School Funding

David Morris Excerpts

Thursday 13th March 2014 Commons Chamber

[Mr Laws]

We are certainly trying to ensure that in areas such as my hon. Friend’s we put in extra money to support the expansion of school places that is taking place. As he knows, we have now had the biggest increase in the primary population since the end of the second world war, and we are making sure that we put all funding, including capital funding, into the system to support that increase.

[David Morris (Morecambe and Lunesdale) (Con)]

Will my right hon. Friend confirm that had the funding criteria been in place a few years ago, the Labour county council would not be shutting down Skerton school in my constituency?

[Mr Laws]

Certainly. We are announcing significant amounts of money today. Hon. Members on both sides of the House need to reflect on the consequence for many millions of young people over a long period of the fact that their schools were not funded fairly in many parts of the country.

Self-Employment

David Morris Excerpts

Tuesday 24th January 2012 Westminster Hall

[Richard Harrington]

My hon. Friend makes very valid points. I hope that I speak for all hon. Members involved in this debate when I point out that Richard Branson and Bill Gates are examples of people whom we would regard as being very successful and would look up to. Both Richard Branson and Bill Gates were rejects from the mainstream academic system. Obviously, when I say “rejects”, I do not mean that they were not up to it, but that they were, through whatever personality they had or whatever came about, not part of it. My hon. Friend’s helpful intervention supports my argument, rather than the other way round.

In my constituency of Watford, there are some excellent initiatives. For example, Wenta, which is run by Chris Pichon and Sharon Gaffney, has many schemes to help schools give young children the opportunity to become entrepreneurs and to create an incubator for people who are without a job to help them set up their own business. Lots of good efforts are happening, but the fundamental point is to ask people to think culturally, socially and educationally. There is still a feeling against the acceptability of business in this country that is not present in Germany or the United States. As I have said, such an attitude is a result of hundreds of years of looking down on business.

[David Morris (Morecambe and Lunesdale) (Con)]

I agree with everything my hon. Friend has said. Back in the 1980s, the manpower allowances service scheme was brought in by Margaret Thatcher’s Government. That scheme took people who were on the unemployment register and gave them twice the amount of unemployment benefit, so that they could go self-employed. Indeed, I was one of those people, and I built up a business that employed more than 100 people and experienced the same sleepless nights as my hon. Friend.

Apprenticeships

David Morris Excerpts

Monday 19th December 2011 Commons Chamber

[David Morris (Morecambe and Lunesdale) (Con)]

Thank you, Mr Deputy Speaker, for calling me to speak in such an important debate.

Apprenticeships have been the bedrock of training in British Industry for generations, and anyone who cares about British Industry must, by extension, care about apprenticeships. I am very proud to say that I left school aged 15 and joined Thatcher’s youth training scheme. The YTS apprenticeship programme was the start of my career, and I believe that I would not be standing here today without it. That is testament to the flexibility in skills and career structure that the hon. Member for Blackpool South (Mr Marsden) seems to seek. However, apprenticeships also benefit companies. According to the British Chambers of Commerce, 82% of companies offering apprenticeships say that they build long-term skills and capacity, as well as offering young people on-the-job training with small salaries to help them get by.

I take the view that the best ideas benefit everyone involved. Apprenticeships create stronger and more profitable companies, offer young people employment, and even regenerate communities by increasing skills and employability, and I am glad to observe that Members in all parts of the House agree on the fundamental premise that they are a good thing. Obviously there are disagreements on the detail, but that is to be expected. I was pleased to hear the right hon. Member for Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath (Mr Brown) say that he wanted to see 220 apprenticeship starts a year by 2013. I agree with him wholeheartedly, which is why I was also delighted to see that the Government have delivered more than twice that number this year. That represents real progress, and we should all applaud it. It is the result of a major new package of funding that will enable the budget for apprenticeships to rise by £250 million a year by 2014-2015.

We should bear in mind, however, that Government money and cross-party agreement are not what it takes to deliver apprenticeships, although it helps. The people who are meeting these ambitious targets are the companies and apprentices themselves: it is they who are making it happen. We must applaud their efforts loudly, and then ask ourselves how we can ensure that more companies and young people join in. As a former small business man myself, I fear that not enough small businesses are being encouraged to participate in schemes. Many fear that red tape, health and safety rules and inflexibility will leave them out of pocket. We must ensure that apprentices are seen as a real economic benefit to their companies.

I do not believe that small businesses can afford to risk losing money on apprenticeships in difficult climates such as this, and I think that the Government are right to offer £1,500 payments to companies that take on apprentices. In that way, we are offering security to the companies, and as the number of places expands, we will offer more of them to young people. I know from my time in small business that gestures like that help to reduce risk and enable companies to act.

