Apprenticeships and Skills Policy

David Simpson Excerpts

Tuesday 8th January 2019 Westminster Hall

[Judith Cummins]

I thank my hon. Friend for the wise words and I certainly welcome them. I say to the Minister that now is the time that we must act to create a better skills and training system if we are to prevent disruption further down the line.

[David Simpson (Upper Bann) (DUP)]

One of the problems we face in my constituency with training centres is that 20 to 25 students will start training, but only four will finish. How can we encourage young people to stay in apprenticeships, or is the apprenticeship scheme not fit for purpose?

[Judith Cummins]

That is a very interesting and pertinent point. I know that some apprenticeships are paid so poorly and offer so little training—apprenticeships are supposed to be jobs with training—that they are not really worth the paper that they are written on. In my view, they should not be called apprenticeships.

At a local level, a significant amount of work is under way to meet the challenges that I have spoken about, with the Bradford Economic Partnership setting out a local economic strategy with a focus on increasing the number of productive businesses in the district through investing in skills provision.

We recently had Bradford manufacturing week, which I was delighted to support. It aimed to show the young people in Bradford the many exciting opportunities in manufacturing that are right on their doorstep, to get them thinking about the skills that they will need for the future. Over half of our secondary schools took part. In just one week more than 3,000 children crossed the doors to get that first-hand manufacturing experience in workplaces.

Another exciting area of work that is being developed locally in Bradford involves the industrial centres of excellence—or ICE—approach to post-14 careers and technical education. ICE gives business a partnership vehicle with local schools, colleges and the University of Bradford to ensure that education and learning in Bradford meet the skills demands of businesses in the local and regional economy within given sector footprints, which opens up opportunities for our young people and improves social mobility.

Those centres are good examples of how schemes that are locally led can deliver for businesses and encourage social mobility. I would welcome the opportunity to discuss them further with the Minister, but Government policy is making it more difficult for places such as Bradford to bring about a transformative change in their labour markets. I will start with the specific issues that Bradford businesses and education providers have raised with me about the operation of the apprenticeship levy.

I fully support the principles behind the levy, but its implementation has compounded the problems of underinvestment in training rather than improving the situation. As the Minister will be aware, the apprenticeship levy aims to encourage employers to invest in apprenticeship programmes, but apprenticeship starts have been significantly down since the introduction of the levy in May 2017. In July 2018, the total number of apprenticeship starts nationally was 25,200.

Family Hubs

David Simpson Excerpts

Tuesday 24th July 2018 Westminster Hall

[Fiona Bruce]

One of the ways—I shall elaborate on this—is to ensure that the centres are grassroots-built, that they engage with the local community and that they involve not just the statutory services but voluntary community groups. Each family hub will therefore be different and tailored to the needs of the local community, much more than Sure Start services were.

Anne Longfield says that

“in expanding the range of support we offer to vulnerable children and their families, we can support many more children in a more efficient and effective way. This is about an approach that works with children and their families, to develop resilience, confidence and independence”.

She says that it is imperative that Government initiatives

“focus on expanding the provision of lower-level services which support children and families, making them routine to access”.

She says that some may simply need a “helping hand” but that

“for others it will be specialist support for them and their families.”

Family hubs can offer that range.

The broader need that Anne Longfield highlights explains why exclusively focusing on the Sure Start children’s centre nought-to-five model is no longer tenable. It is vital, if we are to give children the best start in life, that services are broader. However, we also need to address the massive challenges our country faces due to family instability. That is why family hubs are needed. Such challenges include children’s mental health issues and educational and employment under-attainment, as well as a range of other challenges that can be lifelong, including addiction, housing pressures, pressure on GP surgeries, loneliness in old age and many others.

Although family hubs are as yet few in number, they are already beginning to have a real impact. I understand that the early intervention provision on the Isle of Wight means that fewer children are being put on child protection plans. At Middlewich High School in my constituency, when students have special educational needs or disability or mental health challenges, the whole family is supported. After just a few years, the evidence shows the positive impact of family hubs on the emotional health and wellbeing of students. There has even been an improvement in GCSE results.

