Ceramics Industry

Debate between Anna Soubry and Tristram Hunt

Tuesday 8th March 2016 Westminster Hall

[Tristram Hunt]

My hon. Friend, who has been a brilliant campaigner for the brick business over many years in our part of the world, is exactly right: we would be shooting ourselves in the foot, in terms of industrial policy, if the advances that we want to make in the steel industry undermine the ceramics industry. They are both energy-intensive sectors, so they share similar challenges relating to energy costs.

We would like to hear that the Minister is fighting to ensure that heavy clay producers are also awarded carbon leakage status. We welcome the ceramic valley enterprise zone, but without support on the EU emissions trading scheme, even state-of-the-art facilities will be punished for their carbon costs. We serve neither British industry nor the global environment if we rack up industrial energy prices, export jobs from Britain and import carbon emissions.

It is very important that consumers know where products are made. The outsourcing of production is nothing new in the ceramics business—indeed, during busy periods, Josiah Wedgwood himself sometimes asked other manufacturers to make up blanks for him—but in an age of brand value, the back stamp remains all-important. In Stoke-on-Trent, we are proud to house the turnover club, whose members flip the crockery in restaurants and even dinner parties to find out where it was made.

[The Minister for Small Business, Industry and Enterprise (Anna Soubry)]

Dinner parties? Good heavens!

[Tristram Hunt]

Not while the food is on it, Minister. [Interruption.] Well, sometimes.

For a long time, manufacturers have made products abroad and backstamped, “Made in England”. The rules are clear: the country of origin is where the blank is fired. In an age of global trade, it is perfectly right that products are made in China, Thailand or Indonesia, but consumers also have a right to know whether their purchases are subsidising poor environmental standards and weak labour laws. For an embarrassingly long time, the free market fundamentalists at the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills have opposed the European Union’s compulsory country of origin proposals. Will the Minister tell us whether that is still the case today?

As I am talking about Europe—I subject I know you care passionately about, Mr Hollobone—this is a good moment to reflect on the merits of being inside the European single market for the ceramics industry. It is not only that Stoke-on-Trent and Staffordshire have been helped by £130 million of EU funds and that Europe is a crucial export market; it is thanks to being part of the European Union that our ceramics industry has benefited from the anti-dumping tariffs of between 13% and 36% that are placed on Chinese kitchenware and tableware. Those tariffs have played an important role in the pottery industry’s regeneration. Will the Minister confirm that we will support their extension in 2018, that being part of Europe has helped us—although, I hate to say it, the Government have always opposed those measures—and that if we were outside Europe, tariffs would be placed on British ceramics manufacturers exporting to the single market?

I might be guilty of over-concentrating on the history of the ceramics industry—[Interruption.] Never! Our heritage is part of our brand and our pride. We have to build the careers, apprenticeships and markets of the future. I support the Government’s apprenticeship levy, and I hope that Staffordshire University will forge new partnerships with other higher education institutions to increase the number of designers and manufacturers. I hope to see new factories in the enterprise zone, and I fully back the Materials Processing Institute’s plans for a materials catapult centre to benefit research and development in the ceramics industry. Will the Minister ensure that the materials catapult is given a supportive hearing by her Department?

This week we heard that the Government will centralise all school expenditure as part of the funding review. As a Stoke-on-Trent MP, it drives me mad to see schoolchildren eating off trays, rather than plates, as if they are being set up for life either in prison or as airline passengers. Education Ministers love to micro-manage, so will we see them urging schools to buy and use ceramic plates for their pupils?

New jobs, new orders, new businesses being started, and even another series of “The Great Pottery Throw Down” being commissioned—these are exciting times. Thanks to automation and globalisation, we will not return to the tens of thousands employed in the ceramics and pottery industries in previous decades, but we can build a new high-wage, high-skills ceramics industry of the future, trading on Stoke-on-Trent’s heroic past while taking products and processes into the future. I very much hope that we may take from the debate the Government’s support in that endeavour.

--- Later in debate ---

[Anna Soubry]

I do not normally intervene, but it is really important that we do not mislead. I certainly have never had any tableware of any origin in the Department. If I do eat there, it is a takeaway sandwich in plastic wrapping or a plastic box.

[Tristram Hunt]

That is the problem.

