Owen Smith
Main Page: Owen Smith (Labour - Pontypridd)Department Debates - View all Owen Smith's debates with the Wales Office
(10 years, 9 months ago)
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Chris Evans (Islwyn) (Lab/Co-op)
This is the first time that you have called me to speak in a debate, Madam Deputy Speaker, so may I congratulate you, somewhat belatedly, on your elevation to the Chair?
Chris Evans
Thank you very much.
Like my right hon. Friend the Member for Torfaen (Paul Murphy), who is not in his place, I bemoan the lack of the St David’s day debate, which has been held since 1944. When Aneurin Bevan spoke in this place in 1944, he said that there were no Welsh problems, only problems. The wonderful thing about the Welsh day debate that we are missing is that it allows us to bring up issues that usually go unnoticed in this House. Today, I will bring up the issue of truancy in schools.
Truancy is not simply a matter for schools; increasingly, it affects the whole of society. It is a complex issue. It is not simply about pupils skipping school to go to the park with their friends, but is often a sign of deeper problems at home and, in some cases, of abuse. If a pupil truants from school often enough, they will be excluded. They will thereby miss out not only on a worthwhile education, but on the support network that schools provide. That can result in people falling in with the wrong crowd and getting into trouble with the police, making them less desirable to potential employers.
When I visit schools in my constituency, I am always impressed by the level of pastoral care that students receive. Head teachers have told me that for some students, that care is arguably more important than traditional classes. For many students, the support that they receive in school is invaluable. That is why exclusions and truancy are serious issues.
Over the past few years, the Welsh Government have done an incredible amount of work to prevent schoolchildren from being permanently excluded. Just 102 pupils were permanently removed from Welsh schools last year, which is almost 100 fewer than in 2009-10, when there were 200 exclusions. That is a step in the right direction. However, I will focus today on what is known as “soft exclusion”.
The number of temporary exclusions is still too high. There were 17,508 temporary exclusions in 2011-12 in Wales alone. More research and data are needed to explain why that is occurring. In October 2009, my predecessor, Lord Touhig, asked a parliamentary question about what research the previous Government had done on the effects of exclusion on pupils. He was told that no research had been commissioned. Sadly, that is still the case. What do young people do when they are excluded temporarily? Do they miss out on work? In reality, we just do not know.
In preparation for this debate, I read a report by the charity, Barnardo’s, which did some research on the use of unlawful exclusions. That is when schools ask parents to keep their children away from school without providing a formal notification of exclusion. Local authorities know nothing about such exclusions. There is obviously not a huge amount of data in this area, which is unfortunate, but the Barnardo’s study is based on anecdotal evidence.
I shall quote from the report. One parent said:
“From year 7 the head of year would phone me to say he’d been excluded, but no time scale would be mentioned. A letter would arrive two days later telling me how many days it was. There was no work set or given.”
The report heard evidence from parents of a lack of dialogue between schools and families, which leaves the pupils falling behind. One parent said:
“The head of year would ring me and say they were thinking of excluding him. Sometimes there would be a letter. It takes two days or more to arrive and it would say work would be set two days after that, but by then the exclusion time would have passed.”
The police in Blackwood say that the problems in the market area are caused mainly by young people who have been excluded, whether temporarily or permanently. That demonstrates the drain on police resources and the wider effect that this issue has on society. I was even alarmed to find, shockingly and tragically, that pupils with special needs accounted for a little over 60% of all exclusions in Wales in 2012-13, and those with school action and school action plus special educational needs had the highest rate of permanent exclusions at 0.6% per 1,000 pupils. A report by the charity Ambitious about Autism found that four in 10 children with autism had been informally excluded temporarily.
Alun Cairns
Cardiff university is a fantastic university. The funding structure in Wales is starving the university of funding, as compared to its counterparts in England. The question we need to be asking ourselves is this: how can Cardiff university maintain its standards and status when, because of the different funding structure, there is more funding going into higher education in Wales? That is another sign of the reputational damage being caused by the decisions that are being taken.
