Health and Social Care Update
Debate between Kate Green and Thérèse Coffey(2 years, 2 months ago)
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Kate Green (Stretford and Urmston) (Lab)
The Secretary of State spoke about the importance of prevention and the impact of the cost of living crisis on health and wellbeing. Will she therefore work with colleagues across government, including those from the Department for Work and Pensions and from local authorities, to maximise the take-up of the Healthy Start scheme, which can address both maternal and child health and wellbeing, and help families with living costs?
Oral Answers to Questions
Debate between Kate Green and Thérèse Coffey(5 years, 1 month ago)
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Dr Coffey
That is simply not the case. The first time that I became involved with a food bank was in 2006, when people were falling between the gaps. One of the things that make me proudest of the Conservative Government and the coalition is that people are better off in work than out of it unless they cannot work, and we have championed the vulnerable. Universal credit is ensuring that people can have more and more income, and I should have thought that the hon. Gentleman would welcome that.
Kate Green (Stretford and Urmston) (Lab)
Oral Answers to Questions
Debate between Kate Green and Thérèse Coffey(5 years, 8 months ago)
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Dr Coffey
DEFRA will account for more than half the achievements under the Paris agreements, so I can assure the hon. Lady that work is very much under way on improving the climate and also the environment. This is about actions rather than words. I pay particular tribute to those who joined the Great British spring clean this weekend and who will do so for the next few weeks. I am very happy to work with young people, as we are with our Year of Green Action 2019. We are already working with the Step Up To Serve brigade, which we will be doing with the National Citizen Service.
Kate Green (Stretford and Urmston) (Lab)
Schools Funding
Debate between Kate Green and Thérèse Coffey(10 years, 6 months ago)
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Dr Thérèse Coffey (Suffolk Coastal) (Con)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Hollobone. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Worcester (Mr Walker) on continuing to lead the campaign and securing today’s debate. He has already made an eloquent contribution, and the point about salary increase and increase in pension contribution, or superannuation, has been well made.
I am here to fly the flag for Suffolk, as many other hon. Members have flown the flag for their own constituencies. I am sure that the Minister will do the same for Norfolk in her contribution. I welcome the extra money that we have received, but I echo and endorse the points made by many hon. Members about the real disparity that continues to be a feature of education funding. I agree with my hon. Friend the Member for Stroud (Neil Carmichael) that more money is not necessarily the only way to make improvements in educational attainment, but I am sure that it will help and I hope that the increase of £105, or 2.5%, will go some way to address the situation in Suffolk.
As has been mentioned, Suffolk is a rurally sparse county that struggles with attainment. The county council, working with the Royal Society of Arts and the schools themselves, have embarked on something called “Raising the Bar.” It is a strategy to raise attainment that will take some time, but there will hopefully be some good results quickly en route. We have paired up with Hackney, a great council that has seen significant improvement in educational attainment. I have some sympathy with my head teachers when they point out that we will be moving to funding of £5,251 on average per pupil, but Hackney currently receives £9,268, which is an additional £4,017 or 76% per child. There is a lot more money to provide additional teachers and facilities to tackle some of the issues that Hackney deals with well, including through some of the specialist units that have been developed to help with difficult children. There is a huge difference.
I want to make a point about the pupil premium, of which the coalition is rightly proud. I point out to the Minister and hon. Members present that my part of Suffolk has a low unemployment rate of less than 2%. People who do not have a job are rare—there are about 800 in total—but that does not mean that average or median wages are particularly high. In fact, they are lower than in Liverpool, where I attended school. In Liverpool Wavertree, the median wage is £510; in Suffolk Coastal it is £490; and in Ipswich, it is £460. The pupil premium is adding to a significant funding gap between different parts of the country.
Kate Green
Although the Government have made a welcome commitment to extend free school meals to all children at key stage 1, does the hon. Lady share my concern that, because parents will presumably no longer have to apply for free school meals, it might become more difficult to identify all the students who should attract the pupil premium? That might further exacerbate their position.
Dr Coffey
Some local authorities already do that. I think it is for the Government and the Department to learn from where it already happens successfully, so I am not going to go down that route. I will explain my point by making another comparison with Hackney. About half of the children there are eligible for the pupil premium, and at £1,300 for a primary pupil and £935 for a secondary pupil, that is very welcome. However, that is almost double the budget available to head teachers in Suffolk.
