Further Education

David Lammy Excerpts

Wednesday 18th November 2015 Commons Chamber

[Mr David Lammy (Tottenham) (Lab)]

It was a great honour, as a Minister, to be responsible for skills under Tony Blair’s Government and for universities under Gordon Brown. I learned two things in those two different posts. First, when I put out a press release challenging Oxford and Cambridge as to why more people from the London boroughs of Richmond and Barnet went to those universities than went there from the entirety of Scotland and Wales put together it reached all the headlines—everyone wanted to write about universities. Secondly, when I wanted to talk about skills and FE, I struggled.

That is why this debate is so important and why we must focus on a couple of things. First, many deprived areas across the country—areas suffering different degrees of poverty and areas that would traditionally be described as working class—do not have particularly thriving sixth forms in school. What these areas have are sixth-form colleges and FE. This is often where the working-class children find themselves by virtue of history, and it is why this debate is important. Much has been made of the spending review, but it comes on top of a huge 16% cut in funding to the FE sector.

Secondly, the Minister said a lot about apprenticeship starts but very little about completions. She did not say that a lot of the growth in apprenticeships is in the over-35 age group. She did not talk about the quality of apprenticeships and where those apprenticeships are. In London, the increase in apprenticeships is in hairdressing. People can say, “What is wrong with hairdressing?”, but too often it is not her children who are going into those apprenticeships. That is why it is important that we get serious about what an apprenticeship is. Around the country, a lot of working-class kids are saying, “It is not worth the paper it is written on. I didn’t get a job after it. I cannot get the income I wanted.” That is the real discussion to have when FE budgets are cut.

My main point this evening, however, is that if we are to have a debate about FE, let us concentrate on the real collapse in FE in this country. The huge collapse is in adult learning. It is a disgrace and it is why our productivity is floundering. Bring back the night school. Where is it? When we get to this time of the evening, where is that thriving environment in our FE colleges across the country? It does not exist. On a Saturday and a Sunday, where can working people go? We have gaps in IT and green technology. We have huge new sectors of the economy, but how are working people to get access to jobs in them if the Government cut the funding and cut the central purpose of further education?

Our first night school was in Edinburgh in 1821, and we had wonderful working men’s colleges in our major cities. I remember films such as “Educating Rita” when I was growing up that looked at the context: professors and others who came alongside women and working people and got them into education. That has been cut under this Government and lost entirely in this country. That is why people are turning to parties such as the UK Independence party—they have nowhere else to go. Let us bring back night school and fund FE properly. It is a shame and an outrage that this is not being covered in a much bigger way across the country, because it is what people are talking about in local communities.

Oral Answers to Questions

David Lammy Excerpts

Tuesday 10th November 2015 Commons Chamber

[Nick Boles]

When there is an apprenticeship standard for HGV drivers, the company in my hon. Friend’s constituency will be able to offer training to employers for that apprenticeship, and to secure the funding that the Government will provide through the apprenticeship levy and other public resources.

[Mr David Lammy (Tottenham) (Lab)]

I welcome the decision the Department has made on name-blind applications to university, but the Minister will know that this does little to deal with prejudices of class and race. Postcode, school and being first in the family to go to university are just as important. What progress is being made on contextual data?

[Joseph Johnson]

It is a priority for the Government to increase the proportion of disadvantaged people going to university. We have brought forward proposals for UCAS to look at, so that for the 2017 admission cycle, we can introduce name-blind applications—an important step to ensuring that application and admission to university is on the basis of merit.

Education and Adoption Bill

David Lammy Excerpts

Monday 22nd June 2015 Commons Chamber

[Mr David Lammy (Tottenham) (Lab)]

Last September could well turn out to be the most important month in my life. I began the month by announcing that I intended to seek the Labour nomination for Mayor of London, and I am hoping to achieve that by this September. More importantly, towards the end of the month, I slipped out of the Labour party conference following the speech by the former Leader of the Opposition—that had nothing to do with his speech, by the way—and made my way to meet my new daughter, whom my wife and I had just adopted. I am here today to raise issues about adoption.

There are just under 70,000 young people in the care system in our country. I see that the Minister with responsibility for adoption, the Minister for Children and Families, is in his place. He will know that it is important that couples with their own birth children should feel able to adopt. I congratulate the previous Government on their success in speeding up the system and in stating that we should not hold up adoption, particularly for black and minority ethnic children, solely on the basis of finding adopters of the same race. Much progress has been made, and we are now seeing many more children being placed for adoption instead of languishing in the system. The Minister did a considerable amount to achieve that, as did the former Secretary of State.

However, there are many foster carers, many children in residential care, and many kinship carers, and they do not feature in the Bill. That is a matter of concern for those outside this place who play such an important role in the lives of looked-after children. If we are serious about finding those children a home for life, it is important that we attract couples with birth children to the adoption process. I hope that the Minister will have something to say about how we are going to achieve that within the system.

We must also do considerably more to support families adopting children who are from much harder target groups than the traditional baby daughter or baby son. They include children with tremendous disabilities, children with profound mental health problems, black and minority ethnic children and children who are older at the time they become available for adoption, some of whom have reached their teenage years. This is a real difficulty in our system, but again the Bill says very little about how those children can successfully find a home.

I am not saying that it is appropriate for all such children to be adopted, however, and there are concerns about forced adoption. There are countries, certainly in Europe, where forced adoption is unusual. We must give better support to poorer parents, for example, and to those with drug or alcohol problems. We must support them so that they are better able to parent their children. It is important to stress that this debate is taking place against a backdrop of huge cuts to local government, which are having an impact on children’s services, on budgets for social workers and on the means to support those parents so that they can continue to parent their children, hard though that might be.

