Holiday Pricing

Debate between Julian Lewis and Penny Mordaunt

Monday 24th February 2014 Westminster Hall

[Penny Mordaunt]

rose—

[Dr Lewis]

rose—

Defence Personnel

Debate between Julian Lewis and Penny Mordaunt

Thursday 6th December 2012 Commons Chamber

[Dr Lewis]

I not only agree with the hon. Gentleman but pay tribute to him. I have listened year in, year out while he has raised this subject consistently in debate after debate. He is a champion of service personnel in relation to housing matters.

I know something about this problem because I was recently approached in connection with the situation in the New Forest, a large part of which is protected, with very little available in the way of new housing. What happens if there is only a waiting list to offer to people? Should returning service personnel jump to the head of that waiting list over other people who have been on it for a considerable period? Dr Milroy says that his charity has seen many cases where individuals have taken a copy of the charter to the local authority,

“and the LA has laughed.”

He says that the real problem is that

“if there are no available houses it is a pointless exercise. Until the Government put resource behind this I can’t see things changing.”

Above all, he draws attention to the fact that we are heading for a “huge redundancy programme” that will result in a large increase in the numbers of ex- servicemen returning to civilian lives. Phrases such as “the emperor’s new clothes” feature in his remarks about the covenant, because, as he says, it is a fine idea but it will not change the situation unless backed by resources.

[Penny Mordaunt (Portsmouth North) (Con)]

Given the challenges with service accommodation and some of the estates that we have, does my hon. Friend agree that there might be opportunities to introduce a right-to-buy scheme for armed forces families?

[Dr Lewis]

Yes, absolutely. I believe that the Government are working on schemes that will make it possible for ex-service personnel to get their foot on the housing ladder. I look forward to what I hope will be positive recommendations by the Minister on this subject.

Educational Funding Gap

Debate between Julian Lewis and Penny Mordaunt

Monday 22nd October 2012 Commons Chamber

[Dr Julian Lewis (New Forest East) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to have secured this important debate on the educational funding gap for 16 to 18-year-olds with special needs. I well remember, back in 2008—a date that will feature rather less auspiciously later in my remarks—going to Crewe and Nantwich to campaign in the by-election that resulted in the election of my hon. Friend the Member for Crewe and Nantwich (Mr Timpson), now the Under-Secretary of State for Education, to this House. It is a great pleasure to congratulate him on achieving ministerial office. I understand that this is the first Adjournment debate to which he has replied, and I am sure that he will want to give me as positive a response as possible to the requests that I intend to make.

I am going to focus on two specific areas. The first is the educational funding gap for 16 to 18-year-olds with special needs. The second, which is indirectly related to that, is the funding of what are known as enrichment courses at further education colleges for people in that age range and for those who are somewhat older. The two issues arise as a result of similar causes. I have forewarned those in the Minister’s office of what I am about to say, and they have seen the material to which I shall refer.

This material has been supplied to me by a splendid organisation called SCARF, which is in the New Forest. SCARF stands for Supporting special Children and their Relatives and Friends. I pay particular tribute to Sarah Newman, Cathy Cook and Pam Tibbles, among others, who were present at a meeting of the organisation with me and my right hon. Friend the Member for New Forest West (Mr Swayne). I know that my right hon. Friend would like to join me in participating in the debate tonight, but he is now governed by that particular form of omertà known as the silence of the Whips—or, in present circumstances, perhaps we should say the silence that most Whips generally observe.

I have learned about these problems first hand from SCARF; I have learned of the views of the principal of Totton college in New Forest East via SCARF; and I have learned of the views of the principal of Brockenhurst college, also in New Forest East, directly. I have also been sent briefings by a number of charities, including the National Autistic Society, Ambitious about Autism and the special needs charity Contact a Family.

