Oral Answers to Questions

Kerry McCarthy Excerpts

Thursday 16th October 2014 Commons Chamber

[Mrs Grant]

The hon. Gentleman makes an important point. This is an important area and the Government are taking a lead. Through our body confidence campaign we have been working with industry to develop positive and diverse representations of women and girls in the media and to tackle and get rid of outdated stereotypes. The women’s engagement programme is also working hard, through a series of round-table meetings, to deal with many of the issues that the hon. Gentleman raises.

[Kerry McCarthy (Bristol East) (Lab)]

8. What steps he is taking to protect music venues from closure as a result of noise complaints.

[The Minister for Culture and the Digital Economy (Mr Edward Vaizey)]

The Government have recently reviewed their legislation and believe that the law as currently constituted strikes the appropriate balance between considering the needs of venues and managing the adverse effects that can come from noise.

[Kerry McCarthy]

I thank the Minister for that response. He will know that many people are arguing for an agent of change law in this country, as there is in Australia. They do not believe that existing legislation protects venues from developers who are building around the venue then submitting noise complaints. The owner of The Fleece in Bristol says that

“the reality of the current situation could not be further from the picture painted in the planning practice guidance”,

and the venue’s representatives are back before the planning committee next Wednesday.

The Minister will very soon be getting an invitation to Venues day on 9 December, which will be held just across the river on the south bank. May I urge him to attend that, where he will meet many venue owners who will explain to him just how difficult the situation is on the ground?

[Mr Vaizey]

The hon. Lady is a great champion of live music, so it does not surprise me that she is raising this issue, and I will certainly consider the invitation to Venues day. As for The Fleece, I understand that Bristol city council has imposed some acoustic restrictions on planned developments around it. The agent of change principle has only recently been implemented in Australia. Some elements of it exist in our own planning policies, but I will certainly raise that with planning Ministers.

Oral Answers to Questions

Kerry McCarthy Excerpts

Monday 16th June 2014 Commons Chamber

[Mr Laws]

I entirely agree with my hon. Friend. As she knows, North Yorkshire is one of the areas that will gain from the measures that we proposed a couple of months ago. It was set to gain by £7.2 million under the proposals on which we have consulted. The sparsity issue is also extremely important in areas such as North Yorkshire, and we have therefore introduced a sparsity factor to allow local authorities to protect schools in areas where children would otherwise have to travel an unacceptable distance.

[Kerry McCarthy (Bristol East) (Lab)]

As was pointed out earlier by my hon. Friend the Member for Liverpool, West Derby (Stephen Twigg), it is the sixth-form sector that is really being hit by funding cuts. Is the Minister aware of the impact survey conducted by the Sixth Form Colleges Association, which was published today? I hear reports that officials have been asked to prepare further cuts, which will be announced in September. May I urge the Minister to think again? The sector simply cannot take any more cuts.

[Mr Laws]

I understand the concerns of the 16 to 19 sector. Ministers are very alive to those concerns, and we will consider them carefully before we set our final spending plans for 2015-16. I do not know whether the Labour party has made any commitments on school funding into the next Parliament, but I suggest that the hon. Lady and her hon. Friends make the same commitment that the Deputy Prime Minister has made on behalf of my party today.

Vocational Qualifications

Kerry McCarthy Excerpts

Wednesday 5th March 2014 Commons Chamber

[Matthew Hancock]

Yes, I agree. I pay tribute to my hon. Friend for his work to bring exactly that benefit to the attention of employers in Worcester and across the country.

[Kerry McCarthy (Bristol East) (Lab)]

I am sure that the Minister is aware of the campaign from some quarters to push for a focus on STEAM rather than STEM—science, technology, engineering and maths. The A is for arts subjects. Will the Minister assure me that he values the importance of arts training, particularly for a city such as Bristol, where there are so many jobs in the creative industries, and that he does not regard subjects such as animation as providing Mickey Mouse qualifications?

