National Policy Statement: Airports

Debate between Lucy Powell and Lindsay Hoyle

Monday 25th June 2018 Commons Chamber

[Lucy Powell (Manchester Central) (Lab/Co-op)]

I am pre-empting some of the remarks that I will make in my speech later, but as a Manchester MP, I thought I should speak for Manchester airport on that point. Manchester airport refutes the figures in the forecasts, because it believes that it will exceed those passenger numbers even before the Heathrow expansion is on stream. The hub argument is not the right argument to make for Manchester, because most of its connectivity involves direct flights. There are other reasons that Greater Manchester MPs have come together to support this proposal, but that particular argument is not the one to make.

[Mr Deputy Speaker (Sir Lindsay Hoyle)]

Order. I am not going to stop interventions being made, but they must be short if we are to get through all the speakers.

Joint Enterprise

Debate between Lucy Powell and Lindsay Hoyle

Thursday 25th January 2018 Commons Chamber

[Mr Deputy Speaker (Sir Lindsay Hoyle)]

Order. I hope to give everybody 10 minutes. If Members intervene, the danger is that I will have to drop the time limit immediately.

[Lucy Powell]

I fully agree with my right hon. Friend the Member for Tottenham (Mr Lammy), but I will try to make some progress.

There was a political context when the joint enterprise law began to be overused and extended in its use during the 1990s and the noughties, but there is a different political context today. As my right hon. Friend has just said, we now more clearly understand the consequences of disproportionate and unfair applications of the law against certain groups. I am pleased the Government recognised that when they launched the Lammy review and in the Prime Minister’s recent comments on “burning injustices”—I hope she can live up to that rhetoric.

Practice and the law have been far too slow to catch up with the changing mood in the country. I will briefly discuss what the Supreme Court ruling does and does not say, and what still needs to be addressed. First, the ruling is clear that the law governing secondary liability has taken a “wrong turn” and has resulted in the “erroneous” application of the law. However, it also sets out that, in order for appeals to be heard “out of time,” a substantial injustice test, not the usual unsafe conviction test, will be applied. Yet the substantial injustice test was not clearly set out in the ruling and has never been set out by Parliament. The substantial injustice test has subsequently been tested through case law and is now an almost impossibly high bar for people to clear. That is why, nearly two years on, there has yet to be a single successful appeal awarded by the Court of Appeal.

Finally, in our opinion the Supreme Court failed to address another question put before it: does joint enterprise over-criminalise secondary parties?

What needs to change in the law—first, what needs to change going forward, and secondly, how can we put right some of the injustices of the past? It is clear that joint enterprise continues to be overused and is disproportionately used against groups of young men, particularly those from black and ethnic minority backgrounds. I saw that at first hand in a recent case in which 11 young black men from Moss Side faced charges of murder. Seven of them were convicted of murder and four were convicted of manslaughter. The youngest was only 14 and many of them were not previously known to the police. As research by Manchester Metropolitan University has shown in its study “Dangerous Liaisons”, more than half of all those serving life sentences are children or young adults, and more than half are from a black and ethnic minority background.

Budget Resolutions

Debate between Lucy Powell and Lindsay Hoyle

1st reading: House of Commons
Tuesday 28th November 2017 Commons Chamber

[Lucy Powell]

Very quickly—

[Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Lindsay Hoyle)]

Order. Everybody wishes to speak and that is not a problem, but the hon. and learned Member for South East Cambridgeshire (Lucy Frazer) must understand that this would be her second intervention. I will keep moving her down the list, because that is the way that we will move forward.

[Lucy Powell]

I will not take any more interventions, Mr Deputy Speaker.

There was nothing at all about school budgets, which was one of the key issues in the general election, and they are still falling in real terms. The Institute for Fiscal Studies said that, after the Secretary of State’s announcement in the summer, there was still a 5% cut in real terms, because the number of pupils is going up. We need a much bigger conversation about what education and skills are for in this country. They need to be about delivering for the economy and the society of the future.

Nearly 60% of graduates are working in non-graduate jobs. That is the third highest level among OECD countries, exceeded only by Greece and Estonia. I know that we have many debates in this place about tuition fees, but it is no wonder that they are not being repaid when so many people are not working at the level at which they are qualified to work.

We are in the bottom four of the OECD countries for literacy and numeracy to 18. T-levels are welcome, but with the huge cuts to further education, they will be difficult to deliver. Given that the maths GCSE contains more A-level content, we must ask about the desirability of prioritising compulsory and ongoing GCSE resits over looking at the curriculum and functional skills.

The Government are right to identify maths as the future. The future is about algorithms, matrices, digitisation and automation. Even for the most able, however, our curriculum is going in the wrong direction, which is why the OECD has said that it is

“a mile wide and an inch deep”.

By going down a route of rote learning rather than conceptual understanding, we are moving in the opposite direction to all our competitor countries.

There was absolutely nothing about social mobility in the Budget—in fact, the Chancellor did not even mention that in his statement. Social mobility is especially crucial in the early years if we are looking to close the productivity gap. Development at the age of five is still the biggest indicator of how a person will do in their GCSEs and beyond, yet we are also going in the wrong direction there. As others have said, these are political choices. Of the £9 billion the Government are spending over this Parliament on the early years, 75% will be for the top half of earners, with less than 3% going to the lowest. That is just wrong. This ticking time bomb entrenches social advantage.

Childcare is, yes, about increasing productivity, but the design of the current system under this Government means that we will fail to deliver some of the productivity gains that can come with childcare. We really need a social mobility strategy right across Government to tackle these issues.

Finally, let me talk about regional inequalities and disparities within regions, which are all connected to the points that I have raised. It is even more urgent that we get our fairer share of spending on infrastructure outside London and the south-east, and that we develop even stronger place-based solutions to deal with local job markets and skills. For example, if the Government wanted to be ambitious—this is not a difficult thing to do—they could devolve post-16 further education to places such as Greater Manchester. They could do a lot more to devolve early years solutions for transforming school readiness, as we are attempting to do in Greater Manchester. It is high time that places outside London got their fair share of transport infrastructure expenditure. We absolutely need to see the northern powerhouse rail connecting Liverpool to Hull via Leeds and Manchester. Critical to that is ensuring that we have a future-proofed Manchester Piccadilly station.