First Aid Techniques: National Curriculum

Russell Brown Excerpts

Tuesday 10th March 2015 Westminster Hall

[Heather Wheeler (South Derbyshire) (Con)]

I congratulate the hon. Member for Bolton West (Julie Hilling) on securing the debate. It is a pleasure to be here today. We have followed this debate and issue for quite some time. Defibrillators have been popping up around village halls, swimming pools, leisure centres and gyms across the whole of the South Derbyshire constituency very much as a charitable, volunteer arrangement. Similarly, when the British Heart Foundation really kicked on with this campaign and made the offer of kit to schools, I, as a good constituency MP, wrote to all my local schools and colleges about having the equipment put in, and I am delighted to say that the William Allitt school, High Grange school, the Pingle school, Foremarke school and Granville sports college took up that offer. I have been into the Pingle school and been with the children as they were having one of their lessons, pumping up and down on the dummy. Obviously, people can imagine which face I was imagining as I was doing that—there are people we want to keep and people we perhaps do not want to keep—but it was a pleasure to be there with those children. Would the hon. Member for Dumfries and Galloway (Mr Brown) like to intervene?

[Mr Russell Brown (Dumfries and Galloway) (Lab)]

No, no.

[Heather Wheeler]

The hon. Gentleman was just wondering who I was thinking of. That is fine.

What I find fascinating is that there is no pushback—no pun intended—from the children. The children want to do this training.

Again, as an MP campaigning about issues that are important to people in South Derbyshire, I have written to my hon. Friend the Minister and we have spoken about this issue. Our local St John Ambulance is keen on it, the children are keen on it and the schools are proud of what they are doing. Village hall committees are helping to organise the defibrillators in their areas. There is support from county councillors, such as Linda Chilton in the Melbourne area, which helped to pay for one of the defibrillators. There is a huge groundswell of support. I genuinely believe that the time is right for Ministers to accept that it is a good idea, and to accept that there is an opportunity, perhaps after May, to put such skills on the curriculum. We are rolling out citizenship classes and making sure that older children understand the importance of politics and democracy. Only one thing is more important than politics and democracy, and that is living and breathing. I hope that the Minister takes on board all the comments from everybody in the Chamber, and I again congratulate the hon. Member for Bolton West on ensuring that the debate is alive and kicking today.

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[Chris Ruane]

For those who are not impressed by the examples I have given of people being saved—the mother and daughter, Bob Sheldon and Paul Keetch—in cold-hearted actuarial terms, the insurance industry reckons that every person who dies prematurely costs the country £1 million in lost taxes, lost education and lost life. If we prevent 5,000 people from dying prematurely from heart disease every year, the country will save £5 billion. Over the next 10 years, the saving would be £50 billion. It makes economic sense, but most of all, it makes health sense to introduce lessons about CPR.

Charities such as the British Heart Foundation are doing their part. To date, 930 secondary schools across the country, plus two community groups in my constituency, have signed up to help build a nation of life savers. As has been mentioned, the BHF is providing kits free of charge to schools and clubs. The charity is doing its bit, and it is time for the Government to meet it halfway and help to deliver CPR and public access defibrillator awareness across the four nations. The BHF’s innovative “Call Push Rescue” training scheme teaches CPR and PAD awareness in less than 30 minutes. It takes just 30 minutes to save a life.

Will CPR awareness sessions affect our children’s maths and English? Will they reduce our children’s skills? Will they adversely affect our children’s standard assessment tests, their GCSEs or their A-levels? Such training can be slotted into the curriculum in many different ways, as has been said. For example, it could be taught in biology lessons or—my favourite option—in PE lessons. The good thing about CPR is that it can be taught anywhere in the school curriculum, and it must be possible to find 30 minutes somewhere in that curriculum.

[Mr Russell Brown]

Since the meeting that my hon. Friend and I attended last week, I have made inquiries about what is being done in Scotland. The curriculum in Scotland contains carers modules, and I am led to believe, although I still need confirmation on this, that CPR could well form part of such modules. That should not simply happen in one place; it should be rolled out across the whole of the UK.

[Chris Ruane]

I totally concur with my hon. Friend, and I am glad that he has made investigations about the scene in Scotland. Nineteen MPs have attended this debate, and dozens of others have signed early-day motions, spoken in other debates and tabled parliamentary questions. Heart disease is the biggest killer in the country, and any political party that gets on top of the matter will be given political credit for it. It is a non-party political issue, however, and it is great to see hon. Members from across the House and across the United Kingdom here supporting the call for CPR and PAD. I hope that we will use our position in Parliament to influence our Front-Bench team, our Back-Bench team and our manifestos. I also hope that we will use our position as local leaders in our constituencies to influence schools and health authorities to ensure that the important issue of CPR and PAD is raised locally in our communities and nationally.

