”

However, Members on both sides of the House will know that confidence in that British promise has never been more shaky, knowing that the average age of a first-time buyer is approaching 40, and that there are 1 million young people not in employment, education or training. At the same time, we have all heard young people asking whether the cost of a degree is worth it, and what the alternative would be. We have all heard parents asking how this country will pay its way in a fiercely competitive world, and what young people will do. Only a quarter of parents and grandparents questioned by YouGov believed that their young would be better off than they were.

Today, the Opposition are asking the House to focus on things that the Government should and should not have done, but let us be clear: the challenges did not suddenly emerge from a blue sky at the last election. The Minister for Universities and Science advocates the view that over decades, the older generation has in some way stolen the future from young people, and that we have so rigged the rules of the game throughout our lives that the young have only half a chance—I apologise if I paraphrase cruelly. We hear similar views across the political spectrum. Whether or not we share them—I have very strong reservations—it is clear that the generation now in power has a huge responsibility to young people, and that the changes that are needed in our economy and society are profound. Those changes will take leadership, which Labour will offer, over many years.

However, I would not be doing young people any favours if I pretended that it was only in the past year that everything had gone wrong.

[Mr John Redwood (Wokingham) (Con)]

In his motion, the right hon. Gentleman states that one problem is that the Government have cut

“too far and too fast”,

but in their first year they increased spending by 5.3%, or £32 billion, and every extra pound that they spent was, of course, borrowed. How much extra would he have wanted to spend?

[Mr Denham]

We know that the Government aim to cut sufficiently fast to eliminate the deficit in four years. Our judgment was that the right balance between dealing with the deficit and sustaining jobs and growth would be to halve the deficit over a similar period. That allows us to say not that there would never be any cuts in public expenditure, but that there would be a very different trajectory to public spending. For reasons that I will give, that difference of choice would have made a big difference to the young people of this country.

I have acknowledged that some of the problems are deep-seated and long-term, but today’s Opposition day debates focus critical attention on the Government’s actions. The charge is clear: the Government’s economic policy has directly made the lives and prospects of young people worse. They have not hit young people along with everyone else; they have chosen—I think “chosen” is the right word—to single out young people and to make their lives and prospects worse.

[Alok Sharma (Reading West) (Con)]

Yesterday the shadow Chancellor came to the House and, for the first time in 15 months, apologised for Labour’s mistakes. Are we going to have an apology from the right hon. Gentleman today for the fact that social mobility has fallen and attainment in schools has declined by international standards? By just about every measure, young people suffered under the Labour Government.

[Mr Denham]

We will have the opportunity in a few moments to see whether that last claim is accurate, although I think that the hon. Gentleman might be disappointed. On the question of apologies, though, we did not hear yesterday an apology from the Conservative party for urging the Labour Government to deregulate further and faster in the financial services sector. The right hon. Member for Wokingham (Mr Redwood) was one of those producing Conservative party policy documents in that vein. I think that we should hear a little honesty from the governing party.

[Mr Redwood]

Will the right hon. Gentleman give way?

[Mr Denham]

I will have to give way on that point.

[Mr Redwood]

As the right hon. Gentleman should know by now, the report that I co-authored stated clearly that the Government needed to regulate the cash and capital of the banks more strongly than they did. Had they done that, they would have been in a much better place.

[Mr Denham]

But the problem did not come from the cash or the capital; it came from the complex financial instruments that were not being properly regulated, as we discussed yesterday. However, I am trying your patience, Mr Speaker, so perhaps I should make some progress.

The Government have chosen to single out young people and make their lives and prospects worse. In June I visited the Bombardier factory in Derby and talked to three young apprentices. I asked them how they saw their future in the company. “To go as far as we can,” said one. Mr Colin Walton, the chief executive officer, used to be an apprentice. That is what the promise of Britain was all about: if someone wanted to get on, they could. We all know what happened, though. The Government missed the chance to reopen the Thameslink contract, despite the many changed circumstances. It was a disastrous failure of will and responsibility, and the dreams of those apprentices now hang by a thread.

The decision to tackle the deficit by cutting spending too far and too fast has had predictable results. The economy was growing a year ago, but today it is choking.

[Mr David Evennett (Bexleyheath and Crayford) (Con)]

rose—

[Mr Denham]

And the hon. Gentleman will explain why.

[Mr Evennett]

I will if I get an opportunity to speak later, Mr Speaker. I always listen to the right hon. Gentleman with great interest, but he is rewriting the history of the Labour Government of which he was a member. The present Government have increased the number of apprenticeships dramatically. I would like to refresh his memory: in May 1997 there were 664,000 unemployed 16 to 24-year-olds, but that had increased to 924,000 by May 2010. Is that not an indictment of the failure of the Labour Government of which he was a member to manage affairs and to help young people and apprentices to get the jobs that they needed?

[Mr Denham]

I will deal directly with both those issues in due course, if the hon. Gentleman will have patience.

Every family is suffering, but young people are paying a particularly heavy price. Young people in Britain today are not accidental victims of the cuts; what is happening to them is not some collateral damage of Treasury policy. When the Government drew up plans to cut spending too far and too fast, they decided to target young people, and they did it recklessly and without thought or heeding the evidence. They ended education maintenance awards without understanding how important they were. As the Education Committee wrote:

“The Government should have done more to acknowledge the combined impact on students' participation, attainment and retention, particularly amongst disadvantaged sub-groups, before determining how to restructure financial support.”

They got that wrong, and young people who want to stay on will suffer.

Advice and guidance to young people is essential. The Government are wrecking the careers services—but that is the subject of the second debate today. Labour’s future jobs fund had a simple aim: to prevent a destructive rise in long-term youth unemployment during the recession. All unemployment hurts, but long-term youth unemployment has the longest, most corrosive effect on its victims. And the future jobs fund worked. When it started, the number of those not in employment, education or training fell by more than 200,000. The current Prime Minister praised it when in opposition, but after the election it was scrapped, and nothing effective has taken its place. In the past year, the number of NEETs rose by more than 100,000, with 119,000 19 to 24-year-olds not doing anything productive.

[Robert Halfon (Harlow) (Con)]

Will the right hon. Gentleman acknowledge that, although there were 90,000 starts under the future jobs fund between October 2009 and January 2011, the analysis of the Department for Work and Pensions from March this year shows that half the young people involved were back on the dole just seven months later?

[Mr Denham]

I am proud of the effectiveness of my Government’s policies in tackling long-term youth unemployment. The experience of having nothing to do has a lasting effect on people’s careers, incomes and aspirations up to 20 years after the event, and we succeeded in tackling that throughout our period in office from 1997. The reality is that that this Government have scrapped the future jobs fund and, far from introducing anything better, have put nothing effective in its place. The effects of that on young people are all too clear.

[Stella Creasy (Walthamstow) (Lab/Co-op)]

Does my right hon. Friend agree that the Government’s contempt for young people is illustrated by the fact that the Work and Pensions Select Committee has pointed out the lack of evidence for the decision to scrap the future jobs fund and called into question the value for money of the decision? The Government did not know what they were doing to our young people.

[Mr Denham]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. The truth is that it was more important for this arrogant Government to scrap something because it was a Labour scheme than to look at whether it was working not. But it is not the Labour party that has paid the price; it is young people up and down the country.

[Ian Paisley (North Antrim) (DUP)]

Does the right hon. Gentleman accept that the scrapping of the education maintenance allowance, the apprenticeships fund and the future jobs fund is having a more pronounced effect in the regions of the United Kingdom? In my constituency, for example, 19,000 young people aged 16 and above do not have employment. Does he accept that this loss of benefits and opportunities is having a much more pronounced effect there than it is having even here in England?

[Mr Denham]

The hon. Gentleman speaks with great authority about his constituency.

It is a tragedy that the importance that was attached to young people and to avoiding long-term unemployment, from the new deal onwards, has disappeared under this Government. Too many people are being pushed to the edges of the labour market, where there are too few opportunities for them. Many parents, and young people, want apprenticeships. Labour rescued and rebuilt apprenticeships. There were fewer than 70,000 a year when we took office, but the figure had increased to nearly 280,000 in the last year of the Labour Government, and those apprenticeships were more credible and successful than those that had gone before. Again, however, the new Government were keener to rubbish our record than to get their own plans right.

I have to say that, on paper, it is hard to fault the ambitions that the new Government set out: now, however, the truth is coming through. The great growth in apprenticeships has turned out to involve short-term training courses for adults. There is nothing wrong with training adults, but it is certainly not what most people think of as an apprenticeship, and it certainly does not provide new opportunities for young people. The proportion of apprenticeships for 16 to 18-year-olds has actually fallen. We need, but are not getting, longer apprenticeships in high-end technical subjects that are necessary to spur growth; we need electrical, mechanical and construction apprenticeships.

[James Morris (Halesowen and Rowley Regis) (Con)]

I visited a forging business in Cradley Heath in my constituency on Friday. For the first time in five years, it has taken on an apprentice from a local college. It is offering a high-quality, high-tech apprenticeship to that young person, who will be able to develop the skills to get a high value-added job in the future. That is what is happening as a result of Government policy.

[Mr Denham]

I applaud that company and those apprenticeships. That is a story that is being repeated in my constituency, but it was being repeated three or four years ago as well. The myth is that the situation has been transformed overnight. We are presented with some impressive headline statistics, but close analysis suggests that we are not getting an expansion of the high-quality opportunities that our young people and the economy need.

If the Government really had confidence in what they were doing, they would not have scrapped Labour’s guarantee of an apprenticeship for every qualified school leaver. They have also refused to require Government contractors to provide apprenticeships. In the past, that guarantee meant that investment in social housing also involved investment in training young construction workers. The Minister for Housing and Local Government described that policy as “ridiculous” and “counter-productive”, while the Minister for the Cabinet Office said that it “wouldn’t be appropriate”.

[Geraint Davies (Swansea West) (Lab/Co-op)]

Does my right hon. Friend agree that the key choice in cutting the deficit is the balance between growth and cuts? If the cuts reduce our capacity to grow, as do the cuts to the future jobs fund and in proper apprenticeships, they will be completely counter-productive and economically illiterate.

[Mr Denham]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right, but there is a further point. The refusal to link Government procurement to the provision of apprenticeships has nothing to do with the deficit. It is wrong policy. The Government could take that action whatever their deficit reduction strategy, but they refuse to do so. It is not just about the deficit; it is about missed opportunities.

I am pleased to say that after what could be called a cock-up—I hope it is not an unparliamentary term—by the Government Whips, Labour’s call for green apprenticeships is now in the Energy Bill, and it looks as though it will stay there. One bit of Government will be doing the right thing, thanks to Labour, but more than £200 billion of public procurement—taxpayers’ money—could be working harder by providing apprenticeships.

[Mr Stewart Jackson (Peterborough) (Con)]

The shadow Chancellor apologised yesterday for some aspects of Labour policy, so will the right hon. Gentleman take the opportunity to apologise for the previous Government reckless immigration policy, whereby people were imported into low-skill and low-wage jobs, pushing many thousands of unskilled youngsters into welfare dependency?

[Mr Denham]

I was very pleased that we ended unskilled immigration from outside the EU and introduced a points-based migration system. I think the real issue now is the damage being done in higher and further education, for example, to the country’s economic prospects by restricting universities’ ability to offer courses that attract high-paying overseas students.

The point I was making a few moments ago was that the failures in apprenticeship policy have nothing to do with deficit reduction. They were calculated decisions that harmed young people, as, indeed, did the decision to let fees treble. That is why too many students and parents are now asking whether it is still worth going to university. That policy was not required by deficit reduction. If higher education had been cut in line with other public services, fees would have risen to less than £4,000 a year. This summer, more than 100,000 determined, hard-working and qualified students could not get a university place. The first action of the new Government was to stop 10,000 new places Labour had planned for last September. Another 10,000 places will go next year. Teaching and nursing places, too, will be cut. If the students who missed out this year get a place next year, they will pay a £15,000 lifetime penalty for having missed out this year.

All this has happened because the Government lost control of fees, with most universities wanting to charge £9,000, so they are now introducing a bizarre auction to cut fees at the expense of quality. Those students who apply next year will find not only that they are paying higher fees and that fewer places are available, but that many of the popular courses they thought about getting on to this year do not even exist. Over the next three years, 60,000 places will be taken from popular courses and popular universities and given to cheaper providers—irrespective of whether students want to study them.

A degree is a good thing to get, but recent reports have highlighted the difficulties too many graduates experience in getting a job, particularly one that rewards their effort in today’s sluggish economy. That is not because we have too many graduates, but because the economy is creating too few challenging, demanding and high-value posts. Instead of being plunged into the chaos of the last year and next, universities should have been given one priority—to play their full role in creating growth, getting their knowledge, research and skills into the businesses and companies of the future. That is what a Government with a single-minded focus on jobs and growth would have done, but it is where the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, too, is failing young people and the country as a whole.

[Toby Perkins (Chesterfield) (Lab)]

Does my right hon. Friend agree that it is perverse that, at the very time a generation of students are about to go to university and pay huge tuition fees, setting themselves up for decades of debt, they see people who made that choice three or four years ago leaving university with a degree, but no opportunities to move into?

[Mr Denham]

There is a huge responsibility on the Government to respond to my hon. Friend’s challenge—to take the measures necessary, get growth going, create jobs and reshape our economy so that we can pay our way in the world in the future and make the full use of the talents of young people and, indeed, older people in this country. I say that because there will not be opportunities for young people unless we build an economy that can compete with the best in the world.

The truth is that we had to wait a year for a growth plan and it was so weak and useless that it is already being rewritten for October. When every taxpayer’s pound needs to work as hard as it can to build a new economy for Britain, the Government’s decision on Bombardier means that taxpayers’ money will needlessly be spent abroad. When every pound of taxpayer’s money needs to work hard to build the new economy, the Government are refusing to ensure that public sector contractors provide apprenticeships. When there is £200 billion-worth of infrastructure for the new economy that needs investment, the Government are dragging their feet. To see that, we need only look at the way they are doing broadband: slowly, in inefficient penny-package projects.

When we need the Government to be working with business to build the new economy, all we get is the tired mantra, “The less government does, the better.” If we are to be the very best at the things we are good at—advanced manufacturing, creative industries, business services, pharmaceuticals and renewables—government has to work in partnership with business. It must do so: to understand what technologies and skills we need in the future, so that companies have confidence to invest; to set clear priorities and stick to them, so that companies have the certainty they need to invest; to look at what government buys and how we buy it, so that innovative companies can grow; to must make sure that good regulation lets good companies win new markets; and to build, in every region and nation, the universities, the skills, the banking services and the leadership in cities and regions that will let companies grow and create jobs.

[Mr Denis MacShane (Rotherham) (Lab)]

Does my right hon. Friend think that the Secretary of State is absent from this debate because he realises that, despite his many university qualifications, he is about to lose his job because of the democracy reduction Bill that the Government have imposed and the fact that his constituency is about to disappear? Is it not symbolic that this Government reduce by 50 the number of MPs and in every sector of the economy they are reducing employment as we speak? Sadly, the Secretary of State himself is included in that, but he did vote for it, so what one reaps, one sows.

[Mr Denham]

I have already made a passing remark about the Secretary of State’s role, but let me just say that I have tried to set out briefly the sort of lead we should be getting from the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills. Active, intelligent government working with business is what we need to transform the shape of our economy, but all we are getting is the same dogmatic argument: “Government should do less. It should do less in the regions, less in investment, less in research, less in working with business.” Our young people will pay a heavy price for that.

[Alok Sharma]

The right hon. Gentleman is leaving the House with the impression that the Labour Government left this country with a golden legacy in dealing with businesses. Let me remind him that his party was talking about putting up corporation tax and was imposing such a level of regulation on businesses that they just could not cope, and that we were left with the most complex tax system in the world. Is that what he calls “government working with business”?

[Mr Denham]

We must remember the situation at the end of the previous Labour Government. It is no part of my case that we were a flawless Government with no imperfections. Indeed, I am one of those who has acknowledged already in this debate the need for change, and the Labour party will undertake that. Let me just tell the hon. Gentleman three things. First, there were 1.1 million more small businesses thriving in this country at the end of the Labour Government than there were at the beginning. Secondly, the OECD reckoned that this country was third in the world for ease of setting up a new business. Thirdly, almost alone of the western European countries, we enjoyed net foreign direct investment, because businesses around the world had the confidence to invest in Britain. Not everything was perfect, but that was not a bad record to show that we worked well with business.

What we need today is a plan B for the economy and a plan B for young people to begin to restore the promise of Britain. The Government must see that cutting too far and too fast means sacrificing the growth and jobs that make it easier to reduce the deficit. We need a temporary reduction in VAT until growth is re-established to put money in families’ pockets and to boost shopping centres and jobs.

Yesterday, we saw long-term plans to restructure the banks, whose irresponsibility around the world caused so much harm, but nothing to tackle the immediate problems facing Britain. The Government should repeat the banking levy, raising £2 billion, and with the money they could reduce the damage done by ending the future jobs fund by establishing a £600 million youth jobs fund. The Government could get young people back to work by building 25,000 affordable houses. We could boost opportunities by investing in high-growth small businesses. When every taxpayer’s pound needs to work as hard as it can, the Government should grasp the nettle and require public sector contractors to provide apprenticeships for young people.

For too long, this Conservative-led Government have blamed everything bad that has happened in this country on the unavoidable effects of deficit reduction. They are not just wrong about the pace of deficit reduction, however. Deficit reduction cannot be used as a systematic excuse for, in plain and simple terms, bad policy and missed opportunities. It will take more than this Government to restore the promise of Britain, but in the meantime they could at least stop making things worse.

16:16

[The Minister for Universities and Science (Mr David Willetts)]

Of course, the Government oppose the motion. I regret that we are depleted as a result of efficiency savings, but I should explain that the Secretary of State is battling for Britain and representing British business in Paris and, sadly, our colleague the Minister for Further Education, Skills and Lifelong Learning is recovering from a minor operation in hospital. I hope that satisfies the House on our position.

I assure the shadow Secretary of State that despite our disagreement with many of the assertions in his motion, we very much agree with the underlying principle of which he reminds us. There is an obligation on all our generation to ensure that the younger generation has better opportunities in life. One of people’s most fundamental concerns is that opportunities for social mobility, getting started on the housing ladder and getting a good education should be at least as good for our kids as they have been for us. That is a principle that we absolutely endorse.

Opposition Members might be used to having rather embarrassing books passed under their noses—such as the memoirs of the right hon. Member for Edinburgh South West (Mr Darling)—but I have with me a book that need cause them no embarrassment: my book, “The Pinch”, which is on precisely this subject. I strongly recommend it to the entire Opposition Front Bench team and they should each buy a copy—they are not allowed to share it.

We support the principle of which the motion reminds us and it is a challenge to which successive Governments have had to rise. No Government can claim that they have been able fully to rise to that challenge, and the right hon. Member for Southampton, Itchen (Mr Denham) is right to challenge the Government in the House today to recognise it, which we do, and to ask us what we are doing about it. Let me try to explain what we are doing.

[Margot James (Stourbridge) (Con)]

My right hon. Friend is introducing our side of the argument with great generosity of spirit, but does he not agree that the tone of the motion encourages an extremely unhealthy sense of victimhood among our young people? I will not pre-empt his speech by giving a long list of all that the Government are doing for young people, but we are doing a great deal and I trust that the Minister will give full voice to all that.

[Mr Willetts]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. The debate is an opportunity for me and all Government Members to set out very clearly what we are trying to do with more apprenticeship places, 80,000 work experience places, and a funding system for universities—however controversial—that has been set up on a reliable basis for the future that will enable us to maintain the number of places to students. That adds up to more education and training places in total for young people than ever before. We are also making bold reforms on schools through free schools and the pupil premium, which will help children from low-income families, as well as through the spread of the academies programme and the arrival of university technical colleges. Going beyond education, we are also making bold reforms on housing with the new affordable homes programme bringing 170,000 new affordable homes by 2015. That all adds up to a programme that is absolutely aimed at ensuring that young people get a fair deal.

[Sheila Gilmore (Edinburgh East) (Lab)]

Will the Minister explain how properties at 80% of market value rent are affordable and how that links to his party’s declared aim of reducing spending on housing benefit?

[Mr Willetts]

In our affordable homes programme we have set out arrangements whereby new providers will deliver extra homes for a given amount of rental income. We aim to generate and achieve more house building as a result.

[Alison Seabeck (Plymouth, Moor View) (Lab)]

Will the Minister give way?

[Mr Willetts]

I want to make a tiny bit more progress.

Although we are doing those very important things on higher education, skills, schools and houses, the most important single way in which we can help the younger generation is by reducing the burden of Government debt that they will have to pay for. That is at the heart of our programme. Every time the previous Government introduced some unaffordable expenditure programme paid for not out of taxes but by issuing Government bonds lasting for 25 years, they were paying for public expenditure out of burdens being placed on tomorrow’s younger generations. That is the fundamental moral failure behind the levels of debt that we inherited from the previous Labour Government.

[Stella Creasy]

I am pleased to hear the Minister talk about the importance of debt levels. Will he comment on the figures from the Office for Budget Responsibility that show that directly as a result of the Government’s plans an extra £10,000 of personal debt has been loaded on to our hard-pressed households already in the past year?

[Mr Willetts]

Given what happened to personal debt under the previous Labour Government, about which my colleague the Secretary of State has been absolutely eloquent, I do not think that Labour can be taken seriously on this subject. We are still waiting for Labour to learn from its fundamental mistake of having uncosted public expenditure programmes and irresponsible and unfunded tax reductions, but it has not learned that lesson as we can see from the motion, which is an absolute example of that. It is full of extra public expenditure promises, it has a tax cut in it and, once again, as always with Labour, the figures do not add up.

[Andrew Bridgen (North West Leicestershire) (Con)]

The Browne review estimated that if all new students from 2012 paid Labour’s favoured 3% graduate tax, it would not provide sufficient revenue to fund higher education until the tax year 2041-42. Will the Minister estimate how much that would add to the record budget deficit left behind by the Labour party?

[Mr Willetts]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right that the graduate tax favoured by the Labour leader would make the fiscal crisis that we have inherited far worse. That is one of the many objections to the idea.

[Tom Blenkinsop (Middlesbrough South and East Cleveland) (Lab)]

Will the Minister confirm that the Chancellor’s own Office for Budget Responsibility has stated that the borrowing requirement will have to increase by £46 billion and that unemployment figures will increase by 200,000 as a result of the Chancellor’s economic strategy?

[Mr Willetts]

I do not know which specific OBR forecast the hon. Gentleman refers to, but the OBR work I have seen makes it clear that although there are reductions in public sector employment, they are more than offset by increases in private sector employment. That is one of the many ways in which we are rebalancing the economy. We are now hearing claims to fiscal rectitude from the party that left us the largest structural deficit in the G7 and the largest level of borrowing in the developed world. Unless the Labour party gets serious about the importance of prudent management of the public finances, we simply will not take seriously its commitment to caring about the interests of future generations.

[Mr Evennett]

My right hon. Friend, as always, is correct in saying that it is essential to repair the economy to ensure a good future for all our young people, and that if we had an economy like the one left by the last Labour Government, that future would be bleak. The Wolf report on vocational education said that a significant proportion of the 14 to 19 cohort are being offered a less effective path into employment than their predecessors. Does my right hon. Friend agree that this Government’s policies, particularly in respect of training and apprenticeships, will help to address that serious problem?

[Mr Willetts]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right, and I should have included Alison Wolf’s excellent report on my list of the things that we were doing to try to offer a fairer deal for young people.

[Geraint Davies]

Does the Secretary of State agree that sovereign debt in Ireland, Iceland, Spain, Italy, Portugal and so on is much worse than that of Britain, and the reason is that Labour left 2 million more people in jobs in Britain than we inherited in 1997? The future of keeping deficits down is jobs and growth—not stupid cuts, like those he is pushing forward with.

[Mr Willetts]

The crucial difference between our economy and those that the hon. Gentleman listed is that our economy has the benefit of a credible package for bringing down the public deficit, as a result of which the markets have retained confidence in us. It is because of this Government’s economic policies that we are not facing the same risks.

[John Hemming (Birmingham, Yardley) (LD)]

Does it not surprise the Minister, as it surprises me, that the Opposition seem to be unconcerned about the rate of interest paid and the fact that, as a deficit goes up, the rate of interest goes up as well?

[Mr Willetts]

That is a very important point; indeed, I understand that with its latest debt issue the Bank of England has secured historically low—almost unprecedentedly low—interest rates, which is further evidence of the confidence that people have in our seriousness about tackling the deficit that we inherited from the previous Government.

I now want to make progress on some of the specific points in the motion that the shadow Secretary of State put before us. First, let me focus briefly on youth unemployment and those not in education, employment or training. Youth unemployment is a serious problem; it does need to be tackled, and of course we regret the fact that it now stands at 949,000, having been at 924,000 when we took office. However, as we have heard, when Labour took office it was at 664,000, and the rise in youth unemployment began long before the economic crisis hit.

The really serious question that parties on both sides of the House need to address is why, even during Labour’s boom years, was youth unemployment already starting to rise. That tells us that it is a deep-seated trend, which tells us that something has gone seriously wrong with our education and training system—it was not meeting employers’ needs.

[Tom Blenkinsop]

Will the Minister give way?

[Mr Willetts]

Just a minute; I want to make a bit more headway on this point.

There is a very similar pattern in numbers of NEETs. On the current data series starting in 2000, there were 655,000 NEETs in 2000, and when Labour left office there were 874,000. I have looked up the figures for two dates that may particularly strike the shadow Secretary of State’s memory. When he arrived as Secretary of State in the Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills, there were 835,000 NEETs. During the following two years, until he left that post, he was remorselessly harried on those figures by his Opposition spokesman. By the time he left the post, the number of NEETs had risen to 954,000; we debated that many times in the House. We had an increase of 120,000 on his own watch as the Secretary of State responsible. Actually, he got out just in time: the quarter after he left, the number went over 1 million, to hit 1.74 million. I had hoped we would hear a slightly more frank account from him of the lessons he learned about the difficulty of tackling the challenge of NEETs, drawing on his own experience.

The shadow Secretary of State went on to complain about our record, but I have to say that when in opposition we warned about Train to Gain, which we said was not a serious investment in training opportunities; about programme-led apprenticeships, which were losing contact with the jobs market; and about paper vocational qualifications being churned out that did not meet the real needs of employers. Those warnings, sadly, have proved to be correct.

[Tom Blenkinsop]

I thank the Minister for giving way; he is being generous with his time. We are experiencing not only record youth unemployment, but record female unemployment. I believe that the last time that such rates were experienced was in 1988, when the Minister was last in power.

[Mr Willetts]

I was not personally in power then—but absolutely, some groups are excluded from the labour market whenever times are tough, and youth unemployment and female unemployment are both aspects of that.

[Mr Stewart Jackson]

My right hon. Friend omits to mention one of the biggest catastrophes under the last Government: the disastrous incompetence of the further education capital build programme under the Learning and Skills Council, for which the former Government have not apologised. This Government are having to pick up the pieces.

[Mr Willetts]

Absolutely; my hon. Friend the Minister for Further Education, Skills and Lifelong Learning is doing an excellent job with tight resources in trying to ensure that we can make at least some improvement to the further education estate, but I want to talk about apprenticeships in particular.

[Jeremy Corbyn (Islington North) (Lab)]

Before the Minister goes on to talk about apprenticeships, will he acknowledge that the direction of travel is entirely wrong? With many young people deterred from going to college because of the loss of education maintenance allowance and rising fees, and others deterred from going to university because of debt and rising fees, does he not think that the situation will be considerably worse in a year or two, because of the policies that he has already adopted?

[Mr Willetts]

Let me now turn to what we are doing to ensure that young people have more opportunities, so that the picture that the hon. Gentleman paints does not come to pass.

I should now like to make some progress and to say that one of my other regrets about the Opposition motion is that it repeats not only the economic mistakes that we associate with the Brown premiership, but the spinning techniques that we recall from the Blair premiership, and that is not an attractive combination. The worst example of that in the motion, which the shadow Secretary of State repeated in his speech, is the statement that

“the proportion of apprenticeship places for 16 to 18 year olds has decreased by 11 per cent.”.

I should like briefly to explain to the House why that statement is both strictly speaking accurate and deeply misleading.

We are talking about a nine-month period, because we have only nine months’ data for the latest year. In the first nine months of 2009-10, 92,500 apprenticeships were started for 16 to 18-year-olds out of a total of 211,000 apprenticeships, so 43% of apprenticeships went to 16 to 18-year-olds. By comparison, in the first nine months of the 2010-11 academic year, under this Government, 102,900 16 to 18-year-olds started apprenticeships—up from 92,500—out of a total number of apprenticeship starts of 326,000 in a comparable period. So we have more apprenticeships for 16 to 18-year-olds, as part of a big increase in the total number of apprenticeships. Therefore, because the rate of increase in 16-to-18 apprenticeships was not as rapid as that of other apprenticeships, 16-to-18 apprenticeships in our first nine months constitute 32% of the total number.

The shadow Secretary of State, using his knowledge and ingenuity as a former Secretary of State, constructs an argument in which, because 16-to-18 apprenticeships were previously 43% and are down to 32%, we are all supposed to regret the fact that they have fallen by 11 percentage points given the increase in total apprenticeships. If anyone wants an example of the Blairite attitude to statistics—using every trick in the book to take an increase in the number 16-to-18 apprenticeships as part of an increase in the total number of apprenticeships and to include in a motion an assertion that, somehow, there has been an 11 percentage point fall—we have just seen a case study.

If Labour Members want to be taken seriously, they must get serious not just about the economic challenge that we face, but about levelling with the country and dealing with the facts that we face in an honest way. Referring to that 11 percentage point fall shows something deep in Labour’s instincts; the electorate got completely fed up with it, and we all understand why. We are delivering more apprenticeships across the piece.

[Ian Paisley]

Perhaps the Minister can give me reasons why I should vote against the motion. There are 56,000 unemployed people in Northern Ireland; that is the jobless total. That has trebled over the past four and a half years. The Minister is telling the House that everything is going swimmingly, but I do not think that it is. What are the Government doing to get those 56,000 people out of unemployment?

[Mr Willetts]

I am trying to explain exactly what we are doing to deliver a significant increase in the number of apprenticeships. We initially pledged to deliver 50,000 extra apprenticeships in our first year; we believe that we have achieved more than double that—100,000 extra apprenticeship places—and there are more to come.

[Toby Perkins]

Will the Minister give way?

[Mr Willetts]

I shall try to make progress. Those are real apprenticeships. The shadow Secretary of State said that they were short-term apprenticeships; let me make absolutely clear how we are financing them. We are doing so from the savings that we are making on Train to Gain, which my party in opposition and the Liberal Democrats in opposition rightly criticised as an ineffective programme with a large amount of dead-weight. The average number of hours of training received under a Train to Gain place was 33. We are replacing that with apprenticeships, in which the minimum number of hours of training and directed learning are 280. That is what we are putting in the place of Train to Gain. For the shadow Secretary of State to complain about short-term training when we are providing real apprenticeships instead of his Train to Gain is a bit rich.

[Toby Perkins]

Will the Minister give way?

[Mr Willetts]

No, I shall try to make progress. We are delivering more apprenticeship places, which I very much hope will be of value to the people of Northern Ireland, as it is to the rest of the United Kingdom. The figures are dramatic: the provisional figures for the first three quarters of the academic year 2010-11 show 330,000 apprenticeship starts—an excellent record.

Let me turn to universities, briefly. Of course, we have debated this issue many times in the House, and will doubtless do so again. I begin by accepting something that the shadow Secretary of State said, and a point that he made when he was Secretary of State. It is painful when, in the summer, one is confronted with young people who have done their best in applying for university, and have not secured a place. It is painful for them, and we recognise the work that they have put in, but in recognising the difficulties that they face, I cannot do better than repeat the words spoken by the shadow Secretary of State when he was Secretary of State and was responsible for the matter:

“In terms of student numbers, going to university has always been a competitive process…we cannot afford to fully fund every single person who might like to go to university and we never have been able to.”

