Business and the Economy

Debate between Sarah Dyke and Damian Hinds

Wednesday 21st May 2025 Commons Chamber

[Damian Hinds (East Hampshire) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to join this lively debate. Small businesses are the backbone of the economy in my constituency. In fact, 99.9% of businesses in East Hampshire are small or medium-sized enterprises. We over-index in professional services, retail, information and communications, and, of course, agriculture. [Interruption.] I thought there were few Labour Members present before I stood to speak! The biggest sectors for employment are retail, health and care, and manufacturing. [Interruption.] I am starting to get a complex!

I have heard from all those sectors, which are worried about the prospects for their businesses and the economy under this Government. We must always remember two things about business. First, contrary to what the hon. Member for Loughborough (Dr Sandher) said—he is no longer in his place but I know he will return—only business can create the wealth and jobs, make the livelihoods and generate the tax that, in turn, makes the high-quality and brilliant public services that we all so value and on which we rely.

There is a second thing that we should always remember about business, and I encourage Ministers to remember it. Accountants talk about the entity principle and describe a business as an entity that is separate from the people who run it. That might be true in an accounting sense, but in a broader sense, businesses are people. They are collections of people coming together to achieve something. The joint stock company was created to share risk among different people, and the way that organisations work within companies is a way of increasing efficiency and productivity, compared with everybody doing their own thing as a sole trader. So, because businesses are ultimately people, there is ultimately no such thing as a tax on a business. Taxes can only ever fall on people. A so-called business tax falls on one or more of three groups of people: the business’s customers, the business’s employees or the business’s owners.

[Sarah Dyke]

The hon. Gentleman talks about the impact on people. A small business in Fifehead in my constituency has recently had to reduce its staff by four—small business, real impact. Small businesses create so much for our rural economy. Does he agree that the Government should scrap the national insurance contributions rise and replace the broken business rates with a new, fairer funding system to boost our rural economies and jobs in our rural areas?

[Damian Hinds]

The hon. Lady makes a good point about small businesses, particularly rural small businesses, and I will talk about national insurance contributions and business rates, but let me come back to how taxes on businesses are ultimately taxes on people.

Some Labour Members might say that they do not mind a tax on business owners, because they are the capitalists and they can afford it, but we need to remember that the owners of businesses are a mixture of institutional owners—which, by the way, includes your mum’s pension fund—small business owners, who are quite often sole traders, and family businesses. If the owners are not affected, either the customers or the employees will be affected, and I am afraid the effect of the national insurance contributions rise will ultimately be felt by those two groups of people, and particularly by employees, through a mixture of wage suppression over time and possibly some job losses. The bigger effect will not be about job losses; it will be about jobs that are never created in the first place, particularly among the youngest people and those furthest from the labour market.

Digital Landlines: Rural Communities

Debate between Sarah Dyke and Damian Hinds

Wednesday 2nd April 2025 Westminster Hall

[Damian Hinds]

I am aware, and I do agree.

[Sarah Dyke (Glastonbury and Somerton) (LD)]

The right hon. Gentleman talks about vulnerable people. A constituent of mine, a widowed mother, lives in Westport with her son who has ME—indeed, she suffers from ME as well. Two weeks ago they were left without power and therefore without a phone. Had an emergency occurred during that time, they would have been. Does the right hon. Member agree about the serious risk that the rapid switch to digital landlines poses to more vulnerable residents in rural areas?

[Damian Hinds]

I do. It is a major infrastructure change and there are particular considerations around the elderly and the vulnerable. I have heard from many constituents who have shared their concerns about the switchover, mostly about fear of losing that means of contact during a power cut and not having a mobile phone signal to fall back on. Elderly people often speak of their phone—their landline, as we would call it—as their lifeline, not only for their health support, but to be able to be in touch with friends and family, their support network. One constituent who has had the changeover talks about having her landline cut off, in her words, and replaced with a battery phone, which she says is too bulky for her to carry around and which does not reach all parts of the house. Because she lives alone and is disabled, she has relied on having multiple phones in the house, including a landline extension in her bedroom. The new phone has to be placed on a charger overnight, and the charger is located in a room up steps that she struggles to reach, so she no longer has a phone within reach of her bed.

Apprenticeships and T-Levels

Debate between Sarah Dyke and Damian Hinds

Wednesday 20th November 2024 Westminster Hall

[Damian Hinds (East Hampshire) (Con)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered apprenticeships and T Levels.

It is a pleasure to see you in the Chair, Sir Christopher.

UK productivity is well below that of the United States, Germany and France. That is not a new thing; it has been true in every year I have been alive. If we were able to fix that productivity gap, we could have higher living standards, lower tax and more tax revenue. There are multiple reasons for the gap and much academic literature has been written on it, but the level of skills in an economy is fundamental to productivity and therefore to growth. How we run our skills system is also important, because there is a cadre of young people who are less orientated towards pure academic study but have talent and flair in technical pursuits, and they deserve just the same opportunities and life chances as those who take the academic route.

In this country, although we are famous for aspects of our education system, including for our higher education—our universities—and increasingly for aspects of our school system, we are not, I am afraid, famous for technical and vocational education and training. When foreign Ministers come to Europe to look at vocational education, they tend to go to Germany, and if there is one thing we do not like in England, it is losing out to Germany.