Oral Answers to Questions

Russell Brown Excerpts

Thursday 20th November 2014 Commons Chamber

[Jo Swinson]

Absolutely: workers have rights to rest breaks, which there is a requirement for under law, and if deductions are made from pay, they have to be very clearly outlined—and if they take somebody below the national minimum wage, the employer could find themselves in breach of that law. I very much encourage the hon. Lady’s constituent to seek advice from the pay and work rights helpline on 0800 917 2368, and I am very happy that she has raised this issue and awareness of it in the House.

[Mr Russell Brown (Dumfries and Galloway) (Lab)]

Will the Minister update the House on how many businesses to date have taken up her Government’s unpopular and much derided shares for rights scheme, taking away people’s rights at work in exchange for shares?

[Jo Swinson]

There is an interesting link between the issue of toilet breaks and that question, but in answer to the point about the employee shareholder policy, there is no requirement for companies to inform the Government when they have undertaken that model of employment, and therefore accurate figures would not be available to answer the hon. Gentleman’s question.

Oral Answers to Questions

Russell Brown Excerpts

Thursday 16th October 2014 Commons Chamber

[Mrs Grant]

Our tourism strategy has been very successful. It has seen robust visa reform, cuts in air passenger duty and the creation of a tourism council. Millions of pounds have also been spent on the GREAT campaign. As a result, we have seen record visitor numbers, a record spend and an estimated £127 billion going into the economy as gross value added. I note that the right hon. and learned Lady recently launched a new tourism strategy, but I do not think it adds any more to what we are already doing, and I am not prepared to take finger-pointing from her on tourism issues.

[Mr Russell Brown (Dumfries and Galloway) (Lab)]

Are figures available to show what has been happening in tourism over recent years, in respect of, say, a reduction in the number of UK citizens travelling overseas and an increase in foreign visitors? Is there something to give us a real picture of what is happening on the ground across the UK?

[Mrs Grant]

Various stats are always collected. As I said, we have had record visitor numbers and a record spend. The figures are monitored very carefully. The Deloitte report is always a useful document, but I would be happy to write to the hon. Gentleman with a selection of stats if he would find it helpful.

National Minimum Wage

Russell Brown Excerpts

Wednesday 15th October 2014 Commons Chamber

[Mr Chuka Umunna (Streatham) (Lab)]

I beg to move,

That this House notes that the value of the National Minimum Wage has been eroded since 2010 as working people have been hit by the cost-of-living crisis and are on average £1,600 a year worse off; recognises that the fall in the real value of the minimum wage since 2010 is now costing the public purse £270 million a year in additional benefit and tax credit payments; further notes that the Chancellor of the Exchequer cruelly misled working people by saying he wanted to see a minimum wage of £7 while the Government has no plans to reach this goal; calls on the Government to set an ambitious target for the National Minimum Wage to significantly increase to 58 per cent of median average earnings, putting it on course to reach £8 before the end of the next Parliament; supports action to help and encourage more firms to pay a living wage through “make work pay” contracts to boost living standards and restore the link between hard work and fair pay so that everyone shares in the UK’s wealth, not just a few at the top; and further calls on the Government to set a national goal of halving the number of people on low pay by 2025.

We are a great country with some of the most hard-working and creative people in the world, but there are challenges and problems that must be addressed. We are the sixth largest economy in the world, yet too many people do not have secure, fulfilling jobs that provide dignity, respect and a wage that they can live on. Most people who are living in poverty in this country have a job. If people do the right thing, play by the rules and work hard, day in, day out, they should not have to live in poverty in this country; but the reality in 2014 is that they do. More than 5 million people do not earn a decent wage.

We can see the economic data and, yes, on paper, GDP growth is better than it was two years ago, but the reality of people’s lived experience suggests otherwise. Just in the past fortnight, the much respected Resolution Foundation has produced research that paints a different picture. Tens of thousands of people are trapped in low-paid jobs with little hope of a pay rise. Among those minimum wage employees who have been employed for at least five years, a record one in four has failed to progress off the minimum wage for the entirety of that period. That compares with just one in 10 minimum wage workers a decade ago.

That is the background to our motion. What each party says it will do to address that situation and to make work pay will provide the context in which the next general election is fought. Before I set out what the Labour party would do if elected next year, I will remind people what we have already done. I have said it before and I will say it again: in 2010, this party left the country in an immeasurably better state than we found it in 1997. [Interruption.] If the Minister waits, he will get his time in a moment. One of the many reasons for that was our utter determination to end the outrage of people being exploited at work, which led to our establishment of the national minimum wage in the face of opposition from Conservative Members.

In 1997, the current Secretary of State for Work and Pensions—I note that he is not here—told the House that if we introduced the national minimum wage, it would

“negatively affect, not hundreds of thousands but millions of people.”—[Official Report, 4 July 1997; Vol. 315, c. 526.]

In the same year, the current Defence Secretary told the House that the Conservative party had “always resisted” the minimum wage and that he thought there were “other better solutions” to extreme low pay. Then, of course, there was the Conservative party leader—now the Leader of the House—who said that a minimum wage would be

“either so low as to be utterly irrelevant or so high that it would price people out of work.”—[Official Report, 17 March 1997; Vol. 308, c. 618.]

