Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between James Daly and Greg Smith

Monday 17th April 2023 Commons Chamber

[James Daly (Bury North) (Con)]

12. What steps her Department is taking to increase early years provision. [R]

[Greg Smith (Buckingham) (Con)]

16. What steps her Department is taking to increase early years provision.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Education (Claire Coutinho)]

We are removing one of the biggest barriers to parents working by vastly increasing the amount of free childcare that working families can access. By 2027-28, we expect to be spending in excess of £8 billion every year on free hours and early education, helping working families with their childcare costs.

Employment Relations (Flexible Working) Bill

Debate between James Daly and Greg Smith

3rd reading
Friday 24th February 2023 Commons Chamber

[Greg Smith]

As ever, my hon. Friend puts it far more eloquently than I could. He has hit the nail on the head, certainly on the seasonal aspect of some businesses and the changing times that we have all seen, not just through the pandemic but in recent years. If we want to have the most dynamic, growing, buoyant economy, we have to ensure that the paths into employment and by which people hold down employment—seasonal, permanent or whatever it might be—are allowed for in regulation. It is important that we do not dictate too firmly to businesses how they must go about their practices, but we must ensure that they are fair and open with their employees, so that nobody feels left behind, unable to enter the workplace or held back in some other way.

Indeed, that principle goes beyond business and into the public sector. To back up an argument I made a few moments ago, I am a member of the Transport Committee, which has looked at the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency and the Driver and Vehicle Standards Agency. All right hon. and hon. Members probably grappled with delays in the issuance of driving licences and heard nightmare stories from their constituents. One of the causes of those delays, stemming from the pandemic, was the inability of DVLA staff to access the weight of documents that people had posted to Swansea and to process them from home.

[James Daly]

This is a multidimensional issue, but my hon. Friend has put his finger on a real problem that we have to address and to be honest about. Productivity is the blight of the British economy and, as my hon. Friend rightly says, we must do everything we can as a Parliament to ensure that people can access careers. If somebody on flexible working in the private sector is not working to a high standard, that business will go bankrupt. What is my hon. Friend’s view on productivity in the state sector and these working requirements?

[Greg Smith]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for that intervention. As we look at this legislation, it is important that we do not just think about it through the lens of the private sector, but talk about public sector jobs as well.

I can only highlight the point I made a few moments ago about the challenges involved in getting driving licences issued in the time that our constituents wanted them to be issued. The problem in that example was an inability to do the job from home. Not only had the original documents been posted as good old-fashioned snail mail to Swansea; even when staff in the office scanned those documents and transferred them to a digital format, so that other staff could process them and judge whether a driving licence could be issued, the files were so enormous that they were not necessarily able to get through to the person working from home. We have to ensure that productivity is included in this debate. As others have said, certain jobs simply cannot be done from home. The technology is not necessarily there for absolutely everyone to receive hundreds of megabytes and gigabytes of data in order to do their job, so I very much agree with my hon. Friend the Member for Bury North.

To conclude, Madam Deputy Speaker—

Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between James Daly and Greg Smith

Wednesday 9th March 2022 Commons Chamber

[Greg Smith (Buckingham) (Con)]

3. What steps his Department is taking to promote trade and investment in Northern Ireland.

[James Daly (Bury North) (Con)]

5. What steps his Department is taking to promote trade and investment in Northern Ireland.