Youth Unemployment

Debate between Mark Simmonds and Graham Stuart

Wednesday 9th November 2011 Commons Chamber

[Mark Simmonds (Boston and Skegness) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Wansbeck (Ian Lavery), but the only point on which I agreed with him was when he said that this is a very serious issue, and that we need an extremely detailed and fundamental rethink of how we address unemployment.

Every single person who is unemployed, whether young, middle-aged or old, experiences a personal tragedy, and we need to do as much as we possibly can to address the situation, but the fundamental point is that we will not create jobs unless we have macro-economic stability.

To get macro-economic stability, we have to get the deficit under control, and the coalition Government must not change course. They must stick to the course that they have set, otherwise the economy will not grow, because controlling the structural deficit is a pre requisite of economic growth, not a substitute for it.

Of course there is growing unemployment, but youth unemployment grew by 40% between 1997 and 2010, so it is not a new problem or issue. Indeed, the right hon. Member for Birmingham, Hodge Hill (Mr Byrne), who speaks for the Opposition on this matter, made surreptitious use of statistics, with some of those that he gave painting a wholly inaccurate picture. Interestingly his only solution to the problem was more tax and more spend, the formula that clearly did not work under 13 years of the Labour party in government.

[Mr Graham Stuart]

Is it not true that in Hull and other cities throughout the country, the previous Government ignored youth unemployment, which stayed steady even as the general economy boomed? The truth is that on too many estates the Labour party abandoned people, threw them on welfare and did not provide them with the employment or education that they needed to better themselves?

[Mark Simmonds]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right, and I think I am correct in saying that 97% of current youth unemployment was inherited by this Government from the Labour Administration.

I have three or four suggestions for what the Government might do in addition to the excellent job that they are already doing. The first suggestion is to provide a greater emphasis on lifelong learning through not just traditional learning theatres, but online learning in particular. Secondly, the costs to, and regulations on, businesses must be reduced. For example, businesses are being used for informal tax gathering, which is highly regressive and has a disproportionate impact on small and medium-sized enterprises, thereby inhibiting their ability to create jobs. There needs to be a close look at exempting businesses from a raft of regulations and bureaucracy which has a negative impact on their ability to create jobs. We must also find mechanisms—I hope the Chancellor is looking at this—to incentivise businesses to invest, to create wealth and, therefore, to create jobs for young people and for others.

Owing to the long-term nature of the problem, the education system clearly fails far too many young people. It is clear also from the rise in youth unemployment, which began long before the current economic crisis, that the education system did not meet employers’ needs, but the Minister for Further Education, Skills and Lifelong Learning, my hon. Friend the Member for South Holland and The Deepings (Mr Hayes) is doing an excellent job of trying to make businesses and education link up and perform in that way.

The Government are absolutely right on their key policy areas, such as rolling out broadband to enable people to engage with technological businesses and innovation, and increasing the Work programme. It is absolutely right to involve independent sector providers to deliver personalised help. There is significant evidence in my constituency that the work providers and the Work programme are getting jobs for people whom the state structures had failed for up to 18 months beforehand. My hon. Friend is absolutely right to deliver improved apprenticeships. In my constituency they are up 67% this year, and in the east midlands the figure is 60%. They are significant achievements, and my hon. Friend should rightly be proud of them.

The introduction of university technical colleges is absolutely right, and I hope that there will be many more of them. Then there is the new enterprise allowance and the link between volunteering and work experience. My hon. Friend the Member for Brigg and Goole (Andrew Percy) was right that it is important for people to get something on their CVs. A link with the voluntary sector may enable that to happen. The Government are on exactly the right lines. They need to continue and they must not be deterred from controlling the structural deficit.

Health and Social Care Bill

Debate between Mark Simmonds and Graham Stuart

Monday 31st January 2011 Commons Chamber

[Mark Simmonds]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. I remember him fighting tirelessly and vociferously to try to prevent those in the health service and the then Health Secretary from allowing that to happen.

Another thing that Labour Members have to understand is that we must move the NHS towards being a service that is centred on the patient, not one where the patient revolves around the system. To enable that to happen, we must measure and improve outcomes on a continuing basis, and we must do it with patient-centric information that will enhance patient choice, not only about the choice of the provider and the location of their treatment, but about the treatment that they receive for their ailment. This Bill deals with all the failings that were present when the Labour party was in charge.