That is the correct position. We have been able to continue to provide record numbers of places at university, despite all the funding pressures that we face and the need to make reductions.

The previous Government, in their final days, had a plan for 20,000 extra places, as they called them, but there was no funding attached beyond the first year. There was no money to pay for years 2 or 3 of the studentship. Incidentally, contrary to the implication in the motion and to what the shadow Secretary of State said, that was explicitly described as a one-off funding stream for one year—“extra one-off funding” were the words of the then Chancellor in the 2010 Budget. What we have done instead is provide those 10,000 places last year, and we will provide another 10,000 next year. Instead of having to reduce places, we hope to maintain broadly that number, so that at least an equivalent proportion of the cohort of 18-year-olds has a chance of getting to university.

We inherited from the previous Government a simple statement, which I shall quote from the pre-Budget report of December 2009. In their list of cuts, there was

“£600 million from higher education and science and research budgets from a combination of changes to student support within existing arrangements; efficiency savings and prioritisation across universities”.

We never knew how that £600 million-worth of cuts was to have been delivered, but it was very hard to see how we could maintain the number of university places that we have done and continue to provide high-quality education given that we inherited that commitment to a cut of £600 million. That is why we took the tough but controversial decision, rather than simply face cuts and reduce student numbers, to base university financing on student fees and loans—absolutely following the model used by the previous Government, with no payment up front. I believe, given the fiscal pressures that we face, that that is in the best interests both of universities, which will find, if anything, that they have extra cash as a result of our reforms, and of students, as it has enabled us to maintain a high level of places, and to reduce the monthly repayments facing students. The shadow Secretary of State failed to explain at any point what Labour would do.

[Geraint Davies]

rose—

[Mr Willetts]

I shall not give way, as I am going to try to make progress, although I would welcome an intervention from the shadow Secretary of State, who could usefully clarify his position. We would like to know what Labour policy is. I have been to the House, as have my ministerial colleagues, to explain our policy, and we have heard a range of suggestions from the Labour leadership. We heard what Lord Mandelson, in his memoirs, thought that a Labour Government would have done if they had been re-elected:

“I assumed, as the Treasury did, that the outcome would have to include a significant increase in tuition fees. I felt that they would certainly have to double in order to offset the deficit-reduction measures that we too would have implemented had we won the election. The alternative would have been a disastrous contraction of higher education.”

Separately, the leader of the Labour party, the right hon. Member for Doncaster North (Edward Miliband), said:

“I would not go ahead with the increase they’re going with. I want to have a graduate tax. Why do I want to have a graduate tax? Because I think it’s a fairer way of paying for higher education, because it says the amount you pay is related to the ability to pay”.

We have three options: recognising that fees and loans were the way to help universities out of the fiscal pressures that they faced; having a graduate tax; or having a third policy of no policy whatsoever. Once again, we are having a debate in the House called by the Opposition with no indication whatever of how they would put our universities on a solid financial footing. Governments across Europe are battling to tackle their deficits, and it is important that we hear from Labour what it would do. Instead, what we have in the motion, alongside the promises on NEETs and apprenticeships, and quotes on student places, is a reference to the £2 billion tax on bankers’ bonuses, which will pay for those policies. Let me tell the shadow Secretary of State that that tax is already paying for reversing the consumer prices index-retail prices index switch for benefits and pensions; for jobs and growth spending, which adds up to £9.5 billion; to support the cancellation of the fuel duty escalator, worth £1.7 billion; to enable the Opposition to reverse the child benefit freeze, which costs £1.3 billion; to reverse the time-limited employment and support allowance, costing £1.1 million; to enable them to reverse the working tax credit freeze for £1 billion; and to reduce the age-related payment every year, costing another £600 million. In fact, we estimate that in total, the £2 billion that the Opposition will raise from a bankers’ bonus tax will pay for £27 billion-worth of public spending increases and other tax cuts.

The right hon. Gentleman has put his bid in and it is on the list. If wants to be taken seriously as a member of Government he has to tell us how he would make the figures add up. He does not rise to that challenge. We are rising to the challenge of sorting out the mess in the nation’s finances that we inherited from the Labour Government, and we are addressing that challenge while, at the same time, doing absolutely everything that we can to ensure high-quality education and training opportunities for young people—and we are proud of the commitment that we are displaying to them.

[Several hon. Members]

rose—

[Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Nigel Evans)]

Order. Will hon. Members take their seats? A number of Members want to participate in the debate, but we have not imposed a time limit for speeches. However, if they speak for considerably longer than six minutes, many other Members will simply not be able to take part, so they should bear that in mind when they make their contributions.

16:44

[Mr Adrian Bailey (West Bromwich West) (Lab/Co-op)]

The debate is about future generations. The prospects for the next generation will impact profoundly on not only very young people, but older people. The ability of our young people—the next generation—to get the skills and jobs that form the basis of economic growth will provide the wherewithal to finance our ageing population and the policies that we need for our very young people. Although the debate focuses on a particular generation, it is crucial to the whole population.

Getting the outcome wrong will have profound consequences, socially and economically. Areas such as mine in the black country even now show the scars of the unemployment and lack of investment in education that took place in the 1980s, and the intergenerational social problems that arise from families with low levels of educational aspiration and no head of the family in full-time work. Although any Government would have needed a deficit reduction plan, a slowing economy should not in itself be a reason for cutting investment in education and training. It is education and training that will enable an economy to grow out of recession as circumstances change.

My right hon. Friend the Member for Southampton, Itchen (Mr Denham) acknowledged that the previous Government did not get everything right, but to listen to Government Members one would think the previous Government did not get anything right. No mention has been made of the fact that the number of apprenticeships rose from 70,000 to nearly 280,000—a fourfold increase—or of the huge improvement in education and training qualifications. However, I accept that even at the end of the last Labour Government, there was still a problem.

The west midlands skills partnership, which covers the skills profile in the west midlands, acknowledged that there were 3.5 million people of working age in the west midlands but only 2.5 million jobs. That is an indication of the deep-seated problems that such areas face. The west midlands skills partnership also predicted that under Government policies there would be a net loss of a further 38,000 jobs. It said that with adequate training for people in work and young people, there was the potential to create 10,000 net jobs. If the appropriate investment is made and the required standards are achieved, that will make a substantial contribution to reducing the deficit.

We should recognise that there are deep-seated problems with training and apprenticeships that we as a Labour Government did not totally overcome, but it is legitimate to ask whether this Government’s policies will address them. One of the problems is that a huge sector of the economy consists of small businesses, many of which are so small that they find it difficult to engage with the potential that apprenticeships offer. The figures quoted by my right hon. Friend demonstrate clearly that we are not getting the number of new apprenticeships for young people to which Government policy aspires. That is backed up anecdotally by conversations that I have as Chair of the Business, Innovation and Skills Committee with businesses ranging from a boat building firm in Cornwall to black country manufacturing small and medium-sized enterprises. The hon. Member for Halesowen and Rowley Regis (James Morris) mentioned an apprentice in the black country. I am pleased about that, but I had a conversation with a representative of the Black Country chamber of commerce this morning who tells me that apprenticeships are not happening. All the evidence suggests that the Government have not yet cracked the problem.

[Gordon Birtwistle (Burnley) (LD)]

My hon. Friend the Member for Eastbourne (Stephen Lloyd) and I have held meetings with local industrialists in our constituencies and challenged them to take on 100 apprentices in 100 days, working with the Government’s apprenticeships scheme. He has succeeded in Eastbourne and I have succeeded in Burnley. Has the hon. Gentleman taken on that challenge, and does he understand that if every Member did so, 60,000 more apprentices would be employed across the country? What effort has he made to raise the number of apprenticeships in his constituency?

[Mr Bailey]

I congratulate the hon. Gentleman on that. I cannot comment on his constituency, but I am told that the problem in mine is that there are not enough young people aged 16 to 18 with adequate national vocational qualifications to be accepted by local companies. As representatives of our areas we need to play a role in changing that, but with the greatest respect, that will not be done by setting targets—it is interesting that those Members seem suddenly to have adopted the principle of targets—over a short period of time.

[Jeremy Corbyn]

I am glad that my hon. Friend has come on to this point. Does he share my concern that too many colleges are closing high-skill courses in carpentry, engineering and electronics in favour of others, which means that the whole industrial base of this country is declining rapidly? Intervention at college and school level is essential if we are to get the number of apprenticeships rising.

[Mr Bailey]

My hon. Friend makes a valuable point, and that is certainly a complaint I hear from local manufacturers. I would hope that the new local enterprise partnerships could address that by involving businessmen and further education provides in policy development, but we are yet to see any benefit.

My great concern, which has been reflected in some of the comments made so far, is that the new higher education funding regime will impact on the apprenticeships market. There undoubtedly appear to be real concerns among young people about the financial consequences of going to university and, as a result, they are looking for alternative routes by which to obtain qualifications. That is not wrong in itself, as vocational qualifications could be ideal for them and for the country.

However, I have looked at some figures. Pearson Professional and Vocational Training reckons that 46% of a poll of 1,100 adults and 58% of 16 to 18-year-olds are now more likely to start an apprenticeship than they were before. Analysis shows that the number of internet searches for “apprenticeship vacancies” has increased by 425%, and the website “notgoingtouni” has seen hits soar by 150%. That is not necessarily bad, but it indicates that a cohort of young people who might have gone to university are now looking to take up apprenticeships or go into vocational training. Where will the young people who would otherwise have taken those apprenticeships go? I think that this is very likely to result in a huge surge of NEETs.

That could be combated by reinforcing the policies and structures, some of which were put in place by the Labour Government, intended to overcome young people’s concerns or resistance, and in some cases the cultural obstacles, that prevent them from going to university. The abolition of Aimhigher, which had an enormous effect in areas like my constituency, is a matter of huge concern. The role of encouraging young people from relatively low-income families or deprived backgrounds to go to university has been outsourced. The problems have become much greater and the means for dealing with them have disappeared.

[Margot James]

Aimhigher was not without its merits, but it did not succeed in getting students from lower socio-economic groups into the more selective universities; it succeeded only so far. I also take issue with the question of what help is now going to be provided, because the whole fair access programme, which underpins the rise in tuition fees, will enable many more people from lower socio-economic groups to access university education.

[Mr Bailey]

I agree with one element of the hon. Lady’s point, because the figures for the elite Russell group universities did not increase significantly, but let me give her some UCAS figures. Between 2003 and 2010, the number of disadvantaged people in the west midlands applying to higher education and being accepted rose by 61%, compared with 27% for people from more affluent backgrounds. Certainly within the higher education sector as a whole, there was a big improvement.

I was just coming on to the point about outsourcing and the Office for Fair Access. If OFFA is given the teeth and the funding to clamp down on universities to ensure that, as a result of their being allowed to levy the new increase in tuition fees, they carry out their function successfully, it may work, but the jury is out on that.

I could also talk about the education maintenance allowance, which was referred to earlier, because about 70% of the students in my local college of higher education receive it, but we have yet to see either the fallout from the changes to it or the potential consequences of that for encouraging young people to take up post-16 education.

I am conscious of the time, Mr Deputy Speaker, so I will not go on much longer, but I make the general point that getting young people not only into vocational training but into higher education is a complex and difficult job. What the Government have done with their cuts is to remove the infrastructure needed to encourage, and to provide the right backing for, young people in order to change the fears and attitudes that have prevented them from going into training and higher education.

We do not yet know the full consequences, but I certainly have great fears that the consequences in the 1980s—with the withdrawal of jobs, education and training from so many young people—will be lived out now. I very much fear that we could recreate the vicious cycle of intergenerational deprivation and marginality which has caused so many social problems, and which in retrospect proves so difficult to counter.

I therefore support the motion and welcome the opportunity to make these points. In the new year, my Select Committee will look at apprenticeships and, I hope, secure a more in-depth analysis of what is happening and of what the Government should do.

[Several hon. Members]

rose—

[Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Nigel Evans)]

Order. If everybody takes 14 minutes, it means that well under half the people present are going to participate, so I implore hon. Members to take note of the six-minute guidance.

16:58

[Esther McVey (Wirral West) (Con)]

When I became a Member, I said that one of the biggest issues facing the coalition Government was the number of young people not in work, education or training. The figure stands at almost 1 million, and in some areas of the north-west it is one in four, which equates to a huge amount of young people, with a significant amount of energy and ideology, who might not be able to do anything with their lives. Youth unemployment increased by 40% under Labour, and the number of people not working, in education or in employment rose between 2000 and 2008 under Labour, while in the rest of the world it fell. Those are the figures and that is the reality of the situation. Compounded with that, we have a global financial disaster. In addition, Labour left the country with the largest deficit in the developed world, with a rising structural deficit for the seven years before the recession.

However, I do believe that Members in all parts of the House entirely believe that opportunities for the next generation are vital. There are a couple of things that we have to do. We must learn to live within our means and learn to get the deficit down so that we do not pass on more debt to future generations and so that we do not always have to say no. When we have the money, we will be able to say yes.

[Debbie Abrahams (Oldham East and Saddleworth) (Lab)]

May I remind the hon. Lady that the UK had the second lowest debt in the G7 in 2007 and only slightly worsened its position when it was recovering in 2009? I would suggest that the flatlining of the economy due to this Government’s lack of economic policy is contributing to the poor state of affairs.

[Esther McVey]

I hear what the hon. Lady says, but I hope she recognises that we are paying £120 million per day on interest payments alone—not a healthy bank balance if it were mine, not that it ever would be.

One of the key things we have to do is focus on what resources we have. There must be a fundamental mind shift on what we are going to do genuinely to help young people, with honesty, truthfulness, and no false hopes or expectations being created. The Opposition are saying, “Too far, too fast”, but I would say to them, “You did too little, too late. You took your eye off the ball locally, nationally and globally, and the disconnect between the youth and what business wants expanded.”

Let me substantiate those comments. Before I came into Parliament, I set up and ran the biggest business women’s network in the north-west, with 9,000 women members. I am honorary president of WIN—Wirral Investment Network—which is for businesses in Wirral. For 10 years, I worked with school children across all platforms and all backgrounds, and wondered what their hopes and aspirations were. We believe in creating opportunities, but the question is how we are going to get there and achieve that. I spent the past three years interviewing the world’s top 100 women from top backgrounds. I asked them, “What did you manage to do and how did you manage to achieve it? What differentiated you from other people?” In helping me with those interviews, they too wanted to help the next generation of young girls in particular.

[Lilian Greenwood (Nottingham South) (Lab)]

Last week, my daughter, who is 14 years old and has just gone into year 10, came back from her school and told me that this year it no longer had the funding to arrange work experience for her and her classmates. How is that going to increase opportunities for young women?

[Esther McVey]

I find that hard to believe. I am not sure how that has happened, because under the Department for Work and Pensions we are building and taking forward the biggest programme of work experience and voluntary work.

I asked the women what they had that other people did not have, and they said that in life the great equaliser has to be character and personality traits that will lead to success in individuals, irrespective of their background, connections and schooling. They said that those key things have to come from teaching, at a young age and throughout life, determination, ambition, team playing, trustworthiness, focus, working together, and the realities of life, and that that would be the great equaliser whether someone was the daughter of a baron or a baker.

That is what I want to work on with the Government. I welcome the new university technical colleges that want to expand education and ability—hands-on and mental—and will work with kids who want to do engineering and technical jobs. In Wirral, we are hoping to get one of those for the chemical industries and the built environment. I welcome the notion of free schools and academies that will open up environments and different ways of looking at things that possibly were not there before. I welcome the introduction of the pupil premium worth £430 for every pupil on free school meals. I also welcome the national scholarship programme to help the poorest students. We are also planning 250,000 more apprenticeships than were planned under Labour, which is the biggest ever boost to apprenticeships.

Under Labour—this might be difficult for the Opposition to hear—the gap between the relative chances of poor and rich students to go to university widened, the attainment gap between those at private and comprehensive schools doubled, and in places like Wirral the wealth gap doubled. The life expectancy differential between rich and poor men is now 15 years on the Wirral peninsula. I know that we are all hoping to come together to look at opportunities for the next generation, but we have to live within our means, see what we have got, and have a fundamental mind shift to what businesses want.

I am engaging with the National Youth Theatre, which works with kids from all backgrounds to help them with their dreams, aims and aspirations, and to give them the realities of ambition, hope and desire. In every theatre production, we are saying to 1,000 kids, “You can do it, but life will be tough and it isn’t easy.”

I will finish by mentioning the country’s first ever female to set up a public limited company, Debbie Moore of Pineapple Dance Studios, who has said that “nothing good comes easy”, but that opportunities are out there for everyone, and that in times of economic hardship opportunities are still out there, but it might just be a little tougher.

The Opposition motion is flawed, inaccurate and misleading. For that reason, it needs to be opposed.

17:06

[Pat Glass (North West Durham) (Lab)]

I will focus on the reality of Government policies on the lives of our young people. The Chancellor tells us that unemployment has not increased since the 2010 election. In my constituency unemployment has doubled, and the number of young people who are unemployed has risen by 28%. The hon. Member for Stourbridge (Margot James), who is no longer in her place, told us that the Opposition were encouraging a culture of victimhood among young people. However, citing the 28% increase in youth unemployment in my constituency is not shroud waving; those are real young victims with real young lives that are being wasted.

The Government talk about social mobility, narrowing the attainment gap, and focusing on the vulnerable and those living in deprivation and poverty. In reality, they are presiding over a huge increase in the number of young people not in education, employment or training. They have abolished many of the policies, such as the future jobs fund and the education maintenance allowance, that had a positive impact. Although the Government say nice warm words about social mobility and narrowing the attainment gap, their policies appear to be designed directly to exclude, rather than include, these young people.

The number of young people not in education, employment or training increased by 54,000 in the last quarter of last year. That is an additional 54,000 wasted young lives. Anybody who has worked with these young people sees them not as numbers but as wasted young lives. When the figures are broken down, it is clear that the biggest proportion is made up of young people who would be classified as vulnerable, such as those with special educational needs and those living in poverty. We have not seen this level of wasted young lives, or witnessed such indifference to such a tragedy from a Government, since the 1980s.

I accept that having people who are not in education, employment or training is nothing new. We had them at the time of the last Labour Government. The difference is that we did something about it. We did not sit back complacently and just let it happen. In the period between its implementation in 2009 and its abolition in 2010, the future jobs fund reduced the NEET figure by more than 200,000—that is nearly a quarter of a million young people who were given hope and the possibility of a future.

The Government’s response to all this wasted youth and potential is apprenticeships. However, what they say and what they do are two very different things. They have scrapped the guarantee of an apprenticeship for every 16 to 18-year-old who wants one. They are manipulating the figures on apprenticeships by claiming that apprenticeships for those aged 25 and over have increased by 234%.

The Minister for Universities and Science earlier accused Labour of spinning statistics, and tried to give us a lesson on it, but this is an example of high-grade spinning: the Government have rebadged Train to Gain—in-work training for older people—as “apprenticeships”. The economy needs more proper apprenticeships for young people, not short-term courses designed for older workers simply rebranded as apprenticeships. Older workers deserve better than to be pushed on to courses that do nothing for them, but are cheap for the Government to run.

On education maintenance allowance, I have worked for many years wrestling with the dilemma of improving outcomes for poorer and more vulnerable pupils, narrowing the gap between the most advantaged and the most disadvantaged, and improving participation in further and higher education. In my view, the introduction of EMA had a greater impact on the delivery of those difficult goals than almost anything else that I have seen, but it was abolished. I think it was abolished because it was a Labour Government policy. If we can find £180 million to spend on an experiment such as university technology colleges, we can find the money for EMA.

EMA was a contract between the Government and the student. Those on EMA had better attendance and attainment than their peers, and we were beginning to make good on some of the seemingly intractable and complex issues in education, such as improving boys’ attainment, narrowing the attainment gap and raising the participation of the poorest.

The Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills keeps telling us—we heard this again today—that the gap between the most advantaged and the most disadvantaged increased under Labour, but the truth is that educational attainment for all children improved under Labour. Attainment outcomes improved more for the most advantaged, but that is because of the complex set of barriers that face the most disadvantaged. Anyone who has ever worked in that field—that probably rules out most of the Government—will say that it is easier to improve outcomes for those who are already advantaged. It is much harder to improve outcomes at the same rate for the more disadvantaged. That takes consistent hard work from teachers, high levels of resources, targeted interventions and, most importantly, commitment by the Government, which is clearly no longer there for those young people.

EMA gave a leg-up to the young people who face the biggest challenges in life. It gave them access to the best courses by providing help with travel costs, books and equipment. It became the silver bullet for many disadvantaged young people. The Secretary of State came to this House and told us repeatedly that students would go to college with or without EMA—presumably on the basis that if he told us often enough, someone, somewhere would believe him—but that is not borne out by the evidence given to the Select Committee on Education, and it is not what I hear from students in my constituency, who have seen a combination of the abolition of EMA and the tripling of tuition fees. Those together have robbed them of their shot at further and higher education. That toxic combination has produced a barrier that they simply cannot get over. That is not good for them or their families, and it is disastrous for the long-term interests of this country.

The Government say that they care about all children, and that they want to improve outcomes for all children, and yet their policies directly contradict that. Their policies are about the fragmentation of the education system in favour of those who are already advantaged. A bit of help from the pupil premium will not bridge that gap.

Government cuts are wiping out youth services across the country. At the same time, the Government are providing resources for the Prime Minister’s flagship national citizens service, which, frankly, will provide an extra six weeks’ holiday for some rich kids, at the expense of desperately needed targeted youth services for others. That favours those who are already advantaged over the disadvantaged.

Government policies and cuts in public expenditure that are effectively wiping out careers advice to school pupils favour the advantaged over the disadvantaged. The well-off can already open doors to opportunities for their children, but disadvantaged young people cannot rely on family connections to open doors for them, or to get them work experience, unpaid internships with foreign banks or similar opportunities.

The Government’s policies are disadvantaging those young people and curtailing social mobility. In the long term that makes poor economic sense. It is time for the Government to rethink their policies on young people, and to start supporting all our young people, not just some of them. It is time they stopped supporting the advantaged over the disadvantaged, and stopped wasting young lives and talents.

17:14

[Mr Robin Walker (Worcester) (Con)]

Today’s debate is on a vital subject, and I have no doubt that opportunities for the next generation are dear to the hearts of every Member. I am sure that we all come to this place motivated to ensure that opportunity is as great as possible, and I have no doubt that Members of all parties are passionate about delivering for the next generation. It is tragic, therefore, that Labour Members can only talk down the opportunities for the next generation, given that their party in government did so much to blight them with debt and economic uncertainty.

[Lyn Brown (West Ham) (Lab)]

Is the hon. Gentleman trying to convince the House that no young person in his constituency has talked to him about the withdrawal of the EMA and its impact on their life?

[Mr Walker]

Absolutely not. I have met young people in my constituency and I have been to my local technical college and explained to my constituents what we are doing to replace it. The people to whom I have spoken have been satisfied with that, however, because they have understood that there will be support in the future.

It is important to consider how to create opportunities. In my maiden speech I noted that some of the steps set out in the Gracious Speech aimed to increase opportunities for young people by supporting businesses that wanted to hire, by increasing the number of apprenticeships and by pursuing vital education reforms. Since then, all three of those themes have been strengthened. In answer to a recent parliamentary question, I discovered that 38 businesses in Worcester—a significantly higher proportion than the average—have successfully registered and benefited from the national insurance holiday scheme to allow them to hire new employees, and earlier this year another parliamentary question revealed that 400 apprenticeships were started between May 2010 and the end of last year. Following the huge success of the 100 in 100 campaign, championed by my excellent local newspaper, the Worcester News, I have no doubt that there will be even more this year.

Apprenticeships are a fantastic pathway to opportunities for young people. I have no compunction about saying that the previous Government were right to start the process of building them up, and I will not pretend that all Conservative Governments in the past have given them the priority that they deserve. However, it is churlish for this Opposition motion to decry the achievements of the Government and the Minister for Further Education, Skills and Lifelong Learning in delivering more. As the Minister for Universities and Science pointed out earlier, the statistics in the motion are based on spin. I welcome the Government’s commitment to fund 360,000 apprenticeships in this financial year alone, and we should all welcome the announcement in this year’s budget of a further 50,000 apprenticeship places and the more recent announcement that the Government are beating their own ambitious targets for apprenticeship starts.

[Lilian Greenwood]

Does the hon. Gentleman not share my concern that even if we do see the apprenticeships that he is talking about, if growth does not return to the economy and if the Government do not do something to stimulate that growth, those people will do their training and then have no jobs to go to?

[Mr Walker]

I totally agree that we need to deliver economic growth. I welcome that intervention, and I will come later to that point and to some of my suggestions for delivering growth.

Just last week the Government announced plans to cut more red tape for apprenticeship providers and businesses. That will be welcomed by businesses in my constituency, which often say that it is fear of the red tape involved that discourages them from supporting the scheme. The hon. Member for West Bromwich West (Mr Bailey) made an important point about how it is a challenge to encourage small businesses to provide apprenticeships. It is a challenge that we must meet, though, and one that I am depressed to see is not mentioned in the Opposition motion. It makes no suggestions for how to deal with red tape.

Businesses in Worcester are taking on apprentices, though—businesses such as Worcester Bosch, Skills for Security, Yamazaki Mazak, Sanctuary Housing, Worcester Community Housing and Tesco. From engineering expertise through to cooking and food safety, retail and administration, young people are learning on the job, and more are doing so as a result of the Government’s determination to strengthen the apprenticeship route. Next Monday I shall host an apprenticeship fair at Worcester’s historic guildhall, to celebrate the successes that have already been achieved and to launch a new challenge for apprenticeship recruitment in the city. It will be aimed specifically at NEETs and will be a celebration of real success and a chance to create new opportunities for the next generation.

It is not through apprenticeships alone, however, that opportunities will be created. Businesses must be supported in hiring and encouraged to invest in their staff and pursue opportunities for growth. Through scrapping Labour’s jobs tax right at the start of this Parliament, the Government did exactly that. Is it enough? Of course we would all like to see more, but is it a step in the right direction? Absolutely it is. We have also supported small business through corporation tax reductions and making the small business rate relief automatic.

We should never underestimate the vital role of SMEs in providing employment and opportunities for young people. The Opposition motion makes little mention of that, but it does mention the regional growth fund, which is already backing opportunity in Worcester through its support for the plans for a Worcester technology park. Once it gets the go-ahead, this project will provide a new home for green technologies in our county and provide thousands of jobs for the next generation. In contrast to the picture of doom and gloom painted by Labour Members, this body, created by the coalition Government, is already providing valuable investment in growth and making a real difference in our communities today.

The Labour party calls for a VAT cut, and for many businesses that might seem like an attractive option, but the best way in which this Government can help business is to provide economic growth and stability. Neither will be possible, however, so long as we labour under a growing deficit and burden of debt.

[Toby Perkins]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

[Mr Walker]

I will not, I am afraid; I have already given way twice.

With their unfunded tax cuts, the Opposition have neither a plan nor a blueprint for growth. The coalition Government must do better. We must continue to invest in apprenticeships, and continue to ensure that a world-class higher and further education sector delivers real value and opportunity. Most of all, we must support a business-led recovery.

I would like to see more people taken out of tax, and more businesses participating in schemes such as the national insurance holiday, apprenticeships and business rate discounts. I would like to see a reform of the business rates system, to give local councils more power to provide targeted discounts and to replace the antiquated valuation system. I would also like to see a real focus on the skills needed for the next generation—but today’s negative and dispiriting Opposition motion provides none of those things. I urge the Minister, in dismissing this dismal motion, to show that the coalition Government are continuing as they started out, by supporting skills, backing business and opening opportunity for the next generation.

17:21

[Chris Evans (Islwyn) (Lab/Co-op)]

I congratulate the hon. Member for Worcester (Mr Walker) on manfully standing up and giving us the Tory mantra. Looking across at the Government Benches, I feel sorry for him, however. It is a pity that Government Members could not be bothered to turn up to listen to his speech. Look how empty those Benches are. They should be disgusted with themselves. How many Liberal Democrats can we count? One, two, three—I cannot see any more.

[Sajid Javid (Bromsgrove) (Con)]

Look behind you!

[Chris Evans]

Has Christmas come early? Is this the pantomime season?

I come to this debate remembering the experience of the 1980s. We cannot talk about opportunities for the future without thinking about that period. I grew up in the south Wales valleys, and I remember the headmaster saying to us on our first day at school, “Some of you will bring joy to the school. A tiny minority of you will make us proud and you will go to university. An even smaller minority will get into trouble with the police and bring shame on the school. The vast majority of you are only good for factory fodder, and until that time comes, we are going to make this the happiest period of your lives.” [Laughter.] We can laugh at that, and we can look back and mock it, but he was putting across the poverty of ambition that we felt. We felt ignored by the Tory Government; we did not fit in with Thatcher’s economic miracle. We simply wanted one thing. Well, we wanted a few things, actually. We wanted to feel safe in our own homes, we wanted to feel secure in our jobs, and we wanted hope for the future.

But, as we have heard today from the Opposition Benches, there is no hope for the future. Education maintenance allowance has gone and tuition fees have trebled, but what do we hear from the Minister? “We can’t do anything different. It’s the deficit. It’s the only way.” I congratulate the Whips, because that is all I have heard since I came into the House: “It’s the only way; it’s the only way.” Well, if the Minister wants to find a different way, I suggest that he phone the Welsh Assembly and make an appointment with the Education Minister there, Leighton Andrews. He should then jump on the tube, go to Paddington, take the train to Cardiff and go and speak to him. He will hear how our students in Wales are paying only £3,000 in tuition fees, and how we have managed to keep the education maintenance allowance. Then let him come back here and say, “It’s the only way.” In Wales we have a Labour Government. In Wales we are delivering for young people. That is the truth.

I have been hearing about the wonderful idea of apprenticeships, but there is also a huge problem with them. I pay tribute to the companies in my constituency, including Axiom, Abingdon Carpets and Pensord, that are offering wonderful apprenticeships; those schemes will build for the future. They face a problem, however, and I think that it comes from the 1980s. Many of the candidates do not have the necessary skills, such as timekeeping or communication skills, and that puts them at a disadvantage before they start. We need to look at the education system.

[Justin Tomlinson (North Swindon) (Con)]

I congratulate the hon. Gentleman on his eloquent speech, but will he confirm that those very same potential apprentices were educated under a Labour Government?

[Chris Evans]

The apprenticeship scheme was during the Labour Government, and we have a Labour Government in Wales. It is devolved. [Interruption.] Will the hon. Gentleman repeat his question?

[Justin Tomlinson]

Is it not the case that those potential apprentices who do not have the necessary skills were educated under a Labour Government?

[Chris Evans]

I apologise for not having caught part of the hon. Gentleman’s question. The point I am getting at is that this problem has come down through the years. Sometimes the problems have not been addressed by any Government. As my hon. Friend the Member for West Bromwich West (Mr Bailey), who is no longer in his place, said, because of the decline of the manufacturing base, a number of families had no jobs and were on benefits, as there was a benefit culture there. That permeated through the education system. We need to take action now to ensure that when apprenticeships are available, those people can go for them.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills (Mr Edward Davey)]

The hon. Gentleman is making an important point, which is why the Government have introduced the access to apprenticeship schemes—to tackle that very problem.

[Chris Evans]

I agree with that, but I am saying that it needs to go much deeper. I was talking today to a friend, Andrew Whitcombe, who is the director of skills and business development at a local college. He told me that those schemes were fine, but that more needed to be done within the education system; some sort of driving licence was needed.

