amendment of the law
Debate between Paul Uppal and Yasmin Qureshi(11 years, 8 months ago)
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Paul Uppal (Wolverhampton South West) (Con)
It is not normally my habit to comment on earlier speeches, and I had intended to stick to the main ethos of what I was going to say, but I feel that I must draw something to the attention of the hon. Member for Bolton South East (Yasmin Qureshi). She began by talking about GDP ratios. Let me gently remind her that during the early years of the last Labour Government, they stuck to Conservative spending principles. Does she remember golden economic rules, and the end of boom and bust?
Yasmin Qureshi
Eleven years later, it was the Labour party that reduced the GDP ratio to 35%.
Paul Uppal
No; not 11 years later. [Interruption.] If Labour Members disagree, perhaps they will recall the views of Hamish McRae, the economist who writes for The Independent, who has commented on the issue at length. However, I digress.
The essence of today’s debate concerns housing policy. I am glad that the Government have confirmed that they will make up to £12 billion of guarantees available to support more than £130 billion of mortgages for new-build and existing homes in January for three years. I also welcome the Chancellor’s commitment to realigning the Government’s policy on the private rented sector by increasing the £200 million build to rent fund to more than £1 billion, and providing a £225 million funding boost to support a further 15,000 affordable homes in England by 2015.
Members on both sides of the House have made various points, but it might be wise at this juncture to refer not to politicians, but to housing and property experts. I do not know whether anyone has taken the time to read this week’s edition of Estates Gazette, which is the bible when it comes to real estate and housing issues. According to Richard Threlfall, KPMG’s head of infrastructure, building and construction,
“the Chancellor has thrown the UK house building industry a new lifeline.”
Nick Jopling, executive director of property at Grainger plc and chairman of the Urban Land Institute’s UK Residential Council, added:
“Stimulating the housing market through further mortgage support…will help improve transactions and liquidity in the market, which has for some time been constrained.”
Stewart Baseley, executive chairman of the Home Builders Federation, said:
“A lack of affordable mortgage availability remains the biggest constraint on housing supply”.
He also said:
“Government must be praised for its attempts to stimulate activity”.
Gerry Hughes, senior director at GVA, said:
“We welcome the healthy five fold increase in the Build to Rent fund. This will undoubtedly assist a sector that is struggling severely.”
I will cut my quotations short at this point, but let me emphasise that those are not the views of politicians, but the views of property professionals.
I think that last week’s Budget statement was seminal in many respects, and that the opening line was crucial. The Chancellor said:
“This is a Budget for people who aspire to work hard and get on. It is a Budget for people who realise there are no easy answers to problems built up over many years—just the painstaking work of putting right what went so badly wrong.”—[Official Report, 20 March 2013; Vol. 560, c. 931.]
I believe that blue-collar workers out there, and the general population, understand the challenging economic climate, and agree that we need to tackle the deficit. The Chancellor stated that it had now been cut by one third, not one quarter, and that according to the Office for Budget Responsibility, we are on course to fulfil our fiscal mandate. However, tackling the deficit, although right and necessary, cannot be our only message. We need to reinforce and go further in regard to some of our flagship policies, taking low-paid workers out of tax and freezing fuel duty. Above all, blue-collar workers want to see more money in their wallets at the end of the month, and I believe that we are on course to achieve that. The Budget demonstrates that our priorities—the Government’s priorities—are in the right place.
The Leader of the Opposition often comes to the Dispatch Box and accuses the Government of being “out of touch”. The Budget shows that we are on the side of workers, of families, of people who want to get on and make a better life for themselves. It shows that the Government have their priorities at heart—the right priorities. Our priorities are in the right place when a Budget raises the personal tax allowance to £10,000 from April 2014, which means a tax cut for 24 million people. As a result, some people will pay £700 less in income tax than they did in 2010, and 2.7 million will be taken out of tax altogether. Our priorities are in the right place when fuel duty is being frozen once again, which makes this the longest freeze for over 20 years. Pump prices will be 13p lower than they would have been as a result of Labour’s plans, leaving the average motorist with £170 more in his or her pocket. We are helping the aspirational workers, but we are also helping the entrepreneurs, the risk-takers and the employers. The small business man has faced, and still faces, numerous challenges. Things are not easy, but, as a Government, we can help to make things easier, and help to make those businesses succeed. The fall in fuel duty will help them, too, but more importantly the package of business reforms will make a real difference in the pockets of businesses up and down the backbone of this country.
We will cut the jobs tax for every business by £2,000 in 2014. We are taking people out of tax: 450,000 small businesses—one third of all employers—will pay no jobs tax at all. I hope the Chancellor takes similar steps to increase the allowance in future Budgets. Taking more small businesses out of paying the jobs tax will provide a greater incentive to take on more workers during the continuing long-term rebalancing of our economy.
