Oral Answers to Questions

Barry Sheerman Excerpts

Tuesday 11th September 2018 Commons Chamber

[Mr Speaker]

For the edification of those observing our proceedings, I can advise that the hon. Member for Huddersfield (Mr Sheerman) has just been chuntering at me that his grandmother had a link with the Mayflower, about which I think we are to be enlightened.

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

Some Members may think that I was on the Mayflower, although as a young man I did emigrate to the United States. Some of my ancestors, the Sheermans, could have been on the Mayflower—[Interruption.] Just hold it for a moment. This is the 400-year anniversary. Is it not time that we celebrated migration and the talent, the genius, the innovation and the ideas that we in this country and America get from migration? Should we not use this quadricentenary to celebrate migration across the world?

[Robert Jenrick]

The hon. Gentleman is testing my knowledge of the pilgrim fathers, but of course they were inspired by William Bradford, who came from Yorkshire, I believe. He was the one who said that from small things great things can emerge, and that it takes just one small candle to light a thousand, which was the way that the whole pilgrim fathers’ enterprise was summed up. So I want to see the commemorations take place in Yorkshire, as well as in Plymouth and the rest of the country.

Oral Answers to Questions

Barry Sheerman Excerpts

Tuesday 3rd July 2018 Commons Chamber

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

On his way to Chequers, will the Chancellor give a thought to health trusts such as Calderdale and Huddersfield NHS Foundation Trust? It still cannot deliver the healthcare that my constituents and people in the rest of west Yorkshire want because of the PFI hanging around their necks. Will he do something about PFIs?

[Mr Philip Hammond]

I am afraid that I have to remind the hon. Gentleman that 86% of all PFI contracts currently in place in the NHS, draining money out of NHS trusts, were put in place by the previous Labour Government.

Oral Answers to Questions

Barry Sheerman Excerpts

Tuesday 22nd May 2018 Commons Chamber

[Mr Hammond]

The national productivity investment fund is investing in all those areas. We have the biggest rail investment programme since Victorian times and the biggest road building programme since the 1970s, and we are investing in superfast broadband, which is critical to this country’s future. As my hon. Friend will know, in his area we are investing in the A21, and we are working with Network Rail on exploring options for connecting HS1 services to Hastings via Ashford International.

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

Surely the Chancellor knows that the thing holding back most businesses—small, medium-sized and large—is the lack of good skilled people to work for them. When is he going to give the Secretary of State for Education a good shaking and make him do something about the apprenticeship levy, apprenticeship schemes and the higher education graduate apprenticeship scheme?

[Mr Hammond]

The hon. Gentleman is right that skills are a critical factor for business in an economy with such high levels of employment and low levels of unemployment as we have achieved. We are investing in apprenticeships with the new apprenticeship levy, providing funding for more and better apprenticeships; we are investing in T-levels, improving substantially the level of technical training for 16 to 19-year-olds; and we are reviewing the operation of tertiary education funding.

Oral Answers to Questions

Barry Sheerman Excerpts

Tuesday 17th April 2018 Commons Chamber

[Robert Jenrick]

I quite agree: Stoke-on-Trent is exactly the kind of city that we designed the Transforming Cities fund to benefit. From the meeting we had, I know that my hon. Friend sees opportunity in Stoke—in Stoke station, at junction 15 on the M6 and in the proposal for a ceramics park. With the dynamic Conservative leadership in Stoke at the moment, we look forward to receiving that application.

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

I do not often get angry in the Chamber, but can I ask the Minister to stop spending his time in Maidenhead and Runnymede and come to the real towns and cities of this country like Huddersfield, where we can see the deterioration of infrastructure everywhere we look? That is because this Government have cut and cut local authority spending—that is the truth. He should get out more and see what this country is really like.

[Robert Jenrick]

The independent Infrastructure and Projects Authority has said that by the end of this Parliament, central Government funding for infrastructure will be greater in the north than in the south. The hon. Gentleman is speaking to the wrong Minister if he thinks that we do not care about the north. This son of a Liverpudlian and a Mancunian, born in Wolverhampton and representing North Nottinghamshire, needs no lessons from him.

[Mr Speaker]

I accept that Huddersfield is a most admirable place. My grandma lived there all her life, as I have told the hon. Member for Huddersfield (Mr Sheerman) before. Splendid place, splendid woman.

[Mr Sheerman]

And a good football team!

[Mr Speaker]

Indeed, that too.