[Lyn Brown]

Does my hon. Friend agree that the biggest problem with this Government is that they take an awful lot with one hand, and give back a few pebbles with the other hand, to the people we represent? The biggest problem young people have had to face in trying to fulfil their aspirations in my constituency is the removal of their education maintenance allowance, which is not being replaced by anything of equal value. The replacement is certainly not going to provide for as many people in my constituency as EMA did. Although Conservative Members can talk about their grandiose schemes, they are not replacing what they have taken away—

[Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Nigel Evans)]

Order. Will the hon. Lady face the Chair so that the microphones can pick up her words?

[Chris Evans]

That is the point I was trying to make. We in Wales have realised the importance of EMA, which is why we have kept it. Why have we been able to keep it? Because we have a Labour Government.

To pay off the deficit—yes, we do need enterprise and we do not want inertia, but there is a problem with the Government’s belief that people can somehow go into a shop, see some sort of product on the shelves, drink it and then all of a sudden become entrepreneurs. What we need is a fundamental overhaul of how we look at our education system. We need to make work part of our education from day to day; we need to talk about self-image and communication skills, and above all, we need to talk to people about entrepreneurship. That is the only way forward for us.

To return to the motion, I do believe we need an economic stimulus, and that could come about through a VAT cut—but we also need to look at fundamental problems in our society and try to address them.

I have kept my points short, Mr Deputy Speaker, and have spoken for only six minutes. I hope that you will remember that in future when I want to speak again.

[Several hon. Members]

rose—

[Mr Deputy Speaker]

Order. To make sure that everyone follows the hon. Gentleman’s excellent example, I am now going to introduce a six-minute limit so that all Back Benchers are protected.

17:24

[Lorely Burt (Solihull) (LD)]

I am speaking not just as a member of this coalition Government but, like the hon. Member for West Bromwich West (Mr Bailey), as a west midlands MP. In the west midlands, we have a youth unemployment rate of 9.6%, which is 2% higher than the UK average. There is nothing I would like more than to see young people given the opportunities that they need, but this is not a new problem. Youth unemployment in the west midlands has been running at about 2% higher than the national average since mid-2008, but is this motion the right way to deal with it?

I would say that the Opposition have failed because, once again, they have not faced up to the realities of the situation. The Government are taking the tough action needed to reduce the deficit—a deficit left to us by the Labour party. It is in that context that we have to view the motion before us.

[Debbie Abrahams]

Will the hon. Lady give way?

[Lorely Burt]

I have a six-minute limit, I am sorry.

[Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Nigel Evans)]

The usual injury time will apply.

[Lorely Burt]

In that case, I will give way.

[Debbie Abrahams]

Is the hon. Lady aware that debts in the City of London in 2009 stood at 245% of gross domestic product in comparison with a public sector debt of 60%. Is it not about time that the Government acknowledged that point and made sure that they targeted their action where it belongs?

[Lorely Burt]

I do not think that debt is a good thing. As has been mentioned, we are spending £120 million a day paying off our debts, which means that the money cannot be used for all the things that hon. Members would like to spend it on.

It is well known that Labour’s plans for the economy would have cut £7 for every £8 that the Government are cutting.

[Toby Perkins]

Will the hon. Lady give way?

[Lorely Burt]

No.

The difference, other than the £1, is that the Labour party has not had the decency to tell us where it would cut that from. The Opposition claim that it is this difference that has resulted in the number of people not in education, employment or training reaching 1 million. That is the first of many interesting recollections in the motion, so let me highlight a few stark facts: in May 1997, there were 664,000 unemployed 16 to 24-year-olds in the UK, but in May 2010 there were 924,000. After 13 years in government, the Labour party left youth unemployment 40% higher than when it took office; it was Labour Members who took us to that level.

What are the Government going to do about that? We have rolled out the Work programme across the UK. It provides flexible and tailored support that will be of real benefit to our young people, unlike many of the unsuccessful schemes operated by the previous Government. We are yet to see the initial results of the Work programme, but I am confident that it will prove more successful than the future jobs fund, which was heavily reliant on the public sector and provided little more than a smokescreen for the increasingly poor youth unemployment record. In Birmingham, 2,500 positions were created under the future jobs fund, only 50 of which were in the private sector, and evidence shows that 50% of the people who took up a placement were back on jobseeker’s allowance when their placement ended. So that is not a programme that can be deemed a success.

The motion condemns this Government for leaving 100,000 people without a university place. Labour’s collective amnesia appears to have struck again. The shadow Secretary of State seems to have forgotten that in 2009, when he was universities Minister, he imposed a strict cap on places, which led to 130,000 people missing out. In 2010, the situation got worse, because 150,000 people missed out on a place. The Labour party focused so much on the 50% target it had set that it forgot the minor detail of how it was going to pay for it. Government Members will take no lectures on universities from Labour Members, especially as the intense focus they put on universities left other routes of education for our young people neglected.

The Government have sought to rebalance that equation. We have increased the number of apprenticeships by 100,000, smashing even our own targets. These apprenticeships will provide skills and training that will allow people to progress into the job market. Not only that, they will offer more flexibility than the traditional route of education, allowing people to decide what is best for them, rather than being subjected to the conveyor-belt style of the previous Government.

The motion also, bizarrely, highlights house building and claims that the Government are responsible for the current slow-down. House building under Labour fell to its lowest level since 1946. It got so bad that Labour’s housing Minister advised our young people that it was, “Time to give up the dream of home ownership.” What kind of message is that for young people? What kind of message does it send after 13 years in government? This Government are building 170,000 affordable homes over the lifetime of this Parliament. We have established the new homes bonus and the FirstBuy scheme, and we are bringing back into use many of the 300,000 empty homes in the UK. We are taking action to help young people on to the property ladder—where the previous Government failed.

The Government have also set up the regional growth fund to boost businesses outside the south-east, and I note from the motion the Opposition’s tacit approval for the scheme. They call for more money to be spent. We, too, would like to invest more money but, as the right hon. Member for Birmingham, Hodge Hill (Mr Byrne) admitted, there was “no money left”. At the same time as making spending commitments and opposing deficit reduction, they have called on us to cut VAT. Cutting VAT to 17.5% would require £13 billion more of spending cuts and I would be very interested to know where hon. Members feel that should come from. All that the Opposition offer to pay for new homes, increased regional funding, VAT cuts and a new youth jobs fund is a bankers’ bonus tax that raises less than our bank levy and failed last time. It is economic nonsense.

This debate is about chances for our young people. We do nothing to help their chances if we do not take the difficult decisions necessary to reduce the deficit. We are investing in apprenticeships, building new homes, getting people into work and securing the long-term future of the economy. That is what this Government are doing.

17:35

[Catherine McKinnell (Newcastle upon Tyne North) (Lab)]

There is no doubt that this is a worrying time for this and the next generation of young people. That is not just my view but that of those who see first hand the damage being done to opportunities for young people, particularly across Newcastle and the north-east.

The abolition of Labour’s education maintenance allowance came as a serious blow to thousands of young people across the north-east, yet organisations have stepped into the breach. Newcastle city council, now safely back in Labour hands, was not prepared to stand back and abandon Newcastle’s generation of young people and therefore established a new 16-to-19 bursary scheme that is helping young people who face financial hardship to stay in full-time education.

The decision to end the highly regarded Aimhigher programme recently came in for strong criticism from regional universities, which fear that greater barriers to social mobility in deprived areas will be the result. Despite what the hon. Member for Solihull (Lorely Burt) has just said, I have yet to find any support for the scrapping of Labour’s future jobs fund, which helped more than 5,000 young people get a foot on the job ladder in the north-east alone, not to mention the coalition’s decision to allow universities to charge students up to £9,000 per year, with the maximum fee looking likely to be the norm, not the exception, despite the promises of Ministers.

That all adds up to a total lack of Government strategy to support young people at a time when youth unemployment has hit record levels. Some 949,000 16 to 24-year olds—more than one in five across the country—are now out of work. Over the past 12 months the north-east has seen an 18% rise in the number of jobseeker’s allowance claimants, one of the highest increases in any region by some margin. For me—and for many, I am sure—that is very alarming.

Since I was first elected to this House, I have been a passionate advocate of apprenticeships and the important role that they can play in supporting young people into the workplace. To give him his due, the Minister for Further Education, Skills and Lifelong Learning shares my passion. Indeed, I welcome his commitment to expanding the number of apprenticeship places and to building on Labour’s excellent work in government. I am seriously concerned, however, that the figures on apprenticeship places are possibly being fudged, with the number of places increasing by 234% in the past nine months, which is largely attributable to Train to Gain being rebadged.

I also believe that we need to look very carefully at the quality and types of apprenticeships that are being created because we need to ensure that they genuinely meet the needs of current and future employers and match the skills that we need for Britain’s future economy. How will the Government ensure that new apprenticeship places are additional to any new jobs created? It is no good converting existing jobs into apprenticeships just to say that a target has been reached; we need to offer genuine opportunities to young people and provide genuine support for businesses so that they embrace the apprenticeship model. Despite many local employers taking up the apprenticeship agenda with gusto, many still do not appreciate the benefits that taking on an apprentice can have for their organisation. Indeed, that concern is borne out by a recent north-east chamber of commerce report that found that companies wrongly believe that taking on an apprentice is “too expensive”, or that apprenticeships are available only in a very narrow range of sectors.

[Caroline Dinenage (Gosport) (Con)]

Does the hon. Lady agree that the emphasis that the Government have put on apprenticeships has been fantastic PR in the sense that people who would not previously have thought of offering them now do so? I met a chap in my constituency the other day who is a carpet cleaner and who, purely because of the Government’s emphasis on apprenticeships, suddenly had the idea of offering an apprenticeship to kids from the hardest-hit areas of my constituency. That move has been a huge success and can be credited solely to the emphasis that the Government have put on apprenticeships.

[Catherine McKinnell]

I agree that apprenticeships need a sales job to be done on them, but there is a greater need for real action that meets the needs of businesses and the economy, and I am worried that the Government’s approach is just a PR job and does not have much substance. Having met a number of apprentices from across Newcastle who work in catering, construction and as motor technician apprentices, I have seen how beneficial they can be to businesses. I have a business apprentice in my constituency office in Lemington, who just turned 18 last week and who is genuinely invaluable to my office. I encourage all hon. Members to take on an apprentice in their office and lead the way.

Clearly, the coalition needs to do more. In these straitened economic times, the Government should use every lever in their power to increase the opportunities available to young people. They should lead the way and they could make a huge difference by using public procurement to achieve social and economic ends. They spend £220 billion a year purchasing goods and services from the private sector—from business support services to new schools and hospitals to new trains. They are the top single contractor in the UK. I introduced my Apprenticeships and Skills (Public Procurement Contracts) Bill, which is due to have its Second Reading shortly, so that all companies that win major public sector contracts give a firm commitment to create apprenticeships as part of that bid.

I am delighted that my proposal has been adopted as Labour party policy, but I am disappointed that it has received only warms words from the Minister for Further Education, Skills and Lifelong Learning. As I have said, this is not the time for warm words—it is the time for action. It is hugely disappointing that the Minister for the Cabinet Office has repeatedly rejected the idea, stating that using public procurement policy

“to stimulate the creation of more apprentices...wouldn’t be appropriate”.

I ask, “Why?” If getting the cheapest price for a contract results in long-term costs and missed opportunities for young people and for the creation of our future skills base, that is short-termism at its worst and is an irresponsible way of spending taxpayers’ money. That attitude is even more disappointing because the policy has the backing of many people and major organisations, including the Federation of Small Businesses, chambers of commerce, the Association of Colleges, many unions, the Federation of Master Builders, the Electrical Contractors Association and indeed Lord Sugar.

I urge all right hon. and hon. Members to lend their support to today’s Opposition motion, because we simply cannot take the risk of creating another lost generation of young people. We have the tools to make a difference and we have the spending power of public procurement—let us use them.

17:43

[Justin Tomlinson (North Swindon) (Con)]

Given the time constraints I shall cover a number of topics swiftly and litter them with personal requests in the hope that the Minister will agree to every one of those requests. First, on apprentices, about which several Members have made some excellent points, I welcome the increase in numbers both for young people and for adults as I am a huge fan of apprenticeships. As a Member of Parliament I have taken on an apprentice in my constituency office, and in my former role as a business owner I also took on an apprentice, who has gone on to have a good career.

In my constituency, we have launched a scheme with a number of local businesses called plan 500, which has sought to increase the number of opportunities for work experience and apprenticeships. I am such a huge fan of apprenticeships because they help businesses by giving them an opportunity to train and shape apprentices to their organisation’s needs. They are an affordable step for businesses that are looking to progress and they provide an excellent opportunity for those who participate in apprenticeships, often giving them far better career opportunities than traditional university graduate schemes. Having talked to local businesses and business forums in my constituency, I know that they are extremely supportive of apprenticeships.

My hon. Friend the Member for Gosport (Caroline Dinenage) made a point about the need to improve the perception of apprenticeships, which has continued to improve over a number of years, and rightly so. One problem is that many businesses still do not understand how easy it is to employ an apprentice or what it entails. I have mentioned this in several debates, and I shall repeat it because it is still an excellent point. All businesses receive a business rate mailer, and I call on the Government to include in it information on how to take on apprentices; it would lead to the creation of further opportunities for young people.

We should do all we can to encourage the next generation of entrepreneurs. Talking to young people, it becomes clear that they love, and are inspired by, “The Apprentice” and “Dragon’s Den.” To make a sweeping generalisation, young people have enthusiasm, drive and cheek. These are all essential ingredients needed to innovate and challenge the norm, especially in high-tech and traditional industries where new opportunities could be created.

To be proactive, I think we should encourage young enterprise schemes in schools; we should establish the network of 40,000 business mentors; we should support global enterprise week, which for all those with diary open and pen poised is 14 November; and we should tap into inspirational projects, including the excellent work of the Peter Jones Foundation and of the Premier League, which has managed to deliver enterprise activities to more than 115,000 children in just two years. Too often we actually educate people out of entrepreneurial flair. I studied business at university, and only a handful of the 300 in our year went on to set up their own business. My plea is that we just let people get on and be that next generation of business owners.

I am particularly keen to see an expansion in financial education. It is essential that we equip the next generation to understand the increasingly complex financial world, and to have the confidence to be savvy consumers. That will help young people make informed financial decisions; it will help provide them with the confidence to manage their own money; it is good for their CVs, helping improve their likelihood of securing work in a challenging market; and it encourages entrepreneurs. I hope all Members will continue to support our all-party parliamentary group on financial education for young people, which is calling for compulsory financial education in the school system.

On housing and the challenges for young people in becoming first-time buyers, I would like banks to show flexibility rather than sticking to the crude method of “timesing” income by a multiple to determine whether the young person can afford to pay a mortgage. A lot of young people are already demonstrating that they can afford a mortgage by paying rent, which is nearly always more expensive than the current mortgage. I would like banks to look a lot more carefully at the person’s credit history and disposable income to determine whether they can service a mortgage.

On student finance, we have a duty to provide information to allow young people to make the best career choice for their individual circumstances, so I welcome the setting up of an independent taskforce, led by Martin Lewis of moneysavingexpert.com, to provide clear, independent advice covering the good and, crucially, the bad of any changes. For example, the emphasis should be on the question: is university really the right option for an individual? It is good for some people, not so good for others, and we have a duty to ensure that young people make informed decisions to get them their best opportunities in life.

I was going to set out a series of observations on student finances, but I will go straight to my plea that under the new system graduates should be allowed to repay loans early. The reason that we need to do so is set out in Martin Lewis’s “mythbusters” on the seven deadly sins of not allowing early repayment. First, we encourage everyone to try to manage debt responsibly, and the policy flies in the face of that. It is unpopular; in a survey carried out on the website, 87% of people said they wanted to repay early. It penalises people for good financial management and success. For some it will mean that commercial loans are cheaper; student loans will no longer be good debt for them. It pressurises parents into stumping up so that students do not need loans; and higher repayment thresholds mean that people are in debt for longer.

I understand that the policy is being considered because we do not want to disadvantage people from challenging backgrounds; I was one of the people who benefited from a full grant. But although a young person relies on their parents when they go to university, when they graduate their destiny is in their own hands as they secure work, and if a graduate has secured a good job and has disposable income, they should not be penalised with a lifetime of debt. I urge the Government to consider that.

17:48

[Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)]

I am pleased to be called to speak. The first line of the motion before us says that

“this House believes that young people face a more uncertain future”

than

“their parents and their grandparents”

ever did. None of us in the House could argue with that, and it is the premise on which the debate is founded—that things are not as rosy today as they were for us or our parents. I am proud to be a father and grandfather. I am also proud to represent the constituency of Strangford in Northern Ireland. I am conscious of the fact that, when young people come to me, I sometimes see desperation and anxiety about getting employment and trying to do better for themselves, and I ask myself, “How can this happen? How can we help?”

The hon. Member for North West Durham (Pat Glass) gave an indication of the unemployment figures for her area, and the figures for my area do not make good reading either. In July this year, 2,580 people were unemployed in my constituency. That represents 6% of the economically active population—those aged 16 to 64—and places my constituency 219th among United Kingdom constituencies. Yes, it is in the bottom third, but the number of claimants is 250 higher than last year and has increased by almost 80 in the past four months. So a clear trend is starting, and that worries me.

Many of our young people are in this bracket; they are seeking employment, improvement and opportunity. I often see young, highly qualified university graduates applying for jobs in Tesco stores. There is nothing wrong with them doing that, but they are qualified to do better. I am concerned that they are not getting better opportunities. A new Tesco store is opening in my area in October, and some 2,500 people applied for the 160 jobs on offer. There are opportunities coming through, but not enough of them. We need to ensure that opportunities are there for the future, and I believe that the debate shows how we can do that.

I recognise clearly what the Government have done and what they are trying to do, but I suggest that there should be more focus on other methods of doing things. Internships are a route being followed by increasing numbers of graduates. The Government must continue to encourage employers to invest in students and graduates by offering work experience and internships, which help them to develop valuable skills and boost their employment chances.

I welcome the individual commitment by many hon. Members to successful initiatives in their areas—that is good to see—but apprenticeships are an essential mechanism. There must be in place encouragement schemes for employers to keep on their apprentices once they are qualified. In Northern Ireland, where this is a devolved matter, the Department for Employment and Learning has a programme whereby those who hire long-term unemployed people receive a financial incentive for the first few months of the employment. It is my belief that, if we made a similar offer to those who employ people for the first time, more employers would see the benefit of taking on additional employees.

We are all too aware of the financial difficulties that most small and medium businesses face, and it is the duty of the House to understand them, while encouraging sustainable employment. The motion refers to

“a temporary VAT cut to boost consumer spending”.

There is some debate about whether that is a good idea, but I feel that it is. It would boost confidence and lift the economy, and I believe that it is important to do so. I see the benefits of that proposal.

It distresses me to hear that a great many young people are moving abroad. I know people who have moved from my area to Australia, which has a bit of an economic boom, or to New Zealand to get jobs. People who were brought up in my area and have construction skills see opportunities elsewhere and move out of the country to take them.

As has been said, there is another way if we look hard enough. The Northern Ireland Assembly has put a ceiling on tuition fees for students in Northern Ireland. Initiatives can be taken if the willpower is there. I see a major problem in relation to the brain drain. We often think that that happens when people reach a certain age, but I am concerned that we must stop our young people leaving our shores for pastures further away. The skills for life programme and further education have delivered much, but I am concerned—this terminology was used by a previous speaker—about a lost generation. I see a lost generation for my area if we are not careful in how we plan our strategy for the future. The Government are committed to doing better, but we must look at things in a different way. A business constituent has suggested that people could do voluntary community work for a few hours daily to get their benefits. They could then build that up as a CV, as well as helping the constituency.

I also welcome the part of the motion that refers to the bank bonus levy, which would have a financial benefit if we took it upon us. We must look to the future and foster a generation of workers who have had the opportunity to gain expertise and experience from their education. The reality is very different out there, and I urge the House to support the proposal, which was made with the best of intentions. Hon. Members should look on it favourably.

17:54

[John Hemming (Birmingham, Yardley) (LD)]

Sometimes, I think that there is a tendency in politics to focus too much on trying to avoid tripping over the hurdles in front of us. We do not look at the horizon and see where we are going in the long term. Rather than focusing on the minute issues about the immediate policy and the motion—I oppose the motion and support Government policy—I should like to consider the longer-term issues.

It was rather sad to hear the hon. Member for Islwyn (Chris Evans) criticise factory work. For my constituents, we try to maintain work at Jaguar Land Rover. Those skilled jobs give people an opportunity in life. My view of work is that people should work to live, not live to work. If people have skilled jobs or have gone to sixth form or university, they can find a house to live in, bring up a family and go on a few holidays. They have some stability in their lives. That is a positive thing to have, and it should not be downgraded as something that society should not aim to have. The hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon) made the valid point that jobs in Tesco are important. I am pleased that a Tesco will soon open in Yardley and provide people with additional jobs.

Within all this, we need security. Young people need such opportunities in the first instance. Let us put aside party politics for a moment and look at what has happened over the past 20 or 30 years. Technology has improved things in one sense—obviously, we can do a lot more with fewer people—but we do not need so many people to do what we do. The hon. Member for West Bromwich West (Mr Bailey) said that there are perhaps 1 million jobs short in the west midlands. Obviously, some people are now in education who would previously have been in work. Considering 50% growth is a thought experiment; it will not suddenly magic up massive employment. We need to consider what is happening in other countries. Rather than focusing on a relatively small number of people working many hours a week, trying to put everything together so that they can afford to buy a property, perhaps our long-term aim should be that people need not necessarily work so many hours and that the work is shared out.

We have had disadvantages with the benefits system. People have been discouraged from working part time. If they work part time, they do not qualify for benefits such as tax credits and the like. I hope that the universal credit system will enable people to say, “Actually, by balancing out work and life, I don’t necessarily have to work full time.” We could then share out the work and have greater numbers of people contributing to society and fewer people being described as NEETs. I do not like using acronyms to describe people. Perhaps people’s finances might not be so good, but if more people were in work but not necessarily working so many hours, they would have a better quality of life.

[Sheila Gilmore]

If people work fewer than 16 hours, they do not get support from tax credits. Under the universal credit system, a ceiling will be placed on people’s incomes. They will not get out of poverty as a result of those proposals.

[John Hemming]

I am trying to move on from just being party political about the next few minutes’ policies. If we want to design a society—okay, I do not believe in centralised state management—we should consider our objectives. If our society is to be one in which a greater proportion of people participate in its operation, we do not need to discourage people from working only two days a week, which is what the hon. Lady was referring to. That issue needs to be looked at.

We cannot just solve things with economic growth. In practice, there are limits to the resources available for growth. As colleagues might be aware, I chair the all-party group on peak oil and gas. Putting aside climate change, there are constraints on the availability of fossil fuels and limits to the extent to which we can increase consumption. When we look at obesity in society—perhaps I am a good example—we should consider whether we need to increase consumption.

There is a wider view. We need to look critically at what we are doing in the long term. In the short term, we have to deal with the deficit; there is no question about that. If we do not, interest rates will go up, and we will end up in a situation similar to that of Greece, or various other countries that face serious financial problems. However, in the long term, our objective has to be a society in which everybody participates; in which we work to live, rather than live to work; and in which we try to involve everyone. We cannot do it with a command-economy approach, but we need to support people in doing what they can and working part time, rather than penalising them for that.

I think that I have, in less than six minutes, managed to make my point, so I leave the Floor to other hon. Members.

18:00

[Geraint Davies (Swansea West) (Lab/Co-op)]

It is a great pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Birmingham, Yardley (John Hemming), but in general, we have heard a rag-bag of rubbish from Government Members today. Let us think about the big picture: accelerating globalisation; climate change; the ageing of western populations; and the emergence of developing markets, particularly in China and India, that are driving up energy prices, which makes green technologies economical.

In Europe, there is a sovereign debt crisis in the aftermath of a financial crisis, but the UK, after 13 years of Labour Government, is in a pretty strong position. As I pointed out earlier, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Portugal and Spain are in a much worse position than Britain. Why? It is because Labour had created 2 million extra jobs since 1997. Those people are working, paying tax, and making their way.

Of course, we have a deficit, two thirds of which, as the Institute for Fiscal Studies acknowledged, was created by the bankers. The other third was due to the fact that, in the recession, we invested more than we earned, but there is no apology for that. Yesterday, the Government attempted to say, “Oh well, we’ll sort out the banking crisis,” but their remedy would take eight years. They also acknowledged that they would bail out Lehman Brothers and others, so that was no real solution.

The big choice is in deciding what the balance should be between growth and cuts to get the deficit down, and there is also the issue of timing. We have not heard much about what a growth strategy would look like. We have seen what a cuts strategy looks like; we are living that awful nightmare. What we need in a growth strategy is a strategy for indigenous growth, in which we invest in education, skills, apprenticeships, economic clusters, and an entrepreneurial culture; we have heard some reference to that. We need to build up trade links, which have been savaged by the Government’s disinvestment in regional development agencies, which means that UK Trade & Investment cannot market the UK abroad effectively and get companies to invest in Britain. We need to invest in infrastructure and, in particular, in housing, as is mentioned in the motion, to crank up the economy once again.

We need inward investment, resulting from the effective marketing of Britain—something that has been cut to the bone. We need to create economic conditions of stability and certainty, not just in Britain but across Europe and globally, to give business the confidence to invest. We need to spot the obvious fact that the emerging opportunities are in future markets, not least in China and India. What is the verdict on the Government’s efforts so far? Pretty poor, frankly. Small business is starved of cash from banks. The news of massive cuts in public services means that consumers are saving instead of consuming, so companies are not investing in new jobs. In construction, things are almost as dead as a door-nail.

On education and skills, Government Front Benchers deny that it is possible to send students to university for £3,000, yet in Wales that is precisely what is happening. A student from Wales will leave university with a debt of £10,000, but in England, it will be £30,000. If there are three children in a family, that is £100,000 in England, versus £30,000 in Wales.

[John Hemming]

Does the hon. Gentleman accept that Wales gets a lot more money per capita through the Barnett formula?

[Geraint Davies]

That is complete rubbish. The calculation is that Wales is underpaid by £300 million. We started in the same position. This is about economic choices. There are tough choices; the choice in Wales was to cap investment in the health service. It was a tough choice, but the right choice, to invest in skills for the future and productivity to make Wales strong—

[Mr Davey]

rose—

[Geraint Davies]

What the hon. Gentleman is doing is making England weak.

[Mr Davey]

The hon. Gentleman and his colleague from Wales, the hon. Member for Islwyn (Chris Evans), have praised the Welsh Government. Can the hon. Member for Swansea West (Geraint Davies) explain why the average spend per school pupil in Wales is £604 less than in England in 2010-11?

[Geraint Davies]

The average spend in Wales is less, but the reality is that the Welsh Government have given an undertaking to increase that spend year on year. In fact, because the Government are cutting local authority funding by 7% a year for four years, there will be less money for education in England. What there is will be funnelled into middle-class free schools, to the cost of poorer communities. Wales will put a cap on health spending, and more money will go into education. It will have a comprehensive system in which there is more money, instead of cuts, and a system in which people are enabled to go to university. That is investing in the skills of the future.

As I have mentioned, UK Trade & Investment has historically been very effective in promoting inward investment and trade in Britain, but crucially, that relied on regional development agencies, which have been abolished. When I spoke to UKTI in Brussels, Belgium, and in Düsseldorf, the same message came back: German companies would come back with a computer platform, saying, “We want to put a factory somewhere.” Where are the RDAs to draw that down? They have been abolished. Well done, the Tories and the Liberals.

On infrastructure and construction, the Government have abolished the scheme to renew schools, which basically means that construction workers are being laid off. As for future markets, we have to look at companies such as Tata Steel near Swansea, and Airbus in north Wales. Those big consumers of energy are being penalised by the Government and their unilateral carbon pricing. The Government forget that we operate in a European market, and do not understand how the markets work at all. Those companies are part of the solution. Tata Steel has a new generation of steel, with seven layers, that generates its own heat and energy; that reduces the carbon footprint by cladding a building. Airbus has a new generation of planes that use 30% less energy. That is part of the solution, and we should be supporting, not penalising, those big employers and companies.

Let me talk about Swansea. I am proud that people in companies such as Amazon are flying the flag and saying, “Come to Swansea.” We are in the premier league, so we are a global brand. What is stopping us are the Government, who are cutting the coastguard, which undermines confidence in tourism and investment in wind farms offshore, and are stopping the electrification of the railway from Cardiff to Swansea, which would link us to the European network. We just need a helping hand so that we can keep going for success, can build on the intellectual clusters in the two universities in Swansea, can build on our team spirit in marketing Swansea, and can make our contribution to a sustainable, inclusive, growth-focused future for the rest of Britain. There is enormous opportunity for Britain to get up off the floor and fight, but it is being held down by the Tories’ and Liberals’ ineptitude.

18:07

[Robert Halfon (Harlow) (Con)]

This is a very important debate. As I said in my maiden speech,

“In Essex, nearly 4,000 young people are not in employment, education or training, and Harlow is one of the worst-affected towns…If we give young people the necessary skills and training, we give them opportunities and jobs for the future.”—[Official Report, 2 June 2010; Vol. 510, c. 488.]

I went on to say that that is not just about economic efficiency; it is about social justice. That is what the debate is about—real, tangible, long-term opportunities for young people, not false hope, short-term Government programmes, or a revolving door back to benefits.

It is worth looking at the history of the past few years. In 2000, around 600,000 16 to 24-year-olds were not in employment, education or training. By 2010, the number of jobless had doubled to well over 1 million, where it remains today.

[Sheila Gilmore]

If we are to have a history lesson, it is perhaps pertinent to point out that the rate of youth unemployment fell during the first years of the Labour Government. The 2010 figure that all Government Members want to quote with such glee was after the recession. One must look at the whole period, and not simply take the beginning and end point and imply that the Labour Government did nothing to reduce youth unemployment.

[Robert Halfon]

It is interesting to hear that, because youth unemployment rose steadily over the past 10 years.

For those who call for a stimulus at all costs, such as the hon. Member for Swansea West (Geraint Davies), that decade is a warning. Even during a boom, we cannot spend our way to full employment. Other factors must be taken into account. From 2001, we asked teachers to spread themselves too thinly, with too many competing priorities. Maths and English suffered, and in the past 10 years, 500,000 children left primary school unable to read or write, which is shameful.

Our business culture is flawed. In Austria and Germany, for example, one in four businesses offer apprenticeships to young people, but in England it is just one in 10. Twice as many Germans qualify to become apprentices, or gain technical skills, compared with British people. What has gone wrong in the UK for our skills levels to be so low? I accept that the previous Government, as many Opposition Members have said, were concerned about youth unemployment, but far too often the schemes that were introduced in the past 10 years worked like a hamster’s wheel: people were shifted around and around, but they did not get anywhere.

The future jobs fund, which was celebrated by the right hon. Member for Southampton, Itchen (Mr Denham), cost a huge amount—£6,500 per placement. As I said in an intervention, about 50% of people who took part in the scheme went on the dole. I accept that there is genuine concern in all parts of the House about young people, but some of the policies introduced by the previous Government failed to get to grips with the problem, which should have been acknowledged in the Opposition motion.

What is to be done? We must improve our schools, build up vocational education, and encourage the right climate for employers to create jobs. We are already seeing a massive expansion in academies, and free schools and simpler budget lines for colleges have been introduced. All state schools will be assessed on maths and English, and that new focus is yielding results. We must build up vocational education. As has been said, the Government are funding 100,000 sponsored work experience placements for jobless 18 to 21-year olds. All vocational training will be free at the point of access, with costs repayable only when someone earns a decent salary. As has also been said, record numbers of people are signing up for apprenticeships—real apprenticeships—and getting into work.

The flagship, I believe, will be the 24 university technical colleges, which are being driven by Lord Baker and Lord Adonis. Their vision is for new 14-to-19 apprentice schools, which will be led by employers and will be centres of excellence in manufacturing, building and engineering. That will be a conveyor belt to university and high-skilled jobs. The first round of UTCs will be announced this autumn, and Harlow college in my constituency has made a strong bid to be one of the first, specialising in building systems and the new internet media that are helping to grow our economy at the London TechHub. It is shame that the shadow Secretary of State did not mention UTCs and the advantages that they will bring.

