Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Margot James and Christian Matheson

Thursday 7th March 2019 Commons Chamber

[Christian Matheson (City of Chester) (Lab)]

Bearing in mind the dwindling pipeline of musical talent coming through from state schools, does the Minister agree with the chair of UK Music that music education should be seen as an intrinsic good, just as sporting education is?

[Margot James]

I assure the hon. Gentleman that the Government take music and other creative arts education very seriously. The Minister for School Standards has introduced a hub scheme across the country, with substantial funding to enable state school pupils to access music, as they deserve.

Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Margot James and Christian Matheson

Thursday 31st January 2019 Commons Chamber

[Margot James]

I congratulate the university in the hon. Gentleman’s constituency on its great work. The Government have invested £50 million in AI fellowships and £100 million in 1,000 new PhD places, of which I hope his local institution will be able to take advantage.

[Christian Matheson (City of Chester) (Lab)]

12. What recent discussions he has had with the Secretary of State for Education on the provision of music education in schools.

Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Margot James and Christian Matheson

Tuesday 12th December 2017 Commons Chamber

[Mr Speaker]

Order. I am extremely grateful to the Minister, but we have a lot to get through. We need to be much brisker. Sorry.

[Christian Matheson]

I refer to my entry in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests. As postal workers trudge through the snow this morning, they will have a right to be aggrieved at losing their pensions, while Moya Greene gets paid £1.9 million and gets free flights, paid for by Royal Mail, to Canada. Does the Minister accept that?

[Margot James]

I disagree with the hon. Gentleman. The pension scheme, if left unchanged, would result in virtual bankruptcy for Royal Mail. It would require an injection of £1.3 billion annually, against profitability of approximately £700 million. I think he can do the maths himself.

Draft Trade Union Act 2016 (Political Funds) (Transition Period) Regulations 2017

Debate between Margot James and Christian Matheson

Wednesday 25th January 2017 General Committees

[Margot James]

The hon. Gentleman is right to say that the Government consulted widely with individual unions, the TUC and the certification officer on the length of time deemed reasonable for the transition period. The unions gave differing views. Many have lobbied us for longer than 12 months, but, taken in the round, the Government have decided that 12 months is a reasonable amount of time for unions to introduce the necessary changes to comply with the legislation.

[Christian Matheson (City of Chester) (Lab)]

First, I declare my membership of the Unite and GMB trade unions, in common with my hon. Friend the Member for Cardiff South and Penarth. What was the point of consulting if the Government were simply going to ignore every response they received ?

[Margot James]

We conducted a consultation and took it seriously. We listened to people’s views and arrived at a judgment. I remind the hon. Gentleman and other hon. Members that this is not news to the trade unions concerned. It passed into law last May, following intensive debate on the Floor of the House and a great deal of publicity. In effect, the unions have had more than 12 months to introduce the necessary changes to their systems.

--- Later in debate ---

[Margot James]

I can only repeat what I said to the hon. Member for Glasgow South West. I am not going to repeat myself again. The regulations implement the Act’s provisions by providing for a 12-month transition period. We have taken a proportionate approach on the political funds opt-in transition.

[Christian Matheson]

rose—

[Margot James]

Sorry, I am not going to give way again. We have taken on board the comments from this debate as well as those during the consultation. Our view is that the 12-month period gives sufficient time.

Question put.

National Minimum Wage (Workplace Internships) Bill

Debate between Margot James and Christian Matheson

Friday 4th November 2016 Commons Chamber

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (Margot James)]

We have had a good debate, full of insight and good humour and I warmly congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Elmet and Rothwell (Alec Shelbrooke) on all the work he has done examining the issue of unpaid internships and introducing his Bill today. Indeed, so rich was the debate that it is impossible to do justice to all the excellent contributions. My only disappointment was that my hon. Friend the Member for North East Somerset (Mr Rees-Mogg) tantalised with his presence but confined his remarks to a few pertinent points, rather than giving us the benefit of the full panoply of his views on the matter. That was left to my hon. Friends the Members for Shipley (Philip Davies) and for Bury North (Mr Nuttall), who did not disappoint, and neither did my hon. Friends the Members for Louth and Horncastle (Victoria Atkins) and for North Devon (Peter Heaton-Jones). We have also heard some very good points from the hon. Member for Sheffield, Brightside and Hillsborough (Gill Furniss).

Those of us who have worked with my hon. Friend the Member for Elmet and Rothwell know that he is a tireless campaigner for interns’ rights. He made a personal pledge to act on unpaid internships and this Bill represents only the most recent stage in his impressive campaign to secure fairness of opportunity and equity of consideration for all entrants to the labour market regardless of their personal means or social background.

The principle lying behind and driving my hon. Friend’s efforts is the idea that work can be a powerful engine for social mobility, and the Prime Minister, who talks about her vision of a truly meritocratic Britain and building an economy that works for everybody, is very much of the same mind.

