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Oral Answers to Questions
(10 years, 4 months ago)
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Iain Stewart (Milton Keynes South) (Con)
1. What steps he has taken to promote national lottery funding to sport, heritage and arts groups in the past 12 months.
The Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport (Sajid Javid)
Through the work of the national lottery promotions unit and individual national lottery distributors, we continue to raise awareness of funding for good causes. Demand for lottery funding continues to outstrip supply, with over £1.5 billion spent on national lottery projects in just the past 12 months.
Iain Stewart
The Heritage Lottery Fund recently made a large contribution to the new visitors centre at Bletchley Park in my constituency and also paid for the restoration of some of the old codebreaking huts. May I invite my right hon. Friend to visit Bletchley Park to see for himself what a vital role the Heritage Lottery Fund plays in preserving the heritage of the country?
Sajid Javid
I have visited Bletchley Park a number of times, as I am sure all hon. Members have done, to look at its vivid story and see how that is brought to life. I would be more than happy to do so again. It is a fitting tribute to the remarkable men and women who worked there, including a wonderful woman in my own constituency, Betty Webb, who served there. I am delighted that Bletchley Park has received funding from the Heritage Lottery Fund for its restoration. My hon. Friend is right to give credit to John Major, as he has done in the past, for setting up the fund.
Mr Barry Sheerman (Huddersfield) (Lab/Co-op)
The Secretary of State may know that as chair of the John Clare Trust, I have been the beneficiary of quite a lot of Heritage Lottery funding. I am delighted with it and would like more for projects going forward in my constituency, but will the right hon. Gentleman remember that it does not replace a Government committed to culture and heritage?
Sajid Javid
I am pleased to hear that the hon. Gentleman supports the work that the fund is doing for the causes that he holds dear, which are very good causes. The principle of additionality is very important and the distributors must adhere to it at all times.
Tracey Crouch (Chatham and Aylesford) (Con)
The Secretary of State will be aware that alongside the national lottery, society lotteries contributed £145 million to good causes in 2012-13 and could provide a lot more if the prizes, draw and turnover rules were deregulated. His Department has long promised a consultation on this but has yet to publish it. In the light of the recent Centre for Economics and Business Research report on society lotteries, can he tell the House when the consultation might come?
Sajid Javid
Changes in lottery and gambling markets have made it clear to us that the consultation on society lotteries should be more wide ranging than we had previously thought. The Gambling Commission is providing us with further information and advice, and we are planning to conduct the consultation later this year.
Helen Goodman (Bishop Auckland) (Lab)
The Arts Council announced this week that 99 organisations will be financed solely by the national lottery and it has to cut support to 58 other arts organisations because of the huge cuts in the Department. Local authorities have also been forced to reduce support to arts organisations. Given that London gets 20 times as much philanthropic money per person as the rest of the country, does the Secretary of State agree with the statement from the Under-Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, the hon. Member for Wantage (Mr Vaizey) that arts organisations that cannot raise philanthropic funds are totally misguided and “pathetic”?
Sajid Javid
The hon. Lady will know that I do not agree with her. She knows that Government grants for arts funding have been cut because the Government of whom she was part left our country with the largest deficit in the industrialised world and left us with very difficult decisions to make. The good news is that the Arts Council receives funding from other sources and, taken together with total funding of almost £3 billion during the life of this Parliament, the level of funding is virtually unchanged from the situation in the previous Parliament.
Mr John Leech (Manchester, Withington) (LD)
Given that many regions, particularly in the north, generate disproportionately more revenue for the national lottery, what further steps will the Government take to ensure that other regions where more money is generated get their fair share of sport, heritage and arts funding?
Sajid Javid
The hon. Gentleman is right to raise that important point about the regional distribution of the funds. It is something we discuss with the lottery, and I shall be taking it up with it further.
Sheryll Murray (South East Cornwall) (Con)
2. What steps he is taking to ensure that superfast broadband is available in remote areas of the UK.
The Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport (Sajid Javid)
The Government’s broadband programme will provide superfast broadband to 95% of UK premises by 2017. In February 2014 we announced nearly £3 million in further grant funding to support superfast coverage in Cornwall.
Sheryll Murray
One of my constituents who runs a small business in a not-spot area purchased satellite broadband after being told that they would not get a fibre-optic connection. Can they now bid for some money if Cornwall council is successful to enable other connections, and will it cost people more for any other type of connection?
Sajid Javid
Superfast Cornwall has a satellite broadband offer for premises that currently have slow-speed broadband and are not likely to gain a fibre-optic connection. The grant of almost £3 million that the Government gave in February in phase 2 will help increase coverage. My hon. Friend’s constituent can make an application to Superfast Cornwall, and that will be a decision for it to make. We are making progress on the issue, but I agree that there is much more to do.
Mr Angus Brendan MacNeil (Na h-Eileanan an Iar) (SNP)
10. Finland and Sweden will cover about 99% of their populations with 4G networks capable of delivering high-speed broadband, but the UK’s model of coverage with 2G and 3G has failed many people in rural and island areas. Will the Secretary of State consider a different approach to 4G for rural areas, including mast-sharing and controls on rents at mast sites, especially as 4G will deliver up to 30 megabits and might wirelessly reach areas that cable broadband might not reach?
Sajid Javid
The hon. Gentleman will be pleased to know that there has been a significant increase in superfast broadband coverage since 2010, rising from 45% to 73%, but there is much more to do. There has also been a significant change in 4G coverage in the UK, which many people use for broadband, as he rightly highlights. For example, O2, which has a licence for 4G, is committed to extending it to 99% of the country.
Mr Speaker
Order. I do not know why this question was not grouped, but I will treat it as though it had been. Mr Stephen Metcalfe.
Stephen Metcalfe (South Basildon and East Thurrock) (Con)
7. Linford and parts of East Tilbury and West Tilbury in my constituency fall between the Tilbury and Stanford-le-Hope exchanges, which means that a small but significant community will not benefit from either the commercial roll-out of superfast broadband or the Government-funded programme. What options do I have to ensure that those residents are not disadvantaged by a geographic anomaly?
Sajid Javid
My hon. Friend will be pleased to know that the Government have announced additional funding of £10.72 million for Essex under phase 2 of our superfast broadband programme. The local project team for Essex should be able to advise him on the revised coverage targets. The Government have also announced eight market testing pilots to explore supply solutions for improving broadband coverage beyond 95%.
Stephen Timms (East Ham) (Lab)
The analyst, Redburn, has pointed out that claims that the UK is doing well on superfast broadband are
“only true using a rather unambitious definition of superfast”.
A number of European countries now have over 20% fibre- to-the-home penetration, with symmetric 100 megabits- per-second services. The Under-Secretary of State, the hon. Member for Wantage (Mr Vaizey), told me in a written answer on 23 June that he does not know how much of that we have in the UK, but the industry estimates penetration to be about 0.5%. Surely we need to be doing much better.
Sajid Javid
The right hon. Gentleman will be pleased to know that superfast coverage in the UK is the highest among the EU5 countries; it is higher than Germany, higher than Spain, five times higher than Italy and three times higher than France.
Mr Alan Reid (Argyll and Bute) (LD)
I was pleased when the Government announced the awarding of the contract to look into ways of using satellite to bring superfast broadband to remote areas of Scotland that fibre-optic cables cannot reach. It is very important that that work is done as soon as possible. What time scale does the Minister envisage for bringing superfast broadband to remote areas of the highlands and islands by satellite?
Sajid Javid
These pilots began in June, so they are very recent and it will take a number of months before any results are known. We have deliberately picked a number of different companies with different types of technology to ensure that we learn as much as we can. I envisage that we will have more information in six months.
Dr Thérèse Coffey (Suffolk Coastal) (Con)
3. What steps he is taking to support the tourism industry.
The Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport (Sajid Javid)
The tourism industry is central to the Government’s long-term economic plan, which is why we are investing over £177 million, including partner funding, in the GREAT campaign and other international and domestic marketing campaigns. We recently re-launched the Tourism Council, a partnership between industry and the Government.
Dr Thérèse Coffey
The Suffolk coast is well known as a very attractive place to visit, with its open skies, beaches and cultural offerings. You are certainly most welcome—both you, Mr Speaker, and the Secretary of State—as the shadow Secretary of State will know. However, also adding to the long-term economic plan will hopefully be the construction of Sizewell C. My local businesses have understandable concerns about the impact of the construction phase on tourism in the area. Can he offer any helpful advice?
Sajid Javid
I can tell my hon. Friend that I will be more than happy to visit. I am sure that Mr Speaker has been a number of times himself. The Suffolk coast is indeed beautiful—it is a jewel in Britain—and everyone should be encouraged to visit. She will know that I cannot comment on any planning application that is taking place, but she will be pleased to know that the Government will continue to work hard to promote Suffolk through VisitEngland and other organisations. The wonderful Suffolk coastline featured in VisitEngland’s “Coastal Escapes” marketing campaign was funded by the regional growth fund.
Jonathan Edwards (Carmarthen East and Dinefwr) (PC)
The NATO summit in Newport provides an opportunity to promote Wales to the world, boosting tourism and the wider economy. What discussions are the UK Government having with the Welsh Government to ensure that the summit has a distinct Welsh flavour?
Sajid Javid
We work very closely with the Welsh Government on these issues. There is a lot to be gained from cross-co-operation, and a number of initiatives are in place.
Damian Hinds (East Hampshire) (Con)
8. Inbound tourism is as strategic a sector for this country as advanced manufacturing of pharmaceuticals, and the Tourism Council presents an opportunity for it to punch its weight. Will my right hon. Friend set his sights high in terms of productivity, skills development, and co-operative working on distribution channels in marketing this country to the world?
Sajid Javid
I absolutely agree. My hon. Friend will be pleased to know, as will other hon. Members, that last year inbound tourism hit a new record high of 33 million visitors spending a record amount of £21 billion in the UK. He rightly points out the importance of improving skills, and we are working with the Tourism Council on that.
Clive Efford (Eltham) (Lab)
Despite recent sporting setbacks, our enthusiasm remains at fever pitch. Will the Minister, like me, be among the 3 million people it is anticipated will go to watch the start of the Tour de France this weekend? The Grand Départ will showcase some of Britain’s most beautiful countryside. Will he join me in wishing Yorkshire every success in hosting this event and wish every participant well, and, of course, success to our British riders? What is he doing to ensure that the event goes smoothly and that the region continues to benefit from the boost to tourism that it will get from hosting this event?
Sajid Javid
I agree with the hon. Gentleman about the importance of the Grand Départ taking place in Yorkshire. It is a very important sporting moment for the UK. I will be visiting on day one, on Saturday, and I look forward to seeing him there. The Prime Minister will also be visiting, and the sports Minister, my hon. Friend the Member for Maidstone and The Weald (Mrs Grant), will be helping as well.
Mark Menzies (Fylde) (Con)
14. Fylde is the golf capital of Lancashire, with outstanding courses including the Open championship course at Royal Lytham and St Annes. What are the Government doing to ensure that Britain is getting the most out of this lucrative section of the tourism market?
Sajid Javid
My hon. Friend will be pleased to know that VisitBritain has a specific initiative on promoting golf throughout the UK. That campaign is showing early signs of working, but we will be looking to see what more can be done.
Michael Connarty (Linlithgow and East Falkirk) (Lab)
4. What recent discussions he has had with England's international football representatives on allegations of corruption within FIFA.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport (Mrs Helen Grant)
These are very serious allegations. Of course, major sporting events need to be awarded in an open, fair and transparent manner, but, as the Prime Minister has already said, we need to wait to see the results of Michael Garcia’s inquiry before discussing next steps.
Michael Connarty
I thank the Minister for that very cautious response. I have just finished two years as chair of the sports committee of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, and I am its rapporteur on corruption and governance in sport. Now that the investigative journalists of The Times have revealed how much corruption is going on, and Greg Dyke has spoken out very boldly on this, does the Minister agree that it may be time for a Joint Committee of the House to look at this question in some detail before the beautiful game is mired by the behaviour of FIFA?
Andrew Gwynne (Denton and Reddish) (Lab)
What discussions is the Minister having with her colleagues in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and with football governing bodies to bring about an end to the abuse of the migrant workers who are facing very serious human rights abuses building stadiums in Qatar?
Charlie Elphicke (Dover) (Con)
5. If his Department will commission research on methods of improving mobile telephone coverage; and if he will make a statement.
The Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport (Sajid Javid)
We need to improve mobile coverage in the UK, and I have been discussing with Ofcom and the mobile network operators what more can be done. The mobile infrastructure project will extend coverage to remote and rural areas that currently have no coverage.
Charlie Elphicke
Many visitors from the European Union travel by ferry to my constituency of Dover and, because of international roaming, those from France get better mobile coverage than my own constituents. How can this be?
Sajid Javid
As usual, my hon. Friend makes a very good point. It is true that French nationals who visit the UK get better coverage than his constituents because of international roaming. I encourage operators in the UK to go further and I am discussing the issue with mobile operators and Ofcom. No firm decisions have been taken at this point, but it is a very important issue.
Mr John Whittingdale (Maldon) (Con)
May I commend my right hon. Friend on his efforts to extend mobile coverage, but is he aware that many of my constituents have been without any mobile coverage for nearly three weeks due to Vodafone having to remove a mast from premises that the landlord required it to vacate? Will he consider looking at the electronic communications code to see whether it can be strengthened to give the same sorts of rights that already exist for other utilities, such as water and electricity?
Sajid Javid
I was not aware of that particular issue in my hon. Friend’s constituency, but now he has raised it I will certainly look into it and see whether we can help. The electronic communications code is a very important issue and I am looking into it right now, because I agree that it was set up for a different age and there need to be significant changes.
Miss Anne McIntosh (Thirsk and Malton) (Con)
6. What comparative assessment he has made of the extent of broadband coverage in the UK and other EU member states.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport (Mr Edward Vaizey)
As the House has already heard from my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State, the UK’s broadband coverage is among the best in Europe: 73% of premises can access superfast broadband compared with just 45% in 2010. Government investment will drive superfast coverage up to 95% by 2017.
Miss McIntosh
Sadly, rural areas will be left behind. I understand from NYnet that Thirsk, Malton and Filey will have only 78% coverage by 2015-16. Given that farmers will have to apply digitally for farm payments from 2015, they will be grossly disadvantaged. Will the Government please make it a top priority to ensure that those who have the weakest coverage will be fast-tracked to superfast broadband?
Mr Vaizey
We certainly will. NYnet is one of our most effective programmes and I praise the county council for its effective work. We have already passed 120,000 premises under this programme. We will have reached 170,000 by next spring and we have allocated further millions to take coverage even further.
Mr Dennis Skinner (Bolsover) (Lab)
The EU is a very big area, but Bridle road in Stanfree in Bolsover is relatively small. They told me to ask the appropriate Minister to sort out the broadband that they have been messing about with for four years in that Bridle road, Stanfree area. They must have a letter—get it sorted.
Mr David Heath (Somerton and Frome) (LD)
I am tempted to just say to the Minister, “Somerset—get it sorted.” The good news is that two more communities in my constituency—Fivehead and Milborne Port—will be connected over the next few months, but there are a lot of villages in exactly the position described by the hon. Member for Thirsk and Malton (Miss McIntosh) that will not be connected. Does the Minister recognise how critical Somerset’s bid to the superfast extension fund is in filling in some of those gaps and getting broadband to the rural areas that desperately need it?
Mr Vaizey
Yes, I do. The whole point of all the completely justified questions that have been asked is that people want broadband. That is why we are putting £1.2 billion into rolling out rural broadband and why total funding of something like £70 million from BT, European funding and Broadband Delivery UK is going into connecting Devon and Somerset. More than 250,000 premises are planned to be networked and we have allocated a provisional £22 million for the next phase.
Julie Hilling (Bolton West) (Lab)
This issue is not just a rural problem. At my recent business event, companies told me how lack of access to fast broadband is seriously hampering their businesses. How will the Minister ensure that areas on the edge of major urban centres also get superfast broadband?
Mr Vaizey
The whole point of the rural broadband programme is to help the areas she speaks about. Local councils are in charge of the roll-out, so they should know best where the money should go first for the most impact. As I say, we have had phase 1 to get to 90%; we now have phase 2 to get to 95%; and the money we have allocated for new technologies will give us the figure we need to get to 100%.
Mr David Nuttall (Bury North) (Con)
In some cases, the only way to improve broadband speeds is to install a new cabinet. Will my hon. Friend confirm that the cost of such installation is within the scope of the Government’s assistance scheme?
Sir Peter Luff (Mid Worcestershire) (Con)
9. What steps he is taking to ensure that Commonwealth countries are included in the commemorative events planned for the first world war centenary.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport (Mrs Helen Grant)
The important contribution of all our Commonwealth partners will be commemorated as part of our centenary programme, starting with a service of commemoration on 4 August in Glasgow cathedral.
Sir Peter Luff
It is right that we honour the remarkable sacrifice of so many members of the Commonwealth during the first world war, including the 40,000 Indian and Anzac casualties at Gallipoli. Will the Minister assure me, as someone whose father fought and so nearly died in that controversial campaign, that the centenary events for Gallipoli next April will include full recognition of the contribution of the 27,000 French casualties and the 120,000 British casualties at Gallipoli?
Mrs Grant
As my hon. Friend will know, Gallipoli is one of our key dates in the Government’s programme. My Department is working very closely with the embassy in Ankara to ensure that the event at Cape Helles on 24 April next year marks the British and Commonwealth contribution appropriately. We are also working with the Gallipoli Association on a UK-led event, and I would welcome my hon. Friend’s input into its planning.
Robert Jenrick (Newark) (Con)
11. What steps his Department is taking to encourage (a) national collections and (b) the royal collection to loan works of art to regional museums and galleries.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport (Mr Edward Vaizey)
First, may I welcome my hon. Friend to the Chamber? This is the first opportunity I have had the chance to welcome him to the House.
In 2012-13, national museums sponsored by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport lent objects to more than 1,500 museums around the country through touring exhibitions, star object loans, loans of local significance and long-term loans.
Robert Jenrick
Regional museums would benefit from a much more active programme of loans from national museums, which are sitting on hundreds of thousands if not millions of works of art that are rarely if ever seen by the general public. The Secretary of State recently viewed the site of the new Newark national civil war museum, which is a perfect example of a regional museum that would benefit from active loans from national institutions. What can the Department do to encourage national museums to review their civil war collections and to loan them to our museum in Newark?
Mr Vaizey
I know for a fact that the Secretary of State thoroughly enjoyed his visit to the new National Civil War centre, which was awarded a grant by the Heritage Lottery Fund of £3.5 million in 2012, and we look forward to its opening next year. I am certainly happy to meet my hon. Friend to discuss what we can do to encourage loans of civil war objects from national museums, but it is important for the House to remember that national museums are of course independent and do not simply do what the Government tell them.
Guto Bebb (Aberconwy) (Con)
12. What assessment he has made of the success of the broadband roll-out programme in Wales and that programme’s effect on the tourism industry in Wales.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport (Mr Edward Vaizey)
Independent research estimates that the Government’s investment will generate £20 for every £1 by 2024. Wales has received almost £70 million from the UK Government for the roll-out of superfast broadband. We are confident that this will benefit the Welsh tourist industry, as well as the Welsh economy more generally.
Guto Bebb
My hon. Friend will be aware that I consider his Department’s decision to allocate funding for rural broadband to the Welsh Government to be a mistake. A total of £120 million has now been allocated from taxpayer funds for the roll-out of broadband in rural Wales, yet my constituents and businesses in the tourist sector in my constituency are no nearer to getting any answers from the Welsh Government about when and where they will have roll-outs. Does my hon. Friend agree that transparency is crucial when £120 million of taxpayer funding is being spent?
Mr Vaizey
It is important that roll-out is as transparent as possible—people need to know when broadband is coming to their area. More than 160,000 premises have been passed but I am sure that Opposition Members will have a word with their Labour colleagues in Wales to encourage them to be more transparent with my hon. Friend.
Hugh Bayley (York Central) (Lab)
13. What long-term cycling legacy he expects from the Tour de France Grand Départ in Yorkshire.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport (Mrs Helen Grant)
There has been a strong legacy of cycling from the London 2012 games and I am sure that the Grand Départ in Yorkshire will inspire cycling across the region and the UK as a whole.
Hugh Bayley
I sincerely hope so. I know the Minister will join me in congratulating City of York council and the other local authorities involved, along with the cycling organisations, on all the preparations they have made for the race. In terms of public participation, cycling is the third most popular sport in the country. The biggest single disincentive for cyclists is the state of the roads and the danger. Will her Department set up a joint initiative with the Department for Transport to improve road safety and so get more people on their bikes and cycling?
Mrs Grant
I think that the Tour de France Grand Départ will be a tremendous success. All plans are on track, and I join the hon. Gentleman in thanking all those involved in the preparations—the teams in Yorkshire, Essex, London and Cambridge. It will be an amazing highlight for the year and one we will never forget. I am happy to have a chat with him about his suggestion. Thank you.
Mr Speaker
We are uncharacteristically ahead of schedule today, but as all the principals are present we should now proceed straight away to topical questions.
Diana Johnson (Kingston upon Hull North) (Lab)
T1. If he will make a statement on his departmental responsibilities.
The Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport (Sajid Javid)
Although England’s footballers and Andy Murray have sadly fallen, our sporting season is still in full swing. This weekend sees the climax of the Wimbledon championships, the grand prix at Silverstone and the Tour de France Grand Départ, as we have just heard. Politicians who wish sports stars well seem to jinx them, so I would like to take this opportunity to wish all of Mark Cavendish’s rivals the best of luck.
Diana Johnson
The additional £5 million arts funding allocated to Hull this week is very welcome, but is a drop in the ocean compared with the money that goes to some of our national institutions, such as the National Theatre, which gets £18 million a year. What pressure can the Secretary of State bring to bear on national institutions to make sure they do everything they can to support our national city of culture for 2017, bearing in mind that Hull has had a 25% cut in our council funding during this Parliament?
Sajid Javid
I know that the hon. Lady is as excited as I am that Hull is the city of culture for 2017. It won against strong competition and has done extremely well. She is right to point out the recent announcement of additional funding from the Arts Council. It also announced that Hull will become a major partner museum, which is a significant step forward. The Hull initiative for 2017 and beyond will boost the local economy and jobs, which I am sure she will welcome. I am happy to look into what more can be done to help.
Eric Ollerenshaw (Lancaster and Fleetwood) (Con)
T2. Given BT’s virtual monopoly in contracts for superfast broadband and the problems with that company that have been raised by hon. Members today and previously, is it not about time that the Government held an inquiry into its performance, or would that be better done by the competition authorities?
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport (Mr Edward Vaizey)
The National Audit Office conducted an inquiry. I am confident that BT is doing its job incredibly effectively. We are passing a total of 20,000 premises a week with broadband, and that figure will soon be up to 40,000 a week. More than £60 million has been allocated to Lancashire and more than 130,000 homes there will get superfast broadband as a result.
Ms Harriet Harman (Camberwell and Peckham) (Lab)
The evidence before the Leveson inquiry laid bare the pain and suffering caused to victims of press abuse. The press felt they could act with impunity as there was no proper complaints system, and all parties in both Houses agreed to a new system of independent self-regulation for the press. Will the Secretary of State join me in welcoming the appointment of David Wolfe as chair of the recognition board for the new press complaints system? Does he agree that the rest of the board should be appointed as soon as possible, and will he join me in encouraging the press to establish and put forward for recognition a Leveson-compliant, independent regulator so that there is an effective complaints system that is independent of both politicians and the press?
Sajid Javid
As the right hon. and learned Lady points out, there was rightly a cross-party approach on this important issue. The key to that consensus was that whatever transpired needed to be independent of Government and that there needed to be a self-regulatory body. I will not comment on anyone who is appointed to the recognition panel, because I do not believe that that is a job for Government. It is an independent process and the Government, including my Department, have no role in it. It would therefore not be proper for me to talk about any individual.
As for whether a body should apply for recognition, it is up to the body to decide whether the incentives that we have put in place are enough to encourage it to join. The Government have done what they set out to do.
Andrew Bingham (High Peak) (Con)
T3. Last week, I organised a music skills day at Glossopdale community college in my constituency in conjunction with UK Music, at which more than 100 students from across High Peak learned about the different skills in the industry. The Secretary of State will know that the creative industries are a big economic force in this country and earn about £70 billion each year for the economy. The music skills event gave young people information about the opportunities to work in that sector. Will he say what else is being done to provide even more support to the creative industries across the country?
Sajid Javid
My hon. Friend makes an important point. I join him in welcoming the work of UK Music in promoting careers in that industry to young people. Just this week, a report showed that the creative industries have added more than £70 billion to the economy over the past year and that they employ more than 1.7 million people. Employment is growing five times faster in that sector than in the rest of the economy. Just yesterday, I helped to launch the industry-led creative industries strategy, which is full of more good ideas.
Mr Nicholas Brown (Newcastle upon Tyne East) (Lab)
T4. Will the Minister join me in congratulating the excellent Tyne and Wear Archives and Museums and other arts organisations based in Newcastle upon Tyne on their successful Arts Council bids? In doing so, will he acknowledge that there is still a problem with the disproportionate amount of private sector arts funding—the figure is 82%—that is drawn into the capital and not to the regions of England, and consider the remedy that is set out in “Rebalancing Our Cultural Capital”? If he has not read that report, I commend it to him.
Mr Vaizey
I am very happy to join the right hon. Gentleman in congratulating Tyne and Wear Archives and Museums—it is a fantastic place that I have visited on at least one occasion. I am pleased that following the Arts Council settlement the balance between London and the regions has shifted in favour of the regions. As he knows, I believe that every arts organisation around the country is capable of raising private funding and should be doing so.
Iain Stewart (Milton Keynes South) (Con)
T5. I thank the Minister for the assistance that he and Ofcom have given the community radio station in my constituency, MKFM, in its bid for a permanent FM licence. Will he assure me that he will continue to do all he can to assist such community radio stations to expand the vital service they provide to local communities?
Andrew Gwynne (Denton and Reddish) (Lab)
T6. Ministers will know that cyber-bullying is a growing problem, particularly among teenagers, but the offences fall, confusingly, between five different Acts. Is it not time for Ministers to talk to their colleagues in other Departments to bring about a specific offence of cyber-bullying that mirrors the offence of harassment in the real world?
Mr Vaizey
I hear what the hon. Gentleman says. I work closely with the Minister for Policing, Criminal Justice and Victims and the Under-Secretary of State for Education, my hon. Friend the Member for Crewe and Nantwich (Mr Timpson), on the UK Council for Child Internet Safety. I am sure that the hon. Gentleman’s representations have been heard and they will be considered in the usual way.
Mr Philip Hollobone (Kettering) (Con)
T9. Will the libraries Minister join me in congratulating Northamptonshire county council’s library and information service on being named the best council services team at this year’s Municipal Journal awards? Whereas other local authorities are closing libraries and cutting opening times, the Conservative council in Northamptonshire is extending opening to seven days a week and extending the range of services on offer, and has recruited more than 600 library volunteers.
Keith Vaz (Leicester East) (Lab)
T7. I congratulate the Minister for creative industries on his outstanding work in encouraging international film makers, especially from Bollywood, to come and make their films in the United Kingdom. Does he agree that it is important that that helps with jobs, growth and the diversity of UK film making?
Mr Vaizey
I am very pleased to have that question from the right hon. Gentleman. Although we obviously welcome investment from the west coast of America, particularly yesterday’s announcement by Warner Bros. that it will be filming J. K. Rowling’s “Fantastic Beasts”, it is important to remember that Bollywood is bigger than Hollywood, and we need also to encourage Indian film makers to make films in this country with our excellent crew and casts.
Neil Carmichael (Stroud) (Con)
T10. To reinforce points already made this morning, what assurance can the Minister give my constituents in Stroud valleys and vale that they will have access to broadband so that their businesses and lifestyles can thrive?
Mr Angus Brendan MacNeil (Na h-Eileanan an Iar) (SNP)
T8. The theme of much of this morning’s exchanges has been broadband and mobile coverage. Will the Minister meet me and other interested rural and island Members of Parliament to discuss how proper 4G coverage on a Swedish or Finnish model may help the aims of comprehensive mobile and fast broadband coverage in the years to come?
Mr Vaizey
Broadband is going extremely well in the UK, mainly because we are better together. We are working with Scotland and Wales to roll out broadband and 4G coverage. The hon. Gentleman should not be so modest: we have outstripped a lot of the Scandinavian countries. We have just laid 400 km of undersea cable to the highlands and islands. That could not have been done without the UK Government working with the devolved Government to bring broadband to our rural areas. We are better together.
Sir Bob Russell (Colchester) (LD)
Tourism is a major economic generator in Colchester. Does the Minister agree that the best way to support tourism is by reducing VAT on tourism to 5%? Will he have a chat with the Chancellor, please?
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport (Mrs Helen Grant)
As my hon. Friend knows, VAT is a matter for the Chancellor. We keep all taxes under review, but there is no plan to reduce tax for the tourism sector.
Mrs Mary Glindon (North Tyneside) (Lab)
Sarah Hunter from North Tyneside is part of the England women’s rugby squad. Despite what the Minister said earlier, will he join me in wishing Sarah and the team the best of luck as they head off to the women’s rugby world cup in Paris this summer?
Mr Nigel Evans (Ribble Valley) (Con)
I enjoyed visiting that wonderful rainbow festival, London Pride, over the weekend in our capital. It has become a magnet for hundreds of thousands of tourists, who enjoy the rich diversity of the United Kingdom.
With the ability to convert civil partnerships into marriage later this year, does the Secretary of State believe that there is even more to celebrate in pride festivals throughout the UK in the coming months and years?
Sajid Javid
My hon. Friend makes a good point, and I agree with him. He may be interested to know that the Government will today lay the draft regulations for converting civil partnerships to marriage. The Government previously said that the cost of conversion would be calculated on a cost recovery basis, and that is correct. We had indicated about £100, but I am happy to say that, in almost all cases, the cost will be £45. It would be unfair to charge couples who were in civil partnerships before same sex marriage was available, so I am pleased to announce that my right hon. Friend the Home Secretary has agreed to waive the conversion fee for one year from 10 December.
Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)
Tourism is important to my constituency of Strangford. It definitely brings jobs and opportunities, as promoted by the Northern Ireland Tourist Board. Will the Minister consider joint tourism promotions with the Northern Ireland Tourist Board so that we can benefit from tourism throughout the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland?
Caroline Dinenage (Gosport) (Con)
Will the Minister join me in welcoming two pieces of excellent nautical news for Portsmouth harbour? Not only will it play host to Sir Ben Ainslie’s new America’s cup sailing team hub, but today it welcomes Oceans of Hope—the first yacht to complete a global circumnavigation with a working crew with multiple sclerosis, including my Gosport constituent Phil Gowers.
Chi Onwurah (Newcastle upon Tyne Central) (Lab)
The Minister will no doubt be aware that Northern Stage’s excellent adaptation of Joseph Heller’s “Catch-22” closed at the weekend at Richmond, following a successful nationwide run. What is the Minister doing to ensure that regions outside the north-east benefit from the excellent cultural talent that we produce?
Mr Vaizey
The latest round of Arts Council funding has pushed more money out to the regions, and I am particularly pleased about the new £15 million fund it has set up specifically to support talent outside London, and to keep people outside London working in our regional theatres and doing innovative work.
Philip Davies (Shipley) (Con)
Earlier this week I visited GamCare at its headquarters in Clapham to see the wonderful work it does helping people with problem gambling. May I urge the Secretary of State and the Minister to go themselves to listen to the counsellors, as I did, and to get their perspective on what we can best do to help people who sadly develop a gambling addiction?
Mr Barry Sheerman (Huddersfield) (Lab/Co-op)
I forgot to welcome the Secretary of State, so I do so warmly and ask whether he will support our all-party effort to get at least 150 MPs to read a poem of the countryside, and raise funds to get kids from poorer parts of our country out to the countryside this year?
Sajid Javid
I certainly will; that is an excellent initiative. Since A. E. Housman came from my constituency, that would be a good start.
Peter Aldous (Waveney) (Con)
There is concern that the Government’s approach to allocating funding for the superfast broadband extension programme will leave most rural areas at a disadvantage. What help and assurances will the Minister give to constituents in the villages of Rumburgh, St James and Ringsfield that they will not be penalised?
Mr Vaizey
The principle behind the programme is that we allocate funding in order to get to 95% coverage. We expect local authorities to match that, and we will then work with them to target the areas where it is needed most. I am happy to meet my hon. Friend to discuss the best way forward.
Neil Carmichael (Stroud) (Con)
1. What recent discussions she has had with her counterparts overseas on protecting the rights of women and girls internationally.
The Minister for Women (Nicky Morgan)
The Government are committed to the protection and promotion of women’s rights in the UK and internationally. I met many of my overseas counterparts at the global summit to end sexual violence in conflict last month, which brought together 128 country delegations, UN agencies and civil society. We discussed how best to achieve that aim, including providing opportunities for international collaboration and the exchange of best practices.
Neil Carmichael
I thank the Minister for that answer. What can the Government do to help prevent distressing cases such as that of Mariam Ibrahim which arose simply because she was a Christian?
Nicky Morgan
I am grateful to my hon. Friend for raising this case, and pleased that Mariam Ibrahim and her family have now been released. They are currently staying at the US embassy in Khartoum. The British embassy in Khartoum continues to follow the case closely and is in close contact with the defence team. We continue to raise our concerns about this case and the broader human rights situation in Sudan with the Sudanese authorities, including with a recent delegation of Sudanese female MPs whom I met. We will continue to work bilaterally and in international forums such as the UN to tackle violence and all forms of discrimination against women.
Bridget Phillipson (Houghton and Sunderland South) (Lab)
Ministers are right to draw attention to the appalling sexual violence faced by women and girls in conflict, but we also have responsibilities when women seek sanctuary in the UK. Will the Minister set out what action is being taken following the serious allegations and concerns about operations at Yarl’s Wood detention centre?
Nicky Morgan
The hon. Lady is right, and it is important and extremely welcome that the Government set up last month’s global summit. Those who seek asylum in the UK need to be offered protection, and the Government are committed to making our asylum system more gender sensitive. We have made significant progress, including putting in place new enhanced guidance supported by high-quality training for all decision makers. Women who seek asylum can request a female interviewing officer and interpreter. They can also bring a friend with them to interviews to provide emotional support if needed.
Hugh Bayley (York Central) (Lab)
In last night’s Adjournment debate, my right hon. Friend the Member for Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath (Mr Brown) talked about the case of the abducted girls in Nigeria. He made the point that the problem is not that those girls were abducted, or that others have been abducted since, but that many are at risk and are no longer going to school. Will the Minister look at that speech and prepare a written statement on behalf of her Department to respond to the points my right hon. Friend made?
Nicky Morgan
I certainly will look at that speech—I am afraid I did not have a chance to read it in full before this morning’s Question Time. The hon. Gentleman is absolutely right that one of the tragedies of the situation that has evolved in Nigeria is that the girls who were abducted were doing exactly the right thing—they were in school and taking exams. We absolutely do not want to put girls around the world off their education. The UK remains committed to helping to find the schoolgirls. I shall look at the speech and think about how best to respond.
Heidi Alexander (Lewisham East) (Lab)
2. What steps she is taking to close the gender pay gap.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Women and Equalities (Jo Swinson)
Thank you very much, Mr Speaker. It is good to be back. May I place on the record my thanks to my hon. Friend the Member for Cardiff Central (Jenny Willott) for the fantastic job she did in covering my maternity leave?
The full-time pay gap has now been almost eliminated for women under the age of 40, but we must close the gap across all ages and for part-time workers. We are promoting transparency through the “Think, Act, Report” initiative. As the pay gap is partly driven by the different sectors and jobs in which men and women work, we are encouraging girls and young women to consider a wider range of careers through the “Your Life” initiative.
Heidi Alexander
I, too, welcome the Minister back to her place. The Equal Pay Act 1970 dates back some 44 years, so why does the Minister think that last year the difference between earnings for men and women went up and not down, and why have women in their 20s seen the gender pay gap double since her Government came to power?
Jo Swinson
The 0.1% increase in the pay gap in the past year is certainly not a sign of things going in the right direction, although it was a very small increase. The hon. Lady is absolutely right to highlight the fact that 40 years after equal pay legislation, it is not good enough that we still have a pay gap in this country. We need to look at the causes of that pay gap, which might include time out of the workplace. The new flexible working entitlements regime that came in this week will help to change the culture of our workplace. As I mentioned, we need to look at occupational segregation. We also need to look at discrimination and outdated attitudes when women are not being paid the same for the same work. We need to change that, which is why we are working with businesses.
Charlie Elphicke (Dover) (Con)
What more can be done to get women to consider a wider range of careers, particularly in science and engineering?
Jo Swinson
My hon. Friend is right to raise this issue. Only 7% of engineers are women. That difference in the sectors is a significant driver of the pay gap. The problems start very early in children’s lives, so we need to look at the messages that are being put out through the education system but also more widely in the media regarding stereotypes and what young girls are encouraged to aspire to. We are encouraging parents and schools to have the information they need to assist their children.
Gloria De Piero (Ashfield) (Lab)
I, too, welcome the Minister back.
Progress on narrowing the pay gap has all but come to a standstill. Progress was much quicker under Labour, so will the Minister admit that narrowing the gap by 0.1% in four years is just not good enough?
Jo Swinson
I certainly agree that we need to ensure that we close the pay gap. This is an important issue. It is ideal if we can work with employers to do so. The “Think, Act, Report” initiative means that 200 employers covering 2 million employees in the work force are working to improve the situation for women. They have already made significant steps forward since joining up and since that initiative started in 2011. Two thirds of those employers say that they now publish more information on gender pay. Nearly half of them now do pay audits. That would not have happened without this Government’s initiative, but we have said that we will keep the issue under review, because we need success.
David Morris (Morecambe and Lunesdale) (Con)
3. What discussions she has had with her counterparts overseas on the contribution of women and girls to the global economy.
The Minister for Women (Nicky Morgan)
In June I met many of my overseas counterparts at a global ministerial round table at the global summit of women held in Paris. This event brought together business, professional and governmental leaders to explore strategies and best practices in accelerating women’s economic progress worldwide. The most important task for the UK Government, as for the rest of the global community, is to build a stronger, fairer economy capable of delivering lasting prosperity. Women and girls are essential to the UK’s economic growth.
David Morris
I thank my right hon. Friend for that comprehensive reply. What issues were identified in those recent discussions?
Nicky Morgan
What was really interesting about going to the international summit—it was the same when I went to the Commonwealth summit in Bangladesh last year—was just how many of the same issues we share around the world in terms of enabling women to play their full part in economies. We talked about gender equality, parental leave, returners to work, supporting older workers, women’s access to finance and the importance of coaching, mentoring and role models in encouraging women to set up their own businesses.
Chi Onwurah (Newcastle upon Tyne Central) (Lab)
Last week we had national women in engineering day. As the Minister says, only 7% of professional engineers in this country are women. What she did not say is that that is the lowest figure in Europe. In eastern European countries, the figure is 30% and countries such as China and India are far ahead of us. In her conversations, will she see what we can learn from other countries that are more successful?
Nicky Morgan
When I speak to counterparts overseas, I always engage with the lessons Britain can share and what we can learn from other countries. I am proud to represent Loughborough university, which has, I am told, the highest number of female engineers in the country. I understand that last night the hon. Lady was at the Royal Academy of Engineering awards, where more than one half the rising stars awards went to female engineers. There is, however, more progress to be made.
Mr Barry Sheerman (Huddersfield) (Lab/Co-op)
We want young girls to achieve and to travel the world. Many young girls want to get into business and to travel. If they do not have science and maths as a basis for getting into business and getting good careers, they will not succeed.
Nicky Morgan
I entirely agree with the hon. Gentleman. I assume that he supports the EBacc and that he welcomes the work of the Under-Secretary of State for Education, my hon. Friend the Member for South West Norfolk (Elizabeth Truss), who I think has done more than anyone else in recent years to triumph and to talk about the importance of all students, particularly girls, studying science and maths. [Interruption.] I am glad to hear the hon. Gentleman was there supporting her, too.
Steve Baker (Wycombe) (Con)
4. What recent progress she has made on encouraging women to set up their own businesses.
The Minister for Women (Nicky Morgan)
The Government offer a wide range of support to women entrepreneurs—for example, the new enterprise allowance, mentoring, business advice and start-up loans. I also recently announced a £1 million challenge fund specifically to support women to move their businesses online and take advantage of superfast broadband. We know these measures are making a difference, with more women running their own businesses than ever before.
Steve Baker
Which particular areas have the Government identified where we can celebrate the success of women entrepreneurs?
Nicky Morgan
There are many different areas, but let me just pick one. The latest statistics from the Federation of Small Businesses show a dramatic increase in the number of women starting up businesses in the retail sector, and high streets across the country are seeing the benefit. Half of all small businesses established in retail in the past two years are primarily owned by women. That is in stark contrast with 20 years ago, when it was less than a quarter. That demonstrates the fundamental role that women are playing in helping the country to recover from recession. I hope that Members on all sides of the House will encourage retail businesses on their high streets to apply for the Future High Streets Forum’s Great British high streets awards.
Keith Vaz (Leicester East) (Lab)
Nobody doubts the Minister’s commitment to equality, but why are there so few black and Asian women sitting on the boards of our companies?
Nicky Morgan
It is a very good question. There is no doubt that more progress is needed. Earlier this week I was at an event for the 30% Club, which has been campaigning for a voluntary business-led approach, started by Lord Davies, to get more women in particular on the boards of companies. Part of that is about working with executive search companies and asking the chairmen of companies to think differently about appointments. Often the traditional and expected route of a CV is not something that women or others, particularly from black and minority ethnic communities, can put forward. We need to broaden the way in which chairmen of boards, and the boards themselves, appoint new directors.
Richard Graham (Gloucester) (Con)
6. The rise and rise of women in business is boosting growth and opportunity across the country. We have an inspiring role model in Gloucester, in the first female editor of the Gloucester Citizen in its 138-year history, Jenny Eastwood. The chair of the Gloucestershire local enterprise partnership, Diane Savory, is one of only three female chairs of the 39 LEPS. Will my right hon. Friend join me in recognising their achievements, and in encouraging both Jenny and Diane to do even more to promote new female “Gloucesterpreneurs” like Sarah Churchill of the award-winning Artisan Kitchen?
Nicky Morgan
I congratulate my hon. Friend on coining the new word “Gloucesterpreneurs”, and I hope that he will campaign vigorously under that slogan over the next few months. I am happy to join him in congratulating Gloucestershire Media on its Women in Business awards. Through the work of the Minister for Cities—my right hon. Friend the Member for Tunbridge Wells (Greg Clark)—and the Deputy Prime Minister, the Government are focusing on regional growth, city deals and the power of local enterprise partnerships, and on encouraging growth outside London. That is why I am particularly pleased to hear about the new female entrepreneurs in Gloucester who have set up businesses during the past few years.
Eric Ollerenshaw (Lancaster and Fleetwood) (Con)
5. What recent steps the Government have taken to encourage access for, and participation by, under-represented groups in (a) grass-roots and (b) professional sports.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Women and Equalities (Mrs Helen Grant)
Sport England and UK Sport are committed to achieving equality in grass-roots and elite sport. They invest in a range of expert bodies to work with sport to remove barriers to participation among under-represented groups.
Eric Ollerenshaw
Does my hon. Friend agree that we might achieve even more success in international sporting competitions if our sporting authorities had deeper contacts among ethnic minorities, and were able to use their expertise in what we might consider to be minority sports, but what in their countries of origin are majority sports?
Mrs Grant
My hon. Friend has made an interesting point. UK Sport and national governing bodies capitalise on a wealth of diverse global expertise in order to get athletes on to the podium. Sport England also invests in organisations such as Sporting Equals to promote physical activity and diversity in all sport.
Susan Elan Jones (Clwyd South) (Lab)
I know that I speak for a certain proportion of people in this country who were dreadful at sport at school and never improved thereafter. What will the Minister do to encourage people who have never had a positive experience of sport to take our necessary exercise by that means?
Huw Irranca-Davies (Ogmore) (Lab)
7. What steps she is taking to ensure that mothers' names are included on marriage certificates; and if she will make a statement.
The Minister for Equalities (Sajid Javid)
The content of marriage registers has not changed since civil marriage was introduced in 1837, so it is about time we took a further look. I have discussed this matter with my right hon. Friend the Home Secretary, and we are currently considering a range of options.
Huw Irranca-Davies
The Minister has referred to a range of options. Given that Labour changed the law in respect of same-sex couples and adoption back in 2002, what consideration has he given to ensuring that any changes that may be made to marriage certificates reflect the fact that many individuals now have legal parents of the same sex?
Sajid Javid
I agree with the hon. Gentleman, who has raised a very important point. When the rules were drawn up in 1837, equality was not a priority for our society. Today, thankfully, it is, so those are just the kind of changes that we are considering.
Mrs Sharon Hodgson (Washington and Sunderland West) (Lab)
Can the Minister tell us how much it would cost to bring marriage certificates into the 21st century? If he cannot, why are his colleagues in the Home Office team saying that it would be too expensive? What price do he and the Government place on equality?
Sajid Javid
If the hon. Lady had been listening carefully, she would have already heard the answer to that question; I talked about civil partnerships earlier. We have rightly said that when people are converting civil partnerships into marriage, having entered into those partnerships before same-sex marriage was available, we will waive the fee. I think that that demonstrates the Government’s priorities.
Business of the House
(10 years, 4 months ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Ms Angela Eagle (Wallasey) (Lab)
Will the Leader of the House give us the business for next week?
The Leader of the House of Commons (Mr Andrew Lansley)
The business next week will be as follows:
Monday 7 July—Estimates day [1st allotted day]. There will be a debate on universal credit implementation, followed by a debate on the implementation of the common agricultural policy in England. Further details will be given in the Official Report.
[The details are as follows: There will be a debate on universal credit implementation: monitoring DWP’s performance in 2012-13, Fifth Report from the Work and Pensions Committee, HC 1209, Session 2013-14, and the Government response published as Second Special Report, HC 426, Session 2014-15.
The lead Department is Work and Pensions.
There will be a debate on the implementation of the common agricultural policy in England 2014-20, Seventh Report from the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee, HC 745, Session 2013-14, and the Government response published as Seventh Special Report, HC 1008, 2013-14.
The lead Department is Environment, Food and Rural Affairs.]
At 10 pm, the House will be asked to agree all outstanding estimates.
Tuesday 8 July—Second Reading of the Modern Slavery Bill, followed by proceedings on the Supply and Appropriation (Main Estimates) Bill.
Wednesday 9 July—Opposition day [4th allotted day]. There will be a debate on the subject of education, followed by a debate on housing supply. Both debates will arise on an Opposition motion.
Thursday 10 July—There will be a general debate on the UK’s justice and home affairs opt-outs.
Friday 11 July—The House will not be sitting.
The provisional business for the week commencing 14 July will include the following:
Monday 14 July—Consideration of a Bill, followed by a motion to approve the first report from the Committee on Standards on the respect policy.
Tuesday 15 July—A motion on the retirement of the Clerk of the House, followed by Second Reading of the Small Business, Enterprise and Employment Bill.
Wednesday 16 July—Opposition day [5th allotted day]. There will be debates on Opposition motions, including one on the subject of health.
Thursday 17 July—Business to be nominated by the Backbench Business Committee.
Friday 18 July—The House will not be sitting.
I should also like to inform the House that the business in Westminster Hall will be as follows:
Thursday 10 July—A debate on the second report of the Work and Pensions Committee on the role of Jobcentre Plus in the reformed welfare system.
Ms Eagle
I thank the Leader of the House for announcing next week’s business. On Monday, we will have the first allotted day for the debate on the estimates. That is an arcane and opaque process that does little to scrutinise the actual spending of the Government. Does the Leader of the House agree that we need to reform the estimates process to ensure real scrutiny? Will he support my call for the Chancellor of the Exchequer to answer questions in the Chamber on the estimates, separately from the Budget, and for each Cabinet Minister to have a yearly Budget question and answer on spending in their Department?
On Tuesday, we will debate the Modern Slavery Bill, which the Opposition support but which in some areas does not go far enough. Will the Leader of the House tell us whether his Government will accept our amendments to provide statutory legal guardians for child victims of trafficking, and greater transparency in supply chains to ensure that companies do much more to prevent slave labour?
Yesterday, private Members’ Bills were formally introduced. Labour Members brought forward a series of Bills to tackle the scourge of zero-hours contracts, to strengthen the minimum wage and to protect the NHS. However, all Conservative Members could do was cheer yet another Bill on the UK’s membership of the European Union. [Hon. Members: “Hear, hear.”] They are at it again. While we bring forward practical solutions to the crisis in living standards, all they can do is bang on about Europe.
