Education and Local Services

Mark Prisk Excerpts

Tuesday 27th June 2017 Commons Chamber

[Mr Mark Prisk (Hertford and Stortford) (Con)]

I congratulate the hon. Member for Coatbridge, Chryston and Bellshill (Hugh Gaffney) on that speech. It was passionate and intense, and he was quite right: it was his moment to enjoy, and so it should be. I also congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Aberdeen South (Ross Thomson), who was articulate and informed—that city has an excellent representative. It is a great pleasure to have so many Scottish colleagues around me on the Conservative Benches.

We have only a short time, so let me canter through some of the points I wanted to raise. Rightly, one of today’s themes is education. After all, if we look back just seven years, to 2010, one in three children leaving primary schools was unable to read, write or count properly. What that tells me is that, in too many schools under Labour, the standards just were not good enough. Seven years on, the number of children in schools classed as good or excellent has risen by nearly 2 million. That is nearly 2 million young minds now able to flourish, where previously they were struggling under poor standards.

Education is important to the individual, but it is also crucial to the economy. As we leave the European Union, all of us need to rethink what we mean by education, skills and training. That brings me to how we can best strengthen the economy as a whole. There are good measures in this Queen’s Speech on agriculture, fisheries, and spacecraft and other emerging technologies, but we face a broader challenge, which is that productivity in this country is persistently weak. Unless we address that, all our hopes for public services and other matters will simply come to nought.

At the beginning of this debate last Wednesday, I listened to the Leader of the Opposition tell us that the most effective way of increasing pay was strong trade unions and effective collective bargaining. That showed me that his thinking is out of date and blinkered, because the best way to achieve sustained growth and higher incomes is to raise our productivity. If we add 1% of productivity to our economy each year, that will be another £240 billion over the next 10 years—£9,000 per household. That is the way to grow the economy, lift people’s wages and pay for public services.

In the minute or so that I have left, let me touch on one aspect of productivity, namely trade. In recent months we have seen the pound fall and a resurgence in manufacturing, which is welcome. However, as the excellent economist for The Sunday Times, David Smith, has pointed out, we now need to liberalise the trade in services. After all, services are 80% of our economy.

The Bills on trade and customs are good and I welcome the fact that we have a dedicated trade Department focused on that task, but the liberalisation of the global market in services, which is so important to our economy and to jobs, will need a sustained and cross-Government approach if it is to succeed. Clearly, the EU-Brexit process will affect that most immediately, but there is a wider opportunity and I believe that this country should take up the mantle as the champion for open, global markets in services and pursue that through whatever means possible. Get that right and the chance to grow our economy—and, yes, lift people’s living standards—will be all the greater.