Public Health

Debate between Alex Norris and Ben Bradley

Wednesday 7th October 2020 Commons Chamber

[Alex Norris (Nottingham North) (Lab/Co-op)]

In recent weeks, Ministers and Opposition Front Benchers have met upstairs in Committee to discuss such covid-related statutory instruments. It is welcome that we are debating this in the main Chamber because it means that local Members of Parliament can scrutinise them also. With that in mind, I do not intend to speak for long and I will probably limit the interventions I take—one thing I know is not to disappoint a roomful of colleagues who want to talk about their community.

I will start with the good news. I have been critical throughout the pandemic about the time that it has taken between a statutory instrument being brought into effect, and it being debated. In one case there was a lag of nine and a half weeks. It makes a nonsense of parliamentary scrutiny if we rubber stamp measures months after they have come into effect. We must have a timely say, so that the British public can have confidence, and as the Minister said, this statutory instrument is just four days old—that is the good news.

The bad news is that SI 2020/1074 amends SI 2020/1010, which came into force on 18 September, although it is not to be debated until Monday. We are discussing amendments to secondary legislation, even though we are yet to discuss that secondary legislation. I am keen to hear from the Minister why things have happened in that order. Is it possible that the other SI is more controversial and is to be hidden upstairs and discussed after the fact? We have followed events over the past hour or so on the controversial SI on the curfew. That seems to have been pulled from upstairs entirely because it is coming downstairs. What on earth is going on? I hope the Minister can tell us so that we do not have to find out through anonymous briefings yet again. This is a reflection of rather chaotic, rather than competent, leadership.

I suspect that the Government are doing this to head off division in their own ranks, once again putting the interests of the Conservative party ahead of the interests of the country. I say gently to would-be rebels—I say this at every opportunity—that if they do not like the delegated powers in the Coronavirus Act 2020, they should wait to see the ones in the Brexit-related legislation. For example, as drafted, the Medicines and Medical Devices Bill will hand to the same Secretary of State virtually unfettered powers over our entire medicines regime in this country. I hope that when the time comes, Members will be as keen and proactive to ensure that those powers are used in an appropriate way as they have been with these secondary powers.

The Opposition do not oppose the substance of SI 2020/1074. We know that as infection rates increase, so will restrictions. In this case, Liverpool city region, Warrington, Hartlepool and Middlesbrough are being added to those areas where mixing indoors is barred, which is an inevitable part of rising infection rates. We in Nottingham are awaiting that same call this week.

[Ben Bradley]

The hon. Gentleman mentioned Nottingham and as a fellow Nottinghamshire MP I am interested in his views. A few minutes ago, my hon. Friend the Member for Redcar (Jacob Young) mentioned the granular and localised nature of those lockdown areas and being able to pick the areas where this is most effective. My constituents in Mansfield, with one seventh of the rate of transmission in Nottinghamshire, are faced with lockdown measures linked to that outbreak. Does the hon. Gentleman agree that it is important in those areas to consider local data, and not to impose additional restrictions on people where that might not be appropriate?

[Alex Norris]

I am grateful for that intervention and I share that view. I have seen the hon. Gentleman’s tweet this afternoon in which he is very clear about that. Like me, he will have followed local Nottinghamshire data closely, and there should be close consultation with hon. Members, and with leaders such as the Mayor of Mansfield, and the leader of Nottinghamshire County Council. A one-size-fits-all approach is not the best route scientifically, and it will also breed local discontent and mean that people might be less inclined to follow it. So I support the hon. Gentleman in that venture.

Although rising restrictions are an inevitable part of rising infection rates, there is nothing inevitable about the loss of control of this virus. The Government promised us a world-class test and trace system, but rather than building on tried and tested local options in local government, they pursued a big national private contract. It was a triumph for dogma at a time when we need evidence-based leadership, and of course it has been a debacle.

The Government had a chance to fix this at a time when infection rates were relatively low, but they failed to do so. They have now lost control of the virus entirely, and our people will lose freedoms as a result. Yesterday, I saw a Minister blame the British people for rising infection rates. I thought that was extraordinary. Our constituents have made incredible sacrifices over the last several months; they do not deserve to have the Government thumb their nose at them for it.

Frankly, the Government can deflect as much as they want, but it will not wash. I would like to hear from the Minister today what they are doing to get this right and when it is going to happen. No more being sent hundreds of miles for tests, no more delayed results, no more lost spreadsheets. Drop the ludicrous defence of the indefensible. Let us stop pretending it is all okay when it is obviously not.

