First Aid Techniques: National Curriculum

Debate between Heather Wheeler and Russell Brown

Tuesday 10th March 2015 Westminster Hall

[Heather Wheeler (South Derbyshire) (Con)]

I congratulate the hon. Member for Bolton West (Julie Hilling) on securing the debate. It is a pleasure to be here today. We have followed this debate and issue for quite some time. Defibrillators have been popping up around village halls, swimming pools, leisure centres and gyms across the whole of the South Derbyshire constituency very much as a charitable, volunteer arrangement. Similarly, when the British Heart Foundation really kicked on with this campaign and made the offer of kit to schools, I, as a good constituency MP, wrote to all my local schools and colleges about having the equipment put in, and I am delighted to say that the William Allitt school, High Grange school, the Pingle school, Foremarke school and Granville sports college took up that offer. I have been into the Pingle school and been with the children as they were having one of their lessons, pumping up and down on the dummy. Obviously, people can imagine which face I was imagining as I was doing that—there are people we want to keep and people we perhaps do not want to keep—but it was a pleasure to be there with those children. Would the hon. Member for Dumfries and Galloway (Mr Brown) like to intervene?

[Mr Russell Brown (Dumfries and Galloway) (Lab)]

No, no.

[Heather Wheeler]

The hon. Gentleman was just wondering who I was thinking of. That is fine.

What I find fascinating is that there is no pushback—no pun intended—from the children. The children want to do this training.

Again, as an MP campaigning about issues that are important to people in South Derbyshire, I have written to my hon. Friend the Minister and we have spoken about this issue. Our local St John Ambulance is keen on it, the children are keen on it and the schools are proud of what they are doing. Village hall committees are helping to organise the defibrillators in their areas. There is support from county councillors, such as Linda Chilton in the Melbourne area, which helped to pay for one of the defibrillators. There is a huge groundswell of support. I genuinely believe that the time is right for Ministers to accept that it is a good idea, and to accept that there is an opportunity, perhaps after May, to put such skills on the curriculum. We are rolling out citizenship classes and making sure that older children understand the importance of politics and democracy. Only one thing is more important than politics and democracy, and that is living and breathing. I hope that the Minister takes on board all the comments from everybody in the Chamber, and I again congratulate the hon. Member for Bolton West on ensuring that the debate is alive and kicking today.

National Minimum Wage

Debate between Heather Wheeler and Russell Brown

Wednesday 15th October 2014 Commons Chamber

[Heather Wheeler]

I will have some difficulty in accepting that. The point is that 1 million fewer people are unemployed. There are more people in employment now than ever before. There are more women employed than ever before. I want people to understand that getting a job and looking after their family is their No.1 priority, and that is happening.

Obviously, I have looked at the statistics for South Derbyshire. Fewer than 7% of workers in South Derbyshire are on the minimum wage. That is because we have made a real effort to get manufacturing in South Derbyshire and to get a supply chain for the manufacturers. We have made a real effort to get apprenticeship training schools in South Derbyshire. We have worked like—let me find a nice phrase for this. We have worked very hard to ensure that people do not just say, “Do you know what, I do that because my dad and my grandfather used to do that.” It is about lifting horizons.

I totally agree that we need all our public services to ensure that we have clean streets, bins that are emptied and street lights that stay on. People should understand the value of working. I find it so depressing that all we ever get from Labour is this business of layering on regulation and doom and gloom. The right ideas that we heard at conference include raising the tax threshold to £12,500. The horizon of my hon. Friend the Member for Elmet and Rothwell (Alec Shelbrooke) is to raise it to more than £14,000. We are not talking about people being grateful that we are only going to tax them at 10%. We want everybody lifted up out of that level. It is outrageous that people should even contemplate that that might be in a Labour manifesto.

[Mr Russell Brown]

I know I am about to make a contribution after the hon. Lady, but let me make this point. There are people who are not working enough hours to come anywhere close to paying income tax. The people who really benefit from what the coalition Government are doing are she and I and everyone else on high salaries. We benefit from increasing the personal allowance. Some people do not even earn half of that personal allowance a month.

[Heather Wheeler]

I completely accept the hon. Gentleman’s point of view and it is completely fair to say that people who were unemployed are now working a few hours, but I remember the great outcry about changing working hours from 16 to 20. There was massive outcry and we were told that it would never happen, but I have not had a single constituent come to me to tell me that they are worse off because they are now working 20 hours or because they are working towards those 20 hours. I think that things have changed.

Fuel Prices

Debate between Heather Wheeler and Russell Brown

Tuesday 15th November 2011 Commons Chamber

[Mr Russell Brown (Dumfries and Galloway) (Lab)]

I too want to thank the hon. Member for Harlow (Robert Halfon) for securing the debate today. Like many others in the House, I have received a multitude of e-mails supporting the FairFuelUK campaign. Expectations in my constituency and right across the country are very high indeed, and I think that some people are expecting fuel prices to fall at 7 o’clock this evening, on the back of this debate. That is not going to happen, however, and I have had to make my constituents aware that the wording of the motion will not provide a quick fix to the problems that they are facing.

Let me quickly raise one or two issues. Crude oil today is less than $115 a barrel; in 2008, oil was $147 a barrel. We have to ask about market speculation and what it is doing to the price of fuel and thus to our constituents. Like others who have spoken this afternoon, I represent a rural area, where people often have off-grid heating. That means they suffer more, not just from having to fill up their vehicles.

[Heather Wheeler (South Derbyshire) (Con)]

Do people in the hon. Gentleman’s constituency suffer as we do in South Derbyshire from fuel thefts, which are common in rural areas? This applies to heating oil in particular, but transport companies also have their stocks of oil stolen regularly, and yet the police do not seem to be able to trace them.

[Mr Brown]

Dumfries and Galloway constabulary is first class at tracking and tracing thieves. The hon. Lady is absolutely right. We often face this situation when the value of the product rises and people try to steal heating oil and all the rest of it. People have to heat their homes, whether it be with heating oil or liquefied petroleum gas, and they also have to use their vehicles. In some locations, there is no other form of transport whatever. For some, there is a bus until 5 or 6 o’clock in the evening, which can be very difficult when people need to travel a distance to visit other family members or friends in hospital. A car is thus an absolute necessity for many households.

We are seeing price differentials and we are certainly seeing them with some supermarkets. I am not going to name the supermarkets on this occasion, as the last time I mentioned just the word “supermarkets”, two or three of them were quick to write to me to express their anger. Supermarkets drive the price in our local communities: prices tend to fix around what local supermarkets are bidding from their customers.

Here we are getting towards the back end of the year and we see another price differential between diesel and unleaded petrol. The difference has gone up from what it was in the late summer—about 2p or 3p a litre—to up to 6p, 7p or 8p a litre today. I recognise that lies partly with the refineries, but surely in this day and age more investment should be forthcoming so that the price differential does not create an even greater problem for those who have decided to drive diesel vehicles.