We should be very proud of the achievements of our young people. We have a record number of apprenticeships, they are gender-balanced for the first time, and the number of apprentices over 25 is increasing. This is an issue on which the whole House agrees, which I think is borne out by the results that we have seen. Our young people are our future, and the business community has done us proud. As a former apprentice who is now a Member of Parliament, I commend what the Government are doing.

Business Support (Lancaster and Fleetwood)

David Morris Excerpts

Thursday 12th May 2011 Commons Chamber

[Eric Ollerenshaw]

My hon. Friend makes a significant point. High Speed 2 is critical to the north-west and to Yorkshire. We should talk about it as a line that will go from London to Manchester and from London to Leeds, and eventually from London to Glasgow and from London to Edinburgh. As hon. Members may know, I have said in other places that I do not see why we do not start building south from Glasgow and Edinburgh now, while the areas around London argue about where their terminus will be. The point is clear: High Speed 2 is vital in the long term for business in my area, and in my constituency in particular.

The other helpful development is the proposed northern hub, which will allow faster and more frequent services between the cities of the north and bring an estimated £4 billion of benefits to the region. That will be good for business and for job creation. In particular, the electrification of the line from Preston to Blackpool will be a major help to the growth of business in my area.

I am also pleased that the Department for Transport has finally agreed that the M6 to Heysham link road should go ahead. It has been on the drawing board for 50-odd years. When it is finally built, it should lead to better communication to the port of Heysham, which will help businesses and attract new businesses on both the Morecambe and Lancaster sides of the River Lune, and along the M6 corridor.

[David Morris (Morecambe and Lunesdale) (Con)]

Does my hon. Friend agree that the new link road will create pockets of investment in my constituency and in his constituency next door?

[Eric Ollerenshaw]

Absolutely. I thank my hon. Friend for his support in working with the chamber of commerce, the county council and Ministers to help them see the importance of that scheme, which promises much for business.

The transport links to Fleetwood remain poor. I have raised with Ministers the fact that although there is about four and a half or five miles of railway line in Fleetwood, unfortunately there are no trains on it. There is a plan, with the support of the council, to get that development, which needs capital of about £6 million. I will come back to those figures in a minute.

My last general point is that I fully support the plans to reduce the amount of red tape that businesses have to fight through. We need economic growth, and it is only right that we should make it as easy as possible for businesses and entrepreneurs to start up companies and create the jobs that are so badly needed. That is the greatest area in which businesses have asked me for support and talked about their hopes from the coalition.

The Government’s war on red tape—the red tape challenge, I think it has been branded—is welcomed by all businesses. I know that many previous Governments have talked the talk, but I hope this Administration will finally walk the walk. I am particularly hopeful of that because I know that the Minister has that type of background and has personal experience. I am sure that he will put his full weight behind the deregulation drive.

Those are the general issues, but I also wish to mention one or two specific local examples to demonstrate the problems. The first is that of a company called Nitratec, which is based in Fleetwood and supplies trucks and trailers both new and used for the UK and export markets. It asked me to visit last year. It was having a particular problem in getting help to access export markets, particularly in some less usual export destinations. For instance, it was keen to grow into Africa and Kurdistan. As it happened, I was able to put it on to the British embassy in Iraq via a couple of contacts, and I understand that that side of things is now going well. The lesson is that perhaps we could still be doing more to help companies understand where they can go to get assistance if they want to export goods or services. In that instance, it was just a fluke that I had contacts in the particular area where the company wanted to develop, but why should a business that has such potential have to rely on the chance nature of its MP’s contacts?

Increasing exports is, of course, a major policy plank for the UK. I note that only yesterday, the Foreign Secretary told the House that if we could increase the number of small and medium-sized enterprise exporters in this country from one in five to the EU average of one in four, the extra exports from Britain would more than cancel out the trade deficits that we have experienced in recent years. I hope that more can be done to help companies get on the right track.

I shall give another example. Paul Banks is a constituent of mine who has a start-up business in Lancaster called Image Alchemy. It is highly innovative, as I saw when I visited him a couple of months ago. His potential for further growth is extremely high, and Lancaster university’s environment centre has recently “adopted” him, marking his business out as worthy of support. His new prototype system was an immediate hit at a recent German trade fair and a fair at the national exhibition centre in Birmingham, and order inquiries came pouring in. To get the system to production he needs to get finance, which could mean the immediate creation of five new jobs in the community.

Mr Banks has funded the new product with his own money, but he has struggled to access local and EU funding designed to help expand small start-ups such as his. The bureaucracy that he has encountered in seeking a small five-figure sum has bogged him down with repetitive form-filling, but the rewards if his expansion can be aided are potentially huge. The key point that I wish to underline is the small sum needed to get the company launched. We need to make it easier for such businesses to find funding, especially when the sums needed are so small.