They and their Conservative colleagues made those claims and arguments to justify inaction at a time when some people in this country were earning as little as £1 an hour.

We had the good sense to ignore the Conservatives, and in my view establishing a national minimum wage was one of our greatest ever achievements. As a consequence, between 1997 and 2001 extreme low pay fell from 6.9% to 1.5% of the work force, and we are proud of that. All the evidence shows that the minimum wage boosted earnings considerably, without causing the unemployment that we were told would follow. So when people say that we are all the same, I point to the establishment of the minimum wage to illustrate our very different instincts as parties, our different approaches and the kind of difference that a Labour Government make when in office.

[Mr Russell Brown (Dumfries and Galloway) (Lab)]

I served on the Committee that considered the National Minimum Wage Bill, and the only other person in the Chamber who did that is you, Mr Speaker. We spent many long hours through the night—

[Chris Bryant (Rhondda) (Lab)]

He was wrong then!

[Mr Brown]

I will refer to that later, but it is right that my hon. Friend the Member for Streatham (Mr Umunna) continues to push this issue, because some people out there believe that the national minimum wage would have happened in any case.

[Mr Umunna]

I thank my hon. Friend; that is interesting and I look forward to hearing his comments on who took what position at that time.

Yesterday, I revisited an interview with the great Sir Ian McCartney, a former Member of this House, who was the Minister at the Department of Trade and Industry and pushed the National Minimum Wage Bill through the House. He said that he would have “died in the ditch” to ensure that we got it through, and—my hon. Friend the Member for Dumfries and Galloway (Mr Brown) will remember this—we had a record sitting of the House to get the national minimum wage through in the face of resistance from Conservative Members.

I distinctly remember Sir Ian McCartney at a press conference with the Westminster lobby, explaining why we were doing what we were doing. He was a former kitchen worker and earned poverty wages. I remember seeing the news report of him weeping at that press conference, explaining how he was paid something like 1p or 2p per potato that he put in a bag in that kitchen, and asking the lobbying journalists, “How can you defend that in our country in this day and age?”

As I said, Labour Members are rightly proud of the national minimum wage, and we make no apologies for reminding people of the resistance that we met when we introduced it, and of the difference that a Labour Government make to people’s lives.

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[Matthew Hancock]

It is absolutely true that the long-term and fundamental way to support the increase in productivity is to ensure more rigorous education and more skills, which is why we increased the number of apprenticeships. We are on track to have 2 million apprenticeships started in this Parliament, and we are clear that we will deliver 3 million in the next Parliament. The hon. Gentleman is absolutely right that education and skills underpin the long-term advance of prosperity for everyone in this country. I suggest that he would support the Government’s policies to strengthen education if he was truly interested in supporting a long-term increase in productivity.

We have discussed enforcement, the increase in the budget for enforcement and the Small Business, Enterprise and Employment Bill. We have quadrupled the maximum penalty to £20,000—per worker, not per firm. As a result, the amount from enforcement has increased from £2.6 million in 2003 to £4.6 million today. We know that a strong minimum wage must be properly enforced.

My third and final point is that the true champions of the low-paid know that the minimum wage is only one tool among many. We are reforming welfare so that it supports people into work rather than trapping them in poverty, and we are letting people keep more of what they earn. Thanks to our rise in the tax threshold, a typical taxpayer already pays £700 less income tax than in 2010. The tax bill of someone working a 30-hour week on the minimum wage has been cut by two thirds. In the next Parliament, we will abolish income tax for those working full time on the minimum wage. We can do that only because we are prepared to make difficult decisions on spending.

It seems that the Labour party does not want to make those difficult decisions. Perhaps the shadow Minister will explain why all we have heard from it is taxes on jobs, taxes on business, taxes on homes, pensions, investments, taxes on driving and now even taxes on death.

[Mr Russell Brown]

Does the Minister recognise that the economic recovery he talks about is not being witnessed in many parts of the country? He talks about people coming out of the tax bracket, but the reality is that in many parts of the country less than half the work force works anywhere near enough hours to pay tax.

[Matthew Hancock]

Absolutely. I recognise that as we get the recovery moving we must ensure that it benefits all parts of our country. That is why we are ensuring that the jobs recovery is spread throughout the country. This morning’s jobs data show that unemployment is falling in all regions, and in the hon. Gentleman’s constituency it has fallen by 28% in the last year. Instead of pointing fingers, he should congratulate the Government on that effort.

The Labour party forgets that we do not support the incomes of those at the bottom by making the whole country poorer. Tax cuts and welfare reform are both essential, but ultimately must go hand in hand with strengthening education and skills.

The Government support work and our record shows that we deliver work. We have a plan that will work. A strong minimum wage is possible only with a strong economy. We passionately support the minimum wage, not for a headline, but for the benefit of those who rely on it. It is just one part of our long-term plan to restore the health of the British economy from the ruins of the past. Instead of that past, we will build an economy that works for all and secures a brighter future for Britain.

