Oral Answers to Questions
Debate between Liam Byrne and Matt Hancock(10 years, 8 months ago)
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Matthew Hancock
I agree with my hon. Friend, and I pay tribute to Bridgwater college, which has put an awful lot of effort into ensuring that we build up the courses that will provide us with new nuclear skills.
Mr Liam Byrne (Birmingham, Hodge Hill) (Lab)
National apprenticeship week provides an extraordinary opportunity to celebrate the amazing work of our apprentices, but it is a matter of concern to all Members that there are now 5,000 fewer young people studying in apprenticeships than there were at the time of the last election. That is why news of huge staff cuts at the National Apprenticeship Service is so worrying. The excellent Nick Linford of FE Week says that they may amount to 20%, and I hear from front-line staff in Birmingham that the figure may be 50%. The Minister refused to answer a written question on the subject, and he dodged a question about it in the House yesterday. Will he now tell us how many staff at the National Apprenticeship Service—which is part of the Skills Funding Agency—will lose their jobs in the next year?
Matthew Hancock
The National Apprenticeship Service does a magnificent job in putting together events such as national apprenticeship week, and it is important to ensure that we run it as effectively as possible. I can tell the hon. Gentleman that a record number of people have participated in apprenticeships in the last year, and that they are doing a fantastic job. It is true that we had to remove some low-quality apprenticeships that were only six months long. The Opposition claim that they want high-quality apprenticeships, but then complain when we remove low quality. I will not take any lessons from them.
Vocational Qualifications
Debate between Liam Byrne and Matt Hancock(10 years, 8 months ago)
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Mr Liam Byrne (Birmingham, Hodge Hill) (Lab)
It is nice that we have the chance to have this exchange during national apprenticeship week. It allows me to say how proud the Opposition are of our country’s apprentices, of the National Apprenticeship Service and of national apprenticeship week, which we are grateful this Government have continued.
I am glad that the Minister is with us today to spell out how he plans to implement Nigel Whitehead’s excellent review, and I am grateful to Nigel Whitehead for briefing me on the plans yesterday. However, I have to be honest with the Minister and say that we are a little disappointed that today he has merely announced but a fraction of the change we need. Most Opposition Members are scratching our heads and asking ourselves, “Is that it?”
The Minister is presiding over a Department that is cutting skills spending by half a billion pounds over the next couple of years. We know that difficult decisions are needed, but that is why comprehensive reform should have been announced today, not just a bit of reform. We heard nothing about how to raise employer demand for apprenticeships, although 92% of firms in this country do not offer them. We heard not a word about how the Government plan to raise the quality of courses taught in further education or the quality of teachers.
The Minister instructed the right hon. Member for Carshalton and Wallington (Tom Brake) to vote against Labour’s plans, which were debated in the Deregulation Bill Committee yesterday, to raise the quality of apprenticeships by 2020. The Secretary of State for Education has downgraded training requirements for further education teachers so that they no longer need English and maths even to a basic level. We have heard nothing today about licensing colleges as specialist centres of technical education.
I am not saying that the Minister is a road block to reform, but I am increasingly concerned that he is a straw in the wind, powerless to deliver the change that the skills system needs. His hon. Friends know that he likes a good plot in Parliament; I am worried that he has lost the plot in his Department.
When will we see plans to raise the quality standards for apprenticeships? When will we see plans to raise and support the quality of further education teaching? Where is the plan to use public procurement to raise apprenticeship numbers? Finally, given that the Minister has refused to tell me how big the head count cuts in the National Apprenticeship Service will be in the next year or two, will he tell the House this afternoon exactly how many people will go?
There is a big plank of consensus between us in the House. We, too, believe that good skills are crucial if families are to earn their way to a better standard of living and escape the cost of living crisis in which the Government have trapped them. Frankly, we needed a bigger plan from the Minister this afternoon.
Matthew Hancock
Well, Mr Speaker, it all started well. The consensus on support for the growth of apprenticeships is welcome. I also welcome the support from the Opposition Front Bench on the moves we are driving through to increase the quality of apprenticeships. Unfortunately, after a reasonably good start, the right hon. Gentleman’s speech went a bit haywire. It is pity that he suggested nothing constructive or positive. Instead, he just sniped. I, too, pay tribute to Nigel Whitehead, who has put together an impressive report on which the reforms are based, but for the right hon. Gentleman to complain about English and maths when we are putting through one of the largest ever programmes to increase English and maths requirements in vocational learning is a bit of a surprise.
