Home Affairs and Justice

Neil Carmichael Excerpts

Thursday 28th May 2015 Commons Chamber

[Neil Carmichael (Stroud) (Con)]

It is a great pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Birmingham, Yardley (Jess Phillips), who made an excellent speech. I entirely concur with her observations about domestic violence and sexual abuse. Those are appalling crimes and are utterly indefensible, and action must be taken to put them under a spotlight. We need to be surer in future that we can prevent such things from happening—as urgently as possible—and that, when they do happen, we can pounce properly, accurately and firmly. The hon. Lady made some very powerful points that should land in a safe place, and I would certainly support her in promoting such a development.

Birmingham is a great city, and that is one of the reasons why I am determined to reopen a station in Stroud, enabling people to travel to Birmingham without having to change trains too often. If I have my way, people from Stroud will be going to Birmingham all the more often, and I hope that people from Birmingham will reciprocate by coming to Stroud. This is an important mission of mine, and I look forward to ensuring that commuters, business and tourists benefit from the initiative I am taking.

It is a great pleasure to follow my hon. Friend the Member for South Thanet (Craig Mackinlay). Many Conservatives, at least, were particularly pleased by his election victory, which, as we know, had seminal consequences. I congratulate him on making a fabulous speech.

My constituency is very beautiful; I do not need to expand on that as I did so in my maiden speech five years ago. My constituency covers not just Stroud; all the other parts of it matter, too—the valleys and vales. It is not just beautiful; it is a place of economic vibrancy and good community spirit. It has a strong interest in manufacturing and the creative sector and all the rural characteristics we would expect of a constituency in Gloucestershire. I salute my constituency, and I thank the electors for returning me to this House.

The most impressive sentence in Her Majesty’s Most Gracious Speech was the second one, in which she talked about one nation. I have been a fully signed up supporter of one nation ever since I got involved in politics. It is a particularly strong theme that underpins all parts of the Government’s agenda—building a nation where everybody feels they have opportunity, fair liberty and the capacity to fulfil their lives, and where nobody from any part of the country feels excluded, and where anybody can express themselves properly, within reason. That is the kind of country I want to live in, and we keep on needing to make it because we come across challenges all the time. One nation Britain and a one nation Government is precisely what we want to see.

[Ian Blackford]

We are told as we come into this Parliament that there are four nations: Scotland, England, Northern Ireland and Wales. Perhaps the hon. Gentleman will reflect on that, rather than talking about one nation.

[Neil Carmichael]

That is a good point and I thank the hon. Gentleman for his intervention, and of course one nation does mean a collection of the four nations in a United Kingdom.

One nation is really an expression of how we feel about the people in our nation—how we want to give opportunity, how we want to make sure they can propel themselves forward, how we want to make sure nobody is left behind, how we want to make sure our standards of justice are right for all and fair to everybody. That is the kind of one nation I talk about, and that is the kind of one nation the Government want to build—and the one nation is, of course, the whole of the United Kingdom, and I pay tribute to that. On devolution, which doubtless is to the fore of the hon. Gentleman’s mind, we want to see, and we will deliver, proper devolution to Scotland.

[Mr MacNeil]

I am amazed at what the hon. Gentleman says about the progress of four nations becoming one nation. Might he argue one day that one Europe should become one nation? Is that the path of progress he is following?

[Neil Carmichael]

Our values as one nation are, of course, ones we would want everybody else to follow. We are talking about the United Kingdom, and the current position is that this Government have capacity and dominance over this country, but I also want to emphasise that what matters is that sense of fairness, of equality and of inclusion.

The dominant home affairs topic in the contributions of my right hon. Friend the Home Secretary and the shadow Home Secretary was immigration. It is a critical issue and the Government rightly want to tighten things further in due course, but there is another side to the coin: the way in which we operate ourselves, which is partly to do with the other key issue in the Gracious Speech—productivity. We as a nation need to address our economic productivity. We need to be sure that we can compete well with our competitors in Europe and beyond. We need to address the significant productivity gap between ourselves and, for example, Germany or the United States of America. That is one aspect of this debate on which we should focus in this Parliament.

The skills agenda aims to equip young people with the ability to get the jobs and careers they need and that businesses need them to have. It is about making sure that our factories can produce goods competitively, giving us a trade advantage and delivering higher standards of living for people in those industries.

The key challenge of delivering a strong skills agenda is underpinned by what we do in our schools, so I am really pleased that the speech referred to a Bill to tackle coasting schools. There is a debate about the definition of a coasting school. A coasting school is one in which a child is not able to progress as he or she should or, even worse, is regressing; and we have measurements for that and can see where schools are failing. Too many children leave school without sufficient qualifications and learning capacity. That is captured by the long-tail-of-underachievement argument, and we have to stamp it out. If young people do not get a fair start in life early enough, we let them down—and we let everybody else down, too, because we are all in this together when it comes to the kind of society we build and the kind of economy we want. Skills are absolutely critical.

Another aspect of this debate is the way in which we structure our businesses and think about investment so that we have a clear pathway to develop the new technologies that will lead us to solve the problems of climate change and tackle the productivity gap. I want firms to think more about their long-term prospects and long-term investment needs, so let us alter the tax system to encourage such investment.

The speech refers to tax in another way: enabling hard-working people to keep more of what they earn. I am pleased that once we have passed the necessary legislation anyone on the minimum wage will be exempt from income tax. That is a fabulous encouragement to people to get jobs; it is a fabulous motivation for families to move into the world of work, if they have not done so in the past; it is also a great reward in terms of the idea that people should contribute to our economy, because the real issue is making sure that we as a country can deliver the lifestyle and opportunities that young and older people need to fulfil their lives. That is a really important part of the speech.

There are other elements that we need to celebrate and promote. I want more apprenticeships, which are a key part of equipping people to develop themselves, their interests and issues. The Government are absolutely right to aim to create even more apprenticeships than we managed to create in the past five years. That is what business wants to see and what we all need to see in our constituencies. In my constituency, nearly one in four people is involved in manufacturing and engineering, so they are an important part of the local economy. It is imperative that we have university technical colleges and the promotion of the skills we should have, and I will back the Government as they continue to make sure we have that range of educational provision. I salute the idea of more academies, but I also want to be clear that they are properly accountable, because accountability is crucial in any walk of life, and certainly when we are dealing with the teaching and wellbeing of our children. I want to enhance that further.

In summary, this Queen’s Speech is, as we have been discussing, about creating one nation—a nation that is proud of its people.

[Craig MacKinlay]

My hon. Friend mentioned the interesting topic of UTCs, which are springing up across the whole country. Does he have any experience of them locally, because they are certainly of interest to me?

[Neil Carmichael]

I certainly do, because we are going to have a UTC in my constituency very shortly. It will provide skills for people between the ages of 14 and 18 in the areas of advanced manufacturing, cyber-studies and so on. We have secured the commitment, the site and the sense of purpose, as well as all the necessary commitments from partners. It will be located at Berkeley Green, on the site of a former nuclear power station. It has facilities for precisely the sort of thing that my hon. Friend asks about and it will contribute massively to the pipeline of skills that an economy such as my local one, and the surrounding area, needs desperately. I urge you to pursue UTCs wherever you can, as necessary.

In summary, we want a country where people have opportunity and the capacity to thrive and lead fulfilled lives. We want people to be able to deliver for themselves and their families the sort of life that we all aspire to and can have within our reach. That is what this whole debate will be about. That is the general foundation of this Government’s plan for the next five years and it is well worth supporting and promoting in our constituencies.