A Brighter Future for the Next Generation

Baroness Winterton of Doncaster Excerpts

Thursday 13th May 2021 Commons Chamber

[Charlotte Nichols (Warrington North) (Lab)]

My hon. Friend will be aware, having listened to the interview on Radio 4 yesterday, that the Universities Minister was explicitly asked whether this legislation would cover holocaust denial and she explicitly said that it would. This is appalling. There is no academic merit whatever in debate, distortion or denial of the holocaust. I hope my hon. Friend will agree that the Secretary of State should correct the record, because what he said just then has misled the House.

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Rosie Winterton)]

I am sure that the hon. Lady would say “inadvertently misled the House”.

[Kate Green]

Let me read a transcript of the broadcast yesterday. The Universities Minister says:

“What this bill is designed to do is to protect and promote free speech which is lawful so any free speech which is lawful”.

The interviewer, Evan Davis, says:

“It is lawful isn’t it? Holocaust denial in this country is lawful isn’t it?”

The Minister says:

“So what I’m saying, yeah, so that’s”

Evan Davis asks:

“So holocaust denial is okay, you’d defend a holocaust denier being invited to campus because that is part of the free speech argument?”

The Minister responds:

“Obviously it would depend on exactly what they were saying”.

Madam Deputy Speaker, it never depends on what a holocaust denier is saying.

[Kate Green]

I am grateful for that assurance on the Floor of the House from the Secretary of State. I hope when we are able to debate the Bill again on the Floor of the House and in Committee that we can work together to make sure that we have absolutely watertight provisions to ensure that there is no place for antisemitism anywhere on campus.

I also say very gently to Government Members, many of whom have a proud record of defending free speech, that handing over the power to determine whether free speech complaints on campus are justified to the Office for Students—a Government regulator, with an unqualified former Conservative MP appointed as its chair—smacks of the kind of thought control that we would rightly condemn in authoritarian Governments around the world. But it is not the way we do things in this country. I hope the Secretary of State will also think better of those proposals.

Perhaps the most surprising thing about the Queen’s Speech was the absence of anything meaningful for one of our most precious assets—our children—and their learning and wellbeing in school. Although we know that the Secretary of State is determined to send more schools down the path of academisation, he says that there will be a “try before you buy” model for schools contemplating this route. I have no idea how that will work, so perhaps the Secretary of State will be able to enlighten us.

Most parents do not care that much about the structure of their children’s school, and they are quite right. It is not structure that determines a school’s performance, but high-quality teaching and excellent school leadership, and we see that in both the maintained and academy sectors. Prioritising favoured structures at a time when the role of schools in helping children to bounce back from the pandemic could not be more important once again shows that the Secretary of State has the wrong priorities, especially when schools are struggling with a stealth cut to their budgets because of changes to the pupil premium, while it is rumoured that the national tutoring programme is being taken out of the hands of experts and given to Randstad, a multinational outsourcing company. Can the Secretary of State confirm the media reports that Randstad will be running the national tutoring programme next year, and if so, can he tell the House what expertise in education, teaching and learning it will bring? In fact, can he tell us why it was able to win this tender at all? Was it because his Department decided to lower the quality of provision required to cut corners on price?

Those are questions that the Secretary of State should answer, but let me conclude by addressing the perfectly reasonable question: what would Labour do to guarantee a bright future for children and young people? Let me tell the House what would have been in a Labour Queen’s Speech this week. We would have started with a credible, radical plan to enable children and young people to bounce back from the pandemic—a plan that created time for children to play, learn and develop, that gave the teaching profession the recognition and support it needs to guarantee a world-class education for every child and that ensured the national tutoring programme reached all children who need it. We would have detailed proposals for children’s wellbeing, catch-up breakfast clubs guaranteeing every child a healthy breakfast and creating more time in the school day for children to recover lost learning and time lost with their friends and teachers.

We would have delivered a credible plan to support young people into work. We would have implemented policies outlined earlier this year by my hon. Friend the Member for Stalybridge and Hyde (Jonathan Reynolds) that would have guaranteed every young person not in education or employment a job or training opportunity to end long-term youth unemployment. We would have ensured the apprenticeship levy was used to create opportunities for our young people, as we suggested with our proposal to use the underspend from the apprenticeship levy last year to create 85,000 youth apprenticeship opportunities. Most importantly, we would be working right across a Labour Cabinet to end the scourge of rising child poverty, which is scarring the lives of millions of children. Tackling child poverty will always be a priority for Labour, and I am proud that my hon. Friend the Member for Ilford North (Wes Streeting) will be leading our programme of work on this within the shadow Cabinet.