I want to take a little time to talk about the Government review set up by the Prime Minister at the beginning of last month. It will be headed by the chief executive of the Royal Society of Arts, Matthew Taylor, and is to look specifically at developments in modern working practices. I also want to speak about the national minimum wage and the living wage, and a little bit about Government enforcement through HMRC. I also want to address the provisions set out in the Bill.

First, let me make a few remarks about internships in the broader context and share a few points from my constituency experience. I have changed the names of the people I shall mention. The first of them is Susan. She was educated at a well-known public school. Her father was chairman of a public company and a donor to one of our two major political parties. He effected an introduction to the party chairman which resulted in a six-month unpaid internship for Susan at the party’s headquarters, and from the contacts she made there she was able to secure a second unpaid internship for a Member of Parliament.

[Christian Matheson (City of Chester) (Lab)]

And then a safe seat.

[Margot James]

The hon. Gentleman takes my example a little too far, but one can only imagine such an outcome as being highly likely.

Now, let me introduce Jack. Jack’s father works for a landscape-gardening company and just about makes average earnings, and his wife works part-time as a carer. As a family, they are just about getting by and they think Jack will get on fine because he is a bright boy. But Jack is already disadvantaged by some of the choices he made at GCSE which ruled out the sort of A-levels the Russell Group universities favour. He has no contacts in London and his family cannot afford to support him through an unpaid internship. Unlike Susan I think Jack would probably be one of the 40% of young people my hon. Friend the Member for Elmet and Rothwell indicates would reject an internship if offered on an unpaid basis. Those case studies illustrate to me that my hon. Friend is really on to something in challenging the concept of unpaid internships under the conditions set out in his Bill.

However, we believe that good, worthwhile, genuine internships certainly have a part to play, alongside other routes such as work experience, apprenticeships, work placements and work shadowing, all of which we have heard a great deal about in our debate. I believe we all recognise that young people learning about the workplace, developing skills and getting training can produce networking opportunities in and of themselves. Employers can also benefit from fresh thinking and from finding potentially great new permanent employees to join their team in future.

There are many different types of internship. The Gateways to the Professions Collaborative Forum, for example, represents about 60 professional bodies. We have heard about the excellent programme of paid internships that is run from the Speaker’s quarters in this House. In the attempt to define high-quality apprenticeships as an arrangement whereby individuals work and can gain some compensation, there is also the prospect that they will develop professional skills and an understanding of a profession. Those are all good experiences and we would not want obstacles to their fulfilment to be created unnecessarily from any unintended consequences of legislation.

There are many excellent resources, such as the Government-backed graduate talent pool, which is an initiative designed to help new and recent graduates to gain real work experience across Government. It advertises quality internships with a range of desirable employers in numerous competitive sectors. Most significantly, 100% of the vacancies advertised through the graduate talent pool are for paid positions. A 2011 survey of more than 500 people registered with the pool found that over 60% of respondents were motivated to join in order to improve their long-term prospects and gain general work experience, and it showed that over 80% of interns would recommend the experience and scheme to others.

Another example is the popular RateMyPlacement website, which I heard my hon. Friend the Member for Shipley mention—I think in relation to some experience he offered to a young person from his constituency. Graduates and interns can share their experiences of placements anonymously on the site and often find specific guidance on such things as interviews and general careers advice.

There is an increasing wealth of information out there, for employers as much as anyone else, about what well-managed, high-quality internships look like. However, we all know that not all the internships we are debating today are good quality and properly managed, and I think we all, across the House, aspire to improve our system such that there ends up being just good-quality, preferably paid—and certainly compensated—internships in future.

Let me turn to the point that several hon. Members have made: that workers do have rights. Workers have a contract with their employer under which they perform work to agreement and both parties must get something of value from the arrangements. The contract does not have to be written and the value provided to the person performing the work might initially be the opportunity to gain experience or the promise of future work. Other factors to consider are whether a person has the right to send someone else to do the work and whether the person is better viewed as working for the employer rather than being engaged by an independent contractor.

A genuine worker has a “day one” right to be at least paid the appropriate national minimum wage or the national living wage if he or she is over 25. When a court looks at a person’s employment status, it will always consider the reality of their working arrangements and not just how those are described. Simply labelling someone as an intern is not enough to exempt them from the rights associated with being a worker.



However, there is no universally agreed or accepted definition of the term “intern”, despite many attempts to define it today. I sensed considerable sympathy for the view expressed by my hon. Friend the Member for Bury North that it was perhaps a glorified Americanism used to describe what is effectively work experience. We must acknowledge that there are bad examples of work experience and internships, but let me make it absolutely clear that the Government believe that all people in the UK are entitled to fair wages for fair work.