Miners and Mining Communities
Debate between Liz Twist and Steve Double(6 months ago)
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Liz Twist (Blaydon) (Lab)
Let me start by thanking my hon. Friend the Member for Easington (Grahame Morris) and the hon. Member for Leigh (James Grundy) for securing this debate.
I also thank right hon. and hon. Members for their contributions. We heard from my hon. Friends the Members for Easington, for Barnsley East (Stephanie Peacock), for City of Durham (Mary Kelly Foy), for Wansbeck (Ian Lavery), for South Shields (Mrs Lewell-Buck), for Pontypridd (Alex Davies-Jones), for Selby and Ainsty (Keir Mather) and for Llanelli (Dame Nia Griffith), and from my right hon. Friend the Member for North Durham (Mr Jones). All of them spoke about the Coalfields Regeneration Trust’s “State of the Coalfields 2024” report and the miners’ pension scheme. It is a pleasure to respond to the debate on behalf of the Opposition, not least because these issues are deeply personal for my constituents, as they are for Members from across coalfield communities.
It would be difficult to overstate the impact of the coal industry on my constituency, and on the north-east as a whole. Its history is woven into the fabric of our community. Many towns and villages owe their existence to the pit. Today, statues and colliery wheels commemorate our past, and community facilities set up to serve mining families remain in use. In my constituency, there were many collieries, from Chopwell to Kibblesworth and from Greenside to Bewicke Main. Each pit was surrounded by a community in which coal was not just a job, but a way of life. Like other right hon. and hon. Members, I could not go without mentioning the annual big meeting, the Durham miners’ gala. Each year, brilliant flying banners and marching brass bands bring together thousands in our region to celebrate working-class life and solidarity.
So far, I have talked about my local area, but the mining history of the UK stretches far and wide, from the coalfields in Lanarkshire to mines in the midlands, on to the Welsh valleys and all the way down to Kent.
Liz Twist
Indeed. I noticed the similarities in what the hon. Member said between his community and our coalmining communities.
Let us be clear that the reality of working down the pit was far from romantic. Miners toiled in brutal working conditions, doing backbreaking work in the near darkness. As we have heard, many people lost their lives in disasters or developed industrial diseases, such as pneumoconiosis, as a result of their work. It is important that we remember and pay tribute to them.
Mining communities knew better than anyone that this work was tough and dangerous, but whole ways of life were built around the pits. Their rapid closures caused mass upheaval, the consequences of which are still felt to this day. As the reports from the Industrial Communities Alliance have highlighted, former coalfield areas still suffer from a lack of skilled, well-paid jobs, as well as from high levels of economic inactivity. While employment rates have improved since the days of mass unemployment, many people still feel there are few meaningful and secure alternatives to the work that was once available.
Labour is determined that we will not abandon our communities to the whims of industrial change. Through our green prosperity plan, we will seize the opportunities of energy transition to deliver economic justice and rebuild the strength of our industrial heartlands. We will create secure, clean jobs, backed by strong trade unions, with individual and collective rights guaranteed for all workers. Our former mining communities powered us through the industrial revolution, and it is not right that many people within them are forced to rely on insecure, zero-hours contracts, or left vulnerable to fire and rehire. That is why Labour’s new deal for working people will put an end to those practices and build our economy from the bottom up, and the middle out, to deliver a high-growth, high-wage economy for all.
This Government came to power talking about levelling up, but inequalities remain as stark as ever. A report from the APPG on coalfield communities, in partnership with the Industrial Communities Alliance, speaks of the failure of the current approach to deliver for former coalfield areas. Pots allocated by competitive bidding are too haphazard and too short term to allow for the developments that are needed to transform former industrial sites. Coalfield communities must be allowed to come together, and to learn from each other, not made to compete like contestants on “Dragons’ Den”.
Not only must we deliver a better future for our communities, but we must right the wrongs of the past. As we have heard, the party in Government have broken promises about the mineworkers’ pension scheme. Does the Minister think it is fair that the Government make vast amounts of money from the current arrangement, while former miners struggle to make ends meet? Let me be clear: this is a historic injustice that should never have taken place, and the Government should not be in the business of profiting off mineworkers’ pensions.
After so many years of silence from Parliament on this issue, the BEIS Committee inquiry was very welcome. The Labour party will work with mineworkers and their families to right this wrong, and we will set out our full plans on this by the time of the election. People should be in no doubt that we will deliver justice for mineworkers and their families with the urgency required.