It has been a year and a half since what was billed as the Prime Minister’s last speech on Europe, but what have we seen since? A Prime Minister too afraid to stand up to the Eurosceptics in his own party has been suffering rebellion after rebellion. The more they bully him, the more he appeases them by picking fights in Europe. The trouble is that he keeps losing. Only this Prime Minister could come to the Chamber and claim that losing 26-2 is actually a triumph. If that is what success looks like, I would not like to see what happens when he fails.
We have a PR Prime Minister who cannot deliver the goods. He promised to protect the NHS and keep waiting lists down, but four years later cancer waits have increased by nearly half. Two thirds of people cannot see their GP within two days and the A and E waiting time target has now been missed every week for almost a year. Instead of getting his facts wrong and smearing the Welsh health service, the Prime Minister should listen to the chair of the British Medical Association, who said that the NHS is
“palpably fraying at the edges”.
Will the Leader of the House finally admit that people cannot trust the Tories with the NHS? Will he arrange for a debate in Government time, so that the Secretary of State for Health can come clean about the scale of his failure?
The Government are living in a parallel universe. The Chancellor claimed that we are “all in this together” but Government figures show that in the last two years 1 million more people fell into absolute poverty. Lord Finkelstein, the Tory peer and one of the Chancellor’s closest confidantes, let the cat out of the bag recently when he said that future Tory cuts will
“undoubtedly fall on poor people”.
Does the Leader of the House agree with him, and will he tell me whether Lord Finkelstein was present last night at the Tory summer ball, where, I am told, a bottle of champagne was auctioned for £45,000? [Interruption.] Was that cheap champagne? We now know that last year’s event was attended by six billionaires, 73 financiers, the owner of a strip club and the judo partner of Vladimir Putin. While the Chancellor’s hedge fund mates and dodgy donors are getting tax cuts, millions of Britons are living in poverty, and now the Chancellor’s ally says they can only expect it to get worse. So can the Leader of the House arrange for a debate in Government time on the meaning of “all in this together”?
The Conservatives recently tried to rebrand themselves as the workers party. They produced that beer and bingo advert aimed at people they think of as proles, but this week they have had to abandon a photo-shoot for working-class MPs because they could find only 14 of them. That is far fewer than went to Eton. It is becoming harder for them even to pretend they are in touch with real life: the right hon. Member for Croydon South (Sir Richard Ottaway) thinks that Londoners who cannot afford the soaring rents should get on their bikes to Manchester; the family business of the hon. Member for Newbury (Richard Benyon) is buying up swathes of social housing, trebling rents and threatening mass evictions; and a Tory councillor in Coventry thinks that people who use food banks are selfish.
The Tories say they have changed on Europe, they say they have changed on the NHS and they say they have modernised the Conservative party, but we all know the truth: no matter what spin they put on it, it is the same old Tories.
Mr Lansley
I am grateful to the shadow Leader of the House for responding to the business statement, and to her and her colleagues for giving me the opportunity to announce the business for next Wednesday. She asked about reforming the estimates. As she knows, I am not proposing any reform of the estimates process as such, but Select Committees have considerable latitude and potential to undertake inquiries on departmental expenditure plans and, through the Liaison Committee, to bring forward, on estimates days, opportunities for the House to debate those. I recall that when I was Health Secretary the Health Committee undertook an annual substantive inquiry on all aspects of the health budget. That is not true of all Select Committees, but it is an important pointer to the direction in which we may go. She will be aware that the Public Administration Committee is in discussion with the National Audit Office and often emphasises the importance of NAO support, not only to the PAC but to other Select Committees, in the scrutiny of departmental expenditure.
The hon. Lady asked about the Modern Slavery Bill. Its Second Reading is coming up next week, so, if I may, I will leave things until that debate. We agree on the principles, and I hope the legislation will be of substantial importance. We need to get it right, but, working together, not least with the benefit of the pre-legislative scrutiny, which has been important in that context, I am sure we will have an opportunity to respond to the issues she mentions.
The hon. Lady referred, as did the Leader of the Opposition, to the NHS. I remind her that the Prime Minister was in no sense smearing the NHS in Wales. On the contrary, he was setting out some simple facts. The decisions that the Labour party has made on the NHS in Wales should be understood by people in England as well as by people in Wales. The Labour party has cut the budget for the NHS by 8% in Wales, whereas this year this coalition Government are increasing the budget for the NHS by £3.5 billion. Over this Parliament the NHS budget will increase by £12.7 billion—that is a real-terms increase. That is what is enabling the NHS to deal with rising demand and the very large number of additional patients: 1.3 million more accident and emergency attendances; more than 1 million more in-patient admissions; 6.5 million more out-patient appointments; and 3.5 million more diagnostic tests. Those are substantial increases in demand, and the NHS, with a small real-terms increase, is coping extremely well with that—better than in Wales, where the budget has been cut. For that reason, the latest report—the 2014 report—from the Commonwealth Fund in America put the UK at the top of its comparison of leading health systems across the world. We can be proud of that. All the data on which it is derived, contrary to what the shadow Health Secretary was saying, relate to the experience of the people in this country, in the health service, under this coalition Government.
The hon. Lady asked about private Members’ Bills. I am looking forward to debating those Bills, not least the EU Referendum Bill of my hon. Friend the Member for Bromley and Chislehurst (Robert Neill) on 17 October. I do not understand why she thinks that that matter is not important to the people of this country. If the European parliamentary elections did nothing else they demonstrated that it is important to the people here. Let me say something that is quite unusual for me. The hon. Lady should listen to Len McCluskey and Unite, because they are telling her party that it should be supporting a referendum on our relationship with Europe.
The Prime Minister’s speech, the Bloomberg speech, was important as it made it clear to the people of this country that they had a right to expect us to enter into a renegotiation of our terms that would lead to reform and give them a choice. As the Prime Minister has said, at the end of the day it is the people of this country who will have a choice. He has fought and won in Europe before. He won in getting us out of the banking bail-out in which the Labour party would have left us. He got the budget cut. When we had a Labour Government, they gave away part of the rebate. Our Prime Minister protected the rebate and cut the budget, and that is important. He will win those battles again.
Finally, I did have the pleasure of going to the summer party last night. I did not see my noble Friend Danny Finkelstein—[Interruption.] I did not buy the champagne, which was bought not for drinking purposes but because it was signed by Margaret Thatcher. [Hon. Members: “Yes!”] The highlight of the evening was not the auction but a speech by my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister, who illustrated the positive achievements of this coalition Government and the increasing likelihood of a Conservative victory at the next general election.
Mr Speaker
Order. I gently remind colleagues that they might like to focus their questions on next week’s business.
Pauline Latham (Mid Derbyshire) (Con)
Can we have a debate on the eminent suitability of Derby as the location for the HS2 college? The land is vacant and it is a brownfield site. We can offer apprenticeships and everything that the HS2 college requires, and we are celebrating 175 years of the rail industry in Derby. It is the best place in the country for such a project, so I wish to have a debate on that.
Mr Lansley
I understand and applaud my hon. Friend for her support for that project and for her constituency. She will know that the HS2 college will act as a national college, operating on a hub and spoke model, with a main site linking a network of providers across the country. We launched a consultation to identify the most suitable main site for the new college. Bids were assessed and four locations were shortlisted: Derby, Birmingham, Doncaster and Manchester. Those locations gave presentations to support their bids on 27 June, and a final decision on the preferred site will be taken by Ministers shortly.
Sir Gerald Kaufman (Manchester, Gorton) (Lab)
Will the right hon. Gentleman ask the Foreign Secretary to make an urgent statement in which he condemns the murder by Israeli terrorists of the Palestinian, Mohammed Abu Khdeir, who was kidnapped yesterday? The murder was the outcome of the hysteria that was deliberately provoked by the Israeli Prime Minister following the kidnap and murder of three Israeli teenagers. Will he ask the Foreign Secretary to send our sympathy to the family of Mohammed Abu Khdeir; to join the American Secretary of State, John Kerry, who has described the murder as “sickening”; and to make it clear to the Israelis that we expect nothing more than the hunting down and bringing to justice of the murderers of this poor boy?
Mr Lansley
The right hon. Gentleman rightly calls these murders sickening, as are all murders of teenagers. The Government very much condemn the abduction and murder of the Israeli teenagers and the abduction and murder of the Palestinian teenager. It is vital that those who are responsible are held accountable, and in that respect we welcome Israel’s commitment to bringing those responsible to justice and President Abbas’s firm condemnation of the abduction of youngsters. It is essential, as the right hon. Gentleman knows, to avoid any action or rhetoric that could lead to further loss of life, and events such as these highlight the importance of reaching a negotiated two-state solution with the benefits that that would bring to all Israelis and Palestinians. I will of course, as he asks, draw his comments to the attention of the Foreign Secretary. As he knows, the Foreign Secretary and his colleagues are assiduous in keeping the House informed of events in the middle east. These events and others in the middle east are of serious concern.
Mr Ian Liddell-Grainger (Bridgwater and West Somerset) (Con)
BT is still using its position as a monopoly supplier to hold up the roll-out of rural broadband. May we have time to discuss that in this place? I have just had the latest list from my constituency and it is pitiful how many places have been enabled. The time has come to send a clear message to BT from the House of Commons that we have had enough of its using its position to blackmail the people of this country and to slow down high-speed roll-out.
Mr Lansley
As my hon. Friend knows, BT has won many contracts across the country to provide the roll-out of broadband. As he will have heard during questions to my right hon. and hon. Friends in the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, the overall progress of broadband roll-out is now very impressive, but we must ensure that it reaches many parts. We both know how frustrating it is that, despite the rapid increases in demand for broadband services, in areas where the infrastructure for superfast access to broadband has not been put in place, services are deteriorating rather than remaining stable. It is vital, and I endorse what my hon. Friend says: we need BT and other contract providers—but principally BT—to be well aware of the requirements to put every effort into meeting and, if possible, exceeding their contractual commitments on superfast broadband.
Mr David Winnick (Walsall North) (Lab)
I endorse everything said by my right hon. Friend the Member for Manchester, Gorton (Sir Gerald Kaufman), but on a domestic issue raised earlier by my hon. Friend the Member for Wallasey (Ms Eagle), may I suggest that we have a statement or a debate on political funding so that we may try to find out how many Ministers have been involved in meetings and social events with some of the richest people in this country in order to raise cash? Must the Tory party always prostitute itself with an election looming? And the Tories have the impertinence to criticise trade unions!
Mr Lansley
I have to tell the hon. Gentleman that there is no prohibition on social events, although perhaps he wishes for one; I am not sure. As far as I am aware, only one political donation in this country buys influence and that is the political donation made by the trade unions to the Labour party, with £12.6 million donated by Unite since the right hon. Member for Doncaster North (Edward Miliband) became the hon. Gentleman’s leader. They are now demanding the appointment of a Cabinet Minister for trade unions, no less, whose purpose will be, they say, to bring home the bacon. Since they already decide the candidates for the Labour party, determine the policy of the Labour party and effectively control the leadership of the Labour party, that is some bacon—or perhaps I should say some bacon sandwich.
Mr David Amess (Southend West) (Con)
Will my right hon. Friend find time for a debate on the publication of the Chilcot report? As someone who attended the debate and changed my mind on how to vote because of what the then non-working-class Labour Prime Minister Tony Blair told the House of Commons, I think that it is essential that the Chilcot report is published as soon as possible without redactions so that the House can judge the veracity of what we were told on that momentous occasion.
Mr Lansley
Those of us who did not support the invasion of Iraq in 2003 are as anxious as my hon. Friend to see the Chilcot report. In his letter of 28 May to the Cabinet Secretary, Sir John Chilcot said that it was the inquiry’s intention to submit its report to the Prime Minister as soon as possible. I can tell the House that it is the Prime Minister’s hope that it will be able to do so before the end of the year. The Government will not comment on the Iraq inquiry before the publication of the report.
Alison McGovern (Wirral South) (Lab)
Each and every time a Government Minister is asked about zero-hours contracts, they reference their hope to ban exclusivity clauses, but there are far more problems associated with zero-hours contracts than that, and many other ways in which people are exploited. May we therefore have a debate on zero-hours contracts in Government time?
Mr Lansley
The hon. Lady will be aware that the provision that Ministers refer to is in the Small Business, Enterprise and Employment Bill. There will be an opportunity, as I announced in the provisional business, for that to be debated.
Ian Swales (Redcar) (LD)
Control of discretionary social funds passed from the Department for Work and Pensions to local councils on 1 April 2013. In the first year, my local Labour council, Redcar and Cleveland, turned down 91% of applications from people in need and spent only £256,000 of its £765,000 allocation. May we have a debate on how councils are making use of these discretionary social funds?
Mr Lansley
My hon. Friend makes an interesting point, which might benefit from an application for an Adjournment debate, not least because there may be other Members elsewhere in the House who feel strongly, as he does, about this and their local authority’s decisions.
Ian Paisley (North Antrim) (DUP)
Boxing, swimming, running and cycling, though not all at the same time, are incredibly well followed and practised sports across Northern Ireland. Will the Leader of the House make time for a debate on the legacy of the Commonwealth games so that we can see how the benefit of those wonderful games will be applied to sportspeople across Northern Ireland?
Mr Lansley
The hon. Gentleman makes an interesting point. I do not know whether we have time available before the Commonwealth games for such a debate. We are very much looking forward to the Commonwealth games, which will be a tremendous event, and to the opportunity to see this country, not least Scotland, showcasing itself as a venue for great sporting achievement. In that context, in Cambridge and in my constituency, we are also very much looking forward to seeing the Tour de France coming through on Monday.
Bob Blackman (Harrow East) (Con)
At the end of this month NatWest bank proposes to close the final bank branch in Harrow Weald high street, which will have a devastating effect on businesses and individuals in the area. The key point nationally is why banks are allowed to close the last branch in a high street. May we have a debate in Government time on the future of retail banking and the effects on the high street?
Mr Lansley
I know that my hon. Friend raises a point that will be of interest to many Members across the House, not least at the moment when there is a sort of secular change taking place in the structure of retail banking, with the withdrawal of retail banking from many high streets, including in my own constituency, and the loss of the last remaining bank in some villages. It is difficult to go anywhere else for that kind of access. My hon. Friend and other Members might exploit the opportunity, through the Backbench Business Committee or otherwise, to see whether there is demand among Members for such a debate. He is a member of the Backbench Business Committee, so I know that he is familiar with how that Committee works.
Steve McCabe (Birmingham, Selly Oak) (Lab)
Back in 2010, when I believe the Leader of the House was the Health Secretary, a promise was made to fund a paediatric neuromuscular consultant post for Birmingham. Would he be interested in a debate in which he can tell us what steps are needed to turn that into reality?
Mr Lansley
I do not recall the detail in relation to that, so I will ask my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Health to update the hon. Gentleman and me.
Andrew Percy (Brigg and Goole) (Con)
It is two years since the Chancellor halved the bridge tolls on the Humber bridge, and figures out this month show that local car users have saved £19 million in crossing tolls. At the same time the number of Humber bridge crossings have gone up. Businesses have also saved money through the halving of heavy goods vehicle tolls. May we have a debate next week on how our long-term economic plan is helping the Humber? That would give us an opportunity to explain to the House why the HS2 college should be in Doncaster.
Mr Lansley
I am glad that my hon. Friend can illustrate with evidence the success of what the Chancellor of the Exchequer has announced. It is part of the broader process of ensuring that we have effective infrastructure to support the growth that our long-term economic plan is generating. I am delighted that it is having that effect on infrastructure, as well as on employment, which is going up, and on the deficit, which is coming down, and with taxes now being able to be brought down and with education and skills being promoted, not least through apprenticeships. That is all very much part of the long-term economic plan for regeneration on Humberside.
Mrs Madeleine Moon (Bridgend) (Lab)
During the first and second world wars the majority of engineers in Britain were women, yet today women make up only 7% of the engineering work force, the lowest percentage across Europe. Iceland has 43%. May we have a debate on how we can ensure that women understand that engineering is a first-class career option, for example with companies such as Ford in Bridgend?
Mr Lansley
I have every sympathy with what the hon. Lady says and absolutely agree with the principle of trying to bring more women into engineering. Clearly that is very much in our interests, by supporting the further rebalancing of the economy and the growth in manufacturing. It has been pursued by successive Governments. I remember working as a civil servant, way back in 1980, on the Young Engineers campaign, and Women into Science and Engineering was established at that point too. That was 34 years ago and we have still not succeeded. We must ensure that engineering is at the forefront of careers advice, that there is support for the right courses and, indeed, that engineering role models are made available to young women.
Charlie Elphicke (Dover) (Con)
May we have an urgent debate on the independence of think-tank charities? Last year the Institute for Public Policy Research took up to £40,000 in donations from the TUC and then published a report calling for—wait for it—more trade union power. It looks more like a sock puppet than an independent think-tank charity.
Mr Lansley
I am interested in what my hon. Friend has to say. He might want look for opportunities to raise the matter himself, perhaps in an Adjournment debate. In any case, I think that it is an important subject for all of us to be aware of. Wherever we are engaged in public policy making, I hope that it will be evidence-based and objective. One of the Nolan principles is objectivity. That should be as true for those who seek to influence policy as it is for those who make it.
Ian Mearns (Gateshead) (Lab)
Last night I attended a function organised by the all-party group on rail in the north at which Northern Rail set out its future investment programme. Unfortunately, it will only go as far north as York. At another recent meeting, Network Rail outlined its proposals for the next control period, none of which will go beyond York. The current disparity in public infrastructure spending between London and the north-east is 520:1. May we have a debate on when this Government will put that right?
Mr Lansley
The hon. Gentleman will be aware, not least from the Chancellor of the Exchequer’s speech at the beginning of last week, of the importance that we attach to the further promotion on infrastructure that enables all parts of the United Kingdom to have maximum access to the economic growth being generated by this Government’s long-term economic plan. High-speed rail will clearly make a significant difference, but there are many other projects being promoted by Network Rail. I will draw the attention of the Chancellor and the Secretary of State for Transport to the point the hon. Gentleman makes as we approach the publication later this year of the infrastructure plans for the next 10 years.
Mr Speaker
Order. It is both exceptionally cheeky and thoroughly disorderly for the hon. Member for Stone (Sir William Cash) to be seeking to catch my eye at business questions, for which he arrived almost half an hour late. I do not doubt that he has a point of the highest importance in his mind, and of which he thinks the House needs urgently to be informed, but there are other mechanisms, including points of order, whereby he might be able to realise his objective. Meanwhile, I am concerned for his leg muscles and advise him to remain in his seat. I call Mr Nigel Evans.
Mr Nigel Evans (Ribble Valley) (Con)
Thank you, Mr Speaker; I will ask my hon. Friend’s question for him.
I want to be helpful to the shadow Leader of the House because of her view that Conservative Members are rabid fanatics obsessed with the issue of Europe. Will the Leader of the House find time next week for a debate on Europe in order that we can praise the Prime Minister for his valiant standing up for British interests against the election of President Juncker? We could also look at reform of Europe. There has to be something wrong when we spend £30 million of our money by sending it abroad to youngsters who have never set foot in the United Kingdom via the payments that we give in support to these children. I believe that we now have the support of Germany on this. I think it is therefore an area where real reform can now be made.
Mr Lansley
I noted the reports this morning about debates in the Bundestag about exactly these issues of transfer payments and benefit payments to other countries. That highlights the fact that there is a growing sympathy for what our Prime Minister and members of this Government have been saying about the necessity of the free movement of peoples being about free movement for the purposes of work, not of access to benefits, and that will form part of our reform programme. I cannot promise an immediate debate, although my hon. Friend will have noted that next week’s business includes a debate on the justice and home affairs opt-out.
Mr Barry Sheerman (Huddersfield) (Lab/Co-op)
Does the Leader of the House agree that it is disgraceful that a very high percentage of children up and down our country never get to visit the British countryside? May we have an early debate on access to the countryside? Will he join my campaign, which is an all-party campaign that includes some very good Members on his Benches, to get 150 people in every constituency to read a countryside poem on video, thereby raising £5,000 that will go towards getting schools in poorer areas of our country to visit the countryside to love it and learn about it?
Mr Lansley
I have every sympathy with what the hon. Gentleman says. I am fortunate enough to have, and to live in, a constituency that is predominantly in the countryside, and I very much appreciate what a privilege that is. It is something that is not necessarily available to people in cities and urban areas, and we should give them access to it. I am very engaged with what he describes about the reading of poetry. I will talk to my hon. Friends at the Department for Culture, Media and Sport and the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs about ways in which his admirable objective can be pursued.
Martin Vickers (Cleethorpes) (Con)
There is concern among residents in my constituency that the two hospitals that serve it, based in Grimsby and Scunthorpe, are having to share more and more services and the different specialisms at each location. May we have a debate to explore the reasons for this? Much of it is driven by medical professionals, which is quite right, but, as the Leader of the House will appreciate, it causes considerable concern to constituents.
Mr Lansley
I completely understand what my hon. Friend says. As he says, this is, and should be, clinically led, and it should be evidence-based. He will recall, no doubt, that this has been happening over the years; it is a steady process, not something that started under this coalition Government. It is sometimes the necessary consequence of securing access to sufficient staff with sufficient expertise and sufficient regular practice to be able to provide a 24/7 service; we need a 24/7 NHS. It should not, however, lead to a loss of access that has a damaging impact on outcomes; it should be outcomes-based. In relation to his local area, I will ask my hon. Friends at the Department of Health to respond specifically to his point.
Nic Dakin (Scunthorpe) (Lab)
This House has made real progress on scrutinising important public appointments. Will the Leader of the House outline what process will be in place to allow the House to scrutinise the Government’s nomination for the next European Commissioner?
Mr Lansley
I think that the Prime Minister in this House and my noble Friend Baroness Warsi in the House of Lords yesterday made it clear that while this nomination is one for the Prime Minister, it is open to the scrutiny Committees of the House to request, as they could on any nomination for commissioner, that evidence be given to them. It will be a matter for the nominee concerned as to how to respond.
Philip Davies (Shipley) (Con)
Earlier this week, my hon. Friend the Member for South Derbyshire (Heather Wheeler) raised the case of Keith Williams in Justice questions. He was released early from prison by the Parole Board, completely and utterly against the wishes and views of the victim of his terrible crimes. May we have a debate on how we can make sure that the victim’s views are paramount in the criminal justice system, so that before anybody is released on parole, moved to an open prison or released on temporary licence, the views of the victim are taken fully into account and put at the top of the priority list? Such a debate would also showcase the fantastic work of organisations such as Families Fighting for Justice.
Mr Lansley
I am grateful to my hon. Friend for making his case very well. I will ask my colleagues at the Ministry of Justice to respond directly to him. I am sure he will find further opportunities for a debate, perhaps on the Adjournment or elsewhere, in order to raise the issues properly. I hope he recognises that, through legislation and other action, the Government have sought continuously to put the interests of victims at the forefront of the criminal justice system.
Nia Griffith (Llanelli) (Lab)
As secretary of the all-party group on steel and metal related industry, I have received a response from the Exchequer Secretary declining to meet us. Given that this week, in announcing the devastating loss of 400 jobs in south Wales, Karl Köhler, head of Tata Steel Europe, cited problems with Government policy, such as business rates and delays in getting help for energy intensive industries, will the Leader of the House prevail on his colleague to meet the all-party steel and metal related industry group?
Mr Lansley
I was aware, of course, of the very sad loss of jobs at Port Talbot and sympathise with the hon. Lady’s constituents. I will discuss the issue with my ministerial colleagues. There may be a question about where ministerial responsibility lies: given what the hon. Lady has said, it probably lies more with the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills than directly with the Treasury.
Chris White (Warwick and Leamington) (Con)
This week is create UK week, giving us the opportunity to reflect on the £70 billion-a-year contribution to the economy from the creative industries. In my constituency there is an ever-expanding creative industry, providing some 1,200 jobs in the video games sector in my area alone. May we have a debate about the contribution of creative industries to our economy?
Mr Lansley
I understand the important role played by our creative industries, including the video games sector, in our economic recovery. Indeed, I think that was illustrated by the replies given by my colleagues to the preceding questions to the Department for Culture, Media and Sport. The creative sector is worth £71 billion to our economy, with its employment figure growing at five times that of the economy as a whole. It is a great success and we are committed to working with the creative industries to take the strategy forward. Create UK was launched just yesterday in order to make further progress, and I hope my hon. Friend’s constituency, which is such a leading location for firms in the sector, will be able to fully benefit from the strategy.
Diana Johnson (Kingston upon Hull North) (Lab)
Last week’s Sunday Express reported that a suspected terrorist was freely supporting and encouraging young Britons to travel to Syria to fight jihad. May we please have a debate in Government time on what additional powers we may need to introduce for returning radicalised young people who have been fighting jihad in Syria and Iraq?
Mr Lansley
I understand completely the seriousness and importance of the point raised by the hon. Lady. There will be Home Office questions on Monday. We also intend to introduce powers under the Serious Crime Bill, which is currently in the House of Lords, relating to extraterritorial jurisdiction in relation to acts concerned with terrorism, preparation for terrorism and similar. I know I may be asking the hon. Lady to wait a little, but this House will have an opportunity to debate that Bill in due course.
John Glen (Salisbury) (Con)
Salisbury cathedral’s repair programme has been ongoing for 27 years at a cost of £1 million a year. Therefore, I am very pleased to know that the Government’s first world war centenary repair fund offers an opportunity to provide a boost to the work at the cathedral. Will the Leader of the House make time for a ministerial statement on the outcome of the application, so that Salisbury cathedral can make use of that much-needed funding?
Mr Lansley
I am very glad that we have been able to give support to our cathedrals, which are a wonderful aspect of our overall heritage, especially as they are often the focus of commemorative events. Indeed, I was able to be with the Royal Anglian Regiment at a commemorative event in Ely cathedral just the Sunday before last. The cathedrals that have been successful in securing grants from the first world war centenary repair fund will be announced in a written statement on Thursday 10 July. I will of course ensure that my hon. Friend’s comments are noted by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport.
Andrew Gwynne (Denton and Reddish) (Lab)
Will the Leader of the House find time for a debate on transport connectivity in the north of England? This week, there was a suggestion—thankfully, a misleading one—that Denton and Reddish South stations may be forced to close. A review of the northern franchise is coming up. Frankly, it is no good for the Chancellor of the Exchequer to come up to Manchester to talk up improved connectivity between the city regions in the north of England if transport cuts make it more difficult to get to those city regions.
Mr Lansley
I do not think that the hon. Gentleman can talk about transport cuts at a time when we have an unprecedented scale of Network Rail investment in the largest rail investment programme since the Victorian era. What he said was equally misplaced in that it is absolutely appropriate, at the same time as we are investing to try to deliver improvements in the existing rail network, for the Chancellor to express his views about what the vision might be for further developments in connectivity in the years ahead.
Andrew Jones (Harrogate and Knaresborough) (Con)
Last week, my hon. Friend the Member for Skipton and Ripon (Julian Smith) and I attended an export fair run by UK Trade & Investment at Ripon race course. It was timed to coincide with the increased international attention on our area with the Tour de France departing from Yorkshire this weekend. The event was designed to encourage more companies to be exporters. May we please have a debate to consider the importance of export growth in our long-term economic plan and rebalancing our economy, and what more can be done to support British companies seeking to export?
Mr Lansley
My hon. Friend is absolutely right. I am delighted that he and our hon. Friend the Member for Skipton and Ripon (Julian Smith) are actively supporting businesses and UKTI, working together to achieve that. Other business organisations were no doubt party to it as well. We do need—and, happily, we are seeing—a growth in exports. Indeed, I note that the greatest growth in exports has been in the west midlands. Off the back of the Tour de France and the focus on the area’s attractions, Yorkshire might be able to come forward in encouraging people to undertake more exporting and get to the front of the pack.
Jeremy Lefroy (Stafford) (Con)
May we have an urgent debate on support for NHS trusts, such as my Mid Staffordshire NHS Foundation Trust, which have difficulties in recruiting key staff? It is vital that essential services are maintained, and the debate might consider the creation of a central pool of senior clinical staff who can help out at short notice.
Mr Lansley
I will draw the attention of my right hon. and hon. Friends at the Department of Health to that idea. As I know from past experience, it is sometimes possible to have collaborative arrangements between NHS trusts precisely to ensure that there is such support. The NHS works together, and it is the job of NHS England to ensure that it does so in order to deliver safe and effective care to patients. Where that is at risk in any location, it is important to provide support.
I am delighted that under this Government, because of the resources we are putting in and the savings we are making in administration—delivering £5.5 billion savings on administration in this Parliament, with recurring savings of £1.5 billion a year thereafter—we have been able to have some 16,000 more clinical staff and some 19,000 fewer administrative staff. That shift into front-line care is at the heart of enabling trusts, such as my hon. Friend’s, to deliver services in future.
Mr Philip Hollobone (Kettering) (Con)
This week, finally and at long last, the European Court of Human Rights has made a sensible decision about something. Given that it has this week decided that the ban on Islamic veils in France breaches no one’s human rights, will the Leader of the House or another Minister make a statement to the House next week to say that Her Majesty’s Government intend to introduce such legislation in this country? We will never have a fully functioning, fully integrated multicultural society if growing numbers of our citizens go around with their faces covered.
Mr Lansley
I noted that decision by the Court, but part of it was about the issue of subsidiarity and the right of countries to make such decisions for themselves. In that context I do not anticipate a statement by a Minister in the form my hon. Friend seeks.
Robert Halfon (Harlow) (Con)
Has my right hon. Friend seen my early-day motion 207 on excessive hospital car-parking charges?
[That this House notes that hospital parking charges can be a huge burden on patients and visitors at a vulnerable time in their lives; further notes that Nottingham City Hospital and Queen’s Medical Centre charge £4.00 for one hour of parking, that Royal Free Hospital, Guy’s Hospital, St Thomas’s Hospital, and Chelsea and Westminster Hospital charge £6.00 for two hours of parking, that Royal Free Hospital, Guy’s Hospital, St Thomas’s Hospital and South Bristol Community Hospital charge £12.00 for four hours of parking, that Royal Free Hospital charges £72 for one day of parking and £504.00 for one week of parking; recognises that these charges are disproportionate and onerous for patients; therefore condemns these hospitals and others which charge similar fees; and urges the Government to consider ways to reduce the cost of hospital parking.]
My right hon. Friend will be aware that 109 colleagues from all sides of the House have signed a draft Back-Bench motion on the issue. Despite Government guidance stating that hospital car parking charges should be fair and proportionate, 80% of NHS hospitals in England continue to charge their staff, visitors and patients extortionate amounts to park on their sites. May we have a statement on the issue and will he do all he can to deal with it?
Mr Lansley
I have read my hon. Friend’s early-day motion and had the pleasure of hearing him and colleagues make their application for a debate to the Backbench Business Committee. It will be for that Committee to determine whether a debate should take place. I will say—I freely admit that this is a personal view—that although there is a hospital in my constituency with very high parking charges, I am concerned about deciding simply to subsidise or pay for car parking, as happens in Wales. This is money that would otherwise be available for clinical—[Interruption.] It is a simple fact that that money would otherwise be available for clinical services. When the NHS in Wales is underperforming on standards and achievements relative to England, one has to reflect on whether that subsidy could form part of the problem.
Henry Smith (Crawley) (Con)
Earlier this year, Argentina absurdly started issuing a 50 peso note with a map on it of the Falklands Islands, in the colours of the Argentine flag. Far more sensibly, in contrast, earlier this year my right hon. Friend the Chancellor of the Exchequer announced a new £1 coin, which will be more secure and reaches back to the heritage of our coinage. May we have a statement from the Treasury as to whether the tails side of that new £1 coin could feature the coat of arms of the Falkland Islands and of other overseas territories, in the same way as England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland feature?
Mr Speaker
The hon. Gentleman was too self-effacing to draw to the attention of the House that he is himself a renowned vexillologist.
Mr Lansley
Indeed, Mr Speaker. I will draw my hon. Friend’s views to the attention of the Treasury. I forget the precise title of his role in this regard, but the Chancellor is responsible for the Royal Mint, and there is an advisory committee to help him in that role, so it may be a matter of taking independent advice rather than that of the Government imposing their own view.
Points of Order
(10 years, 4 months ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Mr Speaker
The Leader of the House is in his place and I have a sense that the point of order from the hon. Member for Stone (Sir William Cash) is of a pressing topical character, so we will take it now before we come to the Select Committee statements.
Sir William Cash
I am extremely grateful to you, Mr Speaker. I entirely accept your observations on my attempting to get in during business questions, but I was not here earlier because I was waiting outside the Chamber, as I feared that the Government might introduce a Command Paper, of huge importance to this House and to the United Kingdom, on the issue of justice and home affairs and the opt-outs and opt-ins on 35 measures. That is the reason for my point of order. I fear that I have to say that the Government, knowing that that was the case, did not refer to that paper in the business statement. The difficulty is that by reason of it not being raised before, I was precluded from seeking an urgent question, because I was not entirely aware of the fact that it was going to happen. I simply make the point that I feel very strongly that we should have a debate as soon as possible on the issue. Perhaps the Leader of the House will be good enough to indicate the position through you, Mr Speaker.
Mr Speaker
I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman. I am not sure that that was a point of order, but he has put his concerns on the record. The Leader of the House will say whatever he wants to say, but I just point out that he did reference the general debate on the UK’s justice and home affairs opt-outs, which will take place on Thursday 10 July.
The Leader of the House of Commons (Mr Andrew Lansley)
Further to that point of order, Mr Speaker. I need say little more, other than to draw the attention of the House, as my hon. Friend the Member for Stone (Sir William Cash) has done, to the document that was published this morning on the decision pursuant to article 10(5) of protocol 36 to the treaty on the functioning of the European Union, which relates to the justice and home affairs opt-outs. The document may be debated, as you rightly say, Mr Speaker, next Thursday.
Mr Speaker
It would seem churlish and unkind not to allow the hon. Member for Harlow (Robert Halfon) to make his point of order.
Robert Halfon
On a point of order, Mr Speaker. Following the question from the right hon. Member for Manchester, Gorton (Sir Gerald Kaufman), I fear that the wrong impression has been given to the House. The Israeli Prime Minister and the mayor of Jerusalem condemned the death of the Palestinian in Israel in the last few days. There is absolutely no evidence that that atrocity was carried out by an Israeli.
Mr Speaker
We are grateful to the hon. Gentleman. His point is on the record.
Food Security
Select committee on Environment, Food and Rural Affairs
Mr Speaker
We now come to the first of two Select Committee statements. The Chair of the Select Committee on Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, Miss Anne McIntosh, will speak on her subject for no more than 10 minutes, during which no interventions may be taken. At the conclusion of her statement, I will call Members to put questions on its subject, and call Miss Anne McIntosh to respond to them in turn. Members can expect to be called only once. Interventions should be questions and should be brief. Front Benchers may take part in the questioning.
Miss Anne McIntosh (Thirsk and Malton) (Con)
On behalf of the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee, may I say how delighted we are to have secured this time to launch our report on food production and the supply dimensions of food security? I welcome the Under-Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, my hon. Friend the Member for North Cornwall (Dan Rogerson) to his place. The Committee would like to thank all those who contributed to the inquiry, submitted evidence or appeared before us. I give special thanks to the Committee staff who drew all the evidence together and helped us to reach our conclusions.
We believe that the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs is the key to providing leadership on long-term food security. I should say at the outset that the food and drink sector accounts for 3.7 million jobs and 7% of the overall economy. Food security has been described by the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation as
“when all people, at all times, have physical and economic access to sufficient, safe and nutritious food that meets their dietary needs and food preferences for an active and healthy life”.
That implicitly includes future generations and requires food security methods in the UK and elsewhere to be sustainable.
The UK currently enjoys a high level of food security, but we believe that there is no room for complacency. I would like to take this opportunity to thank and pay tribute to all the farmers across the land who work so hard in all weathers to ensure that we have food on our plates. Food security is under severe challenge from changes in weather patterns, growing populations and rising global demand for food. The report therefore focuses on what food production, supply and systems we need to ensure that we have long-term food security.
What can we do? Our core recommendation is to have a single champion for farming and food security, and we believe that it should be the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs. While it is right that other Departments are involved, such as the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills and the Department of Energy and Climate Change, there is a real need for cross-departmental communication, and DEFRA should step up to the plate and take the lead. We also urge DEFRA to appoint a food security co-ordinator from the Department to ensure a coherent and co-ordinated approach.
Self-sufficiency is in decline. Over the past 20 years, it has reduced from some 75% to around 62%. We need to stem and reverse that decline. We need to look to become more self-sufficient in food, but also aim to be a major exporter in those products that we can afford to export and that are surplus to demand in this country.
We applaud DEFRA’s efforts and congratulate it on its budget and on the work of the Secretary of State and Ministers here and in the other place in leading a vibrant export campaign to ensure that our farmers export more. On a visit to Denmark that the Committee undertook during the Danish presidency, we were struck by the ability of Danish farmers, often working through co-operatives, but with Government support, to export, particularly milk, cheese and other dairy products. We therefore applaud the Department’s efforts to open up new markets where demand is growing.
However, barriers remain, not least in certain emerging markets. I do not wish to single out China, but let me give a particular example. There is a joint operation between the Malton bacon factory and the Cookstown plant, and there will be many pig parts, such as pigs’ feet, that humans do not eat in this country but for which there is wide demand in China. That is a wonderful opportunity for export and we urge the Government—whether DEFRA, the Foreign Office or the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills—to intervene. Having just removed the barriers to cheese exports, we must act urgently to remove the very real barriers to pigmeat. In my constituency alone, in Malton and the hinterland, that will mean thousands, if not millions of pounds every year. We urge the Government to press for opening up those markets to allow such exports to grow.
The boost to food security is challenged by some food production systems and threats such as the impact of extreme weather events. We call for several measures. We need supermarkets to use shorter supply chains, and we applaud efforts on that and look forward to Professor Elliott’s final report and recommendations. We need to diversify if supply is to be safeguarded against disease, severe weather or other domestic supply disruption, and we must be open to imports where they are needed.
We also call on UK farmers to satisfy home consumer tastes and extend seasonal production of fresh fruit and vegetables in co-ordination with the Agriculture and Horticulture Development Board, and working with central and local government. We urge the Government to work hard to reduce dependence on imported soybean or animal feed, as increased demand for protein from emerging economies threatens current supply lines.
I ask the Government to produce a detailed emissions reduction plan for the UK agriculture sector. Agriculture currently accounts for 9% of all greenhouse gas emissions, and livestock production accounts for a staggering 49% of farm-related emissions. The headlines this week mentioned flatulence from animals, and we wish to reduce that wherever we can. The report applauds the work that is going on, particularly that being trialled by Sainsbury’s and other supermarkets, as well as the research that we have heard about to grow high sugar grass that will singlehandedly reduce such emissions.
We also welcome the £410 million that the Government are currently spending on agricultural research, and the £160 million for agri-tech strategy. We urge the Government to act, perhaps as a sort of Cilla Black, and to unite, go out and find partners and bring them to the marketplace—a sort of “Blind Date”, urging research institutes in this country to find other such institutes, including across Europe and internationally, and to ensure that farmers benefit and that research is brought to farmers and to the marketplace.
We believe that there needs to be an urgent public debate to allay public concerns about genetically modified crops, and the Government are best placed to do that. On extreme weather events, thousands of acres of land were flooded and taken out of production during the recent flooding, and we need better long-term forecasting so that farmers know what crops to grow and when. We welcome new entrants and believe that with land in limited supply, and with its conflicting uses such as for housing as well as farming, younger farmers and new entrants will embrace the technology available.
This is the first of two reports and it draws on the work of the previous Government, on which the Committee reported in 2009. I believe that it will be warmly welcomed by farmers, supermarkets and retailers. First and foremost, it is a vote of confidence in British farming, and places DEFRA as the champion for farming and food security.
Mr Speaker
I am most grateful to the hon. Lady for her comprehensive statement, and the House is obliged to her for providing Members with a helping hand through her graphic descriptions of what she had in mind. It is always useful, in my experience, to have a bit of information.
Huw Irranca-Davies (Ogmore) (Lab)
There is much to be commended and debated in this welcome report, and I hope we will have the opportunity to do so in short order, not least the acknowledgement that:
“Food security is not simply about becoming more self-sufficient in food production.”
as well as the imperative for the UK to boost its productivity for domestic and export reasons.
Why does the Committee feel it necessary, as its first recommendation, to urge the Government to
“identify Defra as the lead Department for food security”
given that that should be the Department’s raison d’être and a core part of its mission? Why is it necessary to highlight that, even though it is welcome?
Miss McIntosh
I welcome the welcome from the hon. Gentleman, and we are grateful to BBC 5 Live for using such graphic language, which I felt would also be acceptable in the Chamber. We stated that DEFRA should be a champion and a lead Department because in areas such as farming and—dare I say it?—also outside farming in tourism, which impacts on the rural economy more broadly, policy often cuts across many different Departments. In this instance, the agri-tech strategy is important in promoting and boosting food security and increasing self-sufficiency, and it potentially goes to the heart of exports, and cuts across the three Departments I mentioned. We just want to give DEFRA a little bit of welly to go out and be confident in discussions with other Departments. Farming remains at the heart of DEFRA. It is our fourth priority to grow the rural economy, and I believe that DEFRA is best placed to lead on that.
Neil Parish (Tiverton and Honiton) (Con)
As a member of the Committee, I very much welcome my hon. Friend’s report. It is right for us to talk about food security not only in this country, but throughout the world, because the world population is 7 billion and will rise to 9 billion by 2050. We can grow good grass, good meat and good vegetables in this country along with cereals, but with climate change, we will need to be able to adapt our crops more and more. Biotechnology is out there—there is a blight-resistant potato that does not need spraying—but we close our minds to it. We need the Government to be much more proactive so that people can believe they are safe, and so that we can produce more food in this country using fewer chemicals to do so.
Miss McIntosh
My hon. Friend makes a valid point. I should take this opportunity to thank him for the expertise and knowledge he brings to the Committee. On precision technologies and new technologies such as genetically modified foods, we must ensure that the public have an open mind. If it is the case that there is no cross-contamination, we need to go out there and sell the message. I believe it is for the Government to lead in that regard. Denmark is probably more focused on organic crops, but the UK has many producers in a niche market of organic foods. They need to know that their crops will not be cross-contaminated in that way. An interesting piece of research that the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs could ask for is precisely on the yields compared with organic production—my hon. Friend gave an example. I understand that that work has never been conducted.
Fiona O'Donnell (East Lothian) (Lab)
I congratulate the hon. Lady and her Committee on the report. I am glad she raised the rather uncomfortable issue—it is uncomfortable for some of us—of the lack of progress in reducing emissions in the agricultural sector. She mentioned a taskforce and spoke of a wind of change running through the sector—that is just a pun—but what action could the taskforce take? Does she have any evidence that DEFRA and the Department of Energy and Climate Change are working together well to bring about further progress?
Miss McIntosh
I am grateful to the hon. Lady for her question and her eloquent description of the problem—it was much more eloquent than the one I was able to come up with in the time available. There is evidence that DEFRA, DECC and the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills are working closely together. The evidence we received in writing and on the visit to the Rothamsted institute showed the long lead times needed in respect of research on the long grass with the extra sugar content that can lead to the wind of change to which she referred. I make a plea to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs and the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills: we need longer-term security of research funding. That was the plea of the Rothamsted institute in its evidence to the Committee. If no other good comes from the report, it would be a positive step if we left that message with the House today.
Mr Philip Hollobone (Kettering) (Con)
I hope you have had your Weetabix this morning, Mr Speaker—if you had Weetabix, it came from the Weetabix plant located in Burton Latimer in my constituency. In congratulating my hon. Friend on her Committee’s excellent report, and with specific reference to the parts of the report that focus on supply chains and export opportunities, will she join me and take this opportunity to congratulate Weetabix, which sources all the wheat for its products from farms within a 50-mile radius of the Burton Latimer plant, and which is increasingly looking to export its product to help the British balance of payments?
Miss McIntosh
I congratulate my hon. Friend on his work, and I also congratulate Weetabix. The price of wheat was the talk of the barbecue held by the National Farmers Union and Morrisons this week. It is worrying indeed. It is to be commended that Weetabix turned to British producers to source its wheat.
Gibraltar
Select Committee on Foreign Affairs
Mr Speaker
I hope it is not necessary for me to repeat what I said prior to the delivery of the previous statement. I think everybody who is present now was present then. The same procedure applies to the second statement, which is heard for up to 10 minutes without interruption, following which there is an opportunity for brief questions to the Chair of the Select Committee on Foreign Affairs, whom I now invite to deliver his statement.
Sir Richard Ottaway (Croydon South) (Con)
When problems emerged in Gibraltar last summer, with seven-hour-long delays to cross the border, the Foreign Affairs Committee took a strong interest in the situation and in what the Government were doing, and were going to do, in response. On Tuesday, the Committee published its report, “Gibraltar: Time to get off the fence”. We concluded that the behaviour of Spain towards Gibraltar is unacceptable. A NATO and EU ally is, as a matter of deliberate policy, impacting the economy and functioning of a British overseas territory. In our opinion, it is time for the Government to take a tougher line.
The dispute has a 300-year-long history. However, in the past three years, the Partido Popular Government in Spain have taken a more hard-line approach to the dispute. They have significantly increased pressure on Gibraltar and its people, and Gibraltarians have suffered. They have suffered: the deliberately imposed border delays; aggressive maritime incursions; calculated pressure at the EU and the UN; and inflammatory rhetoric from Spanish Ministers about Gibraltar’s sovereignty and its economic affairs.
We acknowledge that Spain’s actions have placed the UK Government in a difficult position. They have a strong bilateral relationship with Spain that is in the interests of all British citizens, including the 1 million Britons who live in Spain. However, the Government also have responsibilities towards Gibraltar and cannot ignore actions by Spain that are intended to make the lives of Gibraltarians more difficult.
First, we regret that talks including all three partners—Spain, the UK and Gibraltar—have been suspended, and we ask the Government to set out what offer they have made to Spain in connection with these talks and how they intend to restart them.
We are deeply concerned about the dramatic increase in maritime incursions in British Gibraltarian territorial waters and the hostile tactics of some of the vessels that conduct them. The Foreign and Commonwealth Office rightly protests about each incursion, but we were disappointed to find that it sometimes lodges diplomatic protests weeks after the event, robbing them of all force. This gives the wrong impression to Spain about how seriously the UK takes this issue. We recommend that protests are lodged within seven days.
We have no doubt that delays imposed by Spain at the border with Gibraltar are politically motivated, and that the border is being used as a means of coercion. The Government should state publicly that they will take legal action against Spain in the European Court if there is little improvement at the border in the next six months.
The Committee considered the possibility of Gibraltar joining Schengen, while the UK remains outside. Although we saw the merit in this idea and the impact it would have, we suspect that the legal and economic implications could be considerable.
Spain continues to use international institutions as a means of applying pressure on Gibraltar. Gibraltar remains on the UN list of non-self-governing territories, despite repeated UK Government attempts to de-list it. Only a few weeks ago, Spanish MEPs in the European Parliament were trying to limit Gibraltar’s aviation rights. Spain also continues to refuse to allow direct military movements between Gibraltar and Spain, even among its NATO partners. As a result of this, Gibraltar feels it is under siege.
The Government’s laudable attempts to de-escalate the dispute have not worked. They were right to try diplomacy, but they must now take a more robust approach, as long as this is agreed with the Government of Gibraltar. We recommend that the Government take some immediate actions now, including: more prompt diplomatic protests against incursions and border delays, and summoning the ambassador; increased efforts at the EU and UN on Gibraltar’s behalf; renewed effort to establish trilateral talks that are currently not taking place; and withholding UK support for Spain’s international goals, such as its aspiration to membership of the UN Security Council, unless its attitude toward Gibraltar changes. As for more serious measures, we further recommend that the Government be more robust in their defence of the territorial waters around Gibraltar, and we have asked them to report back on how they intend to do that.
Finally, we recommend that if those measures do not improve the situation within six months, the UK should take Spain to court for infringement of EU obligations at the border. I commend the report to the House.
Mr John Spellar (Warley) (Lab)
I congratulate the Committee and its Chairman on a timely, well-balanced report, and look forward to a wider debate about it.
The report underlines the concern that is felt about the fact that no Minister from the Foreign and Commonwealth Office visited Gibraltar between 2011 and 2014. What reassurances has the Committee received that that is now a priority for the FCO and, indeed, for other Departments?
The Committee rightly expresses concern about the mixed message that has been sent by the delay in the delivery of protests about incursions into British Gibraltarian territorial waters, which it says—quite rightly—gives an impression of “going through the motions”. The Committee suggests a much tighter timetable. When does the right hon. Gentleman intend to seek a progress report from the Department on the implementation of that?
On 27 November last year, I said in the House:
“it is vital that the Spanish Government today hear a united statement from the House that such provocative and unlawful acts are not acceptable to this Parliament or to the British people. They cannot be ignored.”—[Official Report, 27 November 2013; Vol. 571, c. 263.]