I hope that the Minister will also say a little more about what is envisaged for regional adoption agencies. There are some very good agencies out there—I was supported by one of them—and there are bigger agencies that could do more. Some local authorities are already working in consortium to try to attract parents. Also, many children are clearly best suited to being adopted outside their local area because of the complexities surrounding their families.

Will the Minister also say something about the strengths of our maintained school system? It is a matter of tremendous concern that Ministers seem to want to talk only about chain and sponsored academies and not about converter academies. It limits the argument somewhat if they do not acknowledge the fantastic schools in the maintained sector. In the end, the debate must always be about standards and children, and not about structure.

Living Wage

David Lammy Excerpts

Thursday 6th November 2014 Commons Chamber

[Mr David Lammy (Tottenham) (Lab)]

I congratulate the hon. Member for Warwick and Leamington (Chris White) on securing this very good debate. There will be Members of the House who, like me, grew up in a home in low pay, by which I mean that there were moments when we did not have 50p for the meter—utilities in homes like ours were metered back in the ’70s and ’80s—so the electricity went off and we lit a candle. It was not always clear that the fridge would be full. I remember at age 12, when my father left our home, focusing on my mother’s salary, which was just above £12,000 at the time, and realising that it would be a struggle to survive on that amount. That was in the mid-1980s, and here we are in 2014.

We are talking about the prospect of a good life, not being wealthy or having lots of money, and about people doing typical jobs, so not just cleaners and security guards, but secretaries and people working in shops. Those are the kinds of jobs for which the call for a living wage has become hugely important and desperately needed in our country. I remember when the cleaners who worked in my local college came to see me. They were women who looked like my mother, and they were pleading with me to help them retain their jobs because the college had said that in order to increase their pay to the living wage, which was their demand, it would have to cut their hours to such an extent that they would be working only 32 weeks a year. Those women did not know how they would survive. Because of the fight along with the GMB union, we got them the living wage.

I also think of the paradox in my constituency of a premiership football club that spent £103 million on new players after Gareth Bale left last summer but still cannot manage to pay its bar staff, caterers, security guards and cleaners the living wage. I do not want to single out my local club, because that is true of the entire premiership, in which we see millions of pounds spent week after week, and in which some players can earn as much in two hours as someone on the living wage earns in a whole year. That is the country in which we are living in 2014. Frankly, it shames our nation that we are having this debate so long after the birth of the welfare state.

In these times we must recognise—Opposition Members, too, must recognise this—that it cannot be right that in our last year in office we were spending £21.5 billion on housing benefit. Why should British taxpayers top up the incomes of people living in homes when surely it is British employers who should be paying that sum? This is a profound debate that has begun in relation to a living wage, but it also cuts to much bigger questions about the kind of society we live in, and the kind of society that we must surely become, in this first part of the 21st century.

Linked to that is the reason why there are people in Britain who increasingly want to travel off to fringe political interests, because when politicians use phrases such as “affordable housing”, they do not see housing that is in any sense affordable. In Kingston and Richmond, here in London, rents have gone up 40% in two years. In my borough of Haringey they have gone up by 20% in two years. The idea that £1,400 a month is affordable is a joke to most families in this city. It takes the lion’s share of the little money that they have. Of course, it is spent in another way, because these parents, as my hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Erdington (Jack Dromey) highlighted, are unable to spend time with their children. As a consequence, many children are raising themselves in their homes, with all the disastrous outcomes that can meet them along the way. Paying the living wage is therefore essential.

This also speaks to the nature of our economy. Here in London, 88% of the economy is in the service sector. The phrase, “the service sector”, sounds kind of nice when we say it, but when we peel it back we see that a smaller and smaller proportion is in the public sector. It is shrinking because of cuts to local government and the health service—the public services that we all recognise. The lion’s share of the service sector is retail. Lots of folk are trapped in jobs that not only do not pay well but do not allow them to be clear about their journey to a job that can pay well. I grew up in a house where my mother made that journey—her salary went from up £12,000 to the £20,000s over a 15-year period. I am very grateful to Unison for helping her with the early Unionlearn schemes and to the shop stewards who pushed her by saying “Rose, you can do better by these kids—you can move on.” I remember the City and Guilds certificate on our wall. Indeed, I have still got it somewhere in the loft; I will have to dig it out after this debate.

Skills are essential. Yet when we look across the country at further education and listen to debates on it in this House, it is predominantly about young people. Where are the night schools? Where are the FE colleges that are open at 10, 11 or 12 o’clock at night when ordinary working people can skill up in that way? Is it simply that these jobs have left our economy because that is the nature of the hourglass economy? Yes, we call for a living wage because it is essential, but we must also ask profound questions about why our economy seems to be leaving so many people in work but in poverty.

London has the biggest inequality of all the regions of the country. This city has 640,000 families on low pay. That is a major challenge to its future prospects that we will surely need to do something about over the coming years, and we can do it only if we ask challenging questions about the economy. Over the coming months and years, we must push employers hard and firmly to meet their obligations on a living wage. We must see many, many more join this fight.

I applaud Citizens UK for all its work. I applaud the unions, the Churches and the faith communities for pushing and pressing for more. However, we in this House will have to heed what the public are telling us if we do not want to see fringe parties occupying this debate with a very simple message: “Blame it on the immigrants; we’ll solve the problem by pulling out of Europe.” I wish it really were that simple. The problems are deep and profound, and we must meet this need as quickly as possible.

Free Schools (Funding)

David Lammy Excerpts

Monday 12th May 2014 Commons Chamber

[Mr Speaker]

Order. Although I understand the concern of the hon. Lady and the possible concern of her constituents on this matter, the terms of the question do not engage ministerial responsibility, which is the issue for the House of Commons.

