Small Business Exports

Debate between Jack Brereton and Gareth Snell

Wednesday 20th March 2019 Commons Chamber

[Jack Brereton]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for the points he has made, and I know the Department will be looking into these issues.

It is essential that we seek to open markets up, and the ambitious free trade agreements that the Department for International Trade will deliver are a key part of that. Indeed, what would be the point of delivering those free trade agreements if we did not have exporters eager to target and take advantage of them? I have read the Government’s export strategy, which is an excellent and comprehensive document—one that I am sure will be drawn on in the Minister’s reply, to the benefit of the House. It would be helpful for there to be an MP’s guide to signposting business to export support programmes, because that is certainly an issue that all colleagues will be keen to engage with at a constituency level.

[Gareth Snell (Stoke-on-Trent Central) (Lab/Co-op)]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for securing this debate. Like him, I understand the nature of exports, particularly in respect of cities such as Stoke-on-Trent. On the point about MPs’ support, will he join me in congratulating the Staffordshire chamber of commerce on the work it does through its export surgeries, where it helps businesses with the import and export paperwork and walks them through, step by step, with a hand-holding exercise that allows them to open up their own domestic products to the global market?

[Jack Brereton]

I thank my parliamentary neighbour for making that point. He is absolutely right about Staffordshire chamber of commerce, which offers some incredible, fantastic services for local businesses in Stoke-on-Trent and Staffordshire more widely. Many businesses would not be able to go without those services.

The strategy to which I just referred is subtitled “supporting and connecting businesses to grow on the world stage”. I am confident that that is the right ambition, and one challenge for us all in this House will be to ensure that our local businesses are connected to it. The Government promise that they will

“encourage and inspire businesses that can export but have not started or are just beginning; placing a particular focus on peer-to-peer learning…inform businesses by providing information, advice and practical assistance on exporting…connect UK businesses to overseas buyers, markets and each other, using our sector expertise and our networks in the UK and overseas”

and, finally,

“place finance at the heart of our offer”.

That is a positive statement to read, and it is in that spirit of positive engagement that I want to raise generally the remaining barriers to small-business exports.

Education Funding

Debate between Jack Brereton and Gareth Snell

Tuesday 13th November 2018 Commons Chamber

[Gareth Snell]

No, because that would take up time and I am sure there are plenty of others who wish to speak.

I cannot go into those schools and justify a tax cut for the wealthiest 10%, while at the same time my schools are going short of provisions. The £10,000 the Chancellor announced for little extras will not go towards closing their budget deficits or towards the provisions they need. It is a disgraceful attack on those schools and their resources.

The Education Secretary looks puzzled by that, but that is the policy of the Government he supports. When I speak to headteachers in my constituency I make it very clear that if they want to see real education funding reform they will not get it from this Government. The Government are simply trying to rig the system to support schools in their constituencies, while cities like mine suffer further. [Interruption.] The Education Secretary asks me what I suggest. What I am suggesting is what I have just said. The funding formula is being re-engineered to move provisions away from areas of deprivation, in cities such as Stoke-on-Trent, towards areas with lower levels of deprivation to placate the electorate in those areas. The hon. Member for South Suffolk said that he knows policies change depending on which electorate they need to placate. That is happening with school budgets. That is why Stoke-on-Trent schools will lose money, while schools in other parts of the country will gain money despite the fact that Stoke-on-Trent ranks 14th for deprivation. [Interruption.] The Parliamentary Private Secretary, the hon. Member for Stoke-on-Trent South (Jack Brereton), is shaking his head. He is an MP for the city I represent—

[Jack Brereton (Stoke-on-Trent South) (Con)]

indicated dissent.

[Gareth Snell]

It is true: he is an MP for the city I represent. [Laughter.] He will have sat in the same meetings as me, with the Stoke-on-Trent Association of School, College and Academy Leaders and the Stoke Heads and Principals Executive, while headteachers talked about the funding deficits they face. All I would say to the Government and the Secretary of State is this: please take up the baton for schools. Take up the requests from colleges and get more money out of the Treasury. At the moment, he is asleep on the job. The sooner he realises that he needs to stand up for schools the better.