Does the right hon. Gentleman think that the Foreign Office has heard that message?
Sir Richard Ottaway
I am grateful to the right hon. Gentleman for his support for the report, and for his comments. The report was agreed unanimously, and it has all-party support.
The right hon. Gentleman asked about visits by Ministers. I think, to be fair to the Government, that the Minister for Europe has been to Gibraltar twice during the current Parliament. The Minister for the Armed Forces went there in the autumn of last year, and the Chief Secretary to the Treasury was there earlier this year. I think that there has been a sustained level of visits, but I take the right hon. Gentleman’s points on board. Of course, there can never be enough visits of this kind.
As for the timetable for incursions, it is worth noting that the Spanish ambassador has been called into the Foreign Office—I think—six times since the escalation of this incident, and that only the Syrian ambassador has been called in more frequently. We none the less recommend that the criteria for calling in the ambassadors be reviewed in order to emphasise the impact, the significance and the importance of the incidents, while also taking account of the fact that if they are called in too often, the impact is sometimes devalued. There must be a balance.
The right hon. Gentleman asked how we expect the situation to develop. As I said, we recommend that if there are no improvements, action should begin in the European Court within six months. I think that that provides a suitable window allowing the Spanish Government to improve the situation.
Andrew Rosindell (Romford) (Con)
I thank my right hon. Friend for leading the inquiry conducted by the Foreign Affairs Committee, on which I am proud to serve.
This is a timely and an absolutely necessary report. We have seen, over a long period, shameful and disgraceful behaviour on the part of a so-called NATO and EU ally, Spain, against the people of Gibraltar. I hope that my right hon. Friend and all other Members agree that it is time for much more robust action by our own Foreign and Commonwealth Office to deal with the issue.
The report refers to high-profile visits. Leaving ministerial visits aside, I can tell the House that it was on 10 May 1954 that the Queen of Gibraltar, our own Head of State, visited the Rock. Does my right hon. Friend agree that it is time Her Majesty was advised that it would be timely for her to visit the people of Gibraltar?
Sir Richard Ottaway
I am grateful to my hon. Friend for the consistent support he gave me throughout the report’s preparation. He will be aware that the convention in this House is not to bring the royal family into debates of this kind. None the less, we recommend that a high-level visit take place, and I am sure that will have been noted in the Foreign Office.
Sandra Osborne (Ayr, Carrick and Cumnock) (Lab)
I thank the Chairman of the Committee for today’s presentation. He has worked very hard on the report and the Committee has come up with some robust recommendations, which I hope the Government will listen to. Why have the Spanish Government escalated the situation to almost crisis-level and put good relations with one of their most important allies at risk? Are the Spanish Government trying to take attention away from the serious economic circumstances in Spain?
Sir Richard Ottaway
I am grateful to my hon. Friend for her question and for the support she has given me in the report’s preparation. All the evidence we received suggested that this was triggered by the Government who took office in Spain in 2011. Spain was in a dire economic situation. Various scandals were going on in the Spanish Government. The evidence we received was that this was an attempt to distract attention from their own domestic policies. Leaders in other countries around the world have on occasion taken similar action.
Henry Smith (Crawley) (Con)
I commend my right hon. Friend for his robust report, which clearly sets out how objectionable it is for a supposed ally to treat the people of Gibraltar in such a way. Gatwick airport in my constituency is a major link to the airport in Gibraltar. I encourage the Foreign Affairs Committee to continue to be robust on that issue as well, so that it has is no effect on trade. As a member of the European Scrutiny Committee, I know that it would be interested in pursuing these issues, too.
Sir Richard Ottaway
Indeed. I understand that the European Scrutiny Committee is examining EU-Ukraine aviation rights. We will be watching with interest the answers to the questions that my hon. Friend has posed. The Spanish Government are using aviation rights as one of their lines of attack. Limiting aviation access to Gibraltar airport will have quite a profound effect on the economy. The Foreign Office is robustly resisting that and I understand that so far it has been successful, but it must persevere and be diligent in protecting aviation rights.
Mike Gapes (Ilford South) (Lab/Co-op)
The Chairman of the Committee has produced, with the rest of us on the Committee, an important and valuable report. One issue needs to be highlighted: the Partido Popular Government are against the policies of their predecessors, who negotiated the Cordoba agreement with the Labour Government. Things were improving. That was working well. Many people in Spain disagree with the current Spanish Government’s approach, particularly workers in La Línea and other Spanish citizens, who are going to work in Gibraltar every day. It is their work and their jobs that are being disrupted. Therefore, there are potential allies in this debate. The Chairman did not mention that Spain itself has two enclaves on the north African coast—Ceuta and Melilla. Could not the Foreign Office consider upping the ante on those issues and improving relations even more with Morocco to make it clear to Spain that there is a level of hypocrisy in its attitude to Gibraltar?
Sir Richard Ottaway
I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for his support for the report, and for the work he has put into producing it. He is right to talk about the local Spanish community just over the border with Gibraltar. I think I am right in saying that he has engaged with the trade unions in the area. It is one of the more puzzling aspects of Spain’s behaviour that it is damaging not only Gibraltar’s economy but the economy of southern Spain. He makes a very strong point about Ceuta and Melilla. Spain argues that there is a constitutional difference involved, but I find it utterly hypocritical that it should take such a line. It is a matter of particular interest that Ceuta is being used to refuel Russian warships. If, as Spain maintains, Ceuta is a part of Spain rather than an overseas territory, that would result in the rather unusual situation of a NATO country refuelling Russian warships while NATO is in dispute with Russia over Ukraine.
Neil Parish (Tiverton and Honiton) (Con)
In a previous life, I had the honour of being one of six representatives in the European Parliament for Gibraltar and south-west England. My experience is that when Spain closes the border, it is the workers of La Línea and the people of Gibraltar who are really affected by the economic problems that ensue. However, Spain is affected as well. The whole situation is absolutely ridiculous. Aviation also plays a part in the economy of Gibraltar. I thank my right hon. Friend for his report. Spain is a real bully, and it must be stood up to. I am not a great believer in sending everything to the European Court, but I think it is time to refer Spain to it, because it is completely out of order.
Sir Richard Ottaway
Gibraltar’s loss is Parliament’s gain, following my hon. Friend’s move from the European Parliament to this House. He is quite right about Spain’s bullying approach. Over the past year, the Government have been right not to raise the temperature and to try to keep the situation calm. However, as the First Minister said in evidence to the Committee, a year has gone by, the queues are still there and the talks are not happening. That is why we are now calling for a more robust approach by the Foreign Office, and I hope that it will agree with us in its response.
Mr Philip Hollobone (Kettering) (Con)
I commend my right hon. Friend and his Committee for their excellent report. Given the growing number of major and minor maritime incursions into Gibraltarian waters by civilian and official vessels from Spain, and the great terrorist risk that Britain and her territories face, particularly at this time of tension in the middle east, someone is going to get killed sooner or later unless we prevent this escalation. I was concerned to read in the report that, despite Gibraltar being a self-governing territory with a constitution, legislature and Government, it is still on the UN list of non-self-governing territories. Given the UK’s presence as a permanent member of the Security Council and a founding member of the United Nations, should not Her Majesty’s Government make it a top priority to get Gibraltar off that list?
Sir Richard Ottaway
My hon. Friend is absolutely right to draw attention to the risk of further escalation leading to loss of life, and to the importance of getting a grip on the situation before it gets hopelessly out of control. He referred to the UN list of non-self-governing countries. I have to confess that I am not an expert on the internal machinations relating to voting rights inside the UN, but he makes a strong point. I gather from private conversations that the Foreign Office is actively looking at the situation and that it has made repeated attempts to take Gibraltar off that list. That would make it a self-governing territory, recognised by the UN, and I hope that the Government will address this point in their response.
Backbench Business
Protecting Children in Conflict
(10 years, 4 months ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Fiona O’Donnell (East Lothian) (Lab)
I beg to move,
That this House has considered the matter of protecting children in conflict.
I begin by thanking the Backbench Business Committee for granting me the opportunity to have this debate today, and to thank the Members from all parts of the House who supported my application for the debate. This is a great opportunity to hear the voices of those who are often not heard. Children whose lives are impacted by conflict are all too often voiceless. It is also appropriate that this debate should follow on from the conference in London that called for action to end sexual violence in conflict. I congratulate the Foreign Secretary, the Under-Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs, the hon. Member for Boston and Skegness (Mark Simmonds), and the whole Department on holding that conference. Indeed, the Minister and I attended an event hosted by War Child, and I hope he will say what progress he believes will be made on these children’s issues. This is not just about ending sexual violence against children; it is about preventing children from losing their childhood.
One reason I am passionately and energetically campaigning in Scotland for a no vote in the referendum on 18 September is that we are better placed as Scots to be a force for good in the world as part of the United Kingdom. The humanitarian global summit in 2016 provides a further opportunity for the nations of the UK to work together and show leadership, and I hope the Minister will say today that the UK will continue to take a leading role in protecting children in conflict.
We need not only to protect children, but to be more active in promoting children’s rights within their own countries and their awareness of those rights. We should not just be promoting the UN rights respecting programmes in our own schools in the UK; we should be doing so wherever we are helping to fund education across the globe. Children need to learn that they have rights and that other children different from them have rights, too. Teachers and parents will then learn these rights and perhaps future generations will do a better job than this one of protecting children in conflict.
Children and youths constitute more than 50% of the populations of conflict-affected countries. As of 2010, more than 1 billion children worldwide lived in countries or territories affected by armed conflict. Sadly, changes in the nature of conflict have had profound consequences for children, who are being denied the special protections due to them under international law. Child injuries and deaths were traditionally seen as the collateral damage of war, but children are increasingly being targeted directly. Those trends need to be met with a renewed focus on how children can be protected in situations of conflict, alongside heightened scrutiny of duty bearers who are failing to safeguard children’s rights.
As a member of the Select Committee on International Development, I have been incredibly privileged to have seen with my own eyes the impact conflict has on the lives of children. The Committee’s most recent visit was to the middle east, where we saw how UK aid is working to support Syrian refugees in Lebanon and Jordan. Since the Syrian conflict began, more than 2.3 million people have sought refuge in neighbouring countries. In Lebanon, families are being settled in host communities. Although the vast majority of refugees in Jordan are in host communities, there are also large-scale camps, such as Camp Zaatari, which the Committee visited. The UK has pledged £600 million in aid and we can all be proud of that, but it cannot compare to the response from Lebanon and Jordan. It is almost impossible for us in the UK to imagine the scale of the challenges they face and the impact on their own country and people, be it on education, water security or employment.
Nicola Blackwood (Oxford West and Abingdon) (Con)
Does the hon. Lady share my concern that in situations such as that in Syria early enforced marriage is seen as a way of escape for young girls? Does she join me in welcoming the Department for International Development’s upcoming summit on ending female genital mutilation and early enforced marriage?
Fiona O'Donnell
Absolutely. When we were in Camp Zaatari we heard about families who suddenly had no prospects—they do not know when they are going to return to Syria and they have no way to earn a livelihood—and we were told that if they have daughters the temptation is to marry them off early and, in order for those daughters to be as prized as possible, to consider awful, gruesome child abuse such as FGM. We also heard about an increased prevalence of domestic violence in those camps. That has an impact not only on the women, but on the children in those families. I am grateful for the hon. Lady’s intervention.
Life for children can be very difficult in these situations, as many parents fled Syria with just the clothes on their back. At times, they live in horrific conditions, but even when the housing is of a satisfactory standard, children have needs, beyond the roof over their head, that are just not being met.
Mrs Louise Ellman (Liverpool, Riverside) (Lab/Co-op)
I thank my hon. Friend for giving way and congratulate her on securing this important debate. She describes a very terrible situation, but does she agree that it is wrong to incite to violence children in conflict situations? For example, a young boy who was speaking about a game being shown on Palestine TV in May said that Zion is Satan with a tail. Is it not terrible for someone to incite a young boy to make such a statement?
Fiona O'Donnell
If my hon. Friend bears with me, she will find that I come on to that matter later. I am not usually someone who speaks from notes, but I will today as this is such a complex issue,
On the IDC visit, we met a family living in an unfinished block of flats. Speaking to three generations of the family—children, mother and grandmother—living in that small space, I asked what life was like for the children. I was told that they were not attending school. The mother never took them out into the town and they were not allowed to play outside as she was worried that someone would complain about the noise. With no one able to say when the conflict will end, it is clearly unacceptable for children to continue to live in such a way. The family had sanitation, water, energy and food, but for children to grow and develop into healthy adults and to reach their potential, they need so much more.
I cannot say with any authority that the children in the camps had better lives, but there is an advantage in that services of scale can be delivered more easily. We saw evidence of that, with the delivery of psychological, health and education services. None of those services is a luxury that can wait to be delivered at some later date.
The children who manage to register for school in the community face many barriers to learning, such as social isolation, language difficulties, and, for those who had already started school in Syria, the problems of adjusting to a different curriculum. For children to be able to take advantage of the opportunity to learn, it is essential that they receive therapeutic services. When they are so traumatised, how can they possibly be expected to learn? Some 28.5 million children are out of school in conflict and emergency-related areas. The humanitarian response does not accord the same priority to education or child protection as it does to water, shelter and food.
Sandra Osborne (Ayr, Carrick and Cumnock) (Lab)
I congratulate my hon. Friend on securing this debate. She will be aware of the initiative of my right hon. Friend the Member for Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath (Mr Brown) on safety in schools, particularly in Nigeria. Does she agree that that is a huge step forward, although, at the moment, the school girls are still missing? That initiative will allow other parents in the same state to send their children to school.
Fiona O'Donnell
Absolutely. Just last night I attended a meeting in the House in which the Finance Minister of Nigeria talked about the campaign to build safer schools. As a fellow Scot, my hon. Friend will remember the awful tragedy of the shooting in Dunblane and the action we had to take to make our children safe in school. Children in Nigeria, and girls attending school, deserve the same protection. Such is the power of education that many people see it as threat.
Jeremy Lefroy (Stafford) (Con)
I return to the hon. Lady’s important point about counselling. Does she recall the Committee’s visit to a centre in Jordan where we met some children who had recently come from Syria? The first things that they drew were AK47s and other terrible things to do with war. Now they are drawing pictures of homes and gardens and other things connected to a much more peaceful way of life.
Fiona O'Donnell
I thank the hon. Gentleman both for his intervention and for his comradeship—if he does not mind that term—during that visit to the middle east. He will also recall a visit where we saw children miming the experience of being refugees—how they were turned away from one country and then another before they were given refuge in Lebanon and Jordan, and just how moving that was. We also had a game on a 3G pitch. MPs, who are always competitive, managed to beat the refugee children 2-0. It was good to see the facility being used.
Analysis of the 2013 UN appeal tracking data shows that less than 2% of UN humanitarian appeal funds went to education and that only 40% of requests for funding for education were met. A coalition comprising non-governmental organisations, UN agencies and others under the banner of the “Education Cannot Wait” campaign is calling for education funding to be at least 4%, and I hope that DFID Ministers will support that campaign. Perhaps the Minister will give us an indication today of what he thinks about that.
I am pleased to see colleagues in the Chamber who have a record of defending children’s rights. I am sure that they will focus on individual countries, but I want to ensure that the debate today does not pass without our speaking up for the children of the Central African Republic The UN has reported “unprecedented” levels of brutality against children in the Central African Republic, including mutilation and beheading. Save the Children says that it is not aware of plans to deploy child protection experts on the new UN mission in the CAR, even though there is clear evidence of large-scale recruitment of children to armed groups and of other grave violations, including sexual violence.
The UK could and should be leading on such action by deploying its own experts on the mission or by insisting on pre-deployment training covering things such as how to work with children who have been recruited to armed groups. It should also be championing funding for child protection and education in the CAR. Will the Minister tell us what is being done as part of the preventing sexual violence initiative to ensure that there are experts in child protection in every team and that all staff have some training in child protection issues? Schools need to be safe places in which children can learn.
There is a rapidly growing international consensus in support of the Lucens guidelines, but so far the UK Government have yet to endorse them. By restricting the use of schools by armies in times of conflict, states can directly and substantially reduce the prevalence of violation of girls and boys in wars, and can facilitate the reintegration of survivors into their communities. Earlier this month, the Norwegian Government officially announced that they will lead in promoting the guidelines. Will the Minister commit the UK—and call for other states to do so—to adopting the Lucens guidelines on the military use of schools, amend the military codes of conduct and issue a clear and unambiguous prohibition of attacks on and military use of schools?
A 45% increase in the number of child casualties from explosive weapons use was recorded from 2011 to 2012. In November 2013, a report entitled “Stolen Futures”, which was released by the Oxford Research Group, identified explosive weapons as the primary cause of child casualties in Syria. It showed that of 12,000 then-recorded casualties, more than 70% of children died as a result of explosive weapons, illustrating the devastating impact that such use has on children.
The use of explosive weapons may not result in the killing or injuring of children, but its effects on their everyday lives are incredibly damaging. Such weapons may cause debilitating injury, displacement or long-term psychological scars and block life-saving humanitarian aid. It is time that states, including the UK, publicly recognised the humanitarian impact of the use of explosive weapons in populated areas and championed moves toward an intergovernmental political declaration against such practice. Norway is providing leadership, and hosted a meeting last month to build consensus. I am not sure whether the UK was present, but will the Minister today commit the UK to being part of a global campaign to protect the innocent victims of war?
This debate is about not just children’s rights but the hope of a safer, more peaceful world for us and future generations. Children are exposed to high levels of violence in conflict, which can significantly impact on their beliefs, behaviours, future opportunities and aspirations. As my hon. Friend the Member for Liverpool, Riverside (Mrs Ellman) said, beliefs, practices and habits that foster violence easily become deeply embedded and can fuel repeated conflict unless addressed. Every civil war since 2003 was a resumption of a previous civil war, and the majority of conflicts re-emerge within 10 years of a ceasefire.
The Israeli-Palestinian conflict makes victims of children on both sides. The Leader of the Opposition was right to highlight the tragedy of Israeli children learning in schools which have to be able to survive rockets attacks from Gaza. What kind of environment is that for children to learn?
I would be grateful if the Minister commented on last year’s UNICEF report which stated that the ill-treatment of Palestinian children in the Israeli military detention system was widespread, systematic and institutionalised. What discussions has his Department had with the Israeli Government and, given the recent loss of young Israeli and Palestinian lives, how is his Department working with the Department for International Development and NGOs to protect children, particularly in Gaza?
I have constituents who have spent time working in the west bank, ensuring that Palestinian children can walk safely to school. Sadly, the people from whom they need to protect the children are all too often other children. Israeli settler children are taught terms of abuse and encouraged to throw stones. That is a tragedy and an abuse not just of the Palestinian children but of the Israeli children. They are all victims. That is why I tabled an early-day motion and wrote to the Foreign Secretary asking him to reintroduce funding for Breaking the Silence so that ordinary Israelis can hear credible voices telling them what is being done in their name. Children’s involvement in violence goes far beyond that kind of activity, however.
Mrs Ellman
I take the point my hon. Friend makes very seriously; when wrongdoing occurs it must be put right. Does she agree with me that there is a consistent and relentless campaign of incitement to violence on the Palestinian media almost daily, which inevitably has an impact on young children who then start to commit acts of violence?
Fiona O'Donnell
My hon. Friend is right, and I saw that when I visited the area. As a mother, I thought how difficult it would be to raise children and try to prevent them from indulging in acts of violence while at the same time making them aware of their rights and encouraging them to challenge injustice. I welcome her contribution.
For children who have been involved with armed forces and groups, rehabilitation and reintegration tailored to their specific needs is essential. World Vision identifies the need for programmes targeting girls who have given birth during the conflict and their children. When children leave armed groups, reintegration cannot be seen as a short-term process to be completed in a few months. World Vision’s experience has shown that reintegration takes much longer and needs to be part of both peace-building and development work. It must be funded accordingly. We know that children’s involvement in violence goes beyond the kind of activity seen in the west bank. It is estimated that a quarter of a million children are active in armed groups. Work to try to prevent the recruitment of child soldiers must focus on stopping armed forces and groups recruiting and using children and on strengthening the systems that protect children, making them less vulnerable to recruitment.
As I draw my remarks to a close, I ask the Minister to support the recommendations from Save the Children, which could save the lives and outcomes of children in conflict. We need to mainstream child protection in conflict, ensuring that there are sufficient resources. Only 36% and 28% of appeal requests for child protection and education respectively are met in emergency responses. That is simply not good enough. The UN and regional peacekeeping missions must include adequate capacity to prevent and respond to the violation of children’s rights, including mandatory pre-deployment training. Governments and partners must provide co-ordinated assistance to children who are unaccompanied or separated as a result of armed conflict. Violations of children’s rights must be monitored and recorded and all reasonable steps must be taken to hold perpetrators to account.
Finally, I want to pay tribute today to the many NGOs who work in the most difficult and dangerous conflict zones, sometimes giving their lives to deliver life-saving aid to children. When we see the worst of humanity, they show us the very best.
Sir Edward Leigh (Gainsborough) (Con)
The whole House will be grateful to the hon. Member for East Lothian (Fiona O'Donnell) for initiating this debate on protecting children in conflict. She was right to deal with the Palestinian situation, but I will not follow her example in any detail as I do not want to get involved in the debate about the rights and wrongs of the Palestinian issue, except for noting the suffering of both the Palestinian people and the Israeli people in a very difficult conflict.
I want to make some general remarks about how the British Government could try to improve the protection of children in conflict areas, particularly when it comes to education. Education is the subject on which I want to focus and I would be grateful if the Minister could deal with that problem when he replies.
I should perhaps declare a family interest. I am speaking today because both my elder daughters work for charities in Africa and have worked in Kenya, Rwanda, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and the Central African Republic. They keep me informed of their work and what is going on and, a few years ago, I visited the Congo with War Child to look at the appalling privations that children faced, particularly because of the conflict and the use of child soldiers. My visit had a deep impact on me and I am sure that, even despite all the excellent work of my hon. Friend the Minister and other Ministers in the FCO and DFID, there is still more that we can do.
As I say, I want to concentrate on education, but why are children particularly vulnerable? It is an obvious point, but they are vulnerable because they are young. When a three-year-old loses their parents in a bomb attack, it is virtually impossible for them to survive alone. If a 25-year-old loses a parent, it is a tragedy, but they can survive. It is right that the House should focus particularly on the appalling impact of conflict on children, which is much greater than its impact on mature people.
Of course, children suffer appalling and severe trauma from witnessing events. They do not have the life experience or emotional maturity to integrate a particular scene into the rest of their life. We have been brought up in a very comfortable environment, but we all know how even quite small events from our childhood can have a traumatic effect later on. Imagine a child in a conflict situation witnessing their mother being raped or their brother being dragged off as a child soldier or witnessing murders or the appalling scenes that have happened in Syria. That trauma will live with those children for ever.
Children are targeted in conflict situations for sexual attacks. Girls and boys make up more than half the rape cases in such conflicts and that is an appalling statistic. Imagine the appalling emotional trauma of that. Children are also targeted by military groups that are keen to expand their ranks quickly and we have seen that in particular over the years in Congo. As I know from my visit to the Congo and as we all know, it is appalling to talk to former child soldiers who have been dragged into these events. They have committed terrible things and terrible things have happened to them, sometimes when they are just 13 or 14-years-old.
War destroys livelihoods, and children are often seen as a way for distressed families to get income. Girls can be married early for a price or used as sex workers and boys can be sent out to work in fields and factories or to collect rubbish from the streets. I occasionally visit the middle east, and we see the desperate struggle for survival, particularly for Syrian refugees in Lebanon or Jordan when there is no social security available to any significant extent. In conflict situations, families are desperate to survive, and we all know that children have to be used as part of that.
The point I want to stress and focus on for the rest of my speech is that it is children and not adults who lose their opportunity for education. Once that opportunity is lost, it is lost for ever and can never be repeated. Education is essential for children and particularly for children in conflict areas. It is a life chance that comes only once and a reasonable level of education is even more important for children who will be expected to build a peaceful recovery from conflict. Education keeps children safe. Obviously, if a child is in a school or in an educational environment, it is less likely that they will be married early, raped, abducted or recruited by armed groups. All that is much more unlikely when schools are open.
Actually, education is prioritised by families in conflict areas. We have seen on television, such as during the Iraq conflicts, and from our own experience how families that are often desperate and have nothing—owning nothing, surviving on nothing—still make the effort to dress their children in immaculate uniforms to walk through bombed-out streets to get school. Education is extraordinarily important for them.
Tim Loughton (East Worthing and Shoreham) (Con)
My hon. Friend makes a compelling case based on his experiences in Africa. It is deeply humbling when we go to developing countries in parts of Africa and elsewhere and see children who have walked miles and miles and miles to attend a classroom where they have no seats, but may have rocks to sit on, if they are lucky, and which have corrugated iron roofs. Their parents have made a contribution out of what limited resources they have, because they absolutely value education as the way out of poverty and conflict. Does my hon. Friend agree that that is deeply humbling for those of us here who take education for granted?
Sir Edward Leigh
My hon. Friend has made that point very movingly. We live in such a comfortable environment here where education is, frankly, of a fantastically high standard and is free—paid for by the taxpayer—that we simply do not appreciate the appalling sacrifices made in places where education is not free by parents who have nothing. They make that huge effort to try to educate their children, because they know, as we know, that education is everything.
We can establish a case that education is absolutely vital, therefore, in terms of taking children out of conflict situations and giving them life chances. So, having made that case, we would expect it to be prioritised by humanitarian agencies and Governments, but analysis of the 2013 United Nations appeal tracking data shows that only 1.9% of UN humanitarian appeal funds went to education. That seems to me to be very low, and I was surprised when I saw that. I cannot believe that the figure is so low, but that is what I have been told. Donors simply did not prioritise that part of the UN appeals.
Nicola Blackwood
Does my hon. Friend agree that one way we can encourage donor countries to prioritise education is by the post-2015 development framework including secondary, as well as primary, education as a core priority?
Sir Edward Leigh
That is a very good point and I hope the Minister has made a note of it, and perhaps will reply to it.
UN-funded education projects, largely delivered through non-governmental organisations, only reach 3.5 million of the children who were targeted for education in emergencies in 2013, and development donors do not get involved in education in emergencies even though they prioritise the education of children in other places. When a humanitarian agency arrives in an appalling situation where people are dying, starving and so forth, and it has to feed them and make sure they are sheltered, I can quite understand the mindset leading it not immediately to prioritise education. However, we must recognise—my daughter made this point to me—that these are often not the sorts of the intensely violent conflicts that we have witnessed in Europe and that last for three or four years; they are often low-level conflicts that can go on for many years and therefore children can be kept out of school for many years, because education is not seen as a priority.
Education falls between the two major funding streams, therefore, with the result that of the 58 million primary-age children not in school, 28.5 million are in conflict countries. Pretty soon the only children not in school in the world will be those living in conflict countries, not because they are hard to reach—mostly, they are easy to reach—but because the funding system has bypassed them almost entirely. That is a serious point for us and this House.
What needs to happen? First, humanitarian donors need to develop policies for education in emergencies that make education a central part of the first response phase, so when they go in, education is at the forefront of their minds. Secondly, the development side of Government donor offices need to stretch their understanding of education to include providing primary education in emergency settings—primary education is absolutely vital—and to do this in a way that builds, develops and protects the local education infrastructure. This has to be a prominent and early part of their investment. Thirdly, total funding for education within humanitarian responses needs to reach at least 4% of total humanitarian funding in emergencies. That figure was given to me by War Child and it seems a fair one. This is the target supported by the Education Cannot Wait campaign, which is backed by the Global Education Cluster and the International Network for Education in Emergencies, so presumably it is a well-researched figure and it makes sense. Fourthly, there is a need to conduct an urgent review of the amount of humanitarian aid DFID allocates to education and child protection; the Minister can no doubt defend the Government’s position. Inclusion of this point in party manifestos would demonstrate a strong commitment to meeting the needs of children affected by conflict.
As chairman of my party’s Back-Bench committee on DFID and foreign affairs, I am involved in helping to write the manifesto. I do not know how much notice the Foreign Secretary will take of my comments, but I will do my best. The Minister might take back to the Foreign Secretary the suggestion to include a phrase or sentence about education in our party manifesto, and perhaps the Labour party will consider doing the same thing, because manifestos are very important. Once it is there in writing in the manifesto, when whoever wins the next election comes to frame their humanitarian responses, education will be at the forefront of their minds. Also, Members of Parliament need to talk about these things and to raise them up the political agenda, which is why this debate is important.
Before I sit down, perhaps I can give testimony from a family from Irbil in Iraq, which I have visited. This family testimony was given to me by War Child. It was of interest to me because I have been to northern Iraq, not with War Child but with another charity, and the situation there is appalling. It was terrible to hear what people had to say. There was a mother. She and her family had been living in Baghdad, and her husband and son went to church and were never seen again. They just vanished—kidnapped, and obviously murdered. There was mother after mother like that. The situation in northern Iraq is, dare I say it, even more terrible than what is going on in Palestine, so may I give a tiny mention for a part of the population there with whom I have worked? In the conflict in northern Iraq there is no doubt that the Christian communities around Mosul— I have visited their villages—are in an extraordinarily stressed situation now. They are being driven from their villages by the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham, and what is happening to the children does not bear thinking about.
So let me read out this family testimony from Irbil in Iraq, because it is important for me to put it on the record as it is personal experience, which is always more interesting than general comments:
“War Child met with a mother of two young boys aged nine and twelve who had suffered displacement three times as a result of the recent violence and ended up having to smuggle themselves into a place of safety. Their reason for leaving their home town was the mother’s fear of her sons being recruited to fight in the violence. The devastated 12-year-old told War Child, ‘I just want to be in school’. He has been forced to leave his education during his exams which will mean all previous years of schooling will count as a ‘fail’ within the system. He is unable to go to school as an Internally Displaced Person (IDP) because when the family fled they had to leave all belongings, including the necessary certification, at home.”
The report continues:
“They are sharing rented accommodation with another three families and will run out of money at the end of the month. ‘We have nowhere to go’, the mother told us. ‘When our money runs out we will have no choice but to sleep in the public park.’ There are many families already sleeping in the rough and engaging in casual labour or begging for survival. ‘We are so frustrated and so humiliated. I used to work and have a normal life and now I have no idea what will happen to us,’ the mother said.
Let me sum up the arguments. To me, the education part of this debate is one of the most interesting and the most important. Sadly, humanitarian actors still often do not prioritise education programming at the start of an emergency. I accept, as I said, all the problems that they face, but education must be at the forefront of their minds. This is still considered something to pick up six months into or after a conflict. Instead, there is no reason why children cannot continue in school if authorities or humanitarian actors have the right support. Surely we can all agree that children have a right to education throughout their childhood. Schools can keep children safe and they are important environments for being able to provide other services such as social care to address trauma.
In the Central African Republic where an appalling conflict is going on, most of the schools in the capital are not open. This is largely due to the collapsed Government’s inability to continue paying teachers’ salaries, and the humanitarian NGOs that are providing most of the services in the city cannot access enough funding for education in particular, so reopening schools is not the priority. As a result, in the capital city large numbers of children are not in school. It is not just a question of funding. Unfortunately, the reality is that aside from conflict, the quality of education on offer in these countries is incredibly low. We need to ensure that once in school, children actually learn. Levels of violence are also shockingly high, with corporal punishment widely used. Organisations such as War Child and Save the Children are trying to address all these issues. I know that my hon. Friend the Minister, on behalf of the Government, will try to help them. Schools need to be safe spaces, with zero tolerance being shown if they are attacked or used by armed groups.
Thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker, for calling me to speak this debate. I am grateful to the hon. Member for East Lothian (Fiona O'Donnell), and I am sure we can continue to highlight these issues and ensure that in these desperate situations our children all over the world get a decent education.
Grahame M. Morris (Easington) (Lab)
I congratulate my good and hon. Friend the Member for East Lothian (Fiona O'Donnell) and the Backbench Business Committee on allocating time for such an important and timely subject for debate.
I want to cover some areas of interest relating to the protection of children in the conflict in Palestine and Israel, child prisoners and the situation of children in Gaza. I shall be interested to hear the Minister’s response. Clearly, the events of the past few weeks have once again brought to our attention in this House and throughout the world the enduring suffering of children as a result of the Israel-Palestine conflict. I draw to the attention of the House my entry in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests.
I would like to express my heartfelt and sincere sympathy to the families of the three Israeli youths abducted and killed in cold blood. My youngest son is of a similar age and I cannot begin to comprehend the grief that their parents must be experiencing at this time. There is no greater tragedy than that of a young and innocent life full of potential being taken away by conflict. In response to an urgent question earlier this week, the Minister of State, Foreign and Commonwealth Office, the right hon. Member for Faversham and Mid Kent (Hugh Robertson) said something that I found poignant. He commented that there is no “hierarchy of victimhood” and that the deaths of innocent Palestinian children are equally tragic. I wholeheartedly agree with that sentiment.
For Palestinians, this week’s kidnapping and murder of a 16-year-old boy in a suspected revenge attack and the two innocent teenagers shot dead by Israeli soldiers at Ofer in May this year are just as painful and just as tragic to the Palestinian communities as the deaths of the Israeli youths are for Israel. Since 2001, 1,407 Palestinian children have been killed by Israeli military forces and Israeli settlers as a consequence of an unjust and illegal military occupation. Worryingly, according to the United Nations, the instances of Israeli soldiers using live fire against the Palestinian civilian population in recent weeks have increased. I place on record my condolences to all the families who have lost children in this conflict, and I emphasise my desire to see those responsible brought to justice under the rule of law.
It is my wish that no more families on either side should have to suffer such tragedies in the future. I know that that wish is shared by right hon. and hon. Members, some of whom are here today, who have participated in other debates and spoken knowledgeably about their experiences, bringing their insight and knowledge of international law and treaties. Right hon. and hon. Members who share this sentiment recognise that the conflict will continue, and children will continue to be harmed and killed until a fair and just settlement is achieved. Until international law, United Nations resolutions and international conventions for peace are implemented in the middle east, parents of the region will continue to worry for their children’s safety and young people will continue to suffer and die as a result of a conflict that is not of their making.
There is a danger that the current climate of vengeance and retribution will worsen the situation. Uri Ariel, the Israeli housing Minister, has called for a “proper Zionist response”, meaning an acceleration of Israel’s illegal expansion of settlements in the west bank and East Jerusalem and a programme of punitive house demolitions. The Israeli Deputy Minister of Defence, Danny Danon, said that Israel should make the entire Palestinian leadership pay a heavy price for the killing of the three Israeli teenagers, and Mr Lieberman, the Israeli Foreign Minister, advocated a full-scale invasion of Gaza as a legitimate response. In the name of security, rights, justice and peace, the demands of these politicians must be rebutted, resisted and challenged by the international community.
Children are never the causes of conflict, but too often they are its victims, and if the cycle of revenge and violence is accelerated, they will pay the heaviest price. I was interested in the intervention from my hon. Friend the Member for Liverpool, Riverside (Mrs Ellman), in which she pointed out the radicalisation of Palestinian youth as a consequence of broadcasts in the Palestinian media. We should also think about the consequences of their day-to-day experience of being brutalised by the occupying power and the impact that that has on young minds. That cannot be discounted and the effects attributed to brainwashing by their own communities. These are relevant issues, but we cannot discount the huge pressures on the Palestinians’ day-to-day existence. Israel has by far the greater ability to make the Palestinians suffer. I fear that it will escalate its policy of punishing them collectively—a crime under international law—for the violent actions of a minority.
The subject of this debate is “Protecting Children in Conflict”. I would like to refer briefly to the plight of children in Gaza. The Israeli blockade of the Gaza strip has now entered its seventh year, spelling despair for its population of 1.6 million, 42% of whom are children aged 14 or younger. Some international organisations are suggesting that the situation cannot continue. The International Monetary Fund, for example, has said that the blockade and other restrictions imposed by the Israelis on Gaza cost the Palestinians 78% of their GDP, or an estimated $6.3 billion a year. With 80% of families in Gaza dependent on humanitarian aid, the consequences are more than economic.
Gaza’s children suffer immeasurably as a result of the severe restrictions Israel places on imports, exports and the movement of people, whether by land, air or sea. Restrictions on the import of construction equipment mean that vital infrastructure, such as housing, health care facilities and schools, are not fit for purpose. More worryingly, water and sewage treatment services are starting to break down. The blockade causes endemic and long-lasting poverty, preventing families from being able to put nutritious food on the table. That manifests itself in malnutrition among the children. Stunting as a result of long-term exposure to chronic malnutrition is found in 10% of children under five in Gaza. Anaemia affects 68% of children and a third of pregnant women. Some 90% of the water extracted from Gaza’s only aquifer is unfit for human consumption, and the UN has warned that it will be irreversibly damaged by 2020.
Fiona O'Donnell
My hon. Friend is making a powerful speech. Unfortunately, the Israeli authorities would not allow the Select Committee to travel to Gaza. Does he share my concerns about salt in the water? When mothers have to make formula with water that contains salt, that has huge implications for their young children’s physical and mental development.
Grahame M. Morris
I am grateful to my hon. Friend for making that point. I was a member of a delegation that visited the west bank, and we, too, were refused entry to Gaza. I have certainly heard from other right hon. and hon. Members who visited Gaza and can corroborate exactly what she says. I think that the Minister should make representations to the Israeli authorities on humanitarian grounds.
The UN Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs has said that the blockade is
“a collective punishment of all those living in Gaza and is a denial of basic human rights in contravention of international law”.
I completely agree. There is no moral or legal justification for Israel’s collective punishment of over 800,000 children. Although they are kept apart by military checkpoints and separation walls—my hon. Friend the Member for East Lothian and I were unable to gain access to Gaza because of the restrictions imposed by the Israeli authorities—the children of Gaza’s fellow Palestinians in the illegally occupied west bank and East Jerusalem, and indeed in the refugee camps, also suffer profoundly as a result of the conflict.
The rights of Palestinian children are routinely violated as Israeli military detention fails to safeguard basic human rights or to adhere to international law in relation to detaining children. The most recent figures indicate that 196 Palestinian children were being held in Israeli military custody at the end of April, but I suspect that the number has increased dramatically in recent weeks. I am disturbed that the Israeli authorities are no longer releasing information on precisely how many children are being held in military detention.
My hon. Friend referred to the independent report “Children in Military Custody”, which was authored by seven senior lawyers from the United Kingdom and funded by the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. It highlights how two distinct legal systems are applied by the Israeli authorities to residents of the west bank depending on an individual’s race or national identity. When that policy was applied in South Africa, it was called apartheid, and international politicians, including John Kerry, have used that term with respect to what is happening in the west bank. That independent report by leading lawyers, commissioned by our own Foreign Office, concluded that Israel is in breach of seven articles of the UN convention on the rights of the child, including in relation to discrimination, the child’s best interests, premature resort to detention, non-separation from adults, prompt access to lawyers and the use of shackles.
When I was first elected, I had the opportunity to visit the west bank and see one of those military courts in operation. Some of the children are very young. Some are arrested in midnight raids. The crime for which they are most commonly arrested is throwing stones, and there is often little evidence that the arrested child is the one responsible. They are then shackled and blindfolded before being questioned without their parents being present and without access to any legal representation. There are extensive reports indicating that physical and verbal abuse by the Israeli authorities against those children is commonplace. They can be detained without charge for 188 days and then be made to wait two more years before the conclusion of their trial. They are often arrested in the refugee camps or the occupied territories, but they are held in military detention within Israel. Again, I am not a lawyer, but I believe that that contravenes a United Nations convention.
Most of those children are forced to sign confessions in Hebrew. They might have some understanding of Hebrew when it is spoken, but not when it is written. They often sign the confession in the hope of speeding up the trial. Unsurprisingly, given the flagrant disregard for international law, the overall conviction rate for Palestinian children in Israeli military courts—I should not laugh, but this number is like something from North Korea—is 99.74%.
I believe that a form of psychological warfare is being waged on an entire community and that it is children who are being made to bear the brunt of Israel’s punitive measures. I have witnessed those court proceedings while visiting Israel. Indeed, the image of a young boy the same age as my youngest son being marched along by soldiers with his hands and feet in shackles was truly shocking and will stay with me for the rest of my life.
Recent events have served as a stark reminder of the brutality of life for children in conflict areas. As a parent, I wish that no mother or father had to experience the tragic loss of their child. For a serious commitment towards that end, we must understand that recent tragedies are rooted in a conflict that will not end until Israel acts in accordance with international law, United Nations resolutions and the overwhelming consensus of the international community in order to realise peace and justice in the middle east.
In conclusion, I ask the Minister, in conjunction with his ministerial colleagues, to press the Israeli Government to adhere to these international conventions, particularly in relation to the rights of the child.
Jeremy Lefroy (Stafford) (Con)
It is an honour to follow the hon. Member for Easington (Grahame M. Morris) and my hon. Friend the Member for Gainsborough (Sir Edward Leigh), who made a particularly important speech about education. I will refer to that as well, but he has covered the ground extensively. I thank the hon. Member for East Lothian (Fiona O’Donnell) for introducing the debate so well and so eloquently, and for her comradeship on International Development Committee trips to the middle east and elsewhere.
Syria, Iraq, the Central African Republic, Nigeria, Somalia, Palestine, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Afghanistan, Pakistan, South Sudan, and many other places: there is a growing list of terrible conflicts, particularly civil conflicts, around the world. In all these, women and children, in particular, are at risk in many different ways: violence, of course; education, as my hon. Friend the Member for Gainsborough explained; health; and, as the hon. Member for East Lothian said, the way they think about things—their freedom of thought and freedom of faith.
In a powerful article in The Independent, the head of War Child, Rob Williams, wrote:
“Sexual violence in conflict zones includes extreme physical violence, the use of sticks, bats, bottles, the cutting of genitals, and the sexual torture of victims who are left with horrific injuries.”
Against anybody, these would be terrible, terrible acts; against children they are just unspeakable. Yet this kind of thing is going on day in, day out in many countries. It is not just about the violence itself but its consequences—not only the medical consequences that are so severe, but the rejection that can occur within these children’s communities and families because of things that have been done to them that are absolutely no fault of theirs. We hear of stories where girls and women who are raped are prosecuted for adultery. What an upside-down world we live in when that happens.
The article refers to the HEAL hospital in Goma in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Three years ago, the International Development Committee and I had the privilege of visiting that hospital, which was under the admirable leadership of Dr Lusi. Sadly, Dr Lusi passed away not so long ago. She was the subject of an outstanding obituary in The Economist that showed the sort of work that she and all those who worked with her in that place have done. In the first half of 2012, 74% of sexual violence survivors in the hospital were children—I repeat, 74%. We often hear about violence against women, which is absolutely terrible, but this is against children.
Then there is the issue of child soldiers, where I would like to introduce a slight element of hope. Although child soldiers are still recruited pretty much everywhere there is conflict, there can be a life after that. During the Committee’s most recent visit to Sierra Leone and Liberia, we saw two countries where child soldiers were commonplace—children as young as 10 taken and forced to carry arms and to kill members of their own families. Yet now, thanks to the intervention of the international community—in Sierra Leone, particularly the intervention of UK forces—those two countries are at peace, and many of the young children who were forced to be child soldiers are gradually adapting to a more peaceful life. A few years ago, I was involved in setting up a business in Sierra Leone, and some of the young men we were able to take on were former child soldiers. It is absolutely critical that those who have been involved, through no fault of their own, are able to re-engage in normal life afterwards. At the same time—we saw good evidence of this in Sierra Leone—there has to be emphasis on reconciliation: on truth coming out and on making sure that what went on in the past is not just brushed under the carpet. There is hope. There are examples in west Africa of how countries can come out of this, albeit with great pain and grief.
What are the answers? Perhaps “answers” is too trite a word to use. In his admirable work, together with many others, on violence against women in conflict and violence in conflict more generally, the Foreign Secretary has rightly focused on prosecution. War Child mentions volunteer committees, which are a more local solution in helping people to educate their own communities about what is going on and, perhaps, how to prevent it. There are also child safety centres. Last night, I attended the excellent debate on education led by the right hon. Member for Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath (Mr Brown), the former Prime Minister. Focusing in particular on Nigeria, he talked about safe schools where children could be protected in that most vital of all activities, education. My hon. Friend the Member for Gainsborough said—I believe I am quoting him—that a central part of the first response to a crisis must be a focus on education. I entirely agree. When the Committee visited Lebanon and Jordan, we saw the work that DFID was doing in supporting education. I congratulate DFID and, indeed, the Foreign Office on their rightful focus on that.
I would like to put on record my admiration for the welcome that Lebanon and Jordan have given to refugees. Let us not forget that Lebanon, with a population of 4 million, now has more than 1 million refugees from Syria. Twenty per cent. of its population are now refugees, yet they were welcomed pretty much with open arms. The same is true of Jordan. Not only that, but those countries have accepted refugee children into their own state education systems. Quite a high percentage of the children being educated in Lebanon’s state system are now Syrian refugees. Let us think about whether we would do the same in similar circumstances. In relative terms, that would mean 12 million refugees coming into the United Kingdom, and probably millions—because a high percentage are children—being educated in our state schools. Would we be prepared to be as hospitable as that? I hope so, but Lebanon is doing it now.
I am glad of the support that DFID is giving those countries in upping their numbers of school places, because that will need to be done. As my hon. Friend the Member for Gainsborough said, education is not just a matter of going in and sorting it out for a few weeks or months—it takes a matter of years. The conflict in Syria is not going to go away; it is going to continue, regrettably and painfully. Therefore, our support for the education of those children must continue, wherever they are, including in Syria itself, where DFID is also helping, although obviously our Committee was unable to go there.
There is a serious problem, specifically, with girls’ education. In many countries, as the former Prime Minister said last night, girls are treated very much as second class in education. If there is not enough money to go round, they will be the ones who are not educated, or ideologies will say that it is not worth educating girls and they should not be educated. For Boko Haram, western education is forbidden, specifically education of girls.
Again, I want to introduce an element of hope. When we were in Sierra Leone, we saw examples of second-chance schools supported by DFID—schools for children who have completely missed out on education because of conflict but who are now able, in very difficult circumstances, to receive an education. Often, the buildings used are schools during the day and teachers go there in the evening or late afternoon to provide an education. It was humbling to see children crowding into those dirty classrooms, which had broken desks and no facilities and where white boards were a million miles away, desperate for a second chance at education, because they knew how important it was.
The impact of conflict on health, particularly that of children, is another issue. Worryingly, we are seeing the re-emergence of polio in Syria as a direct consequence of conflict. That is a problem not just for Syria, but for all of us. We had believed that we were close to eradicating polio—a magnificent achievement over the past 20 or 30 years—but its re-emergence in Syria may mean that many of those gains have been lost in that part of the world. Leishmaniasis, which is a terrible, disfiguring disease caused by the sandfly, is also on the increase in Syria. That is another disease that we were perhaps on track to, if not eradicating, certainly minimising around the world.
There are other diseases. In order to reduce the incidence of malaria, people need to sleep under insecticide-treated bed nets. I declare an interest as chairman of the all-party group on malaria and neglected tropical diseases. When people are in a conflict situation and are being driven from pillar to post, it is very unlikely that they will have access to bed nets, so they, and children and pregnant women in particular, will be more liable to catch malaria and possibly die from it.
I pay tribute to those organisations that provide health services in the most incredibly difficult circumstances, including Médecins sans Frontières, Christian and other faith-based hospitals that provide assistance all the way through conflicts, even though they are under desperate pressure, and the committed individuals who sometimes give their lives in the service of their fellow women and men.
I want to touch briefly on the question of thought, belief and freedoms. At a time of conflict, people’s way of life and the way in which they have been brought up can come under tremendous pressure, because sometimes conflicts are driven by ideology. Children are taken away and brainwashed into thinking something completely different, perhaps into hating their parents and their upbringing to the extent that some who have perhaps also been given drugs are prepared to kill their own parents or other members of their family. We sometimes forget that this not just about health, education and violence itself, but about the emotional trauma of conflict and the way in which all the certainties with which a child has been brought up are taken away and replaced by hatred by vile men.
I also want to talk about the United Nations and what the world can do that it is not doing at the moment. The United Nations Security Council has set out six violations against children in conflict: the killing and maiming of children; the recruitment or use of children as soldiers; sexual violence against children; attacks against schools or hospitals; denial of humanitarian access for children; and abduction of children. Sadly, we have read about all those things in our newspapers in recent weeks and months, yet too little is happening at the United Nations.
I am a great believer in the United Nations—it is the only game in town and the only thing we have internationally to work together—but it must do much, much more. First, it must speak up constantly about this issue, which is relevant not just to one, two or three countries, but to dozens of countries across the world. Secondly, as has been said, peacekeepers play a vital role. Personally, having seen peacekeepers in various countries, I do not think we make nearly enough use of them. They are often sitting in camps, just protecting themselves. They do not have a robust enough mandate. That was particularly true in the DRC, where they were not able to go out and deal with the very problems that we as taxpayers believed we were paying them to deal with. Yes, they were there—this is not to take anything away from the peacekeepers themselves—but their mandates were not strong enough, particularly for the protection of children and violence against civilians.