We are introducing elite colleges to ensure that when we build HS2 and new nuclear power stations, local people will have the training to get those jobs, but there was not a word of support for that. It is a pity to hear the sniping, but it is welcome that in national apprenticeship week there is support from both sides of the House for the big growth in apprenticeships. They have been a big coalition success, with the number of participants doubling, and they are critical to give young people the chance to succeed instead of being on the scrap heap where the Labour party left them.
Oral Answers to Questions
Debate between Liam Byrne and Matt Hancock(11 years, 1 month ago)
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Matthew Hancock
I am delighted to hear about creative enterprises such as Enterprise Works and Uplands Educational Trust in Swindon. I know that for many people with disabilities, school or adult education is a rewarding experience that helps them gain life skills. My hon. Friend is a passionate and effective champion of that, and I look forward to talking to him in more detail about those enterprises and others to ensure that we support disabled people as much as possible.
Mr Liam Byrne (Birmingham, Hodge Hill) (Lab)
I know that the Minister will be as concerned as I am that unemployment among young adults is still more than 1 million, and that the number of apprenticeships among adults under the age of 19 is now below the level in 2010. Can he assure the House that in the next set of figures the number of apprentices under the age of 19 will increase? While he is at it, will he explain why he voted against Labour’s plans to use the power of public procurement to increase precisely those vitally needed apprenticeships?
Matthew Hancock
Of course we do use public procurement to increase the number of apprenticeships, not least in Crossrail, which is the largest public procurement and construction project in Europe at the moment. It is true that we had to take action to remove some low-quality provision in the 16-to-19 space when we introduced rules to ensure that every apprenticeship was a job, which it had not previously been. I would have thought that the right hon. Gentleman would welcome the improvement in quality. We also have a programme in hand to increase the numbers. Participation in apprenticeships is at the highest level ever, which I would have thought all parties would be able to support.
Finance Bill
Debate between Liam Byrne and Matt Hancock(14 years, 4 months ago)
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Matthew Hancock
I am grateful for the opportunity to pay tribute to the then Chancellor, who expressed his gratitude to the then Opposition Conservative party for the support it gave him during September 2008. That is often forgotten on the Labour Benches.
On the evidence, one of the central questions to which we return time and again in this debate is whether there is a contradiction between dealing with the deficit and getting growth. It is clear that the Labour Front-Bench team think that those two things are entirely in contradiction. However, I want to consider the evidence for whether that is true. We all know that, in the long term, tackling the deficit is unavoidable—occasionally that is even acknowledged by those on the Labour Front Bench. Any child born is born with £23,000 of debt, and under the former Government’s plans, interest payments would have amounted to £70 billion a year, which could otherwise have been spent on important public spending.
There is also a question, in the shorter term, of whether fiscal responsibility can lead to growth. I was interested in this, so I went to look at some of the evidence. There is a very good literature review by Alberto Alesina, who, having described the argument that there is only either fiscal consolidation or growth, wrote that
“the accumulated evidence paints a different picture… Many even sharp reductions of budget deficits have been accompanied and immediately followed by sustained growth… These are the adjustments which have occurred on the spending side and have been large, credible and decisive.”
If the shadow Minister thinks that the Budget was large, credible and decisive, I would be happy to hear from him.
Mr Byrne
I understand the debating technique that the hon. Gentleman is adopting—trying to set up a straw man in order to knock it down—but our deficit reduction plan contained £57 billion of decisions relating to fiscal consolidation alongside £22 billion of growth. Fiscal consolidation was not posed as an alternative to growth; actually the two things were seen very much as twins.
Matthew Hancock
Unfortunately, those from whom the previous Government had borrowed so much did not see a credible plan from the Labour party. That is why we have had to introduce the emergency Budget, so that we could put that credible plan in place. Since the election, there have been downgrades in the debt of many of our competitors, so it is critical that we have managed to put that triple A rating on to a sustainable basis.