[Matthew Hancock]

Far from it—spreading apprenticeships to cover the whole economy, including the creative industries, is extremely important. In fact, I was at a breakfast this morning with representatives of the UK music industry to promote music apprenticeships, precisely because we must make sure that the training we support on behalf of taxpayers is needed by employers and reflects the modern economy, including the creative industries in Bristol.

Oral Answers to Questions

Kerry McCarthy Excerpts

Monday 10th February 2014 Commons Chamber

[Mr Timpson]

The report has clearly moved to the top of my reading list. I will read it carefully and look at some of the lessons that we can learn from my hon. Friend’s work, to which I pay tribute. We have already spoken about the role that cadet forces can play in state schools, and we are working with the Ministry of Defence to improve that role. We are also removing unnecessary health and safety rules that prevent children from going on expeditions and seeking adventures, which I hope that the whole House will applaud.

[Kerry McCarthy (Bristol East) (Lab)]

Of course one of the ways of building resilience among pupils would be to introduce compulsory sex and relationships education. Fahma Mohamed, a 17-year-old student from Bristol, is spearheading a national campaign to end female genital mutilation. I understand that she has written to the Secretary of State to ask if he is prepared to meet her. Her petition has already attracted 167,000 signatures. Will the Minister ask his colleague whether he is prepared to meet Fahma, who is doing brilliant work through the campaign?

[Mr Timpson]

The hon. Lady is absolutely right, and the answer is yes.

Education Funding for 18-year-olds

Kerry McCarthy Excerpts

Tuesday 28th January 2014 Westminster Hall

[Mr John Denham (Southampton, Itchen) (Lab)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Stretford and Urmston (Kate Green) on obtaining this important debate. I want to start by asking the Minister a question that sixth-form colleges have raised with me—how he thinks colleges should respond to the cut. Now that full-time students aged 18 will be funded by some £700 a year less than other students, it is not clear whether he thinks that colleges should continue to support those students in their third year with the same quality of education despite not having the money to do so, or whether he wants colleges to offer such students only two years of education. It is important to have a clear answer to that question on the record.

I want to focus on a few matters to do with Southampton. Two consequences of the policy have not been made clear by the Government. Although the Government have said that they will try to protect the base budget, colleges do not teach the students in question separately, so the effect will be felt across the college. The decision will concentrate the cuts on a subset of colleges, particularly those in areas with a higher than average level of deprivation and areas of historically weaker school performance, which will throw up more able students who require a third year to reach level 3 or A-level. The decision will target colleges in relatively small areas, because a concentration of students from more deprived backgrounds with weaker prior school attainment will not be offset by a wider catchment area of students who do not suffer such disadvantages.

That, in a nutshell, is the position that Southampton faces. There are two sixth-form colleges and City college, which is the FE college. They all perform well on inspections and completion rates, but they have a disproportionate number of students with weaker prior school attainment and higher levels of deprivation. The principals estimate that the cut across the three colleges is approximately £500,000. In City college, of the 246 18-year olds, 78% have not yet achieved a C at GCSE English or maths, so they have yet to achieve the basic level of attainment that we are all aiming for; 44% are from disadvantaged postcodes; and 44% are taking level 3 courses. At Richard Taunton sixth-form college there are 212 18-year-olds, of whom 46% come from priority neighbourhoods. Of those third-year students, 49% took a level 2 course before progressing to level 3, 28% are on bursaries to support their attendance and 24% speak English as a second language.

I want the Minister not only to clarify the aim of the policy but to understand how his decision targets institutions such as those in Southampton. In the impact statement, the estimate of the impact on sixth-form colleges is 1.2%. I can only say that some sixth-form colleges must be barely affected, because the effect is nothing like that for the sixth-form colleges that my constituents attend.