UK Research Centre for Ceramics

Debate between Jack Brereton and Gareth Snell

Wednesday 21st February 2018 Commons Chamber

[Jack Brereton (Stoke-on-Trent South) (Con)]

I am grateful to have secured this debate. This is an exciting time for the manufacturing industry, and particularly so for ceramics. In raising a debate on the Adjournment, I follow in the footsteps of Ida Copeland, my illustrious Conservative predecessor as a Member for Stoke-on-Trent, who in the 1930s handed a trayful of ceramic ware around the Chamber and invited Members to guess which pieces were made authentically in Stoke-on-Trent and which were imported knock-offs.

I am sorry to say that I do not have a tray of chinaware for Members to inspect tonight, but that is because the goods I want to talk about have yet to be researched, designed, realised and put into production. It is also worth saying that not enough of the ceramics in our public buildings these days are actually made in Stoke-on-Trent.

It is true that British makers, our manufacturers, are leading the way in realising the new economic opportunities open to global Britain, with output and exports both on the rise. The Library informs me that the UK ceramics industry—in which I include the manufacture of refractory products and bricks, tiles and construction products in baked clay—contributed £824 million to our national economic output in 2016, up from £566 million in 2009. In real terms, the industry’s economic contribution has increased by 44% since 2009.

Meanwhile, according to the British Ceramics Confederation, the global market for ceramics totals more than $150 billion per annum. UK-based ceramics manufacturers’ exports have grown by 6% since 2011, to about £410 million in 2016. However, the BCC calculates that if the UK ceramics manufacturing sector is to maintain its share of the global market in the coming years, the industry’s sales must grow by 9% a year. Let me be clear: that is 9% growth just to stand still.

The sector’s ambition goes much further than just treading water in the international pool. It is confident that if we embrace the opportunities presented by the advance in technical ceramics, annual growth of 15% is possible, with an annual £1.5 billion of gross value added from ceramics possible by the mid-2020s. My ambition is to see £1 billion annual GVA from ceramics in Stoke-on-Trent alone.

[Gareth Snell (Stoke-on-Trent Central) (Lab/Co-op)]

I am very grateful to the hon. Gentleman for his reference to the excellent work that the BCC does. In that same vein, will he put it on record this evening that, when we leave the EU, he will be supporting the efforts that Labour Members will be making when the Taxation (Cross-border Trade) Bill comes back to this House to support the amendments coming from the BCC to protect those manufacturing bases from, as he says, cheap, knock-off imports?

[Jack Brereton]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for that point. I agree that there is a need to ensure that our industries are protected, and the Trade Bill and the customs Bill, which he cited, provide an opportunity to do that. I would like to see a continuation of measures that we have seen in the EU—a continuation of those trade remedies that would ensure that the ceramics industry continued to receive those protections.

I wish to set out two key arguments. The first is that a UK research centre for ceramics is a vital addition to global Britain. The second is that, obviously, such a research centre should reside in the global home of ceramics, Stoke-on-Trent. Why do we need a research centre? For thousands of years, ceramics have been valued for their unique properties of durability, strength and resistance to corrosion. Thanks to hundreds of years of technological advances in ceramics manufacture, we now, regrettably, take for granted the affordability and ubiquity of ceramic products.

Healthcare: North Staffordshire

Debate between Jack Brereton and Gareth Snell

Monday 23rd October 2017 Commons Chamber

[Gareth Snell]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. I could not agree more. As a former trade union official with Unison, I think the way the staff have been treated is simply unacceptable. It is also an additional cost burden. Staff have been made redundant at a cost to the clinical commissioning groups, which may find that the work they were doing is brought back into use if the consultation suggests the beds should exist. Again, I ask the Minister to provide some rationale as to why that is an effective use of public money in a healthcare system that we all agree is overspending and needs to find a way of closing its budget gap.

It is all too easy to point at Royal Stoke Hospital and say, “The hospital is the problem; fix the hospital and everything else will sort itself out”. That is partly true, but there are also issues around our capped expenditure programme. Over the next two years, Staffordshire is being asked to take £160 million out of its broader healthcare economy spending. A sustainability and transformation plan identified a deficit of almost half a billion pounds by 2022, yet the way to deal with that appears to be a disjointed approach to solving little problems in little areas without any reasonable thought about the way forward and how this can be redressed.

