John Bercow
Main Page: John Bercow (Speaker - Buckingham)Department Debates - View all John Bercow's debates with the Department for Education
(14 years, 6 months ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Vince Cable
The language of “reprieve” is not quite right. All the RDAs will change their nature; they will become local partnerships.
Mr Speaker
Order. May I very gently say to the Secretary of State that he must turn to address the House?
Vince Cable
What I said is that Yorkshire, together with the north-east, the north-west and the west midlands, has particular structural problems that do need to be addressed.
Mr Pat McFadden (Wolverhampton South East) (Lab)
I welcome the Secretary of State and his ministerial team to their post and wish them well. The Secretary of State and I have something in common: we both used to work for the late John Smith in times past, but that of course was before the Secretary of State fell in with the wrong crowd—and now he has fallen in with an even worse crowd.
The Secretary of State has said several times in recent weeks that his Department will be the Department for growth. I am not going to begin these exchanges by denying that whoever won the election, there would have been difficult decisions to take on deficit reduction, but does he accept that the £300 million of cuts to RDA budgets this year are not efficiency savings? They will mean real cuts in real business support, with less private investment leveraged in and cuts to important regeneration projects. Is it not the case that the specific feature of these cuts and his plans for replacing RDAs is that they will impact on our capacity to secure the very growth that is necessary to make deficit reduction a success?
Mr Speaker
Order. Just before the hon. Gentleman replies from the Dispatch Box, I should say that I know he will want to keep his answer within order, and that as far as I am aware, the Conservative party is not a public sector body.
Chi Onwurah (Newcastle upon Tyne Central) (Lab)
Business, innovation and skills are the engine that will drive forward our economic recovery. Given that, could the Secretary of State tell me the number of high-value engineering apprenticeships that he intends to fund from his Department in the north-east this year, and how it will increase over time? Further, as he has already accepted £836 million of cuts to his important Department, will he acknowledge that any further cuts would undermine our future economic recovery?
Vince Cable
We have indeed made large economies, along with the rest of Government, and we had to do so. Had we not met the nature of the economic crisis that we now face across Europe, the cost of capital would have risen, causing even further difficulties for business. I have already told the hon. Lady about the increase in apprenticeships, and high-value engineering is clearly a major target for that.