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[Heather Wheeler]

I will have some difficulty in accepting that. The point is that 1 million fewer people are unemployed. There are more people in employment now than ever before. There are more women employed than ever before. I want people to understand that getting a job and looking after their family is their No.1 priority, and that is happening.

Obviously, I have looked at the statistics for South Derbyshire. Fewer than 7% of workers in South Derbyshire are on the minimum wage. That is because we have made a real effort to get manufacturing in South Derbyshire and to get a supply chain for the manufacturers. We have made a real effort to get apprenticeship training schools in South Derbyshire. We have worked like—let me find a nice phrase for this. We have worked very hard to ensure that people do not just say, “Do you know what, I do that because my dad and my grandfather used to do that.” It is about lifting horizons.

I totally agree that we need all our public services to ensure that we have clean streets, bins that are emptied and street lights that stay on. People should understand the value of working. I find it so depressing that all we ever get from Labour is this business of layering on regulation and doom and gloom. The right ideas that we heard at conference include raising the tax threshold to £12,500. The horizon of my hon. Friend the Member for Elmet and Rothwell (Alec Shelbrooke) is to raise it to more than £14,000. We are not talking about people being grateful that we are only going to tax them at 10%. We want everybody lifted up out of that level. It is outrageous that people should even contemplate that that might be in a Labour manifesto.

[Mr Russell Brown]

I know I am about to make a contribution after the hon. Lady, but let me make this point. There are people who are not working enough hours to come anywhere close to paying income tax. The people who really benefit from what the coalition Government are doing are she and I and everyone else on high salaries. We benefit from increasing the personal allowance. Some people do not even earn half of that personal allowance a month.

[Heather Wheeler]

I completely accept the hon. Gentleman’s point of view and it is completely fair to say that people who were unemployed are now working a few hours, but I remember the great outcry about changing working hours from 16 to 20. There was massive outcry and we were told that it would never happen, but I have not had a single constituent come to me to tell me that they are worse off because they are now working 20 hours or because they are working towards those 20 hours. I think that things have changed.

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[Mr Russell Brown (Dumfries and Galloway) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for South Derbyshire (Heather Wheeler), who is, dare I say, one of the jovial characters in this place. She speaks much sense. She speaks about doom and gloom among Labour Members, and I try as best I can to be upbeat, but I am sure that she would recognise that the economic recovery that Government Members talk about is not being seen across the country. I have said it time and again, and I hate to say it, but I will not let people forget that 13 or 14 months ago the average wage in my constituency in rural south-west Scotland was 24% beneath the UK average. Thankfully, that has improved and it is now at about 17% or 18%, but people are struggling.

Across the country, working people have seen their wages fall by an average of £1,600 a year, because under what I—and my colleagues, I am sure—see as the Government’s failing plan, the recovery is benefiting a privileged few and most families are not seeing the green shoots of any kind of economic recovery. The real value of the national minimum wage has fallen and one in five employees are low paid. That impacts not only on low-paid workers but on their families, their communities and the local economy. It piles up across the country as more people in work have to rely, as has been said this afternoon, on the social security system to make ends meet.

My hon. Friend the Member for Westminster North (Ms Buck) mentioned the Campaign to End Child Poverty and the work done by the centre for research and social policy at Loughborough university. The figures out today for my area are soul destroying. The figure for the number of children living in poverty is now 23.2%. Those figures include more than 3,000 children affected by in-work poverty, whereas 1,200 are affected by out-of-work poverty. A massive shift is going on and we are seeing more and more families affected—families with children. We should all be saying that we are going to do something about that together to get children out of poverty. The situation is pretty desperate in some areas, and I recognise that my hon. Friend cited even higher figures from her London constituency.

The hon. Member for South Derbyshire mentioned colleges. I have to tell her that the college system and the further and higher education systems are different north of the border. I have a new college in my constituency that is only two or three years old, but the budget has been cut by the Scottish Government. Over the years, about 30% of the young students going into that college have had no formal qualifications whatsoever. The formal education system has failed them, but the college offers them a second chance that many of them have seized. However, the budget for our further education colleges is being cut—that is not the fault of Government Members, because it is a devolved issue—and so courses are being cut. That means that young people who need that second chance are being deprived of the opportunity.

[Dr Eilidh Whiteford (Banff and Buchan) (SNP)]

Does the hon. Gentleman accept that the number of apprenticeships in Scotland is at a record level and that targeting funding at policies that will get young people into work, rather than at an endless cycle of college courses that do not lead to work, is a better use of scarce public money at a time when the block grant has been cut and when public finances are under immense pressure?