[Kerry McCarthy (Bristol East) (Lab)]

I have had an e-mail from the principal of the sixth-form college in my constituency, who says that the cut to that institution is 17.5%, which will affect 120 students. The college will lose £85,000 of funding that had already been committed, so it will be hit incredibly hard. I agree with my right hon. Friend; I just do not know where that figure comes from.

Oral Answers to Questions

Kerry McCarthy Excerpts

Monday 11th November 2013 Commons Chamber

[Michael Gove]

There is flexibility in the current approach. There is a lump sum attached to every school that ensures that smaller schools that are doing a great job can continue to provide high-quality education for children in rural areas, but the changes we are making to introduce a national fair funding formula will go even further to meet my hon. Friend’s concerns.

[Kerry McCarthy (Bristol East) (Lab)]

Local head teachers tell me that Bristol city council is advising them to offer funded early education in just the mornings or just the afternoons so that they can avoid the cost of providing free school meals to eligible children. Does the Secretary of State share my concern that these children are missing out on their school dinners and that statutory guidance to offer education at times that best support the child’s learning is being breached?

[Michael Gove]

I am grateful to the hon. Lady for drawing that to my attention. I would love to have a chance to know more about the particular situation that she rightly raises. It is important that all children get the nutrition and the education they deserve.

Oral Answers to Questions

Kerry McCarthy Excerpts

Thursday 24th October 2013 Commons Chamber

[Matthew Hancock]

Absolutely. I pay tribute to the work of my hon. Friend on this subject and look forward to following his leadership in driving up the number of women in engineering apprenticeships.

[Kerry McCarthy (Bristol East) (Lab)]

17. What assessment he has made of the potential effect on UK artists and creators of introducing a private copying exception without compensation.

[The Minister for Universities and Science (Mr David Willetts)]

This change will allow people to make personal copies of content they have bought. For example, it will allow an individual to copy their CDs on to an iPad. Many people already do this without realising it is illegal under copyright law. Most people think it is reasonable and should not be prevented by copyright. The Government agree and our new law will recognise this. This change will not allow people to obtain copies unlawfully, and British creators will continue to be rewarded when people buy copies of their works.

[Kerry McCarthy]

So far, the 22 EU member states that have introduced private copying exceptions have all introduced corresponding levy schemes on MP3 players and other copying devices to compensate artists for the loss of income. Why will the UK not do the same?

[Mr Willetts]

The reason is very simple: those European countries have introduced far wider exemptions than we are proposing. Many of them allow content borrowed from friends, families and libraries to be shared very widely. That damages creators, so they need to provide compensation, but our proposal is carefully targeted to protect what happens, as we all know, in almost every family in the country without doing damage to creators.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Willetts]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right; indeed, today is the day, 50 years ago, when the then Conservative Government accepted the Robbins report. We are marking the 50th anniversary with more funding going into universities, with more students and with more applications from students from disadvantaged backgrounds than ever before, so we can be proud of our record on higher education.

[Kerry McCarthy (Bristol East) (Lab)]

A report published today by the 1994 Group of universities shows that, although the overall figures for post-graduate study in the United Kingdom look healthy, that is mainly due to a 90% increase in the number of overseas students. What are the Government doing to support British post-graduate students?

[Mr Willetts]

That is an issue, which is why the Higher Education Funding Council for England has provided an extra £25 million of support for next year’s post-graduate students. We will increase that amount to £75 million for the following year, because we do not wish to see people who could benefit from post-graduate education missing out.

Secondary Schools (Accountability)

Kerry McCarthy Excerpts

Monday 14th October 2013 Commons Chamber

[Mr Laws]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for arranging the visit to his constituency some months ago. I very much enjoyed visiting a couple of schools in his part of the country. Those schools that achieve a particularly high level of progress—one grade more than expected—will have that exemption from Ofsted inspection, and that will send out a clear signal to those schools that we are rewarding the extraordinary progress that they are making.