Oral Answers to Questions

Barry Sheerman Excerpts

Tuesday 27th February 2018 Commons Chamber

[Mel Stride]

My hon. Friend raises a critical point about the importance of getting the debt down to make sure that future generations do not carry the burden of it. That is why we have reduced the deficit by three quarters and why we are going to hit our reduction in the level of debt as a percentage of GDP two years early, in 2020-21.

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

rose—

[Mr Speaker]

The hon. Member for Huddersfield (Mr Sheerman) is a really eager young pup, and at this early point in his parliamentary career, I think we ought to hear the fella.

[Mr Sheerman]

Mr Speaker, you will know that I am not the most radical Member on the Labour Benches, but I want to tell the Minister that if the Government had been successfully reducing their budget, my constituents in Yorkshire could forgive her. The fact of the matter is that we have had the money for the electrification of the trans-Pennine railway stolen from us, and the Chancellor refuses to give it back. When will he make amends?

[Mel Stride]

As the hon. Gentleman will know, whether he is young or a puppy or whatever he may be, we are awaiting the business case for the trans-Pennine project, and when we receive it, we will look at it most closely.

Business of the House

Barry Sheerman Excerpts

Thursday 11th January 2018 Commons Chamber

[Paul Maynard]

I hear what the hon. Gentleman has to say and understand his concern. We are increasing the number of Jobcentre Plus staff in Scotland and throughout the country to provide more support to those who need it most. We are merging a number of smaller offices into bigger sites as leases come to an end. We have consulted the public in areas where people will have to travel more than 3 miles or for more than 20 minutes. If the hon. Gentleman still has concerns about his example in Glasgow, I urge him to secure an Adjournment debate so that he can hear more detailed answers as to the circumstances in Maryhill.

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

Does the hon. Gentleman agree that the past seven years have seen excessive increases in air and marine pollution, and in the pollution of the countryside? Is it not about time that we had a debate so that we can really scrutinise the Government’s record on environmental protection?

[Paul Maynard]

It is a pleasure to encounter the hon. Gentleman again; I can only assume from how often I see him in the Chamber that he is doughty attendee at all Question Times, and he raises some important issues. He will be aware that our 25-year environment plan is forthcoming, and that is the obvious vehicle by which to ensure that we address many of the concerns he rightly raises.

Budget Resolutions

Barry Sheerman Excerpts

Thursday 23rd November 2017 Commons Chamber

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

The Secretary of State is going on, yet again, about investment in the south of England, but he has not mentioned Yorkshire or the north of England. Will we, for example, get the electrification of the trans-Pennine rail system? We have real opportunities to grow the population and wealth in the north of this country, but the Government do not hear that message.

[Sajid Javid]

The hon. Gentleman will know, if he has had an opportunity to study the Budget closely, that the Chancellor referred to the housing deals that we are working on in Greater Manchester, Leeds and the west midlands. The hon. Gentleman mentioned the trans-Pennine railway, and he will know that the Chancellor offered an additional £300 million yesterday for the trans-Pennine railway. I am sure the hon. Gentleman will welcome that.

--- Later in debate ---

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

It might surprise some people on the Government Benches in particular to hear that I agree with several of the major themes of the speech made by the right hon. Member for Sevenoaks (Sir Michael Fallon). We have worked together on manufacturing and other matters and would agree on the need for greater expenditure on our defence sector. As a Labour and Co-operative Member of Parliament, I was surprised at his conversion to passionate advocacy of employee share ownership—I perhaps did not know about his championship of the idea. There are other matters on which we do not agree.

This is my 43rd Budget so, if I am a little cynical and pessimistic, it is because I have sat through 43 Budgets since I came to the House in 1979. Some have been amazingly bold, ambitious and brave. I remember sitting on the Government Benches during what was not a Labour party-induced economic meltdown but a banker-induced global economic meltdown, when brave men such as Alistair Darling stood at the Dispatch Box and made the right decisions about getting our country through. It is sometimes very important to set the record straight.

All Budgets are usually compared to a magician’s performance. We all know what a magician is like—they take one’s eye off the main business with nice sparkly things and rabbits coming out of hats. My experience is that we can never judge a Budget until the papers hit the doormat on a Sunday morning. That is when we get a relatively mature view of what is happening. Let me give an example. We should watch a Chancellor who switches from percentages to pounds, to billions. Yesterday, I noticed that the Chancellor of the Exchequer suddenly said that there would be £1.6 billion for the national health service, but this morning I had the House of Commons Library check what that was. It is 1.2% of the overall NHS budget. So, £1.6 billion sounds like a lot of money; 1.2% does not.