I want to talk about the parents’ experiences, some of which will be drawn from SCARF’s recent submission to the Education Select Committee, but I shall refer first to one from a constituent who wrote to me recently about the strains and stresses placed on her family as a result of the funding gap to which I have referred. She writes as follows:

“Our son is 16 years old and has autism. He attends college just 3 days a week. We are paying £120 p/w for private day service provision on the other two days. This has been necessary to ease the extremely high levels of anxiety and stress for our son and ourselves as parents and to provide”

her son

“with continuing development of his personal, social and communication skills.”

This mother goes on to make a very important point:

“Adolescence and transition to further education, is a particularly difficult time for a young person with autism or any disability…Our son cannot be left unsupervised to structure and manage his own daily activities, hence the alternative was for myself to give up work and be his ‘buddy’ for those two days each week”

when there is no further education available for him.

“This is far from ideal as, aged 16, he does not want to be constantly shadowed by his mother and also having spent a summer holiday this way, the sheer exhaustion and strain has already resulted in breakdown in family relations. I am extremely concerned about the impact the cuts are having on families with disabled young people. I run a parent support group and am deeply saddened by the despair I see on parents faces”.

That is from the coal face, as it were.

[Penny Mordaunt (Portsmouth North) (Con)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend—and his constituency neighbour—on securing this debate. He could have read from the sort of letter I have received from many of my constituents. Does he not believe that this policy is very short-sighted because the actual cost to the public purse of not enabling these young adults to reach their full potential will be much more in the longer term?

[Dr Lewis]

Absolutely. This is one of those classic cases where we are in danger of falling between two stools. There is education funding up to the age of 16 and then adult social funding from the age of 18, but if something goes terribly wrong in that two-year gap, the cost—in terms of both human suffering and additional support from the state resulting from the fallout of something going wrong at that time—will be colossal. My hon. Friend is absolutely right.

The summary of the position is put forward, as I mentioned earlier, in SCARF’s submission to the Education Select Committee. It describes the overall situation as follows:

“Education funding has been repeatedly cut in recent years”.

Apparently, this started in 2008, but it happened again in 2010 and then in 2011. As a result,

“Further Education colleges can only offer 3 days a week of education to these young people. In addition, Social Services day-care is not available, except in the most extreme cases, until these young people turn 18 and are classed as adults. Consequently, many parents/carers are left to provide the care themselves for their young person on 2 weekdays every week…these young people end up stuck at home with their parent/carer, quickly becoming challenging and disruptive…the end result is a crisis which then requires significant support from health and social services.”

SCARF wants a guarantee that all young people with special needs or disabilities—I believe that LDD is shorthand for “learning difficulties and disabilities”—should have “the right to full-time education for 5 days a week up to at least the age of 18.”

As I said in response to the intervention from my hon. Friend the Member for Portsmouth North (Penny Mordaunt), I recognise that it may be necessary for more than one department to be involved. It is possible that those in the education department will say “We simply cannot carry the funding burden for the whole of that period.” Given that this used to be primarily the responsibility of the education department, if the education department is going to shuffle off that responsibility, it surely has a duty to find another department—perhaps one connected with social services—that will take the responsibility on.

As SCARF observes in its submission,

“since September 2008, our local FE colleges have had their funding repeatedly cut”.

It gives a number of examples of the way in which that can affect families. I shall not go into them in detail, because time does not allow me to, but one parent says that her son

“absconded without warning one freezing winter afternoon”

and was knocked down by a car, while another talks of the danger of her son’s lighting fires around the home and the fact that he needs active supervision all the time. Some parents have to give up their jobs, while others strain to find the money to pay people to be the buddies or supervisors of their children on those two days off.

There is no doubt that what was previously a relatively seamless five days a week of provision from childhood to adulthood is no longer available. The explanation, as I understand it, is this. Following the introduction of foundation learning qualifications, the basis was changed from generic or broad learning aims to education that would lead to the achievement of specific qualifications. That is fine for people who are not learning-disadvantaged or disabled, but it obviously has a huge negative impact on that category who are. There was also a reduction in what is called “entitlement funding” from 117 hours to only 30 hours a year, and a restriction excluding what are known as “enrichment” activities from the process. Such activities are not designed to lead to the world of work, but are designed simply to give greater quality to the life of a learning-disabled person.

