Regional Pay

Debate between Andrew Percy and Guy Opperman

Wednesday 20th June 2012 Commons Chamber

[Guy Opperman (Hexham) (Con)]

My entire career has been spent being part of the national health service. My grandmother was an NHS matron, and I came into politics when the hospital in which I was born and which saved my mother’s life was threatened with closure. In 2011 I was diagnosed with a tumour and spent several weeks in London NHS hospitals. I saw all that was good in those hospitals and literally owe my life to the treatment I received. I will be for ever grateful.

If I took one thing in particular away from that experience, it was an understanding of just how many individuals are involved in making the whole process work. From the porter and the nurse to the physiotherapist, the care lady and the cleaner, everyone is just as important as each other. I think that all Members of the House should remember that when we talk about the public sector, we are talking about not only the unions and Unite but the care lady who looks after our mothers and the dinner lady who keeps our children safe at lunch time and provides them with food. It is much more personal than the dry debates we engage in.

There are two key arguments in the debate, the first of which is economic. Having worked as a legal aid barrister or state prosecutor for 15 years, I should declare that I, like many public sector workers, am still owed money by the state, notwithstanding the fact that I stopped working for the state on a legal aid basis two years ago. It was during that time that I saw the effects of local pay, as it is described, and took into account the argument of the right hon. Member for Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath (Mr Brown)—as usual, he is absent from his place—who first contemplated it in 2003 and then forced it on the courts service in 2007.

As with so many of the right hon. Gentleman’s economic policies, I see little evidence that local pay was a success. I have tried to study the economic argument behind it, which is based on the Heckscher-Ohlin factor proportions theory and various academic studies performed by august institutions such as the London School of Economics. I do not support such arguments, which are obscure at best and have not been shown to work in real terms. Also—surely this is the crucial point—it is not supported by businesses in my constituency, none of which has come to me to press for it.

[Andrew Percy (Brigg and Goole) (Con)]

I agree entirely with everything my hon. Friend has said so far. The other reason we do not support regional pay is the facts. In my region, the Humber, we cannot get NHS workers to come and work and have to consider paying them more. A few years ago we could not get teachers to teach in the city of Hull and had to give them an enhanced salary to do it. Whatever the economics, the reality is that we cannot get some public sector workers to come to my region. How we would do that if we paid them even less is beyond me.

[Guy Opperman]

I also believe that regional pay is divisive and manifestly unfair. Members who read The Daily Telegraph today—obviously, that includes many on the Opposition Benches—will know that it has criticised me personally for leading the opposition to these divisive plans. It must be very rare to be criticised by The Daily Telegraph and praised by the hon. Member for Sedgefield (Phil Wilson) all on the same day. I was interested when I read on to find that its argument is that pay distortions are

“economically destructive. They make it harder for businesses in the regions to recruit workers at competitive wage rates and as a consequence they stifle enterprise.”

That is not what individual businesses, whether small or large, in my constituency and elsewhere in the north-east are saying to me, however.

This Government, like previous Governments in 2003 and 2007, are right to look at all potential options for boosting growth, and I have no difficulty with them referring the matter for consideration by the pay review body, but ultimately this will not find business support or create the prospect of business growth in the regions that we represent, and we should not support it if it becomes Government policy.

The majority of public sector workers in my region are doing their bit already. They are hard working, and along with the vast majority of my constituents they accept that the Government are right to reduce the deficit, to cut public sector spending, to reform public sector pensions, to freeze pay in some areas and to eradicate some of the non-jobs and excesses that we saw before 2010. That is accepted.

Veterans (Mental Health)

Debate between Andrew Percy and Guy Opperman

Wednesday 7th March 2012 Westminster Hall

[Guy Opperman (Hexham) (Con)]

It is a great pleasure and a privilege to speak in this debate today. I have been in this House for nearly two years and I have not had the opportunity to raise the issue of the mental health of veterans in the way in which we have done today. I pay great tribute to my hon. Friend the Member for York Outer (Julian Sturdy) for securing this debate and for the measured and eloquent way in which he has brought the issues to the House.

I join my hon. Friend and other colleagues in passing on our respective condolences to the service men and women, and to the families of those who died in Afghanistan so recently. I endorse everything that both the Prime Minister and the Leader of the Opposition said. It is an utter tragedy and one of the largest losses of life for many a year. I remain of the view that the sooner we bring our troops home from Afghanistan, the better it will be.

This debate is certainly overdue. I want to make a declaration. I send out my thanks and support to the various charities, volunteer groups and individuals who provide support. I echo the words of support for the Royal British Legion and Help for Heroes. If I need to declare that I have raised funds for such groups while serving as a Member of Parliament, I do so. I certainly need to make a declaration that I have represented, as defence counsel, multitudes of soldiers facing criminal charges, which was a salutary and depressing experience. Many of the soldiers had committed criminal offences, which they had no desire to commit, because they were suffering from mental health problems and fundamentally from post-traumatic stress disorder.