I have debated a number of these statutory instruments, and it is striking that every one of them has related to the north or the midlands. Rather than levelling up, we risk entrenching the north-south divide in this country. It is no longer reasonable to say, either, that these are going to be short, sharp interventions.

Early Years Education: Equality of Attainment

Debate between Alex Norris and Ben Bradley

Tuesday 10th March 2020 Westminster Hall

[Ben Bradley (Mansfield) (Con)]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for mentioning our debate in this Chamber a few weeks ago about white working-class boys and attainment. An issue that seems to cut across later attainment and across different measures—the number of young men who end up in prison, for example—is their ability very early on to communicate effectively and understand what is happening around them, particularly in the classroom. Does he agree that early years communication and language support, particularly through provision in nursery and primary schools, is hugely important to helping kids to engage with school in the first instance and reach the right attainment levels later on?

[Alex Norris]

I absolutely share that view. The hon. Gentleman will know from visiting schools and discussing behaviour with teachers and senior leaders, as all Members do, that they talk about the frustration and anger that build up in children— particularly white British boys—which leads to temporary and permanent exclusions. That all comes from the fundamental starting point of not really being able to engage fully and getting frustrated, as we all would.

I have time enough to explain the context in my community with a little potted history of Nottingham. I am sure that the context applies to Mansfield as it does to my part of the city of Nottingham. Ours is one of the poorest parts of the country, but it was not always that way. Up until four decades ago, we had lots of skilled work, with Boots, Rayleigh, Players, Plessis, the pits and much more, but over the course of a generation, virtually of all of that has gone. The massive impact on confidence and aspiration means that cyclical poverty has flowed from that, but, for the first time in a generation, we have a chance to change it. In my community, we have three exciting opportunities: High Speed 2 at Toton; improvements to access to East Midlands Airport, which is now the biggest pure freight airport in the country; and the repurposing of our power station sites as clean energy zones. Those projects will add tens of thousands of jobs—perhaps as many as 100,000—to our local economy, and represent a generational chance to break the cycle.

The uncomfortable truth though is that, were we to fast-forward to that bright future tomorrow, which I would very much like, we would have to bring in people from outside to fill those jobs, because our young people, in the light of their experiences, are not yet ready for them. When visiting schools and talking about HS2 and the timeline for that to come onstream, for example, we are not talking about theoretical people who will work in those jobs, but about the children that we see in the room. They will be the IT specialists, project managers, engineers, logistics experts, nurses, police officers and much more. They are the very children who we need to gear up, educate and skill up for that very bright future.

In Nottingham, we are proud of our record as an early intervention city. That is what we talk about when we discuss early years education. I would be smote down if I did not refer to my predecessor, Graham Allen, who is a national leader in that work. Programmes have been established in my constituency to help to develop new practices and change public services. When I was part of the local authority five years ago, I was very proud that we were one of the sites that won the national lottery community fund’s A Better Start programme for our project, Small Steps Big Changes. I am really proud of the difference that the project makes to the lives of our children and young people. Our Think Dads! training brings dads into the picture in a way that they had not been in the past, with father-inclusive practices when they go into the home. I encourage colleagues to look at the family mentoring scheme in the Small Steps Big Changes project, which skills up people in the community whom neighbours look to for leadership and help tackling the challenges faced by families. Those people get skills and employment as a result, and are often better messengers that we are for some of the messages that need to go through to provide better starts and education.

We are halfway through A Better Start, and I am keen to hear the Minister’s views on how it has done and where it is going. Has he had a chance to visit one of the sites and, if not, would he visit ours in Nottingham? There would be lots there that he would really enjoy. A Better Start is a 10-year lottery-funded programme—that is the best funding for any project in my experience—but it will stop. We will look at mainstreaming the bits that were particularly effective in Nottingham, but in the context of budget reductions. What will the Government’s answer be after that?

The Labour party is committed to early years action. We are so proud of Sure Start, which is one of our great legacies. That is the principle that we need to talk about and the way that we should approach early years education, by giving each child the best possible start in life, through childcare and early education, as well as health and family support. Sure Start provided for locally owned and driven programmes, which were understood and were sensitive to the needs of the parents and children, provided greater support for those who needed it. A child’s ability to succeed is shaped by their home environment. Sure Start was perfectly placed to improve and shape those environments. The cuts to Sure Start are not theoretical—the numbers are as they are—and we risk a lost generation. Whatever one’s views on public finances and the big or small state, everybody knows investing early produces greater returns. I worry that we have a generation that has not had that investment. Our priority should be for those children to catch up, while we invest in their little brothers and sisters.