That brings me to my second topic, which is the question of people who are in an older age category but who were previously able to take part in free enrichment courses on one day a week at local further education colleges. Let me give the example—with permission—of my constituent Jessica Snell. She is the daughter of the retired principal of Brockenhurst college. He writes:

“Jessica…is 38 years old and has Down’s syndrome. She lives with her parents and attends a local day centre for 3 days a week. For some time she has attended her local college for one day a week and has gained significantly in her life and social skills. Until 2010 the college was able to draw down funding and remit any fees. This year, she must pay £840 for one day a week for 30 weeks and has no additional income beyond her SDLA”—

severe disability living allowance—

“benefit from which she can pay. Her programme is not work related but she has opted for cooking, drama and craft, all of which add to her independent living skills and enjoyment of life. College also gives her the opportunity to meet and mix with a vibrant community of young people.”

Just as the 16 to 18-year-olds faced a tighter restriction as to whether or not they were going to get qualifications at the end of the process, so the older severe learning-disabled person faces a tighter restriction as to whether or not the course will ever get them into work. If the answer is no in each case, the funding has disappeared, with the consequences I have described.

I began by saying what a pleasure it was to see my hon. Friend the Member for Crewe and Nantwich at the Dispatch Box, and I hope for the far greater pleasure of hearing him say what the Government intend to do to bridge this damaging gap in order to help young people between the ages of 16 and 18 and people like Jessica, who in their adult years cannot hope to enter the world of work, but can still derive much personal satisfaction and advantage from having one day a week at a further education college.

I am sure the Minister will want to tell the House about the Bill on the reform of provision for children and young people with special educational needs, which I believe we will be considering next year. The national special needs charity to which I referred earlier, Contact a Family, has given great support to SCARF’s campaign, and welcomes the draft provisions published last month as far as they go, but it is deeply anxious that they do not guarantee a right to full-time education to those with learning difficulties and disabilities right up to the age of 18. Can the Minister assure us tonight that if his Department is unable single-handedly to fill the gap between these ages, it will work with other Departments so that, between them, we avoid this problem of falling between two stools and we reinstate the situation that used to apply before 2008 and has progressively—or regressively, I should say—deteriorated since then and that we return to the position in which, one way or another, people have five days a week of support between the ages of 16 and 18?

Submarines and Frigates (Plymouth)

Debate between Julian Lewis and Penny Mordaunt

Tuesday 26th April 2011 Westminster Hall

[Dr Lewis]

I will try to be as non-partisan between the services as possible but, following the hon. Lady’s provocation, I cannot resist pointing out that the Navy would have been an even quicker responder to the Libyan crisis had we not decided shortly before that blew up to take our last remaining aircraft carrier out of service. I have raised that issue a number of times, particularly with the Foreign Secretary, who on the most recent occasion informed me—I am sorry that he has such a low opinion of my knowledge of things nautical—that an aircraft carrier would not have been necessary because a Tornado could not be flown from it. I am reassured to know that the Government are well aware of which aircraft can fly from aircraft carriers and which cannot, but I do not hesitate to say that if we had had an aircraft carrier in commission when the events in Libya blew up so unexpectedly, I would have bet the farm on the fact that that particular warship—an aircraft carrier—would have been the first to be dispatched to the Mediterranean in response. It is very unwise to make decisions in peacetime, and still more unwise to make decisions when we are involved in not one but two conflicts simultaneously, that will bind us rigidly into circumstances that we might regret when the strategic situation changes as unexpectedly as it almost always does.

