Skills and Post-16 Education Bill [Lords]

Ben Bradley Excerpts

Report stage
Monday 21st February 2022 Commons Chamber

[Ben Bradley (Mansfield) (Con)]

I am grateful for the chance to sneak in during the last few minutes of this debate. It is always right that Mansfield should have the last word on such subjects, so I will take full advantage.

I warmly welcome this Bill, and it was a privilege to sit on the Committee with the Under-Secretary of State for Education, my hon. Friend the Member for Brentwood and Ongar (Alex Burghart), and to feel his passion and understanding of the subject, which is hugely important, as my hon. Friend the Member for Loughborough (Jane Hunt) just said, for the levelling-up agenda.

I was pleased to see skills and education investment at the heart of last week’s White Paper, because we need a long-term change in communities such as mine in Mansfield to make sure that people have better life chances. We are already seeing the benefits of that agenda. My hon. Friend pointed to examples in Loughborough, and I can point to further examples in Mansfield and North Notts.

Last year, the towns fund funded what we call the knowledge exchange of business innovation and growth. That will support local businesses in north Notts so that they can do things differently, automate, look to the future, grow and employ more people. There was also funding for robotics and automation in neighbouring Ashfield and similar funding for aviation and engineering in Newark. North Nottinghamshire has benefited greatly from £140 million-odd of investment through the towns fund, and a lot of it is going to skills and education, for which I am grateful.

I read in a briefing earlier this week that further education and technical skills contribute £26 billion to the economy. I have no idea how that was worked out, but it sounds like a very big number. Its importance should therefore be clear to all of us. Education is not just about getting a university degree and swanning off to work in whatever sector. I hear so often from employers that they take on first-class graduates with excellent qualifications on paper who simply are not equipped for the workplace. Other routes have to be built with employers, so that workers suit sectors such as engineering, where practical work experience and technical skills are so important. People cannot learn it all in a classroom, and this Bill helps us to deliver for the long term, with the kind of change that will build opportunities for people in constituencies like mine.

I welcome the lifetime skills guarantee and the finance that comes with it. In a post-covid era, more and more adults are finding that the sectors in which they work and the things for which they are qualified simply are not viable anymore. If we are to rebuild, grow and allow such people to get back into rewarding work in sectors that are growing—there are plenty of them—we must support them to retrain with the finance they need, and it needs to be flexible.

If I could make one plug, it would, as always, be for West Notts College and Nottingham Trent University—I could bang on about them forever. Edward Peck, the vice-chancellor of NTU, has fantastic ideas about how we could pilot the lifelong learning loan, and how we could ensure it is flexible by allowing people to study units at individual organisations and transfer them around the country over their adult life, so that they continue to build their qualification and take it with them. It is important that it works flexibly, and I would love to have that conversation with any of my wonderful hon. and right hon. Friends on the Front Bench. The skills Minister is coming to talk to me and NTU tomorrow, for which I am grateful.

Partnerships with employers and universities are key to providing long-term opportunities for people in my constituency, young and old, who will benefit from the Bill long into the future. That is why I am delighted to support it today.

Question put and agreed to.

Bill accordingly read the Third time and passed, with amendments.

[Sir William Cash (Stone) (Con)]

On a point of order, Madam Deputy Speaker. This afternoon, my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Defence made an important and statesmanlike statement on Ukraine. This evening, Mr Putin has recognised the two separatist regions in Ukraine as independent states, with dangerous parallels to Germany’s recognition of the Sudetenland in 1938. In these circumstances, do you accept that it would be appropriate to have a further statement, as soon as possible, on the new Ukrainian situation? The Defence Secretary himself stated today that he would update us as necessary, and this may well be the reason for making such a statement tomorrow or as soon as possible.