We must judge the Budget cautiously. It is the most depressing Budget that I have ever heard, and not just because of the growth figures or the dire situation that so many people in our country are still in, but because the shadow of Brexit looms over everything the Chancellor said yesterday. It could not be a Budget of passion, imagination, new ideas and real change, because he was hemmed in not only by those in the Cabinet who would not give him an inch if he made any slight mistake, but by the passionate Brexiteer majority behind him, which will not let anyone question this absolutely disgraceful decision to take ourselves out of the European Union. Not everyone on my Front Bench agrees with me, but I must confess that I will fight to the very end of the Brexit process to make sure that we stop it if we possibly can.

I want to deal with four points. First, let us start with productivity and growth. Sometimes, I hear the word productivity bandied around, and not many people know that the definition of productivity is the measure of the efficiency of a person, machine or factory system in converting stuff into useful outputs. We ain’t very good at it. Under all parties, of all Governments, we have not quite managed to become as productive as we should be.

The right hon. Member for Sevenoaks referred to managerialism in his closing remarks. That is different from competent management, and what this country needs more than anything else, in the private and public sectors—running our hospitals, our universities and our private sector businesses—is first-class management. Our universities and colleges are producing too many people with soft social science degrees and arts degrees and not enough managers who know how to run this country, run our industries and create wealth. There is very little in this Budget about encouraging managers. There are some nice things about science and maths, and I do not decry them, but we need good managers and more of them.

[Emma Hardy]

My hon. Friend mentions that we need skills for managers, but he will find that, ever since the right hon. Member for Surrey Heath (Michael Gove) was Education Secretary, this Government have got rid of the development of those soft skills—teamwork, leadership and oral communication—because of his ideological focus on fact retention.

[Mr Sheerman]

My hon. Friend makes a very good point.

I want to move on to skills. We can talk about higher education. When I was Chairman of the Select Committee some people said it was disgraceful that we were going to aim to have 50% of people in our country going to university, but I was very much in favour of that move. I came into politics to give every child in this country the maximum opportunity to develop their potential to the full. Often, Members of Parliament like me, with a very successful university in their town—I am very keen on my university, which got the global award for teaching recently and is a gold standard for teaching whereas my alma mater, the London School of Economics, got bronze—find that those who train people for local businesses are the further education colleges. The local FE sector is the Cinderella of our education system.

[Dr David Drew (Stroud) (Lab/Co-op)]

Like my hon. Friend, I go back rather a long way. One of the problems now is the lack of security for those who are doing the teaching, both in higher and further education. Most of my friends are on short-term contracts and cannot invest in their future, let alone the future of the people they are teaching. Surely that is the wrong way to do things. Does he agree?

[Mr Sheerman]

My old friend, and hon. Friend, is absolutely right. The percentage of impermanent and short-term contracts in colleges and universities is not good and does not bode well for a happy team delivering high-quality output.

FE colleges are vital if we are to produce the people who work in the sectors in which we must improve our productivity. There is very little sign that that is being taken seriously. My local college is brand-new, with a fine new building—an extraordinarily good building—because it invested. Why should kids going to FE college not have the nice environment that university students have? All those colleges that invested in new buildings and high-class facilities are now in deep financial trouble. They are struggling.

We must also take into account the intransigence of the Department for Education on the question of GCSEs in English and maths. There should be a practical qualification as well as an academic one, and I and many others have called for this for many months and years. At the moment, most FE colleges are warehousing tens of thousands of young people who cannot get on with their lives or start an apprenticeship because they do not have a GCSE in English and maths.

We know that some very good reforms have come out of the Sainsbury recommendations. They were a good piece of policy in many ways. The new skills levy and apprenticeship levy are excellent policies, based on getting someone who knows about that stuff to take evidence. I gave evidence. However, in the Budget the Government have not considered one of the ramifications of the policy, which is the 62% drop in the number of young people starting an apprenticeship this year. That is appalling news for the income streams of further education colleges. According to the regulators—we had the commissioner in the House of Commons only this week—many of the colleges are experiencing real problems with their financial arrangements. My own college, Kirklees College, and many others are struggling, and this Budget does nothing to help them.