Owen Smith
The hon. Gentleman says that he wants to show some respect for devolution, but could he be a little more impartial with the facts he employs? Will he tell us, for example, whether he accepts that the Welsh Government should be congratulated on a fall of just 250 in the number of students applying to university in Wales, when the fall in England has been 25,000—a hundredfold difference?
Alun Cairns
That is the sort of response that does not get us anywhere. I am looking for an intelligent debate to accept the reality of the situation. Unless we accept the reality, we cannot take the intelligent decisions needed to make changes.
In the time that remains, I want to mention health. I had hoped that yesterday was a turning point. The right hon. Member for Cynon Valley (Ann Clwyd) made an extremely powerful contribution to the debate yesterday. Two weeks earlier, we had learned of data she had brought to the attention of Professor Sir Bruce Keogh. He wrote to his counterpart in Wales, seeking to probe the data that had been shared with him. The response came from a politician, rather than a clinician, who was furious and said that this was an attempt by the Conservative party to
“drag Welsh NHS through the mud”.
The reality, however, is that Sir Bruce Keogh stated in the e-mail that he did not know enough about it, but thought there was a potential smokescreen. There needs to be an intelligent debate, otherwise its reputation will be damaged further.
Owen Smith (Pontypridd) (Lab)
I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Ynys Môn (Albert Owen) on securing this debate today. It has been an extraordinarily wide-ranging debate, as is traditionally the case with St David’s day debates. Many Members rightly highlighted the importance of having time in this House to debate the issues of Wales. I think that we can all agree that in the past three years, insufficient time has been spent on debating Welsh matters. Ignorance of the realities in Wales has perhaps grown in this House as a result. I hope that we have done something today to redress that imbalance and to shed some light on the issues, as I hope to do in my short remarks.
My hon. Friend made a particularly enlightening and topical opening to today’s debate. He talked about the need to reflect the fact that people in Wales have shared identities in that they are both Welsh citizens and British citizens. Indeed, they can play rugby for Wales and for the British Lions—they can captain either team and still feel themselves to be British and Welsh. That is something that I feel very strongly about and that I hope everyone in this House supports. My hon. Friend also said that we need to capitalise on the great economic strengths of our country, and especially on the energy and tourism potential of Wales. I entirely endorse all that he said in that regard.
My right hon. Friend the Member for Torfaen (Paul Murphy) reminded us of the history of the St David’s day debate. He even told us that this was the day of St Colette, the patron saint of pregnant women. At this point, I cannot help but congratulate Kate Groucutt, who is pregnant and leaving my office. She has been the special adviser to the Welsh Affairs team over the past few years.
More importantly, but slightly surreally, my right hon. Friend talked about the problems in his constituency of head shops, which sell legal highs. The problem is massive and growing in communities such as his and mine, and we must get to grips with it notwithstanding the difficulties of legislating in this complicated area.
My hon. Friend the Member for Newport East (Jessica Morden) talked about the economy of Wales, and highlighted two issues in her constituency that have wider implications and ramifications across the UK. The first was the loss of steel jobs at the Orb works, due to the inordinately high energy prices that companies in Britain are paying compared with their European competitors. I am sure that we all understand that we need to get to grips with that matter not just for individual consumers of energy in this country but for vital foundational industries.
The second was the problem of offshore jobs. My hon. Friend highlighted the irony of a Government who claim to be seeking to reshore jobs overseeing the offshoring of Government jobs in the Ministry of Justice shared services centre in Newport. You could not make it up, Madam Deputy Speaker, but it is what is happening.
My hon. Friend the Member for Islwyn (Chris Evans) raised the important issue of truancy and called for improvements in the way in which our schools deal with challenging children in Britain, and I entirely agree with him. My hon. Friend the Member for Blaenau Gwent (Nick Smith) also talked about the economy and threw his weight behind the proposal for a motor sport track and arena in Blaenau Gwent, and I support him on that, as I know the Secretary of State does. My hon. Friend the Member for Bridgend (Mrs Moon) talked about women in Wales and the need for others to promote the talents of women within Wales. She highlighted the fact that the Labour party has done that in the National Assembly, where women make up almost 45% of all groups, and here in Westminster, where the Labour party stands alone in having a significant proportion of female members—32% of the current parliamentary Labour party. We need more, but it is a good start and better than what we are seeing from the Government.
