Child Care

Debate between Meg Hillier and Tristram Hunt

Tuesday 19th November 2013 Commons Chamber

[Tristram Hunt]

Part of Labour’s programme for schools includes creativity and innovation, and that was an extraordinarily creative way of moving from child care to separatism. I will not follow the hon. Gentleman down that route because we are looking at the Conservative party’s past on this issue.

What did the Education Secretary say while grubbing around for votes before the last general election? He said:

“I personally believe we need to do more to provide affordable childcare”—

by which, of course, he meant less. On a Mumsnet webchat, he told “Singalong mum and others”,

“gotta go in a second but on surestart we won’t cut funding”.

No wonder the Government wanted to wipe all records off the internet. No wonder the Education Secretary is too frit to come to this Chamber to defend his appalling record.

[Meg Hillier (Hackney South and Shoreditch) (Lab/Co-op)]

When the Education Secretary talked about more child care, did he perhaps just mean more cheaper, lower quality child care, rather than the quality child care that we support?

[Tristram Hunt]

My hon. Friend makes an incredibly important point. We are not interested in the warehousing of children. We are interested in the growth, the creativity and the education that comes from high-quality child care provision. Unfortunately, with this Government, it is a record of broken promises, misinformation and double speak. Thankfully, the memory of the British people is longer than that of the Tory party’s web server, and they will not forget such a shoddy past.

British Waterways

Debate between Meg Hillier and Tristram Hunt

Wednesday 7th July 2010 Commons Chamber

[Tristram Hunt]

I take the hon. Gentleman’s point. I bow to his superior knowledge on the specificities of that point and I agree with it. However, there was a broad concern about the control railways had over canals in the late 19th century, which led to their being run down and to a collapse in infrastructure. Tonnage levels fell, canal miles collapsed and locks crumbled.

Eventually, the tide turned. The first stirrings of preservation can perhaps best be traced back to L. T. C. Rolt’s masterpiece, “Narrow Boat”, which described a journey taken in 1939 and expressed a terrible fear that

“if the canals are left to the mercies of economists and scientific planners, before many years are past the last of them will become a weedy, stagnant ditch, and the bright boats will rot at the wharves, to live only in old men’s”—

and we should add women’s—

“memories”.

[Meg Hillier (Hackney South and Shoreditch) (Lab/Co-op)]

My hon. Friend speaks eloquently about the history of canals. Does he not agree that the Olympic legacy in east London involves a future for our waterways and that the future of British Waterways, among other bodies, is therefore very important in ensuring that the renaissance of canals continues into the next century?

[Tristram Hunt]

I absolutely agree with my hon. Friend, and I do so as I shunt towards the future and get away from the past. Having seen the Prescott sluice along the Lea valley, I know the wonders of the valley.

Unfortunately, in the mid-19th century, the Government failed to rise to the task of looking after the future of the waterways. A cash-strapped British Transport Commission could not provide the investment needed to open up the waterways and still focused on freight traffic, rather than on the leisure potential of the waterways. Only with Barbara Castle’s great Transport Act 1968 was British Waterways given a specific mandate to focus on exploiting the enjoyment potential of our rivers and canals. Since then, of course, the transformation has been dramatic. All hon. Members will have witnessed in our constituencies the transformation in water quality and amenities brought about by the new British Waterways strategy. In Stoke-on-Trent, the Caldon canal has been rescued from closure and now provides a stunning route from the urban gothic of the Potteries to the stark beauty of the Staffordshire moorlands. Indeed, we even have our very own Hanley regatta based on the canal.

By the early 2000s, some 200 miles of new and restored waterways were added to the 2,000 mile network—a faster expansion than at the height of the industrial revolution. Moreover, we now have an unprecedented 34,900 licensed boats on the network and some 11 million people visit its waters and banks every year. According to Her Majesty’s Treasury, out of the £330 million total value of inland waterways managed and owned by British Waterways, the amenity and recreational use amounts to £230 million and the use for freight £700,000—but that £700,000 is not to be sniffed at, and it was with great pleasure that we learned that Tesco has begun to move much of its wine stock by canal.

Yet a revived canal network has also proved a highly effective vehicle for some £10 billion-worth of urban regeneration. Whereas once we in this country sought to deny our industrial inland heritage, with buildings jutting up to the canal edge, offering no space for waterside walks or civic space, canals are championed today as placemakers and urban signifiers.

--- Later in debate ---

[Meg Hillier]

Does my hon. Friend, like me, tremble at the thought of the alternative to the model that he proposes—that this asset will be sold off and thereby, once and for all, be out of public control and away from where it should be, which is in the hearts of the public?

[Tristram Hunt]

I am in full agreement. We do not know what would happen were British Waterways to be privatised, in terms of fees, uses and common access, and that sense of heritage, of a past coming down to us. The worry is that the Minister has decided to take no decisions until after the forthcoming comprehensive spending review. My worry is that by the time we reach the CSR, his colleagues in the Treasury might have decided that flogging off the property portfolio was too good an opportunity to miss. We might find ourselves in the awful position of watching the Chancellor stand at the Dispatch Box and sell our national heritage down the proverbial Kent and Avon, in the classic Treasury manner of knowing the price of everything and the value of nothing.