[Kerry McCarthy (Bristol East) (Lab)]

I am sure the Minister is an avid reader of ConservativeHome, so he will have seen the blog post by the hon. Member for Kingswood (Chris Skidmore) in August in which he talked about

“a new social divide in subject choices.”

He said that pupils from state schools, in particular pupils on free school meals, often went for the softer options. Will the Minister confirm what I think he said in his statement: that arts and vocational subjects are considered high value, and that performance and attainment in those subjects will be rewarded?

[Mr Laws]

Yes, I certainly can. In the best eight measure there will be three spaces reserved for subjects that can include arts, music, and vocational and other subjects. One of the great benefits of today’s announcement is that there will not be the pressure on schools, which was there in the past, to focus only on five GCSE subjects. For many students that created far too narrow a curriculum at the age of 16.

Oral Answers to Questions

Kerry McCarthy Excerpts

Thursday 18th July 2013 Commons Chamber

[Matthew Hancock]

We introduced a new duty on schools to provide independent and impartial advice in September, and Ofsted is looking at, and will report on, how well that is being implemented. I pay tribute to my hon. Friend, who brings together companies in his constituency to promote skills and working together, so that even though companies compete locally and nationally with their products, they come together on the skills issue to make sure that they give new skills to young people, rather than poaching from each other.

[Kerry McCarthy (Bristol East) (Lab)]

The Minister’s Department has found that one in five apprentices currently receives no training. There has also been a reported rise in employers’ non-compliance with the national minimum wage for apprentices. Does he agree that for apprenticeships to be of value, apprentices need decent training, and need to be paid a decent wage? What is his Department doing to ensure that that happens?

[Matthew Hancock]

Yes, I do, and we are taking action.

Young Fathers

Kerry McCarthy Excerpts

Friday 5th July 2013 Commons Chamber

[Mr Lammy]

The hon. Gentleman raises an important point to which I will return. We as policy makers need to think about and understand families. There may not be a relationship between mum and dad, but more often than not the father needs to remain engaged. In the case of young fathers, they need a lot of support to remain engaged, or they might walk away and never return.

Our media talk so often about “feckless fathers” and “deadbeat dads” and assume that all young fathers fit the same, sometimes inaccurate stereotype. That has to stop. It is time for young dads not just to be listened to, but to be heard, because they are all too often unwilling to disappear from their children’s lives. They are often disfranchised by neglect and by lack of support from the system, not by design. Mums, dads, children—the whole family—lose out if young fathers find themselves in that position.

Let us be clear: as President Obama has said, what makes a man is not conceiving a child, but having the courage to raise one. Fathers of whatever age have to live up to their responsibilities and to the high expectations that we should all as a society have of them. That does not mean that society should not help them live up to those expectations, particularly when they are young people.

Young fathers present specific issues. It is often the case that they were looked-after children, excluded from schools or raised in poverty. Teenage fathers are three times more likely to have failed to have completed secondary education and much more likely than their peers to not be in education, employment or training. Unfortunately, many are young offenders: 12 % of 15 to 17-year-old offenders have children of their own, and nearly half of those aged 22 and under are or are about to become fathers. Many of them have never seen what good parenting looks like so, without support, how do we expect them to raise their own children properly?

Too often, we condemn young fathers for their background. They are failed in their schools and failed in their families, and we fail them again when they become fathers. That feeds feelings of deep inadequacy and shame. They know that they are unprepared for fatherhood, but do not know where to turn to for support. They have much higher rates of anxiety and depression than their peers without children. Most of all, they are often very angry, and often with good reason.

However much teenage dads want to play a role in their child’s upbringing, life seems to conspire against them. A job will be hard to come by for this cohort of fathers, given the state of our economy. Their partners may get a home, as has been indicated by the hon. Member for Woking (Jonathan Lord), but if they are not together, it is highly unlikely that the father will get one. The public services to help them with their role as a dad will be patchy or non-existent. Jobcentre Plus will be more interested in processing their benefits than in working with them to obtain the skills for work while bringing up their children.

