Debate on the Address

Priti Patel Excerpts

Wednesday 9th May 2012 Commons Chamber

[Charlie Elphicke]

My hon. Friend is right. Not only that, but if we examine the figures for job creation since the early 2000s, we see that people from the EU accession eight countries had a massive increase in the number of jobs, that that also applied among foreign nationals—people born overseas—but that employment hardly increased at all for those born in the UK.

[Priti Patel (Witham) (Con)]

Does my hon. Friend agree that one of the previous Government’s biggest failures was to address the skills deficit in this country, and that they also failed to tackle apprenticeships? Is it therefore any wonder that, at the time, the jobs were not going to British-born workers?

[Charlie Elphicke]

I agree with my hon. Friend. That is the central point, which I was about to address. Employers’ difficulty is finding the right person with the skills for the job. It is incumbent on the Government to create a framework whereby people—particularly our young people—can get the skills so that they qualify and are eligible for a job, and that they have the skills that employers need. Instead of dealing with the skills deficit in our population, the previous Government thought it was easier to put a sticking plaster on it and have an open borders policy to enable employers to take people with the skills that they wanted from anywhere, rather than ensuring that our children and young people had the skills for the labour market and therefore a better future.

It is important to have stronger border control in the UK. It is also important to skill up our children because the previous Government sold us a pass on the hopes and aspirations of our young people and people who do not have great skills to get a job, promotion, more money and more skills. The Government’s emphasis on apprenticeships is essential. That is what I hear on the doorsteps in Dover. For many in the House and in the metropolitan elite, that is a difficult message, but the opinion polls show that unemployment and immigration are linked, and we should be honest about that. We should be honest with people, and tell them that we understand their concerns and are acting on them. One of the greatest things about the Government is that we have taken such strong action on apprenticeships to ensure that our people have the skills to have a job and do well in life.

The Government are nothing if they are not about aspiration, but they are also about understanding the pressures of utility bills and the costs of modern life. One really important policy in that respect is the proposed reform of the electricity market to deliver clean, secure and affordable electricity and ensure that prices are fair. The Leader of the Opposition chooses these days to forget that he was Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change, and that he planned, with the renewable heat initiative, to load £193 on to the bills of every household in this country. He chooses to forget that, with the electricity renewable energy obligation to which he signed up, he was going to increase our power prices by 20%, and those of businesses by 30%. He goes on about the costs of living and the pressure on households, and yet chooses to forget that the responsibility for much of the increase in the cost of living lies at his door, because when he was Secretary of State, he loaded bills and balanced our carbon commitments on the backs of the poor, which was a disgusting and disgraceful thing to have done.

We cannot balance our carbon commitments on the backs of the poor, as the Labour Government wanted. We need to ensure that our carbon commitments are executed in the most cost-effective way. That means not that we should back winners or favour this or that technology, but that we should favour technologies that reduce carbon emissions at the most effective and best possible price, regardless of whether we happen to like or dislike them. That is what we owe the least well-off in our communities, and our hard-pressed families and electors.

From the detailed list of Bills in the Queen’s Speech, I want to pick out the children and families Bill, which contains an acceptance of the important principle I proposed in a ten-minute rule Bill last year: that children have the right to know, and have a relationship with, both their parents following separation. I believe that that is right and in the interests of the child and their welfare, but let me explain why. The Bill does not set out with complete clarity reasons for that provision or for the shared parental leave provision, but they are linked, because families have changed. There is a new norm, and we need to accept modern families.

Let me set out how families have changed. One can have an “olde worlde” image of the family—a bloke goes to work while the mother bounces the child on her knee or does the washing up at home. That is perhaps how it was in the 1950s, but things have not been like that for a very long time. Just about everyone I know from my generation joint works. I looked at the figures, because many of our policies seem to be aimed at people who live that kind of traditional family life, rather than at families who joint work, which is the reality.

Some things jump out from the figures on parental employment rates. Back in 1986, half of partnered mothers were in the workplace; today, 71% of them are. Whereas 25 years ago five out of 10 partnered mothers went to work; seven out of 10 now do so. The overwhelming majority of couples with children under the age of 16 both work, which has led to a wider change in respect of juggling the work-life balance.