Let us consider the position with regard to frigates and submarines. I have never hesitated to say that the 1998 strategic defence review was a well thought-out document. The problem, as we know, was that the plans it outlined were not fully funded, although at least one had the feeling that a theory was being set out, which meant that some sort of balance was understood and some sort of flexibility was retained. We did not take the view that because our circumstances in the world were more limited in terms of the interventions we could make, we should reshape our defence forces in such a way that we would be incapable of responding to an unexpected crisis as we had responded in the past.

At one point during the years of the Labour Government, a naval base review was carried out. My hon. Friend the Minister will recall that we, as the shadow defence team in opposition, were adamant that it would be most unwise to rely on only two naval bases in the entire country, one of which would be in Scotland and the other in either Portsmouth or Devonport. In particular, we had regard to the argument put forward so eloquently by my hon. Friend the Member for Plymouth, Sutton and Devonport in his introduction to the debate: if we put all our eggs in one basket, or all our ships in one or two ports—one at one end of the country and one at the far end from that—we will be in danger of the basket of eggs getting smashed or the ships getting bottled up. We therefore argued strongly for retaining the ports at Devonport and at Portsmouth, and it would be a grave mistake to change that argument now. If we believe that it is strategically wise, strategically necessary and, I would say, strategically essential to continue to have the potential to use both Devonport and Portsmouth as naval bases in the future—I can never emphasise enough that we cannot predict the future—it follows that we must spread out our assets to ensure that both ports remain viable. I have no prejudice as to which assets should be in Portsmouth and which should be in Devonport, but some assets should be in each of the two ports.

The Labour Government took office in 1997, and when their SDR was undertaken we had a total of 35 frigates and destroyers. The deal done in the SDR was that in return for the great future promise and asset of two large aircraft carriers, the number of frigates would be modestly reduced from 35 to 32, and the number of attack submarines—nuclear-powered, but not nuclear-armed—would be reduced from 12 to 10. We know what happened over the years: the number of frigates went down successively from 35 to 32, as predicted, and then to 31 and 25. If I remember correctly, at the last count the figure had gone down to 19. It is true that during that period six new Daring class—Type 45 —destroyers came into play, and they are, of course, much more powerful, potent and potentially lethal, so one could argue that they are a much better deterrent than the destroyers they replaced. However, one should fight shy of getting into the position that Geoff Hoon, the then Secretary of State for Defence, got into of saying that because a new warship is so much more powerful than the warship it replaces, the number of “platforms”, as they used to say—the number of ships to the rest of us—becomes irrelevant. That is not true, because no matter how powerful a warship is, it can be in only one place at any one time. Unfortunately, but necessarily, the activities of the Royal Navy often have to take place in many places simultaneously. At the moment, we are considering what we should do in relation to events in Libya.

There is something else that slightly bothers me: I lost count of the number of times that Conservative spokesmen said in opposition that although we could not be sure whether we would spend more money on defence until we saw what the books actually said about the economics, we would definitely keep expenditure on defence in line with the commitments undertaken. I often stood up and said that we would need either to spend more on defence or to reduce our commitments. In reality, as we know, we are very stretched indeed as a result of the ongoing commitment in Afghanistan, and we now find ourselves suddenly with an additional commitment in Libya. After some prodding, the Foreign Secretary conceded that its cost, on which I was rather aggravatingly pressing him, would be met from the Treasury reserve, but all signs are that the commitment to a Libyan no-fly zone will not prove decisive in ousting Colonel Gaddafi, even though it may prove, and arguably has proved, effective in preventing him from initiating the wholesale mass slaughter that he was not only ruthless enough but stupid enough to announce to the world that he intended to visit on the citizens of Benghazi.

If those two statements are true—first, that the no-fly zone will not be enough to oust Gaddafi and, secondly, that it will nevertheless be effective in limiting the massacre of innocent civilians, which was our purpose for intervening—the logical consequence is that the commitment will go on for a considerable time. The Government will have to think hard about what they are prepared to spend on defence.