[Mr David Lammy (Tottenham) (Lab)]

The Secretary of State uses the phrase “quality and rigour” in relation to free schools. Will he look at the recent Ofsted report on Hartsbrook E-ACT free school in my constituency? It found inadequate reading, writing and mathematics, that it was inadequate in all classes, a school body that needed improving, inadequate safeguarding, and that it was inadequately and poorly organised. Is that quality and rigour, and does the Schools Minister agree with that report, and does the Secretary of State as well?

[Michael Gove]

Obviously, we both agree with that report because it is an Ofsted report and we place an enormous amount of weight and confidence in the chief inspector’s scrutiny of underperforming schools. While there are free schools that underperform, it is only fair to say that there are also local authority maintained schools that are underperforming. It is sad that even as standards increase overall, every day that schools are open two local authority schools go into special measures. If we put that in the frame, we can recognise the context in which school improvement work is taking place.

Although Hartsbrook E-ACT free school was underperforming, in the right hon. Gentleman’s constituency the Harris academy, which took over from the failing Downhills school—the right hon. Gentleman, of course, was sceptical about that takeover and forced academisation—is now flourishing. That shows that after initial teething problems, school reform under this Government has worked. I hope that we can work together to ensure that Lord Harris and other high-quality sponsors continue to create the academies and free schools that will help to bring young people in the right hon. Gentleman’s constituency additional hope for the future.

Child Care (London)

David Lammy Excerpts

Wednesday 19th March 2014 Westminster Hall

[Mr David Lammy (Tottenham) (Lab)]

I will try to be quick. I am grateful for your indulgence, Mr Dobbin, because I am due to speak in the Budget debate in the House. Will the Minister forgive me for not being here for her conclusion?

I congratulate my hon. and very good Friend the Member for Lewisham East (Heidi Alexander) on securing this debate. I am also grateful for the work of my right hon. Friend the Member for Tooting (Sadiq Khan) to ensure that the issue of child care is to the fore here in London. My right hon. Friend the Member for Dulwich and West Norwood (Dame Tessa Jowell) is here, and we should remember the work that she did when she was Minister with responsibility for public health to get child care on the agenda and to set up the children’s centres. I suspect that many of us are concerned that the children’s centres are disappearing and are not quite what we envisaged all those years ago. That is the context of this debate.

I reflect, too, on a mother who came to see me last Friday. She is a nurse working in a major London hospital. She is meant to be at that hospital for 7.30 am, and she is a single mum with two kids who have to get to primary school. She is one of the many Londoners in temporary accommodation, and she has been housed by the local authority miles away from the school that her children attend. She is actually housed at the other end of the London borough; I know hon. Members will be familiar with that situation. She also now lives further away from her job. She came to speak to me in tears, asking where the balance was between getting to school for the newly begun breakfast club and getting to work. She faced losing her job. She asked simply whether I, as a local MP, could visit the hospital to ask whether she could have the flexibility to get her kids to the breakfast club and then go to hospital to start work. She is an average Londoner and my heart goes out to her, because I remember my mother juggling the priorities of raising kids on her own and getting to work. The truth is that in the economy we have created—both major political parties have to take some responsibility for it—it is virtually impossible successfully to raise a family on one income in London, particularly if that is one average income.

Child care is a fundamental issue. It takes 31% of the disposable income of London families; that will be 40% in 10 years’ time, and in 50 years’ time, it will be the entirety of their disposable income. We should take the issue seriously. It is not just about child care, however. Local authorities, with their budgets squeezed—we heard in the Budget today that further squeezes are to come in the years ahead—have withdrawn from subsidising breakfast clubs and after-school clubs. Families are having to make difficult choices about how they provide for their children. We should not forget that many working families, when making those decisions, leave younger children in the care of slightly older children; that is what is going on. Those older siblings have to feed younger siblings and marshal the dangers of the internet. They are raising many young Londoners, because of the cost of child care.

To some extent, I welcome the raising of the worth of what is effectively a voucher scheme to £2,000. I suspect that the shadow Minister will raise the issue of who receives that money. It causes me great concern that so much of it will be received by Londoners who can afford child care. Why are we giving subsidies to those earning £300,000? Are bankers, barristers, accountants or senior consultants really complaining about the cost of child care in London? Should we be prioritising them? Child care costs on average £15,000 a year in this city, so let us be honest: £2,000 is a drop in the ocean, and shame on this House if we Members are not very clear about that. It is a drop in the ocean in relation to the demand and the problems that we have in this city.

We should also be clear that the demand among many Londoners and right across the country is for support not just for children aged nought to five, but for those aged nought to 14. People do not want their 11-year-old or 12-year-old in the house on their own, and being expected to make their own breakfast. I am pleased that the Government are shifting the cut-off age for the scheme to 12-year-olds, but I put on the table that the issue is for young Londoners, full stop. The spectrum certainly has to go beyond five-year-olds.

I do not want to get lost in the central discussion on cost and lose sight of quality. Most Londoners are making child care decisions based first on cost and then on location. The real challenge for us in London is to get Londoners making decisions fundamentally based on quality. There are real concerns that a diminution or a stepping back on some of the nursery standards that were in place has led to a drop in quality at nursery level. I have real concerns about our youngest children in London—babies aged nought to 18 months—and the recent changes in regulation regarding the number of child care attendants that should be there for babies.

There is quite a lot of evidence that our youngest children in nurseries should have the one-to-one support that mothers want. It is not just about cost; it is about mum and dad—I should mention dads, as chair of the all-party group on fatherhood—having confidence that the quality and support is there while they go out to work. There is a supply-side issue. We have to drive up standards and ensure that suppliers can flourish and provide the child care that we want. I welcome the debate, but in the end we need a proper 10-year plan. We need to be clear that child care is for those between nought and 14 years old. We need a road map to the universal provision that is required in our capital city.