I will describe one family hub in detail to evidence the range of support that hubs can provide, but before I do so, I will set out my key asks of the Government. National Government, from the Prime Minister down and across ministerial briefs, must really get behind this initiative. They must champion family hubs in policy, promote best practice and provide a transformation fund to help to accelerate the development of family hubs across the country.

I will describe just one example from a number of family hubs, represented at a recent roundtable to showcase good practice that was held at 10 Downing Street. Family hubs are all different because they are created by and tailored to the local communities in which they sit. Chelmsford family hub opened in March and is located in Chelmsford library. The refurbishment was paid for by a £145,000 grant from the Arts Council and £171,000 from Chelmsford’s infrastructure levy fund. In its first two days of opening, more than 80 families received support from the Essex Child and Adult Wellbeing Service and library staff.

The Essex Child and Adult Wellbeing Service focuses on ensuring every child has the best possible start in life and on providing community services that are accessible and high quality, and that meet the identified needs of children, young people and families.

[David Simpson (Upper Bann) (DUP)]

I am very interested in what the hon. Lady is saying. In my constituency, some church community organisations have a wrap-around service, like a family hub, that provides not only education, but clothing, food and breakfast in the morning, and deals with young people who have issues. Is that the sort of thing she is talking about?

[Fiona Bruce]

Absolutely. A family hub could well be placed in a church environment. Indeed, a wonderful church community in my constituency—New Life church—provides a host of services for all ages, including a very effective job club.

Family hubs are at the heart of the services in Essex. The majority of services are delivered and co-ordinated from hubs. There is one in each district and, like the one at Chelmsford library, they are open for 50 hours a week. The hubs’ approach to family care is to look at a family’s strengths and then to work with the family, across all its services, aligning resources and focusing on prevention, early intervention and evidence-based practice. Working with families is so important.

At Chelmsford library, library staff, health and family support workers, and volunteers from other support agencies have come together to create a one-stop shop for free family services, including antenatal contact, parenting support, school readiness, school nursing, family health, substance misuse support, contraception advice, nutrition support, mental health support, smoking cessation, dental care, and SEN and disability support for young people up to 25. They work with an array of family support services, such as Citizens Advice, safer spaces, adult community learning and home start. Volunteers are proactively encouraged to play a role through peer support and by developing grassroots community groups to help to strengthen and build resilience in local communities.

Key features of that successful approach include a true integration of joined-up services and community engagement, the whole-family approach I mentioned and a flexible service that meets individual needs—the right type of support by the right person at the right time. Myriad outcomes are aspired to, including children and young people feeling safer; families being helped to improve parenting and children’s behaviour; better emotional wellbeing of mothers and children in the perinatal period and beyond; good lifestyle choices; more resilient families who can respond well to crises and cope with shocks; young people having strong attachment to at least one adult; and people being connected to and involved in their local community.

So many families are increasingly without the support structures we took for granted only a generation ago, and often live far away from relatives. The impact of family hubs cannot be overestimated. As Javed Khan, chief executive officer of Barnardo’s, said at our No. 10 roundtable, they should be

“at the heart of the domestic policy agenda”.

Family hubs could play a crucial role in fighting the “burning injustices” highlighted by the Prime Minister. Mr Khan also said:

“Our frontline experience strongly supports the proposition that early help for families is absolutely essential to build resilience and prevent more serious problems occurring later on. That’s why, in our 10 year strategy, our first of three aims is to create Stronger Families, alongside Safer Childhoods and Positive Futures. Amongst our 1000+ services, we have some great examples of Family Hubs. We all know that rising demand on safeguarding services and the care system, combined with tightened budgets, leave many local authorities without the means to invest in early support. Yet help for families is vital if we are going to break the cycle and step in when children are at serious risk of harm.”

Other family hubs, such as Woodland Academy Trust’s, help with job and career opportunities. That hub has introduced a character toolkit for children and young people and has established a number of local projects in conjunction with local faith groups. As the hon. Member for Upper Bann (David Simpson) mentioned, they can provide very strong community support. Westminster City Council plans to develop three hubs in collaboration with partner organisations, such as child and adolescent mental health services. I look forward to the launch of the family hub partnership in Westminster this November. We hope that there will be a ministerial presence there—ideally, the Secretary of State for Education.