Another example is a scheme called the fish park in Fleetwood. One of the plans for the regeneration of Fleetwood was to develop a sea and shellfish processing park, providing a new unit for the already resident company AM Seafoods and various other units for some 20 SMEs. The industry is already worth some £135 million and 660 jobs to the local economy, but the enhancement and modern premises could mean the addition of 150 new jobs in a town that needs private sector growth.

A partnership between Wyre borough council, Lancashire county council and AM Seafoods is in place, and the plan is to split the costs 50:50 between the private and public sector. The public sector amount required is £6 million. The point that I am trying to make is that the sums needed in areas outside the major areas of deprivation are quite small, but the resulting employment would be quite large. In my postbag and my surgeries, virtually every fortnight I hear of a new business, whether small or large—although the businesses in my area are not huge—that has the same problem. Through innovation or expanding on existing orders, they could provide the extra jobs that the economy needs, but at the moment there seems no way for them to get assistance with that growth, and certainly not from the banks.

I need to give the Minister time to reply. I should like him to reconsider regional stock exchanges, and I should like him to consider enterprise zones being part and parcel of every university campus, to enable universities to develop innovation. Most of all, I look for some assistance from the Government, or for them to put pressure on banks to provide that much-needed assistance, so that we get the growth we need.

Education Maintenance Allowance

David Morris Excerpts

Wednesday 19th January 2011 Commons Chamber

[David Morris (Morecambe and Lunesdale) (Con)]

Today we are debating a scheme introduced by the previous Government that has done some good for poorer students but is also wasteful and inefficient. We need to work out how to maintain and support poorer students while cutting overall costs. Sadly, this is a typical tale of the previous Government’s waste and the current Government having to mop up the mess.

Much of the discussion has been about access, but I firmly believe that raising the school-leaving age to 18 by 2015 will address the issue. I want to concentrate mainly on looking at how best we can give money to students in genuine need. The system currently costs £565 million a year, at a time when, we all accept, the Government are short of money. We cannot pay for everything, so we have to find savings. Of those receiving the allowance, 10% have parents earning more than £25,000 a year, and 47% of those in full-time education are claiming it. Are we saying that all those people need it?

The 18 October 2010 edition of The Observer reported on a Local Government Association report published that month suggesting that 90% of those claiming did not need that benefit. That means that only £56 million gets into the pockets of the poorest in our society, whereas we want to increase discretionary payments to £78 million by 2015.

[Karl Turner (Kingston upon Hull East) (Lab)]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

[David Morris]

No, I am short of time.

Under our proposals, poorer students in my constituency of Morecambe and Lunesdale will be better off, while we will save the taxpayer money. I thank the Secretary of State, who sadly is not here, for the £250,000 he recently put towards Morecambe college.

EMA was a typical Labour scatter-gun approach: some people benefit, but money is given to many who do not need it. Of course students oppose our proposals, but they aim to support the poor and not give money to everyone who wants it. We must put dogma to one side, as the right hon. Member for Bermondsey and Old Southwark (Simon Hughes) said, and sort this mess out where it counts. I believe that together we could do that constructively.

[Several hon. Members]

rose—

Schools White Paper

David Morris Excerpts

Wednesday 24th November 2010 Commons Chamber

[Michael Gove]

Yes, it means that instead of the performance tables that were used under the Labour Government, in which only English and maths and then any mixture of GCSEs were taken into account, we will, in future, have English, maths—[Interruption.] How many questions does the hon. Gentleman want to ask?

I think I made my view clear in my response to the right hon. Member for Leigh (Andy Burnham), but I am happy to have an opportunity to repeat it. I believe that it is wrong to assume that children from poorer backgrounds cannot pass GCSEs in modern foreign languages, science, history and geography. One of our problems in this country is that only 16% of young people achieve those five academic GCSEs, and only 4% of children eligible for free school meals do so. That is a scandal. The hon. Gentleman should be on our side: he should be trying to get the children in his constituency to learn, and to obtain the qualifications that will give them jobs in the future.

[David Morris (Morecambe and Lunesdale) (Con)]

I congratulate my right hon. Friend on his excellent White Paper. What measures does it contain to protect teachers from false allegations made by disruptive pupils?

[Michael Gove]

It was a pleasure to meet teachers in my hon. Friend’s constituency during the local election campaign two years ago. I know that they will welcome our proposals to ensure that investigations are speeded up when teachers face false allegations, and to ensure that they enjoy anonymity if such allegations are made. We will also tell head teachers that there should be no automatic suspension of teachers when they exercise legitimate authority in the classroom.