Before I came into Parliament, I spent a decade of my life working for and championing a brighter future for young people, because while children make up 20% of the population of this country, they are 100% of our future. They are ambitious, optimistic, imaginative, creative and excited about the world they will grow up to. They have so much to offer, and our job as adults is to give them every opportunity to make the most of their childhoods and their future, so let us not let them down with empty rhetoric and hollow promises. Today, let us commit to truly deliver a programme of change that transforms children’s lives, fulfils the promise that this will be best place to grow up and, in creating a brighter future for young people, gives the promise of a better future for every one of us.

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Rosie Winterton)]

I am now going to put a six-minute time limit on Back-Bench contributions, which will be on the screens and on the clock in the Chamber. We now go to the Chair of the Education Committee, Robert Halfon.

[Robert Halfon (Harlow) (Con) [V]]

I am excited by this Queen’s Speech—excited that, for the first time in many years, skills and further education are a core part. My maiden speech in 2010 was about apprenticeships, and I have yearned for the skills agenda to be embedded within Government. If the heart of levelling up is about education and skills, then we are truly in a good place. If levelling up means providing a ladder of opportunity for millions of our countrymen and women to learn, train and reskill, providing job security and prosperity for themselves and their families, then we will both meet the skills need of our nation and equip ourselves for the coming fourth industrial revolution. As the skills and FE Bill passes through Parliament, we will of course examine the finer details, but the vision of a lifetime skills guarantee providing all adults with the opportunity to retrain and skill for a lifelong learning entitlement is a huge step forward. The offer of free level 3 courses for those without A-levels could do much to retrain those who do not have the right qualifications to advance in key professions. My only wish is that this would come much sooner than 2025. I hope that in time the Government can build on this by providing an adult community learning centre in every town and by giving businesses a skills tax credit for every worker they retrain in vital skills.

We need to address the huge fall in part-time learners for higher education with maintenance support and greater financial muscle for institutions such as the Open University that do so much for disadvantaged students. The Open University is one of the great education inventions of the 20th century and an institution that puts levelling up first and foremost. For too long further education was denied the opportunities given to higher education, both in terms of funding and prestige. Over many years, there has been a culture of snobbery about FE. This has been all the more astonishing given that further education colleges meet our skills needs, provide a ladder of opportunity for thousands of students from disadvantaged backgrounds, and are places of social capital. I have seen this myself in over 70 visits to Harlow College in my constituency. I have urged the Under-Secretary of State for Education, my hon. Friend the Member for Chichester (Gillian Keegan), or the Secretary of State to visit our wonderful college to see the work that it does as a showcase for the importance of FE to our country. The proposals look to build the prestige of further education and create more employer-led qualifications. As the Secretary of State, who has demonstrated a real passion for FE, has acknowledged, this must be backed up by a real-terms increase in funding. Further education has often been described as the Cinderella of our education system, but we should be reminded that Cinderella became a senior member of the royal family and could banish the two ugly sisters of snobbery and underfunding once and for all.

In the longer term, the Government should, alongside the remarkable kickstart programme of financial support for businesses that hire apprentices and young people, look at reform of the apprenticeship levy to ensure that more disadvantaged would-be apprentices can climb the skills ladder. Degree apprenticeships should be rocket-boosted with the ambition of having at least half of all students completing degree apprenticeships over the next 10 years.

Alongside FE, I would like the Government to do more to support university technical colleges. They have some superb outcomes and our ambition should be to have a UTC in every town across the country. Sixty-one per cent. of UTCs were rated good or outstanding in the past year compared with a national average of 50%, while in 2020 55% of students went on to university in contrast to 50% nationally, and 13% went on to do an apprenticeship whereas the national average is just 6%.

The White Paper mentions careers guidance. We will not transform skills unless we change careers guidance fundamentally. There is too much replication, duplication and overlap with the Department for Work and Pensions. Department for Education careers advice must be about skills, skills, skills. It must ensure that all the way through schooling pupils are taught about apprenticeships and FE and given more opportunities for work experience. Ofsted should focus on this kind of careers guidance, in short implementing the Baker clause—a much stricter criterion of inspection. Our curriculum should be changed to embed work and skills all the way through children’s, pupils’ and students’ learning.

The Government have put out the levelling-up skills ladder of opportunity. I am really optimistic that this Queen’s Speech will bring people to that ladder and help them climb to the top.

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Rosie Winterton)]

We now go to the SNP spokesperson, Clare Monaghan.

[Carol Monaghan (Glasgow North West) (SNP) [V]]

Thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker, but Clare is my big sister.

