Pub Companies

Debate between Tony Cunningham and Barry Sheerman

Tuesday 21st January 2014 Commons Chamber

[Mr Barry Sheerman (Huddersfield) (Lab/Co-op)]

It comes almost as a surprise to me to speak in this debate. First, I am a member of the Methodist Church and we have a long tradition of not being very keen on drinking, although we have modernised a bit since those days. As I said in an intervention, I also own a pub as chairman of the John Clare Trust, because we bought the Exeter Arms in Helpston. It is temporarily closed while we finance what we call an omni-hub in the village, which will meet the needs of the local community and the overall educational purposes of the trust. A journalist said to me the other week, “You must be the only MP who owns both a church and a pub.” Funnily enough, the church in Norwood Green in Halifax, where we have an environmental body, has a strict codicil that states we cannot serve alcohol. It is an interesting world we live in.

May I remind the House of a bit of history? I support the motion today. I do not say that in a partisan way because there is so much agreement about the need for action. I shall support it not only because the Whips will tell me to, but because it is about time we had some action. I think there is a majority in this House for action on the situation of the many people in tied houses. When we took over the Exeter Arms, having negotiated a reasonable price with Enterprise Inns, there had been a succession of tenants who just could not make it work while having to pay premium prices for beer and everything else. They had to pay if they introduced new varieties of food and for all the gaming machines—I did not realise the tie could take a lot of that as well. Many people had found it very difficult to make a go of that pub, and they need a new and fair deal.

[Sir Tony Cunningham (Workington) (Lab)]

I do not want to miss the point because the whole essence of this debate is about fairness. We should always remember that word—fairness—because it has been absent for a very long time in that relationship.

[Mr Sheerman]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right and I was about to make that point. Let us look at the history. I have been in the House quite a long time and I remember what seemed to be a dramatic change when Lord Young of Graffham, then Secretary of State for Trade and Industry, cut up the industry, and the link between brewers that cared about their pubs and the pub estate was broken. That was done perhaps with the best intentions, but the unintended consequence was that people who had a tradition of brewing and who loved beer and their pub outlets were cut out of that relationship. The Conservative Government at that time—I am not being too rancorous about this—created unintended consequences that severely damaged brewing and the pubs of this country.

Manufacturing

Debate between Tony Cunningham and Barry Sheerman

Thursday 24th November 2011 Commons Chamber

[Mr Sheerman]

I agree absolutely, and was going to mention that. I was also going to mention the Aldridge Foundation and Rod Aldridge, who founded Capita. He puts a great deal of money into education and is absolutely obsessed with finding entrepreneurs and giving them a chance to become successful.

We must ensure that there is reward for the risk of being an entrepreneur. We have to be open about the fact that that is what we want to reward. No one on either side of the House should fail to realise that. I do not mind seeing entrepreneurs getting super salaries. I have a great deal of sympathy with some aspects of the 99% campaign, but I do not mind people earning a great deal of money and being rewarded if they are entrepreneurs who produce jobs and wealth. I am worried when people in pretty safe and comfortable jobs, who are never going to risk anything, get millions of pounds a year. That is what I do not like.

On skills and training, the STEM subjects are neglected in our country, and we need more young people to stay with science, technology, engineering and mathematics longer.

[Tony Cunningham (Workington) (Lab)]

Many engineering entrepreneurs, past and present, started out as apprentices, so does my hon. Friend agree that if we put more energy, resources, money and time into apprenticeships we might see more entrepreneurs?

[Mr Sheerman]

I absolutely agree, and I will come on to that issue.

The slight disagreement between me and the Secretary of State for Education has occurred because I believe that young people who are not very academic but quite good at practical subjects will lose out on an opportunity if we remove design and technology as an option, focus on the more rarefied academic subjects and push the more hands-on subjects to one side.

After the Tomlinson report we lost diplomas, and that was the fault of the Blair Government, but the role of our universities is one thing that we can say is brilliant. If it was not for our universities, I would despair. They are increasingly working with entrepreneurs and the manufacturing hinterland, and that must be rewarded. We need more links between universities and further education colleges, of which there are about 450 in this country, and they really need to work much more closely, so that they turn out the young people that local industry needs. We should not pretend that all apprenticeships are three-year courses in engineering, because they are not; the average length of an apprenticeship is one year to 15 months, but they are not good enough; they are not proper apprenticeships.

On design, anybody who wants to know or who cares about the creative industries should look at Sir George Cox’s review of them and their relationship with enterprise, innovation and manufacturing. If we were to ask him, “What is the one thing that could transform this country’s manufacturing success and wealth creation?” he would tell us, “It’s the supply chain and how this country and its Departments procure. At the very heart of making a great change, it’s procurement that will do it.”

I could have covered other things today, but I finish on this point. In this country, we are still pussyfooting around competition. I have grown up to be a free trader, with the belief that we are a trading nation and should not have any barriers to trade, but I am changing my mind. I do not believe that this country, at this moment in time, with the imbalance in exports and imports between ourselves and Germany and China, can possibly accept the situation for much longer. Something pretty dramatic has to be done, especially when research increasingly shows that China, that wonderful, not very democratic industrial nation that is growing very fast every year, conducts a form of economic warfare against any area where it feels there is competition.

Let us look at the way in which the Chinese seek raw materials, resources, minerals and rare earths. An expert from a university told me yesterday, “If you want to know who’s going to move into Afghanistan in 2015, it will be the Chinese, because Afghanistan has more of the rare earths that China wants than anywhere else.” The Chinese will be there in 2015, as they already are in Africa and throughout the world, and they are also manipulating currencies and targeting specific industries in a way that we have only just begun to comprehend.

So there is economic warfare, and it is about time that the Treasury, with other Ministries, was conscious of this: manufacturing matters in this country. We need skills and entrepreneurs, but we have to have fair competition with competing nations.