The hon. Member for Carmarthen East and Dinefwr (Jonathan Edwards) talked about local government and the hon. Member for Arfon (Hywel Williams) talked about devolution and suggested that I should be sophisticated and enlightening when addressing it myself, and I shall seek to do so at an appropriate moment.
Government Members told us that they wanted to be respectful and positive—I think those were the words—about Wales and then failed to offer a single respectful and positive word; that was certainly the case for the Conservative Members. There were a number of positive remarks made by Liberal Democrat Members, such as the hon. Member for Ceredigion (Mr Williams), who congratulated the Welsh Government on their investment in flood defences in Wales; £4 million has been invested, in distinct contradiction to the direction of travel in Westminster where we have seen £97 million cut from flood defences, as confirmed last week by the Office for National Statistics. Perhaps that is why we did not see the same degree of problems in Wales as we did elsewhere.
The hon. Members for Monmouth (David T. C. Davies), for Montgomeryshire (Glyn Davies) and for Vale of Glamorgan (Alun Cairns) were particularly jaundiced in their view of Wales and highlighted the volume of column inches about what they saw as poor public service performance. They bemoaned the fact that Wales was getting such bad press, but they know full well why Wales is getting a bad press and it is not because of the performance of Welsh public services and certainly not a fair representation—
Owen Smith
I am not going to give way—[Interruption.] No, I will not give way, because I—[Interruption.] Okay, I will give way once.
Alun Cairns
I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for giving way, but mortality rates, cancer waiting times and A and E access are just three examples; diagnostics in the health service are another. Those are fundamental issues that are dominating the UK newspapers because of poor performance in Wales. Is that not a sad situation?
Owen Smith
If the hon. Gentlemen can point to a hospital in Wales in which there are higher levels of unexpected mortality than he thinks there ought to be, I will listen seriously to him. However, he has not offered that—
Owen Smith
He says the Princess of Wales, where risk adjusted mortality indices improved by more than 20% over the past three years. We have seen significant improvements in mortality indices in Wales and he will know that people cannot do what he and his colleagues have done—and worse, what the Prime Minister has done on 29 occasions in this House—and take out of context extraordinarily complex mortality statistics and use them as a means to smear the Welsh NHS. Only this week, I was confronted with the reality of that smear campaign when I was contacted by members of the Welsh NHS work force to ask me—
Owen Smith
No, it was not a union. Somebody working in the NHS contacted me on their own behalf to ask what they could do to stop the Tories’ smear campaign dragging the reputation of the Welsh NHS through the mud. Members do not need to take my word for it; they could take the words of doctors in Wales. The British Medical Association in Wales said very clearly that this was “a wicked”—[Interruption.] The Under-Secretary says from a sedentary position that this is about the trade unions, implying that it is somehow connected to the Labour party. He knows that that is not the case; he knows—[Interruption.]
Madam Deputy Speaker (Mrs Eleanor Laing)
Order. We do not raise matters from a sedentary position. The hon. Gentleman is about to conclude.
Owen Smith
I am grateful, Madam Deputy Speaker.
The BMA has said that the claims are a “wicked slander”, perpetrated by people in whose interests it is to undermine the NHS, to perpetuate the myth that there is significantly worse performance in the NHS in Wales, compared with England. It is not true, it has not been true in the past and it will not be true in the future. What is true is that Welsh workers and the Welsh people are suffering lower wages, higher job insecurity, higher energy prices and greater difficulties as a result of this Government’s economic mismanagement of this country. In contrast, the Labour Government in Wales have delivered economically. They have delivered a lower unemployment rate in Wales than in the UK as a whole. I conclude by congratulating them on that.