Consumer Rights Bill

Debate between Sharon Hodgson and Nicholas Dakin

Monday 12th January 2015 Commons Chamber

[Nic Dakin]

I will take further interventions later. Let me first describe my constituents’ experiences in relation to the Paul Weller concert, which is to take place on 17 March 2015. Some arrived early to join the queue at the Baths Hall ticket office, while others applied by telephone and via the website, but many failed to obtain tickets. Shortly afterwards, tickets cropped up on secondary sites. Today I looked into where I could buy a ticket for the event, and how much it would cost me. I discovered that it would cost me £102 to obtain one through a secondary site. According to my maths, that is a mark-up of £64 for someone in the system. It would be better to allow more of my constituents to have access to the tickets locally, or to put money into the local community via the venue, or to give more to the performers.

[Mrs Hodgson]

What that example demonstrates—Conservative Members refuse to see this for some reason—is complete market failure. A Select Committee and the Office of Fair Trading looked into the matter, but what Conservative Members fail to mention is that they did so 10 years ago, and because they did not act then, the market is now skewed to the extent that my hon. Friend has described. Is that not exactly why, 10 years later, we need to do something, and would not the amendment solve the problem that he has highlighted?

[Nic Dakin]

With the benefit of her knowledge of this matter, my hon. Friend has made her point extremely well. As she says, what we are seeing is market failure, and it is interesting to note that the main evidence base that was drawn on by the hon. Member for Shipley is many years old.

Teacher Training and Supply

Debate between Sharon Hodgson and Nicholas Dakin

Tuesday 22nd October 2013 Westminster Hall

[Nic Dakin]

My hon. Friend is right to draw attention to the overall ecology of support for teacher education and development. Other professionals work in the education industry and it is necessity for universities to provide part of the infrastructure. If the Government pull at one part of the infrastructure, other things will happen.

I told my head teacher friend whom I bumped into at the weekend that I thought things were in a spot of bother and might get worse. To my surprise, he said that teacher education and supply were already in chaos—that is from someone on the front line—adding that he did not understand why the effective graduate teacher programme had been scrapped. With a bit more digging—speaking to north Lincolnshire’s excellent lead for teacher induction, Kim Francis—I discovered that the restructuring and the reduction in staffing, with the responsibilities passed to the National College for Teaching and Leadership, coupled with systemic change in initial teacher training have resulted in widespread frustration for providers of initial teacher education. Lines of communication have become fractured and unreliable.

The Government’s single driver for policy implementation appears to be focused on School Direct, but given that schools need to be linked to accredited providers, serious confusion has reigned. Many schools are bewildered and question whether they have the capacity to implement and quality-assure initial teacher training. Locally, schools are ambivalent and lukewarm about taking on the responsibility.

[Mrs Hodgson]

Does my hon. Friend agree that serious confusion seems to reign not only in the Department for Education, but in the Government, between the Prime Minister and the Deputy Prime Minister?

[Nic Dakin]

Sadly, my hon. Friend is correct. Confusion is the name of the game, but we are fortunate, indeed blessed, to have the Minister for Schools here today. We all look with anticipation to his illumination at the end of the debate.

School Food

Debate between Sharon Hodgson and Nicholas Dakin

Tuesday 19th July 2011 Westminster Hall

[Mrs Hodgson]

I agree. The point of the debate is that we must learn the lessons of the past, not repeat them. We cannot just sit by and allow everything we have achieved in the past 13 years to be undone, which is what is happening at the moment.

To illustrate the point that not all leadership teams understand the benefits of school food, I want to cite a case that was in the news recently, although it does not fall within the Minister’s purview. Bridgend council considered constructing a pathway between Brynteg comprehensive school and a McDonald’s, which just shows that the argument about the value of ensuring that all our children, not just those on free school meals, have a nutritious lunch in school has not yet been won. It also shows why stay-on-site policies are so important for secondary schools.

[Nic Dakin]

I wholeheartedly agree that stay-on-site policies are important for secondary schools. They improve behaviour at lunch and in the classroom afterwards, so I fully endorse my hon. Friend’s comments.

[Mrs Hodgson]

Exactly. A school or a local authority spending money on a path to a fast-food joint, rather than on instigating a stay-on-site policy, is almost as baffling as bringing in a fast-food giant to write public health policy, although, as we know, that, too, has happened. However, there is a serious point: despite all the evidence of the benefits, it is clear that not all school leaders or local authorities place the value that the majority of us in this room would like on children eating healthy lunches.

Everything that the Government have done so far means that standards will start to slide. Why? What possible benefit can there be for our children in giving certain schools the power to throw the rulebook out the window? Perhaps the Minister can at least explain that today. Of course, it is not only in new academies and free schools that standards could slide, because Ofsted no longer has to assess a school’s compliance with the regulations, so how do Ministers expect them to be honoured?

According to the Minister’s letter to caterers, which I mentioned earlier, mums and dads will now have to keep an eye on things, although she does not explain quite how they are expected to do that. However, she promises that, if they tell the Secretary of State about a school, he will use one of his ever-increasing number of powers to direct the school to jolly well buck up its ideas. Unless schools literally go back to the bad old days of turkey twizzlers and chips, however, I cannot imagine that many parents would notice any changes—for example, if the spaghetti bolognese, which might have met the standards before, suddenly had more fat or less vegetable content. That is a meaningless thing for the Minister to say. All that I would ask her is what possible benefit there is to schools or pupils in removing that element of an Ofsted inspection—none that I can think of.