We must build on the successes that we saw withthe children’s centres, although there were problems. The policy began in the Department of Health under the previous Government with my right hon. Friend the Member for Dulwich and West Norwood, when she was responsible for public health. While we were in government, that policy shifted to the Department for Children, Schools and Families. As has been said by academics and others, that shift meant that the policy became more about the Treasury, gross domestic product and getting women out to work, when it should have been about a holistic vision of well-being, as it was when it sat in the Department of Health. Things have slid even further recently. Yes, the debate is about cost, but it is also about quality provision. We should be ashamed that so many of our continental partners are making huge strides forward on child care, while here in Britain the debate stagnates.

Several hon. Members rose—

[Jim Dobbin (in the Chair)]

Order. Three Members still wish to speak, and we have 25 minutes until I call the shadow Minister.

Teaching Quality

David Lammy Excerpts

Wednesday 29th January 2014 Commons Chamber

[Tristram Hunt]

As ever, the hon. Gentleman is a master of his profession. We were happy to introduce, under a Labour Government, the wonderful Teach First scheme, which was about the road to having qualified teachers in the classroom. Gaining QTS, as I will explain, is not the be all and end all of focusing on teacher quality, but it is an important plank of the minimum standards that we would expect. The attainment gap between children on free school meals and those whose parents can afford to pay actually widened in 72 out of 152 areas last year. There remains a worrying attainment gap between less advantaged pupils and those from more affluent families, and current policy is failing to address that. The most worrying disparities were in the affluent areas of Wokingham and Buckinghamshire. There is therefore much work to be done.

[Mr David Lammy (Tottenham) (Lab)]

When my hon. Friend visited St Thomas More school—the most improved secondary school in the country—did he have an opportunity to discuss with the head teacher, Martin Tissot, the way in which he had rigorously ensured that teaching in the classroom had raised standards in the school? Did my hon. Friend also hear about the commitment of the staff who come in on Saturday mornings as well as taking part in a great deal of activity after school to raise standards further?

[Tristram Hunt]

Such examples prove the power of leadership, of purpose and of camaraderie among teachers. It is the teachers and the head teachers who are the real agents of change, as Martin Tissot at St Thomas More school has shown. Labour’s academy programme was about delivering that sense of autonomy and leadership, which can prove instrumental in that regard.

Secondary Schools (Accountability)

David Lammy Excerpts

Monday 14th October 2013 Commons Chamber

[Mr Laws]

We have had a broad welcome for the proposals in the consultation and the statement, including from many employer organisations, but my hon. Friend is right to highlight that, ultimately, results and attainment are crucial to any young person doing well in future. I believe that, through the best eight measure—an average we will publish as part of the new accountability framework —we will send out the clearest signal ever about how a school is performing in a large range of subjects and for every single student in the school. I believe that that will improve the focus on attainment in every school in the country.

[Mr David Lammy (Tottenham) (Lab)]

I congratulate the Minister on his announcement. I particularly welcome the destinations measure, which I argued for as a Minister —I was not successful in persuading the Department to do it. How will it affect schools that go up to age 16, as opposed to schools that go up to age 18, which often place a greater emphasis on universities, including Russell group universities?

[Mr Laws]

I am grateful to the right hon. Gentleman for his comments. We would expect such a measure to apply both to schools that go up to age 16 and to those that go up to age 18. Looking at what happens to people afterwards is relevant in giving both a powerful incentive. Clearly, the pathway in each situation would, for many students, be slightly different, but we believe that taking an interest in what students go on to do beyond age 16 makes sense in giving a powerful incentive to the many schools in the country that go up to age 16.

Young Fathers

David Lammy Excerpts

Friday 5th July 2013 Commons Chamber

[Mr David Lammy (Tottenham) (Lab)]

I am very grateful for the opportunity to speak in this Adjournment debate. I want to talk about a particularly important subject—young fathers, a group that is often overlooked, frequently marginalised, and rarely supported in our society.

Over the past few years, there has rightly been a lot of concentration on young mothers, with particular public policy concentration on teenage pregnancy. However, there is so little provision for young fathers that we do not even know how many there are in Britain, because there are no accurate figures. However, those of us representing constituencies like Tottenham know that they exist and that they are frequently crying out for help and support.

Modern society is changing more quickly than ever before. The traditional society of the 1950s was opened up with the social liberal revolution of the 1960s and the economic liberal revolution of the 1980s. Both have brought more women into the workplace, raising their skill levels and aspirations, with society increasingly seeing them not just as mothers but as workers in the workplace. That is incontestably a good thing. At the same time, the British family has changed. Between 1975 and 1997, the time British fathers spent with their children on an average working day increased from just 15 minutes to two hours. Again, that is incontestably a good thing.

However, policy has often not caught up with the way that families want to live their lives. Too often, it rests on outdated assumptions of one carer, usually the mum, and one breadwinner, usually the dad. That does not reflect the reality of very many families out there in our country. Therefore, in 2010, I set up the all-party group on fatherhood to place the importance of fathers on to policy makers’ desks and into their in-boxes, and to bring our 19th-century social policy up to date with our 21st-century economy and family life.

Many others have been instrumental in raising these issues over many years, often against a backdrop of official indifference or, sometimes, hostility. Adrienne Burgess and her colleagues at the Fatherhood Institute have shifted the terms of the debate, as has Professor Tina Miller at Oxford Brookes university, both of whom well understand that active, engaged fathers are good for families, good for children, and, importantly in these straitened times, good for the economy. I salute their work.