I believe that the UK has a very important, perhaps unique, role to play. We are involved in training peacekeepers in many of the regions affected by conflict. Our armed forces and trainers do a fantastic job, but I believe we could do much more. As we draw down from Afghanistan, I believe our armed forces can play a very important future role in providing training in peacekeeping and the protection of civilians, particularly women and children, and in perhaps more muscular peacekeeping than is the case at present around the world.
We also need to see action from local citizens. We have seen how the great example of Malala Yousafzai and her courageous stand galvanised the world, but we need to see far more of that and we need to protect and endorse such people.
We also need to see more mediators and more women in particular involved in mediation. Far too few women are involved in the reconciliation and mediation that needs to take place in order to bring peace. That is not because of a lack of incredibly capable women, but because they are not thought of or they are not in the right place at the right time. We need an active programme to train and develop women mediators internationally, so that they can go in and help those countries achieve peace.
In conclusion, we face a difficult situation. The situation for children in conflict is, I believe, getting worse, not better. We have seen some encouraging examples of how countries can come out of it, particularly Sierra Leone and Liberia, and what can be done to reintegrate children affected by conflict, whether they have been involved as child soldiers or damaged by conflict. However, current events in Africa and the middle east in particular are throwing the issue into stark relief. We need much, much more robust international action. The United Nations needs to step up to the plate. I hope that in his response the Minister will outline what the UK Government are doing, particularly at the United Nations and with regard to the individual countries suffering from conflict at the moment.
Tim Loughton (East Worthing and Shoreham) (Con)
I am delighted to follow the very thoughtful contributions made to the debate so far. I pay tribute to the hon. Member for East Lothian (Fiona O'Donnell) for making it possible, and I apologise for missing the very first part of her speech. I was talking about conflict and children in another context elsewhere. I had not anticipated taking part in this debate, but such is its importance that I want to pick up on some of the points made by previous speakers and draw on my own experiences of visiting conflict zones.
This is, of course, a timely debate, for the most tragic of reasons. The images we saw from Palestine earlier this week of the three Israeli children who became victims of war starkly brought home to us the ghastly things and tragedies that are occurring daily in other parts of the world. Another image that brought that home was that of the Nigerian girls, who were the subject of last night’s excellent debate—of which I read, but, alas, was not part—led by the former Prime Minister, the right hon. Member for Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath (Mr Brown). For hundreds of girls to be taken by terrorists from their schools, where they expected to be educated and to do all the things our children take for granted, and for their lives now to be in the balance—they have perhaps already been sold into the sex trade or whatever, because such threats have been made under the nose of that country’s Government—is absolutely alarming.
So alarming is that situation that we now have to talk about “safe schools”. Schools should be places of safety. When we send our children off to school, we expect them to be looked after and safeguarded. The fact that terrorists can make them pawns in some misguided holy war—that is how they try to portray their terrorism—is quite inconceivable to us today.
A third image that sends a chill down all our spines was one I saw on a news report from the conflict involving the so-called ISIS forces in Iraq: on the back of a pick-up were two boys, who could not have been more than 10 years old, with two AK47s and belts of ammunition to go with them. Those 10-year-olds are combatants of war, who have been expected to join, and coaxed and promoted into, the front line of the ghastly and misguided conflict in that country. We recently debated an amendment to the Criminal Justice and Courts Bill—I supported the amendment, which was tabled by my hon. Friend the Member for Enfield North (Nick de Bois)—to make sentencing mandatory for 16 to 18-year-olds caught in unlawful possession of a knife as a second offence. That is something pretty ghastly in this country, but to have children routinely taking AK47s into places of conflict perhaps puts it into context.
Those three images starkly portray the tragedy that we are debating today, but they are of course the tip of the iceberg, as are the 250,000 children—surely an underestimate—who are child soldiers, including the notorious ones in places such as Uganda. I repeat the tributes paid by all hon. Members to the staff of the NGOs, whom many of us have visited and worked with in places of conflict. They absolutely put their lives on the line to try to protect and to give some safety and security to children who, through no fault of their own, find themselves victims of conflict. I particularly want to repeat the tribute paid by my hon. Friend the Member for Stafford (Jeremy Lefroy) to Rob Williams and the excellent charity, War Child. He does such a good job with that charity, as he previously did with UK-based charities involved with families. Such images haunt all hon. Members and, I am sure, all our constituents.
There are, however, things in which we should take great pride, and I am sure that we will hear more about them when the Minister sums up. As in so many cases, the UK is setting the example—putting its money where its mouth is and leading the world—in trying to turn around the juggernaut of children’s involvement in conflict zones.
The international protocol on the documentation and investigation of sexual violence in conflict, which was launched by the UK, is working to establish international standards to help to strengthen prosecutions for rape in conflict, and it is increasing the prospects for successful convictions. We have got to bring people to book to show that such sexual violence is unacceptable. In whatever part of the world, developed or undeveloped, it must not happen and the perpetrators must not get away with it. We must all work together against the forces of evil who allow it to happen.
Fiona O’Donnell
The hon. Gentleman is making a powerful speech. In looking at our record on international prosecutions for acts of sexual violence so far, would the suggestion made by one of his colleagues about having a local form of justice, rather the western developed world being seen to impose its standards on other countries, be a better way forward?
Tim Loughton
I absolutely agree. If there can be a home-grown solution—so that people have ownership of it, and it can be adapted to their cultures and to the baggage of tribal conflicts, histories and cultural identities that have been asserted through violence—that has to be better. Otherwise, there is a risk that the former colonial power is seen as trying to reassert its ways.
There are some common basic moral standards that we should not resile from asserting in the international context, including that children are children, not young adults to be sent into war zones or to become victims of war in all its ghastly forms. They are children, and we treat children differently—they need our protection and respect—whether they are in Khartoum, Boston, Worthing, East Lothian or anywhere else in the world. We should not resile from the expression of such international values, in which we should take pride.
The Government have already committed to providing more than £140 million to the survivors of sexual violence and their supporters. In the context of the many victims of historical cases of horrendous sexual abuse that have recently hit the headlines in the United Kingdom, a key factor is making sure that victims who have had the bravery to come forward get the support they need in order to come to terms with the trauma that befell them, often as children. In this debate, we are talking about victims who have perhaps seen their parents gruesomely killed in front of them, their homes burned, their sisters raped, or their brothers, sisters and school friends kidnapped and taken off into slavery or the sex trade. These children need our support, and they need rehabilitation to get over traumas caused by what happened in front of their eyes, which is why that project is so important. The Government have also called for all soldiers and peacekeepers to be trained not only to understand the gravity of sexual violence in conflict, but to help to prevent it and to protect people. Those are all practical measures that we can sometimes overlook.
The Government, particularly the Foreign Secretary, should be given great credit for the great initiative of the global summit to end sexual violence in conflict—quite rightly, it hit the media, including our television screens—which he co-hosted with the special envoy Angelina Jolie last month in the east end of London. It brought together more than 140 countries and more than 900 experts, making it the biggest global meeting ever convened on the issue. Let us hope that it was not just a talking shop, but that delegates from nations where such violence happens daily could take comfort, ideas and support, could make contacts and could engage with projects that will help them in the future.
The preventing sexual violence initiative—again, the Government are spearheading it—aims to strengthen and support international efforts to respond to sexual violence in conflict, including by enhancing the capacity of countries, institutions and communities to support survivors and to end impunity for perpetrators. A team of UK experts has been deployed to conflict-affected countries at the heart of the problem, such as Libya, Syria, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Mali, to name but a few. The initiative provides good practical experience, and we should be proud that DFID, our Foreign Office and this Government are pioneering, leading and setting such an example on the global stage.
Education is absolutely vital in all this, as my hon. Friend the Member for Gainsborough (Sir Edward Leigh) mentioned. That is why I welcome DFID’s pledge that by 2015 it will spend half of its direct educational aid on unstable or war-torn countries where more than two fifths of the world’s out-of-school children are found and where a lack of education can contribute directly to conflict. In such a revolving doors scenario, kids are indoctrinated to hate other kids and families from other tribes and religions in other parts of the country. If they are brought up to accept that as normal, it is little surprise that they are susceptible to taking up arms when a conflict happens. We have to start at the beginning, by educating against conflict and the mentality of vehement retaliation right at the outset. Education is so important. The United Kingdom’s commitment of up to £300 million for the Global Partnership for Education over the next four years is therefore particularly welcome.
Many children out of school are marginalised and hard to reach, and nearly half of them live in fragile and conflict-affected areas. Marginalisation affects children right through the education system, from early education to university level. In post-conflict environments and fragile states, getting children back into school and addressing out-of-school youth, some of whom may have been child soldiers or refugees themselves, helps to bring back a sense of equity, justice and cohesion to what can be a fractured society. That has to be the start.
Girls’ education is a big issue. The girls’ education challenge will give up to 1 million of the world’s poorest girls the opportunity to improve their lives through education. The point made by my hon. Friend the Member for Stafford was important: if more women were doing the educating—and, indeed, the negotiating before or after a conflict, as well—there might be a better chance of avoiding the worst excesses of conflict in the first place.
We will perhaps think of places such as Afghanistan, where under the Taliban regime girls were excluded from education. Despite all the horrors that have taken place in that country, one great success that we should never cease to emphasise is that so many young women and girls in Afghanistan now have the opportunity to get an education in school and to go on to university. We should never underestimate the importance of that. However, there are other countries, which are not in such familiar conflict zones, where young women do not get access to education. There is so much more to do, particularly in parts of Africa. That is why DFID’s priority of concentrating aid on getting more girls into education across the world is a good one that many of us can support.
I have seen projects in places such as Ghana. In my constituency, I run the EYE project—it stands for Eco, Young and Engaged—and every year we have an eco-summit; recently we had our seventh. A very enthusiastic local man called Jib Hagan runs a charity called CARE—Collecting and Recycling Ecologically. He collects old computers that are being thrown out by local schools and businesses, takes them to Ghana and puts them in schools, pre-loaded with lots of information about how to be more environmentally friendly, how girls can get better education, engagement in the democratic process and so on. In return, he brings back lots of wonderful shopping bags made from old plastic carrier bags by some of the kids and the families out there.
A few years ago, we did a satellite link-up with the British Council between one school in a very impoverished area whose pupils were using those computers and the 250 local kids at my eco-summit. Incredibly, the technology worked. British kids and Ghanaian kids in completely contrasting environments spoke to each other, and understood and empathised with one another. It was a wonderful moment. To see the advantage that a bit of old technology that we were throwing out had brought to those kids—it was going to transform their educational opportunities and, I hope, keep that country out of conflict—was deeply humbling, and a very proud moment for those of us who had helped to make it happen.
Girls’ education is a particularly important part of preventing conflict in the future. I will draw on a couple of examples. I do not need to go over all the statistics about what is happening in Syria at the moment, but there are now 2.3 million children in Syria who are out of school or at risk of dropping out of school. Many hundreds of thousands are refugees outside Syria, as well. I am due to visit some Syrian refugee camps in Jordan later this month—they are vast camps—just as some years ago in Syria I visited what was then the largest refugee camp run by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees in the world. It was for Iraqis fleeing conflict who had gone to Damascus. I saw the great efforts of the UNHCR and other charities, which were trying to make sure that there was some normality in the lives of those kids. Getting some ongoing education for them was absolutely key. We must make sure that children who are displaced because of the horrible war dragging on in Syria can at least have some semblance of a normal childhood by continuing some form of education. The crisis in Syria has placed many women and girls at risk of violence, exploitation and insecurity. We often forget that.
Drawing on some of my previous trips, the very first parliamentary delegation that I went on, some 15 or so years ago, was to Ethiopia. That country had been riven by civil war under a particularly nasty Marxist regime. People had been driven out of their properties and sexual violence was part of the conflict. I remember visiting the Fistula hospital in Addis Ababa. It is a charity set up by some wonderful medics, where visiting clinicians go to help out. Daily I saw 12-year-old, 13-year-old and 14-year-old women—in some cases they had walked hundreds of miles—who had had bad experiences of giving birth because they had been too young. They were victims either of conflict, of misguided forced marriage or of being raped, effectively under the noses of their families in their villages, and had then been cast out. The only sanctuary and help they could get was by walking literally hundreds of miles to that wonderful hospital in Addis Ababa. The war in Ethiopia did huge damage but the country is, I hope, on a better path now.
I visited schools in the drought-affected areas, and, as I said earlier, kids were walking 10 miles or more each day to and from their homes to attend school, because it was such a big deal. They loved it. Nobody was playing hooky there; no truancy officer was needed. They went to school because their parents wanted them to go, as they could see it was a good thing. The kids themselves wanted to go to school and get an education, because that was their ladder out of poverty. It would stop them getting sucked into the conflict that so often happens in these impoverished zones, where people will fight over a little dustbowl of land.
I remember going to Mozambique—again, a country riven by vicious civil war over many, many years. There were many displaced kids who had fled parts of Mozambique and had gone to what they thought was the relative safety of South Africa, but had ended up in the sex trade. I worked with some hugely dedicated charities in Mozambique that were trying to rescue those kids.
A few years ago I went to Tajikistan, where I was taken to a school in Duschanbe, because I wanted to see some of the refugees from Afghanistan—there were a lot of them there. They asked me to give a class to kids of all different ages. They spoke wonderful English and were really enthusiastic about being there. They were there because they had been driven out of Afghanistan. There had been a big spate of kidnappings: brothers and sisters had been kidnapped; indeed, the teacher’s own children had been kidnapped and she had never seen them again. Tajikistan was giving them sanctuary, and had given them a school and some teaching resources, because the way forward is education.
There are many other subjects that we could mention in this debate. Forced marriages are another form of conflict, frankly. Female genital mutilation, of which we have been hearing so much recently, is another form of violence inflicted on children. It is not acceptable in the modern world, and we should not be afraid of saying so, whatever cultural differences might separate us from those people who say it is all right. It is not all right. It is not acceptable in this day and age. It is violence against girls and women.
There is no excuse for children being caught up in war and conflict. Children are different and special, and as adults we have a duty to do whatever we can to protect them, in this country or in any far-flung corner of the globe in which they are involved in conflict. In many of the countries that we are talking about, almost half the population is under the age of 18, so we are talking about huge numbers of people who are the future of those countries. If we do not get it right for those war-torn countries now, we will not get it right in the future. If they get back on the road to peace and prosperity, their kids might at last get an education and a chance to prosper.
Kerry McCarthy (Bristol East) (Lab)
I thank my hon. Friend the Member for East Lothian (Fiona O'Donnell) and the Backbench Business Committee for providing the opportunity to debate this subject. It is sadly not the best attended debate, but that is often the case on Thursday afternoons. However, the speeches have been genuinely excellent, if a little depressing in content.
We have heard much about the suffering of children who are affected by conflict and about the disproportionate, devastating and far-reaching impact that conflict has on children’s lives. Armed conflicts continue to take the young lives of thousands of children each year, whether as civilians or as child soldiers. My hon. Friend said that, whereas children used to be caught up in collateral damage, they are increasingly being targeted during conflict, whether to be recruited as child soldiers or as the victims of sexual violence.
When children are affected by conflict, it has a lasting legacy, even when countries emerge from that conflict. Some people have physical injuries because they have been maimed in the conflict. My hon. Friend spoke about the concern over the growth of indiscriminate explosive weapons such as cluster bombs. Other people are harmed psychologically and suffer trauma because of what they witnessed or took part in during their childhood. Quite often, people suffer because they have missed out on education or suffered health consequences. My hon. Friend the Member for Easington (Grahame M. Morris) spoke of the suffering and deprivation of the children living in Gaza.
Eight years ago, I had the opportunity to visit Uganda with Oxfam. It was the first overseas visit that I made as a Member of Parliament. What I saw there still resonates with me today. I went to the camps for internally displaced people in the north. That was at the beginning of the peace talks between the Government and the Lord’s Resistance Army, and there were about 1.5 million people living in the camps. I heard horrific stories about child soldiers who had been abducted by the Lord’s Resistance Army. More than 25,000 children, some as young as 10, were abducted, indoctrinated and forced to become child soldiers or, in the case of girls, soldiers’ wives. Some were forced to commit atrocities against their own families, such as killing or amputating the limbs of their parents, brothers or sisters, so that they lived in fear of returning to their villages and would not escape.
Being forced to become a child soldier does not necessarily condemn someone for the rest of their life. The hon. Member for Stafford (Jeremy Lefroy) talked about setting up a business in Sierra Leone that recruited former child soldiers. I commend him for that. If he has not read Ishmael Beah’s excellent book, “A Long Way Gone”, I recommend it to him. It is aptly described as “a child’s journey to hell and back”. Ishmael Beah was recruited at the age of 13 by the Government army in Sierra Leone, but was eventually released. It is the amazing story of how he was helped by a UNICEF rehabilitation centre. I think that he is now living in New York and has published his first novel. He is a compelling writer and the book offers inspiration and hope for those who are suffering a similar fate today.
I also pay tribute to Emmanuel Jal, who is a former child soldier from South Sudan. I was privileged to meet him at Glastonbury last year in his new incarnation as a rap artist and political activist. That just shows what people can achieve. The fact that those two men are out there as spokespeople for former child soldiers is incredibly inspiring.
Many Members have spoken about the importance of education. The hon. Member for Gainsborough (Sir Edward Leigh) was very specific in what he asked of the Minister. I look forward to what the Minister has to say about education often being neglected and underfunded in the humanitarian response to conflict. The hon. Gentleman argued that education should be included in the first phase of the humanitarian response and that at least 4% of the funding in such situations should be targeted at education. I look forward to hearing what the Minister has to say about that.
As we have heard, this is a timely debate, given the publication on Tuesday of the UN Secretary-General’s annual report on children and armed conflict, which documents 23 conflict situations in which children were recruited, maimed, killed or subjected to sexual violence and other grave human rights abuses in 2013. The UN reports that seven national armies recruited child soldiers, as did 50 armed groups in 14 countries. The Secretary-General concluded that last year was marked by “worrisome trends” that necessitate “a redoubling of efforts”, including
“a significant spike in the killing and maiming of children”.
There were 4,000 cases of the recruitment and use of children. Of course, those are only the documented cases and there could have been many more. The report also noted the continued detention of children allegedly involved with armed groups.
In Afghanistan, the Secretary-General documented the recruitment of boys as young as eight to be suicide bombers or sex slaves, or to manufacture and plant improvised explosive devices. In December, there were 196 boys in juvenile rehabilitation centres in Afghanistan on national security related charges. The UN has received several reports of alleged ill-treatment of child detainees, including sexual abuse. The number of child casualties in Afghanistan increased by 30% last year and the UN verified reports of sexual violence against girls and boys committed not only by the Taliban and the Haqqani network, but by the national police. Children were also affected by attacks on hospitals and schools. Schools were attacked on at last 73 occasions, resulting in at least 11 children losing their lives.
War Child reports that one in seven Afghan children will not reach their fifth birthday. There are no social services to protect the poorest and most vulnerable children. One in three children under the age of five is moderately or severely underweight. I could go on with the horrific statistics that are revealed by the report. Some 49% of Afghanistan’s internally displaced people are under 18. That all demonstrates the need to maintain a focus on Afghanistan after the withdrawal of the international security assistance force.
As we heard from my hon. Friend the Member for East Lothian, the Central African Republic presents one of the most pressing challenges. The recruitment of child soldiers in that country is described as “endemic”. I have been contacted by many constituents, as I am sure have other Members, who support the Save the Children campaign for the more than 1 million children who are desperate for life-saving assistance. Save the Children has highlighted the threat of sexual violence in the CAR and I know that the Minister has focused on that issue. Indeed, I was pleased to attend his “Voices of Children in Conflict” event at the global summit to end sexual violence, as did my hon. Friend the Member for East Lothian, where we heard more about the efforts to help the estimated 6,000 child soldiers in the CAR, 40% of whom are girls and are more at risk of sexual violence. As the Secretary-General summarised it, children are suffering “abominable atrocities”. We have heard of cases of boys being beheaded, for example.
I understand that the international contact group on the CAR is due to meet next week. I would be grateful if the Minister updated us on his priorities for that, and on what he thinks can be achieved. He will know that Save the Children has called for the appointment of a special envoy and the deployment of UK experts.
In the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the picture is a little more mixed. Some 30,000 child soldiers have been demobilised, according to the World Bank’s figures from 2011. There has been progress in prosecuting the people responsible for recruiting child soldiers. The UN has reported that 910 children were recruited in 2013 to be used as combatants or for supporting roles in the camps. Most of the girls who were recruited were subjected to sexual slavery. The UN was able to verify 209 cases of conflict-related sexual violence. UNICEF has done excellent work to help nearly 5,000 children who had been associated with the conflict. It is imperative that such work continues.
My hon. Friend the Member for Easington made a powerful speech about his personal experiences of visiting Israel and the occupied territories. I am contacted regularly by constituents who are concerned by the plight of Palestinian children in particular. As we have heard, by the end of December, 154 boys were being held in Israeli military detention, most in pre-trial detention. There is concern at the fact that that more than 1,000 children were arrested by Israeli security forces last year. As my hon. Friend said, that conflict is a tragedy for the children on both sides and for the families on both sides who have lost children, who have seen their children suffer or who have had to watch their children grow up with the ongoing conflict, perhaps being stoned on the way to school, suffering abuse or living in fear of rocket attacks. I look forward to hearing what the Minister has to say about that.
Grahame M. Morris
While my hon. Friend is on that point, I would like to ask her opinion on the specific recommendations of the report that the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and Baroness Scotland commissioned on the treatment of Palestinian child detainees, which the Israeli authorities have largely ignored.
Kerry McCarthy
I have read the powerful “Children in Military Custody” report, to which my hon. Friend refers. Obviously, the Minister is not in a position to take it forward with the Israeli authorities, but the recommendations should be acted on.
Burma, too, is an ongoing concern. We had an excellent debate in Westminster Hall a week or two ago about the continuing conflict, particularly as it affects ethnic minorities in Burma, especially in Rakhine state, but also in other areas where it remains a problem. Given the time available, and that fact that we documented it in some detail in that debate, I will move on. However, at the end of the sexual violence summit, the Minister said that addressing the problem of children in conflict was a personal priority for him. Will he therefore tell us whether the training offered by the UK to the Burmese military was conditional on ending the use of child soldiers? There is also the problem of the prevalence of sexual violence in the Burmese military and the immunity enjoyed by the army. Given that we are providing some support for the Burmese army, it is important that we flag up the use of child soldiers with Burma.
As we have heard, the devastating crisis in Syria has created more than 1.2 million child refugees. I pay tribute to the work of my right hon. Friend the Member for Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath (Mr Brown) on ensuring that children are not the forgotten victims of the conflict. Several Members paid tribute to his Adjournment debate last night on the abduction of the Nigerian schoolgirls and the need for safe schools there. I was a present at a debate that he held a couple of months ago about education for children, particularly displaced Syrian refugee children in the camps in Lebanon. He brought forward an amazing initiative. He had been talking to the Department for International Development that day and the Minister said that he would act upon the former Prime Minister’s suggestion for sharing school time: there are two shifts in a school, and the Lebanese children would attend for part of the day and the Syrian refugee children would attend for the rest of the day. Several hundred thousand children would benefit from that initiative, and I commend my right hon. Friend for that, and his work on addressing the problem of Boko Haram and the Nigerian schoolgirls. Boko Haram was added to the Secretary-General’s list published this week, and many other countries, such as Sudan, South Sudan and Somalia were also included.
Slightly more positively, the national army in Chad has met all the requirements of its action plan and has been removed from the list of those recruiting children, which is good news. That shows the difference that the UN can make. It is imperative that the international community pushes for, first and foremost of course, an end to all those devastating conflicts, but also for special consideration for how children can be protected, and for these countries to work with the UN on the development and implementation of action plans.
The examples we have heard today demonstrate the multiple and severe ways in which children are affected by conflict, necessitating a multifaceted, variable and enduring response from the international community. The UN Children, Not Soldiers campaign launched this March works in Afghanistan, Chad, DRC, Burma, Sudan, South Sudan and Yemen to end and prevent the recruitment of child soldiers by Government security forces by 2016. I would be grateful if the Minister set out how the UK is supporting this, and what discussions there have been on deploying child protection experts. It is important, too, as I am sure that the Minister agrees, that the FCO provides robust protections for human rights defenders speaking up for children who are denied a voice.
I am sorry—I am making an awful lot of demands on the Minister in the time he has—but it would be helpful to have an update on how enforcement of the arms trade treaty could protect children and deter the recruitment of child soldiers. I am sure that the Minister will, when he speaks, reiterate the personal commitment he has shown to helping children in conflict. He will know that the FCO has our full support for its work to end sexual violence.
I hope that the Minister can tell us a little more about the concrete steps taken at the summit last month to protect some of the most vulnerable children around the world from such appalling crimes and to ensure that survivors can access age-appropriate support, given the particular difficulties children will face in speaking out about the sexual violence that they have endured.
Today’s debate has also highlighted DFID’s role in working to secure access to education, health care and humanitarian assistance. I have not spent so much time talking about education because several hon. Members have done more than justice to that topic today. It is obviously incredibly important.
I conclude by thanking my hon. Friend the Member for East Lothian again for leading the debate. She understandably cares passionately about the subject and I commend her for her efforts to ensure that the specific needs and vulnerabilities of children in conflict are not overlooked or subsumed in a homogenous approach that neglects the complexities of these atrocities.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs (Mark Simmonds)
I congratulate the hon. Member for East Lothian (Fiona O'Donnell) on securing this important debate and on the passionate, informed and articulate way in which she introduced it. She was right to highlight some of the complexities of these important issues, and I will come to some of the very specific points that she asked about later.
It needs to be said that the subject has been at the forefront of the Government’s agenda, coming as it does after the recent global summit to end sexual violence in conflict. The hon. Lady was right to congratulate the Foreign Secretary and all the officials who were involved in organising the summit, which was the largest ever held on the issue. It set in motion a series of unprecedented practical steps and commitments, such as the first ever international protocol on how to document and investigate sexual violence in conflict, and a statement of action, uniting Governments, UN agencies, civil society, experts and survivors in a shared determination to tackle sexual violence.
When it comes to children’s lives, all efforts must be made. That is why I am personally committed to tackling this issue, not least as the father of three children. I am concentrating my efforts on raising awareness and helping to prevent the recruitment and use of children in armed conflict, focusing on demobilising child soldiers and preventing sexual violence against children, working with multilateral agencies and encouraging those with successful track records to assist those who still have challenges.
During visits to Somalia, South Sudan and the DRC, I have witnessed at first hand the devastation that conflict causes not just to children, but to whole communities. I have also seen the excellent work of NGOs such as War Child, which make a real difference to children’s lives on the ground. I take the opportunity to join other Members of all parties in acknowledging and thanking all the NGOs involved in the issue for their tireless commitment and energy.
As several hon. Members highlighted, on the fringes of the ESVC summit, I held and spoke at a meeting on children and armed conflict in front of a knowledgeable and large audience. There were powerful testimonies from a survivor of the war in Sierra Leone and a child soldier from Uganda, both of whom spoke bravely and articulately about their experiences. Closer to home, a very brave lady, who was affected by the conflict in Bosnia, spoke. That collectively underlined the grave dangers that children face during conflict and the need for us to take urgent action to prevent this from affecting a greater number of children around the world.
In addition to that fringe meeting in the ESVC summit, I also brought together Ministers from the DRC and Somalia along with countries that have experience of successfully tackling the issue. My hon. Friend the Member for Stafford (Jeremy Lefroy) rightly mentioned Sierra Leone, whose Minister underlined the importance of disarmament, demobilisation and reintegration programmes to ensure that children have crucial access to education and training. As other hon. Members have highlighted, that is vital in ensuring that children become less vulnerable to recruitment and sexual violence. As the hon. Member for Bristol East (Kerry McCarthy) rightly said, those who have made progress more recently, for example, Chad, have a significant role to play in assisting others.
At this stage let me tackle head-on the point made by my hon. Friend the Member for Stafford about the role of the United Nations. It has been 15 years since the Security Council recognised children in armed conflict as an issue of international peace and security, with the adoption of resolution 1261. As my hon. Friend the Member for East Worthing and Shoreham (Tim Loughton) rightly pointed out, the United Kingdom continues to play a leading role at the United Nations and internationally on that issue. I was therefore pleased that under the UK’s presidency of the Security Council in July last year, the UN adopted a strong presidential statement to protect the robust mandate of the UN special representative for children affected by armed conflict, as well as introducing steps for tackling persistent perpetrators. That was followed by UN Security Council resolution 2143 in March this year, which outlines practical steps for combating violations against children, while drawing attention to attacks on schools.
I commend the efforts of the United Nations in tackling that issue, and in particular the excellent UN special representative of the Secretary-General for the initiative Children, not Soldiers, which is designed to end the recruitment and use of children by Government armed forces in conflict by 2016. As a result of the SRSG’s excellent work in that area, more than 20 countries have agreed action plans with the UN, and to halt the recruitment and use of children—including, most recently, the Government of Yemen. Those action plans play a crucial role in putting pressure on the perpetrators of those abhorrent violations against children.
In Africa, as I mentioned, we have seen progress in Chad with a completion of its action plan, and a recommitment from South Sudan this month to the action plan it signed in 2012. We must be clear, however, that this issue does not only affect African countries. As we saw in the Secretary-General’s annual report on children and armed conflict, which was released on Tuesday, grave violations have been committed against children in 23 countries, including Iraq, Syria and Burma, and all those countries have been rightly mentioned in this debate.
In Syria and the wider region, 5.5 million children are in need of education, and more than half are out of school. There is danger of a “lost generation” of Syrian children experiencing trauma, displacement and missing out on education, which is the cornerstone for brighter futures. Their lives have been disrupted and potentially wasted. That is why the UK is supporting UNICEF and others in Syria and the region through the No Lost Generation initiative, which aims to increase support for education, psychosocial support, and protection for Syrian children. In addition to education, support partners are running child-friendly spaces that provide a safe place for Syrian children to play and study. This is therefore a global issue that requires a global solution. I highlight to the House the importance that the Prime Minister and Government attach to the girl summit that will be held in July in the United Kingdom, which will hopefully mobilise domestic and international efforts to end female genital mutilation, and early and forced marriage.
Fiona O'Donnell
To return briefly to the Minister’s comments about Lebanon and Jordan, does he recognise a possible future problem in that our aid is supporting refugees whereas the Jordanian and Lebanese populations are struggling as rent prices are forced up? We must guard against that possible tension in the future.
Mark Simmonds
The hon. Lady is right to make that point and there are huge challenges, primarily because of the scale of what is happening in Syria and the displacement of people, both inside Syria and across geopolitical boundaries. In a moment I will detail some of the support that the Department for International Development is providing to people still within Syria, and those who are outside.
Let me use this opportunity to respond to some of the important points that the hon. Lady raised. Hopefully, she will be aware that the UK is an active member of the UN working group on children and armed conflict, and right at the forefront of the international response to issues of child soldiers and child protection. The UK pushes at multilateral level for the inclusion of child protection in peacekeeping responses through UN mandates, both as they are renewed and initial resolutions. Child protection advisers are currently deployed through the UN missions in Mali, the Central African Republic, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, South Sudan, Somalia, Haiti, Côte d’Ivoire, Darfur, Iraq and Afghanistan.
The hon. Lady was right to ask forcefully about child protection training for front-line staff, and the UK is providing £232,000 for the UN Department of Peacekeeping Operations to develop pre-deployment child protection training modules for military and police peacekeepers who encounter children affected by armed conflict. She mentioned the draft Lucens guidelines, and the Department welcomes that those underline existing rules for international humanitarian law to promote better understanding and implementation of the Geneva conventions and their protocols. The draft guidelines form part of our wider protection of civilians approach. A decision on UK Government support for those guidelines needs cross-Whitehall agreement, and we are engaging with our colleagues across Departments.
My hon. Friend the Member for Gainsborough (Sir Edward Leigh) made an excellent speech that articulately and strongly highlighted the terrible events and crimes that affect children. I know he has been to the DRC, and he will therefore be aware of the funding that the Foreign and Commonwealth Office provides to a project in that country led by War Child. I recently visited Goma and saw for myself the excellent work being done by the UN on disarmament, demobilisation and the reintegration of children back into communities. It must also be acknowledged that authorities in the DRC have made good progress in removing children from the ranks of the Congolese army, and they are significantly committed to implementing their action plan, which they discussed in the ESVC summit and the fringe meetings that took place.
My hon. Friend also, quite rightly, mentioned the importance of education, and as part of the package to support the Nigerian Government after the terrible events that have occurred in northern Nigeria, DFID, along with the United States Agency for International Development, is hoping to put in place policies and funding that will draw back into education more than 1 million children in northern Nigeria. DFID is the largest bilateral education donor. Some 11% of its funding goes on education aid, half of which is committed to being spent in fragile and conflicted-affected states. The UK funds partners to provide education supply kits in refugee camps in Syria, and is committed to providing packs of textbooks to benefit 300,000 Syrian children and to funding programmes in Syria to provide basic education. I inform my hon. Friend the Member for Oxford West and Abingdon (Nicola Blackwood) that an open working group at the UN will conclude a report on post-2015 goals for discussion at the General Assembly. Education will clearly form an integral part of that, and those discussions are ongoing.
The hon. Member for Easington (Grahame M. Morris) made a powerful contribution discussing primarily the challenges that are raging in the middle east, particularly as they relate to the Israel-Palestine conflict. I reiterate that we utterly condemn the appalling murders of both Israeli and Palestinian children, and we stand ready to help bring those responsible to justice. We are concerned about the recent increase in violence in Gaza and the risks to children. Rockets coming from Gaza into Israel must stop. We call on Israel, Egypt and the Palestinian Authority to work together to allow for the legal use of the Gaza strip for innocent people. I also inform the hon. Gentleman that DFID has a number of initiatives to protect children specifically in the region, including psychosocial support and clearing schools of unexploded devices.
My hon. Friend the Member for Stafford has knowledge of, passion for and interest in Africa. He was right to highlight the appalling actions there, including women being raped and then prosecuted, and ending up in prison, as I have seen for myself, and the extraordinary challenge of child soldiers. He was right to suggest that progress can and is being made in reconciliation and rehabilitation. Like the hon. Member for Bristol East (Kerry McCarthy), I saw for myself the displaced peoples camps up in Gulu in northern Uganda—it sounds as though we were there at a similar time—and the extraordinary work being done by NGOs such as Oxfam and Christian Aid, not just on assimilating people back into communities, but on forgiveness in such difficult and challenging areas.
My hon. Friend may also be interested to know of the significant progress that has been made by Chad, Sierra Leone and Liberia on stopping recruitment in the first place by putting in place policies on, for example, birth registration. The safer schools initiative is important. Hopefully, he is aware that the UK has invested in that initiative in northern Nigeria, which is being ably led by our ex-Prime Minister.
My hon. Friend the Member for East Worthing and Shoreham (Tim Loughton) was right to crystallise some of the horrific events we have seen recently. Hopefully, he is aware of the support that the UK Government are providing to the Nigerian Government specifically to deal with the challenges in northern Nigeria. He was right to highlight the fact that the UK is leading in that area, whether on ending impunity, building capacity, training, assistance for rehabilitation or allocating funding.
My hon. Friend was correct, as he concluded his remarks, to highlight the importance of forced marriage and female genital mutilation. In July, the Prime Minister will host the UK’s first girl summit, but I should take this opportunity to be unequivocal on the UK position on FGM and forced marriages. In the UK, both are criminal offences, and they are child abuse when minors are involved. We are fully committed to tackling those issues, for example through the work of the joint Foreign and Commonwealth Office and Home Office forced marriage unit, and through providing funding for NGOs.
The hon. Member for Bristol East, who spoke for the Opposition, was right to mention the challenges and the horrific events that have taken place in the Central African Republic. We have contributed £23 million to the CAR, providing emergency health care and support for hundreds of thousands of people. The CAR interim president has rightly referred the situation in the country to the International Criminal Court, which has the scope to investigate the allegations, but the situation is dire, particularly outside the capital, and we are doing everything we can to ensure that UN Security Council resolution 2149, which was adopted earlier this year, is deployed by 15 September.
I recognise the hon. Lady’s points on Burma, but I want to ensure that the House understands that the Burmese Government are committed to ending the practice that she mentioned, building on the progress since signing the action plan with the UN in June 2012. Some child soldiers have been released in Burma, but we are working closely with the Burmese authorities to ensure that releases continue.
All parties to armed conflict, state and non-state alike, must abide by international law. The protection of civilians during armed conflict is a priority for the United Kingdom and forms an integral part of our building stability overseas strategy. We therefore remain committed to making progress. I believe that such abuse of children, wherever it is in the world, but particularly in conflict areas, should not and must not be tolerated. The words “children” and “soldiers” should not and do not belong in the same sentence.
Fiona O'Donnell
I thank all hon. Members for taking part in the debate. As my hon. Friend the Member for Bristol East (Kerry McCarthy) said, we might not have had quantity, but we have certainly had quality in the contributions. The hon. Member for Stafford (Jeremy Lefroy) was right to say that the situation regarding protecting children in conflict is getting worse. I was pleased that my hon. Friend drew attention to the UN report published on Tuesday that makes that clear.
There was hope in the debate. If we had had a debate before the Syria crisis, we would not have emphasised education as much as we have today. The hon. Member for Gainsborough (Sir Edward Leigh), in an in-depth, considered and informed contribution—it was not lengthy—told us of his personal experience of the benefits that education can bring. It is not an add-on, but an essential part of our response to humanitarian crisis. The difference is that the Syrian refugees are not people for whom conflict was the last straw. Those people had quite good lives by middle eastern standards—in many cases, they are professional people.
For children who have seen and experienced things that no child should ever see, there is not a loss of hope, because children have a wonderful quality—resilience. All we need to do is give them that bridge to a life that was good. That can mean education or an attachment to one person in their lives who makes them feel valued. I presume the hon. Member for East Worthing and Shoreham (Tim Loughton) was talking about going to the Zaatari camp. One amazing thing that struck me is that families there now have a supermarket to go to. It would be the most amazing therapeutic experience for a child to be in a supermarket trolley, because it is a bridge to a life in which that child was a happy child. We need to offer children all the time those bridges and opportunities to a better and happier time, and to a childhood.
I thank the Minister for the work that he and his Department are doing. He has the support of Members on both sides of the House. Today, it seems that we are all comrades.
Question put and agreed to.
Resolved,
That this House has considered the matter of protecting children in conflict.
Social Mobility/Child Poverty Strategy
(10 years, 4 months ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Hazel Blears (Salford and Eccles) (Lab)
I beg to move,
That this House has considered social mobility and the child poverty strategy.
I was tremendously moved and impressed by the depth of knowledge of my hon. Friend the Member for East Lothian (Fiona O'Donnell) and the other Members who contributed to the previous debate. It was a pleasure to listen to their contributions.
The second debate this afternoon is also on a very important topic on which there is a great deal of cross-party consensus. We may differ on some issues, but, like protecting children in conflict, social mobility raises a sense of passion, commitment and determination to improve things, which should be a matter for celebration among hon. Members. I look forward to their contributions.
I thank my fellow members of the all-party group on social mobility, some of whom are in the Chamber, although Baroness Tyler cannot be here because she is a Member of the other place. I pay tribute to her work on character and resilience, and on the manifesto she has published. I also pay tribute to the in-depth academic and practical information she has drawn together, which almost gives a new perspective on social mobility, and which we have debated for a considerable period. I will mention later a couple of the points she makes.
I also thank Alan Milburn, chair of the commission on poverty and social mobility. All the members of the commission are doing a tremendous job on behalf of the House. In the introduction to his “State of the Nation” report, he says he was appointed to hold the Government’s feet to the fire. He is pleased about that, and he has not pulled any punches in his recommendations. He has excellent people with him on the commission. In my view, they make not only academic observations, but practical recommendations not only for the Government but for employers, hon. Members, parents, families and citizens of our country. For the Government, taking the step to appoint the commission was brave, because having an external body that holds their feet to the fire is not always the most comfortable situation, as I can testify as a former Minister. However, external bodies give different views, information and perspectives. The report has therefore been tremendously helpful for all of us. The work that has been done is absolutely meticulous. The research conducted means that we now have a body of evidence on child poverty and social mobility that we did not have previously. That has been translated into pretty accessible language that I think most people can understand. The commission has given us a new impetus to take these issues forward.
The question we will all be asking ourselves at the outset is this: why does social mobility matter? Why is it the subject of regular debates in the House? Why, increasingly, are employers concerned about it? Why does it affect every bit of our community?
For me, this is a very personal issue. My mum and dad left school at 14. They did not have the opportunity to stay on into further education, let alone have access to higher education. They were absolutely determined that their children would have the opportunities that they had not had. My mum probably coined the phrase “Education, education, education” long before our previous Prime Minister did. That has been the sense for many years in our country: the people who did not have the educational opportunities, money and resources to pursue their own dreams wanted to make sure that the next generation would have that chance.
My mum—I just want to place this on record as a tribute to my mum—won a scholarship to the Royal Academy of Arts when she was 14 years old. She was an immensely talented artist. Her father was at the war. She came from a very poor background and did not have the money to take up the scholarship in London. She was, therefore, unable to go. If anything, that absolutely redoubled her commitment to education. She took her first O-level at the age of 38. She took an A-level in English in her 40s. Her lifelong love of education was absolutely apparent. In our lives, sometimes the people in our families are our inspiration to try to make things better. She was certainly my inspiration.
I think the issue matters because it is about fairness. Most of us are committed to fairness and ensuring that, as far as possible, people have a platform to succeed and to reach their potential. It is also about merit—a characteristic that is deeply embedded in most of us in this country and in countries across the world. That sense of a meritocracy—that if someone is good enough they will be able to get on in life and break through barriers—is a really powerful driver.
It is also, perhaps in more prosaic terms, a financial issue. Research undertaken by the Sutton Trust states that if we do not tackle the issues of social mobility, the subsequent waste of talent and skills could cost this country £140 billion by 2050. There is an ideological justification, but also an absolutely compelling practical and financial justification too.
Where are we at the moment? I am afraid that the report does not paint a very happy picture:
“We see a danger that social mobility – having risen in the middle of the last century then flat-lined towards the end – could go into reverse in the first part of this century.”
It is part of Britain’s DNA that everyone should have a fair chance in life, but at the moment Alan Milburn warns that Britain could become “a divided country”. Those comments should make us all take a step back, reflect on where we are and redouble our efforts to make sure that the situation does not continue, and does not continue to get worse, in the coming years.
There has been some extremely good research by the Sutton Trust and I want to outline a few sharp bullet points that might help to put the debate in perspective. The state we are in now in the 21st century, in a modern industrialised, relatively wealthy affluent nation, causes us all a great deal of concern. Children in the poorest fifth of families are already nearly a year behind children from middle-income families when they start school at the age of five. I see this in my constituency day after day. I see children coming to school with speech and language problems—they are not even ready to access education. I see children, because of difficult family backgrounds, falling behind almost immediately when they come to school because they do not have the back-up from home and the community.
At the other end of the scale, 3,000 state-educated pupils achieve the A-level grades necessary to enter the country’s most selective universities, but who, for a variety of reasons, do not end up there. There are 3,000 children who are good enough academically, but are not able to take that next step into higher education. Four private schools and one elite college sent more students to Oxbridge over three years than 2,000 schools and colleges across the United Kingdom. State school pupils, when they do get there, are far more likely to get a 2:1 or a first class degree at university than their private school counterparts with the same A-level results. It is therefore not that children from working class backgrounds are not capable of achieving some extremely high academic outcomes; it is that there are barriers in the system that prevent them from achieving their potential.
Those are worrying facts. We clearly need to take action to ensure, as far as possible, that we get rid of the barriers that are not about how clever, bright, determined or hard-working pupils are. They are systemic barriers that have dogged us for generations. We are making some progress. I acknowledge that Government action is taking us along, but it is so slow and so inch-by-inch that I think there is more we can do more quickly to make that happen.
Alan Milburn, in a very important previous report, raised the ability of children to access professions. He talked about the rising use of unpaid internships to access many professions, whether law, journalism, fashion, couture and, dare I say it, politics. Internships increasingly became the way to access professions, but they were denied to many young people from less-affluent backgrounds. Working for free does not come cheap. Most of the internships that provide access to professions are based here in London. If people cannot afford accommodation and do not have the bank of mum and dad, it is virtually impossible to come to London and take them up.
Many companies have made progress on internships in the past few years. The social mobility business compact, working with employers, has begun to highlight the fact that offering long-term unpaid internships is utterly unfair. It is a bad practice and it should not be carried out by the best firms in our country. We now have a whole range of companies providing first-class paid internships, with proper development opportunities. Companies such as KPMG, Ernst and Young, the British Academy of Film and Television Arts, and Fujitsu, which operates in my area, are offering paid internships and developing young people’s skills and talents. CH2M Hill, a massive engineering firm, has just set up a scheme for paid internships, particularly to draw more women into science, engineering and consulting. Johnson & Johnson, the medical and pharmaceutical industries and BP are just some of the examples I know about where firms have changed their practice. In the past, they may have had unpaid internships, but now that practice is no longer acceptable. That is making a key difference to young people, not just in attaining education but in providing the access to professions and jobs that will ensure that they earn a decent income and can have an exciting future.
We used to have a lot of unpaid internships in the House some years ago. I am delighted to say that with the advent of the Speaker’s Parliamentary Placement Scheme, which I helped to establish with the 100% backing of Mr Speaker, I think and hope the number of MPs who take people on unpaid internships can now be counted on the fingers of one hand—maybe just one or two Members. We all now recognise that that might have been the culture in the past, but excluding young people from working-class backgrounds from getting into politics is not just unfair to them: it is bad for our politics. We have a lot of complaints about the political class. I did some research. In 1979, 3% of MPs of all parties came from that career transmission belt of being special advisers working for Ministers and so on. At the last election, it was nearly 25%. We have a real problem getting people from diverse backgrounds to Parliament. I am pleased to say that Mr Speaker’s scheme is making a significant difference. I am grateful to the companies that have supported the scheme. I am beginning a dialogue with the Government on how we can ensure that it is sustainable in the long term. I am extremely encouraged by the all-party commitment to the scheme, which has been endorsed by the three party leaders. That is evidence of consensus across the House. I hope we can achieve sustainability.
There are problems at the beginning of life and with early-years development. There are problems with A-level achievement, problems with access to university and problems with access to professions. These are all systemic barriers.
However, as we get better at tackling each of those issues, the problem seems to settle in different areas. An example of that arose from a case in my constituency involving postgraduate education. At first I wondered why postgraduate education was a social mobility issue: surely, I thought, by the time people reached that stage, they would have gone through the system, obtained their degrees and so forth. However, when a young man in my constituency, Damien Shannon, applied to Oxford for a place on a postgraduate course, he was required to meet certain conditions. Not only did he have to find £11,000 for tuition fees; he also had to find just over £10,000 to cover living expenses, and he had to prove that the necessary liquid cash was available to him. The “living expenses” included entertaining, dining in hall, and being able to sustain an “Oxford lifestyle”.
Damien comes from Salford, and he is a very bright young man. He decided that, one, the requirement was not fair, and two, he could not possibly meet it. He could get a career development loan for the tuition fees, but there was no way in which he could get a loan to enable him to have an “Oxford lifestyle” in the form of dining and entertaining. He therefore decided to bring a legal challenge, and we have worked on that together for the last 18 months. I initiated a very good debate about the matter in the House, to which the Minister for Universities and Science responded. We had endless conversations with Oxford university, which, I am delighted to say, has now changed its admission requirements for postgraduate education, and has abandoned the requirement for applicants to show that they have sufficient living expenses.
Damien has taken up his place at Oxford. He is absolutely delighted, and he is doing really well. I want to place on record my admiration for a brave, clever, determined young man who was not going to let the system beat him. I have no doubt that he will have an absolutely brilliant career in the future. However, we really cannot have that in this day and age, in our top universities. We cannot allow them to hark back to another age when people may have spent slightly more time punting than they spent attending lectures and gaining academic achievements. There is still a wide range of barriers, and I think that we still have a long way to go.
The report also deals with poverty and poverty pay. Many children are finding it very difficult to achieve in the same way as their colleagues because of poverty. The Government will tell me that many more families are now in work, and that the number of completely workless households has been dramatically reduced. However, there is still poverty in families who are out there working hard, doing all the things that we ask them to do, playing by the rules and supporting the system.
The problem of the cost of living and low incomes is a really stubborn one. We need to deal with it, because that poverty is feeding through to children. It is very difficult for them to have a platform for achievement when they are living in difficult housing conditions with no room to do their homework, their parents are extremely low paid, and life is a real struggle. The report recommends that the minimum wage should be increased, and that we should try to give people access to the living wage. I think that that is the least that we can do if we want to give children and young people a chance to get on in life.