It is not just that there are more mothers in the workplace. What about the number of men who work part time? Some people go around saying, “Only women ever look after children,” but that is also old fashioned and archaic. Things have been changing. Notably, the number of all parents in part-time work has changed, which is basically accounted for by the fact that the number of men in part-time work has risen. Official statistics from the Office for National Statistics show that 25 years ago, 696,000 men were in part-time work. That number has risen nearly fourfold to more than 2 million today. To my mind, that indicates that parents are increasingly juggling work and child care, and that there has been something of a seismic shift.

Many think, “Mothers go back to work when the child is a bit older,” but let us look at the figures. When do people go back to work? Do they wait until the child is about five and going to school, or do they go back before that? Twenty-five years ago, 27% of partnered women went back to work when the youngest child was under three years of age. In other words, two thirds of women stayed at home and brought up the child until they were at least three, and then considered going back to work. That position has reversed. Now, 63% of partnered women go back to work when the youngest child is under three.

There has been a massive social change, and we need to understand modern families and how they live. If most women are going back to work when the child is pre-school age, there is a lot of juggling and work-life balancing. Who takes the kid to school or nursery? Who collects the kid? Who looks after the child? Who takes primary responsibility in the workplace and in the home? Increasingly, most people whose children are grown up will know from their children’s lives that there is much more of a juggle and a balance of work and life.

The rate of increase of lone parents has been very great. In 1986, 15% of lone parents went back to work when their child was under three; by 2011, that had doubled to 32%. We can therefore see substantial change in families, which has consequences for family policy. The flexible parental leave provision in the children and families Bill is justified because it is necessary. It is a recognition that families juggle work and child care. It is not just a case of saying, “The mother has a baby, therefore she has maternity leave.” The situation is much more complicated, and provision should be balanced so that men and women in a family can balance that equation.

More work needs to be done on child care, for two reasons. First, the number of child care places has been broadly static for years. In 2001, there were more than 300,000 places with child minders and about 300,000 day nursery places—about 600,000 places in total. The number of places with child minders stayed static, but the number of nursery places—full day care—increased to about 600,000. In 2001, there were 600,000 places in total, but in 2008, there were around 900,000 places. The number has remained static since.

What does it mean if there are now 900,000 places? Are we catering for all the children in the country who are in need of child care? I did some back-of-the envelope calculations, and it struck me that there is potentially a shortage of child care places. There are about 13 million children in the UK, of whom roughly 3 million are pre-school age. The numbers indicate that 55% of children at pre-school have parents who both work. In other words, about 2 million children need child care, but there are only 900,000 child care places. What is happening to the other 1 million children? Who is looking after them? Is it grandparents or neighbours? There is a kind of child care apartheid. On the one hand, there is a system of nurseries that are so heavily regulated that most people cannot afford them, and on the other hand there is a system of child care for the other half that is completely unregulated. We know nothing about what is going on in that half. The right balance would be to reduce the regulation on our nurseries, increase the number of places and bring the cost of child care down so that more people can access it, because one of the biggest pressures on modern families is affording the cost of child care for pre-school children. It is an absolute nightmare—

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[Priti Patel (Witham) (Con)]

It is an honour to follow the hon. Member for Harrow West (Mr Thomas). I listened to his speech with great interest.

I shall focus on three specific sets of proposals in the Queen’s Speech that build on many of the strong reforms the Government introduced in the previous Session: the measures on children and families—which my hon. Friend the Member for Dover (Charlie Elphicke) has already touched on—crime and the courts, and enterprise and regulatory reform.

