Business of the House

Catherine McKinnell Excerpts

Thursday 18th March 2021 Commons Chamber

[Mr Rees-Mogg]

My hon. Friend raises a key question. The strategic review has taken place, but the fire safety work has been a real achievement of the existing Palace authorities. I have some fantastic figures for the House about what has been done to ensure that the risk to life is minimised and the protection of the building is maximised: 7,112 automatic fire detection devices have been put in; 5,949 emergency lights have been put in—one of them outside the Chief Whip’s office, so when he comes out and you see a halo, that is because of our fire safety lights; 3,329 voice alarm sounders; 1,869 new fire safety signs; 1,364 locations for fire-stopping compartmentation; 4,126 sprinkler heads in the basement of the Palace and, amazingly, eight miles of pipe for a new sprinkler system in the basement. I am really reassured by this that the safety of this Palace is so much greater even before R and R has started. When R and R is happening, this is crucial because the highest risk of fire is very often when builders are renovating premises.

[Catherine McKinnell (Newcastle upon Tyne North) (Lab) [V]]

Despite the heroic efforts of schools and their staff, children and young people have had to adapt to enormous change and challenge over the last year, often chopping and changing circumstances with little notice or preparation, and I truly believe that we underestimate the impact on their short and long-term mental wellbeing at our peril. Today’s National Audit Office report on the Department for Education’s covid response reads like a litany of failure, with no plan for our children or their education in place until June. The Government now have plans for pupils to get up to speed with their studies, but can I urge the Government to show more ambition in stemming the damage this last year may have caused to our children’s wellbeing? Given that we know the effect of wellbeing on performance at school, the two must go hand in hand. Can we therefore have a debate in Government time on how we make children’s wellbeing a fundamental part of the recovery?

[Mr Rees-Mogg]

The Government’s record on schooling is actually extremely good. There is a £1.7 billion covid catch-up fund for enhanced support and targeted tutoring, and Sir Kevan Collins has been appointed the education recovery commissioner to oversee our long-term plans to ensure pupils can make up any lost learning over the course of this Parliament. Schools have been a priority during the whole of the pandemic to keep them open as much as possible, because the Government recognise the importance of education. Getting back to normal and helping pupils get back to normal—providing additional funding and distributing many hundreds of thousands of computers to schoolchildren, plus the 57 million lateral flow test kits that have been delivered to schools and colleges as part of ensuring schools are really safe now—has been fundamentally important.