Oral Answers to Questions

Andrew Bridgen Excerpts

Monday 10th October 2016 Commons Chamber

[Robert Halfon]

We are busy with our plans to introduce the apprenticeship levy. By 2020, we will be spending more than double on apprenticeships, or £2.5 billion extra. We are well on the way towards achieving our target of 3 million apprenticeship starts by 2020, with over 500,000 starts in the past year alone.

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

Although I welcome the record number of people participating in apprenticeships in our country, will the Minister outline what steps the Government have taken to encourage more small businesses to offer apprenticeships?

[Robert Halfon]

My hon. Friend, who is a champion of apprenticeships in his area, will be pleased to know that, under the plans for the new apprenticeship levy, small businesses that hire 16 to 18-year-olds as apprentices will pay only 10% of the training costs. Furthermore, they and the providers will each receive £1,000. That will encourage small businesses to hire more apprentices.

Oral Answers to Questions

Andrew Bridgen Excerpts

Monday 4th July 2016 Commons Chamber

[Mr Gibb]

May I first welcome the hon. Member for Ashton-under-Lyne (Angela Rayner) and congratulate her on her appointment as shadow Secretary of State? She follows in the footsteps of the long-serving hon. Member for North West Durham (Pat Glass), and I suspect she was more surprised than I was by her appointment. Having worked with her in seeking to raise standards in Oldham schools, I know how able a shadow Secretary of State she will be.

In answer to the hon. Member for Motherwell and Wishaw (Marion Fellows), flexibility is of course important. It enables academies to flex their salaries and to recruit and retain the top-quality graduates they need. It is a very worthwhile policy, and it is working.

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

Does my hon. Friend agree that it is essential that headteachers have the ability to flex salaries to retain the very best staff? Will he also comment on whether resigning after 48 hours in the education sector sets a new record?

[Mr Gibb]

I think it must be the record for the shortest-serving shadow Secretary of State. I am particularly offended, though, that there is no one to shadow me, and I wonder what I have done to deserve that offence.

Term-time Holidays

Andrew Bridgen Excerpts

Thursday 19th May 2016 Commons Chamber

[Mr Gibb]

My hon. Friend makes a good point, and we must emphasise evidence that suggests that even small absences from school will have a long-term impact on a child’s education. As I set out in my opening remarks, a lot of education is linear, and children must learn one thing before they learn another. If a teacher is not able to provide a catch-up lesson for that child, they will permanently miss out on a crucial part of their education.

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

Does my hon. Friend agree that the Government have taken positive steps to reduce the cost of family holidays, and therefore the financial incentive to take term-time absence? By reducing air passenger duty for children’s tickets to zero, last year 4.5 million children under 12 flew tax free, and this year more than 7.5 million of those under 16 will fly tax free.

[Mr Gibb]

My hon. Friend made that point better than I could have done.

“Educational Excellence Everywhere”: Academies

Andrew Bridgen Excerpts

Monday 9th May 2016 Commons Chamber

[Nicky Morgan]

That just shows that if hon. Members sit here and listen to a statement, they still do not necessarily listen to what I have actually been saying. I have talked about finishing the job—the job of lifting standards for all young people in this country.

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

I commend my right hon. Friend and constituency neighbour for her measured and thoughtful statement, which I believe will address the legitimate concerns of many excellent but small rural schools in my constituency. Does she agree that in education, and indeed across all government, we must never let the outstanding become the enemy of the good?

[Nicky Morgan]

My hon. Friend and neighbour and I both know that we are very fortunate in Leicestershire to have many great schools, but we also know from our experience that not all young people have the opportunity to attend a good or outstanding school, whether in the midlands or elsewhere. That is why we cannot let up on the pursuit of reforms that lift educational standards.

Oral Answers to Questions

Andrew Bridgen Excerpts

Tuesday 3rd May 2016 Commons Chamber

[Nick Boles]

That will depend on when exactly the devolution deal is done. As the hon. Gentleman will be aware, in our own area of Greater Lincolnshire that deal is reasonably well advanced; in other parts of the country, the deals are less well advanced. Fundamentally, it is pretty simple: we want authorities to be commissioning from their local colleges the adult skills provision that they believe their area can benefit from.

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

Although the budget is enhanced, it is only a finite amount. Given that, it is important that it is targeted at where it will have the most effect. Does the Minister agree that those funds are best targeted at young adults, the low-skilled and those actively seeking work?

[Nick Boles]

I agree with my hon. Friend that those will often be the best targets. What is even more important is that his local combined authority and those of other hon. Members are best placed to identify the particular groups or industries with particular needs, and then respond accordingly.

Oral Answers to Questions

Andrew Bridgen Excerpts

Monday 25th April 2016 Commons Chamber

[Nicky Morgan]

I was following the right hon. Gentleman’s question up until the last sentence, when he seemed to imply that, somehow, academies were not part of the public sector. He could not be more mistaken: they get their funding directly from the Department for Education, their teachers are trained in accordance with our guidance and they can follow the national curriculum. What does the right hon. Gentleman say to the headteacher who wrote to me after the Academies Show last week, saying that her colleagues were forgetting that children are the priority, change is the reality and collaboration is the strategy. How can it not be our moral responsibility to serve as many children as possible by working together? That is what we want to see.

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

Does my right hon. Friend agree that a good argument for academisation is to get schools out of the control of loony left councils, such as Brighton and Hove, which is seeking information in relation to the gender assignment of four-year-olds?

[Nicky Morgan]

The point about academies and academisation is that they are the vehicle for schools to innovate, make best use of the freedom to drive up standards and do the right thing for their children, which often does not happen under local authority control. That is what we want to see, and that is why we want schools to become academies.