I go back to the community care beds. They provided a platform whereby people who were in an acute expensive setting could be discharged, at a point of being considered medically fit for discharge, to a provision that was designed to give them the care they needed before they transitioned to their home, a private care provider or a council-run care facility. That allowed them to make the change without the prospect of them re-presenting, at the expense of the acute system, because they had been discharged too quickly. Again, this is money circulating around a system that is identifiable as waste in many people’s considerations of what waste is, while at the same time it is being manufactured by the decisions of the CCG.

The CCG’s decision on community care beds was referred to the Minister under paragraph 29(6) of the 2013 regulation almost a year ago. Letters from myself and my hon. Friend the Member for Stoke-on-Trent North (Ruth Smeeth), which were countersigned by my hon. Friend the Member for Newcastle-under-Lyme (Paul Farrelly), Baroness Golding and the former Member for Stoke-on-Trent South, Mr Flello, have gone unanswered. I have raised the issue here as a point of order and at business questions, and I have asked the Secretary of State directly when we will get that response, but to date we still have had none. That is almost a year of referrals from the two tier 1 authorities and of unanswered parliamentary requests. It is creating an unacceptable level of uncertainty in the economics of the health service in Staffordshire.

[Jack Brereton (Stoke-on-Trent South) (Con)]

I recognise that there are significant financial challenges, particularly around the hospital, but North Staffordshire Combined Healthcare NHS Trust, for example, has made significant improvements in the wider health economy. Does the hon. Gentleman agree that the main financial challenges are with the hospital and that, if we can address those, we can help the wider health economy?

[Gareth Snell]

The hon. Gentleman, like me, wants the best for the constituents of Stoke-on-Trent, but it is far too easy simply to blame the hospital for our wider concerns about the health economy in Stoke-on-Trent and north Staffordshire. He is right about the combined trust making great headway—for example, in dealing with mental health—but he, like me, will still have people coming to his surgery to complain that they have to wait four, five or six months for a referral to the child and mental health adolescent support team; that they ring the access and crisis number and it rings out; or that they have been unable to find a bed with a mental healthcare provider. In Staffordshire, the latter is virtually impossible; in the west midlands, possibly slightly easier. Either way, this is a national issue that is not being addressed and which is not of the making of the hospital in Stoke-on-Trent.

To take the hon. Gentleman’s point slightly further, the CCG in north Staffordshire currently has a programme of slashing and burning all those support services and peripheral services that keep people from having to go to hospital in the first place. There is now no support for drug and alcohol services as a result of decisions by county councils, city councils and the CCG. Previously, these people were not presenting with acute problems in hospitals, but they now have no recourse to support and will end up presenting in A&E, in expensive treatment centres, getting the wrong sort of help for their conditions.

Independent support services in north Staffordshire for people presenting in hospital due to domestic violence are also being looked at and could be lost. The north Staffordshire users group, which recently changed its name to Voice, has had all its funding withdrawn by the CCG, meaning that people with mental health conditions can no longer advocate or receive support to advocate for the help and support they need. Again, that will compound the situation in our acute setting, but small, lower cost interventions from the community or the third sector could have prevented such people presenting.

Furthermore—I know this is not unique to north Staffordshire—the social care system in Staffordshire is a problem, not least because getting people out of hospital into social care is a problem. The Royal Stoke, Stoke-on-Trent City Council and Staffordshire County Council routinely have unacceptable wait times in hospital, and more and more people are having temporary arrangements put in place and having their care packages changed while they are being delivered, which we all accept is not good for patients, for providers or for our overall health economy, because every change will cost money.

I know that the Minister has received numerous substantive briefings from healthcare providers across north Staffordshire—I know that mainly because they have told me and partly because I would not tell them what I was going to say today so they had to cover a multitude of areas. To save the Minister having to regurgitate facts already shared with MPs, I have prepared what I hope are simple questions which, if he can answer them, will provide us with an opportunity to move the debate forward. Everybody, irrespective of party politics, wants to move forward. We want a hospital that has the funding it needs; community care provision that meets the needs of people in our communities; a mental health system that not only responds to people when they hit crisis point, but actively works with them to ensure they do not get to crisis point in the first place; and a social care system that allows people who need care at home to receive it.