[Anna Soubry]

I accept that is wrong, but I will not have misleading information.

National Planning Policy Framework

Debate between Anna Soubry and Tristram Hunt

Thursday 26th April 2012 Commons Chamber

[Tristram Hunt]

I am very grateful for the intervention, which highlights exactly what we warned of: such changes need to be managed properly. In that context, what we hoped for from the Government was a considered and rational strategy for planning reforms to safeguard our great towns, cities and countryside, while ensuring economic growth. Instead, what we received was a botched draft planning policy framework, complete with ugly denunciations of such great English institutions as the National Trust and the Campaign to Protect Rural England, and of anyone else who dared to question the Government’s damaging proposals. We expected more from the Minister. Instead, as Fiona Reynolds, the director general of the National Trust, put it, the Government’s statements were “arrogant”. She said:

“The language exposed some of the Government’s failure to connect with how people feel.”

We now have the finished document, and I am happy to support some of the major U-turns the Government have adopted, such as the explicit recognition of the value of the countryside as a whole; the strengthened protection for the green belt; and the more balanced, if still ambiguous, definition of “sustainable development”. Those are all to the good, but there are some worrying omissions.

Part of the great urban regeneration story of the past 10 years, under Labour Governments, has been a specific programme of encouraging brownfield development. Last year, some 76% of new dwellings were built on brownfield sites, which is an increase on the 55% in 1989. The figure for Stoke-on-Trent was 90% and the one for Liverpool was 91%. It is therefore worrying that the final draft of the NPPF talks only of “encouraging” the effective use of brownfield land, rather than, as Labour did, “prioritising” it. That does not amount to a robust “brownfield first” policy and is a weakening of the guidance in previous regulation. Hon. Members who are concerned about their towns and city centres would do well to reflect on that: an encouragement is not an obligation. As a result, and with no explicit brownfield development targets, there will be serious scope for legal battle involving developers, who will appeal to sections of the NPPF that emphasise economic viability and deliverability over sustainable brownfield development. That is all the more frustrating given that there are almost 62,000 hectares of brownfield or previously developed land in England ready for building on.

I am glad that the Government have taken on board the Labour party’s criticisms of the draft framework in relation to the sequential test on all large retail development. I make a general point about policy development by this Government when I say that we are here to help: if they listen to us at an earlier stage, they can get rid of some of these complexities. I met my local planning officers at Stoke-on-Trent city council last week, and they were adamant that we would not see the kind of urban regeneration we want in Hanley without a proper system of sequential testing.

[Anna Soubry (Broxtowe) (Con)]

Given what the hon. Gentleman has said, will he join me in urging Labour councillors in Broxtowe not to accept a housing target that would result in 4,000 houses being built on green-belt land?

[Tristram Hunt]

I am very grateful for the intervention, as I am an adamant defender of the green belt; almost like an Israeli settler. I believe that we should not take any parts of it.

To complete the point I was making before the intervention, in view of the number of high street shops that are unoccupied, we want to see a much greater focus on the regeneration of our high streets.

All of this debate points to a broader truth: the Government are underwritten by an ideological aversion to state regulation. Because of the monstrous failure of their economic policy, sadly revealed this week with a double-dip recession made in Downing street and £150 billion of extra borrowing, they have been thrashing round for excuses for economic decline. The Treasury stumbled on the idea that planning was stopping growth, but we know that good planning is no impediment to growth. Poor planning and a lack of planning as in Ireland and Spain have not resulted in the kind of economic growth that we would like. The Government would be better advised to devise a decent strategy for sustainable economic growth, rather than blame the planning system.

Secondly, the hostility towards proper regulation has turned a planning document into a lawyers’ charter. For all the clever wheeze of cutting down more than 1,000 pages of guidance, the end result might be far more paperwork than the Minister imagines, thanks to law suits, legal cases and casework. Indeed, we know that a survey of town planners revealed that lawyers are expecting much more work from the framework than they have had previously.

Finally, I welcome the explicit recognition given by the planning policy framework that the historic environment makes a positive contribution to society, the economy, our culture and our environment, but where does the Budget’s plans to slap VAT on approved alterations to listed buildings fit with that? May we please have some joined-up government? If we believe in the historic environment, may we not have this ridiculous addition to the Budget?