Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Kate Green and Sam Gyimah

Monday 19th March 2018 Commons Chamber

[Mr Gyimah]

Scotland is of course a beautiful country. Our reforms here have led to more disadvantaged people going to university than ever before. I agree with the hon. Gentleman that access should not just be defined as getting people into university. We want them to be successful there and to go on to achieve their aspirations. That is why, as part of our reforms, we are introducing access and participation agreements, which will be overseen by the new regulator, the Office for Students. These will ensure that universities are held to account for the success of disadvantaged students.

[Kate Green (Stretford and Urmston) (Lab)]

Can the Minister explain to parents under the age of 25 in my constituency who are unmarried but cohabit why their household is not eligible for an adult dependant’s grant while a similar household with a married couple would be?

[Mr Gyimah]

It sounds as though the hon. Lady is referring to a very specific issue. I would be happy to take it up with her afterwards.

Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Kate Green and Sam Gyimah

Tuesday 5th September 2017 Commons Chamber

[Mr Gyimah]

The hon. Gentleman has come back from his summer holiday with his customary passion. I agree that if prisons are to work properly we need to give people the opportunity to turn their lives around. Prison reform is important to this Government. That is why we are giving governors more control of their budgets and more freedom to implement the plans that are necessary for offenders to turn their lives around. I share his concern and his passion, and such work is a priority for this Government.

[Kate Green (Stretford and Urmston) (Lab)]

How will the personal learning plans of which the Minister has just spoken operate when a prisoner is transferred from one prison to another? What guarantees can he give that the education path on which that prisoner has commenced can be continued in his or her new setting, and that there will be consistency of offer right across the prison estate?

[Mr Gyimah]

The hon. Lady points out a very serious problem that currently exists on the estate. Prisoners are transferred and cannot continue courses that they have started—for example, some were on GCSE programmes and cannot finish them. We are looking at courses and technology systems that allow them to carry on what they have been doing when they are transferred from one prison to another, so that there is progression on all the courses. I completely agree with her, but we are looking at it.

Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Kate Green and Sam Gyimah

Tuesday 6th December 2016 Commons Chamber

[Mr Gyimah]

My hon. Friend asks a very important question. Across the Prison Service there are patches of good work aimed at employment post-release. We want to create a system to measure that, and to identify and rank prisons according to how well they do in that respect. That is precisely what our White Paper does. Employment post-release is one of the outcome measures against which governors will be judged once we proceed with reform.

[Kate Green (Stretford and Urmston) (Lab)]

Work experience outside prison can also enhance a prisoner’s employment opportunities on release, so what guidance is the Minister giving prisons—not just reform prisons, but governors of all prisons—in relation to release on temporary licence?

[Mr Gyimah]

Release on temporary licence has a huge role to play in helping prisoners to gain employment in the wider world. I have been speaking with Timpson’s, for example, which employs a lot of ex-offenders, and that is how they are trialled before release. We are looking at that to ensure that the guidance that governors receive allows them to do more with release on temporary licence, specifically in relation to employment opportunities.

Prison Safety and Security

Debate between Kate Green and Sam Gyimah

Thursday 1st December 2016 Westminster Hall

[Mr Gyimah]

We already have mobile phone blocking in some of our prisons. One challenge with mobile phone blocking is that in some prisons in urban areas we could end up blocking the mobile phones of people who are not in the prison. That is why we are developing a bespoke solution, working with the operators, and we have signed an agreement with them to go ahead with three jails early next year and then on that basis roll it out across the estate.

As for psychoactive substances, much has been said about drugs and our approach to them. We have trained more than 300 dogs to detect psychoactive substances. The point of mandatory testing, other than deterrence, is to help, because if someone is on those drugs, they need treatment, and the only way we can know that they are on the drugs is by testing and finding that they need help to come off them, or punishment where that is necessary.

[Kate Green]

I ask the Minister to keep the effectiveness of mandatory testing under careful review, particularly in relation to those substances, because if they keep being reformed and redesigned to make detection more difficult, the testing will not keep up with the changes in the make-up of the substances being used. I am not saying that he should not be doing mandatory testing and I understand his point about a deterrent effect, but I ask him to keep the effectiveness of that approach under review and to undertake to report to the House regularly on what it is achieving.

[Mr Gyimah]

Of course we will keep the effectiveness under review. Drugs are such a problem in terms of prison violence, safety and the effect on our prisoners that we ought to do so because we have to deal with the problem, and we will keep it under review.

A question was asked about drones and no-fly zones. We are looking to work with drone operators to programme the co-ordinates of prisons into drones so that if someone buys a drone from the operator and tries to fly it into a prison, it just collapses before it reaches the perimeter. That is technologically possible. On the point about the physical infrastructure, we have seen improved netting and CCTV, which help in dealing with that challenge.