I want to go through three reasons why a fiscal consolidation can lead to growth. The first, of course, concerns interest rates. The long-term interest rates at which many companies around the country borrow—they include those in my constituency, and no doubt those of all other Members—have fallen. In fact, since the election the 10-year rate has fallen from 3.88 to 3.44%, which represents more than a 10% fall in the funding costs of companies up and down the country. Of course, that was not taken into account in the two productions of the Office for Budget Responsibility analysis, which is why a direct comparison of the two is, as stated by Sir Alan Budd, misleading.
Matthew Hancock
My hon. Friend is getting a reputation for making extremely good interventions, and that was one of them. Fiscal consolidation also means that interest rates can be held lower for longer by the independent Bank of England, which is a second important channel through which economic growth can be supported, and not opposed, by fiscal consolidation.
Mr Byrne
I am following the hon. Gentleman’s argument with great interest. He will have worked at the Bank of England for long enough to be able to read bond yields. Like me, he will have noticed that they were actually coming down from late 2008, down to a low point in February, not least because there was a flight to safety in the European bond markets. As people began to worry about what was going on in the eurozone, they chose to transfer to safer assets, including UK gilts. That was because there was credibility in what was the fastest and clearest deficit reduction plan of any country in the G7.
Matthew Hancock
Of course, the bond market could see a Conservative—or coalition—Government coming, and that is exactly what happened. I will say this to the right hon. Gentleman: when there is a flight to safety, I would rather it was to British bonds, not to bonds overseas, which is what could easily happen if we did not have a credible policy.
Capital Gains Tax (Rates)
Debate between Liam Byrne and Matt Hancock(14 years, 4 months ago)
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Mr Byrne
I will give way in a moment, because I want Government Members to hear this: far from the absence of detail in the Budget, the Budget prepared by the then Chancellor of Exchequer and presented to the House in March set out to the last penny £19 billion-worth of tax rises and, yes, £20 billion-worth of spending cuts, including £1 billion in cuts from the reform of public sector pensions, £1.2 billion in savings from welfare, £3.5 billion in holding down public sector pay, £5 billion in cuts to lower-priority programmes and £11 billion in savings through the biggest shake-up of Whitehall in a generation. That was on top of £15 billion of efficiencies in this year alone—all carefully broken down by Department.
Matthew Hancock (West Suffolk) (Con)
Will the right hon. Gentleman give way?
Matthew Hancock
Does the right hon. Gentleman think that there is no money left, or does he no longer agree with himself?
Mr Byrne
We can see at whose feet the hon. Gentleman has been training.
Our plan was different from the one the Chancellor presented. Unlike the plan that we heard last week, our plan really did have fairness at its heart. Last Monday night, the Chancellor’s spin doctors made fairness his key Budget test, and by Tuesday lunchtime he had failed it. The night before the Budget, we are reliably informed, Lobby journalists were equipped with an analysis of the Budget’s impact on different groups of citizens, yet somehow, someone forgot to tell the press that the picture was only fair because it included Labour measures. The Government would not dare to present a Budget to stand and fall on its own merits; they had to borrow ours. It did not take long to hear why.
What was the Budget’s impact on pensioners? Age UK says:
“Our research shows that cuts of this scale will be disastrous for older people”
and warns that thousands of lives will be lost. What is the impact on children? Save the Children says:
“Freezing child benefit…will hurt the poorest parents most, rather than their richest peers”.
A 20% VAT rate means driving some of the poorest parents into the arms of loan sharks. The Child Poverty Action Group said:
“This is a disappointing budget for child poverty…The increase in VAT is a regressive measure which will impact hardest on poorest families.”
Perhaps the final word should go to the Institute for Fiscal Studies. In a phrase that will come back to haunt Government Members, it said that the cuts to benefits will
“hit the poorest hardest and keep on hitting them harder year on year”.
Six days on from the main event, the Government’s progressive credentials already lie in ruins.
The price of keeping down unemployment in the worst global recession for 60 years was a price worth paying. It was the price of a national defence in a global storm. When we left office, unemployment was 500,000 lower than people expected a year ago. Repossessions were half the level of the 1990s, and company insolvencies were just a third of the rate they reached in the recession of the early 1990s. We are proud that we got the country though the recession in one piece and that we have delivered a return to growth.
It is true to say that no Government would have had an easy time in this Parliament, but the difficulty of the task demands that we do not take gratuitous bets with the nation’s hard-fought recovery and that we pay down the debt in a way that is fair. The Budget fails both those tests, and we will campaign for a plan that is better in this House and beyond.