There are no surprises in this Queen’s Speech but there is much repetition of many of the Prime Minister’s favourite phrases. While Parliament was prorogued, the SNP campaigned in and comprehensively won an election on a manifesto that included, as well as the obvious clear commitment to holding a referendum on independence, a commitment to our young people—to their education, their health and wellbeing, and their routes to work. In Scotland we already have the highest number of school leavers going on to positive destinations anywhere in the UK. To invest in the next generation the SNP Government will invest £1 billion over the course of this Parliament to work on narrowing the school attainment gap and recruit 3,500 additional teachers and classroom assistants.

The Secretary of State earlier boasted of maths success, but maybe he should take the time to read what has been said by Professor John Jerrim of University College London, who wrote England’s official 2015 country report for PISA—the programme for international student assessment. Professor Jerrim said that some low-achieving students in England have been “systematically excluded” from the PISA data for England, which undermines England’s global rankings. It is suggested that if the data were adjusted on the basis of a more representative sample, England could plummet 11 placings in the maths ratings. Perhaps the Secretary of State should be aware of that.

While this Tory Government have to be forced into providing some school lunches for children, the Scottish Government will provide free school breakfasts and lunches to every primary school pupil throughout the year. Why have we not seen a similar commitment for children in England? For all their talk of levelling up, this Government ignore the fact that children cannot learn effectively when hungry.

The Tories threaten to rip away the lifeline of the £20 a week uplift to universal credit. The new SNP Government will double the game-changing Scottish child payment over the lifetime of this Parliament. The most needy families in Scotland are already receiving an additional £10 per week for every eligible child; doubling this to £20 will make a real difference to these families. That is a Scottish Government delivering on the people’s priorities —what a contrast to what we see from the Tory Government, who are content to continue imposing poverty on the most disadvantaged.

The context of the covid crisis makes choices such as these all the more critical, because in seeking to build economic recovery in the aftermath of the pandemic it is vital that the mistakes of the past are not repeated. The Budget in March and this Queen’s Speech are clearly laying the grounds for more austerity and Tory cuts.

It is also important to point out that no party and no Government who forced through a devastating Brexit in the middle of a pandemic can credibly claim to be focused on recovery. With the powers we have, the Scottish Government are doing everything they can to mitigate the damage and protect our businesses. A fair recovery must be investment-led, so at the centre of our recovery plans is an economic transformation with fair work and the climate emergency at its heart. It includes an investment of £500 million to support new jobs and to retrain people for the jobs of the future, as well as funding the young person’s guarantee of a free university, college, apprenticeship or training place for every young person who wants one.

What a contrast that is to what the Prime Minister has announced in the Queen’s Speech. Colleges in England have been severely underfunded for a decade, leading to a £1.1 billion gap in real-terms funding for 16-to-19 education, and this Tory Government have done very little to address that. The announcement on lifetime access to education cannot be truly considered access; all it does is pave the way for increased financial liability. No longer will educational debt, which is on average £50,000 on graduation for students in England, be reserved to the young; now the Tories want people of all ages to be saddled with debt for their education. This Tory Government need a different approach to post-16 education funding, providing long-term security and putting the interests of learners at its heart. Education is a public good and as such must be publicly funded to provide real lifelong access for all.

The Prime Minister continues his talk of the UK as a science superpower and makes impressive promises regarding research and development funding, but the story on the ground is much less rosy. Researchers are finding themselves in an eternal circle of grant applications, trying to get scraps of funding from various different bodies—one here, another there.

If the Prime Minister makes good on his announcement on additional funding for this sector, many will be relieved, but over the past six months, we have seen much that casts doubt on his promises and, as we have come to expect of this Prime Minister, absolutely no detail. There have been questions and delays over the funding of Horizon Europe, and cuts of £120 million from the ODA budget. The UK’s status as a science superpower is underpinned by international research collaboration. A while back, the UK Government announced, with much fanfare, 12 flagship hubs that were to run projects of five to 10 years for the achievement of the UK’s sustainable development goals. As a result of the ODA cuts, projects halfway through clinical trials cannot continue unless funds are found. That is jeopardising both jobs and research. Is that the action of a science superpower: withdrawing funding in the middle of human trials, in violation of medical ethics?

Also as a result of ODA cuts, universities have reported that research contracts have been terminated, in some cases with just hours’ notice. That has fundamentally undermined trust between universities, researchers and UK Research and Innovation. The system of research commissioning is now one where the first risk assessment that must be done is on the UK Government’s ability to honour their own contracts. Do the UK Government’s promises mean so little that they must now be risk assessed?