Disadvantaged Children

Debate between Kate Green and Sam Gyimah

Thursday 20th January 2011 Commons Chamber

[Mr Sam Gyimah (East Surrey) (Con)]

The right hon. Member for Birkenhead (Mr Field) made an observation about the number of Members here to debate this issue compared with the number who debated the horse racing levy. The other observation that I would make is that so many Members of the new intake are here on a Thursday afternoon to debate this subject. That is so especially because most of us will have stated at some point in our political campaigns that making life better for other people was our motivation for getting into politics. We have my hon. Friends the Members for East Hampshire (Damian Hinds) and for Salisbury (John Glen) to thank for getting this debate together. I know that my hon. Friend the Member for East Hampshire has been focused on this subject for a very long time. Before he came to this place he was involved with the Bow Group, where he examined the causes of debt, deprivation and despair. In this House, he has set up the all-party group on credit unions. So helping the disadvantaged is something that he is committed to, and I am glad that he has given us all the opportunity to speak in this debate.

What is interesting about this debate is the amount of consensus—something that we do not often get in the Chamber—as well as the fact that we are not attacking each other’s motives. We do not always get that in the Chamber. The consensus is that the early years to which the right hon. Member for Birkenhead referred in his excellent report as the “foundation years” are critical to one’s life chances. That is when boundaries are set and when cognitive functions are developed.

We need only consider the difference that the little things, such as reading to a child, can make. If I look back at my own life, it was traumatic in the early years when my parents split up when I was four or five years old. I remember my mother spending a lot of time reading to me in her very strong way. I could not get away from having an hour or two hours of reading with her every evening and, at the time, I hated every moment of it. As my hon. Friend the Member for East Hampshire said, however, if a child cannot read at school, nothing else works. It was important, and I can understand it now. Whenever I complained, she used to throw the scriptures back in my face: train a child in the way they should go and when they grow they will not depart from it. Now, at the age of 34, I can in some way understand what she was trying to achieve.

That is based on my experience and we all have our own individual experiences—some good, some bad, and some to which we are indifferent. The interesting thing about what the right hon. Member for Birkenhead has done is that he has grounded some people’s gut feeling in analytical work. I have commented on what he said about the foundation years, but he has also come up with a set of life chances indicators, all of which are important. What excited me most as I read his report was the fact that it changed the terms of the debate—moving from considering static indicators, such as poverty, to considering this as a life chances issue. The hard data and the research that back them up mean that we can now move on and come up with some decent policies. By move on, I mean that we can move away from the predominant approach of the previous Labour Government, which was the redistributive approach of all-round tax credits, to the approach that some of us on the Government Benches might have had, which is that parenting and the family are outside the responsibility of the state. In fact, if someone is responsible, they know what it means to be a parent, so what business does the state have to comment on it?

We all agree that parenting is at the core of this matter. It is the single biggest responsibility that we can take on as human beings but, interestingly enough, it is the one that nobody trains for. We train if we want to play the piano, or to learn how to speak in public. One can train for almost everything except being a parent. When training does exist, the situation has often irrevocably broken down. As the hon. Member for Stretford and Urmston (Kate Green) said, state intervention happens when people have had problems with the law, by which time it is probably too late. I find it interesting that some of the comments that we have come up with suggest having an intervention earlier on in the process, before things go wrong. Why is that important? It is hard to be a parent. The knowledge that most people have comes from grandparents or their own experience, and we only have to look at the popularity of the site Mumsnet to know that it is all about shared knowledge. Those who live in an area where there is a lot of good shared knowledge can learn from it, but if they live in a part of the country without that knowledge, they are left to their own devices. People make mistakes, sometimes with the best of intentions.

Let me turn to the point I want to focus on, as I have to rush through this. Let us not be fatalistic. Some parents will struggle and some parents will do a good job, but peer pressure might mean that their children will go off the rails. Sometimes the school is where things go right or wrong, and sometimes it is the local environment. In focusing on the early years, we should not automatically consign disadvantaged or unconventional families to an at-risk group. Let us not say that people have only one life chance, as so many things happen in the course of someone’s life that can make a difference to their life chances. There is overwhelming evidence about the early years that we need to focus on, but let us not ignore the other stages in their life. The hon. Member for Stretford and Urmston said that we should continue to invest throughout someone’s life, but that is probably where I slightly disagree with her. It is interesting to move away from seeing this issue as purely one of resources and from thinking that the problem will be addressed by investing more and more. Deep character development, which is how I would sum all this up, does not depend on wealth. One piece of information that I came across in the report of the right hon. Member for Birkenhead is that Chinese families—

[Kate Green]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

[Mr Gyimah]

I need to race on—I am terribly sorry. In Chinese families there is not the same correlation between poverty and the outcomes we see in other types of family. While we focus on the early years, I would like us to reintroduce the concept of character into public discourse and to discuss how to bring up and raise children to improve their life chances. When I talk about character, I mean self-discipline and a child saying, “I am not going to watch TV now; I need to do my homework.” I mean a child showing respect to others and knowing that when they go to school and someone gets on their nerves, they should not just thump that person, but should report them to the teacher. Some academics call these considerations pro-social norms. This is something that happens at home and we should not be afraid to talk about character in our public discourse. Character is a function not of wealth but of values and we should be happy to speak about it.