Food Banks

Debate between Mark Pawsey and Laura Sandys

Wednesday 18th December 2013 Commons Chamber

[Laura Sandys]

My hon. Friend is quite right.

Let us return to some of the reasons that lie behind the present situation, few of which were mentioned by the hon. Member for Garston and Halewood (Maria Eagle). Food prices began to rise in 2008, and since then global commodity prices have risen by 30%. Much of that happened under the last Government. During our first couple of years in office, we linked pensions to inflation and the rise in the cost of living.

We need a solution to the problem of rising global food prices. Why, in 2010, did the proportion of our domestic food production—which would have hedged our exposure to global prices—drop to 48%? This Government are working to increase our food resilience and our long-term food production.

[Mark Pawsey (Rugby) (Con)]

Is it not rather disappointing that the one group of people about whom we have not heard today are the general public, who donate so generously to food banks? Ought we not to express our gratitude to them?

[Laura Sandys]

I entirely agree. There are extraordinary people—committed volunteers—in my constituency.

Poorer families in my constituency also face structural poverty. Some families in private rented accommodation have no cookers and are captured by microwaved food, condemned to eat expensive food with no resilience, while others have to feed families of three or four with only one ring on which to cook. We must do something about the quality of our private rented accommodation.

Grammar Schools

Debate between Mark Pawsey and Laura Sandys

Tuesday 8th November 2011 Westminster Hall

[Mark Pawsey (Rugby) (Con)]

I am grateful for the opportunity to speak in this important debate. Like everyone who has spoken before me, I am a strong supporter of grammar schools. Like my hon. Friend the Member for Dartford (Gareth Johnson), whom I congratulate on securing the debate, I am a product of the grammar school in the constituency that I represent.

Rugby retains grammar schools, but we have the best of both worlds because we also have non-selective schools. We have a non-selective school in Ashlawn that has a grammar stream, and we have two high-class, selective, single-sex grammar schools—Lawrence Sheriff school for boys and Rugby high school for girls. I should declare an interest, in that my daughter is a pupil at the girls’ school.

As I say, Rugby has grammar schools, and I am a product of Lawrence Sheriff. My hon. Friend the Member for Isle of Wight (Mr Turner) was there a few years before me, and I came to this place with my hon. Friend the Member for Warrington South (David Mowat), who also went to the school. The school therefore has a proud tradition of producing Members of Parliament.

At the school, I was in a class with the sons of cement factory workers and scrap metal merchants, each of whom was the first member of their family to go to university. I therefore have a good understanding of the role of grammar schools in providing social mobility.

We retain grammar schools in Rugby because of the hard work and diligence of an earlier generation of politicians, who fought to retain our selective schools in the face of the comprehensivisation of Britain. The fact that we have grammar schools is a major asset for the community that I represent. Our schools are in high demand. Parents move into our area to provide their children with the opportunity to attend a grammar school, and they also apply from substantial distances—20 or 30 miles away—to secure that kind of education for their children. We know the schools are popular, and it is because of the high standards and excellence that a grammar school provides. My hon. Friend the Member for Dartford gave a full account of the academic qualifications secured at most grammar schools.

I am pleased that the Government recognise the strengths and qualities that grammar schools can bring the country, and that they have brought forward a policy that will enable them to expand. In Rugby, we have been looking forward to the expansion of our grammar schools in the past few years, because of our party’s policy to permit them to grow where there is population growth. Rugby has a very positive approach to new housing development. We have a site that is expected to take 6,200 new homes in the next 20 years, and we are expecting the grammar school provision to increase in proportion. It is great news that we may be able to go further.

I am anxious to ensure that our grammar schools should be available for the broadest possible number of children in our community. I have one or two anxieties about the selection process that will take place in an era of academies. Until now, the selection arrangements for our existing grammar schools have been run by the local authority, and I have two concerns about the process to which the authority has moved in recent years.

The first concern is about the need for parents to opt in. That came home clearly to me much as it did to my hon. Friend the Member for South Thanet (Laura Sandys). I was on a doorstep talking to parents who had a bright and gifted young child, who had been denied the opportunity of a grammar school place because they had not filled in the necessary form in time for the child to take the exam. I was horrified that there was a system in which parents must opt in rather than opting out. I should like the Minister to comment on an opt-out system. I recognise that there will be parents who decide that a selective education is not right for their children, or who do not want to put their children under the burden of taking a selection exam. However, if we are to make our grammar schools the engines of social mobility that they should be, we should make certain that a child’s ability to sit the selection exam is not determined by their parents’ ability to get a form filled in on time, and sent back to the school and local authority.

[Laura Sandys]

Another issue in my constituency is that fewer girls than boys apply to grammar school. There is no reason for that, other than parents’ not necessarily looking at their girls, and their potential to go to grammar school, in the same way. My hon. Friend’s system would be extremely interesting, in many ways, in relation to opening that up and perhaps increasing the number of girls who apply.