My next point is on housing. I believe that everyone in this country should have the chance of a decent home, but many people cannot afford one. Let us reflect on the history of housing crises over the years. The Victorians could see the problem and, as the railways came, they established a programme for garden suburbs. After the first world war, Lloyd George declared that we needed “homes fit for heroes”, and the Liberal Government encouraged the building of council houses. What a wonderful initiative that was! Between the wars, the new towns started to be built, and after the war we had the prefabs. In every housing crisis, there has been a resolute determination to have a policy to fix it, but the policy announced in yesterday’s Budget is neither bold nor imaginative, and it will not fix the problem. As the Chancellor was making his remarks yesterday, I could see behind him rows of people who jump up and down in their constituencies and tell their constituency associations and their local electorate, “There will be no houses near you. You can have the green views and the rolling hills. No one will move in next door to you.” The nimbys rule in the Conservative party, but they should stop being so powerful.

I want to finish by mentioning the north-south divide. There was little in the Budget about the north of England, and there was precious little about Yorkshire. When I asked the Secretary of State whether the Budget would give us the money to electrify the Pennine rail link, he would not answer, because the money is not in there; we have not got it. This country has greater gaps between its regions than any other OECD country. If only the Chancellor had grasped the real chance he had in the Budget to invest in the northern regions, he could have given us great transportation and great communications. He could have invested in the north, rather than investing in London and the south all the time. We will fight this Budget. We will fight it for Yorkshire and for working people, and we will change it when there is a Labour Government.

[Several hon. Members rose—]

Oral Answers to Questions

Barry Sheerman Excerpts

Tuesday 24th October 2017 Commons Chamber

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

If the ministerial team are to deliver anything for the London Finance Commission, will the Minister at least talk to the commission about the difficulty, with Brexit coming, of recruiting anyone to come to live and work in London? The search for talent is very difficult indeed. No one wants to work in this financial capital because of Brexit—what is he going to do about it?

[Stephen Barclay]

The hon. Gentleman needs to question whether Labour Members are fully signed up to the recommendations of the London Finance Commission. For example, many of his colleagues on the Opposition Benches may not support the retaining of almost half of all stamp duty across England.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Hammond]

Yes, British business has made it clear that it wants the earliest possible certainty about the implementation of interim arrangements. It has also made it very clear that it does not want any Marxist mayhem.

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

rose—

[Scott Mann (North Cornwall) (Con)]

rose—

[Mr Sheerman]

May I make a plea to the Chancellor? A teacher has visited me in the House today, whose school has run out of money for photocopying and for books in the Library. If the Chancellor wants to do something about productivity, he should invest in schools and colleges now.

[Elizabeth Truss]

The hon. Gentleman seems to have missed the announcement just before the summer that we are putting £1.3 billion more into the frontline, not by taking in more taxes, but by using the money we have across government better.

Oral Answers to Questions

Barry Sheerman Excerpts

Tuesday 18th July 2017 Commons Chamber

[Stephen Barclay]

I very much agree with my hon. Friend. In fact, there are 55,000 fewer young people unemployed than there were a year ago, thanks in large part to the investment that this Government are putting into apprenticeships.

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

Is the Minister aware that if we are going to do anything about skills or productivity in our country and our communities, we have got to look to local further education colleges? Will he support, with money, resources and leadership, the introduction of a practical maths course to help young people who are waiting in colleges up and down the country, struggling to get apprenticeships? Will he talk to the Education Secretary about doing that, to get these young people on their way?

[Stephen Barclay]

The hon. Gentleman will welcome the Government’s record investment of £500 million in T-levels, to tackle exactly the issue that he has raised in technical education. The Government’s commitment can also be seen in apprenticeships. Whereas under the last Labour Government there were just 280,000 apprenticeship starts, there were more than half a million last year under this Government.

Oral Answers to Questions

Barry Sheerman Excerpts

Tuesday 18th April 2017 Commons Chamber

[Mr Hammond]

The Government’s clear intention is to incentivise investment in fibre broadband networks. The Department for Communities and Local Government will shortly publish a consultation on the implementation of this relief, which will set out more detail on how new fibre will be defined, and we look forward to the responses to that consultation.

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

Why does the Chancellor not shake up some of his colleagues, and start investing in the digital infrastructure in the north of England, in Yorkshire in particular? Will he also look at other infrastructure, such as railways? When are we going to get the electrification of the TransPennine Express route?

[Mr Hammond]

At autumn statement, we announced £23 billion of additional investment in our infrastructure, and key priority areas such as research and development, specifically designed to address the UK’s productivity problem. This investment has to be spread across the whole of the UK economy to make sure that we deliver improved productivity and improved economic growth across the economy as a whole. Such investment is going in: public capital investment will be at a higher level in this Parliament following the announcement of this decision than it was before the financial crisis.