[Kerry McCarthy (Bristol East) (Lab)]

This is a brilliant speech. A debate on this matter in Parliament is long overdue. On housing, the single room rate for people up to the age of 35 means that increasingly, young men live in bedsits in houses with lots of other young men. That is not a suitable place to take a child if the father has occasional custody.

[Mr Lammy]

My hon. Friend raises an important issue. If we believe, as I suspect Members across the House do, that we must keep fathers engaged with their children, assuming that there is no issue such as violence, the contact that they have with their children is fundamental. Policies such as the room rate cut across that. The costs that society has to pick up when a father becomes disengaged from his son, and the costs of the repetition when that son becomes a young man, are considerable. I am pleased that she has raised that issue.

The Work programme is limping along and the Youth Contract is not doing its job for this cohort of young men. We need tailored programmes for young men, and for young dads in particular, because we understand the cost to society if they do not get it right at this stage. Things do not look good, which can make these young men very angry. When I hosted a recent meeting of the all-party parliamentary group on fatherhood in which we spoke to young fathers, I saw just how angry these young men can be because of their frustration at wanting to be good fathers, but not being supported by the system.

Not only are young fathers not supported or helped; they are demonised by journalists and politicians. Myths solidify into facts. The isolated but deeply regrettable incidents of men who father children with different mothers become the rule, not the exception. Figures from the Child Maintenance and Enforcement Commission show that fewer than 5,000 men are paying maintenance for children they have had with three partners and that fewer than 500 men are paying maintenance for children they have had with four partners. Although those men may not have lived up to the high expectations that we should have of them, they do not represent the vast majority of young fathers.

We must bust some other myths too. The majority of young fathers are in relationships with the mothers of their children. The millennium cohort study found that half the partners of teenage mothers were living with them during the pregnancy. The vast majority of young fathers intend to play a full role in their children’s lives, and that intention does not disappear with the first sleepless night or the first nappy—in fact, it often grows. The same study found that one in five non-resident fathers who had low contact with their 10-month-old infants were in more frequent and often daily contact when the child was three. Young dads want to be there for their children just as much as all dads; they just need support to do it, as one would expect of young people.

Many young dads live chaotic lives. Many hon. Members will be familiar with young people who live chaotic lives, perhaps even in their own homes. For many young men, becoming a dad is the wake-up call that pushes them to take control of their lives and to take better care of themselves, as well as their families. That is exactly what I saw when I visited St Michael’s Fellowship in Brixton—a wonderful organisation that works with young dads in some of the most testing circumstances in Britain. I wish to place on record my thanks to Seany O’Kane, who runs the scheme, and to Kim Normanton, a BBC producer who allowed me to spend time at St Michael’s recording “Dads Who Do”, a documentary for Radio 4.

Even among fathers facing multiple pressures, the vast majority try to stay involved in their children’s lives and to be good role models. They each told me that they feel they are on their own and expected to get by without help, support or even recognition of their needs. Too often, they come up against maternity services at children’s centres or schools that place no expectation on them as young fathers, and all the expectation on the young mother.

I have said that young dads often have greater needs than other fathers, and in other parts of our public services that would mean more provision for them, not less. In too many parts of our public services, however, young fathers are practically invisible—at best ignored, and seen by some workers as a risk or a danger to be avoided. Too many are denied access to their children and have to fight their way through the courts. Without legal aid many men are now presenting to MPs in a breakdown situation with their partners, and they have to supervise themselves through the court system. Expecting an 18, 19 or 20-year-old to supervise themselves through a legal process is expecting too much and nothing short of a national disgrace. The Government should think carefully about their provisions for legal aid in such family cases.