As a Conservative, I believe in stronger families forming the foundation of a stronger society, so I welcome the measures to support families. As my hon. Friend said, arranging child care is one of the biggest challenges working parents face. Those of us who daily do the school run know all about the pressures of juggling child care commitments with work. For households in which both parents are working, that can be a great struggle. Whether in respect of babysitting toddlers, looking after unwell children, doing the school run or attending school assembly, it can be very difficult for working mums and dads, especially those in traditional working arrangements, to support their children fully and meet their needs. We must not forget that young children—whether attending nursery, pre-school or school—have active lives and social lives, too, and that there are therefore also other commitments such as taking kids to after-school activities

Many households now need two parents to be working and bringing in full-time incomes in order to pay the bills because—let us face it—life is tough at the moment and the cost of living is high and is rising. Many Members have spoken about the rising utilities and fuel bills.

Suitable child care provision in this country is incredibly costly. Many of us could give examples of the average bill for sending a child to nursery in normal working hours exceeding £800 a month. That is equivalent to a monthly mortgage repayment in some households, so is it any wonder that two parents have to go out to work to cover child care costs in addition to the cost of living?

The Government are to be congratulated on recognising the challenges families face and the barriers to family life in this country, but more needs to be done across government and all the political parties. We must take a pragmatic and rational approach and introduce some positive, proactive measures to alleviate the struggles and challenges families face and to remove the barriers that are often in place in respect of child care and employment.

I know that many households across the country, and certainly in my constituency, will welcome the proposals outlined today. We need to give parents more flexibility over working time and over maternity and paternity leave, too. I can only speak from my own personal experience, but I was one of those parents who went back to work three weeks after having my son and, quite frankly, had I had the opportunity to swap with my husband, that really would have been great.

The Government should be commended for considering relationships between children and both parents. Fathers should absolutely have equal, fair and the right kind of access to their children when the family relationship has broken down. In my time as a Member of Parliament thus far, brief though it has been, many fathers have come to me who feel that their children are being used in the court system as an emotional and financial weapon, which is unacceptable. We need to bring some sanity back to the situation. Shared parenting is absolutely the right thing and, if nothing else, we have to start putting the rights of children first, not the rights of warring parents or warring mothers against warring fathers. Children come first and children’s rights are key.

That brings me on to adoption. In my view, the Government should be congratulated on their commitment to supporting the adoption process. I personally feel that it is nothing short of scandalous that the number of adoptions last year totalled just 60 when thousands of children are going through the care system in local authorities up and down the country. That is simply wrong. They deserve loving families and loving homes and hundreds of loving families want to provide good, stable homes for children. It is a shame on our society and on the system that red tape and bureaucracy get in the way and prevent children from being put into loving families. I welcome the change and hope that the Government will ensure that we can start to address the scandal and start to put children into proper loving homes.

My hon. Friend the Member for Dover talked about bureaucracy and red tape and I welcome the steps being taken to support children with special educational needs. As a local MP I have met dozens of families who have been let down by the system. Those mums and dads naturally want the best for their children but all too often bureaucracy, officialdom and, sometimes, bad practice in schools and local authorities let them down and damage the prospects of their children. They are left fighting hard, going through assessment after assessment, just to get the extra help that their children need. More often than not, in many cases, the needs of their children are recorded or summarised through some sort of tick-box process. The real understanding of the emotional or physical needs of the child is often ignored.

One school in my constituency has a very poor record on special educational needs provision and is the source of many complaints from parents to me. Rather than helping an autistic child, the school has classified him as having average communication skills. It is completely failing that poor child and failing to understand his needs because the school does not want to be seen to have too many children with special educational needs on its books, which is wrong and appalling. I would like more to be done to empower parents and I welcome the proposals to do that and to simplify the assessment process with the introduction of the single assessment process and education, health and care plans.

We also need to encourage the spread of best practice to get good results in the running of special educational needs services in other schools. A very positive example of that in my constituency is set by the inspirational head teacher, Jane Bass, at Powers Hall junior school in Witham. She sets a good leadership example and works tirelessly to help children with learning difficulties and special educational needs. I think she should be commended for her work. She has a strong track record of supporting children who have come to her school with very challenging problems and seeing them through their time there so that they leave with more skills and greater independence. That is good for the children and is genuine relief for their parents. Importantly, the parents know that their children’s needs are being met. In taking through the relevant Bill that will be introduced this Session, we should learn from schools that have a good track record of working with children and their parents to understand how to meet a child’s needs and relate that to the legislation. We need more head teachers like Jane Bass and I am optimistic that the legislative programme can deliver positive changes to special educational needs provision.