[Mr Brown]

I recognise that finances are under pressure, but I would say the same to the hon. Lady as I said to the hon. Member for South Derbyshire. The situation is not the same across the entire country. Youth unemployment in my area sits at some 5.3% whereas the Scottish average is 4.8% and the UK average is 3.8%, as there are so few job opportunities. When young academically inclined people in my area manage to get off to college or university, 90% never come back because the quality jobs that the hon. Member for South Derbyshire has spoken about are simply not there. It is a rural economy—tourism is the other major employer—but the growing job market is in the care sector as people come to the area to retire. We have a vastly different economy to other places, although similar economies exist.

I want to move on to the issue of the national minimum wage. I said in an intervention on my hon. Friend the Member for Streatham (Mr Umunna), the shadow Secretary of State, that I served on the Committee for the National Minimum Wage Bill. As I said at the time, the only other person who served on the Committee who was in the Chamber at the time at which I made the intervention was Mr Speaker. There were some long nights. Indeed, I remember two particularly lengthy sittings: one that started at 4.30 on a Tuesday afternoon and ended at 1 o’clock the following afternoon, and another that started at 4.30 on a Thursday afternoon and finished at 6.30 the following morning. But it was really worth it. I remember campaigning in Lockerbie when the figure of £3.60 an hour was announced, and one guy I met on the doorstep asked, “Is this figure of £3.60 right?” I said yes and asked whether it would affect him. “Of course it will,” he said. He was working the best part of 50 hours a week in the forests—heavy, dirty and dangerous work—but taking home only about £112 a week.

[Andy McDonald (Middlesbrough) (Lab)]

I just want to congratulate my hon. Friend on the work he did to introduce the national minimum wage, because I remember that there were adverts in my local press for security guards, and they read, “£1 an hour. Bring your own dog.”

[Mr Brown]

I thank my hon. Friend. Yes, we have moved on, but the fear among Opposition Members is that we are starting to slip back. In those days it was women, in particular, who were having to hold down two or three jobs in order to make ends meet. I see the same thing returning but, more worryingly, it is not only women, but men who are having to hold down two or three jobs.

[Mr Brian H. Donohoe (Central Ayrshire) (Lab)]

Zero-hours contracts.

[Mr Brown]

Yes, this is about the whole employment method. We cannot deal with this just with a stand-alone national minimum wage. When we came to office we had the windfall levy on the privatised utilities, which allowed us to introduce the new deal programme for young unemployed people, the long-term unemployed, the disabled and lone parents, and then we introduced the tax credits system. It was about pulling together two or three strands to make things work, and that led to a step change in people’s standards of living.

[Ian Swales (Redcar) (LD)]

I certainly support the work that the hon. Gentleman’s Government did on the national minimum wage, but does he not regret the fact that when they left office people earning the minimum wage were paying £1,000 a year in tax? By April they will have seen that figure cut by £800 through the work of the Liberal Democrats. [Interruption.]

[Mr Brown]

I refer to the coalition Government in that regard—credit where credit is due—and I will come to that point later.

With regard to the reduced levels of unemployment, we need to look at the figures from the Office for National Statistics for the weekly average number of hours worked across the country and compare them with the number of people working over the past 12 to 18 months. Although more people are working, we have not seen an increase in the number of hours being worked on a pro-rata basis. What we are seeing—this relates to the point about zero-hours contracts—is that more people are in part-time work or working shorter hours. Some people are desperate to grab four or six hours in order to supplement a job they are doing elsewhere. The unemployment figures might be falling, but the overall number of hours being worked across the country is not increasing at the level we would have expected for the number of people now in employment.

People need job security, but we are seeing a scale of job insecurity in this country that we have not seen for many years, so I challenge Government Members to say that we have not gone backwards in some respects. I hate to say it, but there are some unscrupulous employers who are prepared to exploit zero-hours contracts and short-term working for people who are prepared to do a hard day’s work if given the chance. I also want to mention migrant workers, because I was talking about that with three or four guys I met five or six weeks ago. They were very angry, and not about the migrant workers they were working with, but about the fact that their employer was exploiting the situation in order to keep wages low, with local indigenous workers paying the price.

I want to mention the personal tax allowance again, because it is a big issue. I applaud the aim of taking people out of tax. I have challenged Treasury Ministers on this, as has my hon. Friend the Member for Edinburgh East (Sheila Gilmore), because many people are not working enough hours to come anywhere close to paying tax. The fact is that it is the rich, or those in well-paid jobs, who reap the benefits of the personal allowance changes. I also recognise that there is always a narrow band of people who benefit, and if we shift or change tax bands and tax rates, some people will be more heavily penalised than others.

[Mr Donohoe]

This is an increasingly important subject. We must also consider the fact that north of the border, as my hon. Friend will know, many local authorities are talking about not only a minimum wage, but a living wage, because of the problems associated with the minimum wage. Does he agree?

[Mr Brown]

Yes, I think that it is about a step change. We need to recognise that we should do whatever we can to increase the quality of life and lessen the impact of the cost of living on households. My local authority will be looking long and hard at that issue and imploring the businesses it offers contracts to—we know that we cannot demand it—to pay a living wage.