As has been said, we must encourage the right climate for employers to create jobs. Like other hon. Members, I have employed an apprentice, and I am recruiting another one at the moment. However, one problem experienced by my apprentice is that universities did not give his NVQ the UCAS points that it deserved. Apprenticeships are much harder in many ways than A-levels, and we should recognise that in the UCAS system. Elsewhere in the Government there are initiatives to create a job-friendly climate, including the Work programme, lower taxes for lower earners, welfare reform, and cuts in small business tax and corporation tax. In the past few months, I have worked with the National Union of Students and major UK firms to launch a new apprentice card, which has received strong support from my hon. Friend the Minister for Further Education, Skills and Lifelong Learning. It will give apprentices the same financial benefits as those for A-level and university students.

I congratulate the hon. Member for Newcastle upon Tyne North (Catherine McKinnell) on her push for apprenticeships in public sector contracts. I urge the Government to implement that proposal, not just nationally but in local councils. I have called for that repeatedly, and I have discussed it with members of Essex council, which is taking a serious look at it.

The number of jobs available has been discussed, and I want to read something from a recent letter sent to me by Monster, the jobs company:

“In order to meet…challenges, we have identified that the problem lies, not with the availability of jobs, but the failure to match jobseekers to job vacancies.”

That is crucial: it is about information and changing the culture so that people know what jobs are available. We must make sure that the National Apprenticeship Service and other schemes work as they should. In the next few weeks, I will launch a parliamentary academy—some hon. Members will have received a letter from me about this—with Martin Bright and his charity New Deal of the Mind.

Youth unemployment is devastating, and if we can improve school and vocational training—

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Dawn Primarolo)]

Order.

[Several hon. Members]

rose—

[Madam Deputy Speaker]

Order. May I ask the remaining six Members who wish to speak—there were only five on my list—to resume their seats while I am speaking? We have to begin the winding-up speeches at 6.40 pm. Six Members stood up to speak, which means about four minutes each. That is the good news. The bad news is that if everyone takes longer than four minutes someone will fall off the end of the speakers list, and I am afraid that I cannot do anything about that.

18:16

[Debbie Abrahams (Oldham East and Saddleworth) (Lab)]

I will be brief, Madam Deputy Speaker.

With a few notable exceptions, it is a shame that hon. Members have tended to conduct the debate on party political grounds. We are discussing the future of our young people, which is much too important for us to take that approach, so I pay tribute to the hon. Members for North Swindon (Justin Tomlinson) and for Harlow (Robert Halfon). I have grave concerns about the Government’s policies, particularly the spending cuts and what they will mean for our young people.

In my constituency, there has been a steady rise in unemployment among 16 to 24-year-olds over the past 18 months. That was not something that happened before the Government took office—there has been a consistent increase in the past 18 months, and I have looked at the figures for other constituencies, too. As for NEET statistics, the figures are reaching 20% in the north-west. In my constituency, there has been a 10% increase in unemployment in the past year. In the 1980s, when I began my working life as a community worker with unemployed young people, I saw that unemployment had a significant impact on them. We must not forget the human costs, and I remember that those young people felt abandoned and separate from a society in which they had no stake.

The hon. Member for Wirral West (Esther McVey) said that opportunity is open to everyone if they can find it. That is not the evidence from the OECD’s recent report, which shows that, of the 30 developed countries, the UK has one of the poorest records for social mobility, along with the US, France and Italy. Using income changes as a proxy measure for social mobility, the OECD found that a hefty wage premium was associated with growing up in a better educated household, with a corresponding penalty for being raised in a less educated family. That was particularly the case in southern European countries and the UK.

In the UK, the OECD found that 50% of the economic advantage that high-earning fathers have over low-earning fathers is passed on to their sons. By contrast, in Australia, Canada and the Nordic countries, less than 20% of the wage advantage is passed on. Analysis undertaken by the London School of Economics showed that the bigger a country’s income differences the lower its social mobility. The American dream, it seems, is just that, as the US has the lowest social mobility, followed by the UK. Again, the Nordic countries are the most socially mobile. We must look at all those factors in our policies to make sure that we live in a country in which our young people can aspire to achieve their ambitions, and in which they believe there is something for them.

Policy reform can and should remove obstacles to intergenerational social mobility and to promoting economic equality of opportunities for all, but unfortunately I see direct parallels with the policies that we endured in the 1980s. The cuts to public spending are ideologically driven, with scant regard for the human costs. The scale and pace of the cuts mean that we risk abandoning yet another generation. We have already heard about the scrapping of education maintenance allowance and the trebling of university fees, but we have not heard mention of the introduction of commercial interest rates on student loans and how that will make such loans even more off-putting for people from low-income backgrounds. In addition, the Government have done away with the future jobs fund and fudged the figures on apprenticeships.

I urge all Members to look closely at opportunities for all our young people and to support the motion.

18:20

[Nic Dakin (Scunthorpe) (Lab)]

When young people in my Scunthorpe constituency express exasperation about how hard it is to get a job and look me in the eye and say they have no future, I feel guilty because it is our responsibility to ensure that young people have hope. It is our responsibility to ensure that our young people have a better future than their parents and their grandparents. Now, thanks to the actions of this Government, that is in jeopardy.

We all have personal experience of how motivating it is for someone to get on to a course or into a job. It is particularly motivating for young people. I know this from my 30 years’ experience in education, most recently as principal of a large open-access sixth-form college. Students would grow in confidence in their first few weeks, encouraged and enthused by teachers and others. They would be amazed at their own abilities. We would unlock their talent and release their potential.

We have all observed, I am sure, how someone loses interest in life, becomes irritable with friends and family and is in danger of sinking into idleness as a result of weeks of worklessness, and how that same person suddenly grows in stature and confidence in their first few weeks of work. Work is transformational for all of us, but particularly for our young people. At the Crosby employment bureau I was privileged to witness first hand the transformational impact of work on youngsters on the future jobs fund. From being listless and desperate, they became focused and enterprising. With the vast majority progressing on to jobs at the end of the programme, this was a real success for individuals and for society.

Figures show that one in four 18 to 24-year-olds are out of work, and that is worst for young men. Those not in education, employment or training were at a record high of 18.4% last quarter. There is a danger of significant lifelong costs of long-term youth unemployment—a generation suffering for the rest of their working lives from poor job prospects, and a return to the economic, personal and community despair of the 1980s.

The ladders of opportunity put in place by the Labour Government are being systematically kicked away by this Government. EMA, the future jobs fund and the September guarantee have all been scrapped, tuition fees have trebled and student numbers have been slashed. Add to this the chaos in the careers service, which is to be debated later, and the dismantling of youth services up and down the land, which is well documented in a Select Committee report, and one wonders why the Government have got it in for young people.

EMA was the most transformational thing I have ever seen in my professional experience. It gave young people hope. It was demonstrably clear from all the evidence that EMA impacted on their attendance, their achievement and their life chances. The fact that it has gone is extremely worrying. Among the colleges in my constituency, John Leggott college last year received £865,000 in EMA. This year it has £130,000 in bursaries. North Lindsey college last year received £1,168,000 in EMA and this year has £187,000 in bursaries. That is a real impact, and it is being felt out there.

I hope the House rallies behind the motion, recognising that although all of us have not always got it right, this is an opportunity to move forward together in line with the interests of our young people.

18:24

[Toby Perkins (Chesterfield) (Lab)]

We can tell that we have a Tory-led Government when we are back here again debating how a whole generation can be looking forward to so challenging a future. I was desperately disappointed by the speech from the universities Minister. He spoke for 28 minutes today and he kept promising that he was going to get on to what he was doing for young people. I heard him say about four times, “I’m about tell you what I’m going to do for young people.” He quoted Lord Mandelson and my right hon. Friend the Member for Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath (Mr Brown), and he tried to sell us his book. Perhaps we need to buy his book to learn what his policies are, but he did not tell us anything about what the Government’s plan is to try to end the record level of youth unemployment.

The Minister told us that apprenticeships were the way forward, but he was already doing that, so there was no reason for any young person listening to the debate to leave with any confidence that we had a Government with a plan that would do something about youth unemployment. Never before have young people in our country been faced with such an economic assault on all sides. The lesson of our history is that when young people start on the dole, they stay on the dole. It is so important that we get them into the right habits of working from the moment they leave school.

We urgently need growth in our economy. The Prime Minister said last week that the country was facing a growth crisis, yet we come to a debate here about the central issue facing our country, and the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats run out of speakers a long time before the end because they have nothing left to say. We have had about five speakers in a row from the Labour Benches because Government Members have given up. They have no idea what to say about this policy area.

We could look at education maintenance allowance, at university tuition fees, as my colleagues have said, or at the Government’s decision to abolish the future jobs fund before they had even assessed its success. What has happened to all those show that we have a Government who are careless of the damage that they are doing to the next generation. Why? Because the young are dispossessed, they are less likely to vote and they pay less in taxes—but times are changing. The student demonstrations showed that young people are being politicised as never before. The number of young people who have been joining the Labour party in Chesterfield, coming forward and wanting to have their voice heard gives me great confidence about what young people will do in future.

We are facing a desperate graduate employment crisis. The public sector is not growing. We have hundreds of social work graduates out of work. It is no accident that we have a huge increase in graduate unemployment at the same time as the public sector cuts. Perhaps that is because the Government have some sort of plan for a private sector-led recovery. However, the private sector recovery is not doing all that well, as we see from examples such as Bombardier, where the Government had an opportunity to safeguard jobs in British industry but decided instead to send those jobs overseas.

In the case of Forgemasters, the Government could have taken a decision that would have put Britain at the forefront of a new industry, but instead they pulled the ladder away. We see what they have done to growth in our economy with the scrapping of the regional development agencies. In Chesterfield, when Auto Windscreens went into liquidation, more than 1,000 employees turned to the Government for help and no help was forthcoming.

The future looks bleak for graduates, but it looks even worse for those who have not had the opportunity to go to university. In the next debate we will consider the dreadful mess in the careers service. At every level we see a Government who are careless about the future for young people and who are setting young people up to fail. If they do not take action soon, there will be a wasted generation.

18:28

[Tom Blenkinsop (Middlesbrough South and East Cleveland) (Lab)]

This debate is about the ability to provide skills, work and disciplined, self-organising working communities. That in turn provides revenue in tax and safeguards pensions, services and social security, on which we all rely to support the next generation.

I draw the attention of the House to a response that I received from the Minister to a written question. I asked him:

“what assessment he has made of the potential effect on youth unemployment of the change in higher education fee arrangements in 2012.”

He replied:

“The change in the fee arrangements enables the Government to continue to finance a high number of places in higher education for students in 2012, and therefore there is expected to be no adverse impact on youth unemployment as a consequence of the change.”—[Official Report, 7 September 2011; Vol. 532, c. 721W.]

The poverty of that response from the Minister is surpassed only by the poverty that the Government’s policy on tuition fees will induce in areas such as mine.

Last week Bill Gross of PIMCO said that the market would look favourably on a change of the Government’s economic plans. That is because the growth forecast has repeatedly been lowered. Inflation today was 4.5% on the consumer prices index, although that is not reflected in pay increases. We have seen an increase in unemployment, massive public sector redundancies and the private sector slowing down and building up for redundancies. In manufacturing and construction purchasing managers’ index figures have declined continuously in the past few months under this Government

Middlesbrough, unfortunately, tops the league in the north-east as the area with the highest youth unemployment, with 31.6% of economically active young workers aged 16 to 24 resident in the borough out of work. It is followed by Redcar and Cleveland, two boroughs that I also represent. Across the UK as a whole, almost one in five economically active young workers aged 16 to 24 are unemployed. Around 949,000 16 to 24-year-olds are out of work, following a rise of 15,000 in the last quarter, which is approaching levels last seen in the 1980s. Overall, unemployment rose by 39,000 in the three quarters to June this year, to top almost 2.5 million. The number of jobless women benefit claimants rose by 15,600 to over half a million, the highest rate since 1996.

What is especially concerning for me, coming from an area where the mass unemployment of men from 1979 onwards led to a cultural phenomenon of long-term family unemployment, is that we are now seeing massive unemployment for women. We have not seen such unemployment rates since 1988. That has a massive cultural impact on constituencies like mine, where we have had fathers, brothers and uncles unemployed, because we will now see mothers, aunties and sisters unemployed for the long term, too, as a direct result of these policies. However, these concerns seem to be falling on deaf ears in the Government. The Office for Budget Responsibility, which was set up by the Government, knows that the Government will have to borrow £46 billion more as a result of their economic policies. That means that 200,000 more people will become unemployed, also as a result of those policies.

I suggest to the Government that their rebalancing of the economy, along with the recovery, seems to be flatlining. The latest survey data from business organisations suggest that the manufacturing revival has run out of momentum. Even as businesses complain about engineering skills shortages, the unemployment rate remains the highest in the north-east, at 10%. The fear is that the skills hoarding that we saw before is not happening. The unfortunate position we are in at the moment is that the same people are now going back on short-term working agreements that they had only recently come out of. We are returning to a period in which the economy could go either way. One suggestion that the Minister might like to make to the Chancellor is to reverse the CFP policy, please look at primary industries, such as the chemical and steel industries, and please do not put manufacturing in jeopardy from foreign competition.

18:32

[Chris Williamson (Derby North) (Lab)]

I want to talk briefly about the promise of Britain and how it applies in Derby, with specific reference to the rail industry. Derby is renowned for its railway heritage. We have been building trains in the city for 180 years, right back to the 19th century, but we are faced with a serious situation in which the rail industry in our country hangs in the balance. The industry has given hope and a good future to young people in the city for countless generations.

Before the general election, Members now sitting on the Government Benches said that they would review all the major rail contracts, so I assume that they looked in detail at the contracts before eventually deciding not to award the vital Thameslink line to Bombardier, which would have provided employment and security for thousands of people in my city, including young people with apprenticeships, and instead awarded it to Siemens, which will build the trains in Germany. It seems to me that Ministers have been very lax in their scrutiny of the tender specifications, because the invitation to tender clearly—

[Robert Halfon (Harlow) (Con)]

On a point of order, Madam Deputy Speaker. I thought that this debate was about opportunities for the next generation, not Bombardier railways.

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Dawn Primarolo)]

Mr Halfon, I think that you will find that that is a matter for me, not you. The hon. Member for Derby North (Chris Williamson) will return to the debate.

[Chris Williamson]

I am trying to make the point that denying Bombardier the opportunity to fulfil this contract denies future generations the opportunity to enjoy long-term employment in the rail industry. This is a serious situation, because we face the prospect of losing the ability to build a train ever again in this country—the country that gave the world the railways. We will never again be able to build a train because of a decision that this Government have taken. The specifications of the invitation to tender were very clear that the successful bidder must have a proven solution. Siemens does not have a proven solution. It does not have a lightweight bogie. The tender goes on to state that it should be deliverable—

[Madam Deputy Speaker]

Order. Mr Williamson, I am sure that you are illustrating a point, as you said, and mean to address the topic of the debate in your short contribution, but it would be good if you talked about that topic, rather than the tender.

[Chris Williamson]

I am, Madam Deputy Speaker. I am merely pointing out that the Government have not fulfilled their obligations and are thereby denying opportunities for apprenticeships for building the lightweight bogies, the carriages that will run on the Thameslink line.

There are opportunities to terminate that contract. I will not go into the detail in case you call me to order, Madam Deputy Speaker, and because I want to finish my contribution shortly. However, I must refer to what the Prime Minister said when he brought his Cabinet to Derby in March. He said:

“The point of the Cabinet today is to ask one fundamental question: what is it that we can do in government to help the economy to rebalance, to grow and for businesses to start up, to invest and employ people?”

I say to the Prime Minister and to the Government that they should honour the commitment he gave to the people of Derby and of this country when he brought his Cabinet there. They should give young people in my city hope for a future in the rail industry, and give our country hope that we can continue to have a rail industry long into the future. If they do not do that, I fear that people in Derby, and across the country, will be denied for ever the opportunity to work building trains in the rail industry.

18:36

[Sheila Gilmore (Edinburgh East) (Lab)]

I shall address first some of the points that the Minister made, yet again, at the outset of the debate, about the inter-generational issue. What he said is a complete red herring. His argument is that the problems that young people face today were caused by the previous generation stealing their children’s future. I declare an interest, as one of the baby boom generation—the younger end of it. I accept that in many ways we are a fortunate generation. We are fortunate because we are the children of the welfare state. We benefited from better education, better housing and better health. We were the children raised on the cod liver oil and that peculiar-tasting orange juice. I do not know how many Members present remember that, but it did us a great deal of good.

Government Members who are so concerned about social mobility should consider that social mobility rose for the generation who entered adulthood in the 1970s precisely because they had those opportunities. If social mobility is held to have stalled in subsequent years, we must look at what was happening when the young people of the first decade of this century were growing up—the 1980s and early 1990s. Social mobility is a long-term matter. This is not about the selfishness of a generation, but about the way that we structure society. If we are to structure society and the economy for future generations, we must put in place the sorts of measures that benefited us.

Housing is extremely important. In Edinburgh, and I suspect in many other parts of the country, the problem is not planning, despite the planning controversy that seems to have engulfed those on the Government Benches. The problem is about money to fund affordable housing. We have outstanding planning consents for buildings that are not being built. We have regeneration schemes that have stalled after demolition has been carried out, because we cannot afford to build. We have a plan for regenerating our entire docklands area. The development framework was developed five years ago, before the recession, for 18,000 homes, but it has stalled.

How do we unlock that? We could do it by making the investment that would allow affordable homes to be built. That would help to resolve the problem of young people being unable to afford housing. It would also create jobs in the private sector, and apprenticeships, which other Members have spoken about. That is very important, and we need to put it in place. That is where the investment should be going. We need to think about that very seriously, because if we do, there will be a future for our children.

18:40

[Mr Gareth Thomas (Harrow West) (Lab/Co-op)]

We have, as ever, had an interesting debate, with the first Back-Bench contribution coming from my hon. Friend the Member for West Bromwich West (Mr Bailey), who rightly raised concerns about young people being deterred from going to university.

My hon. Friends the Members for North West Durham (Pat Glass) and for Scunthorpe (Nic Dakin), in powerful speeches, rightly outlined the huge mistake that the Government have made in axing the education maintenance allowance.

My hon. Friend the Member for Islwyn (Chris Evans) set out the stark difference between a Labour Government in Wales, committed to EMA and keeping tuition fees down, and the Government here in Westminster.

My hon. Friend the Member for Newcastle upon Tyne North (Catherine McKinnell) rightly raised concerns about what axing Aimhigher means for the delivery of better access to university, and again she rightly pressed Ministers to look afresh at the case she has been making for the use of public procurement to drive more apprenticeship places.

My hon. Friends the Members for Swansea West (Geraint Davies) and for Chesterfield (Toby Perkins) highlighted the absence of a clear and coherent growth strategy—a point that my right hon. Friend the Member for Southampton, Itchen (Mr Denham) clearly highlighted in his opening remarks.

My hon. Friend the Member for Oldham East and Saddleworth (Debbie Abrahams) dwelt on concerns about the impact on future social mobility of the measures from the governing parties.

My hon. Friend the Member for Derby North (Chris Williamson) quite rightly exposed the Government’s failures on Bombardier, offering a devastating indictment of the Government’s approach to manufacturing industry and of the future opportunities for young people not only in that business but, as other Members have said, in other firms such as Sheffield Forgemasters.

My hon. Friend the Member for Middlesbrough South and East Cleveland (Tom Blenkinsop raised the fears that young people in his constituency will be deterred from going to university, and he also highlighted the growing concern about rising unemployment among women, particularly in his area.

My hon. Friend the Member for Edinburgh East (Sheila Gilmore) joined in the concern about the impact on future mobility of the Government’s measures, but she also highlighted the need for more social housing funding in her constituency in particular, but also nationally.

We also heard from the hon. Members for Wirral West (Esther McVey), for Worcester (Mr Walker), for Solihull (Lorely Burt), for North Swindon (Justin Tomlinson), for Strangford (Jim Shannon), for Birmingham, Yardley (John Hemming) and for Harlow (Robert Halfon), but, apart from the hon. Member for Harlow, who joined the call from Opposition Members for a far greater effort by the Government to use public procurement to secure still more apprenticeships, we heard little from Government Members, including little sadly from the Minister for Universities and Science, who opened for the Government, that will encourage Britain’s next generation to believe that this Administration are not playing fast and loose with their prospects.

We had no apology for the decision to treble tuition fees, no apology still for axing the future jobs fund; no apology for scrapping education maintenance allowance; no apology for an economic policy that is cutting our deficit too far, too fast; and no apology for its devastating impact on prospects for the next generation.

The Government instead claim that the impact of their deficit reduction plans will be shared, but the truth, as the Institute for Fiscal Studies revealed this week, is very different. It is the next generation in particular who are bearing the brunt of the Government’s misplaced economic plans. When almost 1 million young people are out of work and Government policies are having little or no positive impact, it is surely time for the Government to come up with a plan B. Leaving young people on the dole is a waste not just of talent but of money, because it is pushing up the benefits bill.

One would have hoped that the current generation of Conservatives had learned the lessons of the 1980s. For years back then, even when recessions were officially over, youth unemployment continued to rise, and that is why action is needed now to prevent another lost generation of young people. Thanks to Labour’s youth jobs programme, youth unemployment was falling. Now, with the future jobs fund axed, youth unemployment is rising.

We have also had to listen to the complacent assertion from Conservative and Liberal Democrat Back Benchers that trebling tuition fees will not discourage the brightest and best of the next generation from going to university. Never mind that independent analysts, such as London Economics, advisers to Lord Browne’s inquiry, or the London School of Economics’ centre for the economics of education, both predict that the numbers of those going to university will drop.

[Robert Halfon]

The hon. Gentleman says that youth unemployment was falling under Labour, but Office for National Statistics figures show that from 1997 to 2010 it increased by 39.2%. Will he explain that, please?

[Mr Thomas]

As my right hon. Friend the Member for Southampton, Itchen pointed out in his opening remarks, youth unemployment was actually falling for the vast majority of our period in office. Of course, there was a global recession, and youth unemployment rose during that time, but thanks to Labour’s jobs fund youth unemployment was actually coming down when we left office.

Perhaps we need also to dwell on the quality of the higher education that will be available to young people. Before the summer recess, the Minister for Universities and Science presented a White Paper that could have meant a dynamic future for universities and their students, that could have been the centre of our country’s plans to rebalance the economy and that could have helped to drive the growth of new jobs in the new industries; instead, we had little more than a Coulson-esque smoke and mirrors exercise to try to disguise the coming auction of places to the lowest bidder in order to help close the funding hole that trebling tuition fees has created in the Government’s higher education budget.

[Mr Willetts]

The shadow Minister attacks our higher education policies, but are the Labour Opposition committed to reversing our increase in tuition fees?

[Mr Thomas]

My right hon. Friend the Member for Southampton, Itchen set out in his opening remarks what Labour would have done had we been in office. The Minister will recognise that we have in place a detailed policy review, but there was absolutely no reason why his party needed to cut university funding by as much as it did or needed to see—as a result—university fees rise so much.

Instead, the right hon. Gentleman is taking places from universities with international reputations and seeking to auction them off to the lowest bidder. He makes much of student choice, but it will not be students who decide which universities get extra places in that auction.

The Minister, under pressure back in April, praised London Metropolitan university for keeping its fees below £9,000, but just days after his praise London Met announced that 400 courses were being closed; and in July, Carl Lygo, the chief executive of BPP, one of the new providers that the right hon. Gentleman wants to see do more, said that his institution would be forced to increase staff-student ratios as it expanded. With higher tuition fees on the one hand, and cuts in courses and worse staff-student ratios on the other, this is a Government who clearly think that such measures are a price worth paying.

“And the…financial cost”

—these are not my words, but those of the independent Higher Education Policy Institute—

“to students and taxpayers—is likely to be considerable.”

As the Minister said in his opening remarks, the Secretary of State—in his more saintly past—railed against the levels of personal debt. Now he aspires to huge increases in the levels of debt that students face on graduation. If that were not bad enough, the Higher Education Policy Institute also found in its analysis that

“social mobility is likely to be”

a

“…victim of the Government’s plans, and the new methods of allocating resources and controlling numbers look likely to reinforce…disadvantage rather than remove it.”

The Conservative party is damaging social mobility and entrenching disadvantage. Why, who on earth could have predicted that? Almost 2,000 university nursing places and 4,000 university teacher training places have gone this coming academic year; 10,000 extra student places were axed last year by the former Chief Secretary to the Treasury, the right hon. Member for Yeovil (Mr Laws); and 10,000 extra places are being axed next year. Each one is an opportunity gone for the brightest and best of the next generation to fulfil their hopes and their ambitions.

The apprenticeships guarantee scheme has been axed, EMA has been ended, there is rising homelessness and we have a Government in need of a plan B. They are leaving young people with a more uncertain future than at any time in the recent past.

The Government need a serious strategy for growth; they need a plan B; the motion offers them one, and I commend it to the House.

18:49

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills (Mr Edward Davey)]

I welcome this debate because I believe that all Members of this House came into politics with the intention of trying to ensure that the next generation has greater opportunities than the current generation. It is a debate that we need to take very seriously because there is a real problem in our country, and there has been for many years, regarding opportunities for the most vulnerable and disadvantaged in our society. The UK’s performance in relation to youngsters who have never been in education, employment or training has been lamentable for many years; we have been near the bottom of the OECD table for a very long time. The youngsters who have left school, are not looking for work and are not in training are those we should most worry about because their opportunities are most scarred, and they are out of contact with the many people who could help them. If we do not give opportunities to those groups of young people, the scars will be with them for life, and it will be a big loss to our whole economy and society; we need a national mission to focus on them.

We heard passionate contributions from many Members in all parts of the House. There was a degree of consensus on apprenticeships. The hon. Member for Newcastle upon Tyne North (Catherine McKinnell) and my hon. Friends the Members for Harlow, for Worcester (Mr Walker) and for North Swindon (Justin Tomlinson) talked about the important opportunities provided by the increase in apprenticeships. I was particularly impressed to hear about the apprenticeships fair being organised by my hon. Friend the Member for Worcester and the increase in apprenticeships that my hon. Friends the Members for Burnley (Gordon Birtwistle) and for Eastbourne (Stephen Lloyd) have managed to achieve by working with businesses in their areas.

There was some debate about the numbers involved. This is only the second time that I have been able to address the House on apprenticeships. The first time was towards the beginning of this Government’s time in office, when Labour Front Benchers pressed me on whether our target of 50,000 apprenticeships in our first year would be hit. I was rather nervous about responding to that, and I said that I hoped it would. I could not have told the House then that we would not just hit it but do it twice over, doubling our target with 100,000 new apprenticeships in our first year—a record that we are proud of. There is a lot of enthusiasm among workers and businesses up and down the country for our approach to apprenticeships.

There was also some debate about the quality of apprenticeships—an important issue. We aspire to ensure that the apprenticeship is the gold standard approach to vocational training. We want to ensure that in putting this investment into the apprenticeships scheme, we manage to reshape it. I have talked about the idea of access to apprenticeships to ensure that people who are unable to persuade employers to take them on have the chance to experience that learning. We also want to look at higher apprenticeships.

[Mr Thomas]

If the hon. Gentleman aspires, as he says, to high-quality apprenticeships, why is he part of a Government who have abolished the apprenticeships guarantee?

[Mr Davey]

We are doing a lot better than under the apprenticeships guarantee. The hon. Gentleman should have apologised for his motion, because, as my right hon. Friend the Minister for Universities and Science clearly showed, it does not tell the real story—the success story—about apprenticeships by suggesting that it is a negative story. The truth is that the absolute number of all apprenticeships is up, as is the absolute number of young people on apprenticeships.

I am afraid that there was some misunderstanding of that success story, despite the support for our overall policy. That is not surprising, in a way, because Labour’s record is surprisingly poor in this respect. As my hon. Friends the Members for Wirral West (Esther McVey) and for Solihull (Lorely Burt) said, under Labour youth unemployment increased by 40%, and the number of NEETs increased. One of the most surprising facts is that as the number of NEETs was increasing under the Labour Government, it was falling internationally, so we fell behind Hungary, Greece and the Slovak Republic in what we were doing for the most vulnerable young people in our society. That is not a record for Labour to be proud of.

[Mr Denham]

The hon. Gentleman made a big point about statistics. Does he accept that the size of the cohort of young people rose massively during the years when Labour was in power, and that that is why we are right to say that up until the recession the rate of young people not in education, training or employment fell?

[Mr Davey]

The right hon. Gentleman will not admit that the percentage of unemployed young people increased. That takes account of all the issues that he is trying to wriggle out of.

There were complaints about parts of the coalition’s policies, particularly on education maintenance allowance. We heard impassioned speeches from the hon. Members for North West Durham (Pat Glass) and for Scunthorpe (Nic Dakin); they both have a lot of knowledge in this area and I listened to them intently. The hon. Member for North West Durham said that she was particularly concerned, rightly, about the outcomes of the most disadvantaged. However, she failed to recognise that our reforms—our different approach—to EMA will mean that more resources are targeted at the most disadvantaged. The 12,000 most disadvantaged young people will get up to £1,200 in a bursary that will help them more than EMA managed to do. I am afraid that her criticism ought to be of the Labour Government.

Two of the coalition’s policies that are vital for young people did not receive the attention they deserved. The first of those is a policy that we should celebrate across this House because it was introduced by the previous Government—increasing the participation age in education and training. We had to make a difficult decision during the spending review about whether this Government would be able to find the funds to continue with that policy. It was a real challenge, but we found the money despite the problems. The shadow Secretary of State complains that we have somehow targeted young people in our policies, but nothing could be further from the truth. Despite the financial situation, we are going forward with raising the participation age in education and training to 17 in 2013 and to 18 in 2015. We should be proud of that policy. We have gone further than the previous Government did. We have increased the number of trials to ensure that the roll-out of the policy is more effective, and we have freed up local authorities to come up with new, more imaginative ways to deliver on it. These are the sorts of policies that will bring real opportunities for the most disadvantaged in our society.

Secondly, there are the reforms to vocational education that we plan to take forward following the report by Professor Alison Wolf. She shook up the cosy consensus that was allowed to develop under the previous Government and made it clear that things were not all hunky-dory and that we needed to back apprenticeships, which the Government were doing, but also, crucially, to increase the quality of vocational education and ensure that those on such courses still managed to achieve basic skills in maths and English. This Government will take forward her recommendations because we believe that that will make a real difference.

We have discovered a number of things today. We have discovered that there is agreement across the House that issues of youth unemployment and the need to increase opportunities for young people are a challenge and a problem, and have been for many years, and that many of the Government’s policies, particularly on apprenticeships, are a real way forward in tackling them. We have discovered that things got worse under the Labour Government, particularly for the most disadvantaged young people. We have discovered that, despite the rhetoric of Labour Members, this Government are determined really to do something for young people and to put social mobility at the heart of our plans to succeed where the previous Government failed.

Question put.

18:58

Division 348

Ayes: 234

---

Labour: 216
Democratic Unionist Party: 6
Scottish National Party: 6
Plaid Cymru: 3
Alliance: 1
Independent: 1
Social Democratic & Labour Party: 1

Noes: 297

---

Conservative: 247
Liberal Democrat: 48

Careers Service (Young People)

Tuesday 13th September 2011 Commons Chamber

19:15

[Andy Burnham (Leigh) (Lab)]

I beg to move,

That this House believes that the Government should act urgently to guarantee face-to-face careers advice for all young people in schools.

The motion is in my name and that of my right hon. Friend the Member for Southampton, Itchen (Mr Denham). The House this afternoon debated the challenges facing the coming generation; this evening, it is right to consider how, as a society, we help all young people to face up to those challenges, and how we give them the advice and support that they will need to find their way in a changing and highly competitive world.