In talking about entrepreneurs and employers, I would like to commend the Government for cutting corporation tax even further. Under the previous Government, business taxes were at 28%. Now we have the lowest rate in the G7, and next month it will fall to 23%. When it reaches 20% in April 2015, we will have the lowest rate in the G20. This is great news for people who wish to invest and bring jobs to this country.
This is a Budget for aspiration and ambition and for all those who wish to work hard.
Academies Bill [Lords]
Debate between Paul Uppal and Yasmin Qureshi(14 years, 4 months ago)
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Yasmin Qureshi (Bolton South East) (Lab)
When I was selected as the parliamentary candidate for my constituency, the editor of the Manchester Evening News described me as a dyed-in-the-wool socialist. He was being complimentary, and I took it as a compliment. That is my starting point.
I believe in education that is free for everyone. I do not believe in selection criteria. I do not believe in a system that says, “You can come in, but someone else can’t.” I do not believe in a system that says, “If you have a certain level of education or qualification, such as particular skills in maths or English, you can come to our school, but otherwise—sorry, we don’t want you.” I believe that all schools should take kids of all abilities, because that is the only way to bring about real levelling and equality in society.
People here sometimes talk of the golden age of grammar schools, and reminisce about how brilliant those schools were. Let me give an example of someone who would have been completely lost if the grammar school system had been all that we had. In Watford, where I grew up, we had some very good comprehensive schools thanks to a Labour Government. Only one grammar school was left. If selection criteria had been applied, I would have been shunted off to one of the old-fashioned sink schools where no one had a chance to go to university, and pupils were expected to leave school at 15 or 16 and work as a shop assistant or in a factory. There were no real expectations of them. That did not happen to me, however. I went to a comprehensive school, I took my A-levels, went to university and qualified as a barrister. I can honestly say that if we had not had comprehensive schools I would have been thrown on the scrapheap, notwithstanding all those golden reminiscences about grammar schools.
Let us get real. Why should we have selection at all? Given that all these schools are state schools, paid for by the taxpayers—you, me and everyone else—why should they be able to act in such a way? People should be able to send their children to schools that are as near as possible to their homes, with good equipment, good teachers and good resources, and they should all be good schools. Members may think that that is utopia, but it may be something we can work towards. Many schools have improved since Labour came to office in 1997. The Labour Government put real money into helping schools. They enabled existing schools to be refurbished and new schools to be built, and provided schools with classroom assistants and extra teachers.
A Conservative Member said that our record of educational achievement had worsened. That is not true. According to all the statistics throughout the country, more people now leave school with five GCSEs, and higher grades than in 1997. That is a record of which a former Labour Government can be proud, and I find it annoying when Members seem to forget the real educational advances that were made under that Government.
When my party introduced academies, I was one of those who was not very happy about it, as I preferred all schools to be looked after by the state and the local education authority. I was convinced by that move, however, when it became clear that the less well-performing schools were going to have the chance to get some extra funding so they could improve their educational level. For that reason alone, I was willing to support that academies measure. I want to make it clear, however, that my Labour Government spent a lot of money on education.
This Academies Bill is ideologically driven. The best-performing schools will not even have to bother to do anything; they can just go through the process and get academy status. We are told that we do not have enough money to build schools. Schools in my constituency that were going to be refurbished and rebuilt have had those plans cancelled because, they are told, there is no money for them, even though those cancellations will cost my council about £9 million, yet most of the schools that will become academies will have to go through a process that will cost them money.
We are trying to save money in that way, yet at the same time we are saying, “No, it’s fine if you want to become exclusive schools and exclude people because you want to maintain your so-called high standards; we are not interested in that.” Therefore, those schools have the freedom to do that. That is not fair, and I think all Members on both sides of the House should be concerned about this elitist attitude—the attitude that says, “We must have these excellent schools which only a few excellent people can attend.”
Let me give an example to explain why we need mixed-ability schools. A junior school in Kilburn was considered to be not so well performing, but then a lot of middle-class professional people started sending their children to that school, and years down the road it was found that the performance of the school had gone up. That is what happens such when parents become involved in ordinary schools—in what might be considered sink schools or less well-performing schools. When parents from different backgrounds are involved in schools, standards rise even though there are mixed-ability children.
The issue of standards is what this debate should always be about. We all talk about wanting to look after our children, yet all we hear about is exclusivity; all we hear is, “We want better schools to get better.” There is no mention in the Bill that there should perhaps be some kind of admissions criteria that allow, let us say, 50% of children in these schools to come from ordinary schools—those that are not performing so well. The Bill does not say that, and everybody knows that when we have a selective system the brightest children get taken on and that cycle continues.
Paul Uppal (Wolverhampton South West) (Con)
The hon. Lady is making a passionate speech, as did the right hon. Member for Tottenham (Mr Lammy), who spoke very personally, and the hon. Member for Wigan (Lisa Nandy). There are no doubts about the passion and the validity of the emotion in their speeches. It is important that I make the point that I myself went to a state school. I did allude to that. When I was in primary school, I was in a remedial class because the assumption was that I could not speak English, but the important point I want to make is—