School Openings: January 2022

Debate between Tim Loughton and Alex Burghart

Wednesday 15th December 2021 Commons Chamber

[Alex Burghart]

I join the hon. Gentleman in his remarks about schools and school staff. We understand that they have worked enormously hard to do the best for children in extremely difficult conditions over the past 18 months. It is important to recognise that the work that they have done throughout has meant that we are now in a position where we have good and improving vaccination rates, good ventilation, good hygiene and good testing in schools. As I made clear in my answer to my right hon. Friend the Member for Harlow (Robert Halfon), that is the key recipe to ensure that schools are in the best possible position, but the national solution to the omicron variant must be—and can only be—boosters, which is why in the next few weeks we need as many people as possible to come forward and take up the Government’s invitation.

We are making an enormous effort to ensure that vaccine centres are available near people, that there are walk-ins, and that people can step forward and take the protection that they, their families and their communities need, and that will mean that we have the best chance for a normal school term in January.

[Tim Loughton (East Worthing and Shoreham) (Con)]

I am reassured to hear the determination of my hon. Friend to keep schools open, but does he agree that the disgraceful campaign of intimidation waged by National Education Union managers to close down schools earlier this year wreaked huge chaos across schools that will take many years to overcome, including the one in six school-age children who now have mental health problems; the chaos caused to the examination system; the academic catch-up; and the problems from a lack of physical exercise? Will he welcome the measures being proposed by my right hon. Friend the Member for Harlow (Robert Halfon), the Chair of the Select Committee, and will he agree that, given the extraordinarily heroic efforts of our headteachers and teachers through difficult circumstances, ultimately the decision on safety and keeping schools open should be left to individual heads?

Stonehenge: Proposed Road Alterations

Debate between Tim Loughton and Alex Burghart

Tuesday 5th June 2018 Westminster Hall

[Alex Burghart]

Thank you very much, Sir Graham; it is a pleasure to serve under your careful and kind direction.

I know that it is slightly unusual for an MP from Essex to call a debate on improvements to a road that is not in Essex; indeed, the A303 does not run through Essex and Stonehenge is not within Essex. So I apologise to Members who represent constituencies in the area around Stonehenge that are affected by this road and I also apologise to the Minister, because I know that there is a due process under way that the Government must religiously and necessarily stick to, and that there is a limit on what he can say in the debate today.

However, I also know that at the end of that process it is Ministers who will have the final say on whether this project goes ahead. Consequently, I would like to put a few things on the record now, to ensure that the Minister has heard the concerns that have been raised with me by the archaeological community, who have themselves made submissions to the appropriate consultation.

We find ourselves in the position of having a world heritage site on a rather awkward transport route in Wiltshire. The need to improve the transport network is running up against that of preserving the site known as Stonehenge, making the debate necessary. My personal interest stems from the fact that for a long time I was a teacher and lecturer in history, admittedly medieval history. I began my studies at about 500 AD— [Interruption.] Even by my own standards, that makes my period modern rubbish, as my hon. Friend the Member for East Worthing and Shoreham (Tim Loughton) so kindly puts it.

I grew up in the locality of the site and have spent a great many happy hours within its confines, viewing the stones at sunset and sunrise and taking great pleasure in seeing them in their natural setting. The proposals do not affect the stones themselves. The extraordinary craftwork that is at least 4,000 years old has given us so much insight into the Neolithic period in which the stones were built. A few years ago, the eminent archaeologist Mike Parker Pearson revealed that underneath the perimeter stones were the cremated remains of inhabitants of Britain, dating from about 3,000 BC. Those remains have been analysed and shown to be of people who grew up in many disparate parts of our island. That is to say that even 4,000 years ago, Stonehenge was a meeting place and in some senses a sacred site, where people brought their ailing, or brought their dead to be interred. We all know about the extraordinary bluestones that appear to have been brought from mountains in Wales, as perhaps either an offering or a spoil of war, and which are among the most striking and iconic elements of the assemblage.

The world heritage site itself is considerably larger than the stones. As it was set out in 1986, it covers a wide area, ranging from the long barrows in the west to the Countess roundabout in the east. Some road change plans for within the periphery of the stones are now being consulted on, and I will briefly talk about what we are dealing with.

In the west, we have an extraordinary collection of Neolithic long barrows, and this grouping in a small area is unique in the world. There are eight early Neolithic long barrows across this part of the western valley, where a new cutting for the road is proposed. The grouping is not just unusual; it is entirely of its own. To the east, we find a remarkably precious patch of boggy ground called Blick Mead, the full significance of which has only recently been revealed: a monograph published earlier this year lights on excavations over the past decade.

