Making Britain the Best Place to Grow Up and Grow Old

David Simmonds Excerpts

Monday 16th May 2022 Commons Chamber

[David Simmonds (Ruislip, Northwood and Pinner) (Con)]

The Queen’s Speech contains a wealth of proposals that broadly fall between how we best support the vast majority of our people for whom things such as state-funded education and state-funded healthcare are important, and how we support and focus on those who need the intervention of the state to thrive.

I echo my hon. Friend the Member for Harrow East (Bob Blackman) in congratulating our colleagues, the re-elected leader of Hillingdon Council, Ian Edwards, and the newly elected leader of Harrow Council, Paul Osborn. Local government is often the vehicle through which the state supports both the most vulnerable and our communities, which is the theme I hope to develop in my brief contribution tonight.

I commend Ministers for their work on special educational needs and disabilities in the Schools Bill. I know they spend a lot of time engaging with people across the sector, and it is clear to us all that, if we are to make sure that every child has the chance to thrive, a change is urgently required. Despite the welcome reforms that have been introduced, the system remains enormously challenged.

The Schools Bill will also begin to create a more level playing field between different types of schools, and it offers an opportunity to ensure that state-funded education gives every child in England the best start in life. This will be debated, but I particularly welcome the Government’s proposals to enable local authorities to set up multi-academy trusts. Research by the Local Government Association, based on previous research by organisations such as Watchsted, shows that there remains a significant advantage for maintained schools and that local authorities remain more effective than academy trusts in improving the attainment of struggling schools. We need to make sure we can harness that to the best advantage of all our communities.

My hon. Friend the Member for Bromley and Chislehurst (Sir Robert Neill) spoke about the importance of the human rights review. As a member of the Joint Committee on Human Rights, I have heard a lot of representations on the review over the past few months. It is very important that we get it right and that we reflect the need to update our human rights legislation to take account of, for example, the growing impact of the online world on how people live their lives, but I echo the concerns about ensuring that we do not displace the problem by sending cases to Strasbourg that we could more effectively deal with at UK level.

For many aspects of our economy, education, local government and healthcare, we need to recognise that the trend of working from home has been embraced by the most productive, most efficient and most profitable parts of our economy, particularly in professional services. We can help the money we spend on taxpayer-funded services go even further by making sure that people who can work from home most efficiently do so, while making sure that those who need to be in the office to provide frontline face-to-face public services are where they are required.

It is important the House recognises that for the local authority with the greatest proportion of residents accessing some form of social care, at any stage of their life’s journey, the figure is less than one in five residents, but those residents are often the most vulnerable. Ministers in the Department for Education have been considering how to review and improve our children’s social care system and update safeguarding to reflect the challenges of the modern world. I urge them to look at the Crocker review of private equity, which considers the cost of providing children’s social care, and I hope they will find time to answer the call from the Children’s Commissioner that England should follow Wales and Scotland in abolishing the reasonable chastisement defence in respect of the disciplining of children.

Finally, on growing old, I encourage the Government to look in all their endeavours at a public health approach to ageing, so that we consider how local authorities can encourage activity such as walking football, bowls and swimming to keep our older citizens active. There is so much potential to show our pride in our communities and our ambition for them. The public will find much of that on the Conservative Benches tonight.