I also salute the work of many organisations—too numerous to mention—that work with not only fathers, but young fathers in places such as my constituency. They often do so out of the limelight and often try to convince local public services of the value that dads can offer families. I am thinking in particular of Shane Ryan and his group Working with Men, which works extensively in south London. Such vital work is too often under-appreciated.

Encouraging active fatherhood has been a subject close to my heart since my own father left my mother and our family when I was 12 and I grew up without a father in my life. I have in the past discussed general policies in relation to fathers, such as paternity leave, but today I want to address issues specific to young fathers.

Although teenage pregnancy remains an issue in our society, at least it is accepted that young mums have problems that are specific to them and that they need help and support. That rarely happens with the young dads who have fathered those children. Too often we treat young fathers as problems to be solved and not people to be supported or helped.

[Jonathan Lord (Woking) (Con)]

I congratulate the right hon. Gentleman on securing this debate. Is not the problem he is outlining exacerbated by the benefit system? Sometimes young fathers are discouraged by the woman and her family themselves, because she might be less well-off with a man. Would it not be better—emotionally and for our society and the future of the children—for those fathers to be given a chance?

[Mr Lammy]

The hon. Gentleman raises an important point to which I will return. We as policy makers need to think about and understand families. There may not be a relationship between mum and dad, but more often than not the father needs to remain engaged. In the case of young fathers, they need a lot of support to remain engaged, or they might walk away and never return.

Our media talk so often about “feckless fathers” and “deadbeat dads” and assume that all young fathers fit the same, sometimes inaccurate stereotype. That has to stop. It is time for young dads not just to be listened to, but to be heard, because they are all too often unwilling to disappear from their children’s lives. They are often disfranchised by neglect and by lack of support from the system, not by design. Mums, dads, children—the whole family—lose out if young fathers find themselves in that position.

Let us be clear: as President Obama has said, what makes a man is not conceiving a child, but having the courage to raise one. Fathers of whatever age have to live up to their responsibilities and to the high expectations that we should all as a society have of them. That does not mean that society should not help them live up to those expectations, particularly when they are young people.

Young fathers present specific issues. It is often the case that they were looked-after children, excluded from schools or raised in poverty. Teenage fathers are three times more likely to have failed to have completed secondary education and much more likely than their peers to not be in education, employment or training. Unfortunately, many are young offenders: 12 % of 15 to 17-year-old offenders have children of their own, and nearly half of those aged 22 and under are or are about to become fathers. Many of them have never seen what good parenting looks like so, without support, how do we expect them to raise their own children properly?

Too often, we condemn young fathers for their background. They are failed in their schools and failed in their families, and we fail them again when they become fathers. That feeds feelings of deep inadequacy and shame. They know that they are unprepared for fatherhood, but do not know where to turn to for support. They have much higher rates of anxiety and depression than their peers without children. Most of all, they are often very angry, and often with good reason.

However much teenage dads want to play a role in their child’s upbringing, life seems to conspire against them. A job will be hard to come by for this cohort of fathers, given the state of our economy. Their partners may get a home, as has been indicated by the hon. Member for Woking (Jonathan Lord), but if they are not together, it is highly unlikely that the father will get one. The public services to help them with their role as a dad will be patchy or non-existent. Jobcentre Plus will be more interested in processing their benefits than in working with them to obtain the skills for work while bringing up their children.

[Kerry McCarthy (Bristol East) (Lab)]

This is a brilliant speech. A debate on this matter in Parliament is long overdue. On housing, the single room rate for people up to the age of 35 means that increasingly, young men live in bedsits in houses with lots of other young men. That is not a suitable place to take a child if the father has occasional custody.

[Mr Lammy]

My hon. Friend raises an important issue. If we believe, as I suspect Members across the House do, that we must keep fathers engaged with their children, assuming that there is no issue such as violence, the contact that they have with their children is fundamental. Policies such as the room rate cut across that. The costs that society has to pick up when a father becomes disengaged from his son, and the costs of the repetition when that son becomes a young man, are considerable. I am pleased that she has raised that issue.

The Work programme is limping along and the Youth Contract is not doing its job for this cohort of young men. We need tailored programmes for young men, and for young dads in particular, because we understand the cost to society if they do not get it right at this stage. Things do not look good, which can make these young men very angry. When I hosted a recent meeting of the all-party parliamentary group on fatherhood in which we spoke to young fathers, I saw just how angry these young men can be because of their frustration at wanting to be good fathers, but not being supported by the system.

Not only are young fathers not supported or helped; they are demonised by journalists and politicians. Myths solidify into facts. The isolated but deeply regrettable incidents of men who father children with different mothers become the rule, not the exception. Figures from the Child Maintenance and Enforcement Commission show that fewer than 5,000 men are paying maintenance for children they have had with three partners and that fewer than 500 men are paying maintenance for children they have had with four partners. Although those men may not have lived up to the high expectations that we should have of them, they do not represent the vast majority of young fathers.

We must bust some other myths too. The majority of young fathers are in relationships with the mothers of their children. The millennium cohort study found that half the partners of teenage mothers were living with them during the pregnancy. The vast majority of young fathers intend to play a full role in their children’s lives, and that intention does not disappear with the first sleepless night or the first nappy—in fact, it often grows. The same study found that one in five non-resident fathers who had low contact with their 10-month-old infants were in more frequent and often daily contact when the child was three. Young dads want to be there for their children just as much as all dads; they just need support to do it, as one would expect of young people.