I represented a Royal Marine who had broken down in a supermarket after he had been unable to get together the right amount of money at the till. He felt that the lady behind the counter, who had been perfectly civil to him, had not been as co-operative as she should have been and it all became too much. The nature and the prevalence of post-traumatic stress are such that it is always the very smallest things at the end of the process that result in the demise of the mental strength of people who have quite happily stormed up Tumbledown ridge, gone across the Gulf deserts and fought repeatedly in a way that very few of us in this House can even contemplate. It is how we provide support that is important. As defence counsel for some of these lads and, on one occasion, a woman, I saw very strongly how their spirit was broken. I have also seen, over the last 15 to 20 years of lawyer practice, plenty of examples of these people falling through the system.

[Andrew Percy (Brigg and Goole) (Con)]

My hon. Friend is making an important speech about how people fall through the net. My neighbour, the hon. Member for Scunthorpe (Nic Dakin), mentioned Charles Brindley, who has been trying to do some work around GPs. Many GPs do not seem to be aware of the military assessment programme that is available. Often if someone presents with a mental health issue, the GP is not trained or aware of the services and support that can be made available. Does my hon. Friend agree that we need to ensure that GPs are better educated and better trained in dealing with such individuals?

[Guy Opperman]

I entirely endorse that point. Although it is incumbent upon Members of this House to raise the profile of this issue and to try to disseminate information about the types of health care support that exist, it is also incumbent upon the relevant health trusts and authorities to ensure that in future a degree of information is passed down the net to individual GPs and action teams, particularly those teams dealing with alcohol abuse, so that the organisations in the regions are able to support the veterans who are out there.

I have worked with a charity called Veterans in Action. It involves some constituents of mine in Northumberland but it also involves servicemen and women who are based in Lancashire and all over the country, who are attempting to do various things. For example, they have a pilot project with the Lancashire Drug and Alcohol Action Team that involves meeting up with GPs to work with them and trying to do exactly the sort of thing that my hon. Friend the Member for Brigg and Goole (Andrew Percy) has outlined.

However, the worry is that, although individual groups in our constituencies are all doing very good work to provide a degree of assistance to veterans, there is no overarching body providing global support. What often happens, therefore—for example it has happened with Veterans in Action, which was set up in my constituency and is now working throughout the country—is that the individual soldiers effectively get fed up with the process and decide to provide support themselves.

I supported what the previous Government did. They were working to do a great deal more than had previously been done. Successive Governments have improved care for veterans over time. But the “Fighting Fit” report and the work done by my hon. Friend the Member for South West Wiltshire (Dr Murrison) have clearly taken things to the next stage and a better level.

I will digress slightly, because in my constituency I have the Albemarle barracks and the Otterburn ranges, troops from my constituency are serving on a regular basis in Afghanistan with the 39 Regiment Royal Artillery, and the Ridsdale ranges provide all the weapons that are tested before the soldiers use them. I also have a large number of constituents who have served in the forces. For example, many Falklands veterans live in my constituency and have come to see me because of the experiences that they have suffered and the lack of support that they have experienced. That was under a different Government and, frankly, I am not here to criticise any Government. However, there is no question but that the degree of support given to the Falklands veterans was limited compared with the support that we are giving to the veterans who are returning from Afghanistan now. Things have got better.

School Governance

Debate between Andrew Percy and Guy Opperman

Tuesday 1st February 2011 Westminster Hall

[Andrew Percy (Brigg and Goole) (Con)]

I apologise in advance if I have to leave the debate early, Mr Dobbin. I have been appointed—joy of joys—to a Delegated Legislation Committee that begins at 10.30 am, so I mean no discourtesy if I have to leave the Chamber before that time.

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for South Swindon (Mr Buckland) on securing this debate. I know that he has a huge interest in school governance, and I agree with much of what he has said. I want to make a couple of observations based on my own time as a school governor. I have been a governor at the same school for the past 10 years, and before that I served on the governing bodies of two secondary schools. I serve as a local education authority governor in a school that I attended as a child and that is in the area where I was a councillor. Consequently, I felt that my role as a LEA governor was to be a link between the community and the school.

I associate myself with my hon. Friend’s comments about the work that governors and governing bodies do in general. Very often, governing bodies are full of dedicated individuals who have the best interests of the school and their wider community at heart. As we change the education system in this country, however, the time has come to question whether we are necessarily doing things correctly. I have a couple of observations about some of the flaws in how governing bodies work at the moment.

My hon. Friend has discussed schools accessing the wider community, members of which might have particular skills in finance, law and such like. However, that is not a scenario for all school catchment areas, particularly if the school is in a deprived area, where some of those skills might not be available—it is sometimes a challenge to attract people to be governors in such schools.