The key aims of the Westminster hubs are just too many to mention, but they include identifying families with complex needs as early as possible, no matter which service they come into contact with; preventing family breakdown; preventing children from going into care and from entering the criminal justice system; helping parents to gain employment; providing access to first-line mental health support to reduce referrals to higher level, more costly interventions; and improving outcomes for children and young people across a range of health and wellbeing indicators. I hope that those descriptions bring home the tremendous potential that family hubs could have if they were sited in local communities right across our country.

The aspiration to support the creation of family hubs nationwide is one of the policy asks in the Manifesto to Strengthen Families, launched last September, which has the support of some 60 Conservative Back-Bench MPs, many other MPs and a large number of peers. I pay tribute to Dr Samantha Callan, whom I mentioned earlier, who has done so much work on how practical policies could be developed by Government to help to strengthen families. She is part of the team that worked on this manifesto, together with Lord Farmer—our representative in the Lords—and our executive director, David Burrowes and myself.

Key policy 6 of the manifesto states that the Government should

“encourage every local authority to work with voluntary and private sector partners to deliver Family Hubs… local ‘one stop shops’ offering families with children and young people, aged 0-19, early help to overcome difficulties and build stronger relationships…the Government should put in place a transformation fund and national task force to encourage Local Authorities to move towards this Family Hub model…that will particularly help children in need.”

The manifesto also states:

“Alongside physical Family Hubs, the Government should work with the Family Hub Movement to develop a virtual Family Hub offering online support and guidance that mirrors the depth and quality of NHS.gov and links families to local provision.”

I want to emphasise, however, that vocal and practical leadership is required from central Government significantly to accelerate the creation of family hubs and their roll-out across the country. We need Ministers and the Prime Minister to champion family hubs. We need this to be a key component of our domestic policy going forward. Backing that up with a transformation fund of £100 million over four years could provide a rocket boost by highlighting good practice and helping senior local authority staff across the country to reconfigure existing services to make them more holistic and co-ordinated. Focus should be on early intervention and prevention, as well as community self-help and developing missing services such as relationship support, which is too rarely available in the community.

Leadership from national Government to strengthen family life in our country is absolutely critical. The fiscal cost of addressing family breakdown, quite apart from the often lifelong pain and suffering of millions, has been estimated and oft-quoted in the House at around £50 billion, but that is a vast underestimate. The cost in terms of lost life potential and lost productivity is much more.

So much of that cost is borne, and so many of the related challenges are addressed, by a wide range of Departments: Education, Health, Justice, Work and Pensions, the Cabinet Office, Housing, Communities and Local Government, and even Defence. That is why our manifesto policy 1 asks for a Cabinet Minister to be appointed with responsibility for families. In the same way that one Cabinet Minister holds the equalities brief, another Secretary of State with a cross-Government brief, or one of the larger Departments such as DWP or Housing, Communities and Local Government, could bear named responsibility for families.

That Secretary of State would require an equivalent body to the Government Equalities Office—a dedicated budget and civil service team to prioritise and co-ordinate family policies across Government. That would also help to avoid the duplication of work that is becoming apparent across Departments and pots of money being allocated to address such challenges. There is serious risk that much good work across Government will not meet its objectives as effectively as it could because of the lack of integration and co-ordination across Departments, as well as the risk of duplication of manpower and money. That could be avoided if a Cabinet-level Minister responsible for families co-ordinated all that good work and more.

I mentioned that good work is being done across Government to strengthen families. Over the past year, our team that has worked on the Manifesto to Strengthen Families has been encouraged by the positive response to the manifesto not only from many Back-Bench colleagues, but from Ministers. We are delighted that the Ministry of Justice has fully adopted and is implementing Lord Farmer’s review on strengthening prisoners’ family ties, which reflects policy 18 of the manifesto.