It would seem that our debate is well timed. After today’s bombshell from the Boundary Commission, perhaps a few more of us all of a sudden have a keener interest in preserving a good-quality careers service. However, our woes are nothing compared with the dejection, disappointment and sheer hopelessness that many of our young constituents are experiencing. Jobs are getting harder to find, with close to 1 million young people now unemployed. Many are struggling to stay in education or training with the loss of education maintenance allowance and local authority travel grants. For a growing number, university is quite simply no longer seen as a realistic option.

Not surprisingly, some young people are feeling lost and do not know where to turn. Some are able to fall back on strong families and family connections to open doors, but that is not available to all young people. Those who feel lost need good careers and life advice more than ever.

What is the Government’s answer? Having kicked away the ladders of support—the EMA, the future jobs fund and Aimhigher—they are now pulling up the drawbridge, leaving young people alone in the dark to fend for themselves. Let me say at the beginning that this debate is not about preserving the status quo, and nor is it special pleading for the Connexions service. The previous Labour Government commissioned a report that highlighted problems with that service and we accepted that there were areas where it needed to improve. I have not come to the House tonight to say, “Nothing must change.”

The Opposition have previously said that we have no real disagreement with the Government over their vision for an all-age careers service. However, with every day that passes, it becomes less likely that the Government’s vision will ever become a reality, because careers services are disappearing, advisers are being made redundant, and young people are being left in the lurch. Schools are being given the statutory responsibility to provide careers advice, but no money to do so. It is a complete mess. Ministers promised a transition plan months ago, and tonight we ask them this simple question: where is it? They are treating dedicated careers professionals with contempt, and owe them the courtesy of some answers. That is why the Opposition have brought Ministers to the House this evening.

We appreciate why the Minister for Further Education, Skills and Lifelong Learning is not here today—the Opposition wish him well—but why is the Secretary of State for Education not leading this debate for the Government? Where is he? I say this to the Minister of State, Department for Education, the hon. Member for Bognor Regis and Littlehampton (Mr Gibb): what is more important when young people all over the country face the difficulty of finding a job, uncertainty about their futures and worries about the cost of education? What could be more important than the Government ensuring that those young people have access to good advice? Why is the Secretary of State not here to answer those concerns?

[The Minister of State, Department for Education (Mr Nick Gibb)]

My right hon. Friend sends his apologies to the House, but he is meeting 100 outstanding head teachers in Nottingham who have travelled there to meet him to discuss the opening of the first 100 teaching schools. That is why he cannot be here. If it had not been for that, he would have been here.

[Andy Burnham]

I thank the Minister for his reply, but debates in the House used to be more important than that. This is an urgent situation facing the careers service in this country. This is more urgent and it needs to be addressed by the Secretary of State. We need him to provide leadership. Frankly, he has provided none to date on this important issue. On his watch, the careers service in England has gone into meltdown, which is unforgivable considering all the pressures on young people today. He has shown next to no interest in this subject and has his head permanently stuck in an ivory tower. Instead of obsessing about Oxbridge, he needs to start engaging with the real world and the challenges that young people face in trying to get on in life.

[Derek Twigg (Halton) (Lab)]

My right hon. Friend is right to pay tribute to dedicated careers professionals, who do a superb job, but is there not complete confusion over who provides advice to young people and those not in education, employment or training? Also, where has the money gone?

[Andy Burnham]

My hon. Friend asks a good question. In opposition, the Conservative party produced a manifesto for careers that spoke of £200 million being allocated to an all-age careers service. As well as asking this evening where the transition plan has gone, we might pick up the question that my hon. Friend has just asked: where has the money gone? Schools have not been given any extra money to provide a new careers service and to fulfil the statutory responsibility that the Government want to place on them. How can it be right at this time to ask schools to do more and then not give them the money to do the job for young people? It is utterly disgraceful.

[Alok Sharma (Reading West) (Con)]

rose—

[Andy Burnham]

I give way so that the hon. Gentleman can apologise for that.

[Alok Sharma]

I was rather hoping that the right hon. Gentleman would apologise, as his colleague the shadow Chancellor did yesterday, for the mess that the Labour party left this country in. The right hon. Gentleman asked where the money has gone. His Government managed to spend it. As he knows, his colleague, the right hon. Member for Birmingham, Hodge Hill (Mr Byrne), left a note at the Treasury saying, “There is no money left.” There he has his answer. He should talk to his own colleagues, not lecture the rest of us.

[Andy Burnham]

The Conservative party has to change the record. The hon. Gentleman stood for young people’s votes—

[Alok Sharma]

indicated assent.

[Andy Burnham]

He is nodding. He promised them the education maintenance allowance, did he not?

[Alok Sharma]

indicated dissent.

[Andy Burnham]

He saw his Prime Minister make a personal promise to those young people that they would continue to have their EMA. He also stood on a manifesto promising £200 million for an all-age careers service. If he could not deliver those promises, should he not now apologise to the House for seeking the votes of young people in his constituency on a false premise? That speaks for itself.

Our motion is deliberately broad so that we do not get drawn into a debate about the merits of one service versus another. I have said that we are prepared to support the Government in their vision for an all-age careers service. We want to work with the Government to make that service as good as it can be so that it is fit for purpose in these times and for the challenges facing young people. The motion is simple, then, and makes two requests. I might say in passing that it is drawn directly from the report, published in the summer, to the Prime Minister and the Deputy Prime Minister from the advocate for access to education, the right hon. Member for Bermondsey and Old Southwark (Simon Hughes), who I am pleased to see in his place. In fact, the motion repeats the words of his recommendation verbatim. I hope, therefore, that he can support us this evening, given that the motion is his own recommendation—but I know now not to come to any such conclusions where he is concerned.

Our motion makes two simple requests to the House. First, as Members of Parliament standing up for young people in our constituencies, we ask the Government Front-Bench team to get a grip on this mess—[Interruption.]—to stop messing around on their BlackBerrys and to stop going off to attend other events around the country. They need to get a grip on this mess, publish the transition plan, show some leadership for once in their lives and get on with the job of standing up for young people. Secondly, we want the House to send a clear message that we have high expectations of what we expect all young people in this country to get and that we want them to have face-to-face advice.

We hear that the Government want to downgrade the quality of careers advice to a phone or web-based service. The national careers service will be a phone or web-based service! It seems that this cost-cutting drive has been partly driven by the raid on the careers budget, to which my hon. Friend the Member for Halton (Derek Twigg) alluded, which the Government made having been forced to make a partial U-turn over EMA. I want every Member to ask themselves whether they think that a remote and impersonal phone or web service is good enough. Would that be good enough for their own children when they are making life-changing choices and considering their options?

[Mr John Redwood (Wokingham) (Con)]

rose—

[Andy Burnham]

I hope that the right hon. Gentleman can answer that question.

[Mr Redwood]

I have a lot of sympathy with the idea of high-quality careers advice, and I am listening with great interest. However, could the right hon. Gentleman tell us exactly how the Secretary of State could guarantee face-to-face advice and what it might cost?

[Andy Burnham]

The Secretary of State could guarantee it by amending the Education Bill, which is in the House of Lords at the moment—

[Alok Sharma]

What about the cost?

[Andy Burnham]

I will come to that in a moment.

The Secretary of State could guarantee it simply by inserting the words “face-to-face”. Indeed, my hon. Friend the Member for Hartlepool (Mr Wright), the shadow young people’s Minister, introduced such an amendment to the Bill on Report. I find it extraordinary that Government Members can troop through the Lobby to vote against face-to-face advice for young people. [Hon. Members: “And the cost?”] As I said a moment ago, the cost was put forward by the Conservative party. It costed its own all-age—[Interruption.] I am trying to answer the question. The Conservative party promised and costed a fully funded, all-age careers service which maintained those currently employed in the Connexions service. It promised £200 million.

[Nick Boles (Grantham and Stamford) (Con)]

Where has the money gone?

[Andy Burnham]

Exactly, what have the Government done with that money? Where have they spent it? Those are questions for the hon. Gentleman to answer, not me.

[Mr Barry Sheerman (Huddersfield) (Lab/Co-op)]

May I correct my right hon. Friend? Is it not a fact that face-to-face careers advice will be available? It will be available in the public schools, the independent schools and the most elite and privileged schools in the country; it just will not be available to most schools.

[Andy Burnham]

That is the point, is it not? This well-connected Cabinet think that everyone’s lives are like their own and that everyone can just call on a friend, uncle or whoever in a law firm or in the City. Sure, they will open a door—ring them up and they will give the advice. They live in a world, and constituencies sometimes, where that advice is readily available through informal family networks. They probably do not see the need for careers advisers. They have used them themselves, but do not see the need for them. However, there are many young people in the constituencies that we represent who cannot draw on those family networks and connections, who do not have role models to whom they can go and who perhaps have never had family members in the professions. They are the ones who need help to enter these closed worlds run often by a self-perpetuating elite.

[Yasmin Qureshi (Bolton South East) (Lab)]

Is my right hon. Friend getting a bit sick and tired of Government Members talking about money issues, given that they will be wasting £3 billion on an unnecessary reorganisation of the NHS and £100 million on unnecessary unelected police commissioners? If they can find money for that, why can they not find a few hundred million pounds for these services?

[Andy Burnham]

My hon. Friend puts her question very well. The Government have got their priorities completely and utterly wrong. If I were a young person watching these proceedings tonight, I would be asking why since the coalition Government came to power they had singled out young people for this barrage of cuts. Do they think that young people are an easy touch? I do not know, but that is what I would be asking if I were them. I would also be asking what an elected police commissioner was going to do to improve life in the community. Very little, I would suggest. I return to the point that I was making earlier. If Government Members do not think that an impersonal, remote service is good enough for their children, they should not accept such a service for anyone else’s children in their constituency.

[Mr Graham Stuart (Beverley and Holderness) (Con)]

As my right hon. Friend the Member for Wokingham (Mr Redwood) said, everyone in the House would like to see high-quality careers advice, but a little humility might be required all round, not least from representatives of the previous Government, under whom the number of young people not in employment increased in this country despite the fact that it fell in other OECD countries. Furthermore, as their own report showed, at the end of their term in office, the standard of careers advice for young people was palpably poor. Does the shadow Secretary of State agree with the Government’s intention to take the decision making down to school level and let the school decide what is most appropriate? In many cases, that will involve face-to-face advice, although I do share his desire to see greater resources allocated to that.

[Andy Burnham]

I thank the Chair of the Select Committee for his question. He calls for humility, but I acknowledged at the beginning of the debate that we did not get the Connexions service perfect and that we were prepared to work with the Government. I pay tribute to him in leading the Select Committee’s production of a very good report that comes to the right conclusions on this issue. It is possible for schools, with sufficient support, to provide face-to-face advice, although I do not think that he or I would want to go back to the days when the PE teacher or some other member of staff was responsible for giving careers advice and did not do a particularly good job of it. We need independent, good-quality, face-to-face advice.

There is an important point to be made about conflicts of interest. At 16, young people face choices about whether to go on to further education college or sixth-form college, or whether to stay at their school. It is important, in the highly competitive world that the Government are creating, that the careers adviser in the school should not have a vested interest in advising the young person to stay there if that would not be the best option for them. That needs to be thought through, but, without a transition plan, we have no means of judging what will happen. The Government have simply not provided us with any detail.

[Jeremy Corbyn (Islington North) (Lab)]

I agree with what my right hon. Friend is saying. Is he aware that a generation of young people will get no support or advice this year or next year? In particular, children whose parents’ first language is not English have no opportunity to talk to them about their options. What those children need is not a school-based service but an independent, professional service that can assess them in the round and give them support, help and, above all, inspiration. They will not get much inspiration from trawling a website.

[Andy Burnham]

My hon. Friend speaks with customary clarity on these issues, and tells us what life is like for the young people he represents, many of whom might be new arrivals in this country who do not understand how young people can open the doors to education, training and jobs. He has put his finger on the problem. The Government take the view that schools can do everything, and that everything can be pushed down to the schools. Some things need to be organised across the whole local authority, however, if we are to maintain quality and expertise.

I am prepared to believe that schools could provide the necessary advice, but the transition process needs to be managed so that the experts who are currently working for the local authorities can be brought into the schools to provide the advice from those schools. Instead, this lot are allowing those people to be let go and made redundant, even though they have many years experience in the careers service. They are being lost to the profession, and in a few months’ time the schools will be expected to subscribe to a phone or web-based service.

Government Members might think that this is funny, but I do not. We are talking about young people’s life chances, and those young people deserve better than what the Government are giving them. We owe them more, because the world that they are facing is far harsher than the one that we lived in 30 or so years ago. Young people today can expect to have at least 10 different jobs throughout their careers—probably more. Unlike their grandparents, who did specific jobs in large industries, they will be most likely to work in smaller companies. They will need to be all-rounders, able to adapt quickly to new situations. It is also more likely that they will be employers as well as employees.

The harsh truth is that it is getting harder for everyone to get on, but the odds are being stacked much more heavily against those who have the least. If we do not act, this century will see us return to a world in which the postcode of the bed that people are born in will pretty much determine where they end up in life. In today’s world, as traditional structures break down, social networks and connections are becoming the key to jobs and opportunities. In some industries—sadly, we can count Parliament among them—it has become almost expected that a young person will have to work for free before they can get their first foot on the ladder. That is wrong; it is the exploitation of young people’s determination to get on.

If we allow the situation to continue in which there is no careers advice and in which the only way in is through having a connection with a company or organisation and moving to London to work for free, we will limit the job opportunities in the most sought-after careers in the country to less than 1% or 2% of the population. That is not a situation that I am prepared to accept. Parliament needs to step in and level up the playing field, to ensure a fair distribution of life chances around the country. We need to help those young people who have the least.

A statutory careers service is important because not all young people get the same support and advice at home. Dame Ruth Silver, chair of the Careers Profession Task Force, says of the Government’s approach:

“It will further deepen deprivation, because some people come from families who have never worked; the ones who need it most are those who don’t have successful adults in their lives.”

[Neil Carmichael (Stroud) (Con)]

The shadow Secretary of State rightly talks about levelling up the playing field. Does he acknowledge the concerns expressed by Dr Alison Wolf about courses leading to no employment, or leading to a “road block” because they are not allied to any specific employment prospects?

[Andy Burnham]

I have some sympathy with that argument, but it is an argument for more and better careers advice, not less. We have some sympathy with the view that we need to ensure that all qualifications should be of a decent standard and should lead somewhere. We accept that view and we will support the Government in that regard, but that is not an alternative; we still need good quality careers advice alongside those routes. I feel passionately that, collectively, the whole lot of us here have failed the 50% or more of young people who are not going to go down the university route. We have not done enough to provide them with a proper structure or a proper route through to good qualifications and a good job, and it is about time that we addressed that balance. It is about time that this House, rather than focusing on the top 20% and the English baccalaureate, thought about a pathway for all children, so that they can all fulfil their potential.

[Elizabeth Truss (South West Norfolk) (Con)]

If the right hon. Gentleman thinks it important that all students have a pathway, why did the Labour Government remove the modern foreign language requirement in 2004?

[Andy Burnham]

The hon. Lady was not here at the start, and I am not sure whether she has heard the whole debate. Her point does not quite fit. We want young people to make the right choices for them. We should strongly encourage the teaching of foreign languages, particularly in primary schools, but they will not be right for all young people. The question I would ask her is this: why are young people who want to do engineering, information and communications technology, business studies, economics, music, art or other creative subjects being told that they are somehow second best because those subjects are not in the English baccalaureate? What is it that justifies the Government ranking some subjects above others—and, by definition, ranking some children above others?

[Neil Carmichael]

rose—

[Andy Burnham]

I give way one last time to the hon. Gentleman.

[Neil Carmichael]

Following the right hon. Gentleman’s response to my previous intervention, will he shed some light on his view on the need to involve employers in creating the courses and qualifications that lead to outcomes for young people? One thing Professor Alison Wolf made very clear is that employers should be much more involved in the FE sector and in the formation of courses and qualifications.

[Andy Burnham]

The hon. Gentleman makes another good point. I agree with him, but urge him, perhaps when the Minister is speaking, to stand up and ask his Front-Bench team what discussions they had with the CBI before they introduced the English baccalaureate. What is the CBI’s view of it? Does it respond sufficiently to the needs of employers. I see the hon. Gentleman nodding and I hope he will direct those questions to his Front-Bench team. Quite frankly, we risk preparing young people for a world that no longer exists and we need to ensure that young people have the crucial skills—good communication skills, critical thinking and good presentational skills—that they will need if they are to survive in a workplace where much more is demanded of them.

The Minister for Further Education, Skills and Lifelong Learning is not in his place this evening, but when we last debated these issues he said:

“Let us once and for all kill off the bourgeois, left assumption that working-class people do not aspire to the same things as their middle-class contemporaries. Their ambitions are the same; what they lack is the wherewithal.”—[Official Report, 11 May 2011; Vol. 527, c. 1257.]

I agree with that statement. Let me share a shocking statistic with the House; I genuinely find it appalling. It is that 39% of 16 to 19-year-olds who went to a state school say that they do not know anyone in a career in which they would like to work. This rises to 45% among the poorest young people who receive free school meals. What Ministers fail to recognise is that if someone does not know a single person in a career in which they would like to work, they might not be able to fulfil their aspirations in the same way as others.

[Kerry McCarthy (Bristol East) (Lab)]

What my right hon. Friend has just said ties in entirely with what I am about to say. Three of my nephews came to do their work experience here; they are mixed-race lads from council estates in Luton. One of their friends—they did not have an aunt who was an MP—spent the night as a security guard in a factory where his dad sat watching telly all night, walking around the building once an hour to check that no one else was in the building. Another friend did his work experience at Costa Coffee. That was because they did not know anyone who worked in professions to which they could aspire. It is important for career advisers not just to try to get people into internships, but to encourage young people through early work experience placements to stretch their horizons and make connections with people in the professions.

[Andy Burnham]

My hon. Friend makes an excellent contribution; she puts her finger on the problem. I hear anecdotally that, increasingly, schools are saying to young people, “Can you sort out your own work experience? Is someone in the family able to give you an opportunity?” I understand why they might say that because there are lots of pressures on schools, but that highlights the dangers of what is being created. If we live in a world where people say, “The schools do it; we’ll leave it up to them”, that can reinforce low expectations. It is basically telling kids that they cannot break out from their family circumstances because they will dictate what they have experience of and where they will set their expectations. That is what is so wrong about that approach—this random laissez-faire approach to this crucial issue.

My hon. Friend and other Opposition Members will remember a report by Alan Milburn on fair access to the professions during the last Parliament. He made the point that we need to do the reverse—take those young people who have no connection with the powerful worlds of the professions and transplant them into those worlds. We need the highest quality careers advice and work experience for those young people. As the Opposition develop our policy, that is exactly what we should aspire to deliver—alongside excellent careers advice, of course, which has to be impartial, independent and personalised.

[Simon Hughes (Bermondsey and Old Southwark) (LD)]

rose—

[Andy Burnham]

I agree, just as I did with the Education Committee report, with much of what the right hon. Member for Bermondsey and Old Southwark said in his report. I look forward to hearing what he has to say and to his support for our motion.

[Simon Hughes]

May I absolutely endorse the comments of the hon. Member for Bristol East (Kerry McCarthy)? All the evidence from my conversations around England in the early part of this year showed that there was not only very poor careers advice for many young people, but really poor work experience. In a difficult economy, the chances of getting a job from 16 onwards are, to put it bluntly, reduced horribly for those who do not have work experience.

[Andy Burnham]

I agree completely, but the right hon. Gentleman is in a position to do something. I say that not to make a party political point. In some ways, this is not the most headline-grabbing of debates. We are raising this issue out of a genuine concern about what is happening to the careers service and what it might do to damage the life chances of some young people. He has produced what I consider to be a very good report for the Prime Minister and the Deputy Prime Minister, but if Government Members troop through the Lobby against this motion tonight, where does that leave the advice he is giving to the Government? Is he happy about that? There has to be a change.

[Simon Hughes]

I will obviously wait to hear the Minister and I hope to be called to speak. My hon. Friend the Member for Burnley (Gordon Birtwistle) said to me earlier that this is exactly the sort of issue where we should avoid party politics and seek a consensus. I commit myself again, as I have said to the right hon. Gentleman and to ministerial colleagues, to doing so, even if it is sometimes very hard work to get us all in the same place. Careers, work and work experience seem to me to be issues on which there is much more than a party interest in getting to that right place.

[Andy Burnham]

I agree again with what the right hon. Gentleman says. If there is some passion in my voice tonight, it is because I am standing up for people to have a careers service that is under attack. It is quite simply going before our eyes. It is no good saying complacently“let us find consensus” complacently; we need to say that the issue is urgent and it needs to be got a grip of right now. Otherwise, the damage will not be reparable. That is why I continue to point out what I consider to be unacceptable complacency on the part of the Government Front-Bench team. It promised us a transition plan on how this responsibility would be managed as it moved from local authorities to schools and on how we would ensure that we do not lose professionals. This plan has been promised for weeks and weeks and weeks. Every day that passes, more and more damage is being done to the careers service. I say to Government Members who worry about these issues that the time has come for them to start holding their own Front-Bench team to account.

I agree with much of what the Minister for Further Education, Skills and Lifelong Learning said when we discussed the Education Bill on Report:

“I find it inconceivable, or at least unlikely, that best practice will not include face-to-face provision.”—[Official Report, 11 May 2011; Vol. 527, c. 1257.]

If that is the Government’s view, why do they not guarantee it for all young people? The aim must be to give a basic minimum to all young people. I have to say that the Government are in danger of looking seriously isolated on this issue. The Education Select Committee—I mentioned its report a few moments ago—highlighted the need to protect face-to-face guidance. When a Committee is chaired by a Conservative Member—the hon. Member for Beverley and Holderness (Mr Stuart) is no longer in the Chamber—and it makes that direct recommendation to the Government, one would expect them to do him the courtesy of making a proper response.

The hon. Member for Wirral West (Esther McVey) put it this way when we last debated these issues:

“We must not lose the knowledge on the internet, but we must also not lose those people and their personal knowledge. We cannot let something so vital slip through our fingertips when it was within our grasp and when we had the ability to save it.”—[Official Report, 11 May 2011; Vol. 527, c. 1249.]

Voices are speaking from the Conservative Benches, which I do not think Ministers can or should ignore, but the careers service is slipping out of our grasp.

Research conducted by the university of Derby and Unison reveals that just 15 councils are retaining a substantial universal careers service. More than 4,000 careers advisers have already lost their jobs and 50 councils have closed their Connexions centres completely. This expertise is being lost. According to the university of Derby,

“the current environment is having a potentially disastrous impact on the careers profession.”

In a speech in November 2010, the Minister said:

“As we go about this, it’s important to recognise that we’re not starting from scratch. On the contrary, we will build on Next Step and on Connexions because we must not lose the best of either.”

But that is exactly what is happening. We are losing the best of what we have, and this gross mismanagement is simply unforgiveable. It could damage the life chances of up to 2 million young people, as the Association of School and College Leaders has estimated. Young people appear to have been sidelined from the Government’s plans for a national careers service; the Education Bill transfers the responsibility, but not the £200 million that they were promised. Ministers need to tell us tonight what has happened to that money, what is available for the new national careers service and when it will be made available to save these services. Schools have a statutory responsibility to provide a service, but it is absolutely clear that if they are not given the guidance or the money, these services will be of a substandard quality.

The Government have provided no transition plan, no funding, no clarity and no guarantee of face-to-face advice. If they vote against our motion, they will be completely isolated. They have not tabled an amendment—an alternative—which in itself illustrates their sheer absence of ideas on how to take this issue forward. If their own advisory group cannot support them, what does that say about the position the Government are in? In August, the entire careers advisory group considered resignation, because it wanted to protest at the situation that it had been left in. These people did not resign, but they must now be listened to if the Government are to retain any credibility on this issue.

In conclusion, I am proud that it is Labour Members who have spoken up for young people and for a service in crisis. I know that many careers professionals will have been watching this debate, and I am sure that many feel utterly demoralised and undervalued right now. If nothing else, I want them to know tonight that, on this side of the House at least, we appreciate what they do for our young people. A bit of recognition is due, and Labour is proud to give it to them.

However, we also know now what we are up against. This is a Government who have a brutal approach to public service reform, and who are too lazy or too arrogant to produce a transition plan for the careers service. We have Education Ministers who like to focus on the elite—on Oxbridge—when the kids who have least are left to fend for themselves. The fact is that some young people cannot call on well-connected families to open doors. When a family does not have role models or where there is little family experience of what it takes to break into the professions, young people need youth workers, careers advisers and personal advisers to help them open those doors.

Just a few short weeks ago, this House reconvened to discuss the summer disturbances. Many theories were put forward on that day to explain what had gone wrong with our young people to make some of them act in that way. Of course we will continue to debate those things, but I suggest to the House something simple that all young people need, regardless of their circumstances—hope. They need hope of a job and hope of a better life, but that hope is being taken from them. So my appeal tonight goes beyond the Government Front-Bench team and to the House as a whole: is it not about time that this Parliament started standing up for young people? How much longer will we tolerate this attack on aspiration? Let us say tonight that enough is enough. That is why I urge the House to support our motion.

19:53

[The Minister of State, Department for Education (Mr Nick Gibb)]

I am delighted to be able to respond to the right hon. Member for Leigh (Andy Burnham). I had thought that this might be a policy area where the differences between us were slight enough and that he would not feel the need to overstate his case. Alas, that hope has been dashed. My right hon. Friend the Secretary of State would have liked to respond to the right hon. Gentleman but, as I mentioned earlier, he is in Nottingham meeting 100 head teachers to discuss the future teaching schools. I hasten to add that 100 people is more than the number of Labour Members in the Chamber right now, and this is an Opposition day debate. The Minister for Further Education, Skills and Lifelong Learning would also have liked to have responded to the right hon. Gentleman, but he has just undergone minor surgery and is recovering in hospital. He sends his best wishes and wanted me to pass on his apologies to the House for the fact that a lesser orator than he is responding.

It is hard to listen to the right hon. Gentleman when he clamours for £200 million here and £200 million there, given that he was in the Cabinet of a Government who left this country with the largest budget deficit in the G7 and interest payments of £120 million a day, leaving the country on the brink of financial collapse. That is why we have had to take some very difficult decisions. Until Opposition spokesmen acknowledge that point, nothing they say on public spending will have any credibility.

[Andy Burnham]

rose—

[Mr Gibb]

I will make this final point and then I will give way to the right hon. Gentleman. I dread to think of the damage that would have been done to young people’s prospects had Labour won the last election and plunged our economy into a crisis such as those that Greece and Ireland have faced.

[Andy Burnham]

This evening, will the Minister at least tell us where the money has gone? Was the careers budget in the Department raided to pay for the patched-up version of the successor to the education maintenance allowance that the Government were forced to cobble together?

[Mr Gibb]

As I just mentioned, the £200 million to which the right hon. Gentleman is referring would pay for two days’ interest on the debt left by his Government. In addition, we have put extra funding into tackling post-16 deprivation and providing help for those who need additional support: we increased that by a third, to £750 million. That is how those sums have been prioritised by this Government.

[Derek Twigg]

Following on from that point, will the Minister tell us what money is actually being given to schools to provide careers advice? I would particularly like to know the answer in respect of Halton, which is one of the most deprived areas. Does how good the careers advice is just depend on what money is in school budgets now? Is this a lottery?

[Mr Gibb]

Despite the appalling state of the public finances that we inherited, we have managed to ensure that school funding is maintained, in cash terms, at a consistent level over the next four years. That is despite the fact that we inherited a budget deficit of £156 billion. We have also allocated a significant sum to the pupil premium, which is worth at least £430 per pupil qualifying for free school meals this year, and the figure will rise to £2.5 billion by 2014-15. These are the extra sums that we are putting into schools, at a time when our public finances are in a dire state.

[Derek Twigg]

Let us be clear about this, because the Minister is trying to avoid the question and we should not forget that we are talking about £200 million. What extra is specifically being given to schools for careers advice?

[Mr Gibb]

This Government are not involved in ring-fenced budgets for schools. We have de-ring-fenced a large number of budgets into the dedicated schools grant, so that head teachers and teachers can decide how that money is allocated within the priorities of their school. That is the approach that this Government are taking to public spending in the schools sector.

[Jeremy Corbyn]

Can the Minister tell us how many secondary schools are providing careers advice, what means he has to survey what they are doing, and how many of the 100 “super heads” who are meeting the Secretary of State this evening are providing careers advice?

[Mr Gibb]

The hon. Gentleman is asking me to provide a critique on the state of careers advice in this country today. I will come to that, because his party’s record is not one of which he should be proud. The Labour party has just been in power for 13 years and the state of careers advice today is a consequence of what happened during those 13 years, not of what has happened during the first 16 months of this Administration. Hon. Members in all parts of the House agree on the importance of pupils receiving good quality advice and guidance to help them make the right choices for their future; that is particularly the case in these difficult economic times. We have recently seen a welcome reduction in the proportion of 16 to 18-year-olds who are not in education, employment or training—it has fallen from 9.4% in 2009 to 7.3% in 2010—and rises in the number of 16 and 17-year-olds in education. The youth labour market is also tightening, with unemployment for 16 to 24-year-olds who are not in full-time education growing each year from about 420,000 in 2004 to its current level of 671,000. The premium on achievement in particular vocational and academic qualifications demanded by employers and universities means that making the right choices becomes ever more important, and the consequences of making the wrong choices are ever more damaging.

[Liz Kendall (Leicester West) (Lab)]

The Minister is talking a lot about 16 to 18-year-olds, but does he agree that if we are going to raise aspirations we need to start young? Will he agree to look at some of the good work that Leicester Connexions has done with Folville primary school in my constituency? Parents and pupils have been brought together when the children are still really young to talk about what careers options might be possible. The events were really well attended—much better attended than many other events involving parents run by the primary school. Does the Minister agree that the new system that his Government are proposing must support and fund initiatives that start at such an early age?

[Mr Gibb]

I could not agree more. We want to promote such best practice and we want schools to be innovative, but to do that they need control of their own funds. We have tried to de-ring-fence funds and to delegate and devolve decision making on funding to schools so that they can engage in such innovative activity. We have also de-ring-fenced the early intervention grant for local authorities, which now stands at £2.2 billion. That means that such initiatives can be undertaken by local authorities to tackle the very vulnerable people about whom the hon. Lady is talking.

[Liz Kendall]

The problem with the early intervention grant is that, in Leicester, it is being cut by £5 million this year. The Minister says that the Government are not ring fencing things, but I am not arguing for that. I am saying that there will be less money for such innovative projects, and I am asking what the Government are going to do about it.

[Mr Gibb]

The hon. Lady makes a valid point. We de-ring-fenced all the components that make up the early intervention grants, and that funding is £2.2 billion, rising to £2.3 billion next year. That is a very large sum. I acknowledge that we had to reduce it by 10.9% as we moved into the coming year, but that is a consequence of the many very difficult decisions we have had to make in government as a result of the budget deficit. I am sorry to sound like an over-wound gramophone, but those are the consequences of being in government and of inheriting a budget deficit that had to be tackled if we were to get our economy moving again. Young people suffer more than any other group in society when an economy is floundering, and we are in the middle of a very difficult world economic crisis driven by world debt, so we have to get our budget deficit under control if we are to survive as an economy through such difficult periods. I think the best thing for young people is to get our economy growing as soon as possible. That is why we have had to make those decisions.

Local authorities currently have a duty to provide careers advice, and they fulfil that duty through the Connexions service—a service that has, I am afraid, had mixed reviews. The Education Committee’s report said, in measured terms:

“Connexions services have provided careers guidance to individuals alongside wider support services targeted, in general, at more disadvantaged groups; and some Connexions services have been more successful than others in discharging these two duties equally successfully.”

