A Brighter Future for the Next Generation

Jonathan Gullis Excerpts

Thursday 13th May 2021 Commons Chamber

[Kate Green]

I am very grateful to the hon. Member for enabling me to be able to put on record in this House my regret for those remarks. They were inappropriate and insensitive and will have been offensive to people who have suffered terribly in this pandemic, including those who have been bereaved and lost those that they loved and will be missing terribly. I should not to have used those remarks, and I thank him for giving me the opportunity to put that on record in this Chamber.

If we are to seize this generational moment and deliver the fair, low-carbon recovery that we need to tackle the climate crisis, which is imperative if we are truly to pass on a bright future to the next generation, many people will need to retrain in new industries as old jobs disappear, as the Secretary of State said. But in the Queen’s Speech and in his remarks just a few moments ago, all that the Secretary of State could announce was a months-old commitment to a lifetime skills guarantee that simply is not guaranteed for everyone. It is not guaranteed because people cannot use it if they are already qualified to level 3; they cannot use it unless they are getting a qualification that the Secretary of State has decided he thinks is valuable; and they cannot use it if they need maintenance support while they are learning. If they are already qualified to level 3 in their existing field but need to retrain for a new industry, there is nothing on offer for them. Ministers have chosen to close the door on millions of people who need to retrain, and who need to do so now. I am at a loss to understand the Secretary of State’s position on this. Can he tell the House why a promised guarantee will not in fact be available to some of those who will need it most?

On maintenance funding, we are awaiting Ministers’ response to the Government’s Augar review, which is now over two years old. Augar said that those in further education should receive the same maintenance support as those in higher education. Does the Secretary of State agree with that proposal? If he does, why is it absent from the Queen’s Speech? While everyone will agree that employers have a central role in creating jobs and training opportunities for young people, they do so in the context of local economic and regeneration strategies driven by metro Mayors and local leaders, who seem to have been sidelined in the creation of the local skills plans and with the Government having abandoned a national industrial strategy.

After a decade of Conservative damage to the sector, I desperately want the Government to get skills policy right. Labour believes in a high-skill, high-wage economy that offers fulfilling, rewarding work and jobs in which people will take great pride. That is why, for years, I and my colleagues in the Labour party, including my right hon. and learned Friend the Leader of the Opposition in his speech opening the debate on the Loyal Address on Tuesday and my right hon. Friend the Member for Ashton-under-Lyne (Angela Rayner) during her time as Shadow Secretary of State for Education, have championed lifelong learning, further education and all those who learn and teach in this sector.

In contrast, in a startling, if only partial, conversion in the Conservative party after a decade spent in power, including times when the Education Secretary and the Prime Minister sat around the Cabinet table and nodded through cuts to further education and a loan-based funding model that, by the Government’s own admission, directly reduced the number of adults in education, we have reforms that offer, at best, a mere reversal of some of the worst excesses of Conservative ideology over the past decade. It is a desperate attempt to polish the windows, having taken a sledgehammer to the foundations.

[Jonathan Gullis (Stoke-on-Trent North) (Con)]

The hon. Lady will know that I was a school teacher who started in 2011, just after the Conservatives took power. I want to remind her of the situation that I, as a teacher, inherited on the frontline. Between 2000 and 2009, England fell from seventh to 25th in reading, eighth to 28th in maths and fourth to 16th in science in international league tables. In addition, we had 350,000 young people aged 16 to 19 who, according to the independent Wolf review, received little to no benefit from the post-16 education system, which provided students with a diet of low-level vocational qualifications—[Interruption.] It is interesting that the hon. Member for Hove (Peter Kyle) is angry that a former teacher is speaking about education; I am interested to hear what he knows better than I. Is the hon. Member for Stretford and Urmston (Kate Green) proud of the record of the Labour party in that decade?

[Kate Green]

We should never accept less than the highest standards for young people in this country. I will compromise with nobody on being ambitious to deliver a world-class education and achieve world-class standards for our young people, but let me remind the hon. Gentleman of the progress that we made under Labour between 1997 and 2010. In London, for example, we massively narrowed the gap in attainment. Will he acknowledge that what we are seeing now, under his party’s Government, is the attainment gap once again widening? Our young people deserve better than that.

There are so many measures that I believe the Government could and should have included in the Queen’s Speech. Ministers could have gone beyond the platitudes on early years that we heard a few minutes ago and set out a plan to reverse the damage their decade of cuts has produced and to ensure affordable, accessible, high-quality early years education and childcare for all children. They could have set out how they will transform the national tutoring programme, creating the space for children to socialise and recover the time they need to develop and grow, and ensuring that no child loses out because of the damage that Ministers’ failure to manage the pandemic has created. They could have addressed the horrifying rise in child poverty—not mentioned once in the Queen’s Speech, although it is the driving cause of the widening attainment gap. They could have ensured that education professionals’ and school and college leaders’ expertise and hard work during the pandemic were recognised with a fair pay rise.

Instead, the Secretary of State has decided that it is more important to focus on free speech on university campuses. Free speech and academic freedom are important, but suggesting that we should use up valuable legislative time while the employment Bill has been quietly dropped and while, nearly two years after the Prime Minister stood on the steps of Downing Street telling us that he had plans for social care ready to go, nothing has appeared, will make people up and down the country think that this is the wrong priority.