We were also delighted by the announcement by Health Ministers of £6 million to help the children of alcoholics—a need referred to in policy 4 of the manifesto. Similarly, the budget of more than £90 million allocated to addressing the mental health crisis faced by young people was welcome, which we also referred to in our manifesto. However, our team has told the Schools Minister that if that funding is to be effectively used, it is critical that young people’s families are involved wherever possible to help to address their mental health needs. Engaging families and early intervention are absolutely essential to avoid the continued mental health challenges among young people in this and future generations.

Only last week, we welcomed the announcement by the Secretary of State for Education of greater emphasis on relationships education in the newly proposed relationships and sex education curriculum guidance. It includes that pupils learn about the characteristics of healthy relationships and the

“nature and importance of marriage for family life and bringing up children”—

an emphasis reflected in policy 3 and elsewhere in our manifesto.

We also welcome the statements by Ministers in both Houses on the manifesto policy suggestions, including family hubs. My hon. Friend the Member for Nuneaton (Mr Jones), when he was Under-Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, said:

“I welcome the development of family hubs and we know that many areas are already moving towards this model of support for children and families.”—[Official Report, 30 October 2017; Vol. 630, c. 564.]

Earlier this month, the Under-Secretary of State for the School System, Lord Agnew, affirmed family hubs, saying of them and other strategies that the Government want

“to ensure that these innovations are recognised and shared, and we want to spread these successful approaches.”—[Official Report, House of Lords, 12 July 2018; Vol. 792, c. 959.]

Spreading the successful approach of the family hubs that are already up and running is important—indeed, it is urgent—hence the need for national Government support.

I have some short practical requests, which are examples of how the Government could support and help to promote family hubs. I understand capital clawback would need to be waived if the change of use of a former children’s centre were part of a local authority’s service redesign. Will the Government look at that? There should be a requirement for parents who are not in work but benefit from free childcare to spend at least one of those childcare sessions with their children in the hub to boost their own parenting confidence. Ofsted’s single inspection framework could specify that early help for families must show regard to the need for support for couples as well as parenting support, and DFE could signal its support for a major gear shift in the development of family hubs by adopting “hub language” and encouraging local authorities to redesign family support along the co-ordinated lines of family hubs.

The good news is that positive outcomes can be achieved quickly, as I outlined. The health and wellbeing work and engagement with families in Middlewich, where such outcomes are already being seen, has been led by an inspiring headteacher, Keith Simpson, who was appointed just six years ago. I read in this week’s edition of the local newspaper that he will be moving on. He has become deeply appreciated and respected in the Middlewich community, and has shown through his local leadership what a positive difference engaging with the whole family can make. I am sure I speak on behalf of the whole town when I say we wish him well with his move to Neston. Middlewich’s loss will be very much Neston’s gain, and he will leave a long-lasting legacy in many lives, particularly young ones.

Imagine the huge difference—the transformative impact —that could be made nationwide in just a few years by having a family hub in every community. Their positive, perhaps lifelong, impacts on individuals would ripple out into the community. Even the Chancellor has signalled his support for the concept, recognising the increased national productivity that may result.

The Under-Secretary of State for Education, who will respond to the debate, said recently that the Government have committed £8.5 million for councils to peer review one another to see what actually works in terms of outcomes for children. Will he confirm that that will include reviewing the effectiveness of family hubs? I know from a private meeting between him and our Manifesto for Strengthening Families team that he understands so much of what I have spoken about, so will he become a vocal champion for family hubs, press his Secretary of State to be so too, and in turn press the Prime Minister to take up the policy asks I outlined? It is not an exaggeration to say that this could be transformative for our nation.

International Men’s Day

David Simpson Excerpts

Tuesday 14th November 2017 Westminster Hall

[Jeremy Lefroy]

I totally agree; the hon. Gentleman anticipates what I was about to say. As he says, there is clear evidence that men are less likely than women to seek help when they are sick. That is certainly true of me. I have sometimes been reluctant to go to the doctor in case it turned out that I had something serious, as if the very act of seeking help would make it more serious than it was. I do not think it is just me. I did not want to confront the possibility of having a serious illness.