Oral Answers to Questions

Andrew Bridgen Excerpts

Tuesday 15th March 2016 Commons Chamber

[Sajid Javid]

The hon. Lady is right to raise the importance of credit throughout every region of the UK for everyone who thinks a vibrant growing economy is important. We talk regularly with the Treasury about these issues—for example, about the work we do through the British Business Bank, which has provided more than £2.4 billion of financing over the past four years, helping some 40,000 businesses, many of them in the north-west.

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

When people take the decision to start their own business, it is on the back of a great idea or they have skills which are useful, but for most people turning a great idea or skills into a business requires expert advice. What steps is the Secretary of State taking to ensure that that advice is available to potential entrepreneurs?

[Sajid Javid]

First, I know my hon. Friend speaks with experience. He is a very successful businessman and no doubt he has talked to many businesses about this. One of the ways we try to help is through the growth hubs. We have made sure that every local enterprise partnership in England has a growth hub and we have increased the financing that goes into that, so locally tailored advice is available to local companies.

Oral Answers to Questions

Andrew Bridgen Excerpts

Tuesday 2nd February 2016 Commons Chamber

[Sajid Javid]

The hon. Lady is right to raise the issue of skills in that industry. The first thing is to do everything we can to help it. Of course, the crisis has inevitably led to job losses, but the measures I referred to earlier will help to protect some of those jobs. We are also talking to a number of companies in the supply chain to see what we can do with skills training to ensure that those skills are transferable.

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

I can assure the House that the midlands engine is firing on all cylinders, but it does need fuel in the tank. Will the Secretary of State confirm that more than £2 billion was raised in venture capital in the UK last year, which was up 50% on the year before?

[Sajid Javid]

My hon. Friend talks about venture capital and the importance of attracting more and more investment across the nation, and of course in the midlands, too. I am sure he would be interested to know that over the last four years, the gross value added of the midlands region has increased by 15% or £27 billion, while the number of jobs has increased by almost 300,000.

Enterprise Bill [Lords]

Andrew Bridgen Excerpts

Tuesday 2nd February 2016 Commons Chamber

[Lucy Frazer (South East Cambridgeshire) (Con)]

Small businesses are critical to our economy and make up 99% of businesses nationally, and the Bill is designed to assist them. I want to focus on the resolution of disputes and debt collection, and I refer to my entry in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests. As a barrister who specialises in business law, and insolvency in particular, I have seen at first hand the impact that uncollected debts can have on a company.

Sometimes the inability to collect debts can have a significant impact on a small company. The most obvious consequence is simply the customer’s failure to pay, which means that their supplier is out of pocket. We know from BACS that an average small business has overdue payments of almost £32,000. However, it is not just the lack of cash flow, it is also the cost of collecting debts, and we know that £10 billion is spent per year in trying to recover overdue payments. It is not just the expense; it is also about management time, and in the end many small businesses simply give up. Indeed, the consequences can be even greater than that—sometimes they mean a lack of survival. R3, the trade body for the insolvency profession, has said that late payment by customers for goods and services is often cited as a cause of insolvency.

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

My hon. Friend is giving a great speech with her experience in insolvency. Does she agree that companies do not go bankrupt because they run out of profit; they go bankrupt because they run out of money, and late payment is part of that?

[Lucy Frazer]

That is absolutely right. Often, the cause is cash-flow insolvency, which is a test of insolvency, as well as the balance sheet.

The measures to introduce a small business commissioner to give free advice and information, and to operate a complaints scheme, are a welcome step in the right direction. Indeed, a similar scheme set up in Victoria Australia has had considerable success. The hon. Member for Wallasey (Ms Eagle) suggested that the Bill does not go far enough, but in 2014-15, with 704 mediation sessions, the Victoria scheme had an 80% success rate.

As my hon. Friends the Members for Huntingdon (Mr Djanogly) and for South Ribble (Seema Kennedy) mentioned, we must ensure the success of this scheme, and to do that, we must ensure that the small business commissioner has good identity, good awareness, and is effective.

We need to ensure that the person appointed has the gravitas to command the respect of businesses big and small. We need to ensure there is public awareness of the role. There are already a number of mechanisms to resolve disputes—there is already a free small claims mediation telephone service—but such schemes are successful only if the public know about them and so can use them. Finally, the small business commissioner will have to take full advantage of his or her powers to ensure speed, efficiency and an effective service.

The measures set out in the Bill are extremely welcome. The Government do not create jobs; businesses—often small businesses—do. It is our job to create the right environment for them to thrive in. This is a significant part of that process.

Oral Answers to Questions

Andrew Bridgen Excerpts

Tuesday 15th December 2015 Commons Chamber

[Sajid Javid]

What I accept is that these were the right set of changes. I considered the responses to the consultation carefully. It is important that we strike the right balance between the interests of the students, making sure that all who have the ability have the opportunity to go to university, and the interests of the taxpayer, ensuring that we have an affordable, sustainable funding system. That is exactly what the changes bring about.

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

Despite the negative comments from the Opposition, can the Secretary of State confirm that this year record numbers of young people secured places at university, including record numbers of children from disadvantaged backgrounds?

[Sajid Javid]

My hon. Friend is right. That is true of England. We have seen a record increase to 382,000 people in the past year, and the number of students from disadvantaged backgrounds has gone up from 9.5% to 18.2% in the past five years. In Scotland we have seen a fall in the number of students because Scotland does not have a funding system that allows all who want to go to university to do so.