Many young dads live chaotic lives. Many hon. Members will be familiar with young people who live chaotic lives, perhaps even in their own homes. For many young men, becoming a dad is the wake-up call that pushes them to take control of their lives and to take better care of themselves, as well as their families. That is exactly what I saw when I visited St Michael’s Fellowship in Brixton—a wonderful organisation that works with young dads in some of the most testing circumstances in Britain. I wish to place on record my thanks to Seany O’Kane, who runs the scheme, and to Kim Normanton, a BBC producer who allowed me to spend time at St Michael’s recording “Dads Who Do”, a documentary for Radio 4.

Even among fathers facing multiple pressures, the vast majority try to stay involved in their children’s lives and to be good role models. They each told me that they feel they are on their own and expected to get by without help, support or even recognition of their needs. Too often, they come up against maternity services at children’s centres or schools that place no expectation on them as young fathers, and all the expectation on the young mother.

I have said that young dads often have greater needs than other fathers, and in other parts of our public services that would mean more provision for them, not less. In too many parts of our public services, however, young fathers are practically invisible—at best ignored, and seen by some workers as a risk or a danger to be avoided. Too many are denied access to their children and have to fight their way through the courts. Without legal aid many men are now presenting to MPs in a breakdown situation with their partners, and they have to supervise themselves through the court system. Expecting an 18, 19 or 20-year-old to supervise themselves through a legal process is expecting too much and nothing short of a national disgrace. The Government should think carefully about their provisions for legal aid in such family cases.

There is no statutory requirement to provide services to young fathers. Support is piecemeal, patchy and at heart a postcode lottery. Too often, young fathers say they are ignored by public service professionals, who assume that the father is not really interested in their child. Where support is provided to fathers, it is often generic and tailored to older fathers who may need less help. A recent survey found that in half of cases involving a young family, the health visitor did not even know the father’s name. Young fathers often have little contact with midwives, health visitors and social workers. Children’s centres often have targets for engaging with dads, but there are no data on how many children actually come into contact with their dad. Good children’s centres, like Earlsmead and Noel Park in my constituency in Haringey, do encourage such contact, but many will not.

This is a problem, and not just for the dads themselves. Research suggests that the mother’s perspective on her care will be determined to a large extent by her partner’s views. A young father who is engaged with public services is more likely to remain supportive of their children’s care as they grow up. That is good for children and the partner. Young mothers who believe that their partner is supportive have higher self-esteem, lower depression, and are more likely to be positively attached to their child.

However, what should be a win-win situation is too often a lose-lose one—public services push away a young dad, which leads to a young mum bringing up her child on her own. Such reluctance to engage with young fathers might also spring from a reluctance to engage young people at all when it comes to sex education. Young dads know less about sex and relationships than young mums, although most are happy to learn.

A reluctance to engage young dads before the birth feeds into a lack of provision for couples to raise their child together after the birth. Most residential homes are for mothers and babies only—again, treating fathers as though they are a danger, irrelevant, or both. Too many young couples are forced apart because of local authority housing decisions that do not take a whole-family approach that would enable young parents to establish their own households. Pressure on young fathers and families builds up, making it even more difficult for them to look after their children.

We need an entire shift in attitude on behalf of public services from focusing exclusively on the mother and child to thinking about the family, including the father, however young he might be. That must begin from the high expectations that we should have of all fathers. Significant numbers of the birth certificates of children born to teenage mothers do not identify the father at all. How can we show fathers our expectations of them if we do not even require their names to be on their children’s birth certificates? Will the Minister explain—I have raised this issue in many forums—why his Government have not enacted the provisions in the Welfare Reform Act 2009 that would provide for joint birth registration?

Young dads often experience significant financial hardship. We know that the best way for them to provide for themselves and their families is through skilled, decent, well-paid work. The problems that young fathers face because of the Work Programme’s one-size-fits-all approach are too numerous to mention. Will the Minister raise that issue with his colleagues in the Department for Work and Pensions? It is not acceptable that public services should fail to engage with young fathers at all. Young dads should be engaged from antenatal services onwards, improving outcomes for their children and breaking down poverty and social exclusion. To achieve that, maternity services, health visitors, social workers and children’s centres should, at the very least, always record the father’s details, regardless of his age, and work with the voluntary sector and children’s centres to provide the best possible targeted support for the family as a whole, including young dads.

Will the Minister work with his colleagues to ensure that public services support young fathers to live up to the high expectations we should have of them? Will he think again with the Secretary of State for Education about what more the Government can do to raise the profile of the expectations that we should have of young fathers and the services that local authorities and local institutions need to deliver if we are to see fewer break-ups and less poverty as a result? Will the Minister also work to introduce parenting education for all secondary school pupils? Most of all, if we are to support young dads properly, we need the data to understand how many are out there. How many are being helped by our public services, as well as by local authorities and the voluntary sector? Will the Minister ensure that those data are collected in a standardised form, where safe to do so, and made open to public services and other organisations that want to do more for fathers?

Finally, will the Minister and his colleagues commit to improving the services offered by young offender institutions for young fathers? Given that so many young fathers come through young offender institutions, we need a better focus from the Department on young fathers while they are in them and can be supported—when they come out—to be better fathers than they might otherwise have been. Will the Minister commit to reinstating the teenage pregnancy strategy, which provided so much support for young parents? There has been a substantial cut. Local authorities are moving away from their budgets. In 2009, teenage pregnancy figures were going in the right direction—we saw a 6% drop—but sadly they are now going back up.

[Craig Whittaker (Calder Valley) (Con)]

Will the right hon. Gentleman give way?

[Mr Lammy]

The hon. Gentleman has a long track record of taking up these issues in children’s services, and I am grateful to him for that, but I probably ought not to give way, so that the Minister has time to respond to the questions I have asked.