The extra funding that has been announced is a welcome step, but it is only a sticking plaster, and we recognise that. It is going to take quite a lot of bravery to get to the point where there is not such a disparity of thousands of pounds per pupil that turns into hundreds of thousands of pounds in our large secondary schools. We must get to grips with that. I encourage my hon. Friend the Member for Worcester to keep the campaign going, and I am sure that all Members will be working on our education Ministers and shadow Ministers in order to ensure that appropriate provision is made in the manifestos for the 2015 election.
Cost of Child Care
Debate between Kate Green and Thérèse Coffey(11 years ago)
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Dr Coffey
My understanding is that the provision has grown in that time. I am sure that the hon. Lady will correct me if she thinks I am wrong. I meant “grown”, not “groan”, unlike the joke yesterday.
Returning to affordability, there is no doubt that the cost of child care has risen significantly. Some of that will have been due to supply and demand; there is no question about that, where demand exceeds supply. It is important to expand the number of child minders to help with that.
One of the things that the Government are doing right is allowing schools to shed some of the regulatory burden on the ability to provide a wider range of child care opportunities on site. Labour suggests that legislation is required to have a primary school guarantee, but I do not believe that. What is important is that a school should not have to register separately with Ofsted if it offers provision for under-four-year-olds or that it should not need such tight planning when it wishes to expand. The same should apply when existing nurseries of good and outstanding quality wish to expand.
We are changing things so that Ofsted-registered and good or outstanding nurseries will start to receive funding directly, cutting out the recycling of money through the local council. That is another good measure to accelerate the needed provision of high quality child care.
Another good thing—the Minister may talk at more length about some of these—would be to streamline qualifications for early years, instead of having a choice of about 400 potential qualifications. In that way, parents could readily and easily check the quality rather than have to do their own research. Having an accreditation with fewer qualifications is a streamlining simplification that will help not only providers of child care but parents to make an appropriate assessment of what the right thing is.
On the cost of child care, I think the Government accept that having some of the most expensive child care in Europe—we are second highest behind Switzerland —is not sustainable. We need to address that. Coming from a Conservative tradition, I would try to do that not just by constantly upping the subsidy, but by providing wider choice, which will bring down cost. However, I commend the tax-free child care scheme, which will be available to working families.
I am sure that Government Members would be delighted if we could persuade the Chancellor to bring that scheme forward by a year, but I accept the fiscal constraints under which the Government operate. In any case, I am pleased that the scheme will be forthcoming in April 2015. That is a real positive for working mothers and fathers.
Other useful measures that the Government are introducing include shared parental leave. I understand that our coalition partners are keen to extend that even further; that is a debate for another time. I am pleased that we are pressing forward with that important development, and I am sure that Opposition Members welcome it too.
The reason why I do not think we need legislation to implement the primary school guarantee is that we can just get on with the scheme if that is what primary schools wish to do. We may require a statutory duty to force that to happen, and we have to consider that, but I see leading schools providing it already.
One point that I made yesterday is key. Governing bodies should work with head teachers and parents to ensure that the school day is not artificially reduced simply to have as short a lunch time as legally possible, but to ensure that time spent at school is available for extra-curricular activities and to be mindful of the fact that parents are working.
On Sure Start, we can have the back-and-forth. I have not had time since yesterday’s debate to go into the full detail, constituency by constituency, on the back-and-forth about whether 500 or just 45 have closed. As I said yesterday, I am happy to rely on the Minister’s assurance.
We are talking about choices. Yesterday, the hon. Member for Newcastle upon Tyne North (Catherine McKinnell)—I got that constituency right—talked about the level of cuts, an issue referred to today by the hon. Member for Houghton and Sunderland South. I have looked briefly at the website of the Department for Communities and Local Government. Using the spending power formula, which the Local Government Association recommended to the Government, I am able to say that spending in Newcastle upon Tyne has gone down by 1.4% this year; in Sunderland by 1.5%; and in Middlesbrough —I see that the hon. Member for Middlesbrough South and East Cleveland (Tom Blenkinsop) is present—by 0.5%. I did not have time to look at Wolverhampton.