Another significant issue raised in the report is one to which I referred earlier. The issue of character and resilience is very new in this area. In the past, people used to say that children at private schools somehow acquired the character and resilience that they were taught in that environment, whereas children at state schools did not have the “grit” that is, increasingly, a foundation for success. As was shown in the “Character and Resilience Manifesto” produced by my noble Friend Baroness Tyler, that quality of character and resilience is not something that people are born with. It is not necessarily in their genetic make-up, and they do not have it because they come from the best families in the land. Character and resilience can be taught.
I have been fascinated to learn that character and resilience, and the ability to get on in life, are about three things. First, one must have a work ethic and be prepared to focus, concentrate and apply one’s mind to a task for a long period. That can be taught. Secondly, one must be prepared to accept deferred gratification and be prepared to invest for the longer term, rather than wanting success immediately. That means saying “If I work now, I will get results. I may get them a little further down the line, but it will be absolutely worth it.” Thirdly, in the context of social mobility, one must have the ability to bounce back from adversity. There is an increasing body of evidence to suggest that those three things can be taught, and they are crucial to the personal ability of someone to succeed in life.
Let me ask the Government specifically to look into what we are doing in our state school system to inculcate in youngsters from tough backgrounds the ability to work hard, focus and concentrate, the ability to accept deferred gratification—it will not all come now—and that essential resilience and ability to bounce back from adversity. If we do that, we shall be doing something which I think will be sustainable in the long term. Rather than developing a programme or a specific initiative, we shall be training our young people to recognise that it is their responsibility as well to acquire the tools that they need in order to make progress.
Alan Milburn has made some very interesting practical recommendations about what the Government could do in regard to educational attainment in particular. He refers to, for instance, the need to ensure that we can have the best teachers in the worst schools. We have talked about that for a long time. I remember, before I was in the Government, looking at our manifesto and asking “Is there a way in which we can reward the teachers who are prepared to come and teach in difficult inner-city schools where life can be really tough?” We have experimented with various schemes and programmes such as Teach First, but I think we must recognise that teaching in some of our most challenged schools is an extremely hard job. I should like to see something in the system, rather than a scheme or a project, which recognises that and rewards teachers for doing it.
Mr Graham Stuart (Beverley and Holderness) (Con)
The right hon. Lady is making a powerful speech, and I think that she and Alan Milburn are absolutely right to focus on the need to embed those incentives in the system. The combination of the pupil premium and the changes in accountability are systemic approaches to provide the wherewithal to reward people for coming in to teach in those schools, and to ensure that we do not have an accountability system whereby those in more prosperous areas are less likely to be found wanting than those in areas where the educational fight is fiercest.
Hazel Blears
Obviously I support the pupil premium, because it is a way of putting a substantial amount of money into the system to be targeted at the children and young people who need the most help. However, I have to say that I have been very disappointed by the monitoring and the accountability of the pupil premium. I know of many schools where—unsurprisingly, at a time of really tight budgets—it is being used to back-fill what could be described as conventional posts, rather than being targeted at the children for whom it was designed. The challenge for us is to ensure that the money is used in the way in which it was intended, to raise the achievements of the poorest children to the level of, at least, the average achievements of the rest. I shall refer to some schemes that have been able to do that, but let me say to the Minister now that better monitoring of the use of the pupil premium is essential.
Alan Milburn also talks about action by employers, and refers to the living wage, apprenticeships and fair internships. Those are practical measures, and if we can persuade all employers to adopt them, we shall make a difference. Alan also makes what I think is quite a brave suggestion; he is well known for being prepared to be brave. He talks of breaking the last “taboo”, which he says is parenting.
I am a former Home Office Minister who was responsible for the antisocial behaviour programme, the respect programme and the beginning of the troubled families programme. The Government are continuing some of that work, but at the time it was highly controversial territory: why were the Government telling parents how to bring up their children? However, all of us will know from our constituencies that in some families the responsibility for setting boundaries, and for supporting children and encouraging them to do their very best, simply is not there. I believe that there is still a huge gap in that regard. There should be more support for parents to enable them to do for their children what they no doubt want to do, but for various reasons are incapable of doing. All politicians should be as brave as the commission has been in saying that we need not just to talk about that problem, but to take action on it, before the family are so dysfunctional that we have to have a troubled families programme, with all the intrusion and intervention that that entails.
What practically can we do through early intervention? In his most recent Ofsted report, Michael Wilshaw said that the big problems of educational under-attainment have moved from the inner cities to some very poor coastal areas, remote areas and suburban areas. I was fascinated to see how that has happened. A lot has been said about the London challenge and how that has transformed schools in London. When I came into Parliament in 1997, about 22% of children in Salford were getting five A to C grades. Now the figure is 76%. There has been a fantastic transformation in the quality of the schools in my inner-city constituency. That is where the focus has been. The big problems of social mobility are now in communities that have not had access to such provision and are not well-off—they are quite poor and almost not on the radar. Michael Wilshaw has done us all a great service in highlighting that. He said:
“Today, many of the disadvantaged children performing least well in school can be found in leafy suburbs, market towns or seaside resorts.
There are stark consequences for our nation if we do not act with sufficient urgency.”
That reinforces the view I took when I was Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government that there were pockets of deprivation in otherwise affluent areas and that, for reasons to do with the data and the information we had, they were not addressed. What are the Minister’s plans to ensure that children in those areas receive the attention that they need?
I find it fascinating that, if there is early intervention in schools through a specific programme where there is evidence that it can make a difference, the transformation can be dramatic. I want to single out two schemes of which I have personal experience. The Place to Be scheme operates in six primary schools in my city and helps families and children who are in the most difficult circumstances imaginable. Many of the children’s parents have problems with alcohol and drug addiction. Many of the children are not able to go to school sometimes because of family difficulties. Place to Be provides a support and counselling service. It has been operating with the pupil premium—that is the reason that money has been provided. I have seen evaluated evidence that is incredibly impressive. The rate of progress of the children in the worst families is now the same as the average rate of progress among the other children in those schools. It is almost a miracle, dare I say it. The head teachers who chose to use the pupil premium for that project have done a great service to their community.
The Shine on Saturdays scheme does Saturday schools. It does Serious Fun on Saturdays. It has a fantastic evidence base. Owing to the work it does on Saturdays, it is helping the most deprived communities. In many places, people will say, “We do not have the money to do that extra programme, on top of what we are already doing.” I ask the Minister to consider carefully—I have spoken to the Secretary of State about the matter—the possibility of mobilising social investment to fund such community-based interventions, which are able to make a dramatic impact and have a strong, rigorous evidence base. That social investment can be repaid through the savings that we make when those children get on in life, rather than causing myriad problems, including welfare dependency and criminal action, which cost us a fortune. It is an excellent way to invest for the long term. Now that we have an evidence base, we have a responsibility to find out how we can spread that across the country. I will declare my unpaid interest as a member of Big Society Capital’s advisory board. The things I have seen, which can be done if we mobilise private investment for public good, are impressive and I ask the Minister to take that into account in his closing remarks.
I had a couple of other questions for the Minister; I think I have raised most of the questions that I had. I have no doubt that he will be pressed for time. Social mobility is sometimes a relatively academic term for something that most of us know in our hearts: all families want their children to have a decent start, to get a good education to get on in life and to be able to bring up their own family. If we are not careful, we are in danger of not seeing that generational improvement. I do not want to live in a society in which people are not motivated to get on and do their best and succeed. It is a primary responsibility of any society to provide a framework in which that can happen.
I was always told growing up, “If you work hard, the world’s your oyster. You can do anything. You can achieve anything.” That has motivated me throughout my life. I want us to be able to say that to every child in this country—if they work hard, the world is their oyster, they are as good as anyone else in this country and they will succeed. It is a huge challenge for us and I look forward to what colleagues and the Minister have to say.
Mr Graham Stuart (Beverley and Holderness) (Con)
It is a pleasure to take part in the debate and to follow the right hon. Member for Salford and Eccles (Hazel Blears), who made a powerful speech. In her closing remarks, she put her finger on a key point: if children work hard, they are as good as anyone else and they can get somewhere. Perhaps at times it has been suggested too often in this country that it is not about working hard. Yesterday and the day before, 32 maths hubs around the country were launched. They are designed to ensure that the methodologies used in the eastern countries, which have such a big lead over us in maths education, are brought here. What are the core principles there? They do not say to someone who does well in maths, “You are very clever at maths.” They say, “You’ve worked hard and mastered those skills.” They emphasise the fact that with practice and application, every child can do well.
A number of years ago in Japan, all the children in a class would be judged by the performance of the weakest child in the class, which is an interesting concept of communal working on the basis that every child can learn. Sometimes in our education debate—it will be the primary focus today—we talk too much about differentiation and insufficiently about ensuring that every child comes up to a standard. More of them are capable of it than we have realised. Sometimes perhaps we have been so quick to recognise the different pace and different circumstances of each child that we lose the idea that they are capable of a lot more if we ensure that they are aware that if they work hard they will get on.
I thank the Backbench Business Committee, chaired by the hon. Member for North East Derbyshire (Natascha Engel), for granting the opportunity to discuss this important issue today. As has been said, last week the Government published their child poverty strategy from 2014 and 2017. It has three main strands: supporting families into work, raising living standards and raising educational attainment. It is on the last of those three that I will focus.
The work of our education system will go a long way towards determining whether we are able to break the connection that the right hon. Lady touched on between demography, deprivation and destiny. Because of that, the Education Committee held a pre-appointment hearing to scrutinise the appointment of Alan Milburn as the chairman of the Social Mobility and Child Poverty Commission two years ago. The Government have two main education priorities: raising standards for all and narrowing the achievement gap between the most disadvantaged pupils and the rest. Those aims underpins the reforms that the Government have undertaken in the past four years.
That is most obviously apparent in the introduction of the pupil premium, now extended to cover the early years. The right hon. Lady made some telling points about ensuring that that money is used to best effect. Perhaps too often in the Government in which she served, there was ring-fencing to try to ensure that ministerial will was translated into action. Often that had counter-productive results. What we have now is a framework in which Ofsted, when it inspects schools, looks at the way in which they use the pupil premium, and data are used to try to ensure that the performance of children on free school meals, or the “ever 6” is watched carefully from the governors downwards and informs their questioning of the head to ensure that every school offers opportunity to all those children. The right hon. Lady made strong points about the need constantly to ensure that that money is used for the purpose for which it was provided.
That thinking also lies at the heart of the structural changes made by Ministers. An example is the extension of free child care, and the refining of accountability structures so that teachers can focus on the whole class rather than just on the pupils at the C-D grade borderline. I welcome the fact that these reforms focus on the whole cohort of young people. It means that school leaders can place equal emphasis on pushing a child on an A grade up to an A* or perhaps—this would not be captured by the accountability mechanisms, but I would hope that the system would acknowledge it in spirit—pushing a child on an A* from their present score to a higher score still.
Too many children have been “warehoused”—I use the word advisedly—because those in authority believe that they are unlikely ever to contribute to the A to C grades in a school. They therefore see it as a sensible deployment of resources to assign the least able teaching practitioners to the most needy pupils. I do not recognise that as the right thing to do, but I recognise that it is what a head teacher would be tempted to do if they were being held to account and stood to lose their job if they failed to meet that threshold. The practice has had a detrimental effect.
This goes to the heart of a whole series of issues relating to incentives in the system, to which the right hon. Member for Salford and Eccles and Alan Milburn have referred. It is important to get those incentives right. Otherwise, there is a risk that successive Governments who have a genuine commitment to closing the gap will create an uneven playing field for the key resource in education—namely, teachers. I am referring in particular to quality teachers. Not all teachers are the same; there is a massive difference between those at the top of the performance levels and those at the bottom.
As well as trying to increase the overall quality of the work force, we need to put in place incentives to ensure that teachers are deployed in the most equitable way possible. Some of the most idealistic people are committed to doing their best to help in the most deprived areas, but at the moment they are being incentivised to teach elsewhere. A head teacher in a prosperous leafy suburb is far less likely to be fired than one in a deprived inner-city school. The same is true for department heads and other teachers. The Government say that they want to close the gap, yet the key resource—quality teachers—is being incentivised to roll down the hill towards where they are least needed.
This reminds me of the Select Committee’s recent report, “Underachievement in Education by White Working Class Children”, which found that this was not just a boy problem. It was thought that white working-class boys had a particular problem, but the report showed that white working-class boys and girls now constitute the lowest performing ethnic minority group. One of the most telling pieces of information I saw during that inquiry related to what free-school-meals children were achieving in the four different Ofsted categories of schools. The percentage of such children getting five good GCSEs—grades A to C on the current measure—in inadequate schools was about 25%. In outstanding schools, the figure was 50%. There was a 100% increase in the number of children from the poorest groups getting five good GCSEs. The difference between the inadequate and outstanding schools for children not in the poorest group was only 50%.
That reinforces the long-standing view, which the Committee has examined, that poor children are peculiarly sensitive to the quality of leadership and teaching in their schools. This is not just a social equity point; the pupils that we need to get the most effective teaching to are the poorest children. They are also the ones who are the most responsive to it, and if they are provided with it, they can do a great deal better.
I support initiatives designed to help talented youngsters from deprived backgrounds to achieve great things. Ultimately, however, the goal of increasing social mobility is best served by taking action at system-wide level, which will benefit children of average and below-average ability as well. I am often told that this country is dominated by a public school elite, but it is frequently people from poorer backgrounds who have made it to the top who tell me this. There is some truth in the observation, but those powerful people from poor backgrounds are often obsessed by people like themselves. A lot of the social mobility agenda appears to be about getting a tiny number of very bright kids out of the poorest homes and into the top universities and the top jobs. That is indeed an important aim, but the question of whether someone goes to the university that is ranked 30th rather than second is not our society’s biggest problem.
The biggest problem in our society is that we do such a dismal job for those people who are not only poor but do not have massive academic ability. They are not hopeless, however. We know that, if they have the right teaching, they can do well. Our problem as a society is that so many young people end up on the dole. In other countries, such as Austria, Switzerland and the Netherlands, the education system does not leave similarly disadvantaged people in the dole queue; it enables them to enter employment.
I am just throwing this into the debate because social mobility is very popular with people such as Sir Peter Lampl of the Sutton Trust, which does fantastic work. He is from a fairly underprivileged background and has reached the top. I say to him that the challenge is not people like him. It is not our biggest problem if people like him end up in middle management instead of becoming multi-millionaire philanthropists like him. Our biggest problem is that so many people have lousy, miserable, deprived lives because we did not give them the basic tools that they needed, along with a bit of self-belief and the idea that if they worked hard, they could do maths and pretty much anything else they wanted to do in life. I just throw that in to be controversial.
It cannot be emphasised too often that the key lies in the quality of teaching. Professor Eric Hanushek from Stanford university, working with Professor Steve Machin and Richard Murphy from the London School of Economics, calculated that one year with a very effective teacher adds an extra 25% to 45% of an average school year to a pupil’s maths score performance. There is an idea that there is an enormous difference between a teacher in the 90th percentile and one in the 10th percentile. The figures that I have already mentioned show that good teachers have a peculiarly positive impact on children who have less support at home, and a peculiarly negative impact on those same children as well. The effects of high-quality teaching are especially significant for people from disadvantaged backgrounds, who gain an extra year’s worth of learning under very effective teachers, compared with poorly performing ones.
These findings underline the importance of good recruitment and teacher training, which are critical. They also show that we must ensure that the best teachers work where they are needed the most. In its 2013 report, the Social Mobility and Child Poverty Commission found that fewer than a third of schools in the most deprived areas in the north-east had teaching rated as good or outstanding, compared with 85% in the least deprived areas. That this does not have to be the case is shown, as the right hon. Member for Salford and Eccles said, by the statistics from London, where 77% of the teaching in the most deprived areas was good or outstanding. We need to put in place the right incentives to encourage the best teachers and school leaders to work in those schools. Governing bodies’ newly granted flexibility to design attractive pay packages to recruit and retain teachers will help, especially when coupled with the additional financial firepower of the pupil premium for schools that serve particularly deprived communities.
Linked to this, we also need to encourage schools to work together to share expertise. The Education Committee has recommended that the Government should widen the funding available to schools to support collaboration beyond academy sponsorship, so that it could be used to assist other partnerships. The Government’s own figures provided to the Select Committee in February showed that the majority of academies were not currently part of a formal partnership. More needs to be done to build on the greater collaboration that exists in our schools, between schools in academy chains and across academy groups as well as between academies and other maintained schools. We need to go further to ensure that we have the right incentives in place to make that collaboration genuine and much more prevalent than it is now.
The Select Committee also recommended that the Government reintroduce targeted seedcorn funding for sustainable partnerships between independent and state schools. School leaders could be encouraged to sign up to partnerships by introducing the excellent leadership awards proposed by Ofsted’s Sir Michael Wilshaw, which would be available only to those who supported underperforming schools in disadvantaged communities. Never again should anyone be able to be seen as a national leader in education or a significant player in our education system—or to be given an award of any sort—if they are not working in some of the deprived communities. We have to make working and being successful in those communities the sine qua non of recognition of someone doing the best job in the toughest of circumstances.
On other possible measures, the Education Committee has advised that it would be helpful if school accountability measures could be redesigned to incorporate encouragement for schools to work together. I am not yet clear exactly what that would look like. Head teachers must be held to account for the performance of their schools, but we must consider how we ensure that someone’s work in collaboration with others is recognised and encouraged. When considering how to support pupils from deprived backgrounds we need to remember that patterns of deprivation are complex. Ofsted’s “Unseen children” report highlighted that the places where the most disadvantaged children are being let down are, as the right hon. Lady said, now no longer so much in the inner cities, but in rural and coastal areas. In 2012, four of the bottom five performing local authorities on attainment outcomes for pupils on free school meals were Peterborough, West Berkshire, Herefordshire and the Isle of Wight. The weak performance of many schools in rural and coastal areas is yet another reason, alongside basic fairness, why launching a national funding formula that is based on need rather than on skewed political priorities should be such an important priority for the Government.
In the relatively short time available to me, I wish to discuss a second area where performance needs to improve if we are to increase social mobility: careers advice and guidance for young people. At the moment, organisations ranging from Ofsted to the CBI and to my Select Committee are clear that careers provision in schools is patchy in its availability, too often underwhelming in quality and frequently affected by perverse incentives, such as those that discourage some struggling schools from advertising further education or apprenticeships properly for fear of losing the funding that follows the pupil and because of the need to keep pupils sitting on seats. For too many school and college leaders, in a system with very sharp-edged accountability structures, careers advice and guidance is simply not a priority. If it is to improve, we need more challenge in the system. The Department’s development of destinations data, showing where pupils go on to work and study, may help to build this challenge in the medium term, although they also may not be the silver bullet that some hope for. Time will tell how useful the data are, not least in driving behaviour and accountability in schools.
A more immediate such challenge can be posed by school governors, particularly where the school appoints a designated careers governor to focus on this area—that person could be from a local employer. That is what is recommended by the Humber local enterprise partnership, which has just published its gold standard assessment criteria for schools in Hull, East Yorkshire and North Lincolnshire. The document sets out, in comprehensive detail, the work that schools and colleges should be doing to provide a first-class careers education, and I recommend it to Ministers. Its stipulations include a requirement that schools offer young people face-to-face careers guidance and that employer engagement and external expertise are integrated into the programme through mentoring, work experience and enterprise clubs. Too often, it seems as though schools can be hermetically sealed worlds with their own drivers, cut off from the real world into which the young people in them will come blinking, and too many will be left on the dole as a result. We need to open up the schools and allow the world of employment into them in multiple ways. I know that Lord Lucas is working on a programme to get employers to help to do the practicals that will be part of the science A-levels in future; they will move to being on a pass/fail basis because of the difficulty of externally monitoring standards there. If employers are getting involved in practicals in all our sixth forms, that will not only help to embed a careers perspective into that learning, but it will make the learning richer and more interesting, and make the practical skills learned seem relevant in an exams system that might have appeared to have downgraded their importance.
The local enterprise partnership gold standard stipulations also include targeting and prioritising those most at risk of disengaging from learning or of becoming NEET—not in education, employment or training. The Humber gold standard is being piloted in a small number of local academies and maintained schools, with a view to a roll-out across the LEP area from this autumn. There will be lessons to learn from the pilot experience, but this approach, which is being complemented by an integrated online portal and the employment of dedicated advisers, appears to be a potential model of its kind. Helping young people to make informed choices about the courses they take and the careers they follow is vital to boost their success in finding employment.
A couple of years ago, the Education and Employers Taskforce undertook a major survey of 15-year-olds, asking them where they thought they would be working in years to come and then mapping their responses against the national data on where the jobs are expected to be. It showed a horrific mismatch. If I recall it correctly, it showed that 29% of young people thought they were going to work in culture, media and sport, even though fewer than 5% of jobs are expected to be in those areas. It showed that only 5% of young people expected to work in finance, yet 20% of the jobs are expected to be in that area. We have to find ways of making this information available to young people and their parents, not so that they can discard their dreams, hopes and desires, but so that they can be informed by the realities of the labour market when they make their choices, both in school and beyond.
The ultimate goal of the £57 billion a year that the Department spends is to help young people get on in life. Getting a decent job is the first step in climbing the ladder in a socially mobile society, as the Government’s child poverty strategy acknowledges. This is a huge and complex area of policy, and I look forward to hearing the thoughts of colleagues and the Minister today. When considering this issue, we must remember that the extent to which social mobility is achievable goes to the heart of who we are and what we are about as a nation, and what we achieve in this area for the next generation will determine the sort of country Britain will become.
Mr William Bain (Glasgow North East) (Lab)
It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Beverley and Holderness (Mr Stuart). I congratulate my right hon. Friend the Member for Salford and Eccles (Hazel Blears) on securing this important debate and launching it with such an excellent, passionate speech. I also congratulate the Backbench Business Committee on granting the time to discuss this study, which was published last October by the Social Mobility and Child Poverty Commission. I have a particular interest in this issue for several reasons, the principal one being that the commission’s chair made a very well-received speech last year at Springburn academy, in my constituency. The experiences of my constituents in communities suffering from multiple deprivation will form the context to my contribution.
My parents, like those of my right hon. Friend, both left school before the age of 16. They had to work hard in jobs as teenagers, because that was needed in order to provide for the rest of the family. The concern that many millions of people across this country have is that their dream of seeing their children do better than they did—a dream we thought would continue through generations to come—is in danger not only of failing to be realised, but of actually going into reverse unless we make big policy changes. I also endorse entirely what my right hon. Friend said about the need for universities and colleges to reach out and be open to talent in every part of the country, regardless of someone’s ability to pay or family connections. That was a big part of my job when I was a university admissions tutor in London and in Glasgow. Links between universities, colleges and schools are central to breaking down the old boy and old girl networks that are too prevalent in many professions and in our politics.
The underlying causes of child poverty are numerous and its solutions complex, but there should be a commitment by all Members across this House to end it. There are real divides of wealth and opportunity in every part of these islands. It cannot be the mark of a decent society that, in the ward in which my constituency office is based, nearly one in every two children is in poverty, while just a few minutes away, in the constituency of the Under-Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills, the hon. Member for East Dunbartonshire (Jo Swinson), the number stands at only one in 12. Some in this House might envisage the answer as being the creation of new state borders across these islands, but the more progressive solution is to bring down the barriers that hold back too many of our talented young people. The concern that many Members will have is that the detail of the Government’s child poverty strategy simply does not meet the scale of the commission’s report, or indeed the need of the people whose voices deserve to be heard in this debate.
The Institute for Fiscal Studies has said that, with no change in current policies, there will be big rises in child poverty. I hope that this debate will give the Government an opportunity to reflect on that and to work with the Opposition on a long-term approach to defeating and ending child poverty.
The first key point is that we are facing a crisis in the nature and security of employment that previous generations in recent times did not encounter in the same way. Global flows of labour, services, goods and capital and the hollowing out of the jobs market, which saw the loss of tens of thousands of skilled manufacturing and construction jobs, has meant that there is an even bigger premium on skills for people at every stage of their working lives.
Glasgow Kelvin college, which sits across the road from my constituency office, is now the beating economic heart of my constituency. It gives young people from very difficult family backgrounds—I am talking about backgrounds in which there is alcohol abuse, violence in the home or drug abuse—the first, second or third opportunity to get the literacy, numeracy or other vocational skills that are required to get the jobs of today and the future. It is only by doing that that we will begin to see genuine shared prosperity across this country.
Two weeks ago, the principal of that local college told me that nearly one young person in five in the north and east of Glasgow lacks skills at even level 3. If we continue with that level of illiteracy and innumeracy, we will not see a rise in social mobility in our country. That is the scale of the crisis that we see in one of the poorest parts of these islands.
The analysis published by the OECD last autumn, with data from England and Northern Ireland—Scotland and Wales were not included—also provides us with a stark warning about reduced living standards in the future compared with other countries if we fail to get to grips with the skills agenda. In the decades to come, inequality in skills will be as big a barrier to a good life as inequality of financial wealth.
I hope the Government will work with the Opposition to look at the impact of the 16-hour rule on many of our colleges. Recently, I spoke to some young people who said that they are unable to get state support if they want to train and improve their skills to level 3 or above at a local college. The rule also limits what courses colleges can offer to improve skills. My local college principal is excited about the prospect of removing that rule and designing new courses that would allow young people to improve their skills and be able to get into the employment market.
Recently, members of the Business, Innovation and Skills Committee, of which I and the hon. Member for Worcester (Mr Walker), who is in his place, are members, saw the huge benefits that come to our society and economy from strong links between business and universities. We must break down the barriers that suggest that universities are ivory towers. Universities give people real skills and experience in engineering, which is the kind of career that we need if we are to thrive and see opportunity flow throughout the country.
Secondly, the biggest reason for the rise in wealth in many households in the past 40 years is the increase in the female employment rate. If we are to continue that progress, which is in danger of being reversed, we need to get real about the need to invest in quality, affordable child care as that is the biggest barrier to some 1 million women being able to get back into the labour market.
I hear over and over from mothers in my constituency that the costs for after-school care are rising and that the hours of child care that they need even to work part-time simply are not available. In an era when public spending will remain tight, we need to ensure that we invest available funds in building institutions for people in their own communities, recognising that social action without state support and vice versa will not bring about the permanent reductions in poverty that we seek. In an era of tight public spending, I urge the Government to work with the Opposition to see how we can increase investment in child care. It is essential to our country’s future and to reducing the inequality gap.
Thirdly, the Government should think again about the design of the universal credit system, if it ever gets off the ground in any meaningful way, and about the tax credit system overall. As Gingerbread and other charities have pointed out, the new system will mean that tens of thousands of mothers in two-earner households with children will face an uphill battle to be better off in work should they work more than 20 hours a week. The tax and benefit system ought to be rewarding such households, not setting a cap or limit on their aspirations or efforts. I urge the Government to look at these rules and at the work allowance for universal credit to ensure that mothers and families do not lose out as a result.
Fourthly, we need to become a living wage society. Two out of every three families in which people are in work are now poor and they see little way of improving their standard of living in the future. More hours at work are not available, and pay is continuing to fall in real terms even now. As few as three in 10 of the people who go out to work in my constituency bring home a living wage. Encouraging employers to pay a living wage to their staff will have the benefits of reducing staff turnover, contributing to greater productivity, which is stagnant in our economy, enhancing satisfaction at work and helping to reduce the bill for tax credits and housing benefit.
The Government can also use their procurement powers to favour living wage employers. They should also be inviting the Low Pay Commission to revise its remit to give proper forward guidance on raising the minimum wage across the economy and to examine the case for a higher sector-by-sector floor so that as many people as possible can be taken out of the low-wage economy. Nearly 3 million people have been trapped on pay around the minimum wage for five years or longer. Without a ladder out of that low-paid trap, they will never see an improvement in their living standards and we will face mass inequality in this country.
Fifthly, as my right hon. Friend the Member for Salford and Eccles has said, we need new pathways to boost social mobility, which is showing worrying signs of reversal. Too few people on low incomes, for example, have the opportunity to save, so the gap between those who have capital, whether it is in a home or another vehicle, and those who do not have capital or any savings at all is growing. Not only in discussions in this city about Thomas Piketty’s book but on the doorstep in every community across the country, we see the impact that that increase in asset inequality is having on communities. A young person might be unable to save to get the car that would allow them to get their first job. Other people might be unable to save to get the money together to allow them to take up a university course. Courses for adult learning are also being cut, particularly in Scotland because of some of the misguided decisions taken by the Scottish Government. The lack of assets is a driving factor in the growing inequality between our poorest communities and other parts of our society.
We also know that the professions have to throw open their doors. I have experience from the law, which has some good and innovative schemes to include people from difficult backgrounds. I know from my experience as a university lecturer, however, how difficult it was for people to get pupillages to become barristers just because they came from certain universities. The law and other professions must break down these barriers. We must remove these old boy and old girl networks if we are to see a proper meritocracy in our country, and see people who have the talent given the opportunities they deserve.
There is nothing inevitable about poverty. Inequality is not a natural state for any society. Let us hope that this debate can serve the purpose of ending the stop-start approach we have seen in policy in this area for too long. More opportunities and a fairer society are not optional extras if we are to pay our way in the world. In the 21st century, they will be essential for this country’s success.
Simon Wright (Norwich South) (LD)
I congratulate the Backbench Business Committee on giving us the opportunity to debate this important subject, and I support many of the points made by Members on both sides of the House.
It is a cause of great shame that in the 21st century the best indicator of a child’s future outcomes remains their social class. Education is one of the most important tools we have to effect change. Quality education can transform a child’s life chances, yet over several decades our education system has not adequately driven social mobility.
Poor children are, however, doing better at school. The proportion of children on free school meals getting five good GCSEs including English and maths increased from 31% in 2010 to 38% last year. That is welcome, but the attainment gap between children from disadvantaged backgrounds and their peers remains too wide.
The pupil premium is supporting the progress of students from poorer backgrounds. It is vital that head teachers retain the freedom to use this funding in a way that provides the greatest benefit to the circumstances of those it is intended to support. It also vital, however, that head teachers can make well-informed spending decisions through an evidence-based understanding of what works. The Education Endowment Foundation is providing resources to help schools identify the most effective interventions and its toolkit is now used by nearly half of all school leaders, but the attainment gap opens at a very young age, before children have even started school. The Sutton Trust believes that there is a 19-month gap at the start of school between the most and least advantaged children.
The coalition has taken important steps through the provision of 15 hours of free early-years education for disadvantaged two-year-olds, which is so important because this is the age at which the attainment gap becomes detectable, and I strongly welcome the published consultation on the new early-years pupil premium for disadvantaged three and four-year-olds. Just as schools have been learning how to get the most out of the pupil premium, it is also vital that early-years settings have the tools and evidence they need to ensure that the early-years pupil premium will help youngsters from disadvantaged backgrounds.
One of the most effective interventions would be to attract more highly qualified early-years specialists, and I am encouraged that the remit of the EEF has recently been extended to include the early years. The challenges in raising awareness of what works in the early years will be different, owing to the diversity of provision, but this is important work.
At every stage of a child’s education, the greatest support that a school or provider can give comes through the quality of its teachers and work force. Liberal Democrats believe that all teachers in state schools should hold qualified teacher status, or be working towards it. Recruiting, training and retaining a highly skilled teaching work force is crucial for all young people, and particularly for those from disadvantaged families.
To improve social mobility, we need to encourage the strongest teachers into schools that serve high numbers of disadvantaged children. We also need to support the continuing professional development of teachers and ensure that research is applied to classroom practice, perhaps by encouraging a profession-led royal college of teaching.
One of the Liberal Democrats’ proudest achievements in government is the increase in the income tax threshold, which will rise again to £10,500 next year. In October, the national minimum wage will rise to £6.50. The combined effect is that every person working full time on the national minimum wage will pocket £1,579 more from their earnings than in 2010. As has been highlighted in the debate, there is also a role for a living wage based on local circumstances for low-pay households, and I am delighted that the Houses of Parliament have this week been accredited as living wage employers. Aviva, which employs around 6,000 people in Norwich, has recently joined other employers in my constituency by committing to be a living wage employer. I encourage others to follow its lead, and I commend in particular the work of the Norwich living wage campaign, which is looking at how we can do that. The Government could build on their own approach to making work pay by encouraging more employers to pay a living wage, starting with Government and public sector employers and their contractors.
Finally, I refer briefly to an unresolved question regarding the definition of child poverty. The previous Government worked to a relatively narrow definition based on relative income. Using this as a driver for policy comes with perverse risks—for example, Governments would find it easier to reduce relative child poverty by freezing the state pension over a period of time. Doing so would take many children closer and over an arbitrary median income line, but would make absolutely no difference to the lives of those in poverty.
A relative income definition of child poverty by itself, therefore, fails to capture the experiences and barriers faced by those in poverty, such as health inequalities, educational attainment and quality of housing. An effective definition of child poverty should include relative and absolute poverty, but it must also account for the causes and consequences of poverty. An effective definition of child poverty would become the driver of Government policy in this area, with appropriate indicators providing the accountability for Government action as we seek to eliminate child poverty by 2020.
There are few issues more important than ensuring that no child in a poor household grows up expecting a lifetime of enslavement by poverty. The distribution of opportunity is a key indicator of the fairness of a society, and it is our duty to ensure that where children start off in life should not determine where they end up in life.
Damian Hinds (East Hampshire) (Con)
I thank the Backbench Business Committee for allowing time for this important debate, and I congratulate the right hon. Member for Salford and Eccles (Hazel Blears) and my hon. Friend the Member for Beverley and Holderness (Mr Stuart) on securing it. I pay tribute to my hon. Friend for the work that his Committee has done on crucial aspects of social mobility, including most recently the report on poor white children, and to the right hon. Lady for not only talking about these things but doing them in a practical way, not only in her constituency but more broadly. She is to be commended and thanked in particular for the Speaker’s Parliamentary Placement Scheme. I benefited from having one of the fantastic young people on the scheme, who has gone on to work for the civil service.
For so many of us, opportunity for the many, making society fairer and relieving poverty are the things that brought us into politics in the first place, and they go to the heart of today’s debate. Bringing up the rear of the debate, as I do, there is the tiniest danger that I might repeat some of the things that have gone before, but I see that as positive as it reflects the commonality across the House on some of the challenges that we face.
There are big challenges today. We have entrenched multigenerational poverty in parts of our country, massive geographical differences, and social mobility that is low by international standards and seems to have been stagnant over a number of decades. For the avoidance of doubt, none of these issues has arisen since 2010, or indeed since 1997, and will not be solved within the term of any one Government. But we have to get our act together and work together because whatever the problems are today there are more difficult headwinds coming tomorrow in the form of globalisation, the further effects of technological change and the differential effect that has on people, whether their job is enhanced and enabled by the computer or is in competition with the computer. Those effects are partly responsible for the hollowing out of the labour market that the hon. Member for Glasgow North East (Mr Bain) referred to, where there are more jobs in the so-called knowledge economy at the top of the scale, lots of jobs in the low wage service sector at the bottom of the scale and relatively fewer in between.
We must think about mobility, fairness and distribution within our society, but we must also think about those things collectively on behalf of our society, relative to the rest of the world. The two go hand in hand, because unless everyone’s talents are optimally deployed, economic efficiency is impossible.
I think that the Government are on the right track. The child poverty strategy is right to focus on the root causes of poverty, because although cash transfers can alleviate and mitigate poverty, they cannot cure it. Curing it, of course, is about many things, including regulatory measures, such as the national minimum wage, and tax, but it is also about bearing down on the extra costs incurred as a result of being poor. It is about building more homes, because the single biggest cost in most people’s lives is rent, and we will not solve that issue structurally until we have more housing. It is about affordable credit and trying to help people to save and build up a cushion of resilience against the nasty shocks that life inevitably brings. Most of all, it is about work: getting into it and getting on in it, and building up the skills required to do that. I am proud to support a Government who are grasping the nettle on welfare reform, especially through universal credit, and addressing the crucial issue of work incentives.
I am also proud that, as my hon. Friend the Member for Beverley and Holderness said, everything that the Government are doing on education—I pay tribute to the Schools Minister, who is sitting in front of me, and his colleagues—is about both raising the average level of attainment and narrowing the gap between the rich and the poor. We see that most obviously in the pupil premium, but it is in so many other measures as well, such as the early-years extensions. We also see that in measures, such as the English baccalaureate, that act as signalling devices to give young people a clear message about which subject choices will keep their options most open in case that advice is not forthcoming from other directions.
I will focus the rest of my remarks on social mobility. When people talk about social mobility, they are generally talking about one of three subjects. They often assume that everybody else is talking about the same thing, but they are distinct subjects that are in danger of being conflated. The first subject is what I call breaking out, meaning breaking out of severe poverty. That is the link between social mobility and child poverty. The subject at the other end is what we might call stars to shine, which is about nurturing outstanding talent. My hon. Friend the Member for Beverley and Holderness talked about how that sometimes develops into an obsession with a relatively small number of people who do amazing, stellar things, going from very humble backgrounds to running the world. The danger is that we forget the third group, the 70% or 80% in the middle, where social mobility is about helping everybody to get on, to be the best they can be, to make the most of their talents and to achieve some security in life.
The three policy areas that I want to focus on cross-cut those three subject areas. I want to focus on teachers, parents and character development. We know that education is fundamental to social mobility. At the heart of the social mobility debate is a close correlation between the circumstances, social class and income of parents and the eventual circumstances, social class and income of their children—but it is not a direct causal link. Rather, disadvantage among parents tends to be associated with low educational attainment, and it is that which drives the child’s eventual circumstances. If we can break that link between poverty among parents and low educational achievement we can achieve a good degree of social mobility.
The pupil premium is the structural measure that enables many of the initiatives for doing that, but it does not actually tell us what to do. The right hon. Member for Salford and Eccles alluded to that, as did the hon. Member for Norwich South (Simon Wright).
Thanks to the Educational Endowment Foundation and others, we now know more about the things that can make a difference. We also have to face up to some of the things that apparently do not make a difference but are favoured policy areas of lots of people in this House and elsewhere, such as reducing class sizes a little, which, according to the data, does not seem to make a huge amount of difference, or the deployment of additional teaching assistants, which again, according to the data, does not seem to make a lot of difference. I can see people looking at me as though I must be mad to suggest that. These are still controversial things to say in such debates.
What we do know, and I think everybody can agree on, is that the most important thing in education is the person standing at the front of the room. When the Secretary of State says that we have the best generation ever of teachers in this country, he is absolutely correct. A number of things have raised the status of teaching, one of which is Teach First. The figures are remarkable, even compared with when I was at school. A couple of years ago, 6% of Russell Group graduates and 10% of Oxford graduates applied to be teachers. Teaching has become one of the top graduate employers at our great universities. That, in itself, is a good thing.
It is also true—this is another controversial thing that one sometimes finds it difficult to say—that qualifications alone are not a great predictor of who is going to make a great teacher. When I served on the Education Committee, we produced a report on attracting, training, retaining and developing teachers. When we tried to address the question of what makes a great teacher, we kept finding ourselves unable to answer it, except to say, “You know it when you see it.” In having great teachers, we need to start with the premise that we have to see it in order to be able to know it.
Teaching is a very high-stakes profession. It is one of the few occupations left where the assumption is pretty much that someone who starts in it at 21 will still be doing it in their 60s. It is a massive decision for someone to go and do an undergrad degree in teaching or a postgraduate certificate in education. I think we need more auditioning in teaching. If we know it when we see it, we have to be able to see the person have a go at teaching, not just at the stage of interview for a post in a school but in pre-initial teacher training. People also need more opportunity to see it in themselves. It is very difficult for anybody to know whether they would make a great teacher—I am pretty sure I would not—and they need opportunities to see that in themselves. I would welcome more taster sessions for undergraduates who might think about doing a PGCE or sixth formers who might think about doing an undergrad degree in teaching.
There is another side to this, I am afraid. People say quite readily and easily, “Everyone remembers a great teacher.” The truth is that we can all also remember someone who really was not a great teacher. We cannot just wait a generation or two generations for brilliant teachers to come through. There is a big challenge today in making sure that continuing professional development is good. Slightly more controversially, there is the issue of performance pay for teachers—not as a way of punishing those who are not so good but encouraging those who are good to stay in the profession and rewarding them accordingly.
One of the lessons from the London Challenge, which we do not see so much in the reports but always hear from the people who ran it—who were absolutely at the top of it—was that a key aspect was the attitude of not quite ruthlessness but an intense focus on quality of leadership in London schools in saying, if it was not working out, “There’s another job for you somewhere, but this one is not quite the right one for you.” We need to have a great focus on making sure that we have the right people in place.
There is a group of people who are far more important even than teachers, and they are, of course, parents. Everybody who has ever looked at social mobility knows that the earlier the involvement in a child’s life, the more impact—the more leverage—it is possible to have on where they end up. Between years zero and five, children are not with teachers, nursery workers, the early-years work force, or whomsoever, all that much—they are with parents. Studies of children who succeed against the odds—who are born into backgrounds and circumstances where all the academic literature would predict they are not going to do well but manage to break out from that and do, in fact, do well—suggest that that has a lot to do with parenting style. We can define that to the nth degree and in a very complicated way, but I would use “books and boundaries” as shorthand for the parenting style that emerges.
As the right hon. Member for Salford and Eccles has said, Alan Milburn has called parenting the last taboo in public policy, and he is right. It is a scary thing to talk about and I think that everybody is reticent to do so. There is good reason for that: nobody wants to try to tell parents how to bring up their children. Many people probably feel qualified to advise other parents on how to do so, but it is dangerous territory for the state or, indeed, anybody else. It is vital, however, that we somehow start to take steps to break through the taboo, do more work in this area, build up knowledge and find new ways to provide support to parents when they want it.
Speaking of parents and parenting, I am reminded of another vital factor in social mobility—character. We all know of kids from among those we grew up with who got either no or one or two GCSEs—or, from my generation, O-levels—and have gone on to do brilliant things. We also know of people who had A grades to spare who have ended up doing nothing that exciting. The difference between them tends to come down to self-belief, drive, tenacity and, admittedly, a little bit of luck. There is a big overlap between those things and the employability skills that firms are looking for and that we hear about so much these days. It is claimed that they are less prevalent now than they used to be—although it is difficult to say whether there was ever a golden age for such things—but in the new world economy they are more important than ever. However, our education system now and ever since I was born has been all but exclusively focused on young people’s exam results.
The all-party group on social mobility’s character and resilience manifesto was written by a think-tank, along with Baroness Tyler of Enfield. We had a simple definition of character and resilience: people need to believe they can achieve; understand the relationship between effort and sometimes distant reward; stick with the task at hand; and bounce back from life’s inevitable setbacks. That is easier said than done, but if people can master those things they will have a very good shout in doing as well as they can in life. The key question is: are those things inherent, or can they be taught? As has been said, the evidence tends to suggest—although we have to be careful about being dogmatic about this—that they can at least be developed and enhanced through life. That can be done through all sorts of things, including volunteering and Saturday jobs, which have been in massive decline, and the National Citizen Service, competitive team sport and the scouts, the guides and the cadets.
The question for public policy is how to institute those character development strands into the social mobility strategy. The process has to start early, so thinking about character should be part of how we think about school readiness. Schools have a key role to play. When our all-party group asked the headmaster of one of Britain’s leading public schools what it was about his school that meant it apparently did so well on character, the first thing he said was, “We teach boys how to fail—the ability for things to go wrong—and then how to bounce back.” I think there are lessons to be learned from that, not only by individual schools but by the system as a whole.
Perhaps the most obvious thing of all is extra-curricular activities. It seems that the gap in extra-curricular activity between better-off and worse-off kids is more about take-up than availability: a lot of programmes are made available, but they are not used that much. I would like to see more emphasis on extra-curricular activities not necessarily happening in schools, but being led, driven and encouraged by schools. That could be a legitimate use of pupil premium money, given how important we know such activities are for how young people get on in life, and I would like Ofsted to pay even more attention to the issue in future. The Government are looking at this in earnest and I hope it will end up becoming a key part of the social mobility strategy.
I want to talk about some of things that we do not know. In many public policy areas, we think that if we know the facts we need only to have a bit of a barney to find solutions or ways forward. On social mobility, we still do not know many of the facts and the situation is still evolving.
We are blessed with one example of a place in Britain that has gone from zero to hero in educational attainment, and probably in wider social mobility measures as well, which is London, particularly inner London. When we look at the data, it is striking to see how far inner London in particular has moved. Today, disadvantaged children growing up in London do half a grade better per GCSE than those growing up elsewhere; they appear to be twice as likely to go to university as those growing up elsewhere; and they are even more likely than that—the maths becomes quite difficult because the numbers are small—to go to a top university than disadvantaged kids growing up elsewhere.
The stock answer that rolls off everybody’s tongue when we say that is, “Oh, yes, but those children had the London Challenge.” Hon. Members should not get me wrong, because the London Challenge was good and positive, and it is difficult to argue against elements of it, but there are several reasons for believing that it was not the sole or primary cause of the change. The first reason is that the improvement predated the London Challenge: the London Challenge began in 2003, which was also the year in which GCSE results in London caught up with those elsewhere. The second reason is that the improvement was in primary schools as well as secondary schools, but at that time the London Challenge covered only secondary schools, and from the limited data we have, it appears that disadvantaged kids in London do better even in nursery, before their schooling has even begun. The third reason is that the improvement was very concentrated among poor kids. The fourth reason is that when the London Challenge was tried in Manchester and Birmingham—again, hon. Members should not get me wrong, because there was some success—the results were not replicated in nearly the same way.
We now have to cope with or come to terms with the strange situation that coming from an ethnic minority and/or having English as an additional language is a predictor of doing better at school, which challenges policy makers a great deal. Given the massive population change in London during the past 20 years, we must at least entertain the possibility not just that that situation is related to the fact that schools are now different and have got better in London, but that it has something—not entirely, but partly—to do with the population make-up of people living in London. That brings us back to questions about parenting.
Mr Graham Stuart
Has my hon. Friend seen the articles by Christopher Cook, who is now the BBC’s education correspondent, which suggest that there is a link between the London effect and graduates, particularly graduate teachers, marrying?
Damian Hinds
I have not seen the marrying study, although I have seen several of Chris Cook’s articles in the Financial Times. There are another two reports. At one launch, the Minister for Schools rightly said, “Londoners are used to this sort of thing. You wait a long time for a report about schools, and two come at once.”
Damian Hinds
Three reports have come along at once.
Lots of different effects are taking place, and we need to understand them much better. What we can be sure of is that there is no one simple and obvious answer, because it would have been found by now. More generally, we do not know enough about the patterns of uneven opportunity in this country. We know that some big areas are worse than others, and we can identify pockets of poor schooling, sometimes in affluent wider areas, where school results are not good enough. However, we do not understand enough about our country as a whole in relation to who stands to do better than others, why that should be the case and what we can do to mitigate it.
In the United States, a recent study on equality of opportunity, led by Raj Chetty of Harvard, has helped us as never before to understand inequality of opportunity and the patterns of inequality in the United States. It found that the chances of achieving the American dream are two and a half times higher in Salt Lake City than in Charlotte, North Carolina. To put that in context, average social mobility in the UK is about halfway along the range for cities in the United States. There is every reason to believe that there will also be quite a range, perhaps for different reasons, in this country. The Chetty study has some challenging findings on the potential causes of inequality, including the de facto segregation that still exists in some American cities and the family structures in different places, as well as dealing with the more obvious issues that we might expect: income inequality, school quality and social capital.
That study was carried out by linking tax data to school records to track how people did through life and look at the differences—seeing how someone was affected if they moved to a different area, and so on. I do not know whether I am the only Member in the House today to have had the benefit of some e-mails from 38 Degrees this week on whether it is legitimate to use data from Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs for other purposes. I totally recognise and share the massive data security concerns about that, but I hope that the Government will look at the potential of using the data to understand this issue better so that we are able to do something about it.
Social mobility alone will not solve poverty or child poverty, but it can solve a part of those problems. It is a huge issue for both social justice and economic growth. It is self-evident that every person in our land should have equal opportunities to fulfil their intrinsic potential. It is also true that maximisation of national income requires optimal deployment of resources, including human resources. It could bring an extra £150 billion a year of national income, or a one-off 4% rise in growth, and that is an opportunity that we as a country cannot afford to miss.
Rushanara Ali (Bethnal Green and Bow) (Lab)
I congratulate my right hon. Friend the Member for Salford and Eccles (Hazel Blears) on securing this important debate, and thank the Backbench Business Committee for providing time for it.
Throughout her time in Parliament my right hon. Friend has made an outstanding contribution on improving the life chances of young people, as I know from direct experience. I established a charity called UpRising, which has the support of the three party leaders. It works on empowering young people to get into politics and public life, promoting social mobility and supporting young people with regard to skills and employability. When I was working to establish that charity, she was Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government and her Department supported UpRising through the empowerment fund; the current Government have continued in that effort. Her work on the Speaker’s parliamentary placements scheme has been outstanding in providing excellent support to young people who want to find an opportunity to work in Parliament and join us here in this Chamber in the future.