There are three or four areas where the detail still needs to be discussed, and I want to make some suggestions. There must be an opportunity for integrated care and for improved patient pathways. I would very much like acute clinicians, pharmacists and others who deliver patient care to be involved in GP consortia and the commissioning process. Some of the more forward-thinking consortia are already involving acute clinicians, and this needs to be implemented across the board. We need to find a non-prescriptive architecture to enable consortia to work together to collaborate where appropriate, not only in the all-important area of cancer, as appropriately highlighted by my hon. Friend the Member for Basildon and Billericay (Mr Baron), but in acute stroke services. This has been done successfully, and it must continue to be done.

Performance management is absolutely critical. The Bill seems to make no specific mention of out-of-hours care. My right hon. Friend the Secretary of State will remember only too clearly the terrible case of Mr Gray, who was killed by Dr Ubani, the out-of-hours doctor who flew in from Germany and prescribed him the wrong dose of a drug. That was a performance management failure. The SHA failed to monitor the PCT, which was failing to monitor the provider. We must ensure that GPs are involved in driving improvements in out-of-hours care as well as in-hours care.

We need to look at GPs’ contracts. It is rather perplexing that a PMS—personal medical services—contract could be held by a national commissioning board. Who will be in charge of revalidation, training and performance lists? We must move GPs’ quality and outcomes framework towards one that is outcome-based rather than process-based.

[Mr Graham Stuart]

Like my hon. Friend, I will support the Bill. Does he hope, as I do, that the Government will look very carefully at any conflicts of interest? As we rightly give the power down to clinicians, we need to ensure that they always take decisions in the interests of the patient and not for their own financial gain.

[Mark Simmonds]

I entirely agree with my hon. Friend. My understanding is that the NHS commissioning board will have a significant monitoring role to ensure that GPs commission services not automatically from themselves but from providers who provide the best outcomes for the patients they are trying to look after.

I would like to make one final point to the ministerial team. Information is the key that will drive improvements in the NHS, and that information must be comparable, easily accessible and easily understandable in order to inform patients’ decision making processes. It should not just be on the internet. We should not just wait for patients to access information—we have to find ways of taking it to them, particularly those living in socio-economically deprived areas.

The Bill is a significant step in the right direction. It preserves the best of the national health service—equality of access—while creating opportunities to improve the provision of health care in the UK, so that it can become among the best in the world, rather than lag behind. Excellence for all should be the goal.

Coastal Towns (Government Policy)

Debate between Mark Simmonds and Graham Stuart

Tuesday 20th July 2010 Westminster Hall

[Mark Simmonds]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for that critical intervention. He is right to highlight the importance of maintaining coastal and flood defences not just in his constituency but throughout the whole of the UK. I cannot give him the assurance that he is looking for, but I am certain that he and other hon. Members on both sides of the House will lobby vociferously to ensure that coastal defences are maintained. There is a big question about the efficiency and effectiveness of the Environment Agency, which sometimes hinders local schemes and solutions to such problems, and that needs to be looked at carefully.

In the short time since the coalition came to power, it has had a positive impact. Some of the policies that have been put in place and changes that have already been made will have a positive impact on coastal towns. For example, reducing the threshold for national insurance contributions and, as outlined in the Budget, reducing corporation tax, particularly for small companies, will have a particular resonance in many coastal towns, and the promised help for Britain’s tourism industry through reinstating favourable tax rules for furnished holiday lettings will avoid a significant detrimental impact.

Most significant of all are the coalition’s proposals to scrap regional strategies and regional development agencies and to devolve decision making and power to local authority level, thereby allowing decisions to be made at that level—in effect, returning decision making and power to coastal local authorities rather than distant RDAs and other quangos that did not really understand the importance of coastal towns and the complex issues involved. I very much hope that that will not be seen as a role for the public sector only, but that the private, voluntary, charitable and social enterprise sectors, which I believe have a significant role to play, will be stimulated.

One of the key messages that I want to get across this morning to the Minister is that although many coastal towns recognise that they must play their part in sharing the burden of reducing expenditure that will inevitably come from the Government’s difficult decisions, they must not take an unfair share of the burden. We all accept that there will be tough spending settlements for local authorities, Government Departments and Executive agencies, but we need to ensure that they do not have a disproportionate, negative impact on many of our coastal towns.

