Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Barry Sheerman and Jane Ellison

Tuesday 19th July 2016 Commons Chamber

[Jane Ellison]

I hear the point that my hon. Friend makes. That is clearly something to which further consideration will be given.

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

Any help that small businesses get from business rates reform will be very welcome in my constituency of Huddersfield, but that does not outbalance the fact that my university and my manufacturing businesses have been hard hit by Brexit. I know that the Minister is not one of the guilty Brexiters, but what will the Government do to help manufacturing industry and universities so hard hit?

[Jane Ellison]

The Chancellor has already made a number of comments about how we will deal with and address this situation, and more will clearly be said in the autumn. It is important that we recognise that, while we undoubtedly face some risks and have to look to manage them, we must also seize the opportunities we can take from the situation we are in.

To return to the point about business rates, taking 600,000 of the very smallest businesses out of business rates altogether is a good thing. It has not taken effect yet. It is important to make it clear that although that has been announced, it has yet to take effect. We all have a job to do in the spring to make sure that our local businesses get the maximum benefit.

Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Barry Sheerman and Jane Ellison

Tuesday 14th January 2014 Commons Chamber

[Jane Ellison]

NICE has issued technology appraisal guidance to the NHS on the use of newer anticoagulants—I think there were three in 2012—for the treatment of atrial fibrillation. NHS commissioners are legally required to fund treatments recommended by NICE in its technology appraisal guidance.

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

Mr Speaker, there is a crisis here. The fact is that half of those who suffer from AF—as a member of my family does—do not know they are suffering from it and are not diagnosed. If they are not diagnosed, that leads to great expense to the health service because they are very prone to having a stroke. Even when doctors know about AF, they say inappropriately, “Have an aspirin as part of your medication.” Some 25% of doctors recommend aspirin, and that is very dangerous. When will the Minister wake up? AF is a dangerous condition and it is very expensive.

Jobs and Social Security

Debate between Barry Sheerman and Jane Ellison

Wednesday 28th November 2012 Commons Chamber

[Mr Sheerman]

I thank the Secretary of State for that intervention, and I accept what he says. He knows that what I am getting at in this short contribution is that we play this game of blaming each other all the time, but the problem is international and global and we will have to sometimes forget party differences and work together on it. I want to make a couple of suggestions as to how we might do that.

Let us face it: all Governments throughout Europe, the United States and beyond have a long history of failure. Modern industrial democracies have this problem of skilling the work force. Indeed, I have never heard such castigation of our country’s further education system as that in yesterday’s annual report by the chief inspector of Ofsted, who said how poorly further education was performing in our country. All the evidence shows that further education is where young people get skills for the good life. It is where they get high skills to get good jobs to be the full citizens that I am after.

I have never heard of the chief inspector picking on one town in particular. I do not know what he has against Hastings, but he said that early years and primary schools are a failure for the children of Hastings and that they also fail when they go on to secondary school and further education. I was astonished. Thank God he was not talking about Huddersfield. It comes down to the fact that a significant percentage of people in our country have inadequate training and skills, and we need to work across parties to do something about that.

I want to share some of my experiences. One of my last reports when I chaired the Children, Schools and Families Committee looked at the problem of those not in education, employment or training. We found that intelligent programmes on the ground which represented a positive response from local authorities that understood their local communities, and which also had good local skills training and good employers, could make a significant difference to the number of people gaining skills and getting into work. There are good exemplars in this country, but some towns are more fortunate than others in retaining their manufacturing and employment base.

[Jane Ellison (Battersea) (Con)]

I rise merely to express agreement with the thrust of the hon. Gentleman’s argument on skills, and in particular to say that London is the classic case that supports it, because it has created hundreds of thousands of jobs over the past decade or so, yet large numbers of our young people have been left behind. That points to a much more deep-seated problem.

[Mr Sheerman]

That is why I spoke of our experience in the United Kingdom, which has good exemplars of significant improvement, but the best example that I found in Europe was in the Netherlands, which has a much tougher welfare policy than us. It is difficult for someone to get any welfare payment there until they are about 27. If they are not in work, they have to be in education or training, and if they are not in education or training, they do not get a welfare payment. We in this country seem to have accepted over a long period that significant numbers of young people, many of them with low skills, can be left in a shadow land—a marginal existence—on housing benefit and a little benefit for subsistence, and that they can live in this half world as half citizens for a very long time.

During one of my shadow ministerial jobs a long time ago—it was so long ago that I was a deputy to Roy Hattersley—I became something of an expert on crime and criminality. It is fascinating that if young people do not get into crime before they are 25, they do not at all; unless they bump off their partner for the usual reason later on, they do not get into criminality. The sensible policy on deterring young people from crime is to spend money on doing so early on. We can apply the same analysis of our society to unemployment. What we hate most is intergenerational worklessness, where three generations of a family have never known anyone work.