Budget Resolutions

George Howarth Excerpts

Monday 13th March 2017 Commons Chamber

[Boris Johnson]

My hon. Friend speaks with great wisdom and authority. I know that the Foreign Affairs Committee, which he chairs, has made some useful recommendations on how we can maximise our overseas spending, and co-ordinate it so that it helps to deliver not only our security but our economic objectives. I totally accept that point.

In the pursuit of the system that we want to see, our diplomats and intelligence officers and our serving men and women, backed up by the Department for International Development, are striving every day to preserve the essentials of the rule-based order, thereby helping to protect jobs and the safety of our constituents here in the United Kingdom.

[Mr George Howarth (Knowsley) (Lab)]

Will the Foreign Secretary give way?

[Boris Johnson]

Let me just conclude my thought about trade. Back in 1990, about 37% of our fellow human beings world wide lived in absolute poverty. Today, that figure has fallen to less than 10%, which is all the more remarkable when we consider that the world population has risen by 1.8 billion in the interim. That dramatic fall in poverty, unparalleled in history, coincided with the biggest expansion of free trade and open markets that the world has ever seen. Conservative Members believe in that policy implicitly.

[Mr Howarth]

rose—

[Boris Johnson]

I think that the right hon. Member for Knowsley (Mr Howarth) will agree with me when I say that the rules-based international order which we uphold in global Britain is an overwhelming benefit for the world as a whole.

[Mr Howarth]

Of course I agree with the Foreign Secretary. It is just a pity that on some occasions he does not seem to project that view when he travels abroad—but that is another problem.

A moment ago, when my hon. Friend the Member for Ilford South (Mike Gapes) asked him some questions, the Foreign Secretary dismissed them as ignorant. When the Chair of the Foreign Affairs Committee, the hon. Member for Reigate (Crispin Blunt), asked him exactly the same questions, he agreed with his hon. Friend. He cannot be right in both cases.

[Boris Johnson]

With great trepidation, I must correct the right hon. Gentleman. We travelled abroad together and both spoke the same sort of language at the time. Alas, the hon. Member for Ilford South (Mike Gapes) revealed the profoundest misunderstanding—let me put it no higher than that—of the exact state of the British Council’s finances. That was regrettable and worth correcting.

Thanks to my right hon. Friend the Chancellor, we are able to continue to support an active global Britain through the Budget, but there is of course much more to be done. Once we leave the EU, the Government will—we will all—regain a power that this country has not been able to deploy for 44 years, and that is the ability to conclude free trade agreements. The first and most important of those deals will be with our friends and partners in the EU. As the Prime Minister has repeatedly said, we are leaving the EU but we are not leaving Europe. To those who seriously doubt that we can pull it off in the next two years, let me remind them of the most essential point—that deal is profoundly in the interests of our friends and partners on the other side of the channel, who have a massive net balance of trade with us. They are optimistic. They are determined. I sometimes wish that we could have a little more of the same spirit from the Labour party.

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[Mr George Howarth (Knowsley) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Tiverton and Honiton (Neil Parish), He described the health and social care crisis in his constituency as “a little local difficulty”. It is a funny that “a little local difficulty” seems to affect every constituency in the country.

I want to deal with three Budget issues as they affect my constituency. The first is school funding. Teachers’ unions contacted me recently to express—rightly—concerns about funding cuts. Over the next few years, such cuts will have a considerable impact on schools in Knowsley, and the council predicts, as a result, a significant rise in the number of schools that will go into deficit or, in some cases, be forced either to merge or to close.

The Government’s decision to cut school funding while preparing to spend money on creating additional places in grammar schools and offering schools incentives to become academies is counterproductive, certainly in Knowsley. The Government’s policy will do nothing to deal with deprivation in Knowsley, or with the challenges posed by its above-average number of pupils on free school meals and high levels of absenteeism: that simply is not going to happen. The Department for Education has confirmed that there will be no inflationary increase in Knowsley’s dedicated schools grant for 2017-18. This will be the seventh consecutive year with no inflationary increase. If the grant had been increased by the average rate of inflation over that period, it would have grown by about 20%, so there has been a significant real-terms cut in school funding.

Training is one of the key drivers for long-term increased economic growth. It is also critical to ensuring that young entrants to the labour market are properly prepared for the opportunities for skilled people that a modern economy can offer. In some cases, however, skill training alone is not an option. Employers whom I speak to in Knowsley often cite another problem: young people who are ill prepared for any form of employment. The reasons for that vary from case to case. In some cases it results from challenging family circumstances, in others from poor attendance, or non-attendance, at school. There are projects—such as Knowsley Skills Academy, a charity that I chair—which can help by providing a structured framework that helps to address those problems, but it is increasingly difficult to fund such approaches, although they are overwhelmingly successful in putting young people back on track.

Having been an engineering apprentice originally, and having taught in further education, I know that skill training should be straightforward. Under successive Governments, however, we have succeeded in over-complicating the process, at best focusing on the names of technical qualifications, and at worst passing off tick-box training as a substitute for the classroom and the workplace. Calling something an apprenticeship is entirely different from actually providing apprenticeship training worthy of the name. The key, which will benefit our economy, is providing skills that are transferable, and not just relevant to a single workplace. That can be achieved only by day release to colleges that can provide transferable skills that are both valued and recognised. If the Government are serious about meeting the economic challenges of the future through training programmes, they need to engage in a radical rethink about skill training.

The second issue is health and social care. Chronic underfunding and increased cuts in local government budgets have created a health and social care crisis. The supplementary funding through the improved better care fund—in Knowsley’s case, it amounts to just under £9 million over three years—is completely inadequate to cover the needs of local residents appropriately. A large proportion of that extra money will be taken up solely by the cost of implementing the national living wage. Lack of resources threatens the financial stability of care homes at a time when they are badly needed.

Finally, Government cuts in local government grant funding have meant that Knowsley has had to save £86 million since 2010, with another £14 million needed over the next three years. Knowsley will have reduced its spending on key local services by £100 million between 2010 and 2020. The funding provided by central Government will have been cut by 50% by 2020. In Knowsley, it is simply not possible to generate enough funds to cover that, so this is a Budget that is unfair to schools, those who need social care, local authorities and those who depend on their services.