Alan Milburn, who was referred to by the right hon. Member for Leigh, was a little less circumspect in his report on access to the professions when he reported a number of surveys that suggested low levels of satisfaction among young people with the careers guidance they received from Connexions, showing that 45% of over-14s received either no careers advice or advice that was poor or limited. He went on to say:

“Throughout our work we have barely heard a good word about the careers work of the current Connexions service.”

It is very difficult to listen to the emotional tones of the right hon. Gentleman when that is the legacy of the very careers advice that he is so passionate about providing to young people.

[Julie Hilling (Bolton West) (Lab)]

I find it slightly odd that the Minister is not quoting from the Department for Education survey of 5,000 young people, which found that more than 90% were satisfied with the service that they had received. That survey was carried out by his own Department.

[Mr Gibb]

I am not sure what service those people were receiving from Connexions, but there is no doubt that all the surveys showed dissatisfaction with the careers advice given by Connexions. There is more satisfaction with the advice that it gives to vulnerable young people on how to get back on track and back into the mainstream, and I acknowledge that that part of the service has been of a higher quality.

[Mr Sheerman]

Perhaps I can assist the Minister. When I was Chair of the Select Committee, whenever we considered that service we felt that it was very patchy up and down the country. That made us very angry in some circumstances, but it is, I think, called localism.

[Mr Gibb]

I agree with the hon. Gentleman that the service is very patchy.

Our starting point was that careers advice needed to improve, and I think that there is unanimity across the House on that. We decided to split the provision of careers advice from the provision of advice to vulnerable young people. They are very different disciplines requiring different skills and different knowledge bases, so the decision was taken to provide an all-age careers service—the national careers service. That is the responsibility of the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, and the service will be up and running from April 2012. I pay tribute to my hon. Friend the Minister for Further Education, Skills and Lifelong Learning for the work that he has put in to delivering that service.

The duty to provide careers advice to young people will therefore be removed from local authorities and transferred, subject to the passage of the Education Bill, to schools from September 2012. That duty will require schools to secure access to independent impartial careers guidance for their pupils in years 9 to 11. As part of the consultation process, we are also considering whether there is a case for extending that duty down to year 8 or up to the age of 18.

[Andy Burnham]

Will the Minister confirm that it might be independent and impartial advice, but it will not be face-to-face advice? That is to say, the Government’s plan is that it will be delivered over the phone or via the internet.

[Mr Gibb]

The legislation states only that the advice must be independent. We are considering all the issues being raised in this debate, and by my right hon. Friend the Member for Bermondsey and Old Southwark (Simon Hughes).

[Stella Creasy (Walthamstow) (Lab/Co-op)]

I am ever so grateful to the Minister for giving way and for setting out the schedule. What careers advice has he given all the careers advisers who have now lost their jobs because local authorities have had that funding cut and are therefore no longer providing that service? Given that he is talking about the new service not coming on line until April 2012, and that there is no guarantee that it will be provided by individuals face to face, what does he expect to happen to the people who are the experts in this system?

[Mr Gibb]

Local authorities still have a duty to provide careers advice, because section 68 of the Education and Skills Act 2008 is still in force, and they are required to do so. They are making decisions based on the very difficult financial settlement that we were left with by the previous Administration, but there are good examples of good practice from around the country, including Northamptonshire. In April we published statutory guidance setting out how local authorities should continue to meet that statutory duty under section 68 to encourage and help young people to participate in education and training. We are publishing on the Department’s website best practice from around the country.

[Julie Hilling]

I thank the Minister for giving way yet again; he has been very generous. Will he confirm that the careers advice will be given by professionally trained and qualified careers advisers? Will he also confirm that as soon as the Education Bill goes through, local authorities will retain responsibility just for the NEETs and not for everything else, which will transfer to schools, although schools have not been given any additional funding to provide that independent careers advice and guidance?

[Mr Gibb]

On the first point, the duty to provide advice to vulnerable young people who face problems in accessing education will remain with local authorities, whereas the duty to provide careers advice is transferring to schools. Of course, schools currently have a duty to provide careers education, within which an element of careers advice is also required. We are introducing that duty in the Education Bill at a time when we are acting to reduce bureaucracy and remove unnecessary duties and burdens from schools to allow them to focus on driving up standards, so the fact that we are introducing that new duty is a signal of the importance that the Government attach to high-quality careers guidance.

We are giving schools that duty for two reasons. First, we believe in the concept of decentralisation and of devolving decision making. We trust schools to take decisions in the best interests of their pupils, and restoring trust to the teaching profession is the cornerstone of our approach to education reform. Some argue, as has been argued today, that schools have an inbuilt bias to advise pupils to stay on in the sixth form regardless of whether it is in their best interests. That is why the Education Bill imposes the duty on schools to give advice that is independent.

Many of the incentives for schools were distorted by the structure of the league tables. Professor Alison Wolf set out this problem in her landmark report on vocational education. She said that false equivalencies have encouraged schools to enter pupils for qualifications that score highly in performance tables but are not necessarily valued by employers—effectively building bad advice into the system. Some qualifications have been proclaimed as being equal to four GCSEs, but they do not provide the broad grounding that students need to progress. As a consequence, some pupils have been encouraged to make choices that significantly reduce their prospects for success in later life.

That is why we are reforming performance tables—to end the damaging impact of false equivalencies, as well as removing perverse incentives in the funding system that have encouraged schools and colleges to offer qualifications that are easier to complete but do not necessarily provide the rigour and quality that students need. We are also introducing destination measures that set out where school leavers go after they leave school—whether into high-quality employment with training, to further education colleges or to university.

[Neil Carmichael]

The shadow Secretary of State asked me to ask the Minister about the E-bac, and I do so with pleasure because I welcome its introduction. I think it will have a huge impact in improving opportunities for young people. Does the Minister agree that it respects and represents the preferences of many employers and universities in that it encourages students to do the right subjects and get the right range of qualifications?

[Mr Gibb]

Yes; my hon. Friend makes a very good point. Whatever people say, employers disproportionately employ people with the E-bac subjects among their qualifications.

Our approach is to measure and report on the outputs—on what schools achieve for their pupils. The destination measure will say more about the success of a school’s approach to careers advice and will do more to deliver high-quality advice than will any number of detailed regulations.

The second reason for giving schools the duty is that they are best placed to decide what support their pupils need to make the right choices. We have considered carefully the evidence about what works and what does not work in the provision of information, advice and guidance. The approaches that are most effective work because they are part of a wider approach in a school or college that promotes ambition and aspiration, and encourages pupils to think about their future throughout their education. Effective careers guidance is not a one-off event.

There is no single right way; many different approaches work, depending on the precise circumstances of the school or pupil. That is why it is right to leave schools to decide how to provide impartial independent advice. How they choose to do that should be determined by what works for them. In making choices about how to provide impartial advice, they will benefit from independent benchmarks of quality—something that was recommended by the taskforce on careers guidance led by Dame Ruth Silver, which was commissioned by the previous Government and reported to us last year.

Alongside the duty for schools, local authorities will also have responsibility for encouraging young people to stay in education to the age of 17 or 18 by 2015. They are free to determine how best to fulfil that responsibility, taking account of local priorities. That is a duty that local authorities take seriously.

There will also be free online and helpline services for young people, which will be provided through the national careers service from April 2012. The motion mentions a requirement to provide “face-to-face” guidance for every young person, and that was also recommended by my right hon. Friend the Member for Bermondsey and Old Southwark in his report as the advocate for access to education. The issues that he raises in his report are important: making the right choices at the key decision points in a young person’s education and career can open or close a lifetime of opportunities. We are still considering all 33 recommendations in his report—not just the one recommendation that has been picked up by the Opposition—so we are not, at this stage, ruling anything in or out, and we will respond in full to his report in due course.

We also need to recognise that although advice is important, other elements are also fundamental to a pupil’s ability to achieve and progress. If a pupil does not have a thorough grounding in the basics of literacy and numeracy, or is not given the opportunity to study the subjects that are the best foundation for progression, the best information and advice in the world will not help that pupil to progress far beyond the constraints that a poor education has put on him or her. The evidence is very clear that the longer someone stays in education, the higher their earnings are and the less likely they are to be unemployed. OECD figures show that the earnings premium resulting from a university degree is between $200,000 and $300,000. People with two or more A-levels can earn 14% more than those without. For those who secure five good GCSEs the chances of being NEET are just one in 40, whereas for those who do not achieve five or more good GCSEs the odds fall to one in six.

For young people who are set on pursuing a vocational route at an early age we are promoting university technical colleges and studio schools, we are encouraging FE colleges to consider recruiting students at age 14 and we are allowing further education lecturers to teach in schools. That is also why we are increasing apprenticeship places for 16 to 18-year-olds, with 102,900 young people starting apprenticeships in the first nine months of this year compared with 117,000 for the whole of the last academic year. That is why we have protected school budgets in cash terms, and why we have ensured that we are funding participation at age 17 by 2013 and at age 18 by 2015. It is also why we make no apology for prioritising resources on funding for early years on the pupil premium in schools and on funding for disadvantaged young people post-16.

[Mr Edward Timpson (Crewe and Nantwich) (Con)]

Perhaps the greatest benchmark for deciding whether we are providing the best careers advice for our children is the advice that we provide to children in care, and we know that the outcomes for children in care, particularly in relation to their education, remain woeful. I welcome the Government’s commitment to the continuation of the care-to-work project. However, will my hon. Friend look again—perhaps this could be a 34th recommendation to add to his list—at widening the Frank Buttle Trust quality mark, which provides looked-after children with real confidence that any higher or further education institution that they might want to go into has support and guidance in place for them as a looked-after child or care leaver, to enable them to succeed and achieve their aspirations?

[Mr Gibb]

My hon. Friend makes some very good points. The gap between looked-after children and the rest of society is unacceptable. The low proportion of looked-after children who go to university—just 6%—is also unacceptable. Looked-after children qualify automatically for the pupil premium, and I am listening carefully to what my hon. Friend suggests.

[Adam Afriyie (Windsor) (Con)]

My hon. Friend is making an incredibly powerful speech, and I have been on the edge of my seat throughout. In Windsor we have some of the best schools in the country, and many eminent and pre-eminent Members of the House have attended one or two of them. What the Government propose is absolutely right: it gives flexibility for schools to decide which type of independent advice they think is necessary for their pupils, but does not rule out the selection of Connexions in future to continue to provide some of those services. Can my hon. Friend confirm that that is the case—that Connexions can continue in the new framework?

[Mr Gibb]

Yes, my hon. Friend is absolutely right. I am grateful to him for his very sincere comments about my speech. He is right that the purpose of the clause in the Education Bill is to enable schools to buy in, to procure those services—whether provided face to face, online or by other means—for the young people in their care. We want to avoid the scenario painted by the right hon. Member for Leigh of a PE teacher providing careers advice in his spare time. We want to ensure that advice is independent and high quality.

I shall now bring my remarks to an end; I apologise to my hon. Friend the Member for Windsor (Adam Afriyie) for doing so. On funding, schools will make any provision for careers guidance from their overall budget. Schools already have, under the existing legislation that we are amending, a duty to provide careers education, which includes duties to provide impartial careers advice. Schools’ budgets are no longer ring-fenced and schools can make, and can fund, careers advice.

We are a Government who believe in high-quality careers advice, which is what our reforms are about. We are acting at a time of fiscal constraint, as a consequence of the state of the public finances left by the last Labour Government. I urge all hon. Members, therefore, to reject any motion tabled by the Opposition on any issue that requires funding, and in particular to reject their motion this evening.

20:21

[Mr Barry Sheerman (Huddersfield) (Lab/Co-op)]

It is a pleasure to be called in this debate. I shall start with a confession: when I chaired the Education and Skills Committee—

[Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Lindsay Hoyle)]

May I just say that we have nine Members left to speak, and that if the hon. Gentleman limits his speech to eight minutes it will help everybody?

[Mr Sheerman]

I was going to confess that when I was Chair of the Education Committee I never did an inquiry into careers, but in 2008 I was co-chair of the Skills Commission and we undertook a major inquiry into careers. Lord Boswell, Baroness Sharp and I were on the commission and we produced an all-party report, “Inspiration and Aspiration: Realising our Potential in the 21st Century.” Dame Ruth Silver, whom the Minister and anyone who knows anything about careers will know, the former principal of Lewisham college, was a very important influence on our inquiry, and she now chairs the Government advisory organisation that fell out with the Government recently.

We found pretty simple things. We found that, yes, information technology is very useful and that it will increasingly be used by many young people and older people, but at that stage—three years ago—it was used by only about 17% or 18%, which is not a lot. We also found that it was not enough in itself—face-to-face experience and trusted professionals were vital. There was no doubt that all the research, all the evidence that we took, showed it could not be done by technology alone, and that we blanked out many people by relying only on the technology and the internet.

We also found that yes, the careers service was not as good as it should have been. Anyone who does a PhD in future about the Conservatives’ enthralment with localism will have a wonderful time with the Minister’s speech tonight, because what is this localism? I intervened and said, “The trouble is that Connexions was patchy.” It is true that in every local government service I know, much is good in some things, but less is good in others and things are pretty average too much of the time. So how does one, believing in localism, raise the bar for careers advice? It is a great challenge, as Conservative Members will find. Pushing the responsibility back entirely on to schools, they will find the service very patchy indeed, especially if there are very few resources to some schools and better resources at others.

The Skills Commission report was accepted by all three parties and influenced all three manifestos, so there was the start of a good cross-party agreement on the need for high-quality careers advice—absolutely everyone from whom we took evidence agreed on that. But how do we push that forward? When we found that all the manifestos had been influenced by the cross-party consensus, we were very hopeful. But how did we get to the Government advisory group on the all-age careers service? The Labour Government of 2008 did not want an all-age careers service. They were eventually persuaded—again, there was cross-party consensus. All three main parties agreed on an all-age careers service, and they reconstituted it under a different name—the national careers service advisory group. I understand that it is now in the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, with the Education Department visiting, rather than its being in the Education Department. I have some concerns, and I think hon. Members will have some concerns, about careers being put very securely in BIS rather than in the Education Department.

Responsibility for providing face-to-face services is, however, being transferred to schools, without funding. I have the report from the advisory group on the all-age careers service and the comments by Dame Ruth Silver about the very real problems with it. It says:

“The new National Careers Service will include face-to-face services for adults, but not for young people. Instead, its service for young people will be confined to telephone- and web-based services. Responsibility for providing the face-to-face services is being transferred to schools, without any transfer of funding: the previous provision of around £200 million per annum for the service for young people has been allowed to disappear.”

That is the Government’s advisory group speaking. These are the leading people in the country advising on careers. The report continues:

“There are widespread concerns about the destruction of careers services across the country, with heavy staff redundancies. At a time when young people are facing massive changes in further and higher education, and new apprenticeships—as well as high youth unemployment—stripping out the professional help available to them is not only foolhardy; it is potentially damaging to young people’s lives and ultimately to the economy.”

What a damning report by the Government’s advisory committee! It cannot be right to go in this direction.

As a result of this kind of localism, schools with few resources will have very little careers advice. That is the truth. At the same time, local authorities up and down the land, under pressure of resources, are getting rid of their careers services or slimming them down to the very bone. We will not recreate a culture of high-quality careers service professionals in that way, even though the Government asked Ruth Silver to chair a committee to determine how to increase the professional quality of the careers service.

Everything was going in the right direction, with all-party consensus. Localism could have worked in this respect if the money had followed local responsibility and accountability. I worked closely with the Minister, who was a good member of the Education and Skills Committee for some years, when I chaired it. He is a reasonable man, and he will understand that this is not a party political issue. Good-quality careers advice is absolutely essential to everyone of whatever age. I am one of those people who believe that it is shame and a stain on our country to have a thing called NEETs. I believe that anyone who is not in education, employment or training of whatever age is a NEET, and we cannot have them.

20:29

[Simon Hughes (Bermondsey and Old Southwark) (LD)]

I am happy to follow the hon. Member for Huddersfield (Mr Sheerman), with all his expertise as the former Chair of the Education Committee and his reminder of what the Skills Commission, on which he so honourably served, so clearly said.

I am grateful to the right hon. Member for Leigh (Andy Burnham) for choosing this subject. I shall let him and the House into a secret: the more pressure that we as a House can put on the Government on this issue between us, the better. I am therefore grateful to the Minister for the way in which he responded. May I pass on through him my thanks to the Minister for Further Education, Skills and Lifelong Learning, with whom I have had several pragmatic and good conversations, and to his colleagues at all levels who have said that, having received the report that I gave them in July, they are taking seriously what I asked them to do?

May I now go back a step? In May, we sent the Education Bill from the House to the House of Lords. We held robust debates on this and other issues. It left with two relevant provisions. First, clause 27 states:

“The responsible authorities for a school in England…must secure that all registered pupils at the school are provided with independent careers guidance”.

I support that. Secondly, it states:

“For the purposes of this section the relevant phase of a pupil’s education is”

between 14 and 16. That is an adequate starting point.

Two months later to the day, the Education Committee, chaired by the hon. Member for Beverley and Holderness (Mr Stuart)—a Conservative Back Bencher—produced its report. The cross-party Select Committee had a clear, unanimous view on the issue. It said specifically, at paragraph 156:

“Professor Watts told us that ‘we used to have a careers service for young people, and all we had for adults was a strategy… What we now have…is a careers service for adults, and a very loose”

information advice and guidance

“framework for young people’. Online career guidance, which allows young people to explore at their own pace and according to their own interests, is valuable; and we heard praise for the online careers services offered by DirectGov. However, this is no substitute for personal advice, given on the basis of an understanding of a young person’s circumstances and ambitions. We recommend that the all age careers service should be funded by the Department for Education for face to face career guidance for young people.”

It could not have been clearer.

I did not know that the Select Committee would say that specifically, but the following week, on 21 July, I gave my report to Ministers. Let me summarise the recommendations and then make a point about my passion for the issue and ask Ministers to consider where we go from here. In passing, I pay tribute to all those in the careers services, including the Institute of Careers Guidance and the trade unions, who have been to see me and are absolutely passionate that this issue needs to be accepted by the Government.

I was clear, because the evidence given to me was clear, that people should start to talk about careers in year 6 in primary school. I was clear, which is why I was so glad about the intervention made by the hon. Member for Bristol East (Kerry McCarthy), that work experience was seen as something where the cleaner did not take a child to work to clean or the accountant take another to do accountancy, but where the cleaner’s child had the same exposure to the opportunities that the accountant’s child would have and, to be honest, vice versa.

[Lilian Greenwood (Nottingham South) (Lab)]

I wonder whether the right hon. Gentleman shares my concern about what is happening in Nottingham and Nottinghamshire, where Futures used to charge £13 per pupil to fix up work experience, but as a result of the loss of a £500,000 Government grant, it now charges £31 per pupil. Many schools are unable to buy in the service to match students with work experience opportunities, yet individual parents can pay £150 to buy just those opportunities for their children to be matched with work experience. What does that say to the children of cleaners and school dinner ladies about the importance of their opportunities?

[Simon Hughes]

I absolutely share that concern. We need a system that guarantees more than just one week of work experience once in July—at the same time all around the country—at one stage in a person’s career. The Under-Secretary of State for Education, the hon. Member for East Worthing and Shoreham (Tim Loughton), and I were at City hall today with some young people who argued that they should have at least two weeks’ work experience. I am clear that it should be for those aged from 14 through to 16, and be held at an appropriate time and in an appropriate place. It should not be something that people charge to fix up; we should develop it so that it is part of the expectation in secondary school, and part of youngsters’ lives.

[Andy Burnham]

I agree very much with the right hon. Gentleman, and I welcome the spirit in which he is speaking. He would probably agree with Labour Members that, as my hon. Friend the Member for Nottingham South (Lilian Greenwood) said, work experience is so important that it should not be left to random chance. We have to find a way of offering structured opportunities, particularly to those young people who have the least. With that in mind, may I ask the right hon. Gentleman to comment on the Government’s intention of removing the requirement on schools, at key stage 4, to offer work-related learning, which essentially is work experience? Is it not the case that if they remove that requirement, provision will be completely random? Some schools will offer it, and some will not.

[Simon Hughes]

Let me be absolutely straight with the right hon. Gentleman: I understand the Government’s wish not to burden heads and schools with over-prescription. I am chair of governors of a primary school, and a trustee of a secondary school, so I understand that completely. However, some things have to be guaranteed, and in my view we have to guarantee the opportunity of work experience during secondary school time, and we have to guarantee face-to-face careers advice. I say that not because I have some theological view about it, but because the evidence that we have heard, and that I collected, is that youngsters are overwhelmingly saying, “We’ve had bad careers advice and bad work experience.”

In a tight economic situation, people even more need both careers advice and work experience. The figures that I collected show that there are more than 4,000 different qualifications that a young person can gain between the ages of 14 and 18. There are millions of combinations of qualifications that they can end up with. Navigating a way through that requires more than a person’s ability to go online and discover what they think they might want to know; that, bluntly, is different depending on how bright the person is, what family support they have, and other things. It is about more than having some books to look at; it is about speaking to somebody who can relate to them where they are, and engage with them.

As my hon. Friend the Member for Burnley (Gordon Birtwistle) said to me when the debate began, in the end what is required may be more than one half-hour session; there may need to be follow-up—mentoring, support, and continuous commitment. That might mean a local employer—PricewaterhouseCoopers could step over the river to my constituency—coming into a school to continue to support somebody as they work things out. It might mean working out how somebody who fluffs some exams, and does not start very well academically, can recover and be told, “You haven’t lost everything just because you had a terrible year when your parents separated and your family situation was a disaster.” We have to understand that people have only one school time in which they can do work experience.

[Nic Dakin (Scunthorpe) (Lab)]

The right hon. Gentleman must be commended for speaking with great foresight and spelling things out with great common sense. Does he agree that there is real urgency, as is reflected in the motion? Young people have only one chance, and getting things right tomorrow is no good for today’s kids. We need to get things right now. There is a transition gap; to be fair, the Minister for Further Education, Skills and Lifelong Learning has recognised that that is an issue in talking to me. That gap needs to be addressed immediately.

[Simon Hughes]

I do not disagree with that; I said it in my report, and I remind the hon. Gentleman to go back and look at it. I just have time to list the recommendations and give my conclusion on where I think we should go.

The second recommendation, which is relevant, is that the Department for Education should continuously consider how best to support schools and colleges in their access activities, and in building up much more available information.

The third recommendation is that at the age of 13 and 14—in year 9—every student should have available to them a proper, broad base of information on what the pathways are. Indeed, it is not just the young people who need that information; their parents do, too, so that they are not prejudiced by their own experiences and past.

The fourth recommendation is that the Government “should act urgently”—those are the words on the Order Paper—to guarantee face-to-face careers advice for all young people in schools; that should be taken up to age 17 and 18, as the school leaving age increases.

We need a plan on how to keep the expertise of current careers services providers, given the change in the system. I welcome the change in the system—Connexions was often not successful, but we must make sure that we do not lose the expertise of the people who delivered the service. We must hold events for parents and carers to make sure that they understand that. Someone in each school—not the independent provider—should be responsible for access issues and someone for careers issues. Finally, Ofsted should evaluate the careers service given to the school and report on it, and how it makes use of destination data.

I am grateful for the Minister’s courtesy and his Department’s consideration. I can hold back my colleagues from voting with the Opposition only because of the undertaking he has given. [Interruption.] No: the Government are going to respond to all the recommendations, not one. I accept absolutely the point about urgency made by Back Benchers. Our Liberal Democrat colleagues in the Lords feel equally strongly that we must ensure the provision of face-to-face guidance.

I represent a strongly working-class constituency. If we believe in social mobility, we must additionally assist those who do not have the advantages of privilege and finance, which is why the Government must deliver. I await the recommendations and their response, but there must be a yes to the proposal.

20:41

[Mrs Jenny Chapman (Darlington) (Lab)]

I greatly admired the speech given by the right hon. Member for Bermondsey and Old Southwark (Simon Hughes), but I am slightly perplexed as to how he can speak eloquently and passionately about something in which he clearly believes but then, at the last minute, say that he will be able to vote with the Government—that is extraordinary— and that he will encourage his colleagues to do the same. It is his call to vote with the Government and support them. I shall support young people in all of this, as they need us now.

We decided to call this debate on careers advice—not the sexiest subject out there—because it matters to us in the Labour party. This is about social mobility, and if the Labour party cares about something, it is social mobility. If we get this wrong, it will make a huge difference to young people’s lives.

[Simon Hughes]

The hon. Lady rightly said that we all have to show that we are on the side of young people, and I hope that I have shown that and that my colleagues are, too. The Government must not just provide one response to one question but respond comprehensively. They also have to find the money. That is their job, not my job. I want them to do it, and we are putting pressure on them. Let me put pressure on in my way; if the hon. Lady puts pressure on in her way, I am determined that the Government will deliver.

[Mrs Chapman]

I listen carefully to the right hon. Gentleman, and clearly he is far more experienced in the ways of the House than I am. It really is not about what we get up and say—it is what we do. We must show support for young people through our actions, not just by giving a fancy speech.

[Dan Rogerson (North Cornwall) (LD)]

I am listening carefully to the distinction that the hon. Lady is drawing between how Members will vote on the motion and their commitments more widely. Will she tell us whether the previous Government guaranteed face-to-face contact for every person, as the motion seeks to demand that the Government guarantee?

[Mrs Chapman]

There are issues with Connexions, and if I am able to deliver the rest of my speech, I will come on to that.

Satisfaction with Connexions varies a great deal, and the Minister rightly pointed out that its careers advice was lacking. In his report, Alan Milburn observed that only one in five young people questioned on the issue found that the careers advice offered by Connexions was satisfactory. That situation is not sustainable, and we should not put up with it. My objection is that the only young people who will receive guaranteed, face-to-face, top-notch, good-quality careers advice are those in fee-paying schools, which no one in the House should tolerate, regardless of their political affiliation, background or education.

The issue is not just the life chances of individual young people, although it certainly includes that, and I am sure that will be the main focus of debate. This is about economic regeneration. My constituency has an engineering heritage and I have some very large engineering companies. I am thinking of Cummins, which makes engines. I do not understand fully what the company does, but I know the engines come in a range of colours. The careers advice and guidance that I was given, growing up in a town with such a strong engineering heritage, was about the public sector, health care and social sciences. Nobody ever spoke to me about taking maths, about a career in engineering, about getting into technology—nothing. Not very much has changed in that respect.

[Damian Hinds (East Hampshire) (Con)]

Does the hon. Lady agree that it is the quality of advice that counts, more than its quantity? What does she recommend we could do to get more people into schools to talk about STEM subjects, for example, and to inspire pupils to take those—boys and girls?

[Mrs Chapman]

Exactly right; I agree with that. I look at my own sons and wonder who is going to talk to them if they want to go into science, technology, engineering or maths. Heaven help them if they look to me or their father for advice. I can give them advice on politics, psychology, archaeology, retail and cake decorating.

Alan Milburn was right. I am happy to see the service devolved to schools. It is fine for schools to commission the service as they see fit, but they need money to enable them to buy quality face-to-face advice, and there needs to be a proper inspection regime.

[Damian Hinds]

rose—

[Mrs Chapman]

Please be brief.

[Damian Hinds]

Is the hon. Lady aware of the STEMNET ambassador programme, in which people from relevant industries go into schools and get the benefit of continuing professional development while they are sharing their knowledge and enthusiasm with the young people?

[Mrs Chapman]

Fantastic! I am all for that. That is marvellous, but is it happening in every school in the country? Of course not. I have some brilliant engineering businesses which go into schools and inspire young people. They try to point young people in the right direction and show them that there are wonderful careers for them on their doorstep—international careers—but young people need more than a visit from such a company. They need proper face-to-face advice from people who will inspire them.

The businesses in Darlington to which I referred are recruiting senior engineers from Greece, Brazil and Turkey, because we are not producing the people to fill those senior roles. One reason for that is that people are not getting the right advice at the right age. I am not talking just about 16 and FE. I am talking about year 6 in primary school, before they take their options, so that they know that they have to take good science subjects and maths. I am glad to see the hon. Member for East Hampshire (Damian Hinds) agreeing with me. Such careers advice will not happen via Google. It needs to be face-to-face, inspiring advice.

I am fortunate to have in Darlington the Queen Elizabeth sixth-form college. I shall shamelessly plug the work of one woman, Stella Barnes, who provides first-class careers advice to young people there. I am sure that despite the pressures that it faces, the college will find the funding to keep Stella doing such fantastic work, but that is one woman and she can only do so much.

In the turbulent world that our young people are entering, job prospects are not certain, the costs of higher education are putting people off, and EMA no longer incentivises young people to stay on post-16. That applies not only to the at-risk, the vulnerable, the people who would not have a job if their mother had not organised something for them. It applies to all young people from all kinds of backgrounds. It is not just about the children of people on benefits. It is about people whose parents are in professional careers but who lack the wherewithal to open other doors—people like myself.

The biggest shame is that the Government have over-promised on what they will do. When they said that there would be an all-age careers service, people took them at their word. They thought that that meant the same for everybody and that it would be fair, but that is not what we will find. Adults can get face-to-face advice, because the Government rightly recognise that they need it, so why can young people not get it? They need it more than anyone else. They need someone to look them in the eye, work out their personal circumstances, listen to their hopes, dreams and aspirations, perhaps give them some if they do not have any, and work out the best thing for them. Otherwise, we are leaving young people stranded.

[Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)]

There are good examples across the United Kingdom, and some of those will be in Northern Ireland. I suggest that that might be a way forward.

[Mrs Chapman]

I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for that inspiring contribution. I find myself now in a situation in which everything has been said, but probably not by everyone.

20:50

[Elizabeth Truss (South West Norfolk) (Con)]

I fear that the Opposition are on the wrong track with the subject they have selected for today’s debate. I fear that much more damage has been done by the dilution of maths, sciences and languages in our schools than by poor careers advice, and yet we have yet another Opposition day debate on education that does not address the core issue. We are not talking about what students actually learn in school.

During their period in government, Labour presided over a hollowing core that failed to prepare people properly for the world of work. Britain has been left with a skills shortage in crucial areas, and I fear that we are losing the race against international competitors. An OECD report published today indicates that there has been a rebalancing of skills between west and east. The leagues tables for the OECD’s programme for international student assessment speak for themselves, with the UK falling to 28th place in maths.

The previous Government, instead of addressing the fundamental weaknesses in our education system, further skewed education towards those subjects that employers did not want and spent money on careers advice that only a few people appreciated. Only 20% of students said that they thought the careers advice provided was useful. Alan Milburn, a former Labour Minister, said that the careers advice simply was not good enough.

[Simon Hughes]

I recognise my hon. Friend’s interest in this wider subject. The really important thing is that both should work. The reason we need good, personalised careers advice is that it enables young people to make the right choices, for example on what subjects to study, so that they do not end up excluded from university courses—medicine, for instance—because they made the wrong choices when they were 14 or 15.

[Elizabeth Truss]

I thank my right hon. Friend for his intervention. I advocate making the E-bac subjects that the Government are encouraging compulsory until age 16, as they are in Canada, Germany and France. It is good for all students to get a core basic education. We currently have one of the lowest proportions in the OECD of students doing maths aged 16 to 18. We have a very poor record on foreign languages, history and sciences.

To address the point that the shadow Secretary of State made in his speech, we need to get everyone up to a good level in a core general education. It is no longer appropriate to say that it is okay for students to cut off their options at age 14 and regret it later in their careers. I do not think that we need a lot of expensive careers advisers telling students that; it should be a broad part of a general education that everyone in this country studies, as is the case in most of our major competitors. I would like the Government to take up that point.