Good public health work has been done to ease people’s fears of seeking medical help if they think something is wrong—I think the NHS recognises that—but there is a greater need for health education, starting at school, to promote healthy lifestyles and to encourage people to consult their doctor early if they believe something is not quite right. I have recent personal experience; a close friend, who was not yet 50, had his cancer caught too late because, due to the nature of his job, he understandably attributed the symptoms to work-related stress when they were in fact much more serious.

Men should not worry that they will waste valuable NHS resources by going to their GP because they have unusual discomfort in their stomach, a persistent cough or problems passing water. Any NHS professional would prefer to allay their patient’s fears by showing that the problem is not serious—or, if it is serious, to catch it early and hence greatly improve the prospects of cure.

We have a serious problem with mental health among men and boys. Some 76% of all suicides in the UK last year were among men. That is 4,287 lives lost to suicide—more than two and a half times the number of deaths on the UK’s roads. The suicide rate has fallen in the last 35 years, and I welcome that, but the fall has been greater among women than men; it has fallen by 50% for women, which is wonderful, but only 14% for men. Suicide is the leading cause of death of men between 20 and 49.

The Samaritans commissioned research on the issues surrounding male suicide, which I will go into in some detail because they are so important. It found that men from the lowest social class who live in the most deprived areas are up to 10 times more likely to end their lives by suicide than those in the highest social class from the most affluent areas. This is undoubtedly a matter of inequality. Men in mid-life are most at risk, which surprised me. Men compare themselves against a masculine gold standard, to which having a job and providing for the family are essential, especially for working-class men. Men—I speak here from personal experience—are far less positive than women about getting formal emotional support for their problems, and when they do it is at the point of crisis. There is also a well-known link between unemployment and suicide; unemployed people are two to three times more likely than those in work to die by suicide, which is why combating unemployment is an absolute moral mission.

[David Simpson (Upper Bann) (DUP)]

I congratulate the hon. Gentleman on obtaining this debate. I am sure that he agrees that more needs to be done about the mental health of not just older men but young men. In my constituency, suicides have risen dramatically. The youngest person to commit suicide was 12, and one was 15. More needs to be done to help young people, especially those from deprived areas, who have social difficulties.

[Jeremy Lefroy]

I absolutely agree. I will read all six of the Samaritans’ recommendations, because they are so important. The first is to recognise and take on gender and socioeconomic inequalities in suicide risk—to follow the evidence, not the preconceptions. The second is to ensure that suicide prevention policy and practice takes account of men’s beliefs and concerns, and the context of what it is to be a man. The third is to recognise that loneliness is, for men in mid-life, a significant cause of their high risk of suicide, and to enable them to strengthen their social relationships—frankly, women are usually better at doing that than men. The fourth is to ensure explicit links between alcohol reduction and suicide prevention strategies, because often the two are taken apart when they should be much more closely linked. The fifth is to support GPs to recognise the signs of distress in men and ensure that those from deprived backgrounds receive a range of support, not just medication—it seems that men from poorer backgrounds are often given much more medication than counselling and other support. Finally, and very importantly, the sixth recommendation is to provide leadership and accountability at local level, and I congratulate councils who are taking this seriously up and down the country.

I would like to hear from my right hon. Friend the Minister on how he believes we can all work together to tackle suicide in all people, and particularly the tragically high rate of male suicide. I have not gone into great detail on some of the excellent initiatives, whether sports initiatives or peer communicators, which perhaps others or the Minister will refer to, but it would be good to hear more about that.

I turn to the access rights of fathers and children. One of the saddest things I have to confront, on an almost weekly basis, in my surgeries, as I am sure all colleagues have, is the fallout from partnerships and marriages that have gone wrong. The problem is almost inevitably one of two: either a father is neglecting his responsibilities to contribute to the maintenance of his children, or father and children are denied access to each other. The causes are complex, especially in cases of the latter, and I am no expert. However, I have no doubt that, in some I have seen, there has been a deliberate attempt to use all means possible to prevent the father from seeing a child or children, just as I have seen cases in which fathers have used all means possible to avoid their responsibilities to contribute to child maintenance.