In its wet environment, Blick Mead keeps organic matter in a deoxygenated state, meaning that the matter does not rot. That creates the most extraordinary catalogue of human activity, going back not just to 3,000 BC when the stones were erected, but to 4,000 years before that, to our Mesolithic hunter-gatherer ancestors. That is to say that the Stonehenge stones are the mid-point of activity between now and the earliest phases of known occupation on the site. I was once told that the lifetime of Cleopatra was closer to the modern day than to the building of the great pyramid at Giza, and this is almost exactly the equivalent—4,000 years back to the stones of Stonehenge and 4,000 years further back to the beginning of Blick Mead. We are only skimming the surface at the moment, but the catalogue enables us to trace the extraordinary transition from a hunter-gatherer society to a settled farming one. It is wholly extraordinary to find any such site anywhere in northern Europe. The site is completely remarkable and must, whatever plans go forward, be preserved. We must seek not to damage it but to protect it. I am sure that there are many ways of doing that, but it must be done.

In the words of the great rock band, Spın̈al Tap:

“Stonehenge! Tis a magic place”

and

“No one knows who they were or what they were doing”.

Blick Mead will enable us to answer the important questions raised by Spın̈al Tap.

[Tim Loughton (East Worthing and Shoreham) (Con)]

Will my hon. Friend give way?

[Alex Burghart]

I give way to the chair of the all-party parliamentary archaeology group.

[Tim Loughton]

I apologise for arriving slightly after the beginning of the debate, which started early, uncharacteristically for my hon. Friend. Notwithstanding the archaeological academic prowess of Spın̈al Tap, I go back to his point about the extraordinary and unique concentration of barrows at the western end of the site. He referred to eight. Does he acknowledge that two new long barrows were discovered as recently as 2016-17, during surveying work for the potential new road? That is just those that we know about. The archaeology that could be destroyed if the scheme were to go ahead could be even more considerable than he has outlined so far.

[Alex Burghart]

I thank my hon. Friend for his remarks and will turn in a moment to what we do not yet know about Stonehenge.

Social Workers

Debate between Tim Loughton and Alex Burghart

Tuesday 13th March 2018 Westminster Hall

[Alex Burghart]

I think for the people in this room, every day is national social worker day. I am sure we celebrate the work they do in our daily lives and in our jobs.

[Tim Loughton (East Worthing and Shoreham) (Con)]

On that point, I do not think we have a social worker day, but, as patron of the Social Worker of the Year awards, I inform the hon. Member for Livingston (Hannah Bardell) that this coming Thursday there will be a reception on the Terrace for all the winners, and she is more than welcome to come along, meet them and pay her tribute in person.

[Alex Burghart]

Unbeknown to us, national social worker day is later this week—what we have achieved in the debate already! Most of my remarks will be confined to children’s social work as it is the area that I know best. That is in no way to denigrate the extraordinary work that adult social workers do. Indeed, on Friday I was with some of the adult social workers in Essex, who were absolutely impressive in their determination to make things better for local people. They were full of new ideas—they have developed an interesting new programme to support newly qualified social workers, which had seen recruitment increase substantially—and I am pleased to know that vulnerable adults and elderly people in my constituency can rely on them.

As I said, I came to this subject relatively recently in my career, and I did so by accident. I had started out working on education, and through good fortune and strange circumstances I ended up working for my hon. Friend the Member for East Worthing and Shoreham (Tim Loughton), who has graced us with his presence. That was back in 2008, and at that time social workers were in particularly difficult circumstances. Their public reputation had taken a hammering following the Victoria Climbié case and soon after I started that job the awful case of Peter Connelly—Baby P—broke in the newspapers. Very unfairly, for a while social workers alone took the blame for the mistakes made in those cases. It was symptomatic of a society and a news environment that did not understand child protection in the round and was searching for the easiest scapegoats.

By the time I joined my hon. Friend—my then boss—he had already written what turned out to be a seminal paper, called “No More Blame Game,” which sought to set aside the myths that had grown up in the public imagination and to give social workers the respect, training, resources and professional autonomy they needed to do their job properly. It was my great pleasure to work alongside him and at the Department for Education in those next few years to see that programme bear fruit. The most substantial part of it was the Munro review of child protection, which was launched in 2010 and reported in 2011. It intended to put a renewed focus on frontline social work—not on national statutory guidance or defensive systems designed to protect organisations from reputational damage, but on the frontline experience of the children being helped by a professional social work body.