It is right that successive Governments have been troubled by this situation and sought to fix it, but perhaps sometimes they have been a bit too quick to look for a fix. The story of our organisational infrastructure for technical and vocational provision is not one of stability. We have had industrial training boards, the Manpower Services Commission, the Training Commission, and training and enterprise councils—TECs. But those TECs were different from another TEC—the Technician Education Council, which existed alongside the Business Education Council, BEC. The two would eventually merge, of course, to give us BTECs. There were national training organisations; the Learning and Skills Council; sector skills councils; the UK Commission for Employment and Skills; the Skills Funding Agency, or SFA, which would later be the ESFA—the Education and Skills Funding Agency—and, most recently, local skills improvement plans and the Institute for Apprenticeships and Technical Education.

The infrastructure has been mirrored by a panoply of qualifications and awards. We have had traditional apprenticeships and then modern apprenticeships; the youth training scheme; the City & Guilds system; the technical and vocational education initiative; the National Council for Vocational Qualifications; NVQs, which are still in use; and GNVQs, which evolved into BTECs and diplomas. There were the 14 to 19 diplomas, which were not quite the same thing as the Tomlinson diplomas; the skills for life programme; and traineeships. Altogether, today, there are somewhere between 100 and 200 recognised awarding organisations, excluding those that only do apprenticeship end-point assessments.

Now, just at level 3—the equivalent to A-levels—we have the following qualifications: tech levels as well as T-levels; applied generals; level 3 ESOL; level 3 NVQ, and access to higher education diplomas. There is a level 3 award, a level 3 certificate and a level 3 diploma—or someone might prefer a level 3 national certificate or a level 3 national diploma. There is also an extended diploma, a subsidiary diploma, and a technical introductory diploma. There is no official count, but by the mid-2010s someone had counted up what they could find and said that, together with other, non-level 3 courses available to 16 to 18-year-olds, there were at least 13,000 possible qualifications that someone in that age group could do. It is not surprising that when the Independent Panel on Technical Education was created in 2015-16, it found that vocational education and training had become “over-complex”.

[Sarah Dyke (Glastonbury and Somerton) (LD)]

I thank the right hon. Member for securing this important debate. Some 6.9% of young people in Somerset are believed to be not in education, employment or training, which is higher than the national average of 5.5%. Does he agree that the Government should not only improve the quality of vocational education, but strengthen the careers advice and links with employers in schools and colleges, to enable more young people to get into education on the right courses?

[Damian Hinds]

Indeed—the hon. Member is absolutely right. Part of the point of careers advice is knowing which course to take and which qualification to pursue. The panel that I mentioned found that if someone was considering a career in plumbing, for example, there were 33 different qualifications that they might seek to take. It also found that in general the various qualifications were not providing the skills needed; they had become divorced from the occupations they were meant to serve, with no requirement, or only a weak requirement, to meet employers’ needs in those occupations.

The panel’s report, which came out in April 2016, became a blueprint for a major upgrade of technical and vocational education in this country. The panel was determined to address both the productivity gap and very clearly also the social justice gap, whereby some young people were being left behind. I stress that although the report was a blueprint, it was also a “redprint”: the panel was chaired by the noble Lord Sainsbury, the distinguished Labour peer. The report called for “a fundamental shift”, with

“a coherent technical education option…from levels 2…to…5”.

There would be 15 clearly defined sector routes, covering 35 different career pathways. Three of those routes would be available only through an apprenticeship; the other 12 would be available either through an apprenticeship or a college track, and there would be common standards for both. Both the apprenticeship and college-based routes would result in

“the same or equivalent technical knowledge, skills and behaviours”

to take into the workplace. The report said that this path

“needs to be clearly delineated from the academic option, as they are designed for different purposes. But, at the same time, movement between the two must be possible…in either direction”.

The report also recommended expanding the then Institute for Apprenticeships into an Institute for Apprenticeships and Technical Education, so as to cover both apprenticeship and college tracks. It added:

“Specifying the standards…is not a role for officials in central government but for professionals working in…occupations, supported by…education professionals.”

It recommended that there should be improvements to apprenticeships and a new, largely college-based qualification, which would become known as the T-level.

With T-levels, the knowledge, skills content and required behaviours are set not by somebody at the Department of Education but by employers. There is the core technical qualification, but there is also content in English, maths and digital. Crucially, there is a 45-day industrial placement. There are also more college hours than with traditional vocational qualifications and indeed more taught hours per week than for A-levels.

For the upgrade that we needed in our country, in both productivity and opportunities available to all young people, T-levels had to become the principal college-based option—not the only option, but the principal or main college-based vocational qualification. And the T-level could not be grafted on to a market that already had thousands of qualifications; there was an incumbency advantage and even commercial interests attached to some of those. It had to replace a number—a lot—of qualifications. Gordon Brown, the former Prime Minister, has been speaking about this quite recently.

The other thing that was always going to be difficult about T-levels was finding enough industry placements. Lord Sainsbury found that we might need up to 250,000 industry placements for 17-year-olds, and that, of course, is hard to achieve. We could say that it is too hard and give up, but if we did that we would be giving up on advancing our competitiveness.

The alternative is that we change culture in our country and say to companies that if they want to be a great success in their sector, and their sector to be a great success in our country, and our whole country to be a success in the world, we all have to invest both the resource and the time in the next generation.