Budget Resolutions

Barry Sheerman Excerpts

1st reading: House of Commons
Tuesday 14th March 2017 Commons Chamber

[Justine Greening]

My right hon. Friend is absolutely right. I hope she will welcome the element of the Budget that saw £5 million invested in returnships, specifically looking at how we can help women who have been out of the workplace—often starting and having a family—to go back into it and rebuild their careers. I will come on to that later in my speech.

[Mr Barry Sheerman (Huddersfield) (Lab/Co-op)]

I believe absolutely that wealth creation is important to give us the resources we need to provide a good education, but is the Secretary of State aware that so many schools have seen cutbacks? We in Huddersfield are the 64th worst-hit area out of 650. We do not feel the affluence she is talking about.

[Justine Greening]

We have record investment coming into our schools now.

To secure and build a strong economy, we need sustained investment in human capital—the skills, knowledge and technical excellence that drive productivity and growth. It is people who will lift our country, and we are investing in people. We need to do that now more than ever, because we know there is a productivity gap between the UK and other advanced economies, and we know that part of that gap is caused by skills shortages.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Barry Sheerman (Huddersfield) (Lab/Co-op)]

I have heard a few Budgets in my time. The first was delivered by Sir Geoffrey Howe, who was a thoroughly decent man. Denis Healey unkindly said that Sir Geoffrey had been round the country stirring up apathy, but he was a decent man and I remember his Budget.

This Budget is deeply, deeply disappointing. In the context of the miserable votes last night, with this country heading headlong into a hard Brexit, I expected an imaginative Budget that prepares the country for what Harold Macmillan called, “Events, dear boy, events.” Well, we have already seen one such event from the First Minister of Scotland, and there will be many more from left field and right field. This country is going to be rocked by events over the coming years, and this Budget does not help anyone—nationally or regionally.

I represent Huddersfield, which is almost the average town in Britain, and it is in a dreadful state. They are going to close the accident and emergency services at our local hospital, and they are going to close the whole hospital. There is chaos across our country, not just in Huddersfield. Two thirds of the health services in our country are in dreadful trouble.

Most of the local authorities I know, especially the ones with indecent levels of deprivation and poverty—the ones in the average, real parts of our urban communities in Britain, not the ones in the leafy suburbs that some Conservative Members represent—are in deep trouble and are unable to bear the cost of social care and health. I was expecting something imaginative from the Budget, and we did not get it.

We also got very little indeed on education. Some earlier speakers asked where we could get alternative funding. The hon. Member for Gainsborough (Sir Edward Leigh) and I used to sit together on the Liaison Committee, and I used to call him, very unkindly, a member of the “barmy army,” but he actually thinks a lot. He has always been quite provocative, and he always has something to say. The fact of the matter is that we need imagination and passion to solve our country’s problems, but I heard little passion from the Government Front Bench today. I feel passion because I believe that every little child in this country has a spark of potential. If we, as politicians, cannot create a system that liberates that spark, we are not doing our job.

As Sir Michael Wilshaw said, the disaster of our education system is that we find bright little kids in our primary schools and we lose them after the age of 11. What sort of country and what sort of school system is that? All parties have underachieved, but we have seen some real change. There are signs of improvement, and I shall briefly give the test that most primary school teachers use to assess a young person’s work. They use “two stars and a wish,” and these are my two stars. First, I give a star for the good fundamental policy approach to skills in this Budget. We have been languishing on skills policy for so long, but there is now some imagination there. Who would have thought it? They used to say that John Prescott was a crazy man of the left who wanted a levy for training. Conservative Members used to say that was an absolutely disgraceful left-wing horror. Well, we now have an apprenticeship levy, as we should. It comes in in April and I hope it will succeed.

The Government actually went about policy making in a sensible way. They took evidence and consulted. They put Lord Sainsbury in charge, along with the former Minister the hon. Member for Grantham and Stamford (Nick Boles), who actually got to know something about skills and training. He has gone now, but some of us will miss him, because he listened. He introduced Lord Sainsbury to the skills commission that I chair, and I gave evidence to them both about what I wanted to see in skills policy. Some of that stuff is in the policy that came through in the Budget. I welcome such evidence-based policy. When I was Chair of the Education Committee, we used to applaud evidence-based policies, along with policies that seemed to work in countries like ours. So, there is something in the Budget in terms of skills, Alison Wolf’s recommendations to the Select Committee, and the work done by the Sainsbury review to talk to businesses, employers and practitioners on a cross-party basis. That is the way to make policy.

[Sir Edward Leigh]

The hon. Gentleman is speaking with great passion and is doing his best to provide some solutions. May I give him another one? Perhaps we should end the fiction that national insurance contributions can pay for all social care. We should merge national insurance and taxation, simplify things, and try to raise more money that way.

[Mr Sheerman]

I have already complimented the hon. Gentleman on being a good, out-of-the-box thinker, and that is another interesting suggestion to debate.

My second star is for productivity. Actually, it is only half a star, because we cannot really check. The Budget includes additional high-value investment, the national productivity investment fund and world-class infrastructure investment. I like most of that, except I am one of those quirky people who still cannot believe in High Speed 2 and in the fact that all that national treasure is being put into a railway that will be out of date by the time it opens in 2033. I think the money should be spent on the national health service, but I know I am in a minority on that.

The Budget also includes £300 million for the future development of the UK’s research talent and to attract talent from the research powerhouses of China, Brazil and Mexico. I like all that—it is all quite good stuff, so it gets half a star. All the stuff about disruptive technology investment to transform the UK economy, electric vehicles, artificial intelligence and robots is good stuff, but there has not been enough private sector research and development for a number of years. Co-operation between business and universities has not been good enough. We will never get the levels of productivity we want until we have the right kind relationships.

Finally, I come to my wish: for goodness’ sake, where is the evidence that grammar schools and free schools do anything to find the spark in children that we want to release? There is no evidence and no research. Not one reputable research institute or organisation in this country believes that a return to selective education will help anyone—quite the reverse. Look at all the research and the experience in other countries. Just look at Kent, for God’s sake! It is the most selective place in the country and it has the worst performance across all schools in the country. That is selective education. It has no research base and no experience base, and there is no global comparison of which we can say, “Isn’t it wonderful?” They do not have it in Denmark, Sweden or Finland. I doubt it is even the latest fashion in Shanghai.

I like policy that is based on good research and good evaluation, and yes, sometimes we should work across the party divide—that is the way to make policy. This Budget has not delivered it. We want that spark to be found and promoted—we want the country to be rich and successful in the challenging disaster of Brexit—but it is not in this Budget.