Employers say that they are most concerned about foreign languages—75% said that it was their major concern. Yet in 2004 the previous Government dropped the requirement of a foreign language at key stage 4, and since then the proportion of students studying foreign languages at GCSE has plunged from 79% to 44%. In mathematics, the UK is an outlier, with only 50% of sixth forms offering further mathematics A-level, and yet students who wish to study mathematics or physics at one of the top universities need a further mathematics A-level. That means that 50% of our young people are unable to study those important subjects at university. That is absolutely disgraceful. Why are they not able to do so? There are perverse incentives in the league tables, as the Minister said earlier, and we all know that some subjects are more equal than others, but there is also a fundamental dishonesty in how they are presented and reported.

One thing that no one has mentioned in the debate so far, however, is the role that teachers should play. We have seen their role diminished since 2003, and in particular since their terms and conditions restricted the activities in which they may become involved. Teachers have a crucial role in inspiring students to think about their future and what they could make of themselves, but sometimes we focus too much on the student’s immediate career, rather than on building up their long-term capabilities.

It is better to have somebody who is close to a student giving them regular advice and being honest about their subject options. I have been into local schools and talked to teachers, and often they are afraid of denigrating a subject for fear of seeming elitist, but unfortunately that is undermining our meritocracy and meaning that students from well-off backgrounds who attend independent schools are twice as likely to study maths and science at A-level, three times as likely to study modern languages and seven times less likely to study media studies. That, I am afraid, is the legacy of our system.

[Steve McCabe (Birmingham, Selly Oak) (Lab)]

What is the basis for assuming that unqualified teachers who flourish in the free-school experiment will be better equipped to provide the support and direction that the hon. Lady hopes pupils will receive?

[Elizabeth Truss]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for his intervention. I support the idea that a good head teacher will select those teachers who are the most inspirational to the students entering that school and encourage them in their future lives and careers. In this country, however, we often look to the short term and the next job, instead of building up the capability for a lifetime of jobs—which could amount to 10 jobs. We are all going to work longer, because we are all living longer.

I know from the previous comments of Labour Front Benchers that they do not always approve of traditional subjects such as physics, chemistry and modern languages—[Interruption.] Well, I have heard expressed in this Chamber objections to the English baccalaureate. However, even if the Opposition think that those subjects are old hat, which people in China and India certainly do not think, as they are rushing to institutes of technology to study them, I am afraid that we are not that great either at teaching new subjects in the way that employers want.

The shadow Secretary of State mentioned ICT, and Dr Eric Schmidt of Google said:

“Your IT curriculum focuses on teaching how to use software, but gives no insight into how it’s made. That is just throwing away your great computing heritage.”

I fear not only that we are not teaching enough rigorous and traditional subjects, but that we are not teaching the new subjects deeply enough, or in a way that imparts how things work, in order to give us the capability to build more effective programming and IT industries. The problem therefore is not just with the subjects, but with the way ICT is being taught.

The Government are taking absolutely the right approach by encouraging more students to study such core subjects, which will give them broad career options, rather than cut off their options early, as many people have unfortunately been doing.

[Julie Hilling]

I thank the hon. Lady for giving way, because I have been sitting here getting increasingly frustrated at the notion that history, geography, modern foreign languages, maths and science are the only subjects that will give a student the breadth of knowledge with which to go forward in their lives. Is the issue not about academic rigour and young people learning to learn and learning to evaluate what they learn? That is the important thing, not the subject that they are doing.

[Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Lindsay Hoyle)]

Order. Interventions are getting a little bit too long.

[Elizabeth Truss]

I thank the hon. Lady for her intervention. Perhaps in due course she could tell me why Canada, France and Germany insist on those subjects being taken to age 16, and why all those countries are doing better than us in the OECD PISA—programme for international student assessment—tables.

The Government are taking absolutely the right approach of strengthening the core, getting rid of modules from exams, making rigorous assessments, and encouraging students to take the E-bac. It is so encouraging that this year the numbers of new entries to these subjects have gone up. We are also offering proper apprenticeships to get people the proper work experience that they need to build a successful career. We will not create careers with more hot air; we will create careers through real learning in real subjects and real jobs.

20:59

[Stephen Twigg (Liverpool, West Derby) (Lab/Co-op)]

This is the first debate I have spoken in since the summer recess, so may I declare an interest that I should have declared when I spoke in a Westminster Hall debate on 6 July? Since March this year, I have had a part-time placement in my local office from a local not-for-profit social enterprise, the Neighbourhood Services Company. Due to an oversight on my part, I did not register that interest until 8 August. I am pleased to have this opportunity to put that on the record.

My right hon. Friend the shadow Education Secretary set the context for this important debate—rising youth unemployment, the loss of education maintenance allowance and the increase in tuition fees, with the danger that today’s generation of young people could be left in the lurch. He also made the important point that Labour Members are not arguing for preserving the status quo, and he made it clear that we want to work on a cross-party basis to deliver the terms of the motion. I welcome the comments by the right hon. Member for Bermondsey and Old Southwark (Simon Hughes), who reminded us of the recommendations in his report. I gently encourage him and his colleagues to follow those words by joining us in the Aye Lobby.

The big policy challenge to which several Members have referred is how we can increase social mobility. We know from research, including last year’s “Going for Growth” report from the OECD, that this country has an appalling record. The strength of the link between a person’s income and their parents’ income is higher in this country than in any other OECD country. That is a truly shocking fact. I think that every speaker has mentioned Alan Milburn, so I feel the need to do so as well. In his 2009 report, Alan said:

“Birth, not worth, has become much more of a determinant of people’s life chances.”

We must ensure that we address that in this debate.

[Mrs Chapman]

On the subject of Alan Milburn, if my hon. Friend cared to read further on in his report, he would notice that Mr Milburn recommended that schools should be funded in order to commission such careers advice.

[Stephen Twigg]

My hon. Friend is absolutely correct. I was going to make a similar point later, but she has made it very powerfully.

The Minister for Further Education, Skills and Lifelong Learning, who is not here this evening, has been cautious in his criticism of the previous Government’s programmes, and rightly so. Of course, as Members on both sides of the House have said, there were serious imperfections with Connexions and Next Step, but we must be careful not to write off the positive features and the important work of many talented and committed professionals who have worked, as some still do, in those programmes.

Today, in advance of tonight’s debate, I spoke to people in some of the secondary schools in my constituency. Those at St John Bosco school in Croxteth told me about the work they have been doing with the Aimhigher programme. They have drawn particularly on the importance of the role of face-to-face contact by employing a graduate mentor to assist the girls at the school with their university applications and career development. This is a school in a very deprived neighbourhood that has an excellent reputation and a high percentage of its girls going on to university.

Cardinal Heenan school for boys has pioneered a particularly innovative approach to careers advice. I want to commend Dave Forshaw, the head teacher, and his team for their industry day programme, which I have had the opportunity to visit on two occasions. The programme draws on alumni, partners and a range of local organisations to deliver rich and effective careers advice, starting in year 7. Its recent industry days have had contributions from a former pupil of the school, the actor Ian Hart, who appeared in the Harry Potter films, as well as local and national journalists, sports professionals, solicitors, accountants and others. West Derby school has adopted a similar approach and held its first careers convention last year.

I cite those examples because they demonstrate two important points. The first is the critical importance of giving information and advice at an early age. Too often, these things are left too late. The second is the importance of drawing on expertise, including among the alumni of the schools themselves, to inspire young people.

The head teachers of those schools said to me today that quality careers advice needs resources. They are very concerned about what they see as a potential shift in policy away from face-to-face interaction to online and telephone-based services. My right hon. Friend the shadow Secretary of State set out the research published by Unison that was done at the university of Derby, which shows the sheer scale of the cuts in careers services up and down the country. That is the backdrop for this important debate.

Some of this debate has focused on low-cost solutions and how effective they are in delivery. I would like to bring the House’s attention to the work of an organisation called Future First. It has done excellent research on careers services. Like the head teachers of the schools in my constituency that I have cited, it emphasises that careers advice cannot be reduced to online information and telephone services. A complementary model is surely the best way forward. Future First seeks to increase social mobility by building communities of alumni around state schools to inspire young people about their futures.

[Mr Graham Stuart]

The hon. Gentleman is giving a passionate speech. He has just said that careers advice should be complementary, and I agree. However, the Opposition motion does not say that the Government should seek to find additional funds to provide face-to-face careers advice; it says that all young people should be provided with face-to-face careers advice whether they need it or not. That does not sound complementary; it sounds like the cumbersome over-specified and overly expensive processes that we saw too much of under the previous Government.

[Stephen Twigg]

Not at all. What I mean by complementary, and what I understand Future First to mean by complementary, is that we need face-to-face advice, but that that is not enough. We also need the other projects to which I and other Members have referred.

[Eric Joyce (Falkirk) (Lab)]

On the subject of complementary services, my hon. Friend will be aware that the Labour Government and my hon. Friend the Member for Huddersfield (Mr Sheerman) explored the possibility of using social media as a complementary way of introducing kids at school to people who have the same interests. Does he think that we might take that idea forward in the future?

[Stephen Twigg]

Absolutely; my hon. Friend makes an important point. Face-to-face advice is vital, and that is why the motion is about that, but it is not enough on its own. We need other initiatives, whether they use information technology or networks of alumni, as Future First does.

Future First started as a project in London state secondary schools. It was founded by a team of graduates from state schools, who were motivated by their own experience. It seeks to improve the support offered to young people at school as soon as they start considering their future. It is now supported by a wide range of organisations, including the Sutton Trust. It is looking to extend its excellent practice beyond London to other parts of the country. Recently, I had the opportunity to introduce Future First to Liverpool Vision, with a view to opening opportunities for it to take its programmes to Liverpool. It will be meeting shortly with head teachers and business leaders in the city of Liverpool.

Future First’s study, “Social Mobility, Careers Advice and Alumni Networks”, to which my right hon. Friend the shadow Secretary of State referred, makes the point that was made earlier by my hon. Friend the Member for Huddersfield (Mr Sheerman) about the contrast between what happens in private schools and state schools. When asked how they rated their careers service, just 31% of young people in state schools said “good” or “very good”, yet in private schools the figure was almost double that at 57%. The figures from the independent sector and those from the state sector show a very significant contrast, which highlights the scale of the challenges that we face.

In-school services must get better. Schools need to improve them, but they cannot do that on their own; they need partners, and organisations such as Future First provide ideal partners for that excellent work. I therefore urge the Government, following tonight’s debate, not only to guarantee face-to-face careers advice as set out in the motion, but to go beyond that, and support and encourage excellent programmes such as the one at Cardinal Heenan school in my constituency and the ones that Future First has promoted in London. As my right hon. Friend the shadow Education Secretary said, Opposition Members will work with the Government if they genuinely seek to advance that vital instrument in the fight for a more socially mobile country.

21:10

[Alok Sharma (Reading West) (Con)]

I do not know whether you have seen the film “Groundhog Day”, Mr Deputy Speaker, in which history keeps repeating itself, but this Opposition day debate and the one before it feel very similar. We have heard the same old tired arguments from the Opposition, with very little acknowledgment of the mistakes that they made or the mess in which we find ourselves, in terms of both the economy and the careers advice service.

A number of hon. Members have quoted the former Member for Darlington, Alan Milburn, so let me do so as well. Having chaired the panel on fair access, he said:

“In my view, the service requires a quite radical rethink”.

Indeed, the panel concluded:

“We believe that schools and colleges need to be given direct responsibility, working with local authorities, for making their decisions about information, advice and guidance”.

That is exactly what the Government plan to do.

The current hon. Member for Darlington (Mrs Chapman) quoted a survey that said that only one in five young people found Connexions helpful. Further surveys said that under Labour, six in 10 were unhappy with the quality of the careers that they were getting—[Interruption.] There has been an element of good advice, but perhaps not enough, and we must acknowledge that there was no golden age of careers advice under the previous Government. We need to put the debate in that context.

I agree with hon. Members who have made it clear that careers advice is vital, and that young people need to get it as early as possible in their school careers. It is important that we foster aspiration, which hon. Members have talked about; that we expand the boundaries of what students believe is possible for them in their careers; and that we get young people to aim high.

The hon. Member for Bristol East (Kerry McCarthy), who is not in the Chamber, spoke about that, and I agreed with her, but the question is this: how do we deliver that careers advice? We have heard that the Education Bill will introduce a legal duty for the provision of impartial careers guidance in years 9 to 11, which is absolutely right. I am pleased that the Minister spoke about the fact that the Government are consulting on whether they should extend that duty downwards to year 8, which would be great. I would like to see it go down further, because we cannot start careers advice early enough.

I agree that that responsibility should go to schools. At the end of the day, they know their pupils best and know what is required. They will be able to commission advice and services from the new national careers service when that is up and running, and of course from other external sources.

It has been implied—I do not whether it was deliberate or not—that providing online advice does not make sense for young people. Some of us have young children ourselves, and some of us know young people, and we know that it is second nature for them to use the internet to do research. Professor Alison Wolf, who led the Government review of vocational education, has said very clearly that there is a role for the Government in providing online, updated information on what is available. It is entirely consistent that online provision is one of the things that will be happening.

[Lilian Greenwood]

I agree that young people often want to access information through new technology, but does the hon. Gentleman consider it an adequate replacement for guidance and the opportunity to discuss options face to face?

[Alok Sharma]

Clearly, we need to have both. [Interruption.] Hang on, let me finish! Schools will be able to access this information.

I want to talk about what is happening on my patch in Reading. It is vital that not just schools, but businesses have a key role in providing careers advice, because, at the end of the day, they have an interest in interacting with their future employees. It is vital that we do not forget that element. As the Minister knows, because he is opening it at the end of the month, we have organised an interactive careers fair—we have called it a “futures fair”—open to all secondary schools in my constituency. We have organised it with the educational charity, Central Berkshire Education Business Partnership, which I guess is the sort of external service provider that we are talking about. I have long thought it important—I am sure that other Members have too—that we connect schools and business and that careers advice is not provided in isolation by schools and teachers.

When I began the initiative, I wondered how we would fund it, but actually businesses bent over backwards to provide funding. We are holding it at the conference centre at the Madejski football stadium in Reading—it is going to be a very big event—and schools will not have to pay a penny because it will be fully funded by business. More than 60 organisations, including businesses, multinationals and local companies, are taking part. An hon. Member said that we needed alumni and former students in positions of responsibility in companies to come and talk to pupils in schools, which is exactly what we will have—every sector will be covered, from engineering to IT and apprenticeships providers—along with seminars on practical skills, including on how to write a CV, perform in mock interviews, secure an apprenticeship, manage money and budget. There will also be advice on pursuing a science career. Hon. Members have rightly said that we need to encourage STEM subjects.

The careers fair is also about ensuring that before the students arrive, they know exactly what to expect and that afterwards there will be follow-up sessions with teachers. Hon. Members talked about the need to involve families and parents. There will be an opportunity, after the school day, for parents to come back with their kids and talk to businesses. There are families in my constituencies—perhaps in all constituencies—who have never had a scientist, lawyer, accountant or whatever in their family, and this is an opportunity for parents to talk with businesses together with their kids. That is vital.

In the previous debate, the shadow Business Secretary, the right hon. Member for Southampton, Itchen (Mr Denham), talked about the need for long-term apprenticeships. We have companies coming to the fair offering three-year apprenticeships, and there is even a seminar for teachers to learn about the local labour market and the types of skills that employers are looking for. I am talking about this because we need to stop thinking one-dimensionally and assuming that the Government must provide everything. There is a clear role for businesses. They bend over backwards to help schools and local communities because they know that at the end of the day they will see the benefits. We need to find a way of getting the business community more engaged. Bridging the skills and expectations gap between young people and potential employers is vital.

In conclusion, I think that the Government are on absolutely the right track with careers advice, and I ask the Opposition to think carefully about what the Government are doing and the constraints placed on them as a result of the position in which we were left by the previous Government. Unfortunately, I cannot support the Opposition motion tonight.

21:19

[Julie Hilling (Bolton West) (Lab)]

In the ’80s and ’90s, I spent 10 years as a youth worker in a youth co-operative project for unemployed young people. At that time, more than a quarter of young people were unemployed. They were a generation who had no jobs, no hope and no future. Some of those young people never recovered from that period. Some committed suicide; others turned to drugs and alcohol, or ended up with long-term mental health problems. Even when the economy started to recover, those young people who had spent many years unemployed found it incredibly difficult to get a job. Let us be honest, most employers would probably prefer to employ a 16-year-old fresh out of school than a 26-year-old who has spent most of the past 10 years unemployed, with nothing to get up for and nothing to do.

The youth co-operative tried to stop the cycle of despair for young people. It helped them to gain skills and set up their own businesses. It gave them driving lessons and taught them how to use computers. It built up their confidence and gave them a reason to get out of bed, and it was open 365 days a year. It was about more than skills education; it provided a support network, and it challenged attitudes. It helped people to believe in themselves and gave them practical help. We helped young people who were sleeping in cars and on friends’ floors to get rehoused. We then helped them to decorate their new homes and find second-hand furniture. We helped young people whose schools and colleges said that they were not good enough for university to get there and to complete their degrees, and we supported young people into work. Then we were closed by Tory cuts in the youth service.

The Labour Government came along and introduced the Connexions service, which offered careers advice-plus, in the form of straightforward careers advice for all young people and a dedicated support service for young people not in employment education or training, or those at risk of becoming NEETs. The service did many of the things that the youth co-operative did in the ’80s and ’90s. Now we have another Tory Government, and youth unemployment is at its highest since 1992. We are seeing the destruction of Connexions and the youth service, and all support services are being slashed. It is back to the future again. Young people again feel that they have no jobs, no hope and no future.

We can argue about the effectiveness of the Connexions service. The Government like to use the result of an online survey of 510 respondents who said that they were unhappy with the service, rather than the survey of 5,000 young people carried out by the then Department for Education and Skills, which found that over 90% were satisfied with the service that they had received. Surely no one can argue that online advice is a substitute for face-to-face advice. Like my hon. Friend the Member for Darlington (Mrs Chapman) and, I suspect, many other Members, I did not get good careers advice—[Laughter.]

[Stephen Twigg]

Like all of us; that’s why we are here.

[Julie Hilling]

Perhaps—although I have to say that it is not a bad job.

It is down to us to ensure that young people are inspired to follow certain careers. How can they find out what jobs and careers are out there? If they do not have friends, family or people in their neighbourhood who are in a variety of professions, how do they find out what they can do, or what their options are? That is the situation that faces many of our young people, especially those from poorer backgrounds.

[Damian Hinds]

The hon. Lady is raising some very good questions, but is she implying that all those services have been working perfectly for the past 10 years or so?

[Julie Hilling]

I am quite happy to concede that they have not been working perfectly, but I have to tell the House that the Government’s proposals will make things worse, not better.

Many industries—not just the professions involving solicitors, doctors and so on—are very much family affairs, in which sons and daughters follow fathers and mothers, aunts and uncles and grandparents into the workplace. Before I worked for a rail union, which was very much a family affair, I had no idea about the range of jobs available in that industry. How does a young person without connections find out about such jobs, and how do they ensure that they have the right skills to apply for them when they do find out about them?

Of course, the advice that young people receive has to be good. I remember a member of my staff taking a young person to meet a careers officer before the Connexions service was established. Again, I am not saying that Connexions was perfect. That young women wanted to become a vet, but the careers adviser very kindly told her about how to become a veterinary nurse. That was disgraceful. We need to be ambitious for young people. I worked with two young people who were told that they were too stupid to go to university. One of them now has her master’s degree, and is a head of department in a sixth-form college. The other has a degree in Russian and splits his time between Russia and Korea. A computer program will not inspire young people. It will not be ambitious for them, and it will not stretch them. It will not build their confidence, or give them the support that they need if they are to reach their full potential.

What if a young person has learning difficulties or physical disabilities? I want to talk about Thomas, whose mum and gran came to see me in my surgery. Thomas had not been diagnosed with a disability and there was a threat to take his mum to court because he would not attend school. Eventually, through our intervention, Thomas was diagnosed with an autism-related condition. He would not leave home, go to school or do anything else. He had a Connexions adviser, however, who regularly came to the house at the same time each week—the sort of thing that a young person with an autism-related condition needs. By using the available funding, the adviser was able to take Thomas out to the library and various other activities, and to give him experience of work programmes. Thomas’s life was transformed, but his mum and gran are now absolutely desperate about what will happen to him.

Connexions was not just about careers advice. Funding was made available to support young people like Thomas or others who for other reasons were not making a good transfer to further education or work. There was funding for programmes that provided support, training and education for young people, including a summer programme for 16-year-olds from the New Opportunities Fund. An activity agreement provided an allowance in return for fulfilling an agreed action plan and funding was provided to purchase experiential learning opportunities. There was a learning agreement aimed at engaging local employers and increasing the number of young people in jobs with training. The programme offered financial incentives to employers and young people, in combination with suitably brokered learning provision.

In Wigan there was a range of bespoke projects aimed at the most vulnerable young people in the borough—including teenage pregnancy courses and a video production course for young offenders. The re-engage project built on the success of the activity agreement pilot by securing a discretionary fund for young people living in Wigan’s most deprived neighbourhoods. That also funded summer projects, in partnership with the youth service, to keep school leavers engaged. An apprenticeship pathways project was delivered by Wigan college and local learning providers, which looked at new ways of engaging and motivating closer to the labour market young people who were struggling to find opportunities. Wigan council’s supported employment team was funded to assist young people with learning difficulties in accessing work opportunities. The council delivered a successful apprenticeship programme, recruiting young people and supporting them through trained mentors. In partnership with local learning providers and colleges, it successfully delivered a range of activities to engage and motivate NEET and potentially NEET clients—including the clearing house, taster sessions, locality-based summer programmes and careers events.

What happened as a result of all that support and all those programmes? Youth unemployment fell by 40% from 1997 to the start of the global financial crisis, and more than half the young people on jobseeker’s allowance were off it within three months. But now it is all gone.

Most young people from advantaged backgrounds will make the transition from school to employment, probably via university, with few problems, but surely we have a duty to support young people who, through no fault of their own, will find that transition difficult or impossible. We owe it to young people to help them fulfil their potential. We owe it to them to give them the best possible support and advice from trained and qualified advisers. I hope that the Government will do another U-turn and save either the Connexions service or the careers service—at least something that will be valuable to young people. And while they are at it, I hope that they will save the youth service, too.

[Several hon. Members]

rose—

[Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Lindsay Hoyle)]

There are two speakers and 12 minutes left.

21:28

[Gordon Birtwistle (Burnley) (LD)]

I thank the shadow Secretary of State for bringing this debate to the House, as I believe it is valuable—one of the most important debates I have attended since being elected. It is only a shame that so few Members are present to hear the contributions. [Interruption.] I am not naming names, just making a comment. The principle behind the motion is very good, but the way in which it has been written is very poor. [Interruption.] Those might be the words of my right hon. Friend the Member for Bermondsey and Old Southwark (Simon Hughes) but they are not in this motion. The problem with it is—[Interruption.] The hon. Member for Kingston upon Hull East (Karl Turner) has only just come into the Chamber, yet he seems to think this is a joke.

The motion says:

“That this House believes that the Government should act urgently to guarantee face-to-face careers advice for all young people in schools.”

It does not tell us how many times, at what stage careers advice is needed, or how old the young people should be. Let me explain why I believe it has been badly written. If it had been written differently, I might have been able to support it.

When I was leader of Burnley council some three years ago, I went to a junior school to speak to some year 6 students who were just about to leave the school and go on to secondary education. The headmistress had invited a number of prominent people in the town—the mayor, myself and one or two more—to say what our jobs were. After we had told the young people what our jobs were, we asked them what sort of vision they had for their future. One little girl said that she was interested in becoming a nursery nurse, as she had some siblings and was keen on looking after them. The shock for me came when one young man said, “I want to be a benefit claimant.” That was the aspiration in life of a young man of 11, and he had never been given any different advice. When I asked him why, he said, “My dad and uncle are benefit claimants and we live very well off it, so why should I get up every morning to go to work?” When I told the head teacher afterwards how stunned I was at that, she said, “I’m afraid that’s the way of the world round here.” I then decided that I would look into how that happened, and what we could do to try to stop it.

After that we got talking to people in the secondary schools. The secondary schools in Burnley have gone through a torrid time, although I am pleased to say that they are now recovering. Nobody in here needs to tell me about privileged students; if they came to Burnley, they would find that we do not have very many privileged students at the moment. I thought it would be a great idea to get the companies involved, and we managed to get a big company involved in every school. They carry out a lot of careers advice because they are the professionals; they know what educational skills they need from the people who are coming to them.

A lot of young people want to go on to university, and that is fine, but a lot of young people are going on to university to study subjects that do not qualify them for any jobs when they have finished studying them, while there are a number of jobs in manufacturing, particularly in Burnley, for which we cannot get staff. One company in Burnley is looking for 300 skilled workers and cannot get them. It has suddenly decided that taking on a vast number of apprentices, through the Government’s apprenticeship scheme, is a good idea. But a young person of 16 does not get to be a skilled airframe fitter or aero-engine fitter by the time they are 17. The process takes four or five years. For the past 30 years that process has not happened; we have let the whole thing fall apart. I am not blaming the Labour Government or the previous Tory Government, but that has happened; this is where we are.

We have a careers service that has failed the young people of this country for the past 30 years, and we desperately need to do something about it. We do not need the Government to do everything; we need to get the professionals from industry involved. Why do we not invite Sir John Rose, who has retired from Rolls-Royce, to talk to people and advise them about how he would run a careers service? He has run Rolls-Royce for donkey’s years and made it very successful. I do not think that the Government can do this on their own. People outside government can give better advice than anybody within it.

I suggest that the Government should examine what they are doing. I accept the need to do more and if money is available, I hope that they will do more. I also think that the local colleges and further education colleges could do more. Twice a year Burnley college has a careers day, when it invites all the companies from Burnley and most of them attend. They put stands up and speak to young people, and they take vast numbers of young people on as a result of those nights. One company took six apprentices on as a result of one of these nights—young people who had never thought of going into that sort of industry.

We cannot take too narrow an approach to this issue. We should expand it to include everybody involved in employing young people once they have finished school or university. I implore the Government to examine all the options. As I have said, I am disappointed that the motion has been so badly written. [Interruption.] It is not my right hon. Friend’s motion; it is the shadow Secretary of State’s motion. It is badly written—but if it had said, “We want to do this at certain times of people’s education and there is some money for it here,” I assure hon. Members that I would have supported it. Unfortunately, the Opposition motion does not say that.

21:34

[Damian Hinds (East Hampshire) (Con)]

So much to say, and so little time to say it in.

Many of the contributions from Opposition Members have been about bad careers advice, stereotyping and ambition limiting. The unfortunate point is that guaranteeing that advice will be provided face to face does not get rid of bad advice; all that it guarantees is that the advice will be heard more directly. The title of this debate displayed on the annunciator is “Careers Service (Young People)”, but doing real service to young people in their careers is about much more than specifying a certain amount of time with the man from the council. It only happens when the whole education system and the economy work together on young people’s careers. We must take a much bigger, broader, holistic view of this at a national level, in industry, throughout the education system and in interaction with individual young people.

As we know, we live in a rapidly changing world that has already changed in many ways, not least through the disappearance of many jobs that young people used to do between the ages of 16 and 18 and in terms of the types of skills we need for the jobs that we expect to be available in the future. As the right hon. Member for Leigh (Andy Burnham) rightly said, the range of different jobs that people might now do over their lifetime calls for much more flexibility.

We do not have a great record in this country, historically, of picking winners, but we need to recognise that certain industries will be growth industries at which we need to excel. Without exception they are industries that need greater skills, and we need to help young people to focus on them. We need better links between industry and education, both so industries can inspire young people to want to go and work in them and so that the skills sets that come out of the education system include the things they need as companies, and that we need as an economy and as a country to succeed in the world. There also needs to be a feedback mechanism so that companies and sectors can tell the education system what they are looking for. We often hear complaints about what comes out, but it is not quite so clear what the mechanism for change is.

There must also be opportunities, of course, for young people to experience, sample and gain experience and training in firms, and I welcome the expansion in apprenticeships and work placements. I agree that we must look again at how the internship system works. We have heard about internships from Opposition Members, and a number of Members of Parliament have taken the decision that they will ensure that internships are paid, so that they are available to the full range of young people.

Education as a whole must guide young people towards fulfilling careers. I was surprised that the right hon. Member for Leigh left colleges out of the motion, as they are an important part of the education system. He referred only to schools, but of course the whole system must work effectively. I do not think anybody could doubt the Government’s commitment to reforming the education system, both to raise the average level of education and, crucially, to narrow the yawning and embarrassing gap between rich and poor.

I am afraid that in parts of the education system too many young people have not been guided towards fulfilling careers. Let me quote the Wolf report:

“The staple offer for between a quarter and a third of the post-16 cohort is a diet of low-level vocational qualifications, most of which have little to no labour market value.”

At an even earlier stage—coming up to key stage 4—it seems that some young people are guided towards subjects that will boost the school’s performance in the league tables more than they might boost the individual’s performance in the job market and their opportunities through life. Perhaps they get face-to-face advice: perhaps somebody tells them that all GCSE subjects will be worth the same to them as any other; perhaps somebody tells them that equivalencies will always be accepted in the outside world; and perhaps somebody tells them that getting a GCSE in accountancy, law or financial services is a key step to starting a career in one of those professions.

I welcome what the Government are doing to publish destination data on schools as well as more information on higher education institutions, and I also welcome the reform of the key stage 4 league tables. I also welcome the somewhat controversial—in parts—English baccalaureate. The simple fact is that those core subjects have a premium value among employers and higher education institutions, and we should stop fibbing to young people. It is not a full curriculum. There is plenty of room for options on top of the English baccalaureate, but the best advice we can give to a young person who wants to keep their options as open as possible is to include in what they study those core academic subjects. Of course it will not be for everyone, and I also welcome the Government’s moves to ensure that the league tables and metrics recognise equally the progress of every child. We must find new and better ways to ensure that post-16 students are more engaged with mathematics.

In conclusion, the motion talks about guaranteeing good careers advice. I put it to you, Mr Speaker, that the only way to guarantee a good careers service for young people is if all the elements—at national level, in industry, in education, and direct advice for people—are working in concert.

21:39

[Mr Iain Wright (Hartlepool) (Lab)]

May I begin by extending the Opposition’s best wishes to the Minister for Further Education, Skills and Lifelong Learning? He always makes these debates an absolute delight and pleasure; frankly, we have missed him today and we very much hope that he has a speedy recovery from his operation.

The debate has not been what I expected, which was more of the yah-boo politics that we have come to expect in the House. I expected to hear, “You spent too much money,” coming from one side and, “You don’t care about vulnerable people,” on the other. I have been struck by how much consensus there has been and what a good, measured, well-informed and excellent tone there has been throughout. At its best, the debate has featured hon. Members being very much in agreement. I pay tribute to all hon. Members who have contributed tonight, particularly to the spirit in which the right hon. Member for Bermondsey and Old Southwark (Simon Hughes) made his remarks. What I did find regrettable, however, were the contortions that he and the hon. Member for Burnley (Gordon Birtwistle) got into in saying, “We agree with every single point that the Opposition are making regarding the motion, but we cannot possibly vote with them tonight,” for whatever reason.

[Dan Rogerson]

The point that might have escaped the shadow Minister is that the Opposition have taken one recommendation out of a whole report and sought to force a vote on something tonight that they never provided for when they were in government. Unfortunately, that brings a yah-boo, cynical element to something that goes much wider. It would be better to debate the full report from the Government and the reaction to that report.

[Mr Wright]

I disagree. The right hon. Member for Bermondsey and Old Southwark made an excellent and measured contribution about expanding the provision of careers advice to younger pupils, about making sure that we have a wide variety of work experience and about making sure that careers guidance is not offered on a wet Wednesday afternoon, as we mentioned in the Committee on the Education Bill. I agree with every word. This is more complex than it just being about face-to-face guidance, but face-to-face guidance is an important complementary step. I should have thought that he agreed with that and would want to show his support and put pressure on the Government by joining us in the Lobby tonight.