In 1997, we were told that we would lose millions of pounds as a result of a national minimum wage, but my party had clearly done our homework while in opposition, because the figures showed that when we give £1 million to the lowest-paid people in any community, they will go out and spend it, which creates 35 to 40 jobs in the community. That is what we saw. Some people in my area saw businesses shedding jobs, because the type of work they were doing was coming to the end of its life, and they could not understand why unemployment levels were still low. Unemployment was falling simply because we were putting money into the local economy.

I will return to a point that was made when we were discussing the benefits increase earlier this year. The figures clearly show that freezing benefits for the lowest-paid people over a three-year period took £6 billion out of the local economy. Giving some of the poorest paid extra money stimulates the local economy.

[Mr Angus Brendan MacNeil (Na h-Eileanan an Iar) (SNP)]

The hon. Gentleman is making a good speech. I agree with his point about the economic multiplier effect of a minimum wage, and indeed of increasing benefits. The economist Paul Krugman makes the economic argument that increasing benefits adds to the economy by creating demand among the people who are likely to spend.

[Mr Brown]

Absolutely. As my hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Erdington (Jack Dromey) said earlier, low-paid workers do not salt the money away but go out and spend it, and that is what we need. I honestly believe that that is where the coalition Government, to a certain extent, have failed. They have taken money away from some of the poorest communities and households, and there is no doubt that if we had left money in their hands, it would have been spent.

[Richard Fuller]

rose—

[Mr Brown]

Mr Deputy Speaker is looking at me and I want to draw to a conclusion.

I want to mention “make work pay” contracts. In November last year, the Leader of the Opposition announced

“that a future Labour government would encourage employers to pay the living wage through new ‘Make Work Pay’ contracts.

Firms which sign up to become Living Wage employers in the first year of the next Parliament will benefit from a 12-month tax rebate of up to £1,000—and an average of £445—for every low paid worker who gets a pay rise.

This measure will be entirely funded from the increased tax and National Insurance revenue received by the Treasury when employees receive higher wages. Additional savings in lower tax credits and benefit payments, as well as increased tax revenues in future years, will cut social security bills and help pay down the deficit”—

as we all want to do. That, without a shadow of a doubt, is a commitment that an incoming Government would make the desperate moves that have to be made to reduce the deficit.

[Richard Fuller]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

[Mr Brown]

I am going to finish now.

I am proud that when I came into this House I was one of a team of people who took forward the National Minimum Wage Bill. I have always said that even if I do nothing else in life, I can say that I played that part in what that Labour Government did. With no doubt whatsoever, I will be supporting our motion. I would like to think that one or two Government Members who have spoken will support us too.

[Several hon. Members]

rose—

Oral Answers to Questions

Russell Brown Excerpts

Thursday 10th April 2014 Commons Chamber

[Matthew Hancock]

I would be delighted to speak to the hon. Gentleman to understand more about the packaging recycling industry and to see whether we can tackle that problem.

[Mr Russell Brown (Dumfries and Galloway) (Lab)]

If we are to grow the economy and increase exports, we need to ensure that there is support for SMEs. In the last quarter, net lending to small and medium-sized enterprises fell by more then £1 billion. When will Ministers get a grip and start backing our wealth creators to take on employees and develop greater opportunities for exports?

Munitions Workers

Russell Brown Excerpts

Tuesday 26th March 2013 Westminster Hall

[Mr Russell Brown (Dumfries and Galloway) (Lab)]

As other colleagues have already done this morning, I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Stoke-on-Trent South (Robert Flello) on securing this debate. Like one or two others who are here in Westminster Hall today, I am also a member of the all-party group on recognition for munitions workers. I also have to declare a further interest; before I came to this place, I was a munitions worker myself for 18 years. So there was life before this place.

In considering the task that was laid before people during the second world war and the first world war, I recognise only too well just how hard the work of munitions factory staff was. However, that work was being done in completely different circumstances to those that exist today. The “war effort” is something that people glibly talk about, but they never recognise just how difficult it really was back in those days.

I will go back to the first world war. In my local community—I say “my local community”, but it is actually in the constituency of the Under-Secretary of State for Scotland, the right hon. Member for Dumfriesshire, Clydesdale and Tweeddale (David Mundell) —the two villages of Eastriggs and Gretna were built around the manufacture of munitions. In fact, the village of Eastriggs is called “the Commonwealth village”, and that can be seen in its street names: Halifax road; Sydney road; Melbourne avenue; Winnipeg way; and Auckland way. All around that village, there are streets and avenues with names from the Commonwealth.

I pay tribute to the local people in that area who have developed what could be seen as a tourist attraction. They have developed a project called “The Devil’s Porridge”, where they put on a display of what life was like during the first world war. They have tried to replicate that period as best they can, and I must say that they have made a fantastic effort to replicate what it was like to work in a munitions factory back then.