Apprenticeships

David Lammy Excerpts

Tuesday 12th March 2013 Commons Chamber

[Mr Marsden]

I am glad that the hon. Gentleman has made what is not just a detailed point, but an important general point: that these things cannot simply be delivered and micro-managed in Whitehall. They need to be taken forward at the local and sub-regional level. He gave an example, and I welcome apprenticeships coming from councils of whatever political persuasion. I shall have a little more to say about that later.

[Mr David Lammy (Tottenham) (Lab)]

rose—

[Rehman Chishti (Gillingham and Rainham) (Con)]

rose—

--- Later in debate ---

[The Minister of State, Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (Michael Fallon)]

I can join the hon. Member for Blackpool South (Mr Marsden) in making one point: we are all in the Chamber today to celebrate apprenticeships on the second day of national apprenticeship week. I was privileged this morning to meet Jenny Westworth, the apprentice of the year, who is an aeronautical engineer at BAE Systems near Preston.

Apprenticeships offer a huge amount. They work for the economy, they work for employers and they work for apprentices. In short, apprenticeships deliver. For the economy, apprenticeships improve productivity. For employers, apprenticeships increase morale and retention, not to mention the skills that employers need. They also work for the apprentices themselves and evidence published by the Centre for Economic and Business Research shows that the average higher apprentice increases his or her lifetime earnings by about £150,000, about as much as if he or she had gone to university.

Apprenticeships deliver and that is why over the past two years the number of apprentices starting has increased so sharply. In 2010, the coalition promised 50,000 more apprentices every year. I confirm to the House today that we have already not only delivered on that promise but exceeded it. We have all but doubled the number of apprentices starting each year, with more than 1 million starts under this Government.

[Mr Lammy]

rose—

[Michael Fallon]

I shall give way in a moment.

Apprenticeships deliver and we can now set out a more stretching goal, that is, the vision that on leaving school it will become the new norm to go either into an apprenticeship or to university. Gone are the days when a Prime Minister could set an arbitrary target for how many children should go to university, forcing some down a route that did not suit them and ignoring the rest. Gone are the days of Labour’s forgotten 50%. Gone are the days of youth unemployment rising even in the boom years. Gone are the days of uncontrolled immigration as the only answer to skill shortages, of dumbing down, of worklessness, of welfare and of the race to the bottom. Instead, the Government aspire that all the young people of this great nation should reach their personal best and that they should all succeed and fulfil their potential.

Of course, such a change is an economic imperative, as we cannot afford the drag anchor of the welfare bill in this global race, but there is also a moral imperative to support everyone in reaching their potential—for the many, not the few. How will we do that? Of course, the sharp increase in the quantity of apprentices is important, but alone it is not enough; despite unemployment falling, we still, shockingly, find both youth unemployment and skills shortages together in many towns in Britain. That points to a skills system that for too long has failed. For too long, the Government directed centrally the training that should be provided, at what level and where. The result was too much poor-quality training in skills employers did not need, and not enough high-quality training in skills employers do need.

The lodestars in reforming the apprenticeship system will be rigour and responsiveness: rigour to stretch, challenge and raise the expectations of apprentices and responsiveness to the needs of employers, public or private, large or small. The Richard review, which we published in the autumn, sets out a clear and specific guide to delivering those reforms, and we shall publish our formal response shortly.

What of Labour’s response today? I certainly welcome the Opposition’s general support for apprenticeships. I welcome their specific support for more employer ownership of skills, which has support across the spectrum, from trade unions, employers and the third sector alike. However, I am disappointed by the rather negative and carping tone that we heard from the hon. Member for Blackpool South. I turn to some of his specific points.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr David Lammy (Tottenham) (Lab)]

In contributing to this debate, I think back to 2008 when I launched national apprenticeship week as Minister for Skills. I recall debates in the Department at that time about why anything that we said about higher education would run right across the national newspapers and broadcasters, whereas it was very hard to get journalists to write even a small story about the importance of apprenticeships. That is largely because people in that sector, as is now the case with many politicians, have not experienced apprenticeships themselves. It has also been the case that many middle-class people in this country have not considered apprenticeships to be a preferred option for their children. For that reason, apprenticeships have languished behind.

I therefore welcome the cross-party nature of at least part of this debate, despite its being an Opposition day debate. I congratulate the Government on continuing to hold national apprenticeship week and on maintaining the National Apprenticeship Service, which I launched. It is important that the minimum length for an apprenticeship has been set at a year. All that progress is welcome.

It is important to introduce some fundamentals to this debate—otherwise, many young people searching for apprenticeships in our country might think that we have gone mad, and parents who are concerned about apprenticeships might feel that we are out of touch. At the heart of our system is the understanding that we must be there not only for our own children but for others. In a sense, we act in loco parentis, and navigating young people through a journey into work is important and necessary. For so many—indeed most—young people, going on such a journey alongside studying is essential.

We must remember that teachers spend time working and studying, just as I did when I was a young barrister. Across many job areas, the apprenticeship—an idea as old as the human being—is necessary. Why do we still have a fundamental problem? Largely, it goes back to the central debates of our times: what is growth; what is the industrial policy in this country; and where are our jobs to come from? I think we have some problems with those issues.

We should be concerned that when we talk about apprenticeships, a significant bulk of what we mean are level 2 apprenticeships—GSCE level. If we are serious about giving people the necessary life chances, and replicating what we see in countries such as Germany, Sweden and elsewhere, we need to do considerably better and have more apprenticeships at level 3 and beyond. Are we in this House content that when we look at growth over the past years, 100,000 of the new apprenticeships are in administration, more than 60,000 are in retail and fewer than one sixth are in engineering and construction? What does that say about the underlying problems in our economy? Many of those listening to this debate want to know that when we talk about apprenticeships, we are serious about what they are.