[Mr Graham Stuart (Beverley and Holderness) (Con)]

When large Departments have to make cuts fairly deeply and relatively quickly, the tendency is to cut out all the smaller centres of service provision and concentrate on the larger centres. That works against rural communities and coastal towns. Does my hon. Friend agree that, although we recognise the severity of the situation and the need for speed, Ministers need to give local people the opportunity to deliver the savings and find a way of doing so that does not denude coastal towns and rural areas of the services on which they depend?

[Mark Simmonds]

My hon. Friend makes a powerful, important point. I understand that the Government direction of policy is to do exactly what he requests, in that decisions should be devolved down to the lowest possible level and those who really understand the needs of each community. One significant fault of the previous Government was that they regarded centralised decision making as the solution to many of these problems and they lacked understanding of the needs of and changes in specific local communities and how to reflect those.

I should like to trot through five specific areas that I think that the coalition needs to focus on if we are to improve the lives of those who live and work in and visit our coastal communities. First, on economic diversification, we need to find ways of putting the economic heart back in our coastal towns. Only a few years ago, coastal towns were not only people’s holiday location of choice, but the gateway to the empire, with goods leaving and coming into the country from many ports; but far too often, that economic dynamism has gone. Too many of our coastal towns are now magnets for the long-term unemployed, those on benefits and people with long-term medical conditions. More must be done to diversify the economic base of our coastal towns.

Understanding the macro-economic constraints, we need to put in place medium to long-term strategies to encourage business to locate and create employment in our coastal towns, creating economic diversification. An obvious example of that would be the establishment of green technology companies, particularly those connected to green energy generation. My hon. Friend the Member for Waveney (Peter Aldous) is particularly passionate about that work in his constituency.

The second area is funding formulae, which were the subject of significant debate in the previous Parliament. The independent National Audit Office should be tasked with examining the funding formulae to ensure that coastal towns and regions receive their fair share, albeit that perhaps it will diminish, of resources for public services. The formulae should reflect the visitor numbers to particular areas. I found the starkest example of that problem in Blackpool, where the vast majority of some 18,000 people a year who visit its walk-in health centre do not come from that town, yet Blackpool primary care trust, which is responsible for the centre, currently receives no extra money. There are similar problems in Skegness and elsewhere. There is a double whammy in funding for coastal towns because of the elderly and vulnerable population and the large number of visitors.

Thirdly, there are high levels of benefit dependency in coastal towns—significantly higher than in other areas. The Government are planning some innovative work on benefit culture that will incentivise people to come off benefits and get back into work, and ensure that work pays and that people are not better off on benefits. The Government may like to consider piloting some of these schemes in our coastal towns.

Fourthly, many coastal towns are blighted by poor-quality housing stock and many have high levels of houses in multiple occupation. Local authorities must retain the flexibility to deal with HMOs and prevent their development in localities where they are not wanted or where there is already over-supply.

Fifthly, many coastal towns’ public services are overstretched as a result of their demographics, limited catchment areas and poor transport infrastructure. If I could ask the coalition to focus on one area, it would be improving public health in coastal towns, where there are higher rates of alcohol abuse, smoking and teenage pregnancy. There are 74.8 conceptions per 1,000 girls between 15 and 17 in Blackpool, compared with the national average of 42.6. I accept that that is an historical statistic, but it still makes the point.

I urge the Government to work alongside not just the traditional local authorities with responsibility for health, but the broader charitable and voluntary sector, which has a significant role to play. I am sure that all hon. Members agree that in all coastal towns there are a significant sense of community and people who want to make a difference. There is a direct correlation between poor public health and high rates of people on incapacity benefit further down the line.

I should like the Minister to make a commitment. The previous Government set up a cross-departmental working group to pull Departments together on all the various aspects of that issue. I want to ensure that that working group continues and that it will focus particularly on coastal towns. Although that might sound administrative and bureaucratic, there is no doubt that cross-departmental working can lead to achievements. Perhaps the best example of that is the Office of Life Sciences, which has made a significant contribution to promoting the interests of the British pharmaceutical sector.

Many other hon. Members wish to speak, so I will draw my remarks to a close. There are many significant issues relating to coastal towns that I have not had time to mention, including communities running facilities; raising educational aspiration and achievement; the performance of the Environment Agency and flood defences; the importance of the public realm in attracting people to coastal towns; and support for the elderly, who are attracted to retiring to the coast. Too often under the previous Government coastal towns were ignored and marginalised, despite one or two Labour Members fighting to change that perception. I hope that the coalition will not make the same mistake. Coastal towns have a significant contribution to make. They need to be reinvigorated and focused on by central and local government.