Oral Answers to Questions
Debate between Lindsay Hoyle and Rebecca Smith(3 days, 8 hours ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Rebecca Smith (South West Devon) (Con)
The Secretary of State recently announced the closure of the independent Social Mobility Commission and its replacement with a Government-run class unit. The commission existed to pose independent challenges to Ministers, whereas the new unit will report to Ministers. Many will conclude that abolishing an independent commission and replacing it with an internal Government body amounts to weakening scrutiny, at precisely the moment when the Government claim to be serious about tackling inequality and child poverty. How can we have confidence in the Government’s assessment of their own performance when the independent body established to provide that assessment has been abolished?
Rebecca Smith (South West Devon) (Con)
Female genital mutilation is one of the most serious forms of violence against women and girls, yet the Government’s understanding of its prevalence is still based on figures from 2011, estimating that 137,000 women were living with FGM in this country. We cannot tackle what we do not measure, so if Ministers genuinely regard violence against women and girls as a national priority, will they stop relying on 15-year-old estimates and commission an urgent, comprehensive study to establish the true prevalence of FGM in Britain?
Satvir Kaur
We are going further than ever before to deal with honour-based abuse. On data, FGM is an under-reported crime and there is definitely work that we can all be doing to ensure that we are raising awareness. A campaign to raise awareness is about to be launched, so that we can get victims to come forward and support them.
Rebecca Smith (South West Devon) (Con)
The Secretary of State has made class a central theme of her equalities agenda, but before she can tackle class-based disadvantage, she must surely be able to define it, so what is her definition of class and how will her Department identify who is and who is not working class?
Oral Answers to Questions
Debate between Lindsay Hoyle and Rebecca Smith(2 months ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Rebecca Smith (South West Devon) (Con)
The Government continue to point the finger at schools for the number of those not in education, employment or training, when that is one area that is performing comparatively well. Meanwhile, in Labour-led Wales, which ignored the Conservative Government’s education reforms, school standards have fallen and the NEETs crisis is even worse than in England. Why are the Government blaming schools for NEETs when the bigger problem is the collapse of entry-level jobs for young people?
Lucy Powell
I say gently to the hon. Lady that we do not just have more than a million young people not in education, employment or training—most of whom were educated under the Conservatives—but 1.5 million students persistently absent from school; a stubborn disadvantage gap, which did not close on their watch; widening regional attainment gaps; and a special educational needs and disabilities crisis that we are having to deal with, which they did not. Perhaps more importantly, the Conservatives put our young people on a treadmill of resits, with failure after failure. Just this summer, less than 14% of our young people passed their resits in maths. That is the legacy that they left, and I will rectify it.
Oral Answers to Questions
Debate between Lindsay Hoyle and Rebecca Smith(4 months, 2 weeks ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Rebecca Smith (South West Devon) (Con)
I am not surprised that Labour Ministers and Back Benchers are patting themselves on the back for their youth guarantee, but it is a sticking plaster solution to a problem of their own creation. Rather than U-turn on their triple whammy of increased business costs, higher national insurance, higher wages and higher business rates, the Government would rather use the state to subsidise jobs for the same young people who businesses can no longer afford to employ. Will the Secretary of State finally concede that no amount of Government work programmes can undo the damage that they have done to the labour market and to opportunities for young people?
Oral Answers to Questions
Debate between Lindsay Hoyle and Rebecca Smith(4 months, 3 weeks ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Rebecca Smith (South West Devon) (Con)
Oral Answers to Questions
Debate between Lindsay Hoyle and Rebecca Smith(5 months, 1 week ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Rebecca Smith (South West Devon) (Con)
I know that, like me, those on the Government Front Bench welcome the regulating for growth Bill, which will enable the modernisation of regulations for maritime autonomy testing and the creation of regulatory sandbox powers. That is vital for the unmanned vessels that we need to protect our coastal waters, but defence firms such as those in my constituency cannot afford unnecessary delay due to the parliamentary timetable, or we will risk losing ground to international competitors. What conversations is the Department having with colleagues across Government to speed up the progress of the Bill through Parliament? I am planning to ask the Leader of the House about that in due course.