My right hon. Friend spoke powerfully about the inspiration her mother provided to her in everything she has achieved. The phrase, “The world is your oyster if you work hard,” is one that I can associate with my own experiences. It echoes the message I received not only from my mother and the rest of my family but from my teachers, who had a profound effect on what I went on to do and the opportunities I had to get a great education in Tower Hamlets, where I then lived. Other Members have talked about their own direct experience of how education has provided the critical chance for them to achieve their aspirations and make a contribution.
That is the context for this debate on the importance of making sure that young people today do not do less well than their parents’ generation. We all have a duty and a responsibility to make sure that the next generation does better than the current one, as has been the case previously. All Members who have spoken have highlighted the grave position that we are now in as a society. The twin challenges of tackling child poverty and powering social mobility should demand the most urgent attention from this House, the Government, employers and wider society.
Figures that came out this week show that, on this Government’s watch, 2.6 million children are now living in absolute poverty. That means that almost one in five young people face profound threats to their childhoods, aspirations and life chances. Many Members across the political divide represent constituencies in which child poverty is a widespread reality. In my constituency, 42% of children are living in poverty. That is one of the highest levels in the country. I was a commissioner on the London Child Poverty Commission for a number of years and we highlighted the dangers of the stubbornly high level of child poverty in this city, which results from the high cost of living, including the cost of housing, and the level of worklessness.
The hon. Member for East Hampshire (Damian Hinds) said that we must build homes and create opportunities for people to work. He is absolutely right. That is what we must do to help children in poverty not only in London, but in other parts of the country. He was particularly right about work. Parents must have the opportunity to earn a decent wage so that they can provide a decent living for their children.
What is coming into sharper focus is that more than two thirds of children in poverty are growing up in families in which someone works. Not only is early intervention, such as support for child care and Sure Start centres, critical to children’s development; it enables parents, especially mothers, to secure work and contribute to the family income so that their children do not live in poverty. Labour’s proposals to link the minimum wage to average earnings and to address insecure work are badly needed to tackle low pay and the child poverty that occurs as a consequence.
Last year’s landmark report by the Social Mobility and Child Poverty Commission condemned the Government’s failure to produce a credible strategy to tackle in-work poverty. The Child Poverty Action Group has rightly highlighted the importance of promoting second-earner employment among couples with children. It points to the Resolution Foundation’s estimate that 1 million women are missing from the Labour market. We will never meet the child poverty target without addressing that problem. That means that we must address the serious flaw in the proposals for universal credit that makes second-earner work incentives worse than under the current system. The universal credit rescue committee submitted its report to the Labour party last week. On second-earner work incentives, it said that
“Universal Credit will weaken the incentive for second earners in couples to work. One in five children in poverty now lives with a single-earner couple, and ensuring that more second earners, principally women, are able to take up employment will be critical to reducing child poverty rates.”
The last Labour Government reduced the number of children in poverty by almost 900,000. In the final years of the last Government, child poverty went down to its lowest level since the ’80s. However, there was much more to do and this Government needed to continue that trend of reducing poverty. This should always be a collective effort. What we have seen is an increase in poverty that threatens to obliterate that progress. Save the Children, the End Child Poverty campaign and the Joseph Rowntree Foundation have warned that the Government will miss their own 2020 target by a staggering margin. That cannot be acceptable, whichever end of the political spectrum one is on.
The Social Mobility and Child Poverty Commission gives us no reason to hope that the Government can turn the situation around. It says that, despite the Government’s decent intentions, their recent work on child poverty reads like a “list of policies”, rather than the coherent strategy that our children and young people need; lacks any
“clear measures to assess progress”
over the coming years; and fails to “engage with independent projections” of rising poverty. Experts are united in the belief that the strategy simply lacks any credibility. The commission goes on to say that the strategy is a “missed opportunity” to create momentum towards securing a high-mobility, low-poverty society. We desperately need decisive action to support young people in realising their aspirations and talents. I hope that the Minister will address the concerns that have been expressed by the commission and hon. Members.
That analysis underpins much of the discussion today about declining social mobility. Family background, educational attainment and later life chances remain closely bound together in the UK. Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development research shows that intergenerational mobility in the UK is weaker than in most comparable nations, including France and Germany. The Government have so far unfortunately failed to close the attainment gap between those who have free school meals and those who do not.
The hon. Member for East Hampshire talked about the success of the London Challenge and I am grateful for his remarks about that. He is right to point out that some areas were already doing much of what the London Challenge did. In my constituency, head teachers led the way, along with those in Newham and other parts of the country. It is clear that the lessons learned from specific examples, such as in my borough throughout the late 1990s and beyond, were pulled together to promote collaboration, joint working, good management and leadership by head teachers and other teachers working with the wider community. That was an important way of driving up standards in London, which has experienced the most improvements in the country. It is a great shame that the Government are not speaking up for those sorts of initiatives, trying to ensure that educational standards are improved throughout the country and that lessons are learned from what has worked, whoever happened to introduce it.
Mr Graham Stuart
The shadow Minister is being a little churlish, which is not in her nature, so I am sure she will want to correct what she has said. After all, the results for children who have free school meals have improved against a tougher level, and that is worth celebrating. One of the interesting aspects of our report was looking at the gap between free school meals children in inadequate schools and those in outstanding schools. That gap stayed roughly the same, but doubling outcomes for them is something to celebrate, regardless.
Rushanara Ali
I referred to the failure to close the gap. The hon. Gentleman is right that there have been improvements, but that is not enough. It is not satisfactory. As the Education Committee’s commendable work highlights, the position of white working-class children—boys and girls—is deeply disturbing. As a society, we have failed them. Most of them are in that category of having free school meals, so the position is not good enough. The Government should take seriously the hon. Gentleman’s work, which has cross-party support, on the plight of white working-class children. We need to step up and address the challenge.
It is clear from the speeches that we all want children to do well, regardless of background. We want their talents to be maximised, not wasted, so that their abilities are recognised and they can contribute to our economy and our society.
The Government’s policy of scrapping the education maintenance allowance has had a direct impact on social mobility. I know that from the experience of several groups. More than 80% of ethnic minority children, for example, from Pakistani and Bangladeshi backgrounds, relied on that grant. Young people from parts of the country where they spend money on transport now struggle to commute to their further education colleges. Many have highlighted the challenges they face because they do not have the support that they need. Some go to their further education colleges not being able to feed themselves. In a climate of high levels of poverty and deprivation, provision such as an education maintenance allowance was a great help and its removal has contributed to taking away the ladders to progress.
I know from direct experience with young people that other changes, such as the proposal to scrap support for young people under 24, are deeply troubling. Without support and access to benefits, one young woman whom my charity supported would not have made it from a broken family and having been made homeless to what turned out to be an incredible opportunity: she got a place at Cambridge.
She would not have had that ladder of opportunity if the support system offered by the state had been removed. We must consider many welfare changes to ensure that the barriers to young people being socially mobile are not added to, and that we all work hard to remove them.
The hon. Member for Norwich South (Simon Wright) highlighted the importance of qualified teachers and the need for a royal college of teaching. I am delighted that he emphasised the importance of qualified teachers, and his party’s support for that. It is a great shame that the Government, the Secretary of State and the Conservative party do not support that provision, but I hope we can get agreement on that.
Rushanara Ali
I did not give way to the hon. Gentleman, but if he insists—if I am allowed to continue then I am happy to, but I will give way.
Damian Hinds
The hon. Lady was talking about London a moment ago. Can she tell the House which region has the highest proportion of unqualified teachers?
Rushanara Ali
Perhaps the hon. Gentleman will say why his Secretary of State said that there is no need for qualified teachers, when evidence suggests that qualified teachers play a profound in role in young people’s attainment. On his point about London, I suspect he is referring to the last Labour Government. We increased the supply of teachers by introducing teaching assistants who then got qualifications. We have called for teachers and for those who are not trained to be able to work towards training, and that is what we did. Perhaps the Conservative party will address that point given that the Conservative Chair of the Education Committee has said that qualified teachers make a massive difference to young people’s potential to achieve.
Rushanara Ali
I will not give way any further because I have already given way twice to the hon. Gentleman—[Interruption.] A number of times to his colleagues then. I would like to make progress because I know the Minister will want to address some of these points.
Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Lindsay Hoyle)
Order. It might be helpful to say that it is up to the shadow Minister whether she wishes to give way. It is in the hands of Rushanara Ali whether she gives way or not.
Mr Stuart
I am grateful to the hon. Lady since she mentioned me. As she has made clear, qualified teachers can do a great job, but I trust heads to make that decision. Given the accountability they are subject to, the idea that heads would take on people who they do not think will improve the education of their children is false, and there are fewer non-qualified teachers than when the Labour party left office. I just throw that in—it is a bit of a distraction when such a tiny percentage of the work force do not have that particular piece of paper, which is not all that indicative of quality.
Rushanara Ali
I am rather disappointed that the Chair of the Select Committee is taking such a partisan view. The point is that if a policy is introduced and a message sent that there is no need for qualified teachers or to invest in their qualifications, that is wrong. It means that the supply of qualified teachers in the future will decline, which is a huge concern. Evidence shows that qualified teachers make a massive difference, particularly when they are dealing with large class sizes, as is the case in most state-funded schools—unlike in private schools, which is often the comparison made by the Conservative party.
Let me move on to the point about professions, which I hope Government Members might agree on. Institutions, whether Parliament, the legal or financial professions, journalism, and many others, all have a major job to ensure that young people from working and lower middle-class backgrounds have the opportunity to access those professions. Those young people’s chances of being able to access those professions remain much lower than for those from upper middle-class backgrounds, and there remains a massive disparity between those who are privately educated and those who go to state schools, although progress is being made. There is a role for ensuring that private schools, which have to pass a public benefit test, make more effort to work with state schools, and share not only their physical assets and facilities, which many do, but their social capital, which they have in abundance. Such sharing could support and promote learning in both private and state schools—private schools have much to learn from the work of state schools and vice versa. My right hon. Friend the Member for Salford and Eccles mentioned the work on resilience and on how young people adapt and learn in the state sector. That is an important aspect of shared learning.
A number of hon. Members, including the Chair the Education Committee, referred to careers guidance in education, which is a deep concern for all hon. Members. As the Committee report points out, major challenges need to be addressed. Changes made by the Government have led to massive problems in what schools offer to young people. We need to rectify that quickly. The CBI’s verdict is that the Government’s changes mean that careers guidance in our country has been left on life support. The Chair of the Committee highlighted some of the conflicts of interest that can arise. Schools have been given a statutory duty, but they might not be in a position to provide independent advice and guidance to young people, which is important if they are to keep their options open and have the broadest awareness of what is on offer, whether that is university or training and apprenticeship opportunities, and of the institutions they will go on to.
Furthermore, the removal of the entitlement to work experience means that many working-class parents—the majority—are struggling to find placements for their children, whereas those from professional backgrounds are better placed to use their networks to provide work experience opportunities for their children. We need to ensure that schools and other educational establishments can work together to provide work experience opportunities, mentors and a ladder for recognising, and learning about, professions that are not accessible to many young people in our country because of their social class background. Enabling that requires Government action. The careers co-ordinator role and careers support are critical in helping to orchestrate and provide such help and support for young people. Families are being left to their own devices, which is creating more disparities, not only in work experience—horizons are either opened or left closed for people from working-class backgrounds—but in careers information and guidance, which are limited in some places and virtually non-existent in others.
There are many great examples of great work—all hon. Members know of it in our constituencies—but we need to be concerned about those who do not have access to independent guidance and advice. I hope the Minister takes on board the concerns raised by hon. Members of all parties. The lack of independent guidance and advice blocks young people from realising their aspirations, whatever their background.
Youth unemployment remains incredibly high—850,000 young people are still unemployed. We need to ensure that, in future, young people who are unemployed get the support they need. My hon. Friend the Member for Glasgow North East (Mr Bain), highlighted the importance of ensuring that the 16-hour rule is flexed so that young people can get the appropriate training and skills to get into the labour market. That is critical.
I hope the Government reconsider the Opposition’s proposal for a youth jobs guarantee. The Labour Government introduced the future jobs fund, which showed dramatic and positive results. The current Government’s Work programme has had limited success. In constituencies such as mine, only 14% of those on the Work programme have gone into a job, and the numbers nationally are much worse. I hope the Minister and his Government will be pragmatic and look at what works, learn from it and reform proposals to ensure that young people’s life chances are not further worsened.
Rushanara Ali
I am not going to give way. I want to conclude and let the Minister make his speech. If Mr Deputy Speaker says that I should give way then I might consider it.
Rushanara Ali
I will make some more progress and then I will consider giving way.
Apprenticeships are critical. The number of apprenticeships for 16 to 18-year-olds has actually gone down over the course of this Parliament. Although the number is beginning to go up for other groups, we want more apprenticeships for young people. I hope the Minister will consider why the figure is so low for 16 to 18-year-olds and what his Government will do to improve it.
The hon. Member for Beverley and Holderness (Mr Stuart) highlighted the challenges faced by those who do not go to university and are being left behind. I know he would not want to use the term coined by the leader of my party, “the forgotten 50%”, but whatever we call that group, this is a serious issue. Successive Governments have overlooked the need to ensure that young people have a world-class vocational, educational and training pathway into work or higher education, if they choose to go into higher education later on. We must all take action to ensure they have the opportunity to gain meaningful work and the skills they desperately need to avoid long-term unemployment, despair and hopelessness. It is important, particularly in times of economic downturn, that we do not lose out on their potential to make a contribution to our economy.
Child poverty and social mobility are of paramount importance. We have, as was evident from the reaction of Government Members to some of my comments, massive disagreements on how we get there, but we all want to get to the same destination: making sure that young people, whatever their background, can reach their full potential. We want to ensure that the barriers that can be removed, such as class, social connections and lack of opportunities, are removed whoever is in government.
We cannot have a situation in which so many children are in poverty and more are likely to be in the future. We need a step change to ensure that we eliminate poverty, not just halve it. If we want to reduce global child poverty, we need to practise what we preach here at home. I hope we can all agree that that is a task we must all work towards. We must ensure that we agree to do what we can to make sure that young people have the best possible opportunities. We need leadership, resources and investment in young people’s life chances to tackle those inequalities and barriers.
Did the hon. Member for Reading East (Mr Wilson) want to intervene? I note that he has been restless.
Mr Rob Wilson
I thank the hon. Lady for giving way and for being so generous with her time. I would like to take her back, briefly, to her comments on youth unemployment.
Mr Deputy Speaker
Order. I am sorry, but I just need to clear up this matter. It is up to the shadow Minister, the Minister and any Member to decide whether to give way. It is not up to the Chair and I want to keep out of any disputes that may arise.
Mr Wilson
I would just like to take the hon. Lady back to her comments on youth unemployment. From what she said we would not know that youth unemployment is falling rapidly. She did not state how the policies she is putting forward would make that fall more rapid than it is at the moment. What is the solution to making it fall even more rapidly than it is falling at the moment?
Rushanara Ali
If the hon. Gentleman looks at the evidence, he will find that the future jobs fund got young people back to work very quickly. His party rapidly scrapped it without replacing it, and the massive delay that followed meant that people all over the country, including people in my constituency, had no programme at all. His party then introduced the Work programme, which was and continues to be a disgrace. It is not getting people back to work. Last year, only 3% of my constituents were getting jobs. If the hon. Gentleman looks at the facts, he will find that the future jobs fund was a success and the current programme is still struggling. He ought to stop being so obsessed with something that is not working, and start looking at policies that work and encouraging his Ministers to implement them.
Despite the fall in youth unemployment, 870,000 young people are still unemployed. [Interruption.] Is the hon. Member for Reading East denying that? I think it is a scandal if he is in denial about it. Those people are desperate for work and desperate for opportunities. He needs to recognise that instead of living in denial, because otherwise people will think—quite rightly—that he and his party are completely out of touch.
Let me end by returning to the subject raised by my right hon. Friend the Member for Salford and Eccles, whose work in this field has been phenomenal. She has stood up for young people, and not only in relation to this agenda. She mentioned her work in supporting troubled families, her work on the respect agenda, and her work in supporting families and education, promoting empowerment, and tackling powerlessness and exclusion during her career here in Parliament. I am sad that she is leaving Parliament, and I know that Members in all parts of the House will be sad as well. However, we look forward to working with her in fighting for young people, tackling child poverty, and promoting social mobility. We will all be there, whatever our political leanings, to support the causes for which she will continue to fight, including the very important causes that we have discussed today.
The Minister for Schools (Mr David Laws)
I thank the Backbench Business Committee for giving us the opportunity to debate this very important and wide-ranging subject. I also thank the right hon. Member for Salford and Eccles (Hazel Blears) and the Chair of the Education Committee, the hon. Member for Beverley and Holderness (Mr Stuart), for sponsoring the debate and for opening it in such a powerful way. Their extensive speeches covered a great many of the major policy areas relating to social mobility.
I especially enjoyed the right hon. Lady’s speech. I enjoyed her challenges on some of the issues about which she thinks the Government should be doing more. I was interested to hear about her own family background, and her mother’s efforts to take all the opportunities that life presented. I congratulate her particularly on her success, and the success of her constituent, in helping to change some of what sounded like the rather backward-looking arrangements for the admission of postgraduates to Oxford university. I imagine that it is even more difficult to change the arrangements for admissions to Oxford university than it can sometimes be to change Government policy, so I think that that was something of a victory for her and her constituent.
The Government are committed to the principle that where people start in life should not determine where they end up, and that forms the basis of a huge amount of work that we are doing on both economic and social policy, which we have set out in the recent child poverty strategy and the social mobility strategy. It was good to hear not only the two opening speeches, but the speeches made by other Members including the hon. Member for Glasgow North East (Mr Bain), my hon. Friend the Member for Norwich South (Simon Wright), the hon. Member for East Hampshire (Damian Hinds) and, of course, the hon. Member for Bethnal Green and Bow (Rushanara Ali). They made powerful speeches which covered different aspects of the debate, and which signalled that in all parties, whatever their philosophy and whatever their ideology, there is a strong commitment to changing society in this regard, and ensuring that there is genuine opportunity for everyone regardless of background. That national consensus comes across clearly in the foreword to the Social Mobility and Child Poverty Commission report from the autumn of 2013, where Alan Milburn and his fellow commissioners said:
“It is part of Britain’s DNA that everyone should have a fair chance in life. Yet too often demography is destiny in our country. Being born poor often leads to a lifetime of poverty. Poor schools ease people into poor jobs. Disadvantage and advantage cascade down the generations.”
That is the challenge that we all face. The last Government faced it and we face it in this Parliament.
It is our ambition to build not only a stronger economy out of the rubble of the crash of 2008 but a fairer society, even in these challenging times. We are not only getting on with that job but making progress, as we have set out in our strategy report and as is highlighted in parts of the Social Mobility and Child Poverty Commission report. The economy is now escaping from the worst recession in generations. We have already helped record numbers of people into work and put in place far-reaching measures to improve the educational attainment of the poorest people in society.
The right hon. Lady praised Alan Milburn and all members of the Social Mobility and Child Poverty Commission for their work, commitment and dedication to that shared cause. I join her in thanking Alan Milburn and the commissioners for their work. She was also kind enough to praise the Government for their bravery, I think she said, in taking the novel step of setting up an independent watchdog and asking a leading former Cabinet Minister from the Labour party to chair it and to be our critical friend on those issues. That demonstrates how serious the coalition Government are about that policy agenda. We decided to take a risk in setting up a body that we fully expected would be not only a friend but a critical friend and would challenge us on our ambitions to address social injustice and create a society of real opportunity for every individual.
The Government’s child poverty strategy sets out that our approach is rigorous and evidence-based. We are focusing on sustainable solutions that will work in the long term and make our society fairer. I acknowledge that the last Government also had a strong commitment in that area. It did some important work, not least in schools policy. In the debate, we have talked about the success of London schools in the last 15 or so years. I pay tribute to former Education Secretaries and individuals such as Lord Adonis who played a large part in some of those education reforms.
It is also true that, in their strategy in this area, the last Government became very dependent on public expenditure through the benefits and tax credits system. By the end of the last Parliament, it became clear to most commentators and people in the House that the strategy of relying on ever more means-tested benefits was not sustainable in the long term, particularly in an environment where the public finances were deeply in deficit.
Therefore, we are now focusing on tackling the causes of inequality and social injustice. That is why we are putting a particular focus on some of the areas that right hon. and hon. Members have raised today: on investing in the early years, on improving the quality of our schools system, and on ensuring that people get more opportunities in work and make progress in work, rather than simply being in work on low pay. I would like to set out some of the Government’s plans in those areas and to try to respond to some of the points that right hon. and hon. Members have made.
The right hon. Lady placed a heavy emphasis on the importance of tackling disadvantage in the early years, as did a number of other Members, rightly. The Government fully share the view that, in order to address disadvantage and inequality of opportunity, we have to be able to act early on. Far too many young people start off way behind as they join our schools system. Schools then struggle to try to make good the disadvantage that has already been embedded in the early years. We have to do more in those crucial early years to prevent these gaps from opening up, so across the early years we are helping disadvantaged children to gain access to high-quality education and we are providing more help to parents who want to get back to work. Our new entitlement for the parents of the most disadvantaged 40% of two-year-olds will mean that about 260,000 disadvantaged two-year-olds will be entitled to get a Government-funded early education place from September.
Earlier this year, we also announced that from 2015-16 we will extend the pupil premium, which is having a profoundly important impact in schools, into the early years, so that we ensure that three-year-olds and four-year-olds from the most disadvantaged backgrounds can get the best start in life. That is extra money to raise the quality of teaching and pay for more qualified teaching staff, particularly in settings with a large number of disadvantaged youngsters. We have announced the consultation on that and the level of the early years pupil premium for 2015-16, and I very much hope that the party or parties in government after the next election will continue to be committed to the early-years pupil premium and to the schools pupil premium. I hope we will significantly increase the early-years pupil premium so that it is at least as great financially—if anything, I hope it is more—as the pupil premium for primary schools, on a full-time equivalent basis. We know that investment in these areas makes the biggest impact when we invest early, which is why we decided in 2014-15 to put almost all the increase in the pupil premium into the primary setting rather than into secondary education. We are also doing other good work.
Stephen Timms (East Ham) (Lab)
The pupil premium is based on free school meal eligibility, but we still do not know which recipients of universal credit will be entitled to free school meals for their children. We have been waiting for this decision for about three years, and I think the delay is because of a disagreement—or an inability to reach agreement—between the Department for Work and Pensions and the Department for Education. Is the Minister able to tell us when that very important policy decision will be made?
Mr Laws
I can tell the right hon. Gentleman that there is no disagreement in government. This is a very important decision to get right, for the reasons he explains, and we have no intention of undermining support for disadvantaged youngsters through the decisions we take. We have to make sure that we use the new mechanisms that will be available, including through universal credit, to target money effectively. We will be taking decisions shortly—Ministers often say that—on this matter, but in the meantime it is perfectly reasonable for him to ask questions about it, because it is important for us to get it right.
We are also taking other action to support families in the early years: for working families on universal credit, we are further increasing support for child care costs to 85%, as Alan Milburn’s commission urged us to do, making sure that for these families work will always pay; we are introducing tax-free child care; and the Deputy Prime Minister recently announced the commencement of flexible parental leave, so that all parents can get the support they need to go back to work. As the Social Mobility and Child Poverty Commission has consistently argued, the early years are the most important years in young people’s lives. That is why we are investing so heavily to make sure that all our children get the very best start they can and why we are giving a priority in public expenditure terms to this area, even in these times of austerity.
Understandably, education in our schools system has been a major area debated today, and it is one of the Government’s big priorities. I am very proud, as a member of the coalition Government, that even in these times of austerity, when we are trying to deal with the massive deficit we inherited, that we have made the commitment to fund a pupil premium for schools. As hon. Members have said, we are focused not only on raising attainment for all school pupils, but on closing the unacceptable attainment gap between richer and poorer pupils, and we are making progress. Under this Government, poor children are doing better than ever at school. The proportion of children on free school meals and the pupil premium who are getting five good GCSEs has increased, as my hon. Friend the Member for Norwich South said, from 31% when the coalition came to power to 38% now. That is a very significant increase over a relatively short period, and comes at a time when we are ensuring that there is no grade inflation in the system, which means that these improvements in recorded results are real improvements.
We are also making big improvements in narrowing the gap at key stages 2 and 4. At key stage 2, the acceleration in narrowing the gap seems to have been present since the pupil premium came in, and we need to ensure that that acceleration is sustained in future years and that it is present in both key stages 2 and 4.
As hon. Members have said, a massive amount more needs to be done in this area. It is still the case that, despite the progress, six in 10 children on free school meals fail to secure five C grades at GCSE, including English and maths. I hope that all of us across the House agree that that is entirely unacceptable in an advanced country such as Britain. As the Chair of the Select Committee pointed out so powerfully, we can see that that is unacceptable when we look at the levels of attainment and the reduction in the gap in some of the best schools where they have large numbers of disadvantaged young people. In those schools, including in areas such as inner London, the teachers and the head teachers are proving that there is nothing inevitable about this level of underperformance. There are parts of the country today where almost 80% of young people who are considered disadvantaged are failing to get those five Cs, and that is not something that any of us can accept.
We are continuing to put our money where our mouth is —through the pupil premium. Since 2011, we have invested almost £4 billion to help schools directly to address educational disadvantage. This year, the pupil premium will increase to £2.5 billion a year—the full amount that we promised in the coalition agreement. That means that children who are poor and who receive the pupil premium throughout their school career will now receive—or their schools will receive—an additional £14,000 to boost their attainment, which is a significant amount of money. Schools will be able to make powerful use of that money, and they will be informed by the mechanisms to improve education that the Education Endowment Foundation has flagged up as things that work.
I have been to schools in very disadvantaged neighbourhoods around the country, and recognise that this boost to the budget is quite transformational. With my hon. Friend the Member for Redcar (Ian Swales), I visited a school in his constituency with very high levels of deprivation—80% or 90% of young people were entitled to the pupil premium. It is a community that never really recovered from the de-industrialisation of the 1980s and a community where aspirations have been very low. This additional money is giving that school the opportunity to change the life chances of those young people.
Of course we have to ensure that, even though we give discretion to schools to spend this money in the way they think best, there is accountability for it. The right thing to do in the school system is to have more freedom and autonomy, but those things have to come with accountability. The accountability mechanism that we have chosen is through Ofsted. When Ofsted goes into a school, it will look to see whether the disadvantaged pupils are making good progress and it will see whether the gap is closing. If those things are happening, it will not have to ask lots of questions and it will not be wasting the time of school leaders and teachers by creating a bureaucracy around this. Where there is not progress and where the gaps are not closing, it will challenge schools. Schools that thought they might be outstanding will discover that they are not so graded because they are failing in this area. Schools that are weaker will be highlighted. Head teachers today know that this is now an important area for their school’s performance, and Ofsted will recommend pupil premium reviews by outstanding system leaders of schools that are not using this money sensibly.
Later this month, Ofsted will report on its view of how the pupil premium is being used in schools. Although I would be the first to accept that not every school is using every penny perfectly, I believe that the evidence will show that the school system increasingly does understand what this money is for and is using it and targeting it in the right way.
Another important thing that we have done is to change the accountability systems for both primary and secondary schools and in 16-to-19 provision. For too long in primary education we have set the bar too low for schools. At one stage, we accepted that 40% of young people could fail to reach the level of attainment to which we were aspiring and we now know that even that level was too modest and was, for those people who were just achieving it, a passport to failure later in life and in their educational career. We are raising the bar and we are expecting more young people to get over it.
As the Chairman of the Select Committee pointed out, by focusing more on progress and not on the C-D borderline, we are giving a real incentive to schools to value the progress made by every pupil—the B-grade students going to A, the A-grade students going to A* and, critically, the F-grade students going to E, the E-grade students going to D and the D-grade students going to C. One of the disappointments under the previous Government, in spite of the progress made in some areas of education, was that a lot of the progress was across the C-D borderline on which schools had an incentive to focus. A lot of the most disadvantaged youngsters who were not on that borderline saw almost no improvement in performance under the previous Government. They and many of the most disadvantaged communities saw precious little improvement during the last Parliament and I hope that our accountability reforms will change that.
I am optimistic. We had the pupil premium awards recently and saw some splendid best practice across the country. Schools are doing the right things, with high expectations and good teaching. That includes schools such as Mossbourne academy. The recent destinations data show that a large number of young people from those schools are going to first-class jobs and first-class educational settings, and are going on to places such as Oxford and Cambridge. More people from that school did that than was the case from some entire local authority areas, as, disgracefully, there are still some parts of the country in which no pupil at all goes on to our best universities.
Mr Graham Stuart
The Minister will know that thanks in part to the flexibilities that this Government have introduced, there is an increasing correlation between the amount of money that schools get and their efficacy in a way that there was not in the past, which is probably a good thing. That shows the need for a new national funding formula that ensures equitable distribution of funds across the country. We do not have that now. London is doing well, and we are all delighted about that, but it is also the best-funded part of the country.
Mr Laws
I entirely agree. Money is of course not always the answer—if it is spent badly, for instance—but it is really important. If we did not think that money was important we would not have the pupil premium, which is about money, accountability and best practice. We must make sure that we have a fairer national funding formula. We are making the biggest step for 10 or 20 years towards fairer school funding through the minimum funding levels we are introducing, and I hope that my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State will be able to say more about the additional funding we can give to underfunded parts of the country when our consultation concludes.
As well as addressing attainment in education for disadvantaged groups, we need to help them to secure the right jobs so that they can get on in life. Apprenticeships are at the heart of our drive to equip people of all ages with the skills employers need to grow and compete, and we are very proud that more than 1.6 million new apprenticeships have been started in this Parliament at more than 200,000 workplaces. More than 860,000 people undertook an apprenticeship in the past academic year, which is the highest recorded figure in modern history. Our new programme of traineeships will help young people to develop the skills and attributes they need to secure apprenticeships and other sustainable jobs.
We are also pleased that the work we are doing with young people means that the number not in education, employment or training has been falling. We will continue to do more to help young people from 16 to 18 and to ensure that, as a number of hon. Members have said, we have proper careers advice and guidance, and proper incentives for educational establishments to focus on destinations.
We are also helping young people in work, helping parents to find jobs and helping to ensure that take-home pay after tax increases. We are incentivising employers to take on more young people by abolishing employer national insurance contributions for most employees under 21 from April of next year. We are raising the national minimum wage to £6.50 per hour, which represents the biggest cash increase since 2008 and will increase the pay of more than 1 million people. We are cutting income tax for those on the minimum wage by almost two thirds and we have increased the personal allowance five times, from £6,475 when the coalition came to power to £10,500 in 2015-16, which is a massive support to many people on low pay in employment—people who are also, incidentally, going to benefit from the free school meals for infant-age pupils from this September, and that will also be extended for the first time to disadvantaged young people in college settings who previously, for no rational reason, were excluded from the entitlement that there was to free school meals for those in schools. I am pleased that this Government have resolved that very long-running injustice.
We are also working with business to ensure that it helps people to progress, earn more and have responsible terms and conditions. We are addressing exclusivity clauses in zero-hours contracts and are committed to the social mobility business compact. I am proud that, as a consequence of the work the Government have done and of the recovery of the economy, employment has increased by nearly 1.7 million. In just the past year unemployment is down by almost 350,000, and we have one of the highest employment rates in the history of our country.
Because we know that work is the best route out of poverty, our welfare reforms will incentivise even more people into work, and ensure that work always pays and that work pays more than benefits. We provide intensive, personalised support for parents who have been out of work for 12 months or more through the Work programme. To date, around 300,000 people on the Work programme have found lasting work. We are also supporting families with multiple disadvantages to get back to work through the troubled families programme, in order to help young people.
We cannot highlight the importance of social mobility and of tackling child poverty enough. They are central to the Government’s mission and to what the coalition hopes to achieve over our period of five years in government. Quite simply, no child should become a poor adult for the simple reason that their parents were poor.
I have set out the steps we are taking in early-years education and 16-to-19 education, and in trying to improve employment outcomes, but we know there is more to do. We have listened carefully to the proposals made by hon. Members and we are listening carefully to what comes out of Alan Milburn’s reports and the work of his commissioners. We will seek to build on the success so far, to make sure we break this unacceptable link between social backgrounds and success in life.
Hazel Blears
I record my thanks to the Backbench Business Committee for allocating time for this debate. I hope it will agree with me that the time was extremely well spent.
We heard a number of very high quality, well-informed, accurate and passionate speeches from Members on both sides of the House. I want to thank in particular the chair of the all-party group on social mobility, the hon. Member for East Hampshire (Damian Hinds), who again gave us a formidable tour de force of his data analysis. I like to think my politics are evidence-based. Occasionally he does manage to convince me, but occasionally my emotions also play a part in my political ideology, but I have great respect for the work he does in this area.
I also thank my hon. Friend the Member for Bethnal Green and Bow (Rushanara Ali) for her contribution, and I would like to say to her that I hope electoral circumstances may result in her having the chance to achieve her undoubted potential to be a very successful Minister in future.
I thank the Minister for his response, his personal commitment and his passion for this area. He has acknowledged that a lot has been done and there is a lot more to do. That is a familiar phrase that we all should subscribe to.
I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Glasgow North East (Mr Bain), too. I had no idea he was a university admissions tutor. It is amazing how much information we discover about each other in these debates.
I thank the Chair of the Education Committee, the hon. Member for Beverley and Holderness (Mr Stuart), for his support in going to the Backbench Business Committee to request this cross-party debate.
My final thanks are to the commission on social mobility, and to a particular member of it. I would not normally single out a member of that commission, but David Johnston, chief executive of the Social Mobility Foundation, is a key member of it. For many years he has not just been talking about the problem; he has been running the Social Mobility Foundation. He and that organisation have helped thousands of young people become doctors, lawyers and engineers or get jobs in the finance professions. Those young people would never have got to university without the residential programmes, one-to-one mentoring and face-to-face careers guidance—all the things that we talked about today. My thanks go to David Johnston because he stuck at it.
That is the message for us on this agenda. It will still be here when we come and go. We have to stick at it and work together, as we can. In that way we will continue to make progress to ensure that everybody in this country has the chance to achieve what they are capable of and to do well. It is an incredibly optimistic agenda and one that I am delighted to be part of.
Question put and agreed to.
Resolved,
That this House has considered social mobility and the child poverty strategy.
Data Transparency (Banking)
(10 years, 4 months ago)
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Mr Andrew Love (Edmonton) (Lab/Co-op)
The debate is starting a little earlier than expected, but I am pleased to see that all are present and correct.
The debate is about the voluntary agreement for the disclosure of bank lending data for every community in Britain, which came into effect last December and has been, on the whole, well received. Thanks are due to Members of both Houses, the British Bankers Association, Her Majesty’s Treasury and the seven participating banks and building societies—Barclays and Clydesdale and Yorkshire banks, HSBC, Lloyds Banking Group, Nationwide building society, Royal Bank of Scotland and Santander—for agreeing to work together to create a voluntary framework for the disclosure of bank lending data. I echo the words of the Minister and welcome the positive engagement of the UK’s largest lenders to make this agreement happen.
The first tranche of data was released in December 2013, the second in April 2014 and the next is due in a couple of weeks. Among the advantages of disclosure is that it clearly identifies the availability of bank lending in all communities—who the banks are reaching and who they are excluding. At the time of its announcement the Chief Secretary to the Treasury said that the agreement
“is a major step forward in terms of transparency and should encourage competition by helping smaller lenders to identify gaps in the market and allowing businesses to hold their local bank to account where they aren’t lending.”
This is an important first step, but today I will ask the Minister to go further.
For the Community Investment Coalition, the objective of the disclosure is to create clarity about which communities are well or poorly served by mainstream banking institutions and the action that is required to fill the gaps in areas that are poorly served. As a result, it is hoped that every adult household or business will eventually have access to appropriate and affordable financial products.
Bank data disclosure, as I understand it, means providing information about a range of banking activities in defined geographical areas. The data show the ways in which banks invest the money that the public deposit with them. Disclosure of lending data can also provide an opportunity to deepen understanding of market trends and refine products and services better to serve local markets. Moreover, data disclosure highlights whether the main high street lenders are concentrating the provision of credit in certain areas, leaving other areas to become credit deserts, with businesses and consumers in these areas struggling to access affordable credit.
The voluntary framework is a major step forward in terms of transparency, as the new data will allow the public to see clearly how the bank and building society sectors are serving the wider economy. Publishing data in such a detailed way will assist competition, allowing new entrants such as credit unions and community development finance institutions to identify where there is unmet demand and pursue new business in those areas.
Disclosure of lending figures will, it is hoped, clearly identify those who are effectively excluded from the banking system. That type of financial exclusion is often localised, meaning that the framework needs to disclose information on a local area basis, and hopefully in a way that is consistent with local measures of diversity and deprivation. Without that type of local area disclosure, communities are left in the dark on how their savings are being invested.
At the time of the launch in July, the Government indicated that they expected more lenders, including banks, building societies, credit unions and other types of finance providers, to sign up to the voluntary framework. What progress has been made on improving the coverage of the voluntary framework and what new lenders have been, or are being, signed up?
As part of the voluntary agreement, the British Bankers Association and the Council of Mortgage Lenders jointly publish quarterly aggregated data detailing the outstanding stock of lending that has been committed to customers in three different categories: loans and overdrafts to small and medium-sized enterprises; mortgages; and unsecured personal loans to individuals.
Each postcode sector is broken down by category to show the exact lending being made to each. Wherever possible, any figures for an individual lender that either could not be attributed to a specific sector postcode or had to be redacted for data privacy or other reasons have been added to the area totals. In a small number of instances, data privacy reasons prevent the attribution of specific amounts to certain postal areas. That means that aggregate figures might not be exactly comparable across different postal areas. Therefore, sector postcodes do not necessarily map across readily or exactly to alternative geographic classifications.
If we are to make the most of the data released by the voluntary framework, surely they must be truly comprehensive and presented consistently, making them easy to analyse. They must also include all lenders, large and small, other than possibly an exemption for the smallest providers. Only that will give a fully inclusive picture of lending in all communities.
That is borne out by the experience of the wide range of organisations that are beginning to use these data to identify gaps in the supply of lending. They include: universities and academics working on financial exclusion; local authorities and local enterprise partnerships looking to extend access to affordable credit to support economic growth; and decision makers developing effective approaches to support innovation in the supply of affordable credit and the provision of financial services to all communities and businesses. For example, Birmingham city council has already analysed its local data and is now working with partners to fill the gaps in lending, for instance by supporting the development of local credit unions and community development finance institutions.
In response to concerns regarding consistency in the format of the released data, it has been suggested that that could be overcome if the framework scheme were to be managed by an independent organisation such as the Office for National Statistics. What more can the Government do to ensure the consistency of the data disclosed in the voluntary agreement, and what consideration is being given to bringing in an independent body to manage the scheme?
The methodology used for data collection centres on the postal addresses represented by Royal Mail postcodes. The data published reflect borrowing in live postcodes and give an up-to-date picture of its geographic distribution across Great Britain. However, there are no figures provided for Northern Ireland, Jersey, Guernsey or the Isle of Man. What efforts are being made to extend the voluntary framework to include the whole of the United Kingdom, not just Great Britain? For as long as the framework remains voluntary, it is open to many financial services providers to choose not to participate. There is also the possibility that those currently participating will pull out, for whatever reason. What assurances has the Minister received on future involvement in the framework? Is consideration being given—
Mr Love
That rather surprised me, Mr Deputy Speaker. I should have realised that when we got to 5 o’clock that announcement would have to be made.
Is consideration being given to putting the framework on a statutory basis?
It is important to take considerable care in interpreting local-level figures, as they will not necessarily be truly representative of the current picture for lending as a whole. For example, personal loan figures for participating lenders together represent fewer than 30% of the total national unsecured credit market and only an estimated 60% of all personal loans. There are no figures for larger payday lenders or for credit unions. Similarly, SME lending figures relate only to borrowing through loans and overdrafts. Other forms of finance, including business credit cards and asset-based finance, are widely used by SMEs but are not included in the data. SME loans and overdrafts for participating lenders represent about 60% of the total national market for all lending to SMEs, but this does not include community development finance institutions. The picture for the mortgage market, which includes most buy-to-let activity, as well as borrowing by home owners, is slightly better, with participating lenders together reporting on about three quarters of the national market.
Recently, following the Minister’s predecessor’s speech to the Community Development Finance Association conference in Bristol, the Community Development Foundation wrote to him outlining the additional data sets that would help to better explain which communities struggle to access affordable credit. These include the number of applications and loans in each area; the demographics of applications, including age, gender and ethnicity; and, regarding the loan itself, the interest rate and length of the loan. Greater transparency on all these issues will help to inform strategy to promote competition. What steps is the Minister taking to ensure that the data enable an accurate understanding of patterns of lending and highlights communities that struggle to access affordable credit?
Recently, in a comment on the disclosure framework, the Minister, in launching the Business Banking Insight survey said that,
“postcode lending data has highlighted the more deprived areas where larger banks are often not willing to lend and that will enable; challenger banks, smaller building societies, credit unions and community development finance institutions to move into those areas and to offer finance to those customers who are crying out for support to make their business grow”.
With that in mind, what use is the Treasury making of the data on bank lending to promote greater competition and enable smaller lenders to pursue new SME business?
We would like to see further progress and a clear Government plan to increase the amount of data released, and a strategy to fill gaps in the provision of financial services where they exist. It is crucial that the Government and regulators start to use the data to inform policy and market interventions, and we would like to understand plans and time scales for this. Has the Treasury made any request to the Financial Conduct Authority to undertake an analysis of these figures as part of its objective to “have regard” to competition and accessibility to better inform policy and decision making? Is the Treasury developing a clear Government strategy to tackle the “credit deserts” in many of our communities up and down the country?
The release of more consistent and comprehensive bank lending data has the potential to make a significant contribution to tackling financial exclusion, generating more fairness in the provision of financial services, supporting the growth of the SME sector and benefiting consumers by opening the door to a more competitive market. I commend that to the House.
Mr Gareth Thomas (Harrow West) (Lab/Co-op)
I am grateful to you, Mr Deputy Speaker, and to my hon. Friend the Member for Edmonton (Mr Love) and, indeed, to the Economic Secretary for allowing me to contribute to this brief debate. The Economic Secretary is a Minister of particular intelligence and sophistication, and I hope as a result she will be sympathetic to my hon. Friend’s request for clarity on whether the Financial Conduct Authority and, behind it, the Treasury and the Bank of England are really using the data on lending patterns that are being disclosed in order to identify the credit deserts across the UK which clearly exist.
One lesson from the United States, where similar disclosure of lending data takes place, is just how important the data are in identifying where credit unions or community banks—the community development financial institutions to which my hon. Friend referred—can help to plug the gaps. If the FCA or the Bank of England look with vigour at the lessons that can be learned from the data, that might help steer the work of the credit union expansion project being undertaken by the Department for Work and Pensions and the efforts of local enterprise partnerships to support CDFIs in plugging the lending gaps.
I support my hon. Friend in all the different points he made and urge the Minister to press the FCA to undertake open and rigorous scrutiny of the data following the forthcoming second disclosure, so that we can begin to get a sense of the emerging patterns and as a result better direct our resources to drive the expansion of alternative sources of lending in the credit deserts.
The Economic Secretary to the Treasury (Andrea Leadsom)
First, I congratulate the hon. Member for Edmonton (Mr Love) on securing this debate and presenting his case so eloquently. He was, of course, one of my partners in crime on the Treasury Committee, during which time together we held the Government to account. Therefore, given that this is our second debate together in as many months, I am very glad that he is doing just as good a job of holding the Government to account now that I am not on the Treasury Committee. I am grateful to him for that. The other thing that he and I share is a huge enthusiasm for greater competition, greater transparency and far greater choice and diversity of financial services for businesses and customers. We have worked together on that agenda for a very long time.
Before I get on to the hon. Gentleman’s specific points, I want to highlight the many measures that the Government are taking to try to improve that competition, choice and diversity. As he will know, we are currently consulting on whether to make the large banks provide referrals to challenger banks when they do not wish to lend to a small or medium-sized business. We are already looking at legislating through the small business Bill to require banks to share credit histories with credit reference agencies so that challenger banks with permission can look at other areas for lending. We are supporting peer-to-peer funding and crowdfunding.
Last week, in our bid to support the credit union movement, and quite apart from the funding from the Department for Work and Pensions, we put out a call for evidence to look at the future of the credit union movement and what is wanted from communities and the credit unions themselves. The Government therefore have a big agenda to promote precisely the transparency and competition on which the hon. Gentleman and I have worked very hard over the past few years.
The hon. Gentleman has raised a number of specific issues, but before turning to them I would like to provide a brief reminder of how far along we are with the work on postcode lending data and why we believe it is so important. As the hon. Gentleman has pointed out, the Government secured an agreement with the major banks last July to publish lending data across nearly 10,000 postcodes. It is worth reminding hon. Members that the measure has made the British banking industry into one of the most transparent in the world.
As the hon. Gentleman well knows, improving competition in banking is a No. 1 priority for many jurisdictions, not least the UK. The publication of the data will therefore play a big role in improving competition by enabling challenger banks, smaller building societies, credit unions and CDFIs to identify and move into areas that are not currently served by the larger banks. It will also mean that our economy is better served by their offering finance to customers who are crying out for support to help their business grow. I certainly believe that the project is vital, and that it will play a key role in improving lending in areas where it is currently lacking. I am sure that he agrees with that overarching sentiment.
I turn now to the specific points made by the hon. Gentleman and the hon. Member for Harrow West (Mr Thomas). On the comments of the hon. Member for Edmonton about expanding coverage across institutions, the Government made a clear commitment during the passage of the Financial Services Bill that the data would initially involve the lending of the seven major lenders. That decision was taken because of their dominance in the market. The Government also made it very clear that we intend to discuss with interested peers and the industry exactly how the data could be extended to cover other types of institutions, including banks, building societies, credit unions and other finance providers. It is, however, important to bear in mind that the cost of such a level of disclosure, particularly for smaller institutions, might be prohibitive and might increase the costs they pass on to their customers. We therefore want to consider the matter very carefully before we act.
With regard to expanding coverage across the country, the hon. Member for Edmonton will know that the first dataset did not include lending in Northern Ireland, due to the differing banking markets and reporting requirements for Northern Ireland banks. However, I assure him that the Government will ensure that any future extension includes the main Northern Ireland banks, and I confirm that the Government, with the British Bankers Association, are discussing with the Northern Ireland banks how the agreement might be extended to them.
I am sure that the hon. Gentleman will agree that it is important that due time is given for discussions to ensure that any agreement is proportionate and that data provided will be beneficial. I am also sure that he will welcome the news that, just yesterday, the BBA published composite bank lending data for Northern Ireland businesses and households for the first time. The Northern Ireland data have been sought after for some time, and their publication has been encouraged and helped by the joint ministerial taskforce on banking and access to finance.
The hon. Gentleman suggested that the framework in question should be managed by an independent organisation, such as the Office for National Statistics, but the BBA already collects and publishes a range of comprehensive data on lending to individuals, households and businesses, so it is very well positioned to agree the necessary standards on data release and accessibility. However, as he would expect, the Government will keep the situation under review.
Andrea Leadsom
Yes, the Government are keeping the matter under review, and we will discuss exactly that with the BBA.
The hon. Gentleman expressed concern that postcode lending data do not give a full picture of lending in the UK, and suggested that a wider set of lenders and products might be included. For example, he noted that SME figures represent about 60% of the national market, covering loans and overdrafts only. Other forms of finance, such as business credit cards and asset-based finance, are not included at this stage. He is therefore right that it is important for public data to be as broad as possible, but as I have mentioned, we must bear in mind that, particularly for smaller institutions, the cost of making such disclosure might be prohibitive and might increase the costs passed on to customers and businesses. It is important to see postcode data as part of a wide range of data to which the Government, banks and businesses have access, on top of data from the Bank of England, the BBA and other surveys.
Those other surveys, including the SME Finance Monitor and the new Business Banking Insight, can also be of real importance. The latter, which the Government announced in the Budget and I launched just over a month ago, is a really useful tool for UK businesses, as it lets them see which banks are in a good place to offer them the products and services they need at the right prices and will give them a decent service in their area and their particular market.
Finally, the hon. Gentleman asked what use the Government are making of the data on bank lending and whether we have a clear strategy for tackling any credit deserts in UK communities; the hon. Member for Harrow West also raised that issue. I reassure them both that the Government regularly interrogate these data as part of our wider analysis of bank lending conditions across the UK. However, the full usefulness of the data will only really be known once we have been able to identify longer-term series and trends.
At the current time, the data do not appear to show any regional imbalances, but we will continue to monitor that. As the dataset grows and trends become more readily identifiable, we plan to make increasing use of the data. We will of course take action on the issue if we think it is needed.