Education and Attainment of White Working-Class Boys

Debate between Alex Norris and Ben Bradley

Wednesday 12th February 2020 Westminster Hall

[Ben Bradley]

I thank the hon. Member for that intervention and I totally agree. As I say, I fully recognise that the challenges I am highlighting in this speech affect many communities and many children from disadvantaged backgrounds, regardless of race or gender. I have said why I am highlighting it in these particular terms today, but she is absolutely right that there is a broader issue that we need to focus on. She also mentioned that kind of parental drive and engagement with schools, which I will come on to.

As I was saying, we need to understand the communities that these boys grow up in. In former coalfield areas such as Mansfield, not so long ago boys generally left school before they were 16, and they went to work down the pit or in a factory. There was a simplistic kind of certainty to that, in that regardless of what happened at school, they would have a job and a career. If someone was lucky, they might get to take the 11-plus and go off to grammar school to do something different. A few children benefited from that route, but then that was taken away as well.

That certainty of career does not exist any more in these communities, but in many cases they have not moved on. Many parents in the poorest communities do not have qualifications and therefore are not able to extol the virtues of school—indeed, they do not necessarily see the point of that education—and they cannot help their children to study because they do not have that level of attainment themselves.

I have schools in my area where 70% of the children are involved with social services, such is the chaotic backdrop to their lives, so school is very far from the top of the agenda for those children. Boys are far more likely to say that school is a waste of time, so we have to engage them in a different way and help them to see the value of school.

[Alex Norris (Nottingham North) (Lab/Co-op)]

I commend the hon. Gentleman for securing this debate and for the case that he has made; I agree with every word he has said. Does he, like me, see the real sadness that generations—multiple generation—of boys from Nottingham and from Nottinghamshire, which we both represent, have had that perception that school does not matter, and as a result there is wasted talent, instead of all the good things that they could be doing in our community if they had had a better education and we had not failed them?

[Ben Bradley]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for that intervention and I agree. I meet a number of young men who are bright, sharp and intelligent, but they do not have many qualifications and are struggling to find work, struggling to make a positive impact and struggling to see where their lives are going. We certainly need to do more to change that situation in the future and, as I have said, to go back to those guys who have finished school already and support them.

We need to prepare children for the 21st century and update our curriculum so that it is fit for the future. Repetitive tasks and memory tests are no longer relevant for study and even top private schools in America have shown that kids simply do not remember such stuff when they come back from school holidays.

The OECD’s programme of international student assessment rankings show that memorisation remains the dominant learning strategy in British classrooms. I could go off on a massive tangent at this point, and if I did I am sure that I would have a huge debate with the Minister for School Standards on this particular issue. However, I only have 10 minutes to cover things today, so I will try to focus on the headline issue, although there is a broader problem.

[Ben Bradley]

I thank the hon. Member for that intervention and I agree. There is certainly a disparity that is entrenched when those boys go home over the summer to a household that is not necessarily pushing them to continue to learn and engage, compared with parents who are perhaps better-off and who drive that engagement. We must bridge that gap and I will come on to some of the potential solutions. The point I am trying to make is that we need to create incentives for these boys to learn and to make space in the curriculum, if needed, for something more relevant to them. It would be wrong if we assumed that everyone’s aspiration was to study to degree level. We would do far better to accept that where these boys are getting nothing currently, giving them something of interest and value would be a step forward.

Whether it meets our middle-class aspiration or not is kind of irrelevant; I am talking about choice and variety. Whether we do that through alternative provision or by giving all schools more freedom by offering more vocational and technical education, we have to do something more to show the career value of what they are learning, perhaps by doing it thematically, rather than in subject silos that do not connect with the real world. Everyone needs a certain core knowledge, but outside of that there are lots of different options.

[Alex Norris]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

[Ben Bradley]

I will, but then I am going to have to stop giving way.

[Alex Norris]

I am sorry to come back again, but does the hon. Gentleman agree that there is a real importance for us in this place to start talking about vocational and technical education with the same emphasis as higher education? That would set the tone that, actually, we think all those paths are just as legitimate and can lead to full and happy lives.