Oral Answers to Questions
Debate between Lindsay Hoyle and Rebecca Smith(6 months, 2 weeks ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Rebecca Smith (South West Devon) (Con)
The Child Maintenance Service is not working for parents and it is not working for children. My own casework shows that the majority of those getting in touch about the CMS believe it to be ineffective, with systemic issues in communication, timeliness and case handling. My constituents are not alone. The independent case examiner received 1,827 complaints about the CMS in 2024-25, up from 1,519 in 2023-24. In November 2024, the charity Gingerbread published a report, “Fix the CMS”. In October 2025, a House of Lords Public Services Committee report recommended a range of changes to do the same. The Government have responded to both, but when will the Government enact the changes to bring forward the recommended and acknowledged improvements to the service?
Oral Answers to Questions
Debate between Lindsay Hoyle and Rebecca Smith(9 months, 2 weeks ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Rebecca Smith (South West Devon) (Con)
It strikes me as odd that rather than extolling the virtues of the Government’s flagship youth guarantee, we have had a number of Labour MPs asking about youth hubs. Is that because it is easier to defend the setting up of some youth hubs than feeding back on the roll-out of the youth guarantee? Since the Labour Government came into power, businesses have stopped hiring young people in roles where they could be paying someone more experienced the same amount of money. That has meant that youth employment has gone up since July 2024, with the most recent figures showing a 103,000 increase in unemployed young people.
Does the Secretary of State agree that rather than Back Bench-pleasing schemes tinkering around the edges of the youth unemployment crisis, what we need is a strong economy with confident businesses actively seeking to employ the hundreds of thousands of talented yet unemployed young people across the country?
Oral Answers to Questions
Debate between Lindsay Hoyle and Rebecca Smith(11 months ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Rebecca Smith (South West Devon) (Con)
Since the Chancellor delivered her Budget, it has come to light that benefits have been extended for the parents of teenagers with disabilities or illnesses. Although on the face of it that may seem kind and compassionate, it is also contradictory. Parents and carers are no longer required to ensure that their teenagers are attending an educational setting at all to receive additional child benefit, which means that young people living with neurodivergent conditions such as ADHD are being enabled to stay at home and out of education, training or even work. This flies directly in the face of the Prime Minister’s words after the Budget:
“if you’re not given the support you need…or if you are simply written off because you’re neurodivergent or disabled, then it can trap you in a cycle of worklessness and dependency for decades.”
May I ask the Secretary of State how extending access to benefits for conditions such as ADHD in teenagers before coming up with a plan to ensure that young people remain in full-time education and training delivers on the Prime Minister’s point?
Oral Answers to Questions
Debate between Lindsay Hoyle and Rebecca Smith(1 year ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Rebecca Smith (South West Devon) (Con)
Every Member in this Chamber shares a commitment to lifting people out of poverty, especially children; we just have different views on how to go about it. Children in workless households are nearly four times more likely to live in poverty than those in households where adults work. We know that work pays, yet we on the Conservative Benches find ourselves surrounded by parties that are just itching to scrap the two-child benefit cap, resorting to yet more sticking plasters, like universal breakfast clubs, to reduce uncomfortable figures without putting in the hard work to tackle their causes. Does the Minister share my concern that lifting the two-child benefit cap will increase worklessness, and can he guarantee that taxes will not go up in next month’s Budget for adults who work hard and make careful decisions about family size in order to pay for the £3.6 billion it will cost to lift that cap?
Andrew Western
I am stunned to hear that the fight that the Opposition Front Benchers are choosing to pick on this occasion is opposing universal free breakfast clubs, when we know that well-fed children have hungry minds. [Interruption.] For those chirping from a sedentary position, that is exactly what the shadow Minister. What I find even more staggering are the lectures from an Opposition who left almost 3 million people in this country economically inactive and around 1 million young people out of work. They dragged 900,000 children into poverty, when the last Labour Government lifted 600,000 out. It is the last Labour Government who we will be taking lessons from, not the last Tory one.
Oral Answers to Questions
Debate between Lindsay Hoyle and Rebecca Smith(1 year, 9 months ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Rebecca Smith (South West Devon) (Con)