Mr Thomas
Will the Minister give us a little more clarity on who is analysing the trends? I ask, having asked the Financial Inclusion Centre specifically to give me a sense of the bank lending data for London; its analysis suggested that there was a wide disparity among different postcodes—potentially 50% to 300% of the average per capita lending per postcode. As my hon. Friend the Member for Edmonton mentioned, my sense was that there was a need for one particular organisation to analyse those data.
Andrea Leadsom
As I have said, at the current time the data do not seem to show any major regional imbalances, but my officials, the Bank of England, the BBA and the banks themselves are looking at the data. If the hon. Gentleman wants to write to me on a specific point where he believes that there may be evidence of a distinct imbalance I would be delighted to look into it and respond to him. We will continue to monitor the data and ensure that as trends become more identifiable we can make more use of the data to assess potential areas where there is a lack of banking facilities.
In conclusion—
Mr Love
I apologise—when the Minister said, “In conclusion,” I thought I had missed my opportunity. The Financial Conduct Authority has an objective of looking at particular areas, specifically for the purpose of researching into credit deserts. Have Treasury Ministers had any discussions with the FCA on that?
Andrea Leadsom
I assure the hon. Gentleman that officials meet the FCA on a regular basis, as do I. If it will make him feel better, I shall make a point of raising that issue with the FCA the next time we meet to ensure that it is looking at it carefully.
I thank the hon. Members for Edmonton and for Harrow West again for raising this important issue. As they know—the hon. Member for Edmonton certainly knows this—transparency and competition are central to the Government’s work on financial services. My interest lies very much in that area, so the hon. Member for Edmonton and I are aligned on that. Although I am sorry that I cannot give him the answers that he wants right now, because the new policy has not been in place for long and we do not have enough material as yet and because of our natural reticence to increase the costs for smaller institutions in the early days, I hope that I have reassured him that we will continue to monitor the data and look for ways to improve the service. Ultimately, I am confident that we will end up with a banking system that better serves people and businesses up and down the country.
Question put and agreed to.
Ministerial Correction
(10 years, 4 months ago)
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Electoral Register
(10 years, 4 months ago)
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Chris Ruane
To ask the Deputy Prime Minister if he will consider the merits of ring-fencing funds allocated by his Office to local government for the purpose of voter registration.
[Official Report, 12 May 2014, Vol. 580, c. 359W.]
Letter of correction from Greg Clark:
An error has been identified in the written answer given to the hon. Member for Vale of Clwyd (Chris Ruane) on 12 May 2014.
The full answer given was as follows:
Greg Clark
Both the paper forms and the new online registration channel to be used under individual electoral registration have been designed to meet a wide range of accessibility needs. The Government has no current plans to commission such research, but the Electoral Commission is currently aiming to publish its assessment of registration rates under individual electoral registration in July 2016.
The correct answer should have been:
Greg Clark
In the 2010 spending review, the Government ended ring-fencing of all main revenue grants from 2011-12. The removal of ring-fencing from local government grants has given councils the freedom over the money they receive and allows them to work with their residents to decide how best to make their spending decisions.
As part of the preparation for the transition to individual electoral registration (IER), the Government has paid grants to EROs and in advance of this sought a signed declaration from all Section 151 officers in local authorities in England and Wales, and electoral registration officers in Scotland, agreeing that they would not reduce the level of funding to electoral registration over the transition to IER.
Westminster Hall
Westminster Hall is an alternative Chamber for MPs to hold debates, named after the adjoining Westminster Hall.
Each debate is chaired by an MP from the Panel of Chairs, rather than the Speaker or Deputy Speaker. A Government Minister will give the final speech, and no votes may be called on the debate topic.
This information is provided by Parallel Parliament and does not comprise part of the offical record
North and West Africa (UK Response)
(10 years, 4 months ago)
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Westminster Hall is an alternative Chamber for MPs to hold debates, named after the adjoining Westminster Hall.
Each debate is chaired by an MP from the Panel of Chairs, rather than the Speaker or Deputy Speaker. A Government Minister will give the final speech, and no votes may be called on the debate topic.
This information is provided by Parallel Parliament and does not comprise part of the offical record
Sir Richard Ottaway (Croydon South) (Con)
It is a pleasure to have this important debate under your chairmanship, Mr Amess.
Two weeks ago, the Prime Minister warned against the threats posed by extremists fighting in Iraq and Syria. He said:
“The most important intervention of all is to ensure that those Governments are fully representative of the people who live in their countries, that they close down the ungoverned space and that they remove the support for the extremists. We must do that not only in Syria, but in Iraq, Somalia, Nigeria and Mali, because these problems will come back and hit us at home if we do not.”—[Official Report, 18 June 2014; Vol. 582, c. 1108.]
Those words remind me of the Prime Minister’s statement in January 2013, just after the al-Qaeda-linked attack on the In Amenas gas facility in Algeria in which 39 foreign workers, including six Britons, lost their lives. The terrorists hit Algeria a couple of days after France intervened in Mali in order to push back Islamists. At that time, the Prime Minister said:
“Those who believe that there is a terrorist, extremist al-Qaeda problem in parts of north Africa, but that it is a problem for those places and we can somehow back off and ignore it, are profoundly wrong. This is a problem for those places and for us.”—[Official Report, 18 January 2013; Vol. 556, c. 1167.]
He warned that those terrorists posed an existential threat.
That threat, and the spread of jihadist extremism in Africa’s western Sahel-Sahara region, was considered by the Select Committee on Foreign Affairs, which I have the privilege of chairing, and we published a report entitled “The UK’s response to extremism and instability in north and west Africa”. We considered three case studies: the French intervention in Mali, the In Amenas gas facility attack and the emergence of Boko Haram in northern Nigeria. Crises in Mali, Algeria, the Central African Republic or even Libya do not ring a bell with much of UK public opinion. The abduction of more than 200 Nigerian girls by Boko Haram is an exception, but only due to the global social media campaign and international press coverage. Sadly, the girls have not yet been rescued, and, worse, the kidnappings continue.
The situation in north and west Africa is serious. The region has become a new front line in the contest with Islamist extremism and terrorism, and those threats must be addressed, not only by regional powers but by the west. African problems will not be fixed only with African solutions—not yet, anyway. The African Union and its affiliated regional bodies do not yet seem able effectively to impose peace on a troubled area. Latent or open clashes can suddenly turn into far-reaching conflicts that can result in general instability, kidnappings, sexual violence, the imposition of sharia law, humanitarian crises and even mass killings.
As we look back over the events of the past 12 to 18 months, what is striking is the speed with which things change and how new groups appear. According to the United Nations, terrorist acts in the Sahel and the Maghreb increased by 60% in 2013 compared with 2012, reaching the region’s highest annual total for the past 12 years. This is not a criticism but an observation: the UK and other western countries seem to have been caught out by the eruption of successive conflicts in Africa’s western Sahel-Sahara region. The region has always been subject to local ethnic rivalries and power plays between states, and now it has become a powder keg. Jihadists and drug smugglers have taken advantage of its marginalised areas and porous borders and have capitalised on economic misery, chronic unemployment, weak state security and popular anger with corrupt governing elites.
The downfall of the Gaddafi regime in Libya has only worsened the situation. The western military intervention was a success in that it stopped Gaddafi bombing his own people and thus averted a humanitarian disaster in Libya, but international powers, including the United Kingdom, failed to foresee and mitigate the regional fallout. The former regime’s arms have spread all over the region, old mercenaries have made alliances with jihadists and extremists have settled in southern Libya. Libya has also become the busiest transit route for illegal immigration from Africa to Europe.
On the UK’s role in the situation, the UK Government pledged in January last year to increase their political security and economic engagement in north and west Africa, but in all honesty, since then, their actions have not matched their ambitions. The evidence points to a mismatch between the Government’s rhetoric and the UK’s scant diplomatic resources in the region. If the Government want to engage more effectively in the region, they must accumulate deeper specialist expertise and knowledge about the western Sahel-Sahara, and they must expand their diplomatic network in the francophone part of the region. Here the UK’s soft and hard power could be of great help, but the UK cannot do it on its own; it must co-operate closely with other western powers.
We as a Committee advocate that the UK should press for an international accord aimed at bringing security and stability to the region. The prime responsibility for implementing that agreement should rest with the tripartite leadership of France, the UK and the United States, assisted by the European External Action Service. This is a golden opportunity for the EEAS to get its teeth into something and come up with a solution. The three powers have already worked together, when France sent its troops to Mali; both the UK and the US supported Paris with logistics and technical assistance. Although Operation Serval has routed the jihadists from their northern stronghold, the fight is not yet over. Recent events in the city of Kidal, where the Malian army was humiliated by Tuareg separatists, have forced France to prolong its military mission in the country.
Obviously, the UK must co-operate with regional powers on foreign security and military policies. Algeria and Morocco, two stable countries in the region, are key to delivering stability there. They are natural partners for the UK and other western countries. However, the issue of western Sahara still divides them, and its resolution should always be on the Foreign and Commonwealth Office agenda. The same goes for Nigeria: the UK should assist Nigeria in its battle against Boko Haram, and it is rightly doing so. However, we should never forget that country’s poor record on human rights, its lack of leadership and widespread corruption and the brutality of its security forces.
A new opportunity for military co-operation will open by the end of the year, following the final withdrawal of UK troops from Afghanistan. I think I am right in saying that it will be the first time for many decades that we have not had an overseas deployment. We thought that the suggestion made by the previous Chief of the Defence Staff—that we should seriously consider the possibility of sending some of those well-skilled soldiers to training missions in Africa—was a good one, and I am pleased that the Minister, in his evidence to us, confirmed that the CDS was not just flying a kite. The UK is already providing military training to Kenya, Mali and Somalia, and it would assist the security and stability of fragile states, which could lead to assistance with good governance. Once stability was achieved, we could move on to economic aid packages. I think that that would contribute a lot to providing stability and security in the region.
Aid development is an issue that needs to be reviewed. All the evidence points to the fact that in some places, international aid development programmes may have become part of the problem instead of the solution. That is not to decry the good intentions of the aid providers, but in Mali the Committee was concerned to note that western help may have inadvertently inhibited the development of responsive and responsible government and entrenched corruption in the country’s political culture. We also believe—this is an old chestnut, but it is highly relevant—that development assistance should be redefined. At present, the OECD describes development assistance as
“promotion of the economic development and welfare of developing countries”.
We believe that in a rapidly changing world, security assistance should be included in that definition. Such an enhanced definition would guarantee financing for the security of inland borders, as well as funding for training and non-lethal equipment.
Illegal immigration facing southern Europe is another pressing issue. Despite the family planning programmes that the UK is now funding, there are unsustainable levels of population growth right across the Sahel. Millions of young men and women are being born into an economic desert, with little or no economic prospects, which is leading to increased political instability, organised crime and the spread of radical views. It also pushes people to risk their lives to find a safer place to live. Unfortunately, that often turns into human exploitation and sometimes death. Only last week, the Italian navy rescued more than 5,000 migrants who were trying to cross from north Africa. On one boat carrying 600 people, the navy discovered 30 bodies. That has echoes of the incident off Lampedusa last winter, when hundreds of dead people were found in a boat of migrants.
Illegal immigration and human trafficking from north Africa into Europe is a growing problem facing more and more EU countries. What really bothers us is the fact that the European Union does not seem to have a clear strategy for dealing with it. My question to the Minister—it was posed in our report, but I am afraid that the Foreign Office did not really take it up in its response—is this. If a boatload of refugees is found in the middle of the Mediterranean, is the policy to shepherd them to safety or to encourage them to turn back to the port they have come from? That is a fairly straightforward question.
We need quick action. Islamic extremism is a dynamic phenomenon. All eyes are now on advances in Iraq and Syria by the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham, but we should not forget the spread of extremism in north and west Africa. Concerted and quick action is a must, so I urge the Government to outline soon their strategy for dealing with the regional insecurity and crawling terrorism that are blighting a continent with which Britain has had so many connections over the centuries.
Sandra Osborne (Ayr, Carrick and Cumnock) (Lab)
The Foreign Affairs Committee report is important, and unfortunately it did not get the coverage that it deserved when it was published. I wonder whether that would still be the case today, given everything that has happened in the region, especially in Nigeria.
The spread of jihadist groups in the region is becoming more and more apparent, and it represents a new front line in violent extremism, which is spreading and becoming increasingly assertive and networked. We are concerned by the seeming failure of the states concerned and the international community to anticipate events and respond quickly, despite the statement in the Government’s response to our report that the UK and its partners had identified Mali, the Central African Republic and the wider Sahel region as being at risk of conflicts several years earlier due to the factors the Committee identified in our report. Those factors included weak governance, failure to address historic disputes, ungoverned spaces and organised crime, as well as the presence of terrorist groups. That prompts the question, why was more timely action not taken? What lessons can be learned and what is to be done now to stem the escalation of those problems?
Among the report’s recommendations, we make the point that the UK Government should match the rhetoric of their ambitions to increase their political, security and economic engagement with the region with substantive diplomatic input and resources. Even within the current financial restraints, they should make it a priority to support humanitarian efforts where people, especially women and girls, are being displaced and subjected to the most heinous atrocities. The prioritisation of such action is entirely consistent with the Government’s initiative on tackling violence against women and girls in conflict, and I know that the Department for International Development is doing a lot of work in northern Nigeria. Such action is also a priority if we are to protect the UK’s long-term interests and play a leading role with France and the US in developing an international security and stability policy for that region.
Although I am a member of the Foreign Affairs Committee, I joined the Committee mid-way through the inquiry, so I participated mainly in the aspects of the report that relate to Nigeria. The Committee’s visit to Nigeria was one of the most shocking experiences I have had during my time as a member of the Defence Committee and, now, the Foreign Affairs Committee. There is no doubt that violent extremism has taken root because of the inadequacy or absence of state institutions and the abandonment of huge sections of the population in remote and marginalised—mainly Muslim—areas, where the need to address socio-economic disadvantage has been met by complacency, even though Nigeria is the richest country in Africa. The country has been unable to provide security for its people.
Government officials in Nigeria informed us during our visit that measures will be taken to tackle unemployment and poverty, and they said that they recognised the link between deprivation and extremism, but more action is needed, rather than words. The fact that the Government have undertaken to work with international and regional bodies to build resilience and capacity to prevent state structures from being overwhelmed is welcome, but those structures have already been overwhelmed. In Borno state, it has been reported that Boko Haram has free rein in the area. It is doing what it likes, when it likes. Far from defeating those forces, the state of emergency declared more than a year ago in north-east Nigeria has failed to curb the Islamist insurgency and attacks have increased. In the past couple of months, Boko Haram has attacked several military bases. It is extending its reach beyond its remote north-eastern heartlands, and on two occasions has bombed a bus terminal in the capital, Abuja. Only last week, it bombed an upmarket shopping district in the capital, killing 21 people. As we all know, in April it kidnapped 276 schoolgirls from Chibok, an event that shocked the world.
The military have no public credibility because of their record of human rights abuses, and they lack modern equipment, training and motivation. They also lack air cover, and they requested help in that area from the US and the UK while we were in the country. Compared with the size of the population, the military are small in number and do not have the capacity to prosecute large-scale counter-insurgency operations. As the Chair of the Foreign Affairs Committee, the right hon. Member for Croydon South (Sir Richard Ottaway), has said, there are constraints on the military support that the UK can provide because of human rights concerns, which have been highlighted by Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch. The sale of lethal weapons is prohibited by UK law because of those concerns. That is a Catch-22 situation, because without training, the Nigerian military cannot get equipment or dramatically improve their capacity. Without those, they will remain weak in the face of the most ruthless and determined attacks from Boko Haram.
The UK has a large Nigerian diaspora and trading links with Nigeria, so UK bilateral input to that part of the region is particularly relevant. I therefore support the Committee’s recommendation that the UK Government should provide as much security and intelligence as is consistent with their human rights values. However, years of intensive commitment will surely be required for that to have any real effect. I wonder how much the international community and the regional groupings, including the African Union, are committed to that.
Inadequate military capacity is only one of the impediments to addressing the insurgency. Political will, accountability and credibility are also key to regaining stability and preventing the continuation of radicalisation. At the moment, the political leadership of the three states in the north-east is aligned with the opposition All Progressives Congress. On 14 May, the BBC reported that Mr Ledum Mitee, a former activist from the same region as President Goodluck Jonathan, had been quoted as saying:
“People around the President, his closest allies, all tell him this Boko Haram is manufactured by the northerners to play politics… This leads him to distance himself from the whole affair.”
He also said that the military commanders have to play politics because if
“they give the impression it is a very bad situation, they risk being branded incompetent, so they give a less bad picture to their bosses.”
He went on to say that when the crisis erupts, no one is able to deal with it effectively because it is so confused. That is just one person’s analysis, and he is probably no friend of the president, but if that was the situation previously, recent developments have surely proved that Boko Haram is only too real.
At the meeting last night, chaired by the Speaker and attended by Nigerian Finance Minister Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, I was pleased to hear that the president has been meeting with people across the political spectrum and across civil society to bring the people of Nigeria together at this time of crisis. She also said that the search is being stepped up with a greater and better equipped Nigerian army presence to take on Boko Haram in the northern states.
The recent relentless violence—including a bomb in a vehicle carrying charcoal that exploded in a busy market in north-east Nigeria, killing at least 20 people—has led to widespread concern, including in the capital, Abuja, and that is showing itself in public demonstrations. International pressure over the kidnapping of the girls from Chibok has forced the Nigerian Government to take notice and allow advisers from China, France, Israel, the UK and the US to assist its forces, but their presence is likely to be limited to assisting the search for the kidnapped girls, and will not include a general role in improving the Nigerian military’s capacity, over and above what is already being done.
I was pleased to hear from my right hon. Friend the Member for Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath (Mr Brown) that President Goodluck Jonathan has announced a plan to co-ordinate international anti-terrorist capability in the fight against Boko Haram and al-Qaeda-linked groups. That is precisely what our Committee has asked for—not just in Nigeria, but in the whole north-west Africa region. I add my support to my right hon. Friend’s request that the UK Government support the initiative.
Mike Gapes (Ilford South) (Lab/Co-op)
I want to highlight a wider aspect of this issue: the ongoing conflict within Islam, which is taking place not only in north and west Africa; it is a global struggle. It is not helpful to refer to moderates and extremists, because there are complex historical religious disputes and power struggles in which individuals are using religion to try to gain political or economic power.
There was a justified intervention in Libya in 2011, to save the people of Benghazi from being killed, as Gaddafi intended, house by house, like rats. One unfortunate consequence of that intervention was that the country, which was in many senses an artificial creation—as are many countries in the middle east, too, lines having been drawn on maps in the colonial period—has ceased to function in any way as what we would regard to be a state. Because of the weaponry stockpiled by Gaddafi’s regime, and the way he used mercenaries and citizens of other states as part of his elite forces, an unintended consequence of that intervention has been that masses of weaponry have come out of Libya, much of it going to other parts of north and west Africa, but some is going to Syria, Iraq and elsewhere in the Muslim Arab world.
We have already heard mention of the instability in Mali as the Tuaregs swept across the desert and reinforced the incipient disaffected insurgency in the north of the country. I went with the Select Committee to visit both Mali and Nigeria, and we also visited Algeria. It is very revealing to visit a country and get the sense that the lines on the map have created an absolute nightmare. In terms of its borders, Mali must be the strangest country of almost any. There is a round part at the bottom and a triangle going out at the top. There is a completely ungovernable desert area, called Azawad, and the River Niger bending round. All the population lives alongside the river, and there are huge areas of desert and ungovernable space. In any state where the mass of the population is in the capital in the south, I do not know how any Government would be able to govern areas hundreds or thousands of miles away, with virtually no people—except small communities living in areas with access to water, and nomadic populations—and lots of poverty. How any Government, even the most advanced, with massive economic resources, would be able to govern that space effectively is beyond me.
The Chairman of the Select Committee, the right hon. Member for Croydon South (Sir Richard Ottaway), quite rightly referred to the attack on the BP facility in In Amenas in Algeria. People swept across from desert areas and launched a terrorist attack; workers were taken hostage and killed, and there was the terrible long-term consequence of instability in the region.
We now have a nexus of robbers, bandits and criminal bands who would normally be smuggling tobacco or other products across the desert, or smuggling people to the coast to try to board the very same vessels heading across the Mediterranean that were referred to earlier, and that nexus is linked to Islamist ideology and the weaponry that has come out of the Libyan conflict. The Governments in the region face enormous, insurmountable problems.
Mark Hendrick (Preston) (Lab/Co-op)
My hon. Friend said “linked”; what is the link between criminal gangs that are smuggling, arms dealing and dealing in drugs from south America, and those who claim that their movement is about faith, ideology and the Islamic religion? What is the connection between the two? I cannot see one, so how does my hon. Friend make that link, and, for that matter, how do they make links with each other?
Mike Gapes
Unfortunately, there are a number of examples of groups in different parts of the world that have used illegal activities to finance their organisations. The pattern is not just prevalent among Islamist groups; the IRA used to rob banks, so such criminal activities are not confined to Muslims. I believe that some people use the ideology and label as a way of getting external support. When we were in Nigeria, we were told that Boko Haram had originally started as a localised conflict group, but managed to get itself endorsed as an al-Qaeda franchise. Presumably that means that people in parts of Saudi Arabia may be indirectly financing those groups; that is something that we have to confront.
The essence of the point I am trying to make, which the former Prime Minister Tony Blair correctly made, is that there is an ideological aspect. One of the problems that we face, as we touched on in our report, is that we are not only dealing with what is happening in the region; there are diaspora communities, as has been said, but there are also people who have been radicalised by the internet. There are also people who have come back from conflicts to which they went as foreign fighters, and of course there are people who have converted. The terrible murder of Lee Rigby was carried out by people who were born into Christian families from Nigeria but who, at a later stage, converted to become part of the same radicalised, Islamist terrorist network. The roots of the problems are therefore complex, and they are with us not just this year, next year or even next decade; they are probably with us for decades. Those of us who believe in societies in which men and women are equal, in which we do not discriminate and in which minority religions are protected have a difficult dilemma. My hon. Friend the Member for Ayr, Carrick and Cumnock (Sandra Osborne) referred to that dilemma when she talked about the human rights problems in Nigeria.
The same argument applies—I referred to this in our debate on Africa a few weeks ago—to the attitude that the British Government should take to the situation in Egypt. The best can be the enemy of the good. We can insist on stepping back because things are difficult, or because we do not want to be associated with a Government with whom we do not agree on all matters, but such Governments are infinitely better than societies that are either ungoverned or taken over by Islamist, al-Qaeda-linked terrorist organisations, or worse. That is a recipe for disaster.
People who think that all the world’s problems were caused by the 2003 intervention in Iraq will not agree with what I am about to say, but we are dealing with fundamental issues that are related to a conflict within Islam that goes back decades or centuries. We cannot solve that conflict from outside, but we can at least try to help people whose view is closer to that of western European and north American society. Given that Islam is a religion within our country, we cannot sit on the side and ignore it. The radicalisation and de-radicalisation of young men, and some young women, in our European and British society is part of the domestic debate in this country, too.
What goes on in north and west Africa also affects us. The Prime Minister is right that we have to engage on those issues as internationalists, and as people who believe in human values and defending women’s rights, the right of girls to go to school and all the other things to which we agreed when we signed the universal declaration of human rights, which was written by Eleanor Roosevelt and a few other people in 1948. Those values are under attack from activities not only in north and west Africa but in other parts of the world. Countries such as Egypt, Nigeria and others therefore need our support and solidarity as they engage with such difficult issues.
Finally, non-intervention also has consequences. We will see spill-over consequences in neighbouring states if we sit back and say that it is too difficult: “Some 170,000 people have died in Syria—well, it’s too difficult. Nine million people have been internally displaced or made refugees—it’s too difficult.” The same issue could arise if extremist Salafists destabilise the Sinai peninsula. What if, as a result, a more extreme situation arises in Gaza? I am still in Africa when I talk about Sinai, but I do not think I am when I talk about Gaza, although it is a complex issue. We are able to understand those issues, but nevertheless, for perhaps understandable reasons, there is great reluctance to address them. People ask why we should get involved. The reason why we should get involved, and why we should support people who are working for equality of men and women, for girls to go to school and for human rights, is because these things affect us, too.
I recognise that our report did not get the publicity it deserved, but the people who look at these issues in detail will understand that the report makes a valuable contribution to the debate and raises questions for the Government, particularly on our co-operation with other partners. We were right to support Operation Serval, the French intervention in Mali, and we are right to be involved in the European Union training mission, but much more needs to be done, not just in Mali but in other countries in the region. One country that has not been mentioned is the Central African Republic, where there has been terrible Christian-Muslim violence. As a permanent member of the UN Security Council and a member of NATO, the European Union and the UN Human Rights Council, we have an important international responsibility to ensure that the world does not forget and assists countries in north and west Africa.
Mark Hendrick (Preston) (Lab/Co-op)
The Chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee, the right hon. Member for Croydon South (Sir Richard Ottaway), rightly highlighted the three case studies in the report: Mali, Algeria and Nigeria. We wanted to establish the principal causes of the extremism that we saw in those countries and what we, in Britain, could do about it. We found a heady mix. As I am sure is of no surprise to many people in the Chamber, the combination of poverty, inequality, corruption and misgovernance contributed to the situation we found in Africa. Those things are not unique to Africa, and they occur in the middle east, Asia and many other parts of the world where terrorism is beginning to flourish. They are a recipe for instability.
If we look back to 19th and 20th century Europe, we see that, from the beginning of the industrial revolution through to the nuclear age, there was affluence and wealth but a huge difference between rich and poor. That mix spawned the revolutions and instability of those centuries. We are seeing the same in the 21st century, but it is much worse and on a global scale. We particularly see that in Africa, where there is newfound wealth from oil, gas, valuable materials, diamonds and gold. Africa has become a battleground extraordinaire between rich and poor because it is a continent where, in many ways, economic development seems to be going backwards while there is huge wealth and potential prosperity from which very few people benefit.
Different things happened in our three case studies. There was French intervention in Mali. In Algeria we particularly looked at the In Amenas incident, and I still get inquiries to this day from people who work for oil companies attached not only to Algeria but to other parts of north Africa. I can draw on what members of the Committee learned from travelling to Algeria. The third country that we looked at, Nigeria, has hit the headlines at the moment. Visiting Nigeria had a big impact on me, as it did on my hon. Friend the Member for Ayr, Carrick and Cumnock (Sandra Osborne). To see the rampant and explicit nature of the terrorism in northern Nigeria was indeed a shock, and of course since our return it has become much worse; I will refer to that development later.
One of the conclusions of the report is that north and west Africa has become a new front line. We all knew about the existing front line. In the east, it started around Chechnya, in what was a southern part of the Soviet Union; it reached through to the middle east and north Africa; and it covered Somalia in eastern Africa. Now it has extended across to north and west Africa, the region that we are considering today. It is an arc reaching from north-eastern Europe through the middle east and across the whole of Africa, and it is encircling Europe. The UK is obviously a bit further afield because of our geographical location, and I will discuss the UK later. Nevertheless, the effect is being felt not only in mainland Europe but in the UK, as we are already beginning to see; my hon. Friend the Member for Ilford South (Mike Gapes) mentioned that earlier.
The report outlines many of our findings, but let me go through some of the events that have taken place in Africa this year alone. I believe that there is no end in sight to the current instability in the region of north and west Africa, particularly in the three countries we looked at but further afield as well. In Libya, we have seen continued instability, with political assassinations and attempted coups, and there is now fighting in the capital between the rebels and the army. On 11 January, the deputy Industry Minister, Hassan al-Droui, was shot dead during a visit to his home town of Sirte, which is east of Tripoli. The identity of the shooters is still unknown. On 20 February, Libyans went to the polls to elect a panel to draft a new constitution. Just 1.1 million of the 3.4 million eligible voters went to register, compared with the more than 2.7 million people who participated in Libya’s first free election in July 2012.
When Labour was in Government and Mr Blair went to embrace Colonel Gaddafi, Libya quite openly and willingly discarded its nuclear weapons. We thought that would possibly be a new beginning in Libya. Since then, however, we and the French have intervened in what was the beginning of a civil war. Afterwards, when we thought we had what we would call a result in Libya, the situation became even worse, and currently there is great instability.
Two coup d’état attempts have been made in 2014 by forces loyal to Major General Haftar, the commander of the Libyan ground forces. First Haftar took control of Libya’s main institutions, before announcing on TV that he had suspended the General National Congress and the Government and made a constitutional declaration. On 18 May, it was reported that the Parliament building had been stormed by troops loyal to him.
As my hon. Friend the Member for Ilford South said, there are consequences of intervention, even if it is very difficult to say what they are. Then again, we know the consequences of non-intervention, because the people of Benghazi would have been slaughtered by Colonel Gaddafi’s forces if the west had not intervened in the way that it did and he had remained in power.
We have seen the ousting of the sitting Prime Minister, and on 11 March the rebels sold oil to North Korea; the Morning Glory tanker reportedly took at least 234,000 barrels of crude oil there. It was the first vessel to have loaded oil from a rebel-held port since the revolt against the Tripoli authorities erupted last July. Such unchecked activities are going on in the background, and a rogue state such as North Korea can receive support from a country such as Libya. There has been further fighting by rebels in Libya, too. We could not have predicted what is going on today, and that is the problem with intervention.
The French intervened in Mali. In May, the ceasefire was broken with clashes between the two sides in the northern city of Kidal, which killed at least 36 people. Mali’s army launched an operation to seize Kidal but was defeated by the rebels, who then seized two more towns. Also in May, the fragile truce with the Tuareg National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad separatists broke down in the north of the country, and the separatists seized control of Kidal and the towns of Menaka, Aguellok, Anefis and Tessalit.
In Nigeria, things are also getting worse. On Tuesday, the military said that it had broken up a Boko Haram cell that had masterminded the kidnapping of more than 200 schoolgirls in April, but hours before that a bomb blast struck a busy market in Maiduguri, the capital of the Islamist insurgents’ home state of Borno. At least 2,000 people have been killed this year, compared with an estimated 3,600 in the four years since the insurgency began. This year alone, there have been 20 attacks by Boko Haram that have been officially reported, in which at least 1,158 people have been killed, and an estimated 12,000 people have died so far in the five-year insurgency.
As I said at the beginning of my contribution, the link between economic inequality and extremism is well known and well developed. Nigeria has the resources to beat Boko Haram if it was determined to do so, but most of its staggering oil wealth—up to $70 billion annually—is held by a small, politically connected elite, who remain insulated from Boko Haram’s terror tactics and seem almost indifferent to the war. As far as many people in Lagos are concerned, Boko Haram is Muslims killing Muslims. Those people in Lagos are Christians, so do they care? No, they do not. That attitude permeates the political realm in Nigeria.
When we were in Nigeria and spoke to people there, we learned that Nigerian MPs are paid a salary 10 times that of a Member of this House, and if they are not corrupt people think that there is something wrong with them as a politician. It is the sort of society where corruption is endemic and self-serving politicians are rife, so what is going on in the north of the country is of little or no consequence to people in Lagos.
Nigeria has nearly 16,000 millionaires, a number that has jumped by 44% in the past six years. As I have said, much of the wealth is concentrated in Lagos, Nigeria’s biggest city, where the northern rebellion by Boko Haram feels like a distant rumour. The divide between the Christian south and the Muslim north is huge, and the extent of relative poverty and inequality in the north has led several analysts and organisations to argue that socio-economic deprivation is the main factor behind Boko Haram’s campaign of violence there.
The communities of northern Nigeria are being wrecked by poverty, deteriorating social services and infrastructure, educational backwardness, rising numbers of unemployed graduates, massive numbers of unemployed youths, dwindling fortunes in agriculture and the weak and dwindling production base of the northern economy.
As for Mali, after Gaddafi’s fall in Libya the Tuareg people who had fought for him went home to Mali. Poor and with no livelihoods, within months they had tipped northern Mali into full-scale armed rebellion and there was a takeover of the region by Islamist fighters. The Tuareg have traditionally been a nomadic people with little personal wealth.
As I have said, Libya is reliant on oil and much of the current fighting is about the oil revenues going to the capital and not to other parts of the country. There is a strong argument in many places for greater autonomy. What the Tuareg separatists in Mali, Boko Haram in Nigeria and the Islamist rebels in Libya all have in common is a desire for their own state, as we have seen in Syria and Iraq with ISIS. Extremist as they may be, they feel that they are not getting a fair deal from the existing establishment. A lot of that stems from the growth inequalities that I have spoken about. Ultimately, they desire to govern their own affairs.
In Mali, the separatist movements demand greater autonomy for the north, which they term Azawad, as my hon. Friend the Member for Ilford South mentioned. Yet Governments in the region continue to be mistrustful of Islamists in politics, as they would put it. The Prime Minister of Mali, Moussa Mara, said:
“Say we give the Kidal region more resources and a lot more decentralized power, and they elect a jihadist to lead Kidal. That means we would have given our territory to jihadists, and democratically. This is what we want to avoid”.
A similar sentiment is offered by many Governments throughout the region and the throughout the west.
We know that boundaries in many of these countries do not reflect historical tribal land occupations, religious differences that exist between groups and locations of resources. In the aftermath of colonialisation, the development of cities and the exploitation of resources do not take account of population needs. That is the reason for the current conflict.
What can we do? Diplomatic effort by the UK in Africa may have a little effect, but many African countries remember the colonisation of Africa by the United Kingdom. As much as Britain has good intentions, given that history, it is not always trusted in Africa.
We have tried intervention in Libya and Iraq. As my hon. Friend the Member for Ilford South said, we have also tried inaction sometimes, and non-intervention, for example in Syria, although that is not a response. It seems contradictory and inconsistent to have invaded Iraq, as we in the west did with the Americans, where there were no weapons of mass destruction and no chemical weapons, but not to have invaded Syria when we had the option to do so, albeit from the air or by helping separatists, when there were chemical weapons.
Maliki is blaming Saudi Arabia and Saudi Arabia is blaming Maliki. In America, the Republicans are blaming Obama and the liberals are blaming Bush. Everybody is blaming each other when looking at the separatists, whether ISIS or terrorist operations in Africa. Everybody in every country has to take some responsibility.
Aid is helpful if it is targeted, but there are governance problems and corruption. In Africa and elsewhere around the world, post-colonialism, there was a move towards nationalism, whether in Africa or in the Arab middle east—Assad in Syria, Gaddafi in Libya, Mugabe in Zimbabwe. However, many nationalist leaders have, as a result of impoverishment and inequalities, now been swept away by religious movements. People are now saying, “Perhaps we should have supported Gaddafi, Saddam Hussein or Assad, because what we are seeing now is much worse.” We will never know the answer. However, we are now sure that pure military intervention is no solution.
A long-term solution may be to shape events, win hearts and minds and try to secure economic development where it is needed, but that cannot be done by Britain alone. Many of us think that because of our colonial past—hon. Members can see that I am a product of our colonial past—Britain has all the answers. However, we do not and neither does the United States. Although we have good intentions, the future of this country’s wider international influence is in helping people shape events for the greater good, rather than just attacking or intervening because we do not like people or standing back because we are too scared about public opinion. We have to be brave about this. I look forward to hearing the Minister’s response.
Ian Lucas (Wrexham) (Lab)
It is a real pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Amess, and it has been a pleasure to listen to the debate.
I thank the Chair of the Foreign Affairs Committee, the right hon. Member for Croydon South (Sir Richard Ottaway), and Committee members for undertaking this inquiry and producing an incredibly valuable report, which I found helpful, dealing with profound issues affecting this region. As we have heard, it is difficult to limit discussion of the region to this geographical area alone. As hon. Members have indicated, many themes and big issues confront us within this region and beyond it; these are common and reach across into north-east Africa and the middle east. These are some of the major issues of our time, which we must confront. The Committee Chair’s introduction was valuable.
I should like to make a point that I do not think has been emphasised enough in this debate. This area of the world has a great deal of potential. When visiting Algeria, I was struck, on meeting a huge number of young people at the university of Algiers, by the fact that they were intensely ambitious and knowledgeable about the world, including the United Kingdom. They were keen to develop close links with the UK in particular, especially through the medium of the English language. This has been recognised by our ambassador to Algeria, for example, who is working hard to try to develop better connections. There is also a good, developing relationship between Morocco and the UK in terms of trade and education, which is a force for good, and a way that we can try to begin to address some long-term issues.
The Committee Chair made an important point, which I, too, would emphasise, about Algeria and Morocco being natural partners. These two countries in the region are stable, albeit that they have different histories, and we know that they are rivals. During my visit to Algeria and Morocco, I had constructive discussions with politicians in both countries, until I mentioned either Morocco or Algeria. My hon. Friend the Member for Preston (Mark Hendrick) mentioned the European historical context; their relationship reminds me of the French-German relationship. For example, the Western Sahara situation has parallels with Alsace-Lorraine.
It would be a major step forward if those of us developing good relations with both Algeria and Morocco could emphasise the importance of trying to find a way forward on the Western Sahara issue. The border between Algeria and Morocco is still closed. We cannot conceive of a good trading relationship and real economic development in that region while that situation pertains.
Mark Hendrick
Some 30 years ago, when I was a student in Liverpool, many students on my electrical engineering course were from Algeria. I think that Algeria is relatively stable now because many of those students who came to the UK and elsewhere in Europe to study engineering went back with degrees, although they had little opportunity to exploit and use them. The experience of the tremendous upheavals in Algeria 20 years ago has made it much more stable and more resistant to terrorism than many other countries in the north of Africa.
Ian Lucas
There was indeed a dreadful civil war in Algeria that predated the Arab uprisings, and stability there is a product of recent history. There is an opportunity in Algeria, which is on the cusp of change, in my view, having had various discussions about it. There have to be better relationships within the region—that is important—and we must try to find, within the region, improved mechanisms for dealing with issues, because the people who are most profoundly and immediately affected by all the instability that the report outlines are those who live in the region.
Another country that has not been mentioned is Tunisia. It is an important country that has struggled hard since the beginning of the Arab uprisings, which started there. It has managed to accommodate different viewpoints and, through hard work in difficult times, it has created a constitution that will hopefully lead to elections in the near future. I would like to see Tunisia work together with other countries, along with those of us who wish for this part of the world to stabilise, to make progress. I know—there have been references to this—that there is profound unease in Tunisia and Algeria about the instability in Libya, and that unease extends to Egypt, as the Chair of the Select Committee knows. The instability in Libya is a real worry, and it is affecting many countries in the region.
The debate has highlighted the different pressures and the seriousness of the situation, but there is an opportunity, through the more stable countries in the region, to build an approach that confronts many of the issues that my hon. Friend the Member for Ilford South (Mike Gapes) raised. They are profound issues for us all, and he is right to emphasise that they are not distant from us. Anyone who has been to the strait of Gibraltar knows how close Europe is to Africa. In the days of the Roman empire, the quickest routes to Africa were across the sea from Italy to places such as Libya. Such places as Leptis Magna show the common culture that existed in that part of the world. Instability in north Africa will inevitably affect all of Europe—not just southern Europe. The important issues highlighted by my hon. Friend are part of why we need to engage so strongly with young people in places such as Algiers, Morocco and Egypt, in order to encourage them and understand why some people—not just in north Africa; it has happened in the United Kingdom—are radicalised and commit heinous crimes.
It is important that we deal with the economic disparities in the region. On Nigeria, which my hon. Friend the Member for Ayr, Carrick and Cumnock (Sandra Osborne) focused on because she joined the Committee when the inquiry was looking at that country, it is intensely frustrating that a country that has so many millionaires, and so much wealth and potential, seems incapable of administering the area that it governs. That must play a part in why some people feel that they have no stake in that country and see extreme ideologies as offering something that is not being offered by the Government.
The issues are long term, but the questions of economic stability and economic opportunities for young people are urgent. In these days of the internet and global connectivity, a common theme among young people is ambition, and a common theme across north Africa is the number of highly educated young people who have great capabilities and talents that are not supported sufficiently by the number of jobs created in the local economy. They and their families are not being offered the real opportunities to progress that they need. Those big questions—I am sorry that they are such big questions, because big questions have complex and protracted solutions—mean that we have to be in this for the long term. There are not a million miles between the Minister and me on these issues. It is important that the United Kingdom stays in this for the long term and devises the best approach, so that we can play a positive role. I have met with members of the ambassadorial teams, who have an ambitious role, but the report is right to highlight that the reality does not match the rhetoric.
Another point that the report picks up on is the ministerial organisation within the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. I am shadow Minister with responsibility for Africa and the middle east. The Minister’s remit is the middle east and north Africa, and there is a separate Minister with the remit of Africa. The FCO splits the remit of Africa between two different teams because of the Sahara. The report states:
“A common thread in UK policy appears to be a weakness of analysis in relation to crises straddling North Africa and West Africa: the Sahara may form a departmental barrier within the Foreign Office, but it is not one for terrorists.”
That is a sharp observation. I find it helpful that I have to cover the whole of Africa, because so many of the issues relating to Africa extend from north Africa down to Nigeria and the band right across the continent from Somalia in the east to Mauritania and Morocco in the west. In the Foreign Office, thought should at least be given to that, and whether the current organisation of areas reflects the massive challenges. I have thought about that point, and it was picked up on by the Committee.
We heard from my hon. Friend the Member for Ayr, Carrick and Cumnock about the work that my right hon. Friend the Member for Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath (Mr Brown) has been doing. I attended the meetings and the Adjournment debate last night on the young women abducted in Nigeria. That horrific series of incidents has troubled us all in the House, and my right hon. Friend should be commended on his superb work. He put it interestingly when he referred to this being a civil rights issue for girls. I was struck by that terminology. This is not only an issue in Nigeria; there are threats to girls’ future right across the region. Many of the people I have met in Algiers and during my visits across north Africa have been women—highly educated women with massive potential, who can offer much to their countries. The idea that they should be prevented from contributing to their future, and the future of their family and country, simply because they are women is so abhorrent that we should see it as a civil rights issue. It should motivate us, right across the political spectrum and the world, to confront this.
We need to look for long-term solutions, and to learn from the report, which I commend again, how to develop a better analysis. Our connection with the region is perhaps lesser, historically, than our connections with many other parts of Africa. There is more of a French connection, historically. I have been struck by Morocco and Algeria wishing to have closer relations with the United Kingdom, and we need to build on that. Our education system provides the key to the door. We need to be passionate in our advocacy of women as part of the future of the region. Tunisia is a potential beacon of open democracy in the region, so can we please ensure that is has support? It was able to create a constitution and can work with partners across north Africa to secure a more stable situation in the years ahead.
The Minister of State, Foreign and Commonwealth Office (Hugh Robertson)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Amess. I start by thanking the Select Committee on Foreign Affairs for its report and hon. Members for their contributions, and by apologising for not being the Under-Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs, my hon. Friend the Member for Boston and Skegness (Mark Simmonds)—the Minister with responsibility for Africa—who has been responding to the debate in the Chamber. I will try my best to answer the questions that have been put to me, but if I cannot, I hope that hon. Members will accept a response in writing after the debate.
The hon. Member for Wrexham (Ian Lucas), the Opposition spokesman, said that there was not a million miles—was it a million or 100 million?—between us. The honest truth is that there is not even 1 mile between us on this matter. The danger, as pointed out by my right hon. Friend the Member for Croydon South (Sir Richard Ottaway), the Chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee, is that we tend to examine threats and then the focus moves on. Since the Committee produced its report, the focus moved to Syria and is now on Iraq. The spotlight moves on and we tend to follow it. As many hon. Members said, the underlying problems are long term and systemic, and only by committing ourselves to the region multilaterally will they be addressed.
Before addressing the points raised in the debate, I was asked to put on the record the apologies of the Prime Minister’s representative for the Sahel, my right hon. Friend the Member for Eddisbury (Mr O’Brien), for not being here. He is in Niger, where, I am glad to say, he is overseeing the first contract signed by that country with a UK company, so there is progress of a sort.
The best way for me to respond might be to go through the various contributions to pick up the questions asked—[Interruption.] I have just been told that that is probably not the way to do it, but there we go. Let me start with the speech of my right hon. Friend the Member for Croydon South, the Chairman of the Committee. He and others are right that Morocco and Algeria are natural allies of ours. They are two countries for which I am responsible and I have visited both this year. In the past, we might have suffered from the misapprehension that, being Francophone countries, they look to Paris, but they are keen to broaden their approach and to do more business with this part of the world, and, as the hon. Member for Wrexham said, the English language is key to that. Younger people in both countries are keen to learn English—the language of the internet. The idea that the quid pro quo for that should be a much more proactive involvement in the international affairs of north and west Africa is absolutely something that they understand and agree with.
Western Sahara is the sticky issue that prevents that, however. Relations between the two countries are not good. Nevertheless, it is encouraging that both recognise that relations are not good and that that is a barrier to further progress. I hope that a slight change in how this country deals with Morocco—to set parameters regarding Western Sahara and then to encourage it to meet them, which is a more proactive involvement, spearheaded by our excellent ambassador in Rabat—is starting to make a difference.
I agree with my right hon. Friend, the Chairman of the Committee, that the definition of development assistance must be enhanced and he is right that security and other areas can play a role; it cannot simply be the traditional definition. The same is true for the work of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. There was a time, some 20 years ago perhaps, when the Foreign Office saw its role in terms of pure diplomacy. These days, our relationships with countries are also about defence, security, health and education and, in some places, even culture and sport. We must learn to engage across a much wider waterfront.
Mentioning a wider waterfront brings me on to the question about the boat. The best answer is that I will write to my right hon. Friend, but I will have a go. Task Force Mediterranean is focused on prevention rather than stopping people leaving in the first place. I suspect that the answer to his question is that once a boat of migrants is intercepted, they would be returned to the nearest safe port or their home country, whichever is closer. That is the common-sense answer, but I will check and write to him.
The hon. Member for Ayr, Carrick and Cumnock (Sandra Osborne) talked mainly about Nigeria, which I have not visited, but I was struck by the impression that it had made on her. She is right to say that the UK Government should give as much support as possible. I presume that she is aware of the package of support announced by the Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs on 12 June, following the London ministerial meeting, which includes direct tactical training and advice for Nigerian forces about the fight against terrorism. We are also involved in a regional intelligence-sharing partnership with France, the US, Nigeria and its neighbours. The Department for International Development and the United States Agency for International Development partnership will hopefully draw a million more children into education by 2020, which is in addition to the million that this country committed to in May under the UN safe schools initiative, and DFID will commit to 60% of its spend in northern Nigeria over coming years. Before coming here, I asked about last night’s debate introduced by the former Prime Minister, the right hon. Member for Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath (Mr Brown), and was delighted to hear that it went well. Indeed, I believe that he welcomed the UK’s support for Nigeria.
The hon. Member for Ilford South (Mike Gapes), the former Chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee, made a thought-provoking speech, and I absolutely agree with him. He will be amused to know that when I first met the Foreign Minister of the Kurdish autonomous region, as we were walking out at the end of a half-hour meeting, he said, “I forgot to do the thing that I should have done, which is to thank you for saving us all in 1991.” He then laughed and said, “And blame you for causing the problem in the first place.” The lines that we—Sykes and Picot in that case—drew across maps have caused many repercussions, and the hon. Gentleman is right to point to their illogicality.
The hon. Gentleman is also right that engagement with a country—this has really struck me during my 10 months in the Foreign Office—is always much more powerful than standing off and criticising. It is all too easy to think that because we are uncomfortable with some things that a country does it is better to disengage and criticise. It is almost always right to get involved and then make comments from the position of critical friend. There is a balance, but he is correct to say that non-intervention also has consequences. When we do not intervene, the problem often arrives in due course anyway.
The hon. Gentleman asked in particular about arms and ammunition in Libya. The Government have committed £20 million to address that problem. I am not sure whether this came out in the inquiry, but it was suggested to me that more than 400 arms dumps were left across Libya when Gaddafi fell, and that more arms and ammunition were floating around than when the eastern bloc fell in the late 1980s, which is a worrying statistic.
In another excellent speech, the hon. Member for Preston (Mark Hendrick) made some good points about Mali, Nigeria, Libya and others. On Libya, the Prime Minister has just appointed Jonathan Powell, who used to work for Tony Blair, as special envoy. He will work closely with his US counterpart to try to support and bring together reconciliation efforts in the country. Every country must take its share of responsibility. Looking across the whole area, the key to solving the issues and to long-term, sustained engagement will be a multilateral approach, involving us, the French, the United Nations, African forces and the rest coming together to achieve a common agenda. It is fair to say that that has not been the case up to now, and we are in the early stages of doing it, but that is clearly the way forward.
