Better Jobs and a Fair Deal at Work

Laura Farris Excerpts

Wednesday 12th May 2021 Commons Chamber

[Laura Farris (Newbury) (Con)]

There is no greater priority for me than the jobs and livelihoods of my constituents. The most anxiety-inducing aspect of the past year has been watching unemployment nearly triple in my constituency, notwithstanding the nearly 22,000 people whose wages were supported by furlough. That is why I wish to start by welcoming the measures in the Queen’s Speech that go to jobs and, in particular, to our ambitions in science and technology as it applies to defence, healthcare and telecommunications.

In addition, I welcome the huge research and development opportunities that will come from the Advanced Research and Invention Agency Bill and the opportunities they will create for people in West Berkshire. Let me start by saying that the vote of confidence the Government have expressed in those industries is already reflected in recruitment decisions. At the Atomic Weapons Establishment at Aldermaston, where they are tasked with developing the new warhead, 300 jobs are being created. At a new test and validation laboratory at Vodafone’s headquarters in Newbury a further 30 jobs are coming. At the Harwell science park, just up the road from us, where they have opened the vaccine manufacturing and innovation centre but also have plans for bioscience, artificial intelligence and genomics, there is a prospect of another 5,000 new jobs in the coming years.

The Labour party always describes itself as the party of working people, but that often feels as though it is rooted in the old, industrialised, unionised industries. What are the people who do these highly skilled, highly paid jobs if they are not also working people? What are a one nation Conservative Government for if it is not to make sure that the opportunities in those jobs are as accessible to old and young, to male and female, and to those resident in any part of the country?

We in Newbury measure our success in part by the success of the students at Newbury College, who provide our best local apprentices—be that in green energy, technology or engineering. But all those courses are brand new to the college, and there are many who live locally who would not have had the same opportunities. That is why I fully support the lifetime skills guarantee and the supporting loan entitlement, to give workers the chance to develop new skills, irrespective of age—or, I may add, gender. In this brave new world of science and tech, we know that women have been historically under-represented, often because of educational choices they made when they were at school. Therefore, it is crucial that further training opportunities are available to them, so that they have an equal opportunity to seize those chances.

If there was one thing missing from the focus on jobs, for me it was a new solution for childcare, the need for which has been revealed particularly in the course of the last year. I look forward to speaking to Treasury Ministers in the coming days about what I think that ought to look like.

Madam Deputy Speaker, you will forgive me if I end by briefly swerving on to Home Office territory, because another notable mention in the Queen’s Speech was the safety of women and girls. This is a work in progress for the Government. The Government have done such important work in this area and deserve credit for their unflinching approach to things such as stalking; for creating new offences to tackle some of the most pernicious forms of domestic abuse; and for tackling new crimes of sexual violence to protect the Tinder generation, when for too long we were too embarrassed to talk about it.

However, serious issues remain—the safety of women in public, street harassment and, most recently, what happens to girls at school and the sexual exploitation that they have experienced. I look forward to supporting the Home Secretary’s work on that this year and to the strategy on violence against women and girls that will be published in the autumn.