We must never shrug off injustice. We all remember the violent images of the strike in 1984 and 1985, perhaps no more so than the sight of Lesley Boulton cowering in the face of a police truncheon at the Orgreave coking plant. Earlier this year, new footage from Orgreave was shown in a Channel 4 documentary, which clearly set out the police brutality and allegations of a cover-up. The former Prime Minister, the right hon. Member for Maidenhead (Mrs May), considered the case for an inquiry, but it seems that the Government no longer think that they have any lessons to learn. Their memories are clearly short. The Labour party has long supported a full investigation or inquiry into the events at Orgreave, and we are committed to putting a new Hillsborough law on to the statute book to prevent future injustices. I hope the Minister shares my conviction that the truth must be heard.
Our coalmining days may be behind us, but we must not forget the communities that formed around them. They were the engine that powered Britain’s industrial success, and we owe it to them that they should share in the rewards.
Oral Answers to Questions
Debate between Liz Twist and Steve Double(2 years, 2 months ago)
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Liz Twist (Blaydon) (Lab)
The Environment Agency is a key player in tackling sewage discharges, yet it has seen its funding halved over the past 10 years. What is the Minister doing to reinstate the essential funding for the Environment Agency?
Steve Double
I do not recognise the figures that the hon. Lady quotes. In this spending review, the DEFRA budget increased by more than £4 billion, and the Environment Agency is being more active than ever before in enforcing the regulations on our water quality.
School Funding
Debate between Liz Twist and Steve Double(5 years, 8 months ago)
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Liz Twist
I will make some progress, so that the debate makes some sense.
As I said, this is a speech of two parts. The first part is about the facts and figures and the second part is about what they mean for our schools—the staff, the governors, the parents and, most of all, the pupils.
Liz Twist
I absolutely agree with my hon. Friend’s assessment of the situation. That is a real problem, as it is for Mr Ramanandi and schools in Gateshead.
As I was saying, the Minister must know that schools face real-terms cuts year on year. It is simply not right to say that funding per pupil, which is the measure that really matters, has gone up. The Government’s statistics show that England’s schools have 137,000 more pupils in the system. The respected Institute for Fiscal Studies acknowledges that schools have suffered an 8% real-terms reduction in spending per pupil, despite growing numbers of pupils coming through the door.
With increasing numbers of pupils, and decreasing funding in real terms, schools have had to make cuts that have resulted in 5,400 fewer teachers, 2,800 fewer teaching assistants, 1,400 fewer support staff and 1,200 fewer auxiliary staff. If funding per pupil had been maintained in value since 2015, school funding in England would be £5.1 billion higher than it is now.
Like the petitioners, school leaders across England are concerned that the Government have not kept their promise to increase school funding in cash terms this year. The Secretary of State for Education promised that
“all schools would see a modest rise in funding”.
However, 4,819 schools have not received the Education Secretary’s guaranteed cash increase, meaning that one in four primary schools and one in six secondary schools have had their funding cut in cash terms this year. Locally, 71 schools in Gateshead have suffered Government cuts to per-pupil funding since 2015, losing out on £14 million. In my constituency, the average cut is about £45,000 per primary school and £185,000 per secondary school.
Headteachers in my constituency tell me that, as funding has become tighter, schools have had to cut back on essential resources: teaching and non-teaching staff; support staff who work with vulnerable pupils; small group work; interventions with children who are not thriving; teaching resources; subject choices; classroom and extracurricular activities; repairs for buildings, including asbestos management; and renewal of equipment.
Unison, which represents support staff in many of our schools, forecast that over the next year one in four schools across Gateshead borough will see redundancies. We know that, on top of that, many schools are not replacing staff who leave, so the reality is much worse for them.
Support staff are disproportionately affected by the redundancies. These are mostly part-time or term-time-only jobs, low-paid and generally taken by women living close to the school. By 2021, all but three schools in Gateshead are expected to be in budget deficit, so it is likely that further redundancies are on the horizon. How do we expect our schools to plan for the future?
Steve Double
I am very grateful to the hon. Lady and fellow member of the Petitions Committee for giving way, and she is making an excellent start and making the case for more funding for schools. I am sure that there is no one in this Chamber today who does not want to see more funding for schools. However, schools in Cornwall have been making the sorts of rationalisations and working efficiently in the way that she is describing for many years. So while we make the case for more funding for our schools, does she agree that the allocation of that funding must be fairly distributed across the country, because metropolitan schools have had too big a share of the cake for far too long?