Given that 55% of young black men in this country are languishing as unemployed, we should be hugely concerned about the ethnic minority profile within apprenticeships and—when people do get apprenticeships —about where they tend to be. Given levels of unemployment among young people, we should be concerned that so much of the growth—75%—is among those older than 25. All parties can be guilty of playing politics, but I was Skills Minister with responsibility for Train to Gain, Unionlearn and Skilling up, and 70% of these new apprenticeships are taken by those who were already employed, and that is not progress. Those people already had jobs and—let us be serious—rebadging those jobs as apprenticeships is not actually progress. It is of huge concern that we are now using the term “apprenticeship”, when we are talking about the Train to Gain programme.

[Jenny Chapman (Darlington) (Lab)]

My right hon. Friend is making a superb speech and indicating that early decisions made by young people and supported by their parents and teachers are not going in the right direction for our economy. Is one main problem the lack of decent advice that young people receive?

[Mr Lammy]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right and we will not sort out that issue unless we get to grips with a serious problem in careers, information, advice and guidance. We struggled with that in government; we had the Connexions service but we got rid of it. I think it worked in certain parts of the country but not in others, and it was certainly good for more vulnerable young people. The situation now is that many schools with responsibility in that area are totally out of touch with the sectors into which we need young people to go if we are to be serious about apprenticeships.

The indication of decline is also significant. When Labour left office, my Department was spending about £2,400 in direct payments for each apprenticeship start.

That figure has now fallen to £1,600, and is part of the dressing up of what constitutes an apprenticeship.

I hope we will begin to get serious about what an apprenticeship is, and recognise that young people are concerned that they will just go round and round in circles and not end up with a proper job. A proper job is where we need to get to, and we should keep a close eye on both completion rates and success rates. If we go back in time, the legacy of a former Government was an apprenticeship that one did not finish, and one did not get a job at the end of it.

--- Later in debate ---

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Skills (Matthew Hancock)]

It is a great pleasure to be here, in national apprenticeship week, celebrating apprenticeships. We have had an extremely positive debate, with almost all contributions being positive and huge support on both sides of the House for apprenticeships. Success has many fathers. We heard first the claim that apprenticeships really got going in 1997. I had planned to say that they were in fact first mentioned in Chaucer 651 years ago, but then we heard the even greater claim from the right hon. Member for Tottenham (Mr Lammy) that they are as old as human beings.

It has been a great national apprenticeship week so far. At 5.30 this morning I was learning from Morrisons apprentices how to fillet fish, and what brilliant apprentices they are. It is quite a skill they have with knives—I certainly cannot match it. I have only one note of mild disappointment, because the speech we just heard from the Opposition Front Bench was rather disappointing. I thought that the hon. Member for Westminster North (Ms Buck) sounded rather like the sultan of scepticism or the Eeyore of apprenticeships, only seeing the worst and determined to dampen, downgrade and darken the mood. But we will not darken the mood, Mr Deputy Speaker, because apprenticeships are a cause to celebrate, and celebrate them we will.

Let me turn to the many issues raised by Members across the Chamber. First, careers advice is vital, as the Chairman of the Select Committee, the hon. Member for West Bromwich West (Mr Bailey), said, as did the right hon. Member for Tottenham, in a powerful speech, and my hon. Friend the Member for Worcester (Mr Walker) and the hon. Member for Inverclyde (Mr McKenzie). We have introduced a new statutory duty on schools that came into force in September, and Ofsted has said that it is making it a priority to consider that. The new destination data that were brought in this summer not only highlight, as they have in the past, the proportion of pupils going to university but, for the first time, publish for all schools the proportion going into apprenticeships. That is an important step, as Members in all parts of the House will recognise. We look forward to Ofsted’s report in the summer on the implementation of the duty to provide independent and impartial careers advice.

The second issue, which was raised by many Members, is the importance of the link between youth unemployment and apprenticeships. It is a scandal that youth unemployment is as high as it is, falling though it may be, when there are skills shortages in key parts of our economy such as engineering and computing. This shows that the linkage between the education system and the skills system, on the one hand, and employers, on the other, has not been strong enough. As my hon. Friend the Member for Thurrock (Jackie Doyle-Price) so eloquently explained, increasing that employer focus is a vital part of the reforms that we are pursuing. Another part of those reforms is the introduction of traineeships so that as apprenticeships become more rigorous and more high-quality, there is a programme of support, alongside the DWP programmes, to make sure that people get the skills they need, including in English, maths and work preparation, to get a good job and to hold down a job. My hon. Friend the Member for South Staffordshire (Gavin Williamson), and the hon. Members for Newcastle-under-Lyme (Paul Farrelly), for Edinburgh West (Mike Crockart) and for Eastbourne (Stephen Lloyd) also talked about the link between youth unemployment and apprenticeships. Several Members mentioned their local jobs clubs, and I wish them well. I am having a jobs club in Newmarket on Friday and look forward to it very much.

The third issue is how much apprenticeships are valued. The Chair of the Select Committee mentioned the recently published statistic that, on average, a higher apprenticeship increases lifetime earnings by £150,000. Let that figure go out there and let us all present and explain it, because it shows the value of apprenticeships.

[Mr Lammy]

The Minister makes a good point, but does he recognise that most of the growth in apprenticeships is at level 2, not level 3—the higher apprenticeships to which he refers?

[Matthew Hancock]

I absolutely recognise that there have been increases in the number of apprenticeships over the past two and half years in level 2 and level 3, and we are going to introduce levels 4, 5 and 6. In every age group there have been increases in the number of apprenticeships, and we should celebrate that.