Those figures come from the spreadsheet that I have opened. Meanwhile, spending has decreased in Norfolk by 1.6% and in Suffolk by 2.1%. In spite of that, Suffolk county council is keeping open its Sure Start centres. Yes, the management of some centres has been merged. The two in Felixstowe are run by one lady, the magnificent Jennifer Clarke-Pearson, who is working hard with families in Felixstowe to make that happen.
As I reiterated yesterday, it is important that in this wider debate about public services, which my hon. Friend the Member for Norwich North (Chloe Smith) mentioned, we must ensure that front-line services are protected—as constituency champions, all hon. Members in this Chamber will continue to do that. However, we should not get hung up solely on bricks and mortar. We must focus on the outcomes.
Kate Green
I agree that we should not just focus on bricks and mortar. However, although centres in my local authority in Trafford are being merged, as the hon. Lady described, the availability of services has been significantly reduced. A number of programmes that were appreciated by families, some of which were available universally in the past, are now not available.
Dr Thérèse Coffey
I am genuinely sorry to hear that; I am not being flippant. It is important that local councils continue to provide valuable services that are doing good for local families, but, again, sometimes the Whitehall solution does not always work in the constituency or council area. The Department for Education issued statutory guidance in April to try to encourage councils and children’s centres to refocus—not on universality, perhaps, but on the families that Sure Start was originally set up to help.
Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Bill
Debate between Kate Green and Thérèse Coffey(11 years, 6 months ago)
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Kate Green
The hon. Lady is right to highlight the general importance of the premises in English law in relation to most faiths, but I think she should bear in mind that in the Church of England the clergy are registered, that registrars are registered in our civil system and that, as I have said, Jews and Quakers already operate in a different legislative framework from that governing religions as a whole.
Prisoners (Voting Rights)
Debate between Kate Green and Thérèse Coffey(13 years, 10 months ago)
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Kate Green
I am not aware of the breach of law by the Labour parliamentary candidate in the Oldham by-election. Perhaps the hon. Gentleman can enlighten me later.
The hon. Member for Kettering said—I suspect rightly—that many in my constituency would be disconcerted to hear me making the arguments I do today. That is why I strongly support his call and that of others for a full and informed discussion to take place in this House, because we have not properly considered the evidence or, indeed, the purpose of our criminal justice system and the role that the right to vote or withdrawal of it plays. I hope that this debate will make some contribution to that analysis and information, but I consider that we need a far fuller understanding in the country as a whole.
I have taken an interest in this subject because I served as a magistrate for 16 years. I have sentenced people to custody and have never done it lightly. I am mindful that it entails not just a loss of liberty but puts at risk people’s jobs, homes and family life. Hence, magistrates follow a rigorous decision-making process in selecting an appropriate sentence. With 16 years’ experience on the bench, I cannot think of a single sentencing objective that removing the right to vote from prisoners sentenced to custody would have helped to achieve.
Kate Green
I am grateful to the hon. Lady for raising that issue, which I want to explore in my remarks. The hon. Member for Kettering was right to say that there is more than one way to skin a cat. I am not suggesting that a blanket rule that applies before or after a four-year custodial sentence is the most appropriate way to go, but it is a step in the right direction and one on which I would like to see us build.
I would like to say a little more about how we might see restoration of the right to vote as a positive by enabling prisoners to fulfil their responsibilities as citizens, and how that might in a small way—I see scepticism on faces opposite me—contribute to reducing reoffending, which is surely the prime purpose of the criminal justice system. If we fail to give prisoners any stake in our society, it is difficult to see why they should wish to reintegrate into that society—why they should feel any sense of obligation to mutual rights, dignity and respect when we do not afford that to them. I see an opportunity alongside this new legislation to improve education and rehabilitation in our prisons.
When I raised the matter with the Secretary of State at Justice Question Time before Christmas, he expressed scepticism as to whether prisoners would take advantage of the right to vote. However, before last year’s general election the Prison Reform Trust participated in a debate with prisoners in a local prison. It reported that prisoners were intensely engaged in debating the political matters of the day: not just criminal justice but a wide range of issues that would affect them, their families, communities and society as a whole—a society, of which, like it or not, they remain a part.
Prisoners are rightly recognised as being among the most disadvantaged in terms of social inclusion prior to receiving custodial sentence. We should be looking to take steps to improve their social inclusion. What happens to them while they are in prison undoubtedly has a role to play.