One way of tackling that problem, which my hon. Friend has touched on, is to set up a federation of schools, whether it involves a better performing school pooling and federating with a poorer performing school, or whether it involves a cluster of schools pooling and federating, such as a secondary school and its feeder primary schools. I say that because if there is a gentle criticism to be made of governing bodies—I make it very gently, because nobody here wants to attack or insult the work of people who are giving their time for free—it is that sometimes the governing body sees its role as being to support the head teacher in the decisions that they make. Often, governing bodies lack the robust challenge and scrutiny role that they are actually there to fulfil, and I have seen that myself as a governor. Frankly, that sometimes happens because governing bodies are full of educationists. I say that as a former teacher who still serves as a school governor, but I have sat on governing bodies where the people who have fulfilled the parental governors’ roles might well be parents of children at the school, but very often they also work in the LEA or are teachers themselves. The question whether we get the wide representation on governing bodies that we desire is sometimes open to debate.

When I was a councillor in Hull, one thing that my local authority looked at was using the children’s trust model as a way of changing the governance arrangements within the city. The idea was to bring together the primary schools and possibly one or two secondary schools through the children’s trust, to try to get some of the more strategic thinking that has to be done within schools fed through that process. I supported that model, and I hope that we can build on it. Indeed, it is a model that becomes more important as we move towards the academy structure and increasing numbers of free schools.

The situation has changed in schools. At one time, head teachers saw themselves as looking after their particular parish, as it were—it was almost as if their responsibilities stopped outside the school gates and, perhaps quite reasonably, they focused on what went on within their own schools. However, that has changed, and secondary schools are much better at engaging with their feeder primary schools, and primary schools are much better at working with one another. There are initiatives that have helped that process along the way. One of those is school sports partnerships, which have brought together schools that would previously not have communicated with each other. Perhaps it is time to consider whether the current structure works and whether we should put a greater emphasis on schools’ governing bodies to get their schools either to federate or to work more collaboratively with other schools in their area, so that we can introduce strategic thinking into the system and, perhaps, a more robust way of challenging of things.

I am making only a mild criticism of governing bodies, because, as I have already said, people who serve as governors tend to be incredibly hard-working, and I would not wish to besmirch them in any way. Nevertheless, we must accept that they do not necessarily always challenge things robustly. It can be hard to challenge things. If a motivated parent becomes a parent governor, their reason for doing so is often that they want to support the school, and it is a natural conclusion that supporting the school involves supporting the head teacher in the decisions that they take.

Another criticism concerns the links between the LEA and governing bodies. LEA governors often work in the LEA or as teachers themselves, and they sometimes serve as community governors or parent governors. However, governing bodies can sometimes become a little too LEA-centric. I have sat at many governing body meetings where we considered a paper from the LEA that included a recommendation. In such cases, people around the table often conclude that, because the recommendation has come from the LEA, they should, of course, approve it. Their reasoning is, “Why would the LEA suggest it if it was anything other than in the interests of the school?” That process is sometimes reinforced by clerking services being brought in from the LEA, which further builds the link between the governing body and the LEA. In one sense, that link is important, but there needs to be a clear separation of power.

My hon. Friend the Member for South Swindon has touched very eloquently—much better than I could have done—on the roles that particular governors play. Those roles have changed in my time as a governor, and more governors seem to engage with the school. When I was a local councillor and a school governor at the same time, I always saw my role as providing a community link, but other governors were determined to get involved in the school and spend some time in it. For example, if they were the foundation link governor, they spent some time with the foundation stage teachers, or if they were the literacy governor they spent some time talking to the literacy co-ordinator. That situation has improved, but it is still open to debate whether it has improved scrutiny.

[Guy Opperman]

My hon. Friend is giving a good overview of the different assets provided by particular governors. Does he see an ongoing role for a pastoral support programme, and would that help us to go forward? It used to be in the programme, but it is not currently included.

[Andrew Percy]

That is absolutely vital. When we had a debate on disadvantaged children, I pointed out that in some ways pastoral care has been sidelined in recent years. Pastoral care is more important than ever, particularly where behaviour is concerned, and we all agree that we want to reduce the amount of exclusion.

I am straying a little from the topic, but I point out to the Minister that one of the biggest sadnesses of the changes in recent years is that classroom teachers, particularly in secondary schools, have often had their pastoral roles taken away and handed to other people in the school—albeit those people are often very capable—including learning mentors and teaching assistants. I have always believed that classroom teachers are not just educators but part-time social workers, occasionally parents and sometimes, depending on the class, just childminders. We have a multiplicity of roles as classroom teachers, and we have been losing our role in pastoral care. Hopefully, the Minister has heard my pleas on that issue.

I have identified some of the problems that I see at the moment, which I am good at, but I am not quite so good at identifying the solutions, which is why I do not hold ministerial office—that is a job for Ministers. The time has come, however, to question whether school governance arrangements work as they should, and if I had a solution, it would be, as I have said, to encourage federation.