I welcome the Government’s tough stance on drug drivers, which I hope will lead to robust legislation. It is shameful that our criminal justice system sentences perpetrators for these offences—people who have taken away lives and ruined the lives of victims’ families—to just a few weeks behind prison bars instead of the lengthy spells in prison totalling many years that they should receive. I know that Ministers have listened closely to people’s concerns about this issue. Indeed, my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister today spoke about the many representations from families that he has listened to and the campaigns fought by victims’ families. Clearly, the Government have responded positively to those representations, but many more victims of other crimes have been excluded by the criminal justice system. Ministers need to listen to their concerns and introduce positive changes.

Victims and the public are being put in danger by a criminal justice system that, from the top down, sets free far too many offenders so that they end up roaming our streets and committing more crimes. There are more than 250 offenders with more than 100 convictions, more than 3,500 with 50 or more convictions and more than 2,000 offenders who have served 25 or more separate spells in prison. In addition, there are rapists and sex offenders who are never sentenced to serve a day behind bars. That should change. Some 20,000 offenders who are let off with community orders are out on the streets committing 50 crimes a day, including offences against children. The Government’s reforms to community sentences are a positive step forward, but there are tens of thousands of offenders on our streets for whom prison is the best place. Importantly, if they are in prison the public will know that they are being kept safe. Keeping the public safe should be fundamental to any criminal justice reforms we make in this Session.

We should also do more to support the victims of crime. I have seen from the work I have done with victims—let me refer hon. Members to my private Member’s Bill in the previous Session on championing victims’ rights—that victims are fed up with seeing policy makers and the courts focusing their efforts on appeasing offenders instead of helping victims to get through the horrific experiences they have faced. The former victims commissioner, Louise Casey, did a good job of highlighting this issue alongside charities such as Victim Support, the National Victims Association and Support After Murder and Manslaughter Abroad. The Government’s response to the consultation on its “Getting it right for victims and witnesses” strategy is due later this year, and I very much hope that they will recognise where the proposals need beefing up and that they will show some flexibility and deliver the new and improved services that victims of crime need. At the moment, my constituent Marie Heath and her family are being subjected to the horrendous ordeal of travelling to Germany every week for the ongoing trial of the defendants alleged to have brutally murdered her son. The family face huge logistical challenges and thousands of pounds in costs. The Government are aware of that case and I hope that in the Bill they will learn from the experience of the Heaths and many other victims of crime.

[Dr Thérèse Coffey (Suffolk Coastal) (Con)]

My hon. Friend is making a powerful point about people’s need to feel secure, to feel that sentencing is appropriate and to feel that those who should be behind bars are behind bars. Does she, like me, want the Government to take steps to ensure that sentences mean that if someone is sentenced to four years, for example, they serve those four years as opposed to perhaps just two?

[Priti Patel]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. We are talking about public confidence in the criminal justice system, which should do what it says on the tin. If an offender is sentenced to four years, the public do not want them released within 18 months or a shorter time. They want to know that the full sentence will be served. This is a good opportunity for the Government to restore public confidence in our criminal justice system.

I welcome the proposals the Government have outlined to free up businesses and scrap costly and unnecessary burdens on them. I refer to regulation. As the daughter of a small shopkeeper, I have recognised throughout my adult and teenage working life how important small businesses are for jobs and economic growth. I have also become very aware of regulation. As shopkeepers, my parents have owned a range of small shops—post offices, supermarkets and newsagents. We have been through many iterations of health and safety legislation, business and small shop regulation, Sunday trading, opening hours and particularly employment legislation. You name it, Madam Deputy Speaker, and we have been there, seen it and done it.

Small and medium-sized enterprises are the bedrock of our economy. We were once described as a nation of shopkeepers, but we do not feel like that any more, as small and independent retailers are decimated in our high streets. More needs to be done. SMEs support two thirds of jobs throughout the country. In my constituency, the figure rises to 83%, which is high and I should like it to be higher. With greater economic liberalisation and less regulation I am sure that will happen.

