Better Jobs and a Fair Deal at Work

Tom Hunt Excerpts

Wednesday 12th May 2021 Commons Chamber

[Tom Hunt (Ipswich) (Con)]

With the greatest respect to the hon. Member for Cambridge (Daniel Zeichner) and to what was initially my home county, I hope it is just one year that Ipswich will have a local derby against Cambridge and that very soon we will be at least a couple of divisions higher than Cambridge.

There is a huge amount to welcome in the Queen’s Speech, but I only have a short period of time to speak. It is right that we are robust in tackling illegal immigration. There is nothing compassionate about sending out a message that it is worth the risk, fuelling an evil trade in human lives and limiting the capacity of this country to help the most genuine refugees who are fleeing actual areas of conflict, not other safe European countries such as France. I welcome that, but we really do need to deliver, because—like many other Members, I imagine—my inbox is pretty full of emails from constituents who are quite angry about that.

I very much welcome the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill, which will introduce tougher sentences for some of the most serious offenders and has good stuff on protests. There is nothing that threatens peaceful protest, but it gives the police the powers they need to curb excessive protesting, which causes a huge nuisance and disrupts the lives of the law-abiding majority on far too many occasions.

There is a lot further to go on criminal justice. Many of my constituents feel that the system is not far away from being broken, and I cannot blame them, when we find out that the person responsible for killing Richard Day in Ipswich not long ago received only four years and will be let out automatically after only two years. This is an individual who punched my constituent in the neck, which led to his death, and was seen laughing over a dying man, going through his pockets and stealing his belongings. Understandably, my constituents are sickened by that, and I will take that up in the debates we have.

As for skills, we are in a great place to benefit from a freeport in Felixstowe, but I am determined that Ipswich people benefit from that freeport as much as possible. We have to have an ecosystem approach when it comes to skills and education. We need to create a framework for business, FE colleges and our university, and we need to start careers advice early, so that there is a clear sense early on that there are multiple pathways—there is an academic pathway but also a technical pathway—and that no one route is superior to any other. There needs to be that common sense of purpose.

The lifetime skills guarantee is a huge benefit and a huge plus. Ipswich will also benefit from a town deal. In Ipswich we have Spirit Yachts, which designs some of the world’s most in-demand, elegant yachts that are sold across the world, but in the past it has been people from outside the area coming to Ipswich to make them. The maritime skills funded by the town deal will make sure that it is local people who get those jobs and sell products from Ipswich—the greatest town in the country—around the world. I very much welcome this Queen’s Speech. I cannot say any more about it, but it is a good job.