The hon. Member for Wrexham also made that point—the multilateral approach using stable countries will be the key to progress in the region—and he is absolutely right to talk about the phenomenal potential of countries such as Algeria and Morocco. We have both visited Algeria, a country that is changing extraordinarily quickly. The Algerians said to me, “The west has only just woken up to what we went through in the 1990s,” and, having come out of that, slowly but surely, they are keen not only to forge closer links with us in the west, and probably to shake off that Paris focus in policy, but to see what they can do in the region. When I was last in Algeria, on my second visit, the Algerians were in the process of hosting peace talks for the Malian Government. That was the first time, I think, that the Algerian Government had reached out beyond their own borders. We applaud such encouraging signs there.
The hon. Gentleman is absolutely right to talk about the key role of the English language. In a sense, the British Council can never do enough in such areas, although we have been helped enormously by the fact that English has become the language of the internet and the preferred language for many young people. It gives us a real opportunity, which we should not miss.
We have spoken about reconciliation between Morocco and Algeria, but the hon. Gentleman also made a good point about Tunisia, the home of the Arab spring and in many ways its most successful graduate. There has been progress, although things seem to get there just before the critical moment. As he said, however, it is good to see that elections are scheduled for the autumn. It is vital that this country continues to support the Tunisians.
I will deal with the easy points made by the hon. Gentleman. He is absolutely right about civil rights and Nigeria—he is on the money there. On the question of ministerial responsibilities, the situation predates me, and I took over from someone with the same brief as mine. On the question of how things are divided up, the danger of grouping the middle east and all of Africa is that together they are a large part of the cake, which raises the issue of whether someone could give the region all the attention it deserves. I suspect we follow the Arab League arrangements, which take in the countries of north Africa, but not much further beyond.
When I arrived in the Foreign Office, however, the Foreign Secretary said that he was always open to moving responsibilities around as situations changed. The hon. Gentleman makes a good point, and that is something we should definitely keep under review. If there is a more sensible way to arrange responsibilities, there is no political reason for not doing so.
I finish where I started, and thank the Select Committee and its Chairman for a thoughtful piece of work, which we in the Foreign Office have read carefully. Many of the points made are good ones, which we agree with, and the report has given us a firm platform for progress in the years ahead.
Local Government Procurement
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Mr Clive Betts (Sheffield South East) (Lab)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Amess, and to introduce the debate on the sixth report of the Select Committee on Communities and Local Government in the 2013-14 Session.
The main theme of what I have to say is that there is an awful lot of agreement on local government procurement, which is probably unusual, given some of the subjects that we discuss in debates on communities and local government. Many of our recommendations—a little unusually for our reports—are aimed at local authorities and at the Local Government Association, rather than at central Government. That is consistent with the Committee’s intention to take a localist approach to such matters. Indeed, if I may tease the Minister, the extent to which the Government agree with the Committee’s recommendations is partly because most of the recommendations are not aimed at them, but at local government. That might be a little unkind, because generally we are on the same page.
Talking of the LGA and its supportive response to our report, I am pleased to be going to the LGA conference next week, and to the launch of its national procurement strategy, which is an important part of delivering the Committee’s recommendations. I look forward to giving a presentation, and to hearing what the LGA has to say.
Local government procurement might not be the most exciting of subjects, but it is an important one, because local authorities spend £45 billion a year, which is not an inconsiderable sum of public money. Indeed, 25% of local authority expenditure is involved in procuring goods and services from outside local government. In our inquiry, we found some really good examples of councils moving ahead and developing good or excellent practice, which in some instances central Government might learn from.
We clearly identified that many councils are doing the right thing and getting better all the time at procurement, although some councils have not moved forward at all. Patchy performance was highlighted by our inquiry, and the obvious requirement is for those councils that have not addressed the issue seriously, or are not performing well, to get up to the standard of the authorities where there is first-class procurement. In that way, an awful lot could be achieved, an awful lot of money saved and better value delivered.
Returning to the localist theme, we were strongly of the view that the problem would not be solved by the imposition of centralised purchasing, or by the Department for Communities and Local Government coming up with new regulations to compel local authorities to behave in a certain way. This is about encouraging the local authority sector, with the LGA in a key role, to look at best performance and to replicate it in many more circumstances.
Three overarching messages come out of the report. First, we welcome the LGA and local government in general taking a lead on procurement. It is for local government to sort out, but of course in partnership with central Government. The Cabinet Office, the DCLG, the LGA and local government can work together on this, as well as with business, listening to what it has to say about procurement and the ease with which it can engage with the process. There is also the third sector; we must not forget that a good percentage of local authority services are delivered not only by private businesses, but by the third sector.
The second overarching message is that procurement is not only a job for specialists. There is the idea that some expert procurement officer in a local authority can be given a problem, if there is one, to sort out. First, however, we have to ensure that what we are procuring will result in the service that we want to see delivered. Procurement is simply another way of delivering a service to the residents of an area. Getting what we want delivered, how we want it delivered, right from the start is important. In councils, that involves councillors who are responsible for service delivery, as well as experts in procurement.
Procurement is not just about cost. Cost is vital, particularly at the moment, but other issues must be looked at as well: the effect on local businesses, environmental issues, the possibility of getting training for apprentices as part of any procurement arrangements —they are all important, and need to be thought about by councils when procuring. There is no point complaining afterwards that no local businesses got any tenders, if the response is that perhaps the way that councils designed the contracts excluded those businesses. The delivery of services must be monitored. Procurement is not only about getting tenders in and selecting the lowest price, the one with the best quality or a mixture of the two, but about seeing whether what is promised is delivered. That is crucial and involves not only procurement officers, but other council officials, councillors and members of the public.
The third overarching message is political leadership. We welcome the fact that some authorities have appointed a cabinet member to be responsible for procurement, and that some involved front-line councillors in monitoring what happens when a contract is let. A simple proposal that we made—I do not think it has been made elsewhere—which the LGA endorsed, is that every year the whole council should provide an annual report on its procurement strategy, setting out what it is trying to achieve, rather than thinking of things after contracts have been let.
[Hugh Bayley in the Chair]
Turning to the specific proposals, we argued strongly that a centralised approach should not be imposed, but we estimated that willing and voluntary collaboration by councils could deliver about £1.8 billion. I do not want to be held to every £100,000 of that, but it is a reasonable ballpark estimate of what might be achieved. We recognise that collaboration will sometimes not be appropriate, and that councils sometimes have specific local issues and intentions when making purchases. Sometimes, forcing collaboration could lead to extra bureaucracy and delay, but with a simple purchase of a fairly standardised product, such as energy, councils can gain a lot by collaborating and ensuring that they have market power and influence. Provided it is done in a considered way, collaboration can certainly produce benefits.
Cost is important, but there are other issues to be considered, such as the impact on local companies, whether small and medium-sized enterprises really have access to the tenders, and whether tenders can be split up to allow more access by smaller companies. That is important for small businesses and for apprentices. It is not simply the council that should employ apprentices; the private sector can also do that, and it could be encouraged or be required to do so as part of a tender. The Government’s aspiration is to have 25% of their contracts with SMEs. Local government already has 47% of its contracts with SMEs. Central Government will probably never get anywhere near that, so full marks to local government, which is ahead of the game again. We should congratulate it on that.
On the cost of procurement, there were quite a lot of complaints about EU rules and regulations, and suggestions that we sometimes over-apply them. We thought it was desirable to have a proportionate approach to the application of EU rules. We would like a clearer definition from the Minister of what the Government believe a proportionate approach might be. If he cannot give that today, it would be helpful if he would write to the Committee.
We received a lot of evidence about pre-qualification questionnaires, and we heard that for every tender, different authorities, or parts of the public sector, seem to devise different questionnaires. Businesses, particularly small businesses, are upset about that and about the cost. The Committee’s view was slightly different from that of the Government, and the LGA sided with us on this. We still think that pre-qualification questionnaires are useful in virtually every respect, because without them, even for fairly small contracts, it is open to anyone to put in a bid, and far too many firms end up wasting time and effort trying to bid for a contract. There may be dozens of firms tendering. If there is a questionnaire, at least the number can be thinned out and a reasonable number of tenders made, giving firms a reasonable chance. In addition, the local authority does not have to do quite as much work analysing lots of tenders that will not be successful. We welcome the LGA’s response, and thought the Government were perhaps not quite up to the game on that and should think about it again.
There was a lot of agreement on the requirement to pay subcontractors on time. There has been a lot of pressure on local authorities to pay their contracts on time, and the evidence shows that they are generally pretty good at that. The problem is further down the chain. Small companies are probably most affected by cash-flow issues, and may be put out of business if a contractor does not pay them. We welcome the Government’s proposals to legislate in this area, which are positive; the Committee may return to scrutinise the legislation when we see it. There is general agreement on that.
The Committee made it clear that outsourcing—changing the organisation that delivers a service—does not absolve the council of responsibility for delivering that service. As far as the public are concerned, it is a council service being provided by a different organisation, and they expect their councillors, whom they elect, to be accountable and responsible. Sometimes, it is not always clear in the contract and when the service is delivered how that accountability goes back to the council. That calls into question the front-line councillors who represent their constituents. If something goes wrong, how is that dealt with? Does the council simply say, “Well, that’s the contractor’s responsibility; it’s nothing to do with us any more”? That is not so, and contracts should recognise that as far as the public are concerned, the service is a council one delivered in a different way. There must be a clear line of accountability when things go wrong, and the public must be clear about whom they complain to when that happens, and how their complaints will be dealt with.
The same applies to employment. When services are outsourced, the council does not directly employ the workers, but it nevertheless has a responsibility. It puts the contract out and decides which contractor does the job. TUPE arrangements are in place when staff are transferred as part of the outsourcing, but we felt in general terms that there is a responsibility on councils. We did not come to the view that they had to do one thing or another, but they should at least consider issues such as the operation of zero-hours contracts. The Government have promised proposals, and we welcome that and look forward to seeing what they suggest.
We discussed the living wage. Some councils insist not merely on paying the living wage, but that their contractors do so. When the Committee went to Sheffield, we saw some excellent procurement practices. The council was very honest with us, and said that it writes into contracts for construction and many other council services a requirement for contractors to pay the living wage. The one area where they are unable to do that is social care. There is concern that social care contracts are outsourced not to improve the quality of service, but because the cost of paying the workers will be reduced.
There are real issues about the future cost of social care. The Committee did not go into that, but raised it as an issue of concern. It is a challenge across the party spectrum to look into the future, when more people will require care, the population will get older, and we will encourage and help people to remain in their homes, instead of spending nights in hospital when they need not be there. There are challenges in how that social care is delivered, in paying the people who provide that care, in training and in other costs.
We did not find much evidence of fraud in local government. We asked for information and evidence. Clearly, there are examples, but nothing like those the Government have been grappling with in the Ministry of Justice recently involving contracts for monitoring prisoners and so on. We found very little fraud, but that does not mean that the Government should be complacent. We believe that there should be a proactive approach, particularly on transparency. Making information available to the public and councils is one of the best ways of ensuring that fraud does not happen.
We welcome the fact that the LGA will produce guidance to councils, so that when they write contracts, they ensure that they have a right to data created under those contracts. It is a bit of a worry that private companies sometimes hide behind commercial confidentiality, saying, “We can’t let you know what’s going on because this is our information, not yours.” If they are being paid public money for delivering a service or providing goods, there is a public interest. Some councils are looking at extending the freedom of information provisions to contracts that they let. We concluded that that was for councils to decide on, but transparency is important.
If there is corruption, it is likely that it will not be revealed by highly paid auditors searching through books. They will sometimes find evidence of fraud, but it is more likely to be found as a result of whistleblowing by people who see at first hand what is going on, and who say, “This is not right. I’m going to tell.” It is therefore important to have methods of enabling anonymous reporting.
We said that councils should insist on a requirement in contracts that where whistleblowing is identified and information is made available to the contractor, the contractor must pass that information on to the council. In that way, the information will be available to the council, not just the contractor, who may cover it up because something is going wrong in their organisation. We await the Government’s proposals on strengthening the whistleblowing framework, but we welcome their approach; again, we are moving in the same direction.
To summarise, Mr Amess—sorry, Mr Bayley; welcome to you—there is general agreement on the way forward. I have highlighted one or two areas where we have a slight difference of emphasis from the Government, and where we need a bit more clarification, as on the policy on EU directives. Essentially, procurement is a matter for a localist approach; it is about identifying best practice in local government and getting all local authorities to implement it, following the example of others.
I very much look forward to going to the LGA conference next week and hearing from its members at the national procurement strategy launch, where I will be speaking. I also look forward to working with the LGA on developing many of the ideas the Committee recommended in its report.
Roberta Blackman-Woods (City of Durham) (Lab)
May I say what a pleasure it is to serve under your chairmanship again, Mr Bayley?
I find myself here again on a Thursday afternoon congratulating my hon. Friend the Member for Sheffield South East (Mr Betts) and his Select Committee on an excellent report. I want to take a few moments to explain why it is an excellent report, before going on to look at some of the issues it raised. As we can see from looking around the Chamber, few of our parliamentary colleagues think local government procurement is a really exciting issue or one they want to spend their Thursday debating, so I might be one of the few who are interested in it.
Given the cuts facing local councils, particularly those serving poor areas, and given the jobs that will be lost as a result, I decided, as the shadow Minister with responsibility for the issue, to see whether councils were using procurement to support local employment where possible. I sent out two rounds of freedom of information requests to 400 councils and got 367 responses, which is pretty good. The responses highlighted a number of the issues raised in the Committee’s report.
The responses to my first request demonstrated that a significant number of councils want to take on a more proactive role in deciding who to award contracts to. Everything else being equal, they want, where possible, to prioritise local service delivery, but many felt unable to do so because of EU legislation, and the issue was raised again and again. Some 67% of the responding councils said they did not prioritise local goods and services and that the main reason for that was the perceived restrictions in European legislation. I should say that that was before we saw the new directive on procurement.
Armed with that information, I did a second round of freedom of information requests, seeking more detail on what councils were doing locally, and it showed that there were differences, depending on the councils’ political make-up. On average, a Labour council will procure about 40% of its goods and services from the local authority area, while the average Conservative council procures about 31%, although that might have improved. What was striking, however, was the range of local procurement. The highest proportion of goods procured locally was 80%, while the lowest was 2.5%, so there is great variation in practice.
The second set of questions also asked about the use of social value clauses in contracts, and I discovered that about 56% of councils used them in their procurement strategy. Indeed, most councils—about 90%—had a written procurement strategy, which was also pretty good. I also asked councils whether they took into account whether suppliers gave employees non-statutory benefits such as the living wage, and about 40% said they did.
That was all very interesting, and as we have a few moments, I thought I would outline some of the good practice I discovered, because it reflects some of the issues in the report.
Newcastle city council supports a living wage and promotes it not only in the direct delivery of council services, but in its supply chain. The council also said that 53% of its spend was with local—north-east—suppliers, compared with a national average of 35.8%. In addition, the corporate procurement team seeks to obtain at least one north-east quote for all contracts not requiring a formal tender process.
The council also ensures that the lots within larger contracts are a proper size to encourage bids and competition, and it works with north-east procurement organisations to streamline procurement documentation, making procurement processes consistent across the region and easier to understand.
The council has participated in a regional supplier development pilot to educate, and improve competitiveness of, the region’s small and medium-sized enterprises. It has also ensured that SMEs have received training on procurement. The council’s “Quick Quotes” initiative was launched to streamline and speed up the process for small bids. The council is also committed to e-procurement and to making communication on all aspects of procurement much easier to understand.
Finally, through its targeted recruitment and training programme, the council focuses on job creation by including clauses on it in the procurement process, bringing new jobs to the area. Through their procurement strategies, a number of other councils have also tried to deliver jobs where possible.
There were equally good examples at Sheffield city council, which has adopted the national procurement concordat for SMEs to encourage trade between SMEs and the council. It looks at how to get more local businesses, particularly small businesses, competing for council contracts. It also monitors closely the proportion of the council spend that goes to local businesses, which is about 72%. There were similar processes in Birmingham, although there was much stronger focus there on delivering local jobs and local training opportunities.
That is all by way of preamble. Like my hon. Friend and his Committee, I thought there was really good practice out there in opening up procurement processes and ensuring, where possible, that SMEs got a chance to bid for contracts and that procurement could deliver for the local community. There were issues, but it was comforting—this is why I wanted to go through the preamble—to know that the Committee and I had discovered similar issues and concerns. Indeed, I was reflecting this morning on the fact that I could probably have sat back and let my hon. Friend’s Committee do the work I did through my freedom of information requests.
We need to ask a fundamental question: why are we here discussing procurement? The public sector spends about £220 billion a year on procurement, of which about £50 billion a year is for local government procurement. That is a huge amount of money, and we are asking whether it is being spent wisely. About 47% of what local government spends on procurement goes to small and medium-sized enterprises. The Federation of Small Businesses has shown that for every £1 spent in the local economy 83p goes back into it. Obviously, it makes a lot of sense for local governments that want to build their local economies to try to get as much local procurement as possible.
The way local authorities choose to spend their money can have significant impact on businesses and jobs, and on wider social value. What they do could include using more SMEs; ensuring that suppliers give staff non-statutory benefits, such as the living wage or extra training; and asking suppliers to provide apprenticeships or jobs for those who struggle to find work and to use local businesses if possible. There is growing evidence to suggest that SMEs provide better quality and more flexible services, and that they are more responsive when the procurer’s demands change, or there is a need to change a contract.
I was therefore interested in the excellent report that has been produced, and in the evidence that the Select Committee took on the need for local authorities to get better at procurement. Interestingly, the report reached the same conclusion as the shadow team. It is always tempting for people involved in central Government to think that centralising everything will get things done better, because of economies of scale and because there can be, for example, one pre-application questionnaire, simplifying the whole process, but I wonder about that. Many councils told us they could not do certain things because of EU legislation, which we were not sure was really the case. Some local authorities seemed to manage to do what others could not. However, I agree with my hon. Friend’s conclusion that it would be wrong to centralise the procurement system for local government, because that could mean services being unresponsive or inappropriate, which would be a major disbenefit. It could, indeed, lead ultimately to higher service delivery costs in the long term, particularly if contracts broke down and had to be retendered.
We thought that there was much good practice in local government. We saw that local authorities would come together voluntarily in an area that made sense to them, to deal with procurement. Often they would procure back office functions between several authorities, or they would look at working more effectively to improve value for money. Large contracts were another reason for them to come together. We hope that the Government will support local authorities in working together voluntarily, and perhaps in setting up, at regional, sub-regional or combined authority level, ways to make procurement easier, more consistent and easier to understand.
I also agree with the Select Committee’s conclusion that the difficult balancing act for local authorities is to get best value while supporting local businesses. In many cases, simply going by cost may not necessarily mean the best service, or the one that local people want, and it can mean employees from another area providing the service: local authorities thus cannot use procurement to benefit the people they represent. That is a difficult balancing act, but the people who are best able to chart a course through the difficulty are the local authorities, either alone or in co-operation.
I was pleased that the report showed that smart procurement can bring other benefits, such as a living wage, training and upskilling opportunities, and apprenticeships. It is right to suggest that the Local Government Association could and should do more to promote sharing good practice of that kind. We came across good examples, and felt that all local authorities need to understand how to use procurement more effectively.
In the responses we received, European rules that were never really outlined in detail were often used to justify a lack of imagination in the way councils procure services. Things were often very bureaucratic, and the reason we were given was, “We have to do this because of Europe.” However, some councils managed to avoid that. I was therefore pleased that the Select Committee paid attention to the issue, informing us that procurement takes longer and is more expensive in the UK than in other EU countries. I hope that that worries the Minister; it worries me. I thought that it showed that the Select Committee report is timely, and that its recommendations should be acted on.
The report states:
“Some 75% of all contracts tendered in the UK have a value below the thresholds at which the full EU requirements apply, but witnesses contended that councils applied the full rules to many of these lower value contracts”.
We came across that, and clearly it must cease. It is imperative that the Department for Communities and Local Government and the Local Government Association act on the relevant recommendation, at paragraph 59 of the report. Local authorities need to become more competent in applying EU rules. The first step is surely for the Government and sector leaders, including the LGA, to spell out what constitutes a sensible approach that complies with the regulations proportionately. The LGA should produce guidance on that aspect of the new EU directive on public procurement, and work with local authorities to disseminate best practice.
The report is right to highlight the need for a consistent, measured approach to the management of the procurement process. We, like the Select Committee, found huge variation in practice for pre-qualification questionnaires. We interviewed small businesses, and for some of them—with some councils—the PQQ experience was truly frightening. Often there is a lack of consistency between councils in dealing with PQQs, but sometimes the lack of consistency is between departments within a council. Our plea would be that if there is to be support to enable councils to get more streamlined systems, attention should be paid to PQQs. Indeed, there should be assistance from central Government or the LGA in developing a better system.
There was much good practice. We found, as did the Select Committee, good examples of streamlining to make the procurement and tendering process more straightforward, but there is a big role for the LGA to play in ensuring that all local authorities follow best practice. That is what the Select Committee report says, I think.
I was pleased that the Select Committee considered the quality of employment that is provided, through outsourcing in particular, and that it pressed the Government to monitor the quality of employment. As my hon. Friend said, that is particularly an issue for the care sector. I note that his Committee was not able to pay a huge amount of attention to that, but I hope that it will examine it in more detail later, because, again, we found real issues there.
The Minister can tell us later whether he is in favour of zero-hours contracts. We are not against them, but we want to see them only where they are appropriate and welcomed by staff. I feel strongly that they should not be imposed on people, as they often are, but there is a wider issue of outsourcing that can happen as a result of the local authority procurement process. We also want to reflect on the issues of accountability that the report produced by my hon. Friend’s Committee went into in some detail. It is all too easy for councils, once they have outsourced a particular service, to think that they no longer have any responsibility for the quality or delivery of that service, which would be quite wrong.
Elsewhere, the report talks about the need for councils to demonstrate probity, have good monitoring and complaints systems in place, and, critically, have a whistleblowing system, so that if there is fraud or bad practice, it is easy for people to highlight that, bring it into the open and make it transparent. We thought that there was some very good practice, which the report highlighted, but again, this is about the LGA and the Department encouraging the sharing of good practice.
The report was excellent, so I looked forward to reading the Government’s response, which I thought started well. It is good that, over the coming year, the Government will take a range of further actions to promote the Public Services (Social Value) Act 2012, and that they will review progress throughout the year and consider what actions to take as a result of that review. There is also a commitment to continue reviewing the impact of the community right to challenge. Will the Minister tell us when those reviews are likely to be completed and how they will be published and put into the public domain?
Roberta Blackman-Woods
That is wonderful. I am interested and pleased to hear that, and look forward to seeing the report.
I am not exactly sure what action the Government will take to enable local authorities to understand better the new EU procurement framework, which is a result of the new directive published on 28 March. I would like to hear what the Minister’s Department is doing to communicate that to councils. If the Minister and the Department intend that the LGA should take that role on board, he should make that clear today and assure us that the LGA has the resources to undertake the task, because it is critical in improving procurement. Local authorities have to get away from the belief that the EU directive stops them doing all sorts of interesting things locally. I also look forward to seeing the Government’s response to the consultation on zero-hours contracts and the implications for the care sector in particular.
I was perhaps a bit disappointed that the Government’s response did not seem to show any real determination, or vigour, to assist local government in transforming procurement, so that it would not only deliver value for money, but take on all the social value issues and deliver jobs and improvements for their local communities, although perhaps I am being unduly unfair to the Minister, and perhaps he will convince me that he finds this a really interesting area, and that the Government need to put their weight behind it to get real changes in local government procurement. I look forward to hearing what he has to say.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government (Brandon Lewis)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship today, Mr Bayley. I thank the hon. Member for Sheffield South East (Mr Betts) and congratulate him on securing the debate. He is quite right: we absolutely welcome the Select Committee’s report and endorse its view on the need for councils to improve the way in which they procure goods and services. The hon. Member for City of Durham (Roberta Blackman-Woods) made a good point about the number of Members who have joined us for this debate this afternoon. I appreciate that there is also an important debate in the Chamber, but this is an important matter, and it is good to have the chance to air some issues, discuss good practice, which I will touch on, and highlight how important procurement is and what local government should be doing to focus on it.
I will resist the urge to go too far down the road that the hon. Lady tempted me down at the end of her speech, when she mentioned social values and jobs. As meritorious as those issues are, and as important as it is that councils are aware of them, going in that direction would tempt us towards having some sort of central governance over what those values should be, which is the very opposite of the localism that I believe in. It has to be for local authorities to decide what the right values are for them.
We agree with the Communities and Local Government Committee that councils, with the support of the Local Government Association, should absolutely take the lead and have the responsibility for delivering on the procurement agenda. Councils are uniquely placed—geographically as well as structurally—to understand the needs of their residents and communities and to be locally accountable to them for their actions and decisions.
The hon. Lady gave some figures, and just to put things in context, this is a hugely important area, not least because last year the local government sector spent £57 billion on procuring goods and services. As she said, that accounts for roughly a quarter of all public sector procurement. Councils are often one of the largest spenders and one of the largest employers in their local economy. By being more astute and imaginative in how they use that spending power, they can do much more to ensure that they achieve greater value for money and help their local economies to grow. When we talk about savings, most sensible business people, hearing that local government spending is £57 billion, would come to the conclusion straight away that just a little improvement in procurement could bring a small percentage saving, which would be a very large amount of money.
I accept that the Government have an important role to play, at least in incentivising service transformation and encouraging innovation. As set out in our evidence and response, we have already introduced a range of key public sector procurement reforms that will open up procurement opportunities to both small and medium-sized enterprises. As the hon. Member for Sheffield South East said, the FSB has targeted those opportunities. Sometime last year, I was on a platform with the LGA and the FSB talking about the added local benefit that can be brought particularly by small businesses but also, as he rightly says, by voluntary and community organisations—the third sector as a whole.
The Small Business, Enterprise and Employment Bill was introduced into the House on 25 June. It will help to deliver our commitment to build a stronger economy by supporting small businesses. The Bill contains a number of measures intended to improve public sector procurement, which will, subject to consultation, ensure that procurers run an efficient process, accept electronic invoices, do not charge for bid information and do proper pre-market engagement.
The Bill will also make it easier for small businesses to raise concerns about public procurement practices and cut down on red tape by ensuring that regulations affecting businesses are reviewed frequently and remain effective. It will deter employers from breaking the national minimum wage legislation by creating a power to allow the penalty for underpayment to be imposed on employers on a per-worker basis, and it will stop the abuse of zero-hours contracts—the hon. Member for City of Durham mentioned them, and I shall come back to this point in a moment—by preventing the inclusion of exclusivity clauses, which are used to prevent individuals from working for other employers, even if the current employer is offering no work.
Other key reforms, which will be introduced later this year, include the abolition of the pre-qualification questionnaires for contracts below the EU threshold—I note the comment by the hon. Member for Sheffield South East, and I will come back to that in a moment—and the requirement for public bodies, including local authorities, to use Contracts Finder, which is a national procurement portal.
We are developing a standard pre-qualification questionnaire—for contracts that are above the EU threshold, I stress—and councils will be encouraged to use that. The aim is to ensure that businesses no longer have to complete the countless different versions that currently exist. That will make it easier for small businesses and voluntary organisations to bid for contracts and increase collaboration across authorities.
I noted the hon. Gentleman’s comments and the Select Committee’s points on pre-qualification questionnaires. I can understand why local authorities like them, but if we want to get more small businesses involved, I think the risk of having more tendering is a good risk and one that could actually be to the benefit of local authorities. If they want to reduce that risk, they can do that by getting their tender documentation right in the first place.
Mr Betts
Clearly, this is one of the few areas of specific disagreement. We picked up from small businesses that if suddenly they found that they were putting a tender in along with 20 other organisations, 19 of them would be wasting their time. As long as it is a standardised and simple pre-qualification questionnaire to thin out the number that will tender, it could be greatly to the advantage of small businesses in particular and reduce their costs overall.
Brandon Lewis
Of course, if councils are giving an up-front line on their procurement process, that gives companies more time to plan and, particularly for small businesses, allows them to decide whether it is right for them to tender and whether they want to do so. However, most small businesses also tender for business in the private sector, where they will be used to being involved in competitive tendering for work that they want and going up against anything from one to a countless number of competitors. That is how the market works. From my experience of working in and talking to businesses—small, medium and large, but small businesses in particular—I know that another piece of paper from an authority that they have to fill in before they even start to tender is just another layer of bureaucracy, red tape and paper that they do not want.
We have been providing support for councils by encouraging them to use Contracts Finder now rather than waiting for its use to become mandatory. We have pointed out the benefits that it can bring for both procurers and suppliers, because it opens up procurement opportunities and makes them transparent. We have been encouraging councils to start using the current simplified pre-qualification questionnaire for contracts that are, I stress again, over the EU threshold. The hon. Member for City of Durham made a good point about the myths that exist about what can be done in a whole range of areas that local authorities deal with. I will come back to that.
We have been encouraging the improvement of commissioning skills among local authority employees—a very important issue—by offering access to the commissioning academy. We have been sharing expertise by offering access to courses and learning tools provided by the Crown Commercial Service. We are providing £16.5 million of funding over two years to change behaviour and perception in respect of tackling fraud in local authorities, including in local government procurement, regardless of how small it may be. We should bear in mind the fact that overall fraud and error in local government costs more than £2 billion, but that does not necessarily involve procurement. However, it is still an important matter, and we need to ensure that we are on top of it. We are providing guidance on social value considerations and the pre-procurement market engagement process.
Following the success of last year’s transformation challenge award, which was hugely oversubscribed, we have launched another one for 2014 to 2016, and £320 million will be available over that period. The aim of the award is to encourage and reward local authorities that are able significantly to improve their services so that they better meet the needs of local residents. That can include making improvements to and transforming how services are commissioned and procured through greater sharing and efficiency, such as integrated commissioning in shared financial planning, testing new tools and pooling budgets. There can also be joint procurement of things such as ICT, and services can be extended to nearby local authorities. In addition, we have been working with the Local Government Association on its draft national procurement strategy and supporting the Chief Fire Officers Association’s national procurement group in developing a national procurement strategy.
However, the central Government cannot deliver better local procurement ourselves, nor should we try to. That can only lead to more red tape, bureaucracy and top-down control, which no one in local government or the small business sector wants. What we can do and should aim to do is to create the right conditions for it by eliminating unnecessary red tape and removing barriers to local innovation. As the Select Committee recognised, it is then for local authorities themselves to take the initiative.
We do see examples of good practice throughout the country. We have time, so I will place on record some good examples that we know exist. Halton borough council has abolished pre-qualification questionnaires for all its contracts below the EU threshold. In Norfolk, my home county, the county council no longer uses them for contracts under £100,000, and a number of other local councils do not use them for low-value contracts. Oxford city council had the idea of running a programme of workshops specifically targeted at small and medium-sized enterprises. That is about helping them on how to tender for business. Herefordshire council has a programme of opportunities and events for current and potential suppliers, which it developed as a way of informing, and maintaining strong relationships with the local supply market.
A number of local authorities have developed local procurement hubs, such as Supply Hertfordshire, Procurement Lincolnshire and the East Sussex procurement hub. Those hubs cover large areas. There are also hubs that cover even larger areas, such as The Chest, which covers much of the north-west. Across the country, there are also a number of multi-authority purchasing and public buying organisations, such as the Yorkshire Purchasing Organisation, which has already helped North Yorkshire county council make savings of about a third of a million pounds by buying social care equipment to help people with daily living. That was done through the organisation’s assistive technology contract. The Central Buying Consortium can also help councils deliver savings. For example, the royal borough of Kingston upon Thames, which I visited today, achieved 26% total cost savings on a £32 million project to expand its primary schools by using a public buying organisation. That was a substantial saving for that community.
However, despite the examples of good practice, too many local authorities still have a long way to go. They need to go further in saving money and doing more for less through better procurement. Councils need to adopt a strategic approach to their procurement and use their collective buying power to best effect. They need to ensure that their procurement officers have the necessary skills and that they take advantage of the learning opportunities and tools that are available to them. They also need to find ways of sharing best practice around local government. That is a role not just for councils, working with their partners, but for the Local Government Association.
All too often small firms are locked out of local government contracts, or at least perceive and believe that they are, by councils adopting over-complicated procurement processes. Councils need to be sure that they are doing everything they can to remove those barriers. I always say to councillors, and I will say it again on the record today, that if officers are quoting to them regulations, guidance or EU bureaucracy that is getting in the way, they need to ensure that that is correct. Let us bust those myths. Let us ensure that councillors are challenging the officers and getting to see what is in the way to make sure that it is real rather than perceived. That will mean that we can start to open things up even more.
There are many simple things that councils can do to improve their procurement practices. For example, in addition to abolishing unnecessary requirements to complete a pre-qualification questionnaire for contracts below the EU threshold and publishing all their tenders and contracts online, they should build up a supplier network and engage with suppliers.
That is related to one of the myths that I would like to bust and be clear about. EU procurement rules apply only once a council has made a decision to procure goods and services. Early engagement with suppliers can mean that innovation and co-design are built in from the outset, leading to better services. Creating and publishing a future pipeline of commercial activity so that suppliers can plan ahead is another positive step that councils can take. They can publish details of contracts that have been awarded so that contractors can not only see what has happened before, in order to get an idea of what will be expected of them in the future, but view subcontracting opportunities.
Councils can ensure that they have robust procedures in place to tackle fraud. We need to ensure that we keep fraud low and aim to drive it to zero. An important point, which relates to one that the hon. Member for City of Durham made, is that they can stop gold-plating on equalities. Equalities impact assessments are not, and never have been, a legal requirement. Officers can use their judgment to pay due regard to equality without resorting to time-consuming, often bureaucratic tick-box exercises at the end of a decision-making process—the very thing that can put people off. Councils can break contracts up into smaller lots to open up procurement by bringing in more competition on price and attracting some of the smaller firms that prefer to go for smaller contracts.
Better procurement, the sharing of senior management teams, service transformation, asset rationalisation and the driving of local economic growth all contribute to the overall improvement in local government productivity. Some councils—I have given just a few examples, but there are many more—have already made considerable progress in improving their procurement processes, making it much easier for businesses to bid effectively for contracts. However, I am not yet convinced that all local authorities have made the necessary changes, although I am confident, based on its approach to the Select Committee report, that the Local Government Association and its national procurement strategy can play an important part in helping driving forward the changes. Nationally, we need to keep talking about it in order to motivate and encourage local authorities, but it is vital to remember that it is for local authorities to deliver.
Mr Betts
I will take a couple of minutes to summarise this constructive, well-informed debate, in which agreement has generally been found across the parties and between the Select Committee and both Front Benches. That should be welcomed. I think that we have all ultimately agreed that this is a matter for local councils, and that it is for local government in general, and the Local Government Association in particular, to help councils that are not up to the same level of procurement practice as their counterparts that are delivering a first-class service to learn from that best practice and emulate it. I am sure the Select Committee will want to return to the issue in future to monitor and assess whether the improvements that we think can be made have been made.
I have one slight worry about a disagreement that I had not expected. On behalf of the Select Committee, I identified £45 billion in local government procurement. To show that I was paying close attention to what the two Front-Bench spokespeople said, I think my hon. Friend the Member for City of Durham (Roberta Blackman-Woods) put the figure at £50 billion, while the Minister set it at £57 billion. If we had had more speakers, we might have seen an exponential growth in local authority procurement. Clearly, there is a difference in how we evaluate it. We may want to clear that up at some point in future.
Finally, I am sure that it is appropriate for me, on behalf of the whole Committee, to thank Sarah Coe, our second Clerk, who was the lead officer in helping us produce this report. We very much appreciated her excellent support, which was instrumental in helping us get to the end result. I also thank Colin Cram, our specialist adviser, who was extremely helpful as well.
Hugh Bayley (in the Chair)
Thank you all for an interesting debate.
Question put and agreed to.
Written Statements
(10 years, 4 months ago)
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Plutonium Management
(10 years, 4 months ago)
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The Minister of State, Department of Energy and Climate Change (Michael Fallon)
In December 2011 the Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC) published its response to the consultation on plutonium management.
The consultation response indicated that Government’s preferred option was to reuse the plutonium as MOX fuel, but that we would be open to consider alternative options that offered better value to the UK taxpayer.
In addition Government said that overseas owners of plutonium stored in the UK could have that plutonium managed in line with UK plutonium, subject to commercial terms that are acceptable to the UK Government. In addition, subject to compliance with intergovernmental agreements and acceptable commercial arrangements, the UK is prepared to take ownership of overseas plutonium stored in the UK as a result of which it would be treated in the same way as UK-owned plutonium. The Government consider that there are advantages to having national control over more of the civil plutonium in the UK, as this gives us greater influence over how we ultimately manage it.
The Department of Energy and Climate Change has agreed to the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA):
Taking ownership of about 800 kg of material previously owned by a Swedish utility.
Taking ownership of about 140 kg of material previously owned by a German research organisation.
These transactions, which have been agreed by the Euratom supply agency, will not result in any new plutonium being brought into the UK and will not therefore increase the overall amount of plutonium in the UK.
We have agreed to these transactions as they offer a cost-effective and beneficial arrangement, which removes the need to transport separated plutonium, allows the UK to gain national control over more of the civil plutonium in the UK and enables an outstanding contract with a Swedish utility to be concluded.
In line with the DECC policy statement, the NDA continues to engage with other third parties regarding taking ownership of further overseas plutonium in the UK arising from overseas reprocessing contracts. As well as UK Government approval, these transactions will require consent from the relevant overseas Governments and regulatory bodies, and thereafter Euratom supply agency agreement, before any contracts are enacted.
The UK has committed to publish annual figures for national holdings of civil plutonium at the end of each calendar year to improve transparency and public confidence. The most recent data can be found at: http://www.onr.org.uk/safeguards/civilplut13.htm
This data will be updated in due course to reflect the changes described above.
Daniel Morgan
(10 years, 4 months ago)
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The Secretary of State for the Home Department (Mrs Theresa May)
Daniel Morgan, a private investigator, was found murdered in a pub car park in south-east London on 10 March 1987. It is one of the country’s most notorious unsolved murder cases. After numerous separate police investigations into the case between 1987 and 2002, the Crown Prosecution Service discontinued the attempted prosecution against five suspects in 2011. The Metropolitan Police admitted that police corruption was a “debilitating factor” in the original investigation.
Last May I announced the creation of the Daniel Morgan independent panel and the appointment of Sir Stanley Burnton as chair of the panel. On 19 November 2013, I reported to the House the decision of Sir Stanley Burnton to resign from this role for personal reasons.
I am now able to announce the appointment of Baroness Nuala O’Loan of Kirkinriola, DBE, MRIA, as chair of the independent panel. Baroness O’Loan was Northern Ireland’s first Police Ombudsman from 2000 to 2007, during which time she investigated thousands of cases, including the police handling of the Omagh bombing in 1998 and police collusion with loyalist paramilitaries engaged in the most serious crime between 1990 and 2002.
The remit of the panel is to shine a light on the circumstances of Daniel Morgan’s murder, its background and the handling of the case over the period since 1987. I am very grateful to Baroness O’Loan for accepting this important role and look forward to the panel completing its work.
Tackling Violence against Women and Girls Overseas
(10 years, 4 months ago)
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The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for International Development (Lynne Featherstone)
I would like to update the House on my work championing the issue of tackling violence against women and girls internationally, building policy coherence across Whitehall and pushing for as much progress as possible towards our goal of ending all forms of violence.
The concerning abduction of over 200 school girls in Nigeria in April and the recent gang rape and murder of girls in India are a sharp reminder of the low status of women and girls globally and the terrible injustice and violence faced by so many.
The UNMISS human rights report on the conflict in South Sudan, published on 8 May 2014, presents grim evidence of how the conflict has exacerbated the vulnerability of women and children. All parties to the conflict have committed acts of rape and other forms of sexual violence against women with impunity. The ability of survivors of sexual violence to receive services in this environment has diminished, leaving most incidents unreported.
I am proud to say that the UK is supporting the International Rescue Committee in South Sudan to conduct outreach and support services to survivors of gender-based violence.
Since my last statement the UK has refreshed our cross-government action plan, “A call to end violence against women and girls”, which sets out an ambitious agenda for the year ahead, including how we will continue to bring international and domestic work on violence against women and girls closer together.
The International Development (Gender Equality) Act came into force on 13 May. This Act, strongly supported by the Secretary of State for International Development, makes it law for the UK to consider gender equality before it provides development assistance, and the differences in gender-related needs for its humanitarian support. This puts our existing commitment to delivering important outcomes for girls and women—including a reduction in violence—on a statutory footing.
In May I had the great privilege of speaking at DFID Mozambique’s summit on ending child, early and forced marriage (CEFM). This is a huge issue in Mozambique, where one in two girls is married before her 18th birthday. CEFM is a global issue that has a significant negative impact on girls, their families, communities and countries.
On 10 to 13 June over 120 country delegations, over 80 Ministers, and around 1,700 delegates including eight UN agency heads, presidents and prosecutors from the ICC and international tribunals, civil society, and over 300 sponsored delegates, including from conflict-affected countries, among them a number of survivors, came together at the global summit to end sexual violence in conflict hosted by the Foreign Secretary and UN special envoy, Angelina Jolie.
I was proud to be part of the summit and to formally launch “What works to prevent violence” DFID’s new research and innovation fund. I spoke on the panel with leading experts to highlight the need to invest in work to understand and address the root causes and social norms which underpin many forms of violence—both in times of peace and in conflict. I also participated in the ministerial round table on hidden victims to highlight the issues of domestic violence, female genital mutilation (FGM/C) and CEFM which are often exacerbated in conflict. The Secretary of State for International Development chaired a ministerial round table on the call to action to protect women and girls in humanitarian emergencies and jointly launched the UK’s new national action plan on women, peace and security with the Foreign Secretary and Defence Secretary.
The momentum will continue over the summer. In July, the UK Prime Minister and UNICEF will co-host a Girl summit on female genital mutilation and child, early and forced marriage. The summit aims to support southern leadership on these issues and to further rally a global movement to end the practices for all girls, within a generation. I know that many in the House will have an interest in these issues, given the impact they have in the UK as well as internationally.
A youth event will be held at DFID on 19 July with 170 attendees, made up of young people, including several nominated by Members of Parliament, several from developing countries, a youth panel and other attendees nominated by partners.
A social media campaign has also been launched this week. The campaign aims to receive pledges of support from people across the UK, reaching beyond the usual network of development organisations and civil society supporters. The action focuses around “play your part”—we are asking people to play their part in ending these harmful practices through pledging support and spreading the word.
In the coming months, I will visit more of our programmes overseas so that I can see in practice how our commitments to this agenda are being implemented.
Northern Ireland Economic Pact
(10 years, 4 months ago)
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The Secretary of State for Northern Ireland (Mrs Theresa Villiers)
My right hon. Friend the Prime Minister and I met yesterday with the First Minister and Deputy First Minister of Northern Ireland to discuss the economic pact, “Building a prosperous and united community”.
We considered the progress that has been made by the Government and Northern Ireland Executive against our respective commitments made last June. We also agreed to publish a joint report, “Building a Prosperous and United Community—One Year On”, that highlights our successes as well considering the challenges ahead. I have placed a copy of this report in the Libraries of both Houses.
The Government’s long-term economic plan is working for Northern Ireland. Figures published for the first time yesterday show that credit conditions are easing and many more businesses are accessing the funds they need to grow. The Green Investment Bank is also making investments in Northern Ireland providing a total of £3.2 million of funding.
The Government and the Executive working together have helped deliver a record year for investment advancing our shared aims to strengthen the private sector and rebalance the Northern Ireland economy. The international investment conference last October was hugely successful, contributing to the 11,000 jobs that Invest NI has promoted over the last year.
There has also been some progress in supporting initiatives designed to build a shared society. The Government made available an additional £100 million of borrowing and have now agreed to the Executive’s proposals to use this for improved facilities at integrated primary schools, a new further education college, and increased provision of shared housing. The Government have also identified 106 surplus Ministry of Defence homes that could be gifted to the Executive for use as additional shared housing if the Executive bring forward appropriate proposals. The update also sets out the latest position on the support the Government are giving to the Executive on further improving broadband infrastructure and mobile coverage in Northern Ireland.
This report confirms that the Government remain on track to make a final decision on the devolution of corporation tax no later than the 2014 autumn statement. Work has taken place to look at how the international tax regime might apply in an intra-country situation as well as how a regime might work for both smaller and larger companies.
There remain areas that require further work from both the Government and the Executive. The British-Irish visa scheme is due to begin in the autumn, encouraging tourism by allowing Indian and Chinese nationals to visit Northern Ireland using an Irish visit visa. This is part of the continuing programme of engagement set out at the annual UK-Ireland summits to boost trade and strengthen economic co-operation between the UK and Ireland.
There will also be further progress on the Executive’s red tape review, ambassador-led trade missions to Northern Ireland and continued efforts to improve access to finance.
The economic pact set out a new approach for the Government and the Executive to work more closely on our joint objectives. The report shows this approach can deliver better results for the people of Northern Ireland and we will continue to build on the good progress already made.
Crossrail
(10 years, 4 months ago)
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The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Transport (Stephen Hammond)
In January the Prime Minister joined me at Tottenham Court Road to mark 50% completion of the Crossrail project. The Crossrail project has now moved into the peak of its construction phase. There are over 11,000 people working at over 40 sites across London. Four of the tunnel boring machines have completed their journeys and the new rail tunnels are over 80% complete including the Thames tunnel. The final tunnel drives are now under way and tunnelling should be completed by next spring. Construction is also progressing on the 10 new Crossrail stations and on works above ground west of Paddington and east of Stratford.
In the past year we have made great progress in many different areas of the project. Last July we announced that there would be a Crossrail station in Woolwich which is now the catalyst for the regeneration of the surrounding area, attracting investment from businesses and developers and supporting our plans for long-term economic growth.
In February the joint sponsors announced the contract to provide the rolling stock and depot was awarded to Bombardier UK plc. The contract covers the supply, delivery and maintenance of 66 new trains and a depot at Old Oak Common. This will support 760 UK manufacturing jobs plus 80 apprenticeships building the trains in Derby. The construction of the maintenance depot at Old Oak Common will see 244 jobs plus 16 apprenticeships supported when fully operational.
This is just one part of the contribution Crossrail is making to economic growth across the United Kingdom. It is estimated that during the construction phase the project will generate at least 75,000 business opportunities and support the equivalent of 55,000 full-time jobs around the UK. Firms from across the United Kingdom are winning business from the project. Sixty-two per cent of the suppliers winning work are outside London and over half (58%) are small and medium-sized enterprises. Ninety-seven per cent of Crossrail’s contracts are based in the United Kingdom.
We have also announced that Crossrail will now be extended to Reading. The extension of Crossrail services to Reading will achieve the best use of capacity on the Great Western line while also offering greater flexibility for future timetabled services.
The National Audit Office published their report on the project in February and this found that taxpayers’ interest in the Crossrail programme has so far been well protected. A Public Accounts Committee hearing held on 9 April supported those findings.
As we move towards the operational phase of the project, work is progressing on the appointment of the operator of the Crossrail services. Transport for London expect to announce the award of the Crossrail train operating concession later this year.
The Crossrail board continues to forecast that the costs of constructing Crossrail will be within the agreed funding limits. We expect Crossrail to cost no more than £14.5 billion (excluding rolling stock costs).
During the passage of the Crossrail Bill through Parliament, a commitment was given that a statement would be published at least every 12 months until the completion of the construction of Crossrail, setting out information about the project’s funding and finances.
In line with this commitment, this statement comes within 12 months of my last one which was published on 9 July 2013. The relevant information is as follows:
Total funding amounts provided to Crossrail Ltd by the Department for Transport and Transport for London in relation to the construction of Crossrail to the end of the period—22 July 2008 to 29 May 2014. | £5,981,006,3091 |
Expenditure incurred (including committed land and property spend not yet paid out) by Crossrail Ltd in relation to the construction of Crossrail in the period—30 May 2013 to 29 May 2014 (excluding recoverable VAT on land and property purchases. | £1,576,835,000 |
Total expenditure incurred (including committed land and property spend not yet paid out) by Crossrail Ltd in relation to the construction of Crossrail to the end of the period—22 July 2008 to 29 May 2014 (excluding recoverable VAT on land and property puchases). | £6,011,730,000 |
The amounts realised by the disposal of any land or property for the purposes of the construction of Crossrail by the Secretary of State, TFL or Crossrail Ltd in the period covered by this statement. | Nil |
The total funding amounts provided to CRL by the Department for Transport and Transport for London refer to the expenditure drawn down from the Sponsor Funding Account in the period 22 July 2008 and 29 May 2014. Included within the amount of £5,981,006, 309 that was drawn down from the Sponsor Funding Account is £498,780, 936 of interim funding that has been provided to Network Rail to finance their delivery of the On-Network Works between 1 April 2009 and 29 May 2014. |
The numbers above are drawn from Crossrail Ltd’s books of account and have been prepared on a consistent basis with the update provided last year. The figure for expenditure incurred includes moneys already paid out in relevant periods, including committed land and property expenditure where this has not yet been paid. It does not include future expenditure on construction contracts that have been awarded.