I also think back to the presentation of awards and badges to the Land Army girls. I must say that some of the hardy souls I met at that time made the comment, “Well, we were very lucky, we escaped the munitions factories”, because they were given a choice: did they want to go to work on the land, or did they want to go to the munitions factories? Quite clearly, they wanted to be out in the open air rather than working in a munitions factory, which they recognised was very dangerous work. Unfortunately, that offer was not made to some people, who were told, “You are going to munitions factories.” We must also keep it in mind that the women at that time were paid only half what the men were being paid, so there was not just a workforce dominated by women; there were men in the factories, who were actually paid twice as much as the women were.

Colleagues have mentioned today the companionship and comradeship found in munitions factories, and I have to say that I have found it absolutely fascinating, during the period that the all-party group has been established, to meet some of the women workers. They related their own stories and I must say that some of them could not be printed in Hansard, because of some of the antics that these people got up to. They were safe in a workplace, but their antics outwith included social events, social evenings, even cycling 10 or 15 miles to a dance. That was not uncommon and when we consider that many of today’s young people will ask “Can I get a lift?” if they are asked to pop down to the shops, we realise that these women in the factories were real hardy souls who saw nothing whatever as a challenge.

They also experienced a lot in the workplace. We have already heard about the “canary girls”, but all of the people in munitions factories were working with chemicals of all kinds, including acids. Sadly, many individuals were left disfigured because of severe acid burns. There were some acids that people worked with that resulted in their teeth falling out. So it was not pretty, but it was the war effort.

I also thank the Royal British Legion for enabling a number of these ex-munitions workers to take part in the Armistice day parade last year. I actually came down to London to be with two ladies from my constituency who took part in that parade, Margaret Proudlock and Margaret Shields. They will be for ever grateful to the all-party group for achieving that initial recognition. However, as hon. Members, including the Minister, have heard we want that little bit extra—something a little bit special—for individuals to be recognised.

The site that I worked at was the Royal Ordnance factory Powfoot, which was managed by Nobel Explosives, a subsidiary of ICI. I remember distinctly being told about the site on my first day, “There’s 365 acres here, boy. One for every day of the year.” That was founded in 1940. Also in my constituency was a site at Edingham in Dalbeattie, built in 1939. There was a further subsidiary site of Nobel’s in Dumfries itself, at Drungans. In checking one or two things, I came across the following in Hansard from 25 February 1946:

“Mr. McKie asked the President of the Board of Trade whether he will make a statement regarding future plans for the munitions factory at Drungans, Dumfries.”

At that time, the President of the Board of Trade was Sir Stafford Cripps, who replied:

“This factory has just been declared surplus to Government requirements. It is, in its present form, suitable only to a limited extent for peace-time production, but the Board of Trade will endeavour to make arrangements for it to be used to the best possible advantage.”—[Official Report, 25 February 1946; Vol. 419, c. 548.]

That factory continued to operate from that date into the late 1980s, when it closed. The Powfoot site, which I worked at, ceased production in November 1992, after the privatisation of Royal Ordnance factories.

I want to add a little support to what has been said this morning. The Imperial War museum has been helpful to us. I am confident that we will get something at the national memorial arboretum and that there will be an effort to raise the £100,000 that we want. I also thank Scott Dodsworth of BAE Systems for all the work that he has done.

One challenge that became apparent when I first raised this issue was that we have no records of these individuals. In my home town of Annan, a lady at the Historic Resources Centre, Renée Anderson, has a card index system of some 2,600 members of staff who were employed. It is fascinating. I do not know how old this lady thinks I am, but she produced a significant number of photographs, some of which were black and white and from way back and asked if I recognised any of the people. Of course I did not, but I am sure that people in the community will come forward to try to identify them. Renée wants to put on a display about what that site did.

As we have heard this morning, these places were secret. I met a chap a good number of years ago who used to fly for the RAF. He said, “We were always told to keep away from this area, because we had no idea what was there. We were told, ‘Do not fly within this specific zone.’” People were moving around that site something that could, with the slightest spark, have decimated the area. To give an example, I am sure that colleagues will remember incidents in recent years, in Peru and Holland, where fireworks have gone off in an enclosed area and totally destroyed it, and have taken the paintwork off vehicles in the vicinity. That is the ferocity with which this material—small arms propellant—burns. It is ferocious and, when it goes, people stand no chance at all. That is the sort of environment that women worked in during the war.

My latter days at the Powfoot site were spent as a production supervisor. People in a work force do complain and my answer to complaints from some of the guys that that was dirty, heavy work, was, “This was women’s work during the war”—not demeaning anyone, but just showing the fortitude of those women in ensuring that our guys on the front line were properly armed.

I hope that the Minister will speak to his colleagues. It is little to ask that these women get individual recognition. I know that the records are not as we would like to be able to identify each and every one of them, but the information channelled to my office and in the Historic Resources Centre in my home town is a good starting point. I am sure that other colleagues will work tirelessly to ensure that we get official recognition for these people who made the difference to our troops on the front line, especially during the second world war.