[Simon Hughes]

The hon. Gentleman knows that I respect his commitment to these issues both before he came to the House and since he has been here. We are very clear that we want the same objective. Tonight is a chance for the Labour party to put its cards on the table, and we have made our position clear about where we want the Government to get to. I believe that they have listened and that the Minister will respond, and I hope that in not many weeks from now we will end up where we all want to be.

[Mr Wright]

The Minister said earlier that he did not want to rule anything in or out regarding the right hon. Gentleman’s recommendations and I should have thought that meant an abstention in tonight’s debate to make sure that all the cards were on the table, but that does not seem to be the case. I do think that the Minister is thinking about moving in that direction and I hope that he will accept an amendment to the Education Bill—we will certainly put pressure on him as the Bill makes its way through the Lords—but it is disappointing that, in the spirit of consensus that we have seen in tonight’s debate, he cannot make more positive remarks to make sure that we make provision for face-to-face guidance.

Two or three weeks ago, our young people got excellent GCSE and A-level results and, as hon. Members have said tonight, we should all celebrate their success. The Minister said in August that

“we have to make sure we prepare young people for the future, whether they are going onto further education, training or into the workplace.”

He reiterated that tonight by saying that it is important for young people to make the right choices in order for them to be guided in the future. We could not agree more, but it is abundantly clear that the Government are failing to do that.

As my right hon. Friend the shadow Secretary of State has made clear, young people are facing the most difficult and turbulent prospects for at least a generation. The modern world is complex and often disorienting and is unrecognisable from what it was a few short years ago, both in its challenges and in its opportunities. The certainties that we had in the labour markets in the 1950s and 1960s when the Minister of State, Department for Education, the hon. Member for Bognor Regis and Littlehampton (Mr Gibb), listened to his gramophone records have gone for good. Much of that change is due to large-scale shifts in global forces, such as the economic rise of China. The present economic situation is made more difficult by the current turbulence in the global economy. I fully accept that when global aggregate demand goes down, additional pressure is placed on youth employment, but the Government’s policies are making a bad situation very much worse.

As we heard in an earlier debate today, the loss of EMA, the abolition of the future jobs fund, the scrapping of the young people’s guarantee, the trebling of tuition fees and the ending of Aimhigher have made it more difficult than ever for young people in this country to work hard, to get on and to succeed. That implicit contract that we had, in place since the post-war era and shared by successive Governments, that somehow the next generation would do better than the previous generation, is in real danger of being broken. That was made clear in an excellent contribution by my hon. Friend the Member for Liverpool, West Derby (Stephen Twigg).

In difficult and confusing times such as these we need, now more than ever, an effective, functioning and professional careers service to support and navigate young people through the turbulence. We need a personalised service, with close links between the young person and the adviser. We need, as the right hon. Member for Bermondsey and Old Southwark said tonight, face-to-face guidance, helping to motivate, inspire and enthuse young people in difficult times.

In the current economic difficulties, when a young person receives rejection letter after rejection letter, it is neither use nor ornament just to point them to a phone. As my hon. Friend the Member for Huddersfield (Mr Sheerman) said, IT is important but we cannot do it with technology alone. We need a professional to say to that young person, “Keep going,” or “I think you should try this,” or “This might suit you.” As my hon. Friend the Member for Bolton West (Julie Hilling) said, we need in the careers service trusted professionals who know the young people—young people such as Thomas—who can help inspire and motivate them. Tragically, the cuts to such services mean that the professionalism and expertise of careers personnel has been lost, and lost for good.

Time and again in the debate we heard that our young people from places across the country have been denied such opportunities. We heard that from my hon. Friends the Members for Huddersfield and for Darlington (Mrs Chapman), who in a powerful speech expressed her concern that high-quality advice might be confined to those in fee-paying schools.

Ministers in the Department for Education pride themselves on trusting professionals to make the right decisions, but we have had in the last month the astonishing, and possibly unprecedented, situation where a Government advisory group of some 20 renowned experts and professionals considered resigning en masse in protest at the Government’s shambolic and incompetent handling of careers services for young people. Steve Higginbotham, president of the Institute of Career Guidance, blasted the Government and stated that the service

“will not be an all-age careers service. It is a rebranded Next Step service for adults plus an all-age telephone advice line and website.”

As my hon. Friend the Member for Darlington said, if the Government truly wish to aid social mobility and break the cycle of multigenerational worklessness or low aspiration, they need to provide all possible tools. By removing face-to-face careers guidance for all young people, they are taking one of those vital tools away.

Ministers also often cite international comparisons to support their policies. The hon. Member for South West Norfolk (Elizabeth Truss) cited those a lot tonight. But international evidence shows clearly that devolving such career advice to schools has not worked in other countries. Professor Tony Watts, giving evidence to the Education Committee, stated that in studying 55 countries it emerged that three negative things happen when it comes to school-based guidance. First, impartiality goes out of the window because schools have a direct and vested interest; secondly, there is a weakening in links with the labour market; and finally there is an unevenness in performance in schools. Professor Watts said that two countries, New Zealand and the Netherlands, have recently done what this Government are now doing, and in both cases it resulted in a significant erosion in the quality of help as well as the breadth of its extent.

I mentioned the Education Committee. In its excellent report on participation in education and training by 16 to 19-year-olds, it makes a valued point on the unease about the Government’s changes to careers. That was highlighted several times tonight. It draws attention to the fact that the Department for Education’s funding commitments to an all-age careers service consists only of online and phone services. As we heard tonight, the Select Committee makes the very clear recommendation that the Departments should fund face-to-face careers guidance for young people under the age of 18. Opposition Members very much agree.

So I ask the Minister—for the sake of his career, let alone the careers of hundreds of thousands of young people—to look again at this important matter. Will he listen to the impassioned pleas made tonight by hon. Members on both sides of the House? Will he consider the almost unanimous view of professionals? Will he take on board the Education Committee’s reasoned comments? Will he listen to what is best for young people? Will he listen again to the right hon. Member for Bermondsey and Old Southwark and act urgently to guarantee face-to-face careers information, advice and guidance for all and not just some young people in schools? Listening to the speeches made by hon. Members on both sides of the House, that definitely seems to be the will of hon. Members tonight. I commend the motion to the House in a spirit of consensus.

21:50

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Education (Tim Loughton)]

First, I agree with the shadow Minister that we have had a lively, good-humoured and balanced debate this evening, even if it has lacked the sagacity and flair of my hon. Friend the Minister for Further Education, Skills and Lifelong Learning. I am sure that we all wish him well in his recovery.

I must repeat that the Secretary of State is not here this evening because, heeding the shadow Secretary of State’s advice, he is not hiding his head in an ivory tower; he is out meeting 100 excellent head teachers who have gone to see him to talk about weighty matters—five times the number of Labour Members who bothered to come to the Chamber to listen to the shadow Secretary of State when he opened the Labour party’s debate in this Opposition day earlier this evening, so let us get things into perspective.

We heard the same old script. Whether it is “Groundhog Day”, which was mentioned by my hon. Friend the Member for Reading West (Alok Sharma), a wind-up gramophone—a phrase used by my hon. Friend the Minister—or an over-heated iPod, the shadow Secretary of State and the hon. Members for Halton (Derek Twigg), who is not here, and for Bolton West (Julie Hilling) came out with the same old stuff: where is the money? They should tell us where the money went. Where did the money go? Why did we have such an inheritance, which meant that difficult decisions had to be made? Why has face-to-face advice become such a totemic issue? If it was such a be-all and end-all that it had to be guaranteed, why did the previous Labour Government, in 13 years of running the careers service, never offer that guarantee? Why has it become so totemic now?

It was an understatement par excellence by the shadow Secretary of State when he said that the previous system was not perfect. He is dead right that it was not perfect. Labour Members left a system where youth unemployment had risen from 664,000 to 924,000 on their watch and where the number of NEETs aged between 15 and 19 rose from 8% to 8.8% when it was falling in other OECD countries. They left far too many of our young people without the basic literacy and numeracy skills that they need to get any career going at all.

Labour Members trotted out the same old platitudes and clichés. The right hon. Member for Leigh (Andy Burnham) said that we are interested only in the elites. If pioneering a pupil premium for the most disadvantaged young people from the most disadvantaged estates in this country is an elite, call me elitist. If giving special treatment to those children in care who suffer appalling outcomes after 13 years of Labour Government is elite, call me elitist. If it is elitist to offer 250,000 additional apprenticeships and 80,000 more work experience places and to ensure that we will raise the participation age, despite the financial pressures at the moment, call me an elitist. Our view of elitism is to ensure that every child in this country gets a fair crack of the whip and a fair opportunity to get a decent career—something that got worse under the previous Government.

The hon. Member for Darlington (Mrs Chapman)—the successor to Alan Milburn, who came up in just about every speech that we heard—gave us the most unparalleled outpouring of stereotypes that I have ever heard in 14 years in the House: the feminine qualifications of cake decorating and the colour of cars. She talked about social mobility and said, “If Labour is about anything, it is about social mobility.” Why, then, after 13 years of Labour, at key stage 4 did 68.5% of non-free-school-meal pupils achieve five or more A to C grade GCSEs or the equivalent, compared with only 30.9% of free-school-meal pupils? Why did only 8% of free-school-meal pupils take the E-bac, with 4% achieving it, as against 24% of non-FSM pupils? Why, at age 18, are 29% of young people who have claimed free school meals not in employment, education or training? That is more than double the rate for those who had not claimed free school meals, for whom the figure is 13%. If that is social mobility under Labour, I do not want any of it. It is up to this Government to do something about social mobility, which Labour talked and talked about but delivered in reverse.

The hon. Member for Huddersfield (Mr Sheerman), whom I respect greatly as a former Chair of the Select Committee, said that in his day technology alone would certainly not have solved the problem. Of course it would not; technology has moved on enormously in the past 10 or 20 years. Who, 20 years ago, would have envisaged ringing up NHS Direct to get medical advice, or using computer programs to get mental health advice? It is horses for courses. He talks about localism; what localism means for us is leaving it up to the expertise in the schools—the professionals, teachers and heads—to decide whether careers advice should be given face to face, over the internet, over the phone, or even by retaining Connexions. [Interruption.] If Labour Members listen, they will learn something, I hope. I have four minutes to try to get them to learn something, but they are in denial about where the money went, about where the £200 million exclusively to guarantee face-to-face interviews will come from, and about social mobility, when they know that it went the wrong way under Labour.

I pay tribute to my right hon. Friend the Member for Bermondsey and Old Southwark (Simon Hughes) for the work he has done on the subject, and for his report. He is interested not in numbers, but in quality. He says that there has been a proliferation of courses and qualifications, and he is absolutely right. That is why we are ensuring a concentration on good-quality, core subjects that people can understand—subjects in which employers want the people whom they take on to have qualifications.

My hon. Friend the Member for South West Norfolk (Elizabeth Truss), in another excellent and typically thoughtful speech, said that we need pupils to have a core general education. We need real subjects for real jobs. Teachers, who did not feature much in the contributions of Opposition Members, have a crucial role in inspiring young people in the classroom. In the same way, people from industry—engineers, business men and women, scientists, doctors—who were mentioned by several hon. Members, have a crucial role to play in coming into classrooms and giving their face-to-face advice, and experience of what it is like to go into their career.

The hon. Member for Liverpool, West Derby (Stephen Twigg) gave some very good examples of good practice in his constituency. He talked about an industry day, when real people come in and share their real-life experiences to inspire others. We are talking about people who have lived those experiences, trained for those experiences, and are making a living from them. All that can happen under the new system; it is up to the schools to decide, because we trust the schools. We trust the teachers and head teachers to make the right decisions on the ground, locally, for the children whom they teach, and to have an interest in what those children go on to do.

My hon. Friend the Member for Reading West (Alok Sharma) talked about “Groundhog Day”; he got it absolutely right. You would not believe it from the opening speech, or from other contributions from Labour Members, but there was never a golden age of careers advice. It was as if things had suddenly gone down the plug-hole after the election. The hon. Member for Bolton West (Julie Hilling) talked about the youth service, as she often does; she has expertise in the subject.

[Ms Rosie Winterton (Doncaster Central) (Lab)]

claimed to move the closure (Standing Order No. 36).

Question put forthwith, That the Question be now put.

Question agreed to.

Main Question accordingly put.

21:59

Division 349

Ayes: 220

---

Labour: 209
Democratic Unionist Party: 6
Plaid Cymru: 2
Alliance: 1
Green Party: 1
Social Democratic & Labour Party: 1

Noes: 288

---

Conservative: 242
Liberal Democrat: 44

Business without Debate

Tuesday 13th September 2011 Commons Chamber

European Union Documents

Motion made, and Question put forthwith (Standing Order No. 119(11)),

Rights of the Child

That this House takes note of European Union Document No. 7226/11, a Commission Communication on an EU Agenda for the Rights of the Child; welcomes the Government’s commitment to children’s rights and urges that any European Union-level action in this area supports rather than supplants the role of Member States.—(Miss Chloe Smith.)

Question agreed to.

Petitions

Tuesday 13th September 2011 Commons Chamber

22:16

[Martin Caton (Gower) (Lab)]

I present a petition on behalf of the “Save Swansea Coastguard” campaign, which in a few weeks has collected more than 100,000 signatures in opposition to the closure of the coastguard station at Mumbles, Swansea.

The petition states:

The Petition of people concerned about maritime safety in the Bristol Channel,

Declares that the recommendation of the UK Government to close the Swansea Maritime Rescue Coordination Centre at Tutts Head, Mumbles, would endanger the lives and wellbeing of people on the water and around the coast of the Bristol Channel.

The Petitioners therefore request that the House of Commons press the UK Government to retain the Swansea Maritime Rescue Centre as a 24-hour staffed coastguard station.

And the Petitioners remain, etc.

[P000957]

22:17

[Paul Maynard (Blackpool North and Cleveleys) (Con)]

I should like to present a petition from the people of Blackpool and Cleveleys.

The petition declares:

The Petition of the people of Blackpool and Cleveleys,

Declares that the Petitioners are opposed to the permanent closure of the Lauderdale Avenue/Blandford Avenue crossing to traffic and pedestrians.

The Petitioners therefore request that the House of Commons urges the Government to encourage Blackpool Council to ensure that the Lauderdale Avenue/Blandford Avenue crossing remains open.

And the Petitioners remain, etc.

[P000959]

22:17

[Sarah Newton (Truro and Falmouth) (Con)]

This petition states:

The Petition of the residents of Falmouth,

Declares that the Petitioners believe that the dredging of Falmouth Harbour should be permitted to go ahead so as to enable the implementation of the Port of Falmouth Masterplan which is essential to the future prosperity of Falmouth.

The Petitioners therefore request that the House of Commons urges the Government to ensure that the Marine Management Organisation strikes the appropriate balance between environmental protection and social and economic development, with particular regard to the Port of Falmouth Masterplan including the dredging of Falmouth Harbour.

And the Petitioners remain, etc.

[P000958]

Microgravity Research

Tuesday 13th September 2011 Commons Chamber

Motion made, and Question proposed, That this House do now adjourn.—(Miss Chloe Smith.)

22:19

[Dr Phillip Lee (Bracknell) (Con)]

This is a rather esoteric subject on the face of it, so I should like to explain why I have chosen it. I am vice-chairman of the parliamentary space committee, and as a consequence of that role I have come into contact with many people in the space industry who have spoken to me about microgravity, the research thereof and its potential value to the British economy. I do not have any direct constituency link, although I have a local company that provides equipment for satellites. In the past decade, the UK space industry has been growing, year on year, at a rate in excess of 10%. I genuinely think that it should be part of the Government’s growth strategy and that it would contribute to the diversification of this country’s economic base. I have had the particular pleasure of meeting Tim Peake, who is the only British astronaut on the European Space Agency manned programme, and who also happens to be a champion of microgravity. That is quite important, because it indicates how good we are in Britain at research in this area.

Why have microgravity research? First, as I said, the UK is very strong in that area. Microgravity crosses a large number of fields, and that may contribute to why it has not always received support from the research councils. Secondly, it has huge potential economic benefits, particularly in bio-medicine. Thirdly, I do not think I am alone in this House in thinking that we should have a manned space flight programme. We need to do that with partners—perhaps with Europe, Russia or the United States—but I genuinely believe that we are better off seeking out new knowledge, endeavour and aspiration. All those things are positives, and Britain was at its best when it was displaying those facets.

Let me explain the structure of my speech. First, I will explain microgravity. I am sure that all colleagues here understand it fully and do not need a definition, but I will provide it for the benefit of the many people who have tuned into BBC Parliament for this debate. I will then touch on the sectors that microgravity research can impact on; talk about the history of the involvement in microgravity research, or the lack thereof, of Governments, this one and previous; and put some questions to the Minister.

As life evolved on this earth, lots of physical and chemical change took place in the environment that caused adaptations to take place in life, be it plant or animal. The only thing that has been constant in 4.8 billion years is gravity. It is therefore thought that organisms now have little or no genetic memory of how they would respond to low gravity, and that the low-gravity environment could uncover some novel mechanisms and responses to adaptations that may benefit the economy through commercial applications. That is basically why researchers are so eager to get into space, so to speak, to test the impact of microgravity.

This definition is just one of many I have read:

“Microgravity research = the research into the impact of low or zero gravity on human health and on other materials, and the exploitation of the low gravity environment to conduct research into pure science and human applications.”

We can create such low gravity here on earth in drop towers—something like those found at Alton Towers—or through parabolic flights. However, the best place for it to happen is in space. It can be done by a sounding rocket; at the moment, it is done at the international space station. Why conduct the research? Put simply, gravity adds complexity to certain experiments by contributing to convection currents, shear stresses and buoyancy, and that can impact on processes that we would like to study. In order to try to remove those potentially confounding variables from the experiment, one needs to go into a microgravity environment, and the best place for that is in space.

Let me turn to the sectors that may be impacted on, both economically and in terms of human knowledge and pushing back these boundaries. First, I will mention bio-medicine; as a doctor, I would be expected to do so. The bio-medical applications are numerous. Essentially, it is thought that putting cells—any cells—into a microgravity environment affects the way in which they work. Understanding how cells work and how they communicate with one another will have broad applications in the study of cancer, coronary heart disease, AIDS and diabetes. We can all understand that that might lead to the development of new therapies and drugs that would benefit mankind. In economic terms, if British patents were attached to such developments, UK plc would benefit.

One can also grow pure protein crystals in microgravity, and by doing so aid the understanding of the immune system, which would again benefit health care. One of the most noted areas is musculoskeletal systems and the response of bone and muscle. I am sure that most hon. Members know that spacemen who have spent lots of time in space have been found to have reduced bone density and muscle wastage. Why that happens is not fully understood. By trying to understanding that and how tissue remodels, we may very well find new techniques to treat musculoskeletal disorders.

Another sector where microgravity can be used is fluid physics. The understanding of the forces that affect fluids has wide applications. If we can understand them better, it might contribute to the miniaturisation of electronic devices. The BlackBerrys and laptops that we use have all benefited from greater knowledge in this area. Using these developments will undeniably lead to a reduction in costs for the customer when they buy such electronic devices at John Lewis and elsewhere.

[Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)]

I am not an expert in microgravity research—far from it—but I had a wee look at it before the debate. I understand that some microgravity research has looked at earthquakes and the pre-warning of earthquakes. Perhaps the hon. Gentleman would comment on that, because obviously if people can be warned of earthquakes and tremors, it might save life.

[Dr Lee]

I have absolutely no idea about the prediction of earthquakes and I am struggling to think why an understanding of microgravity would help to determine when there might be an earthquake. The hon. Gentleman has given me something to look up when I leave the Chamber.

The final area is material science. Understanding how materials or composite materials behave in a microgravity environment might help to develop new alloys and ceramics. That has broad applications. We are at the cutting edge in Formula 1 and in the use of composite materials and alloys. That knowledge originally came from the space sector. By doing this research we will enhance our standing in that area.

This list is not exhaustive. A variety of different sectors are involved. In the area of plant biology, I have seen the suggestion that plant stem cells could be grown on an industrial scale in space, thereby assisting us in our need to develop biomass for energy. I could go on.

Moving on to the history of Government involvement in microgravity, the Pippard report of 1989 was the first mention that I could find. It made some interesting observations that have since proven to be true. The Wakeham review of 2003 found a lack of interest among the research councils, which goes back to the point I made at the start of my remarks that microgravity does not have a single voice. That is why it has not received funding in the past. As a result of the Wakeham review, Britain did not contribute to the European Programme for Life and Physical Sciences—ELIPS—with the European Space Agency, which was started in 2001 and is ongoing. The ELIPS 4 funding round is due at the next ministerial ESA meeting in 2012. I would push for us to participate in that, not least because doing so would allow us to work with NASA, which will not work with us outside ESA as I understand it.

Finally, I have some questions for the Minister. First, will he confirm that the Government are not against manned space flight? For some time in this country, it was Government policy to be against manned space flight. I think that manned space flight is inspirational. Anybody who goes into a school on a science, technology, engineering and mathematics day will find children building rockets and looking at pictures of planets. The reality is that space inspires children and that we will need more scientists and engineers in the future. I spoke about the inspirational quality of space in my maiden speech—I do not know how many hon. Members who are present were here for that. I strongly believe that there has to be a man on top of the rocket for it to be inspiring.

Secondly, will the Minister outline the Government’s position on the ELIPS programme and the ESA manned space flight programme in anticipation of the 2012 ministerial meeting? I ask that because for about £200 million a year we could participate in that programme. Over a 20 to 25-year period, we could perhaps participate in the exploration of the moon and, further, of Mars. That may seem an extravagance to some, but it is not. For every $1 spent on the Apollo space programme, it was estimated that the US economy got $14 in return.

We can make money out of space—it is as simple as that. Britain is outstanding at space, and we do it on a shoestring in comparison with some of our competitors. I think that in future, we should be a greater player in space. I know that the Minister shares my feelings on that. I forget the figures, but we are projected to increase our space industry over the next 10 years, and I am wholly supportive of that.

What is the Minister’s opinion on a microgravity forum? I have had e-mails from around the world since I tweeted that I would introduce this debate, and I have met people, and it is interesting that there is not one, single voice for microgravity. Microgravity perhaps needs that one voice, but does the Minister have any views on that?

Finally, more generally, as a new boy in town, I get the distinct impression that Whitehall is risk averse. If there is one thing that we cannot be when it comes to space, it is that. We have to go for it. I am encouraged that the Government have in the last year announced changes to legislation with regard to aiding the space industry—it relates to space insurance—but ultimately, Whitehall remains risk averse. I would be interested to know the Minister’s view on that.

The best way to conclude is by quoting an e-mail that somebody sent. He ended one paragraphs as follows:

“In addition to providing benefits to society”

microgravity

“research will also help the UK to maintain some degree of scientific relevance - scientific capability in a nation is a recognised necessity for economic development.”

I could not have put it better myself, and that is why I called for this debate.

22:32

[David Morris (Morecambe and Lunesdale) (Con)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Bracknell (Dr Lee) on securing this important debate, which is particularly timely given that we are gearing up for the ESA conference in 2012, in which the funding priorities for the industry will be set for the future. As a result, the UK’s involvement in the ESA will also be forged.

May I thank Tom Gunner and Sarah Chilman from the parliamentary space committee for the work that they do all year round in promoting space? Unlike many other industries, space does not have lots of lobbyists with huge budgets, but the small team at the PSC is none the less effective. I must also thank Astrium for allowing Tom and Sarah to undertake their important work.

The space industry has grown 10% year on year. It is one of this country’s major success stories, but it has not been sung out loudly. For most people, the space industry seems distant—both literally and figuratively—but we need the public to understand just how big an impact that high-tech industry has on our lives.

Like my hon. Friend, I am a vice-chair of the PSC, and many of my constituents ask why an MP from a northern Lancashire constituency would take an interest in space. I point out to them that there are important benefits from the space industry, including high-tech jobs in places such as Bracknell and the M4 corridor. Perhaps more importantly, however, space technologies impact on areas such as Morecambe and Lunesdale and people’s day-to-day lives.

Owing to the space industry, people can get around easily by sat-nav and explore areas of the country that they would not ordinarily be able to go to and find their way around; we can roll out fast satellite broadband to rural areas; and we can watch satellite television, which has brought a wider entertainment choice to everyone. Those industries are direct spin-offs of the space industry. Even though the space industry does not have major funding, it is a success story year in, year out.

Space delivers a host of everyday benefits—some might even say that they are mundane—but we are not always very good at pointing out those successes. We can all agree that although we have led the way on space in general, we have lagged behind badly in microgravity research.

I add my name to the list of those who believe that we should be involved in ELIPS and, by extension, the international space station. It cannot be right that Germany funds 50% of it. The widely accepted tradition of the UK being negative about putting scientists into space should end, not least because space tourism and exploration are going to become boom industries in the future, in the same way as transatlantic shipping and air travel became hugely popular in a short space of time. We do not want to be on the list of countries left behind by this exciting new development in human history.

I have asked the Secretary of State about our preparedness for the next European Space Agency ministerial council, and I am glad that things are progressing well, but we need the Government to set, as a central aim for that conference, greater UK involvement in microgravity research. It is important that we ride on the back of this industry. Future generations are looking to science as a cool subject to be involved in. A report by the Science and Technology Committee, of which I am a member, has shown that young people are engaging particularly well in anything to do with space exploration. Amazingly, when I was a small boy, I made an Apollo rocket, like many Members here, from an Airfix kit. I am sure that we can all remember sitting at the kitchen table gluing our hands to our faces and everywhere but the model itself. Funnily enough, my little boy, Robert, found my Saturn 5 rocket that I made—I had forgotten that I still had it. I grudgingly put it back together. It brought back happy memories, but I looked at my eight-year-old son, and he turned around and asked, “Dad, why are we not going to the moon again?” I think that that was very poignant.

22:36

[The Minister for Universities and Science (Mr David Willetts)]

This has been a rather special Adjournment debate in which the passion of colleagues for space travel and the space sector has been exposed to wider debate. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Bracknell (Dr Lee) on securing the debate and leading it so well. I also thank my hon. Friend the Member for Morecambe and Lunesdale (David Morris) for his speech, because he also spoke with the authority that comes from being a member of the parliamentary space committee. It is also great to see in his place my hon. Friend the Member for Windsor (Adam Afriyie), who does an excellent job as the chair of that committee. We have people here who rightly care about space.

I would like to make it clear that the Government realise the significance of the space sector, which is why we have tried to support the space industry even during the tough fiscal decisions that we have had to take. Through my role as co-chair of the space leadership council, I have a good and constructive dialogue with the industry, and we were able to get a section of the growth review devoted specifically to the space industry. The space sector matters in lots of different ways. It is crucial to scientific and technological advance. We undoubtedly conduct high-grade scientific research through the space programme, and the technological challenges posed by the programme drive technology forward.

As we have heard, with 10% growth a year, the space sector is a rapidly growing part of the British economy. There are not many parts of the British economy growing as fast as China, but the space sector is. I absolutely agree with the final point from my hon. Friend the Member for Morecambe and Lunesdale that the excitement of space can get younger people involved in science. As someone who wants more and more young people excited by space, I believe that, by and large, it is space and dinosaurs that interest young people in science. In America, they still talk of the generation of scientists and technicians that came through as a result of the Apollo effect getting them interested and involved. The space sector has a lot to contribute, and within the inevitable constraints on public spending, we are doing our best to back it.

I was asked some specific questions that I will try briefly to answer. The first was about manned space flight. I should make it clear that the UK has historically focused its space investments on areas such as telecommunications, earth science and robotic exploration of the universe; and, as we are not directly involved with the international space station, we have not developed human space flight technology, although we have the relevant technology for the future exploration of the moon and Mars, including advanced robotics—of which the ExoMars rover programme is a classic example—communications systems and small satellites. So that is the view that we have taken, historically.

I was asked whether we had any objection in principle to a manned space flight, and the answer is no, although there will always be pertinent questions about cost effectiveness. The Government are delighted that Major Tim Peake has been selected on merit to join the ESA astronaut corps. That will be a great opportunity for him to inspire young people in the UK; indeed, I know that he is already doing so. So that is our attitude to manned space flight.

I was also asked specifically about microgravity. It would be correct to disentangle microgravity research from the manned space flight issue. It is possible to research microgravity without getting involved in manned space flight, and we do understand the value of microgravity research. There are difficult obstacles to overcome, however. First, the range of topics is so wide that there is no coherent voice to articulate the needs of the researchers, as my hon. Friend the Member for Bracknell said. I understand that point. Secondly, materials researchers do not normally work with biomedics or astrobiologists, but they would all find microgravity important in pursuing their research. The researchers who would benefit from microgravity research therefore comprise a rather fragmented and diverse group, but my hon. Friend eloquently argued that it would be helpful if they could come together to provide a more coherent voice.

Historically, the UK has had little involvement in microgravity research, so the researchers are largely unaware of the possibilities involved. Let me make it clear that I would welcome new collaborations, including the ones that are now developing, and new ways of serving the interests of UK researchers and those of our international partners.

[Stephen Barclay (North East Cambridgeshire) (Con)]

I was interested to hear about the Government’s support for a forum. Would my right hon. Friend support ministerial attendance at such a forum, if one were to be established?

[Mr Willetts]

As I hope those in the space sector know, I am personally committed to working closely with the sector. The idea of a microgravity forum is very worth while, and it would be great if people who could benefit from microgravity research came together. If it would make sense to do so, I would be willing to meet such a group, but I must stress that I am working within a fixed science budget. We have the protection of the ring fence around the £4.6 billion, and we are all very proud of that illustration of our commitment to science, but I have to work within that budget. So, provided that ministerial attendance did not give rise to the assumption that the Minister would come to the meeting armed with a cheque book, I would be happy to attend. We could then purse the matter from there.

[Adam Afriyie (Windsor) (Con)]

The research council model for funding research has worked incredibly well over the decades since it was established in the 1980s by Lady Thatcher when she was Prime Minister. I wonder whether the Minister might write a letter urging the research councils to consider such a forum or meeting to facilitate an interest in it.

[Mr Willetts]

It would be best if there were ways in which the research community could come together, but I am always wary of anything that could be taken as a breach of the Haldane principle, which hovers over all these debates. We have to be very clear in regard to giving instructions or directions on areas of research activity. One of the reasons that we have an excellent science research base in this country is that, by and large, Ministers have kept their grubby hands off these issues.

As I said, I have tried to indicate that I recognise that microgravity research could play an important role. It has suffered from the structural problem of having such a diverse and different range of disciplines that could benefit from it. I can see the argument for them coming together in a more coherent way and I would be happy to look at that. Of course, many of the decisions would ultimately be for the research councils.

Let me briefly say in the few minutes remaining that a lot of this stuff will come up as we plan for the European Space Agency ministerial council in 2012. No doubt we will be invited by the ESA to join its microgravity research programme, ELIPS. I am told that the UK Space Agency has already held a workshop with researchers and providers of facilities to explore their mutual interests, and it will be holding a further workshop in November to examine the opportunities presented through the ESA’s programmes. As we prepare for the next ESA ministerial, we are of course considering this alongside many other options.

Let me conclude by saying that we recognise the significance not just of microgravity, but of the presence of people like Major Tim Peake who are aiming to become astronauts. I am delighted that Tim Peake has said that he will act as an ambassador for microgravity research in the UK. Because of our ambition that he should be able to engage in space flight, it is great that he is willing to take on that role. I am confident that, as part of that role and of the UK Space Agency’s work, we will consider the proposed strategy for space biomedicine that the UK space biomedical consortium is developing with Tim’s help. It will continue to facilitate negotiations between UK research groups and prospective international partners.

I should like to assure the several Members in their places today who all share this interest in space research—my hon. Friend the Member for Bracknell has done an excellent job in bringing this crucial subject to our attention—that I will undertake, given my ministerial responsibilities, to follow the debate on microgravity research very closely as we prepare for the ESA ministerial next year.

Question put and agreed to.

22:47

House adjourned.