Will the Minister commit himself to providing a full response to the community care bed referrals from Staffordshire County Council and Stoke-on-Trent City Council, and respond to the letters from the Members whom I mentioned earlier? Will he do that as a matter of courtesy, if nothing else, even if his response is “We are rejecting the referrals”? At present those beds are mothballed, and the consultation is being rerun. The Minister has an opportunity to ensure that 168 community care beds are returned to our health economy this winter, which would significantly reduce pressures on A&E departments.

I ask the Minister to use whatever powers he has to intervene between the University Hospital of North Midlands Trust and the clinical commissioning groups to ensure that the £10 million of fines are waived, because they constitute the difference between our hospital’s getting through the next 12 months and its crawling through the next 12 months on its knees. It does not make financial sense to penalise a hospital further for not meeting targets that it has struggled to meet because of its funding crisis. That is perverse economics by anyone’s standards.

I should be grateful if the Minister would guarantee that the £9.9 million from the Department of Health and the £14.9 million from NHS England which were promised to Royal Stoke University Hospital so that it could cope with taking on the responsibilities and, dare I say, the burdens of the county hospital for a short time as part of the trust special administrator model will be handed over to Staffordshire as a matter of urgency. That money is already budgeted for in Royal Stoke’s plans, and is part of the amount that would enable it to reduce its deficit from £119 million to £69 million. Without it, we shall face a winter of absolute crisis.

Would the Minister consider convening a meeting to reassess the 2018-19 and 2019-20 cost improvement programme figures of £35 million each? Asking the hospital to take a further £70 million out of its operating budgets over the next two years is akin to asking someone with no money to pay a huge fine. It will just rack up more debt, and will end up being fined for not meeting its financial targets and fined further for not meeting its medical targets. This is a vicious and horrible circle, and I hope that, if the Minister cannot do so himself, the Secretary of State will use his powers to halt it so that we can have a little breathing space in which to try to solve the problems in our hospital.

Will the Minister intervene to ensure that the £19.5 million that is owed to Staffordshire County Council for the better care fund to help relieve the pressure on local authorities that are trying to deliver social care can be handed over? NHS England should have handed over that money, but it has not done so, and the delay has caused the better care fund to have a deficit. If the money is released, the assessment programme that was meant to alleviate some of the hospital’s problems with discharging may be able to continue, but without it we shall be storing up problems for the future.

My next request involves a personal interest. As I am sure the Minister will know from his briefings, Staffordshire was a pilot area for a cancer care contract undertaken by Marcus Warnes of the CCG. The CCG hoped to procure a provider to deliver cancer care services, and £890,000 of public money was spent to that end—including staff time, the total came to nearly £3 million—only for the contract never to be let, and the process to be aborted. I appreciate that we cannot go back in time and rewrite the process, but what we can do is learn the lessons from Staffordshire to ensure that no other CCGs go through such an appalling and bungled procedure that wastes taxpayers’ money. I should be grateful if the Minister would consider convening a meeting that would enable us to learn the lessons and share them with other CCGs so that we, and they, do not make the same mistakes in the future.

Let me end on a convivial note. Nearly 18 months ago my predecessor, Mr Tristram Hunt, invited the Secretary of State to visit the hospital. During the by-election that I fought in February, the Secretary of State came to Stoke-on-Trent, but did not go to the hospital. On my own behalf and that of my hon. Friend and neighbour the Member for Stoke-on-Trent North (Ruth Smeeth), I invite the Minister, or one of his colleagues, to come to Stoke-on-Trent, not so that we can have a stand-up row about the future of our hospital, but so that we can actually start the process of healing it. No one in Staffordshire wants to see our hospital fail, but we are currently walking down that road blindfolded.

All I ask is for the Minister to address the seven simple questions that I have put to him, and if he were to take up the offer to visit us, he would be most welcome.