I am delighted that the Secretary of State was so enthusiastic in his praise for my home city of Glasgow and he is welcome to join me here in Glasgow at any point. I wonder whether he would also be enthusiastic about meeting the researchers who as a result of the ODA cuts are now struggling to continue with their research. Nothing in this Queen’s Speech provides any certainty for international collaboration. Instead, we have seen that young people’s ability to travel freely to 27 other countries has been curtailed. Opportunities have been lost. Despite his praise of the Turing scheme, it is a poor relative of the Erasmus scheme and our young people can see right through this.

Scotland is a confident nation, one that celebrates diversity. Although the electorate in England might buy the Prime Minister’s promises, young people in Scotland can see through them. They want a different path, one with opportunity, and they want to choose their own future as an independent nation. The Scottish Parliament elections have shown that the young people of Scotland are clear: they know that the SNP Government have their interests at heart and they look forward to re-joining the independent nations of the EU.

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Rosie Winterton)]

I do apologise to the hon. Lady for the slip-up at the beginning with her name.

--- Later in debate ---

[Jack Dromey (Birmingham, Erdington) (Lab) [V]]

The last year has been one of tragedy for the tens of thousands of relatives of those who died from covid, such as Jane Roche of Castle Vale in my constituency. Her dad, Vince, died, and five days later her sister Jocelyn died. She has campaigned fiercely for an independent inquiry into why tens of thousands died who should never have died. Yesterday she once again wept tears when the inquiry was announced. She said three things. First, she and the relatives from Birmingham will meet the Secretary of State shortly, and they want their voice to be heard in the drawing up of the terms of reference. Secondly, they want to be able to give evidence on behalf of the families from Birmingham—Britain’s second city—which saw such a terrible price paid. Thirdly, 2022 is simply too late for the inquiry to start if painful lessons are to be learned.

I want to focus my remarks on manufacturing, which matters to the success of the United Kingdom. The genius of manufacturing, science and the national health service was responsible for the development and roll-out of the vaccine, and 30 million people have already been vaccinated. That success teaches us two lessons, which I fear the Government have not sufficiently learned. First, it was the coming together of the state, businesses and workers that delivered one of the greatest feats that this country has achieved in recent times. Secondly, British manufacturing, having shown its worth to the country in its hour of need, deserves and requires a Government who think strategically about how to support the sector to reap the rewards of our world-class manufacturing. However, the Queen’s Speech and the events of recent months demonstrate that the Government are failing to learn these lessons. The scrapping of the Industrial Strategy Council, the ending of the industrial strategy policy and the Treasury land grab of industrial strategy have been received with dismay by many in the world of manufacturing—employer and trade union alike.

Time after time, we have seen the Government shirk their responsibility to support British industry. All the while, our international competitors are making strides forward. Last year, the French invested £15 billion in the aerospace industry and £8 billion in the automotive industry to put them at the forefront of the next generation of green planes and cars. The German Government have invested £4 billion in German automotive production to ease the transition to electric vehicles. In America, President Biden has secured a $1.9 trillion stimulus package to kickstart the economy. The failure in our country to do likewise on the necessary scale means that we run the risk of Britain falling behind, and that must change.

The Government need to act now on three fronts. First, they need to recognise that it is absolutely key to our economic recovery that we invest in manufacturing, which is central to our economy, creating good, well-paid and stable jobs when too many people are now in insecure and low-paid employment.

Secondly, on the challenges of net zero, this is the year of Glasgow, with the immense potential that that brings. However, if we are to rise to that challenge, demanding —rightly so—that we end the scandal of global warming, and then take advantage of that, it means investment in our world-class manufacturing and research and development. One example of where the Government simply fall behind continental Europe is investment in gigafactories, and another is investment in infrastructure.

Thirdly, if the Government mean what they say about the levelling-up agenda, it is crucial that much of manufacturing is located in seats of high deprivation, such as Erdington. I always describe Erdington as being rich in talent, but it is one of the poorest constituencies in the country. At its heart we have the jewels in the crown of manufacturing, such as Jaguar Land Rover and the GKN factory—we are battling right now to save that from closure. Manufacturing is key if the Government are to come anywhere near achieving their objective of levelling up.

In conclusion, let me return to the success of the vaccine roll-out. It has demonstrated the enormous and endless potential of the state, businesses and workers coming together to deliver, in our hour of need, one of this country’s greatest achievements. It also demonstrates just how important manufacturing is to Britain. The Government need to learn those lessons, but I fear that they will not. They are proceeding with nowhere near the ambition that is necessary. Is it true that some welcome initiatives have been taken? Yes, it is, but not at the scale demanded. If France, Germany and America can do it, Britain demands and deserves better.

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Rosie Winterton)]

I have been told that some Members have withdrawn from this debate, so, unusually, I will put the time limit up for a bit to seven minutes.