The ability of business owners and entrepreneurs to create even more jobs has been compromised by the unrelenting growth of regulation from both Whitehall and Brussels. In 2011, 84% of businesses reported that they spent more time dealing with legislation than in 2009. The annual cost to SMEs of that compliance is about £17 billion, which is equivalent to the cost of Crossrail, and 12 times the Government’s budget for apprenticeships.

The Government are committed to the red tape challenge; they have already identified more than 600 regulations to be scrapped or overhauled. The sooner the process begins, the better. Freeing business from the costs imposed by regulation will allow them, importantly, to invest in more jobs and economic growth.

I urge the Government to take more robust action on EU red tape. For me as a new Member of Parliament, one of the most disappointing aspects of EU regulation was the enforcement in the previous Session of the agency workers regulations, which unfortunately the Government could do nothing about because the previous Government had done the deal. That has cost business £1.5 billion. Such regulations do far more to create unemployment and block job creation than they do to support workers’ rights.

In my constituency and throughout Essex, more people are prepared to take risks and set up their own business. As many Members may have seen in the news over the past 24 hours, there has been a great deal of political focus on Essex; one might argue that the only way is up in Essex. It is indeed a county of dynamic entrepreneurs. Many of my constituents are prepared to go out on a limb and do the right thing, which is to take risks and set up a business. In the county of entrepreneurs, there are 6,000 new enterprise births a year. The figure is high, and I hope that it will grow higher.

As the Prime Minister saw on his visit yesterday, those wealth creators will be key to the future economic success not just of the county of Essex but of our country. By taking steps to empower them to create more wealth, jobs and prosperity, we can once again restore dynamism and strength in the British economy, and as a country we shall start to regain our rightful place in the world economic league tables. That is why I support the Queen’s Speech and everything the Government are doing on economic and regulatory reform.

[Chris Skidmore (Kingswood) (Con)]

It is an honour, although a daunting one, to follow that excellent speech by my hon. Friend the Member for Witham (Priti Patel), who speaks with a wealth of expertise as both a parent of young children, a job she juggles very well with her other abilities, and an excellent parliamentarian. She spoke about businesses in Essex, again with a wealth of expertise as the daughter of shopkeepers, and gave a thorough going over of the Queen’s Speech.

It feels odd to speak on the first day of a parliamentary Session. It reminds me of when I turned up here in the previous Session hoping to make my maiden speech. I wanted to make it as soon as possible so that I could get into the cut and thrust of debate, so I put in and waited to make it on several occasions. I will never forget my first moment in Parliament. I was sitting in the corner of the Chamber and waiting, and new Members on both sides bobbed up and down to say how beautiful their constituencies were—it was funny how that theme kept coming up. I waited from half-past 2, without having a drink of water or going to the toilet, until half-past 10. I sat there for eight hours, so afterwards I went over to the Chairman of Ways and Means and explained that I had hoped to be called that day. “Oh no”, he replied, “You weren’t going to be called at all. You should have come and seen me and I could have told you that you were never going to make it today.” That was the first lesson I learnt here.

[Priti Patel]

Welcome to Parliament.

[Chris Skidmore]

Absolutely. There is a lot of waiting going on here, but we do not have to wait long for the contents of the Queen’s Speech, which I will come to shortly.

To continue with my anecdote for a moment, I remember still wanting to make my maiden speech as soon as possible, and sitting in the Tea Room looking through the draft of what I hoped to say when a more senior Conservative Member came over and asked, “Oh boy, you’re looking to make your maiden speech, are you?” I replied that I was and explained that I had waited to be called for eight hours the day before. “Oh well, there’s only one piece of advice I can give you about making your maiden speech,” he said. I was a young newbie and so asked what it was. “Well, just don’t muck it up,” he said, before wandering off laughing. He actually used stronger language, but I will not use it in the Chamber—[Interruption.] Yes, indeed, it rhymes with muck.