Oral Answers to Questions

Russell Brown Excerpts

Thursday 21st March 2013 Commons Chamber

[Michael Fallon]

It is our intention to conduct a sale during the forthcoming financial year, 2013-14, and I confirm that at the time of that sale we intend to make a share scheme available to the 130,000 employees of Royal Mail who, as my hon. Friend says, have worked so tirelessly to turn it into a successful and profitable business and should share in that success.

[Mr Russell Brown (Dumfries and Galloway) (Lab)]

What assurances can the Minister give to small businesses and many individuals across the UK who rely on a well performing, six-day-a-week service to their homes and businesses? Will that remain so once Royal Mail is privatised?

[Michael Fallon]

Yes, it will, because Parliament put in place, in the Postal Services Act 2011, the statutory requirement for a universal postal service that is secured by Ofcom, an independent regulator, and that will exist irrespective of the ownership of Royal Mail.

Oral Answers to Questions

Russell Brown Excerpts

Thursday 8th November 2012 Commons Chamber

[Michael Fallon]

Yes, I will certainly look at that. We are now preparing how we manage and administer the programmes under the new multi-annual financial framework, which will begin in January 2014 and last until 2020. I want to make sure that we have a smaller number of programmes across the United Kingdom and that we therefore minimise the differing costs and start dates under the previous seven-year framework. We need a simpler approach to the cohesion funds, but I certainly take the hon. Gentleman’s point on the importance of the transition regions outside the category A regions.

[Mr Russell Brown (Dumfries and Galloway) (Lab)]

7. If he will establish an independent body to review the relationship between big pub companies and tied landlords.

[Lisa Nandy (Wigan) (Lab)]

11. If he will establish an independent body to review the relationship between big pub companies and tied landlords.

--- Later in debate ---

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills (Jo Swinson)]

The Secretary of State has written to the industry asking for evidence on how the self-regulatory approach announced last November is working. We will make our decisions after considering its response.

[Mr Russell Brown]

I thank the Minister for that answer, but a broad coalition of organisations as diverse as the Campaign for Real Ale, the Federation of Small Businesses, the Business, Innovation and Skills Committee, which has a majority of coalition members, the all-party save the pub group, Unite and the GMB—the list goes on—all think that the relationship between pubcos and their licensees is unfair. Is the Minister able to name any serious organisation that thinks that self-regulation will work in this sector?

[Jo Swinson]

I understand that a wide range of organisations have expressed concerns, which is exactly why we have written to the industry to ask for its views on how this is working. We want to proceed on an evidence-based approach and once we receive the evidence we will report back to the House.

Oral Answers to Questions

Russell Brown Excerpts

Thursday 27th October 2011 Commons Chamber

[Mr Hayes]

Knowing my hon. Friend’s expertise and commitment to this subject, when I saw his question I spoke to my officials and got an interesting response from them. I think that if we better estimate at the outset people’s prospects of progression, we may well be able to take account of what my hon. Friend says. I invite him, as I did earlier, to come to the Department to talk that through and to see what changes we can make to remove any disincentives of the kind to which he refers.

[Mr Russell Brown (Dumfries and Galloway) (Lab)]

The construction industry, the manufacturing sector and apprenticeships all go hand in hand. Will the Minister confirm that the vast majority of the increase in apprenticeships in the past year has been in the over-25s category? Frankly, that is not doing enough to assist with the serious problem of youth unemployment.

[Mr Hayes]

The hon. Gentleman is right that there has been a growth in over-25s apprenticeships and he will know that the previous Government commissioned the Leitch report, which said that that was exactly what we needed—to upskill and reskill the work force. Notwithstanding that, however, he will also know that there has been remarkable, unprecedented growth in 16 to 18 apprenticeships and in 19 to 24 apprenticeships over two years. Contrary to the complaints of the carpers and the cringers, the whiners and the whingers, the biggest proportion of growth has been at level 3—that is A-level equivalent.

Oral Answers to Questions

Russell Brown Excerpts

Thursday 14th October 2010 Commons Chamber

[Mr Hayes]

My hon. Friend is right that we need to consider closely not just the apprenticeships that are available to people as they leave school or college, but those for people who want to reskill or upskill. Lord Leitch, in a report that the previous Administration commissioned, made it clear that that is vital because of the demographics, the challenges that we face and the competitive pressures from those countries that have invested in apprenticeships. We will certainly take his remarks on board.

[Mr Russell Brown (Dumfries and Galloway) (Lab)]

What preliminary discussions has the Department had with private sector employers who are about to provide those many hundreds, if not thousands, of apprenticeships? Does the Department have a target or time scale for delivering them?

[Mr Hayes]

I do not want to be repetitive, Mr Speaker, and you would not let be so, but I make it absolutely clear that almost as soon as we entered government we transferred an additional £150 million into the apprenticeship budget to create extra apprenticeships. Yes, of course, I am working with businesses, small and large, to make that dream—that vision—a reality. Indeed, we held a consultation on that over the summer, which I know the hon. Gentleman will have studied closely.