Living Standards

Pat Glass Excerpts

Wednesday 30th November 2011 Commons Chamber

[Pat Glass (North West Durham) (Lab)]

Is it worth it? I will have to rely on bullet points.

I want to speak about the impact of the Government’s policies on children and young people—their educational chances, their life chances and their employment. In the past 19 months, we have seen a Government who have a massive gap between their stated political objectives and the main drivers put in place to meet them. We heard from the hon. Member for Broxtowe (Anna Soubry), who said that she came into Parliament to eradicate child poverty, yet the Government are going to put 600,000 more children into child poverty. The hon. Member for Erewash (Jessica Lee) gave a notable speech, much of which I agreed with, about early intervention, yet the Government have massively cut funding to local government, which is going to deliver on that.

The Government tell us that they want to narrow the gap in outcomes between the poorest and the most advantaged in our schools, that they want more children from disadvantaged backgrounds to go to university and that they want to build skills for the future—but what do they do? They slash the education maintenance allowance. The number of young people going into further education this year has fallen—in one year—to levels last seen in 1990. That will not deliver a knowledge-based economy for us in the future. They triple tuition fees and tell us that £9,000 will not be the norm. Wake up—it is the norm, and as a result, this year applications for higher education fell by 12% nationally and by 15% from British students. The biggest drop has been in applications from young people in the most disadvantaged and poorest families.

That is what the Government are doing. What they say is one thing, but what they deliver is something completely different. It is not just that they are failing on the economy now; it is that they will not deliver on the skills we need to get us out of this mess in the future.