The Government cannot meet the costs from Treasury reserves indefinitely. We all know what then happens: we tend to get ourselves into the situation encountered by Tony Blair, who said towards the end of his time as Prime Minister that spending on defence had remained roughly constant at 2.5% of gross domestic product throughout the decade of Labour rule, but then added the crucial words, “if the costs of Iraq and Afghanistan are included.” In other words, the cost of those two wars was effectively being counted as part of our basic expenditure on defence. Such a thing will always happen.

The Government must think clearly about whether to put the economic case at the top of their agenda or whether to put up there instead the ability to intervene, as we have intervened in Libya. They cannot have it both ways. Many countries, including in Europe, would doubtless love to be able to intervene to stop massacres in Benghazi, but they do not do so—or not more than minimally—because their simple view is, “Well, we’re very sorry but we’re too small, too ineffective, too weak and too poor, and we cannot afford to maintain the armed forces necessary to do that sort of thing.” That is fair enough.

[Penny Mordaunt]

My hon. Friend makes a case for flexibility and options versus the economy, but it is worth remembering that we need a strong Navy with the right number of platforms to protect trade, our fuel security and our fibre-optic cables. Our economy depends on the Royal Navy.

[Dr Lewis]

I thank my hon. Friend for that intervention, which takes my argument forward exactly as I intended. The key point is that the things that she outlines are constants. Those requirements of a strong Royal Navy will carry on regardless, even if we were not involved in those additional conflicts. It really worries me that if we continue to be driven by every crisis that pops up in other parts of the world, whether or not we have what is commonly described as a dog in the fight, something else will have to give. Unless we see a genuine increase in resources and in the priority given to defence, if we continue to take on roles such as the worthy one of trying to intervene in Libya, something will have to give, and it is precisely the sort of core functions to which my hon. Friend adverts that may suffer.

If we cap the defence budget, we might have to sell off or mothball vital defence assets, or not introduce new assets that had been planned for, but I am concerned that whenever a crisis pops up in another part of the world, we want to be at the forefront and to punch above our weight. There will be only one outcome of that approach: our very limited defence resources will be used up in dealing with these ad hoc crises, which are not of our choosing, but then one day, when we face an existential threat to the security of the United Kingdom, we will not have the assets necessary to defend ourselves. I predict that there will be attempts to derail the renewal of the nuclear deterrent on the grounds that we are so stretched in other conventional areas that we cannot afford to build those submarines.

That is not a subject for this debate but, with your indulgence Mrs Brooke, may I say that I am particularly alarmed about the Trident Commission? The commission is orchestrated by a well-known anti-nuclear group called the British American Security Information Council, and is funded by such anti-nuclear bodies as the Ploughshares fund and the Joseph Rowntree charitable trust but, nevertheless, such distinguished people as two former Secretaries of State for Defence—my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Kensington (Sir Malcolm Rifkind) and Lord Browne of Ladyton—have agreed to sit on it. What will the commission come up with? In my opinion, it certainly will not come up with a recommendation for the like-for-like replacement of Trident. What will it say? Will it say, “We’d better not have continuous at-sea deterrence,” or, “We must join up with the French”? Whatever it says, I bet that the root of its argument will be the statement that we cannot afford to continue with a properly self-sufficient strategic independent nuclear deterrent. If so, future generations may have cause bitterly to regret the sort of arguments that have been put forward when we one day find ourselves vulnerable as a result of that omission.

How does that relate to base-porting? It is simple: during times of economic stringency, it is vital to conserve defence assets. Whatever final decision my hon. Friend the Minister and his colleagues make about what should be based at Portsmouth or Devonport, one point is vital. Something must be based at each of those two ports so that their viability is retained, because we might need those naval bases one day not simply to allow us to intervene in wars of choice, but to safeguard ourselves against an existential threat to the United Kingdom itself.