--- Later in debate ---

[Jonathan Gullis (Stoke-on-Trent North) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Coatbridge, Chryston and Bellshill (Steven Bonnar). I am sure he is much more fun over a beer than he is in the Chamber right now, and I look forward to enjoying one with him next week, as we reopen.

Areas such as Stoke-on-Trent, Kidsgrove and Talke had been forgotten, but this Queen’s Speech reaffirms that, under this Prime Minister, we are delivering on the people’s priorities and levelling up our United Kingdom. Like the geothermal potential that lies beneath the Potteries waiting to be unleashed in the green industrial revolution, Stoke-on-Trent is a hotbed of potential and talent. For levelling up to mean something in Stoke-on-Trent, Kidsgrove and Talke, we need to make sure that people can get access to the skills they need and the opportunities to use them.

As a teacher, I saw the impact a good education can have, but, sadly, Stoke-on-Trent currently has one the lowest take-up rates of level 3 and 4 qualifications in the country, with too many children not reaching their full potential. So the introduction of the skills and post-16 education Bill and the new lifetime skills guarantee is transformative, offering access to skills across the country that will allow people to reskill or upskill for the jobs of the future.

While education is crucial to levelling up, so too is the opportunity to access high-skilled and well-paid jobs in our local area. That is why I continue to campaign for the Home Office to make its second home in Stoke-on-Trent as part of the Places for Growth programme. I hope my right hon. Friend the Home Secretary, a Keele University graduate and former Stoke-on-Trent resident, will hear my calls once again this afternoon and deliver for her adopted city.

We can also deliver jobs through the fantastic Advanced Research and Invention Agency Bill in this Queen’s Speech. The new agency ties in neatly with the campaign of Lucideon’s chief executive, Tony Kinsella, whose global headquarters is based in Stoke-on-Trent, for £36 million of Government investment in an advanced ceramics campus, which would unlock £150 million of private investment and create up to 4,200 jobs. This campaign is being led by my hon. Friend the Member for Stoke-on-Trent Central (Jo Gideon), with the full support of my hon. Friend the Member for Stoke-on-Trent South (Jack Brereton) and me.

This Government are also investing millions in previously forgotten towns through the levelling-up fund and the towns deal fund, creating new jobs—all in the name of levelling up. Under a Conservative Staffordshire County Council, Conservative-led Newcastle-under-Lyme Borough Council and a Conservative Chancellor, we have managed to secure £7 million of funding collectively, which will see this important community asset revived in 2022. In total, the £17.6 million towns deal fund for Kidsgrove is unlocking the opportunity to regenerate our high street, upgrade our railway station, create up to 2,000 new jobs at the Chatterley Valley site and invest in activities for young people, such as the 3G astro pitches at the King’s School or the soon-to-be completed pump track at Chinky Park. That is in comparison with when Labour ran Newcastle-under-Lyme Borough Council from 2012 to 2018, when it spent the grand sum of £15,000 over six years. It is a Conservative Government, a Conservative county council and a Conservative borough council—all of them are blue—that are delivering for local people.

In the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill, again we have legislation that delivers on what the people of Stoke-on-Trent North, Kidsgrove and Talke want—tougher sentences for child murderers, tougher sentences for the sex offenders, tougher sentences for the killer drivers, tougher sentences for drug dealers and tougher sentences for knife carriers. It also adopts the private Member’s Bill brought forward by me and my hon. Friend the Member for Bracknell (James Sunderland), introduced almost 12 months ago, which creates a distinct offence and punishment for anyone who desecrates war memorials and war graves to our glorious dead. How anyone can object to this baffles me, and I hope Opposition Members will have seen the recent local elections as a wake-up call and will now back the Home Secretary in passing this vital piece of legislation. I also hope that they will recognise that people want us to sort out the immigration system, and that they will back my right hon. Friend the Home Secretary as she brings forward the new sovereign borders Bill. This legislation is positive, long overdue and important to the people of Stoke-on-Trent North, Kidsgrove and Talke.

What I have mentioned today is only a snapshot of a bold and ambitious domestic agenda. It is therefore a shame that the Labour party has adopted such a negative attitude to this Queen’s Speech, but it is not a surprise. The Labour party is simply a party that represents the views and opinions of the few, not the many. In jest, I described it on BBC Radio Stoke as having become the party for the avocado-eating, chai latte-drinking elites, but I think that the hon. Member for Birmingham, Perry Barr (Mr Mahmood) was much more succinct when he tweeted that the Labour party had become a

“London-based bourgeoisie, with the support of brigades of woke social media warriors”.

That is no better evidenced than by the former Labour leader of Amber Valley Borough Council, Chris Emmas-Williams, who said after his electoral loss:

“The voters have let us down.”

That mentality shows that the Labour party has adopted a master and servant complex. The champagne socialists of north Islington carry on tweeting their ideology, violently denouncing anyone who does not agree with them, while Government Members proudly listen to and serve the hard-working men and women of this country—the silent majority who make our United Kingdom the best country in the world.