Education and Local Services

Chris Bryant Excerpts

Tuesday 27th June 2017 Commons Chamber

[Justine Greening]

That is absolutely right. It is critical that we take advantage of two opportunities. The first is the kinds of businesses and industries in my hon. Friend’s area that are creating jobs and opportunities. The second is a generation of young people who want opportunity and want a career. We should be investing in generating our home-grown talent to take advantage of those opportunities, which we all see in our local communities. Exiting the European Union provides new impetus to the focus on developing our home-grown talent.

[Chris Bryant (Rhondda) (Lab)]

The Secretary of State referred to world-class universities. We are proud of them in this country, but it is important that they are able to attract students from all around the world. Why do the Government persist with the ludicrous idea that we must cut net migration to the tens of thousands, including cutting the number of international students coming to stay in this country? They pay their own way, they improve their relationship with this country, and when they go back home they want to continue doing business with us. It is ludicrous!

[Justine Greening]

The hon. Gentleman will be delighted to know that he is entirely misinformed, because we do not have a cap on the number of international students. That will save him from having to ask that question again. We are determined to ensure that our universities sector remains open to the best and brightest talent around the world. He can scaremonger and raise fake issues all he likes, but it will not change the position. The much bigger threat to universities lies in decimating the funding going into them. That is the biggest challenge they would face if they ended up with the kind of higher education funding black hole that the Labour party would present them with.

We are shaping the curriculum for young people going into technical education into 15 technical routes, each culminating in a so-called T-level, which will become the gold standard qualification for technical excellence. That reform is matched by investment, as the Chancellor announced in the March Budget—a Budget that the CBI called

“a breakthrough Budget for skills.”

That investment would be at risk under a Labour Government because of the black hole in post-16 funding for higher education. Our new institutes of technology will also provide a path to develop excellence in higher technical skills. One problem we have had with technical education is that there has not been a ladder of steadily more challenging qualifications so that young people can better themselves.

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[Chris Bryant (Rhondda) (Lab)]

I congratulate my hon. Friends the Members for Coatbridge, Chryston and Bellshill (Hugh Gaffney) and for Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath (Lesley Laird) on magnificent speeches—far more magnificent than that of the hon. Member for Aberdeen South (Ross Thomson), but I congratulate him too in the generosity of the day. No, it was a magnificent speech, but we saw in the completely different way in which the three of them presented their cases that Parliament is at its best when it is diverse, and it is more so in this Parliament than we have ever seen before.

I truly worry about this country. We face probably the biggest challenge since the second world war, yet we have a Prime Minister who has shown herself to have a tin ear. Her authority, frankly, is in tatters, she has no mandate and she patently cannot carry the country. She is like a massive oil tanker holed beneath the water line. She cannot proceed at pace, she cannot turn around and everyone knows, in this Chamber and in the country, that she is doomed to sink. It is just a question of when.

Could there be any clearer sign of the vacuum at the heart of the Government than this Queen’s Speech? This is not a Queen’s Speech; it would barely qualify as a Queen’s intervention, it is so thin. It’s not worth the vellum it’s not written on.

We seem to have become a country that believes we can have our cake and eat it. We want Swedish levels of healthcare, but US levels of taxation to pay for it. We want cheap coffee and fruit, but we are not prepared to have migrants come to this country to serve it or pick it. We want our offices cleaned, our bedsores dressed and our grandparents cared for, but we are not prepared to pay cleaners and carers properly, nor to build homes for them to live in.

In Grenfell we saw the horror of leaving everything to the market. Cost-cutting has a human price. Every single one of us has a housing estate we feel ashamed of. Let us hope there will never be another fire like that at Grenfell, but in every sink estate and in every miserable flat with black mould growing on the walls, children grow up undernourished and unable to achieve their full potential, and people die before their time. It is not a tragedy that will ever get on the front pages of the newspapers, but it is a daily tragedy that we could all prevent. Let us hope we never again hear those words, “Health and safety gone mad.”

We simply cannot get a properly functioning modern society on the cheap. Look at the NHS: Ministers now say that it is all the fault of the public and that we expect too much. I am sorry, but all that my constituents want is a functioning local surgery where they can get an appointment. Unfortunately, the Government’s relentless assault on the NHS has meant that fewer and fewer doctors consider working as a GP in deprived areas or even in the UK at all. France spent $4,959 per head on healthcare in 2014; we spent only $3,935. The point is that we cannot have our cake and eat it. You cannot get a first-class flight if you only pay for economy. We cannot get a Scandinavian NHS if we only pay US taxes.

And let us end the biggest fib of all. We cannot get our national finances back in order by slash-and-burn economics. The Government should know that. After all, they have repeatedly failed to meet their own targets on the deficit and on debt. Deliberately attempting to get the proportion of national income down—deliberately creating a smaller state—is a wrong-headed ideological chimera. It leads to false economies, it has a terrible human cost and it will never get our house back in order.