It will be little surprise if nutritional standards slip; after all, the cash that subsidises them has effectively gone. Ministers say that it is within the direct schools grant, but again that is meaningless, because many schools are struggling with their budgets. For many of them, subsidising school meals will be far down the list of priorities, behind staff, materials and many services for which they would previously not have had to pay, such as the broadband bill, to take one example. One more service that they will now have to buy on a commercial basis will be advice from the School Food Trust on how to meet the nutritional standards—not really an attractive option if they do not now have to meet those standards anyway.

As we have heard—it was highlighted in the media last week—school meal take-up is on the rise. I congratulate the Minister on using that for some positive media coverage. I cannot really blame her, I suppose, but there is evidence that that spike could be due to pupil premium-chasing, as reported in The Independent on Sunday. The test of her policies will lie in whether we can see the same rise in three years’ time, and unless there is a radical rethink, I do not think we will. If it should become clear that we are spiralling in the wrong direction, I hope that the Minister will rethink her approach.

My colleagues have spoken at length on the merits of free school meals as a way of closing the gaps in health and educational attainment between children living in poverty and those from better-off backgrounds. It was, as has been said, a cruel blow to hundreds of thousands of young children in working poverty when the Minister and her colleagues scrapped the extended eligibility.

In the Westminster Hall debate on free school meals that I led last June, I noted what my hon. Friend the Member for City of Durham has pointed out—that the Liberal Democrats were conspicuous by their absence, as were the Conservatives. That was hardly surprising given their part in one of the most regressive decisions that we have seen from the Government. It is noted that the Minister is here today representing her Lib Dem colleagues as well as her Conservative friends and that she is alone in that task. As my hon. Friend the Member for Denton and Reddish said in his excellent speech, the universal credit throws the whole system of free school meals into confusion, which will not be cleared up for some time.

Financial Support (Students)

Debate between Sharon Hodgson and Nicholas Dakin

Wednesday 15th December 2010 Westminster Hall

[Mrs Sharon Hodgson (Washington and Sunderland West) (Lab)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Erith and Thamesmead (Teresa Pearce) on securing this important and timely debate. I also congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Wigan (Lisa Nandy), who has had to leave. I know she has been trying for some time to secure the debate, together with our hon. Friend.

Both hon. Friends are proven great champions of young people from low-income backgrounds. I look forward to the Minister’s response to the strong arguments that we have heard today. My hon. Friend the Member for Wigan is also a prolific tabler of parliamentary questions, and I commend her for her persistence on this issue; I only wish that Ministers would get into the spirit of open democracy and answer some of the questions more promptly.

This has been a good-natured and high-quality debate, considering the passion that the subject evokes, especially in our party. The debate is not yet over, so perhaps I should not speak too soon. However, I will try to stay within that spirit. We have had some strong speeches, although probably not as many as we would have liked, as a number of hon. Members have not been able to speak. I hope the Minister will take that on board and perhaps ask whether this matter should be debated on the Floor of the House in Government time.

Those who have spoken include: the hon. Members for York Outer (Julian Sturdy), for Stourbridge (Margot James) and for North Cornwall (Dan Rogerson); my hon. Friends the Members for Kingston upon Hull East (Karl Turner) and for Hyndburn (Graham Jones); and the hon. Member for Totnes (Dr Wollaston), who was very brief, as was my right hon. Friend the Member for Wythenshawe and Sale East (Paul Goggins). There were some excellent contributions and I am sorry that I do not have time to go through them all in detail.

We have had a lot of debate on EMA this week, including the “Save EMA” national campaign day in Westminster and around the country, when 60,000 young people sent a clear message to the Government that this policy is unfair. Yesterday, we had an extremely embarrassing report from the Institute for Fiscal Studies—referred to by some hon. Friends—which laid bare the ridiculously weak evidence base the Government use to support their position.

[Nic Dakin (Scunthorpe) (Lab)]

In mentioning the IFS, my hon. Friend draws attention to the fact that the Government spent a lot of time insisting on the NFER study, which focuses only on participation. EMA, does she not agree, has four main purposes—participation, attendance, attainment and supporting the well-being of people from disadvantaged backgrounds in education? Those things have not been evaluated properly, though the IFS study reported yesterday started to do so.

[Mrs Hodgson]

My hon. Friend makes a valuable point, one which I hope the Minister and Government will consider before coming forward with an announcement in this regard.

This morning we had a very good seminar in the Boothroyd room, at which young people, teachers and administrators from across the country—including Becky, Codie, John and Jordan from Hylton skills campus in my constituency—talked to politicians about what scrapping EMA will mean to them. It was a shame that the Minister could not be there. With respect to all hon. Members who have contributed to this debate, it would have been much more valuable for the Minister to have heard first-hand what young people and those who work with them say to those of us willing to listen, about how much impact this choice will have on the lives of people from the poorest backgrounds.