Net Zero Carbon Emissions: UK’s Progress
Thelma Walker Excerpts(5 years, 8 months ago)
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Thelma Walker (Colne Valley) (Lab)
I thank the hon. Members for Oxford West and Abingdon (Layla Moran) and for Brighton, Pavilion (Caroline Lucas) for securing this debate, and I pay tribute to the West Yorkshire fire authority officers who worked so bravely to put out the moorland fires in Saddleworth and Marsden this week. They are heroes.
It took a 15-year-old Swedish girl, Greta Thunberg, to speak the words that needed to be spoken about the destruction of our planet and to prick the world’s conscience. Now our children and young people are grasping their future, condemning the irresponsible actions of past generations and demanding a cleaner, greener, more sustainable environment, which is their right. Article 24 of the UN convention on the rights of the children states that every child has the right to the best possible health and that Governments must provide good-quality healthcare, clean water, nutritious food and a clean environment, and education on health and wellbeing so that children can stay healthy. We owe it to future generations to be doing all we can to give them a clean environment to grow up in.
In England and Wales, hundreds of thousands of children are being exposed to illegal levels of damaging air pollution from diesel vehicles at more than 2,000 schools and nurseries. The World Health Organisation estimates that around 7 million people die every year from exposure to polluted air. Air pollution alone causes many adverse health effects for children, from neurodevelopmental issues, child obesity and asthma to childhood cancers and higher infant mortality rates.
Article 12 of the convention states that every child has the right to express their views, feelings and wishes in all matters affecting them and to have their views considered and taken seriously. I was proud to see children protesting earlier this month, engaging in political action, to share their concerns about the future. I believe that environmental studies and climate change should be an integral part of the curriculum, but it needs to be part of a society-wide rethink on the environment. Yes, positive steps have been made, but there is much more to be done. Labour’s green transformation, covering the economy and the industrial strategy, aims to address the calls from our youngest citizens. It will be driven by science—by what is necessary, instead of what can be achieved through political compromise. In addition to supporting the target to build a net zero emissions economy by 2050, Labour will ensure that 60% of the UK’s energy comes from low carbon or renewable sources within 12 years of coming to power.
I want children and adults to work together to drive forward the UK’s progress towards making net zero emissions a reality. To the children and young people worldwide who took a stand a fortnight ago, I say thank you for making your voices heard and for advocating a better future. We hear you.
Higher Education
Thelma Walker Excerpts(6 years, 7 months ago)
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Wes Streeting (Ilford North) (Lab)
As the first person in my family to go to university and to have made it from free school meals in an inner-city state school to the University of Cambridge, I am not taking any lectures from the Conservative party about being anti-aspiration. It is because so many of my constituents have high aspirations for their children to go on to high-quality technical education or high-quality higher education that I am so concerned about the direction of Government policy.
As much as Conservative Members come here this evening to accuse the Labour party of trying to bring down the OfS by daring to vote against the statutory instrument, they neglect to notice that this SI was not in place yesterday and yet the architecture of the higher education sector has not fallen apart. It is not in place today, yet the higher education sector still seems to manage to function. If they expect us to pass any old rubbish on the basis that we have to pass it or there will be calamity, I have to tell them that, unfortunately for the Conservative party, they did not win a majority at the last election, and they have to get used to winning arguments and to parliamentary scrutiny. Presumably, that is why they bring forward so little legislation; they realise that this House of Commons will not pass any old rubbish.
That brings me to the statutory instrument we are dealing with this evening. The Office for Students is the logical conclusion of a vision of a higher education system in which, as my hon. Friend the shadow Secretary of State said, the market rules supreme and which seeks to reduce higher education to a commodity for students to purchase as consumers and trade in for future success in the workplace. We were promised that the Office for Students would be this great champion of consumers, but we have seen precious little evidence of that so far.
The tragedy is that the Government managed to find a well-respected chair of the Office for Students, who was the architect of the system and who believes in their vision of a consumer-driven higher education system. The problem for the chair of the Office for Students and its very capable poacher-turned-gamekeeper chief executive is that, because of politicisation by the Government and their sheer incompetence, the Office for Students has been left discredited by the political process that led to the composition of its board. How can they come here with a straight face and defend a process that was condemned by the Commissioner for Public Appointments, who found not only that assurances given to this place were incorrect, but that there was direct political interference by special advisers from 10 Downing Street?
Thelma Walker (Colne Valley) (Lab)
The report by the Commissioner for Public Appointments on recruitment to the Office for Students highlighted several concerns about fairness and consistency in the appointment process. Will my hon. Friend comment on how students and universities can be expected to place any trust in that body as a regulator?
Wes Streeting
I wholeheartedly agree with my hon. Friend. In fact, one of the things about the appointments process that has deeply damaged the standing of the OfS in the eyes of students was the insistence by Government political advisers that there should be no representatives from students unions or the National Union of Students on the board. The Government did not say, “We’re going to cast the net wide, and if we find a student who is more capable than an elected officer of the NUS or a students union, we’ll appoint them,” but instead effectively blacklisted the NUS and students unions. As a former president of the NUS, I think that is an absolute disgrace, not least because students who are elected have the confidence of the student body. They present manifestos about the issues that those they represent care about.
If the Government had listened a bit more to what students were saying, perhaps they would not be in the political mess they are in, not just with students but with their parents and grandparents, who are horrified that tuition fees have been trebled, that student grants for the poorest were abolished and that the education maintenance allowance for students in further education was scrapped. The Government have got themselves into a real mess by failing to listen to people who know best about higher education, which is the people who work in it and the people who learn from it. It is a disgrace that there is no NUS representative on the board of the Office for Students.
It is also a disgrace that there is no staff representative from the University and College Union. Recent events, particularly in the pensions dispute, have shown that the lack of effective dialogue between staff representatives and university leaders leads to students being severely disadvantaged, but we have barely heard a peep from the Government about that crisis. They seem to have their heads in the sand. It is deeply regrettable that the Office for Students has been so deeply damaged by politicisation in the run-up to its creation, and the Government should not be surprised that we wish to oppose this statutory instrument.
Finally, let me gently say, without apology or any humility whatsoever, that many of the issues that have confronted the Government, particularly vice-chancellor pay and scrutiny and accountability, would easily have been dealt with had they accepted more amendments from me and my party’s Front Bench during the Higher Education and Research Bill Committee. I warned them that vice-chancellor pay was soaring out of control, and I proposed a modest amendment that would have put student and staff representatives on remuneration committees to better hold vice-chancellors’ pay to account, but that modest proposal was rejected by the Minister’s predecessor. The Government must be regretting that now. I also tabled an amendment that would have required universities to publish the ratios of the highest-paid to the lowest-paid at their institutions, to allow students, staff and the public to better hold them to account. That modest proposal was rejected as well.
As my hon. Friend the shadow Secretary of State said, the truth is that, when it comes to championing the interests of students and making our higher education sector better, fairer and more equitable, the Government do not listen and do not act. I agree strongly with what the Chair of the Education Committee said about the lack of further education representation. If we are serious about a further and higher education system that is well placed not just to serve the needs of our future economy, but to champion social justice, the Government need to do a damn sight better than they have done with the creation of the Office for Students. They cannot expect an effective Opposition to wade through statutory instruments like this when the work beneath it is so shabby and poor.