There is no statutory requirement to provide services to young fathers. Support is piecemeal, patchy and at heart a postcode lottery. Too often, young fathers say they are ignored by public service professionals, who assume that the father is not really interested in their child. Where support is provided to fathers, it is often generic and tailored to older fathers who may need less help. A recent survey found that in half of cases involving a young family, the health visitor did not even know the father’s name. Young fathers often have little contact with midwives, health visitors and social workers. Children’s centres often have targets for engaging with dads, but there are no data on how many children actually come into contact with their dad. Good children’s centres, like Earlsmead and Noel Park in my constituency in Haringey, do encourage such contact, but many will not.

This is a problem, and not just for the dads themselves. Research suggests that the mother’s perspective on her care will be determined to a large extent by her partner’s views. A young father who is engaged with public services is more likely to remain supportive of their children’s care as they grow up. That is good for children and the partner. Young mothers who believe that their partner is supportive have higher self-esteem, lower depression, and are more likely to be positively attached to their child.

However, what should be a win-win situation is too often a lose-lose one—public services push away a young dad, which leads to a young mum bringing up her child on her own. Such reluctance to engage with young fathers might also spring from a reluctance to engage young people at all when it comes to sex education. Young dads know less about sex and relationships than young mums, although most are happy to learn.

A reluctance to engage young dads before the birth feeds into a lack of provision for couples to raise their child together after the birth. Most residential homes are for mothers and babies only—again, treating fathers as though they are a danger, irrelevant, or both. Too many young couples are forced apart because of local authority housing decisions that do not take a whole-family approach that would enable young parents to establish their own households. Pressure on young fathers and families builds up, making it even more difficult for them to look after their children.

We need an entire shift in attitude on behalf of public services from focusing exclusively on the mother and child to thinking about the family, including the father, however young he might be. That must begin from the high expectations that we should have of all fathers. Significant numbers of the birth certificates of children born to teenage mothers do not identify the father at all. How can we show fathers our expectations of them if we do not even require their names to be on their children’s birth certificates? Will the Minister explain—I have raised this issue in many forums—why his Government have not enacted the provisions in the Welfare Reform Act 2009 that would provide for joint birth registration?

Young dads often experience significant financial hardship. We know that the best way for them to provide for themselves and their families is through skilled, decent, well-paid work. The problems that young fathers face because of the Work Programme’s one-size-fits-all approach are too numerous to mention. Will the Minister raise that issue with his colleagues in the Department for Work and Pensions? It is not acceptable that public services should fail to engage with young fathers at all. Young dads should be engaged from antenatal services onwards, improving outcomes for their children and breaking down poverty and social exclusion. To achieve that, maternity services, health visitors, social workers and children’s centres should, at the very least, always record the father’s details, regardless of his age, and work with the voluntary sector and children’s centres to provide the best possible targeted support for the family as a whole, including young dads.

Will the Minister work with his colleagues to ensure that public services support young fathers to live up to the high expectations we should have of them? Will he think again with the Secretary of State for Education about what more the Government can do to raise the profile of the expectations that we should have of young fathers and the services that local authorities and local institutions need to deliver if we are to see fewer break-ups and less poverty as a result? Will the Minister also work to introduce parenting education for all secondary school pupils? Most of all, if we are to support young dads properly, we need the data to understand how many are out there. How many are being helped by our public services, as well as by local authorities and the voluntary sector? Will the Minister ensure that those data are collected in a standardised form, where safe to do so, and made open to public services and other organisations that want to do more for fathers?

Finally, will the Minister and his colleagues commit to improving the services offered by young offender institutions for young fathers? Given that so many young fathers come through young offender institutions, we need a better focus from the Department on young fathers while they are in them and can be supported—when they come out—to be better fathers than they might otherwise have been. Will the Minister commit to reinstating the teenage pregnancy strategy, which provided so much support for young parents? There has been a substantial cut. Local authorities are moving away from their budgets. In 2009, teenage pregnancy figures were going in the right direction—we saw a 6% drop—but sadly they are now going back up.